Curious Leadership with Dominic Monkhouse

Everyone’s heard of WD 40 company, it’s been a dependable staple of every garage and DIYer for over 50 years. The distinctive blue can with its yellow label and red cap has been oiling and lubricating homes across the globe for half a century, creating memories and lasting relationships. But it isn’t the spread of this product that CEO and chair of WD 40 company board, Garry Ridge, is renowned for. Yes, when Garry took over as CEO he transformed the business from an American manufacturer of WD 40, to a global supplier and manufacturer of all things oil and lubricant. But he’s also known for building a workplace that people are queuing up to work for. For bringing out the best in his team. For placing such a high value on core values. “I think one of the biggest opportunities we have at the moment is to really get a message across to leaders that it's all about the people. If we can create environments where people go to work every day, they make a contribution to something bigger than themselves, they learn something new, they feel safe, and they go home happy.”On today’s podcast:Why Garry’s view of company culture is rareGarry’s algorithm for cultureWhy WD 40 company have managers not coachesHire first for valuesThe journey from WD 40 to creating memoriesWhat WD 40 company learned from COVIDLinks:www.thelearningmoment.netBook - Helping People Win At Work

What did Steve Jobs and Blackbeard have in common? According to Sam Conniff, they were both pirates. Why would Sam know this? Because he wrote the bestselling book - Be More Pirate in 2018, and was amazed when it inspired a global movement. From Tate & Lyle to Mercedes Benz, financiers to farmers, CEOs to students, some of the biggest brands around the world, including our very own NHS, have taken heed of Sam’s message, created a pirate crew and rewritten the existing rules. Because that is what being a pirate is all about:Pirates don’t just break the rules, they rewrite them. Pirates don’t just reject society, they reinvent it. Pirates don’t just challenge the status quo, they change it. “It's now more of a global social movement and a method and a way of creating change within organisations.”The network that has grown up around Sam’s book recognises that too many of the rules, norms and conventions that uphold our systems and business models no longer serve people and planet; we need to create new ones.“Being more pirate is a shift in your mindset; a willingness to think differently, to challenge and be challenged, and to stop asking for permission to do what you know is right.”In this episode, Sam and newly appointed Right Hand Pirate, Alex Barker, share the 5 Rs framework which helps mutineers become more pirate. As well as that, Alex talks about how she takes this framework and uses it to run workshops and helps people who are searching for change. On today’s podcast:How Be More Pirate became a social movementThe pirate mindsetThe 5 Rs of piratingWhy Extinction Rebellion and Banksy are piratesHow To Be More PirateThe future of the pirate movementProfessional rule breakingLinks:Be More PirateHow To: Be More Pirate

If your company culture could do with an overhaul, then who better to impart advice on this very topic than the culture transformer guru with a track record of making workplaces better, Siobhán McHale?“We've got to move beyond the framing of culture purely in employee experience terms. It’s about how to create more agile, innovative, and commercial cultures that can be sustainable over time.”Siobhán has worked across 4 continents helping thousands of leaders create more agile and productive workplaces. One such example of her work in action was the radical 7 year change initiative at Australia and New Zealand Bank Ltd (ANZ). In her time with ANZ she transformed the bank from being the lowest performing bank in the country into one of the highest performing and most admired banks in the world - a recognised paragon of customer service.This work forms the backbone of her book The Insider's Guide To Culture Change which she talks about in this episode. She also discusses her four step approach to driving culture and what needs to happen inside an organisation to make that happen, how to test for EQ when recruiting and how to hire for customer-centricity. One thing that is apparent during this conversation with Siobhán is that she is adamant that culture is in service of strategy and that it follows on from strategy. Culture isn’t about staff engagement. It's about where your business is trying to go and what culture does your business need to put in place to enable its strategy to be successful?A truly insightful conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:How Siobhán defines cultureHow she turned ANZ culture aroundRewriting valuesChanging the way you hireRunning a ‘day in the life’ programmeCulture is about you deliver your strategyLinks:Insider's Guide to Culture Change

What would you do if you’ve sold your company for enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life - sail the Caribbean? Or start over. Today’s guest, Jonty Slater, Manager Director at Blue Globe Innovation is in the latter camp. Jonty decided to create a business and to give back at the same time. Blue Globe Innovation is like no other company, it’s an organisation that solves amazingly complex technical challenges for companies, governments and NGOs. Blue Globe Innovation runs open innovation challenges around the world and in this incredibly insightful episode, Jonty shares with listeners a few of the challenges he’s recently been involved in, including the UK government's ventilator challenge and the Rwanda Lake Kivu challenge. While these challenges are exciting, you might be wondering how they’re applicable to your organisation. Well, here’s the thing - CEOs are often great at linear innovation, really good at running business as usual. But a lot of the time they’re struggling to have incremental innovation. And that’s precisely where Jonty’s team can help. Open innovation isn’t just for finding solutions to big pandemic problems, like COVID. It’s a process that can be applied to solve your current business problem. This is a fantastic conversation and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:What is Blue Globe InnovationOpen innovation and the innovation funnelUsing the crowd to solve your corporate problemAfrica Drone ForumHow to reward staff for innovationInnovation databasesUsing innovation challenges as a CSRLinks:InnocentiveAfrica Drone Forum

If you want to improve the managers in your business, says Michael Bungay Stanier, do more coaching. You might think coaching equals being soft, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. “When I'm asked to talk about my philosophy of coaching I've got two words, and the words are Fierce Love.”Michael wrote the book on coaching, literally. The Coaching Habit is the biggest book on coaching this century. He is the go-to guy for anything coaching related - his 7 questions format has revolutionised coaching, and while we don’t necessarily talk about those today, they do feature. In this enlightening episode all about coaching, Michael, who’s also founder of Box of Crayons - a learning and development company helping organisations shift from advice-driven to curiosity-led, talks about his latest book - The Advice Trap. This conversation is full of fantastic insights from Michael on how to be a better coach, how to be a better leader, and how to encourage coaching inside your organisation. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The Coaching HabitThe need for social contracting when hiring a coachThe principles of coachingWhy ‘and what else?’ is the most powerful question to askThe power of staying curious a little bit longerThe advice trap

“The journey of leadership is a journey to irrelevance. It has to be. Otherwise you're just a do-er, you're an individual contributor like everybody else.”The problem with military command is that when you say ‘jump’, your subordinates are supposed to say ‘how high?’, regardless of the danger or the stupidity of the order. L. David Marquet realised there was something fundamentally wrong with this form of blind leadership when he took command of the USS Santa Fe, the US Navy’s submarine with the worst morale out of all its ships. David didn’t know his way around this submarine, he wasn’t trained on it, but he was still expected to command it. He realised that the only way to take control and quite literally turn the ship around, was to adopt a radical approach to leadership. He decided to empower his subordinates as they knew far more about their day to day roles than he did - he told them to take ownership of their decisions. He needed the ship to manage itself. His revolutionary approach to leadership went against everything he’d been taught, but it worked. In the three years under David’s command, the Santa Fe rose from the bottom of the ranks to being the number one ship in the US navy. In this latest episode, David shares his story, how he had to park his ego in order to succeed and how he relinquished control in order to take command. This is a truly fascinating conversation with actionable insights. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. “I used to be a control freak. Well actually, I'm still wired to be a control freak. But I'm trying to get over it.”On today’s podcast:Get out of the decision making businessFrom permission to proactivity You can’t change characteristics, only behaviourThe psychological safety netThe power of ‘I don’t know’  How to play the feedback gameLinks:Turn the Ship Around!

How do you give difficult, impactful feedback in your workplace without offending anyone or being misconstrued?“Pause, right now, and think about that moment in your career when someone told you something that stung a bit at the time, but stood you in good stead for the next 10 years. That is radical candour.”If you just do one thing this week, listen to Kim Scott, co-creator of an executive education company and workplace comedy series based on her best-selling book Radical Candor - Be A Kick Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Kim led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick teams at Google and then joined Apple University to develop and teach “Managing at Apple.” She’s also been a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and several other tech companies. Kim knows what she’s talking about. In this latest episode she talks about why it’s so difficult to be frank with people, how to be better at being candid, where you should start and more importantly, how to be radically candid in today’s workplace - i.e. how to give feedback when you’re not face to face. “If you're doing it right, if you're doing routine radical candour maintenance, it's more like brushing and flossing. It's not a root canal, it’s a two minute conversation.”This is one podcast episode you don’t want to miss. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!On today’s podcast:The impetus to write the book What radical candour means and looks likeHow to deliver radically candid feedbackHow to solicit radical candourDelivering feedback via videoRadical candour is culturally relativeLinks:Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You MeanJust Work: Get Sh*t Done, Fast & Fair

Death is such an unusual, fascinating, and emotional area to work in, however the industry hasn’t evolved much since the 1850s. But today’s guest, Dan Garrett, CEO and co-founder at Farewill, is on a mission to change that - to bring wills, probate and funerals into the 21st century. “[Will writing] is the most amazing industry because it's basically the biggest consumer industry that's been untouched by technology. It’s a multi-hundred billion dollar business globally. The industry looks and feels like it did in Victorian times.”Having just raised £20 million in a Series B round and with their absolutely awesome recruitment process, Farewill is the UK’s leading tech firm in the death space, working to bring technology and an improved customer experience to a difficult time in everyone’s life. Starting a business, raising funds and recruitment are all common topics for discussion on The Melting Pot, what makes this a truly unusual episode is simply because of the industry Dan is revolutionising. From tech and the death business, to the incredible recruitment engine he’s built that gets the hiring process right 80% of the time, this is a really interesting discussion with useful points pertinent to all entrepreneurs. On today’s podcast:Why he started an online will writing businessTheir chosen marketing channelsThe problem with the existing funeral industryRaising a successful series B during lockdownHis aggressive growth planThe effect of burnout on him

Leadership isn’t about you, says Frances Frei, co-author of Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. Leadership, according to Frances, Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, depends on how well you unleash the potential of other people. Frances has not only carried out extensive research investigating how leaders create the conditions for organisations and individuals to thrive. She also regularly advises senior executives (famously turning around the toxic culture at Uber), to implement large-scale change initiatives and organisational transformation. This involves addressing and embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for significantly improving performance.In today’s challenging podcast episode, Frances discusses her new book and shares some fantastic takeaways about how to create a business that plays to the strengths of minorities. Because if you’re only hiring white men, you're only fishing in a pond with 25% of the available talent. The businesses that will be successful in the next 5 years will be the ones that actively bring on board the remaining 75% of talent that aren’t being fished. This is an incredibly insightful conversation packed full of great, actionable advice. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.On today’s podcast:Leadership is about empowering othersThe pros and cons of recruitment legislationWhy you can’t find the diverse employees you’re looking forUse an indignities list for your next hireUnconscious bias during recruiting and promotionThe trust triangleLinks:Frances Frei - TED talksUnleashed

What’s your business aim? To achieve growth? To create a winning corporate culture? Deb Gabor, keynote speaker and bestselling author is on a mission to inspire 1 million brands to create irrational loyalty. Yes, that’s also the name of her latest book, Irrational Loyalty, but the premise behind it should strike a chord with anyone who owns a business - not least because the subtitle is - Building a Brand That Thrives In Turbulent Times. And times don’t get much more turbulent than the ones we are currently living through. The irrepressible Deb was born to brand and excels at her craft. With Dell as one of her core customers, Deb knows her stuff and is compelled to share her ‘grow or die’ mindset with other entrepreneurially spirited leaders. At the heart of this episode is the need for businesses to understand their core customer as a person, and (in Deb’s own words), understanding what your customer needs to do to get laid and if you can achieve that, you’ll get their irrational loyalty and growth for your business.“Irrational loyalty is that condition where people are so indelibly bonded to a brand that they feel like they were cheating on it if they were to choose a competitor or an alternative… I'm in the business of creating those conditions, which can sustain brands for the long term, make them grow profitably, rapidly, and in a highly focused way.”On today’s podcast:Irrational loyaltyThe four things the biggest brands in the world do Creating the ideal customer profileA niche is the sexiest thing about businessThe branding misconceptions holding businesses backCreate core values to benefit your business and your clientsLinks:Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customers Laid and Sell the Hell Out of AnythingIrrational Loyalty: Building a Brand That Thrives in Turbulent Times