Curious Leadership with Dominic Monkhouse

“I believe that it's not just that we are masked, it's that we are addicted to them. And so what that requires is a solution that is similar to what helps addicts get free.”Michael Brody-Waite has gone from being a drug addict to a successful CEO. Not only that, he’s an author, a public speaker, and a sponsor. His TED X talk has had over 700,000 views, and although he was talking about great leaders doing what drug addicts do, the most polarising comments were about his choice of footwear. This is a guy who has learned what it truly means to be authentic. And he’s written a book about it. As he learned to take his mask off in recovery by following the 12 step programme, he realised that the process to help addicts recover is the same process that creates great leadership. If we all just take our mask off, turn up, be authentic, have difficult conversations, our businesses would run better, we’d have better places to work, we’d be better humans and our lives would be more successful and more fulfilling. “I'm not the first person to write a book on how to be a great leader, that's been done before, and I'm not the first addict to talk about their story, that's been done before. But what has never been done was taking the process that addicts use to recover, that's been working for millions of addicts over 80 years, and translate that into a leadership framework that allows anyone to truly become a great leader.”We hope you enjoy this conversation with Michael as much as we did, he truly is a great human being. On today’s podcast:What the mask free movement isWhy we are taught to hideHow Michael learned to be authenticWhy sponsors are the best leadersThe three principles of authentic leadershipWhat CEOs should be doing differentlyHow to take your mask offLinks:Book - Great Leaders Live Like Drug AddictsTED Talk

If you’re trying to deliver remarkable customer experiences that will get customers talking, then you’re trying to create Talk Triggers. And that is exactly what this episode with Jay Baer, the founder of five multimillion-dollar companies, New York Times bestselling author of 6 books, public speaker, social media marketing and customer experience guru, is about. “Word of mouth influences 50% of all purchases, and it influences 91% of B2B purchases. And for major purchases, word of mouth is the number one decision-making criteria. Yet fewer than 1% of businesses have an actual word of mouth strategy.”In this episode, Dom chats to Jay about his most recent book, Talk Triggers. A talk trigger is defined in Jay’s book as an operational choice that is designed to create conversations - something that customers will go away and tell their friends and family about. So if you’re trying to figure out your business’ talk trigger, then this episode is for you. On today’s podcast:The work that Convince and Convert doesUsing customer experience to create conversationsWhen talk triggers go wrongThe marketing power of word of mouth5 types of talk triggersLinks:Talk Triggers - Jay Baer

“We're not really evolving, the way that we work… it's no wonder that a lot of us are finding work exhausting, repetitive, wears us down.”Is your job wearing you down? Do you hate Mondays? Perhaps it’s not your work that’s the issue, but in fact the workplace culture. Before you jack it all in and start looking for gainful employment elsewhere, take a listen to Bruce Daisley.You might know Bruce Daisley from his #1 Apple business chart topping podcast Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat on work culture. Or you may know him as the former VP Europe for Twitter, having spent over a decade running Twitter and YouTube (the latter at Google) for Europe, leaving Twitter as its most senior leader outside of the US. Regardless, he is an authority on the subject of workplace culture, now spending his time championing reforms to it and finding solutions to climate change. This is Dom’s second recorded chat with Bruce (the first didn’t make it to publication) so luckily this one is all encompassing. Whether you’re the CEO or the new kid at the company, sit back and listen to this enlightening podcast episode, as Bruce talks about the things he's learned along the way to make your work culture suck less. On today’s podcast:The genesis of what made him do the podcastWhy anyone can improve their workplaceThe challenges of remote workingHow to make open plan office space work for youHow to build psychological safety with work colleaguesSilent meetingsHeadphones in the office

Today’s guest is Nic Marks, CEO and Founder of Friday, the company Nic set up to track employee happiness, in order to help businesses build a more positive, productive work culture. A statistician by trade but with a background as a therapist, Nic has a slightly weird speciality—happiness—having used it spending the last three decades creating a measure of people’s quality of life. Nic firmly believes that measuring happiness kick-starts a process which ultimately builds happiness.In just over 6 years, Nic and the team at Friday have worked with more than 9,000 teams across 1,000 organisations, measuring and improving happiness at work. Happiness is a great proxy for quickly judging how things are in a team at a moment in time—if you’re happy at work things are likely to be going well, if you’re not happy, they’re not. On today’s podcast:Why Nic measures happinessHow happiness is an indicator of how content people areThe benefits of increasing happiness among the population of the UKThe link between happiness and political affiliationWhy Friday is the best day of the week to conduct a happiness survey5 ways to increase happiness at workLinks:FridayDaniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and SlowMaslow’s hierarchy of needs

By day, this week’s guest on The Melting Pot, Jamal Reimer, works for Oracle as an enterprise SaaS rep, helping pharma R&D squeeze every drop of value from their clinical data. By night (and at weekends), he coaches the CEOs of late stage startups land mega deals that will change the course of their business’s growth. It’s not Jamal’s work at Oracle that Dom talks to him about today - although they touch on it briefly as it explains why he’s so well placed to coach CEOs: “I'm an intentional individual contributor. I've been selling for almost 20 years, and I've made the choice that I love what I do. I love being in the field, in the foxhole, doing the work with the customer through hard times and great times. And it's never appealed to me to go into management ... but I certainly work with executives on both sides, at the table every day.”It’s what he does in his spare time that Dom discusses. Because in his spare time Jamal coaches CEOs and individual sellers, helping them change their mindset and put in place a structure in their organisations which allows their businesses to land their first mega deal - the deals that will change the trajectory of their business's growth. So if you’re a CEO wondering how to get away from the run rate and make mega deals that will transform the growth of your organisation, then this conversation is definitely one you want to listen to.On today’s podcast:Why Jamal made the choice to stay in salesThe steps to conducting mega dealsHow to use CEOs to hunt dealsWhy Jamal teaches how to shift your mindset on his courseWhy you should chase mega deals (as well as small and medium deals too)Jamal’s thoughts on close rates

Do you know how to use LinkedIn? As in really know how to use LinkedIn? As in to generate leads, make sales, connect with meaningful prospects and make decent money from the platform? Because if LinkedIn is a platform you want to be leveraging, or you’re trying to leverage, then listen to this week’s episode of The Melting Pot with John Nemo, author and marketing coach, for some amazing advice and top tips. John helps business coaches, business owners, small business owners and consultants use platforms like LinkedIn to find and engage and win new business online. He will show you how to leverage LinkedIn to find and engage your ideal prospects, along with how to use content as currency to "purchase" the time, attention and interest of your target audience. In fact, John was an inspiration behind Dom’s transition from the corporate world to becoming a solopreneur, so it’s quite poetic to have him on the podcast, sharing his secret sauce. And what is John’s secret sauce?“The book I launched my business on was called ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie, written in 1936. I built my whole business around that book. I built my whole business around this one line, which is: ‘your ideal prospects don't care about you, they care about themselves, morning, noon, and after supper, so make it all about them’.”So if you want to find and attract the type of prospects who will be a real fit for your brand, then keep on listening - this is a great conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:You’ve got to have a story and be memorable if you hope to succeed How to leverage LinkedInUsing content marketing to get big winsHow to deal with failureSuccess is 98% mindset and 2% talentBe unique when connecting with prospects

What do you do when the banks foreclose on your $6.5m loans, just as you’re trying to scale your business? And then you endure a very public bankruptcy as the bank wants to show that no one is untouchable? For some people that might be the end of them, for Andy Buyting it was the beginning. “It feels like I died. And the whole town is showing up for the reading of the will to see what they can get out of it.”Andy is founder and CEO of Tulip Media, a very successful business combining digital and print media. This idea sprang from the ashes of his former business, Green Village Home and Garden - a home and garden shop in Canada. Like many people and businesses, Andy was hit hard by the global financial crisis of 2007, but he didn’t let it drag him down. Today, alongside running Tulip Media, Andy is also a certified Scale Up coach, sharing over 20 years of sales, marketing, operations, business development and entrepreneurship experience with his clients as he travels across the US and Canada, talking to entrepreneurs about how they can own the ink in their industry. “My track record speaks for itself. Over 57% of the “for-profit” organisations that I have coached over the past 10 years have gone on to sell for 2x+ industry multiple and often 5-10x founders expectations.”This is a hugely insightful and honest conversation; we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The rise and fall of Green Village Home and GardenDealing with a very public bankruptcyWhy he became a Scale Up coachHow he got into the publishing businessHow Tulip Media can help your businessWhy you need to create content for both digital and print platforms The importance of performance reviews for employees

If you’re looking to sell your business, then you will be wanting to get the most out of what is effectively the sale of your life’s worth. But how do you do that? You’ll probably need to draw on the expertise of financial advisors, and today’s guest, Daniel Havercroft is MD of Oakley Advisory, one of Europe’s leading independent corporate finance firms.Daniel is focused mainly on origination and execution of M&A and fundraising mandates, and has considerable experience helping companies that operate in hosting, colocation and digital media/online sub-sectors. Having completed over 20 transactions in his time with Oakley, helping shareholders sell businesses, companies acquire competitors and private equity investing in new opportunities, Daniel is incredibly well-placed to talk all things selling a business.When it comes to selling your business you want to drive your company’s valuation, and be able to look at your business from the eyes of the potential purchaser rather than through the eyes of the people running the business. Because in order to extract maximum value from the sale, you will probably need to change some aspects of your business. And Daniel shares with us what those changes should be.This is a fantastic conversation with Daniel, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The benefits of being a sector specialist advisorWhen an entrepreneur should bring in an advisory firm in the sell cycleThe KPIs you should be looking at prior to selling your companyThe impact of the management team on valuationGlobal trends and hot topics for 2020What to consider when appointing an advisor

Shannon Byrne Susko isn’t just a CEO, she’s a serial entrepreneur, business coach, keynote speaker and the reluctant author of two best selling books. Recognised and named as one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40 in 2000, Shannon co-founded, served as CEO and led the sale of two SaaS companies in less than 6 years, before turning her hand to business coaching in 2011.That’s quite an achievement for someone who comes from, what she describes as, a pretty traditional household where dad worked, mom stayed at home and she was expected to go to university and then get married. “You know, I was like, that's not happening, I have things to do. I didn't know I was going to do these things. But I definitely knew like, no, I don't think so.”Looking back she realises that: “I didn't have a problem being a woman CEO. The problem is the old school thinking about women being CEOs. I didn't even think about it... tech was probably the most accepting industry of a woman CEO at that time, because we're all a bunch of geeks and geeks accept geeks, they didn't care.”In this hugely insightful episode, Shannon tells the incredible story of her rise to the top. Of her time as CEO, how she grew and sold two businesses in less than 6 years, of how she got Verne Harnish to help her get her company to a good place. As well as why she needed a mentor when she was running the show, why she’s transitioned into a business, leadership and CEO coach and more importantly, why she wrote two bestselling books that she never wanted to write. On today’s podcast:How her entrepreneurial journey began by simply wanting to solve a problemWhy she became CEOHow she got Verne Harnish to help her The less than traditional business things she did during her time at the helm3 HAGHow she ended up coachingThe inspiration for her two booksLinks:Verne Harnish - ScaleUp Summit3 HAG way

Are you looking for ways to fire up your marketing efforts in 2020? Then listen to David Meerman Scott, author, public speaker and advisor to emerging companies, talk about how to build a fan base. David has written 11 books, selling over 1 million copies in 29 languages, but it’s his latest book, Fanocracy, which he co-authored with his daughter, that he talks about in this interview. David’s 2007 book, "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" (now in its 6th edition having sold over 400,000 copies), was written based on his early experiences with the web, because he says that marketing on the web was (and still remains to this day) all about creating great, publishable content. “I was the first person to clearly articulate that if you want to reach people on the web, it's about creating great content, whether that's blog posts or YouTube videos or a great website or whatever it might be.” But the problem, says David, is that over the last few years, the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of superficial online, polarised communications, at a time when people are hungry for a true human connection. And it’s how companies can create this human connection with their customers, that David talks about with Dom in this episode. On today’s podcast: Why content is still king How to write a book with your daughter How entrepreneurs can reach customers The human connection of going to live concerts with loved ones How to use mirror neurons to help build your business The process organisations can go through to create fans Using fans to build an emotional connection with your product What he wishes he knew then that he knows now Links: Fanocracy The New Rules of Marketing and PR