The Communicative Leader
On The Communicative Leader, we're making your work life what you want it to be. Do you need years of training or special equipment? Not at all my friends. Simple, yet thoughtful changes in your communication can make great strides in displaying your leadership ability. And why the heck should you care about leadership communication? Well, communication is the yardstick others use to determine whether or not they see you as a leader. Ahhh don't be scared, I got you. We will walk through common organizational obstacles and chat about small, but meaningful communication-rooted changes you can integrate immediately. No more waiting for the workplace to become what you hope it will. Nope. You, my friends, will be empowered and equipped to make those changes. Let's have some fun! Can't get enough?
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The Communicative Leader
The Growth Formula: How High-Level Management Can Drive Large-Scale Change A Conversation with Prof. Adam Boddison OBE
We are excited to welcome, Prof. Adam Boddison OBE, CEO of the Association for Project Management to The Communicative Leader.
In this episode, we discuss the definition of large-scale growth and the criteria that differentiate it from traditional organizational growth. Adam emphasizes the importance of scalability, replicability, and sustainability in achieving large-scale growth. They also discuss the allocation of resources, prioritizing efficiency in business as usual, over-resourcing growth areas, and managing workload. Message clarity and effective communication are highlighted, with repetition and storytelling as key techniques. Finally, they touch on leadership styles and the need for leaders to be adaptable and switch between different styles.
Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose.
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Hey leader! Thanks for listening. For more leadership communication tips, check out https://www.thecommunicativeleader.com/
Today, on the Communicative Leader, we welcome Adam Boddison, ceo of the Association for Project Management. Adam discusses large-scale organizational growth and the strategies and tactics that can be used to achieve it. So we talk about this. We talk about scalability, how to replicate, how to sustain, but also, adam just gives us some really, really great concrete leadership and communication takeaways. So let's dive in.
Dr. Leah OH:Hello and welcome to the Communicative Leader hosted by me, dr Leah O Hodges. My friends call me Dr Oak. I'm a professor of communication and a leadership communication expert. I'm the communicative leader. We're working to make your work life what you want it to be Well.
Dr. Leah OH:thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited to learn more about large-scale organizational growth.
Speaker 3:Of course, thank you for having me on the podcast. So my name is Adam Boddison. I'm the chief executive officer of the Association for Project Management, so that is a professional body. We've got 45,000 individual members. We work with 500 corporates and we're a registered charity. We exist for the public benefit. It's always about improving society by delivering projects better. I've been there for about three years.
Speaker 3:I kind of got into this job by accident, really, because my last chief exec role was for a, a national inclusion charity, which was interested in children with special needs and disabilities. Um, and that also wasn't my background. My background is actually as a maths teacher, a school maths teacher, in fact. But in my last role, because I became, if you like, put in the specialist box of you're an expert about children with disabilities, I thought that's great, but I want to do much more than that. So I deliberately looked for something broad, hence found this project management role. And boy is it broad. I mean, this is every sector you can imagine yes, education, but it's also defense and nuclear and energy, and healthcare.
Speaker 3:And wow, it's just absolutely brilliant. Really really love it.
Dr. Leah OH:Excellent, and I love that when you can take these skills and then move into a different industry and then parlay those new experiences. I just think it really it speaks to someone who loves learning and is good with people and good at navigating organizations, so I imagine that you really do well and enjoy this role that is so expansive, yeah, so kudos to you no, no, thank you.
Speaker 3:Interestingly, I remember going for my interview for my first CEO role, which was in this special needs charity, and one of the opening questions was Adam, you don't know a lot about special educational needs. What makes you think you're going to have any credibility at all in this role? And my answer to that was well, my first kind of vote of confidence is the fact that you've shortlisted me for this post. Why did you shortlist me for the post?
Speaker 3:and then we had this you know, you have to imagine the scene. This was like a big, long table. We had, like most of the board of trustees on one side and me on the other side. It was like facing the last supper. You know something like this yes, yes ultimately, what was really interesting.
Speaker 3:What they decided was look, we've got an organization that's rammed with people with special needs expertise. What we need is a leader. We need someone who can help scale our organization, help us to grow, help us to really sort out the commercial side, and that's what I was able to bring, and, of course, you learn the rest on the way.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, that is phenomenal. I love that. As a leadership scholar, that is really neat taking that perspective. So we know we're going to be looking at large scale growth and one question for you is can you help define that for us, and what are the criteria that go from, just you know, a general organizational change or shift, or even traditional organizational growth, to large-scale growth?
Speaker 3:yeah, it's a really good question and and I actually think I thought a lot about this I I don't think you can put a particular metric on this and say well, if it's below that threshold, it's not major and it's not large scale.
Speaker 3:And if it's above it, then it is I think it's really contextual, um, and it's dependent on scale, and if it's above it, then it is. I think it's really contextual and it's dependent on both the organisation and the operating environment. You know, if I give you an example, the inclusion charity I talked about before that was a professional membership association. They'd been around for about 40 years. At the time They'd never really had more than about 3,000 or 4,000 members, but actually the pool, if you like, the market of possible members was hundreds of thousands. So they'd grown. If you look that they'd grown from zero to 4,000 over 40 years you could say, okay, does that count? But when I was there, in six years we went from 4,000 to 40,000.
Adam Boddison:And then, in the three years that followed, my successor took it from 40 000 to 100 000, so something changed and and it's to me, it's about orders of magnitude.
Speaker 3:So when you say, how do you define? It um, I don't think it's a particular metric. It's how does it? It's relative, it's how does it compare to the past? But how does it compare to other organizations like us? Um, and and, and, by the way, it could be on a whole range of things. So I talk about number of members there, because that was their main metric. It could be revenue service.
Speaker 3:I even think engagement is a really important one as well, you know when you take an organization that's kind of you know, let's say, known for quality but not known enough, and then all of a sudden they hit the mainstream. That in itself for me would constitute large scale growth.
Dr. Leah OH:the mainstream that in itself, for me, would constitute large-scale growth. Yeah, yeah, excellent, that's really helpful. So it's kind of this process and, like you said, contextual, it's not this destination, like we've arrived, we've done that. You know, all set box is checked.
Speaker 3:Exactly, exactly that.
Dr. Leah OH:Mm-hmm. So I'm wondering now about some key strategies. So what you know, maybe in your previous work or in the work that you're doing now, what do you see, these strategies or tactics that tend to be most effective or that, if we're going to, you know, advise organizations who are looking to make this shift? You know, what do we encourage them to do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, again a great question. I think obviously some of this is about painting the picture, the vision and so on, but I think that alone is not enough. But if I give you an example of in my current organization at the moment I talked before about, you know, corporate partnerships that we have- and memberships and so on.
Speaker 3:So we really need to scale our organization. And the reason we need to scale is not just for growth sake. It's because we are a relatively immature professional body. You know, we've been around for just over 50 years, 52 years. But there are other organizations the accountants, the engineers, you know, they've been around for hundreds of years, you know, and what's interesting about them, even though they've been around for hundreds of years? You know, yeah, and what's interesting about them? Even though they've been around for hundreds of years, they all tend to have a scale which is around about the same size. So that's obviously the scale you need to have to kind of have a tangible impact. So what I did in terms of your question about what specific strategies or tactics can you use, what I did was, rather than just say, right, well, we need to be that big guys, I said yes, yeah, what, what?
Adam Boddison:would it take what?
Speaker 3:would it take for us to get there? So in that, in my particular context, we have what I call the 110 100 uh strategy. So I said what would it take for us to become an organization that has 1 000 corporate partners, 10 000 chartered project professionals and 100 000000 members? And what that does when you ask the question, rather than saying this is the destination, when you ask the question, it focuses on the how, not on the what. So people start saying, oh, adam, if you really want to do that, we're going to need to double our workforce. Or do you know what, adam, if we're going to do that, we need to have some kind of technology revolution, because we don't have scalable processes.
Speaker 3:Here Everything's done by hand and there's 150 touch points for every single person we bring on board or something. So it shifts the focus to really look at the scalability, and I have three tests that I always ask for in my organization. If we're going to do something, it has to be replicable, scalable and sustainable, and if it doesn't meet those three tests, we shouldn't be doing it.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, I love that. It's so, so helpful, because I think you're right, when you're asking the right questions, the how we're changing the way we think All of a sudden it becomes concrete. It's something that we can actually solve and make a process to achieving.
Speaker 3:I agree and interesting. Yeah no, it's interesting when we start to have those conversations, what tends to come out are the pain points and the gain points. Right, because people in every organization you've got people who say, oh, this bit of the organization doesn't work because and you need to try and shift that narrative. So, instead of hearing, you know we can't do this because we can do this if and that's what the what does it take? Question does is it shifts from one mindset to the other mindset?
Dr. Leah OH:Yes, yeah, yeah and I like as an organizational scholar, I'm so happy hearing about employee empowerment, that idea of giving them in a room to be innovative and to think about it. That's really incredible. I imagine you have really good retention because people feel engaged and heard.
Speaker 3:Interestingly so, we have an external organization that we use to kind of get staff views and so on, and you know if we've been doing that. It started before I arrived, uh, but but over time, over the past kind of five, six years, the feedback that we get from that goes up and up and up. Exactly for the reason you said, around staff engagements, I think the challenge we have is not so much with engagement, it's trying to match, uh, appetite with capacity.
Adam Boddison:Um, so you, you empower all of these staff and they go great, we can do all this stuff, you know, and the leadership team. I'm the worst offender right, I'm like, yeah, we can do this, let's go.
Speaker 3:And then you look around and you say you can't really do all of this stuff, and so then you've got to be careful that you don't go too far and create these kind of workload challenges. So you know, we've kind of gone from one problem we've solved it's a bit like a mole, you know and another problem pops up somewhere else?
Dr. Leah OH:Yes, yeah, pops up. Oh, that's excellent. So this is a really nice segue. So I was wondering about resources, so thinking about prioritizing them, allocating them. So if we know that we are kind of growth focused, you know and it's probably hard to find an organization that says they are not growth focused in some way but you know, what does that advice look like when they're saying, Adam, I don't know what to do with these resources, how do I best allocate these?
Speaker 3:Yeah, again, I don't think there's any silver bullet for this. There's no one way of doing it.
Adam Boddison:Otherwise every organization would be doing it already, right so?
Speaker 3:I think I start with that caveat, but if I try and think, you know what has generally worked for me in organizations. There's a couple of things. So I think the first one is where are the efficiencies in business as usual? Business as usual, so mapping out all of those business as usual processes that we can't live as an organization without and saying is there a way we could do this better and therefore free up resource that we can allocate elsewhere. That does two things. One it makes people's lives easier, so they're happier and therefore more productive.
Speaker 3:But two it just gives you more resource for free, so why wouldn't you do that? So so secure efficiencies in business as usual, then what I always tend to do is over resource, deliberately those areas uh, which bring growth into the organization. So what do I mean by that? I mean things like marketing, business development, external engagement. You know um, you know so speaking events and all that profile stuff round tables all of those things.
Speaker 3:Yes, because although sometimes some of those things have very tangible returns on investment, some of them are slow burns, but actually they always pay off in the end, in my opinion, if you're doing them well, so get the efficiencies overinvest in, or over-resource in, growth. And then the third thing for me is around workload.
Speaker 3:I mentioned it before um when you really get people fired up, they, they want to do a brilliant job, and I, you know, uh, we have an interesting situation in my organization at the moment where we have really diligent colleagues who produce such excellent work that it's almost too good, um, and you have this situation where they've got a lot of things to do but the standard is so high that you say, look, this is not scalable because it's too good. So we have uh we've been talking about are we letting perfect be the enemy of good?
Dr. Leah OH:uh, here yeah, is good enough.
Speaker 3:Okay, you know, sometimes you need perfect right, but sometimes, sometimes, you know.
Speaker 3:So there's this kind of self-imposed workload that sometimes comes in, so we're having open conversations about that and we also put in a stop and slow initiative which says to people what are the things that you do in your job which, if you stop doing them or spent less time on them, actually it wouldn't really impact on our ability to meet our strategic goals, really impact on our ability to meet our strategic goals. And actually when people start looking at that, it turns out there's quite a bit in that bucket that they can release workload and resource from.
Dr. Leah OH:That's incredible. I really love what you're doing and I think you know, anytime a communication scholar hears open dialogue, right, it's heart to eyes, because there's so many times, especially employees and I'm finding this a lot post-COVID, especially where resources still aren't necessarily where they were you know, flexibility, lifestyle isn't exactly where it was and some people are so afraid to speak up, but when organizations create these opportunities and I like that stop and slow initiative, where you have to stop, you have to reflect. This is just part of our work that really, really pays off in so many different areas yeah, I mean lots of organizations have.
Speaker 3:I think they call it stop, start, continue, which is a more traditional version of this. I quite like stop and slow because, yeah, we don't want to introduce anything new here.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly. You know, just focus on those things that are going to help you stop or slow. Yep, exactly, yep, nice and simple and clear. So that brings us to message clarity and I'm what are things either you've done or you kind of see some of your corporate partners do? Because you know that organizations can be really large, they can be broken up, a lot of hierarchy. So how do you ensure this message is consistently communicated across an organization, especially when we're having those rapid periods of growth?
Speaker 3:So first of all, we know from you know it's in the academic literature, it's in like every leadership book you ever read, every communications book you ever read. You're going to tell people a lot of times before the message sinks in. Whatever the message is. Probably in a lot of different ways as well, because people hear the messages in different ways. So I think repetition is important because you know, we've just had the general election over here, right in the UK.
Speaker 3:And one of the interesting things is the prime minister, keir Starmer. When he was elected there were lots of kind of satire, kind of jokes about the fact that everywhere he went, he kept saying to everybody oh, did you know that my father's a toolmaker? And it kind of became the joke, right. And when they talked to the strategist about this.
Adam Boddison:They said why does?
Speaker 3:he keep going on about this and they said because actually he needs to repeat it that many times so that people so there is real logic in this. So I think repetition's important. The other thing I learned and this is maybe personal to me because of my background as a maths teacher I like to be logical and have logic models for how things are going to work.
Speaker 3:but that's not enough. Just because something looks good on a piece of paper and there's a real logic to it, it's not going to work for everybody. I really believe in storytelling as a leadership technique, so this is kind of almost drawing on the literature skills. How do you tell a really effective story?
Speaker 3:that you know who all the characters are, what their roles are going to be, where the tension and the drama is going to be. You know where things are going to go disastrously wrong, but actually it all works out well in the end and we have this happy ending that actually is really applicable to a business context and captures the heart as well as the head of people. So I think that's absolutely essential if you're going to get this kind of organizational clarity. And, by the way, all of this is much harder in this new world of hybrid Like when people are there every day and you can have all that conversation, all those, the water cooler conversations how do?
Speaker 3:you replicate that in hybrid. Well, we're still working on that, um, but it's definitely harder now than it was before it makes me think of um.
Dr. Leah OH:We had karen eber on, so she is all about storytelling and she was talking about, uh, the neuroscience behind it, and actually more real estate in our brain lights up when we're listening to stories, and that also leads to not only retention but also feelings of psychological safety, so it actually puts your employees in a calmer, more comfortable place. So I can see why you really like that.
Speaker 3:Interestingly, I'm sure lots of your listeners of this podcast have been experimenting with ai and things like that, one of the things I do when I have an idea that I want to communicate or I want to get some organizational clarity. I have a, I have a chat with ai. It's quite interesting, so probably, uh, probably, a couple of times a week. Um, I just have a bit of back and forth and I said you know, do you know what chat gpt or gemini or whatever your preferred?
Dr. Leah OH:uh, you know ai provider is.
Speaker 3:So I'm thinking about this. What do you think? Is this the best way to say it? It comes back and this is what have you thought about it? And sometimes my way is better, right I mean yeah, I mean it's sound egotistical about it yeah more often than not, more often than not the ai is better, um, and actually that kind of back and forth can really help you to polish how you communicate that idea across without, if you like, burning through real people. But you know, with the idea before it hits a human.
Speaker 3:You've already had that.
Dr. Leah OH:Yes, yep, yep. And if we're thinking about their workloads, it's kind of, you know, ability to lessen their load or maintain it. Well, you can have that sounding board. That's so helpful.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Dr. Leah OH:So we've talked about messaging and communication, and now I'm wondering about leadership styles. So I you know I'm a leadership scholar. I know there's so many different paths to being effective, and I'm wondering if you have found or observed some particular traits or styles that tend to be really effective when we're looking at this kind of large scale change.
Speaker 3:Well, it's a bit like the conversation we had before around, you know, strategies. Again, there's no one leadership style that. I think works for everyone in every situation again or everybody doing it.
Speaker 3:So I think there's one ability that leaders definitely need to have, and that's the ability to switch between different styles, and that's not just contextual. I think it's also about managing one's self, because sometimes you can get better out of yourself and your own ability by using a particular style with a particular person. So so I, so I think that's part of it. I also have discovered that the more senior you get in your role, um, the more you need to be less worried about your own style and more worried about how you get the best out of other people, um and so. So, in a sense, your own style is I'm not saying it's not important, but it but it's more important that it generates the right style in that whole leadership team around you. Yes, uh, I wouldn't quite go as far as this, but it's almost like if it came to sacrificing yourself so your whole leadership team could perform better, because everybody thought you were an idiot in terms of how you were in it, but all the teams were working, working brilliantly.
Speaker 3:That would be worth it, yeah you know, yeah, it's probably quite an unusual, unusual perspective on on things. Um, I find, yeah, coaching culture um is a really, really good.
Speaker 3:So this is something we've been working on in our organization um is trying to create this kind of coaching culture, um, uh, and we started with leadership teams, so with individual executive coaches, but group coaching as well, and now we're kind of cascading that through the organization. That creates an emphasis on feedback, honest conversations, um, so that's great, um, and I suppose the last thing I would say is alignment to values. For me, I think is really important, because people can tell right.
Speaker 3:They can tell if you say the values of this and then you're saying you're doing something else, they know it doesn't fit. We have one in our organization which I've never seen anywhere before. So we have four values. So we talk about being excellent, progressive, thoughtful, and then we have this other one, which is that we are a warm organization oh yeah, I haven't heard that one.
Dr. Leah OH:Um, and you know I love it. I've heard the other. Yeah, when.
Speaker 3:I arrived I thought what is this warm thing? I mean normally warm. You know we're talking about global warming. That's bad right? So yeah, what you know, does this?
Speaker 3:mean we're like I don't know. We're all sitting around on beanbags. You know what's it all about? And it turns out this warm thing is about saying look, you know, sometimes we've got to make hard decisions, sometimes we've got to make them popular decisions. Sometimes we've got to do things that not everybody agrees on, but that doesn't mean we can't do it in the right way. Treat people decently, with respect, bring people along Really, try hard to communicate what we care about and why we care about it.
Speaker 3:And I tell you, boy, do we live this value? This is not a value that's in the drawer, that we never you know, no one knows about.
Dr. Leah OH:We live it and it's so powerful and so this kind of leadership styles that link directly with those kind of values I just think are incredible styles that link directly with those kind of values I just think are incredible. Yeah, and I like the reminder because I think we're at a point in society where there's so much divisiveness and so much strife and so much uncertainty that having warm as a consistent part of your work life and infused in those relationships and decisions, that's a place I want to work at.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I agree, and some people have criticized this before externally and said look, does warm mean like you're a bit, you're not as ruthless as you need to be or you're not as sharp edged? And actually it doesn't, because it's not about what we do, it's about how we do it, and I think that's the difference.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, I like that distinction. So we just talked about these effective approaches to leading in organizations and, more specifically, in organizations looking for large-scale change. So now I'd like to ask you about instances that you've seen that are less effective or maybe downright counterproductive. So what are some of those? You know, what is that bumpiest path that you've seen people take or tried to take in this route?
Speaker 3:Yeah, again, an excellent question. I suppose the obvious place to start is when you get the opposite of what I've just talked about, a misalignment to the values, where the behaviors doesn't match the rhetoric, if you like and I think that's highly problematic. People see through pretty quickly and things unravel pretty quickly. So it doesn't really matter whether you're trying to achieve large-scale growth or just keep the show on the road. It's going to fall apart pretty quickly so I think that's that's problematic.
Speaker 3:I the other thing is, I think when, when there's a, an undervaluing of difference, uh, and I'm thinking particularly of things like, um, you know, neurodiversity and so on um, we see it sometimes with kind of introverts, extroverts, whichever you know side of the equation, you fall on the idea that your way is the only way to do it and therefore you don't value anybody. It does it a different way or it's not quite as good as your way.
Speaker 3:I think that is really problematic. Um and I've seen leaders fall foul of that several times um, I think organizationally lack of room for progression can be problematic, because then your good people kind of have nowhere to go, and so they either get um, you know, demoralized, or they leave you know, so, so, and and and. There are so many options. You don't always have to promote people or pay them more. You know you can give them other.
Speaker 3:You know, I think succumbents are great, because then you get people back at the right time, you know, with all this other skills to bring. Uh, I think giving you know, giving people opportunities to kind of shadow and step into other roles for periods of time. So I think there's lots of things you can do there, but I think the two biggest problems that I see are leaders where they either don't own their mistakes, because then it creates a kind of blame culture. You know it's not my mistake.
Adam Boddison:It's your mistake or they don't take enough risk.
Speaker 3:So that risk appetite piece in terms of, yeah, and it's appetite piece in terms of, and it's particularly true of growing organizations, right, If you're going to change the dial, do something different. Sorry, if you want to grow at a different pace you've got to do something different.
Dr. Leah OH:So not taking enough risk, I think, is a big problem. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm feeling anxious because I'm thinking about all of these things and I know it happens in organizations, but that's just. That is a tough organization to be, to be part of. So when I was getting ready for our chat, I was thinking about, you know, short term and long term in this vision, because growth, you know, as you said, vision is one part of it, but we can't get there alone with vision. But you know, what do you recommend in thinking about talking to employees and stakeholders today and kind of keeping them in conversation as we head towards this long-term goal?
Speaker 3:yeah. So I mean, some of it is about measuring and tracking and reporting so people know where they are on the journey. Are we? Are we getting any closer, you know? Are we the same place as we were last year? What's working, what's not working, and and just and. Some of that is not just about presenting the positive picture of look, we're doing great on this stuff, but don't look over there, you know there's that's not.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, actually shine a light on the bad stuff as well, because that's where you get the ideas from people that say you actually could do something differently here, or maybe we just abandon that because that's just not going to work for us and put all our you know, put our resources into something else instead. So there's that honesty in terms of regular communication about what's working, what's not working. Are we are we getting? Are we getting towards it? I've seen some offices where they have these kind of, you know, big kind of thermometer type charts on the wall or something like this. So it's really visual and stuff. I really love that. Um, you know others where they have, uh, you know, the home page when people log in.
Speaker 3:It's like a, it's like a dashboard from the crm, uh something which shows them where we are so that kind of thing is great but the other thing is you've got to have a few aces up your sleeve for the for the long term. Um, do you know that the the film uh, school of rock, uh with jack black, yes, yeah I love this film, but if anyone's not watched this film, right, you're missing a treat. You've got to watch this film but, he has.
Speaker 3:He has a line he uses in this film where he says one great rock show can change the world. And I think you know, let's think about that in a business context, right, yeah, what? What are the rock shows that you've got kind of coming up your sleeve, so not?
Speaker 3:not the main strategy stuff and the business as usual in the short term and long term goals, but a few kind of game changes, most of which probably won't go anywhere. But you only need one to come off and it's going to massively accelerate your progress and change the world, to use Jack Black's phrase. So I think, as a leader, you've got to kind of set a few of those hairs off at some point and see what happens.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yes, I absolutely love that and I love the inspiration, because I always say leadership, inspiration is everywhere and we connect with it all differently. But when you make that connection, then figuring out, how do I parlay this into what I'm doing and where I wanna be?
Speaker 3:Absolutely 100% yeah.
Dr. Leah OH:So, adam, I have two final questions for you and these are kind of interconnected. So, on the communicative leader, we like to leave our listeners with pragmatic leadership or communication. It can be a tip advice challenge. So, first part of the question what advice do you have for our titled leaders out there, right, our managers, directors, ceos, anyone who has that formal leadership position?
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, I've got two pieces of advice, if I'm allowed to, yeah. So I think the first one would be to judge people more by their intentions than by their actions, Because then you encourage that risk-taking I talked about before. You know, they're not going to be shut down because actually they had a good idea but it was badly implemented or it didn't quite come off in the way they expected. As long as they've got the right intention, you can help someone to get there. If someone hasn't got the right intentions, I mean it's a non-starter, it doesn't matter if they accidentally get it right you know, so I think that intentions piece is really important.
Speaker 3:So, that's the first one. The second one for me is around picking your battles as a leader. You come across all kinds of things that you could get your sticky fingers all over and try and sort out. But in my mind those battles have to be small enough to win, but big enough to make a difference, and if they don't fall into that sweet spot, then you should leave them.
Speaker 3:well, alone because it's either going to give you a fight that just creates chaos and disharmony, or it doesn't kind of matter anyway. So yeah, that would be my two pieces of advice.
Dr. Leah OH:Yes, yes, I love that. I'm always reminded how much leadership is like parenting for parents out there, and you're talking about message repetition, how all the leadership books I'm am like so do parenting books in this too, figuring out how you know, does it make sense to pick here? And then I think, too, is the immediacy like is this going to cause a huge immediate issue, or is this just something that's a one-off right, like so, like you're saying, like if it's just not going to make a big difference, even if I could win it, I'm going to let it go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and letting it go, you know, is harder than it sounds sometimes. You know, as a leader, you're in a room and you can see something's not quite right and you feel like almost a professional obligation to say something and being able to kind of bite your tongue and say you know what? I'm just going to leave it because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that much. That's honestly so much harder than it sounds.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yep. And it makes me think about your point when you're talking about how, when you get to these higher ranks as a leader, part of your skill in what you're bringing to the table is to help others to shine and to raise up their leadership. So part of that might be modeling the grace and kind of letting some of these things like, okay, this doesn't have an immediate consequence, I don't okay, going to let it go, and I think that's really a beautiful example of leadership.
Speaker 3:I mean, I'll tell you a real example. It happened earlier this year, so I was meeting a CEO of another organization. I won't say who, but it was overseas anywhere a little bit that way.
Speaker 3:So over in the Middle East and we were meeting this person for the first time, I had three members of my team with me, kind of, you know, middle management type stuff, and this person, it was just one person from their side, it was this chief exec, first time meeting in person, and we sat down and this guy's opening comment was Adam, you remind me a lot of Lewis Lipp from Seats. You look so much like him. I can't believe it. And now I've seen that program. Right, this character is not known for good reasons.
Speaker 3:Uh, yes you know, you see, you know, if anyone's seen if your listeners have seen this, you'll, they'll, they'll know it's a bit kind of nerdy, and so on. Now it would have been so easy for me to be really offended, really insulted by this, uh, you know, to come to comment that that was not an appropriate way to start to me, or whatever, and in fact, what it took all my, all my will to say, oh, I must watch that program sometime and find out exactly who you're talking about yeah, and then move on.
Speaker 3:And actually a couple of members of my team said afterwards we know you've watched that program. And I said, well, yes, but you know that's not a great way to start a relationship off. If I, if I, fault in the very first thing they've said to me. So, that's just a real example, you know, of something that's happened this year.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, that is excellent. Your professional privilege is like what is going on and then taking the time to think that through. Yeah, kudos to you. So that the final part of the question. So we've talked about some advice for our title leaders. What about for all employees, Any rank, any industry? What do we leave them with?
Speaker 3:I suppose I would want to remind people that their words matter, what they say and what they do really matters, and actually people, at any level, have more influence than they, they they know, on the people around them. Um, there's a story from when I was a maths teacher which always, always kind of comes to mind when I think about influence. So I remember my very first year as a kind of um, well, I just finished as a student teacher, my first year as a secondary school maths teacher, so high school maths, and I, um, and I came into this lesson one day to the classroom and there's a young man there with his feet on the table, you know, hands behind his head, didn't particularly want to be there, I think, and I said to him come on, get your feet off the table. I said you wouldn't do this at home, would you? And he said to me no, but then I wouldn't do algebra at home either. Uh, and I said well, that's that's actually a really funny answer.
Speaker 3:So I gave him 10, uh 10 kind of house points, just like this reward system. He, the guy, nearly fell off his chair. He, he was 15 years old. He said in his 15 years. Nobody had ever given him house points before he'd never been given a reward before. Yeah, he was a bit of a rogue.
Speaker 3:This, this chap right you understand yeah, anyway, we we ended up getting off, getting off on the right foot, and we got him quite well. Um, he went on to do his uh, you know, his gcse exams. So they're the exams they do it with age 16 in the uk. Um, I'd left the school by then, um, but many years later, um I I saw him on a train. I was on the train going somewhere and he spotted me and he said oh, do you remember? And we talked about this time and falling off the chair, all of this um, and. And he spotted me and he said oh, do you remember? And we talked about this time and falling off the chair, all of this um, and. And he said and he said to me, he I said well, what do you do now? He said uh, he said I'm a maths teacher.
Speaker 3:Uh, and by the way I do algebra at home every day um but, but, but the point was oh, I got goosebumps. Yeah, what he said to me was look, no, no other teacher cared you know about me he said. He said I went on, I got my gcse I went on to do um maths at you know a level university became a teacher. He's now a head of head of maths in a high school um, and he puts it down to this one conversation.
Speaker 3:Not, it wasn't all of the stuff afterwards, the exams, all of that was enablers, but the thing that really mattered was that one conversation and I was fortunate that I happened to bump into him and we we had this conversation. I would never have known but the reason. Sorry, I've been a bit around the houses here, leah, but but what I'm saying is in the workplace.
Speaker 3:In a workplace, people are having these conversations all the time. You know over lunch, you know around the water cooler on a team. But those words matter and they could be life changing for people. So I suppose my advice is think carefully about what you say, because it could change someone's life.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, gosh, I absolutely love, love that story One I will not forget. So cool that you got to see that go full circle.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was very lucky, Very lucky that you got to see that go full circle.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, I was very lucky, very lucky. Yeah, adam, it has been an absolute joy chatting with you and learning from you, and I am so excited to share all your words of wisdom with our listeners. So thank you for being with us today.
Speaker 3:Thank you for the invitation.
Adam Boddison:All right, my friends. That wraps up our conversation today. Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose. I'm looking forward to chatting with you again soon on the Communicative Leader.
