Dig Deeper

How often do you stop yourself from doing the thing you know is right, because it feels like it isn’t your call? And how many people around you are doing the same?

In a recent conversation on Dig Deeper, City of Vincent CEO David MacLennan shared a formula from Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis: performance equals potential minus interference. In this solocast I explore what changes when you see your job as clearing what’s in the way rather than adding more.

Key takeaways:

• Why removing interference matters more than adding capability
• The three kinds of interference: practical, structural and psychological
• Why frustrating rules usually start out as sensible ones
• What it means to be a “pain manager”
• How one staff survey across 25 areas led to decisions that freed things up
• How hosting looks different from heroing when it comes to potential
• Two questions to take into your week

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:10) Permission and “that’s not my lane”

(01:15) The Inner Game of Tennis formula

(02:02) Potential minus interference

(02:32) Three kinds of interference

(03:02) Why interference piles up, and the pain manager

(03:35) The City of Vincent staff survey

(04:01) We don’t grow potential, we release it

(05:05) Two questions for your week

Listen to the full conversation with David MacLennan: [Interview] Leading a City for Lasting Impact | David MacLennan

Others mentioned:

The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey

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Have you ever found out that something you were doing to help was actually getting in the way? You had good intent, and knew exactly what you were trying to do for your team. Then someone told you, in much kinder words, to get out of the way.

This episode is about the gap between what you intend and what people actually experience (and, what to do when you find one of those gaps in your own leadership). Celena Harry and I get into how to go looking for that feedback without making a production of it, why the best work a leader does is often the work nobody sees, and what it takes to stop telling yourself the worst version of the story.

You’ll learn:

• Why your intent matters far less than your impact, and how to tell the difference
• Three questions that close the gap between the impact you want and the impact you are actually having
• How to ask for feedback in a way that gets you something useful back
• Why the best work a leader does is often invisible, and how to get comfortable with that
• How perfectionism shows up as an inner critic, and what it costs the people around you
• How to work out whose opinion genuinely matters to you

Celena Harry is Chief People Officer at Ando Insurance and previously held the same role at Mitre 10. She has spent more than two decades helping organisations grow through great leadership, strong culture, and a healthy dose of pragmatism.

Away from work, Celena is a mum of two and stepmum of three talented young adults, and cat mum to a feline who has very clear views on household leadership. Proud to hail from West Auckland, she’s built her career on keeping things practical, people-focused, and refreshingly free of corporate jargon.

Whether she’s talking leadership, culture transformation, or what it takes to create a fantastic workplace, Celena believes the best conversations are honest, human and grounded in real life. And if those conversations happen to be accompanied by a 90s rock soundtrack, even better.

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(02:22) - The feedback that changed how she leads

(03:48) - What getting in the way actually looked like

(05:17) - Handing over the stage, and what happened next

(07:00) - Wind beneath my wings: the work nobody needs to know you did

(09:34) - Why people are led by their leader, not by HR

(11:59) - Getting braver, and what changed when she went contracting

(15:38) - What Playcentre taught her about the human condition

(17:57) - Separation, redundancy and Dare to Lead in 2020

(20:37) - How to catch the story you are telling yourself

(22:57) - Dual awareness, and finding language for your own state

(28:25) - Perfectionism, and who is actually in your arena

(33:53) - Leading for impact when your impact is indirect

(36:54) - The three questions that close the intent and impact gap

(38:48) - A practical way to find out how you are landing

(42:13) - Gloriously, beautifully messy humans

(45:21) - Reflections

You can find Celena at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/celenaharry/

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When one of your people brings you work that's accurate, well researched and clearly argued, and it still goes nowhere, where do you look for the reason? At the decision maker who ignored the evidence? Or at what your person couldn't see from where they were sitting?

In this solocast, I start with a CFO placement I lost early in my career as a recruitment consultant. I had the strongest candidate on the shortlist and still missed, because I'd answered the brief without asking what the client was really trying to solve. From there I look at research from Gerald Ferris and colleagues showing that intelligence and the ability to read a room are separate capabilities. That's why context is something you need to teach your people rather than hope they pick up. You'll come away with three things to keep in front of your people, and a question that might change what you hand over next.

You'll learn:

• Why a strong shortlist still lost the CFO role, and the three questions that would have changed the outcome
• Why clever and savvy are separate capabilities, and what the research says about which one predicts performance
• How most people actually learn context, and why neither route counts as a development plan
• The three things your people need to weigh up to get an idea across the line: content, circumstances and consequences
• How to walk alongside your people while the work is still taking shape, rather than after it's failed
• Why handing over context does more for your people than handing over corrections
• The question to ask yourself about what you know and haven't said out loud

Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction

(00:10) The CFO placement I got wrong

(01:52) Answering the brief and missing the real question

(02:09) When great work isn't enough

(02:52) Clever people and astute people

(03:38) Context is taught

(04:25) Content, circumstances and consequences

(05:22) Giving context rather than the answer

(05:46) A question for you

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What if the most powerful thing you can do to lift your team's performance isn't to add more, but to remove what's getting in the way? And what does a sheep meat trade ban in Mexico have to do with how one CEO is building a high-performing city?

In this conversation, David MacLennan and I get into what 15 years of diplomacy teaches you about leading without authority, a trade crisis that became his most formative leadership moment, and a framework he's built his entire organisation around. We land somewhere worth sitting with: the job of a leader might be less about what you add and more about what you remove.

David MacLennan is the CEO of the City of Vincent in Perth, Western Australia, named the second most livable city in Australia last year. He is also Chair of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre at the University of Western Australia. He spent 15 years as a diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, fluent in Spanish, with postings to Papua New Guinea, Mexico City, Lima, and London. During his time in Lima, he was awarded the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services, Commander Grade, by the President of Peru for his contribution to Peru's hosting of the 2008 APEC Leaders Summit. Before joining local government, he was Assistant Director General at the WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from UWA and a Master of Management from ANU and has been at the City of Vincent since 2018.

We get into:

• How a trade ban on Australian sheepmeat became the leadership lesson David still draws on today
• Why the CEO's job is best understood as pain management: finding and removing what stops people doing their best work
• How the City of Vincent gave a whole community permission to lead their own streets, and what that says about leadership at scale
• What it looks like to get an entire organisation into flow state, and how David accesses his own
• Why the problems in your work life never go away, and what that actually means for how you grow

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:40) - From small-town WA to diplomat: David's unlikely career arc

(06:52) - The Mexico sheep meat crisis, and what no one saw coming

(11:55) - The lesson that stayed: step up when no one else will

(17:24) - Clever, creative, courageous: running a city with limited resources

(21:11) - Town Teams and giving a whole community permission to lead

(24:52) - Performance equals potential minus interference

(29:41) - Getting an entire organisation into flow state

(30:56) - How David accesses his own flow state

(32:30) - From individual performance to a culture of high performance

(37:44) - Reflections and where to find David

You can find David MacLennan at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-maclennan-35724334/

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Someone comes to you with a problem. What's your first move? For a lot of us, there's a pull to just solve it, hand over the answer, and feel useful. It's a natural instinct. It's also, more often than not, the least helpful thing you can do.

This episode walks through a model I've used in workshops for years: five levels of intention, from combatant at the bottom right up to co-creator at the top. Each level sounds different, asks different questions, and leaves the other person with something different. Underneath it all is one idea: intent determines impact. Your technique matters less than what you're actually trying to do underneath the words.

In this solocast, you'll get:

• The five levels of intention, from combatant through to co-creator, and what each one sounds like in a real conversation
• Why solving someone's problem for them can quietly teach them nothing but the shape of your answers
• A second lens, attention in, attention out, and a tension between, that's arguably more useful than the levels themselves
• Why your job gets easier, not harder, once your attention shifts off yourself
• A simple fishing metaphor for the difference between catching someone's fish and teaching them to fish
• One thing to try this week: picking a single conversation and moving up just one level

Timestamps

(00:09) The pull to give someone the answer, and why it's not actually help

(02:08) The ladder: level zero, the combatant, and level one, the troubleshooter

(04:08) Level two, the advisor, and level three, the enabler

(06:27) Level four, co-creator, and the second lens: attention in, out, and between

(08:32) Your centre of gravity, and one thing to try this week

I've put the whole model, all five levels, the questions that go with each one, and the fishing language, into a free one-page PDF. Download it here: https://digbyscott.com/five-levels-of-intention

There's also a longer written version of this model on my website: https://digbyscott.com/thoughts/intent-determines-impact

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How do you know if the way you're showing up as a leader is actually landing the way you mean it to?

Francois Barton has spent years learning to host, not control. As chief executive of New Zealand's largest CEO group, his job isn't to have the answers, it's to set the table and get out of the way. In this conversation he talks candidly about the moment a partner pointed out the gap between his intention and his impact, why tenure can sharpen a leader or dull them, and the shift he's now navigating: from curating conversations to challenging what's actually being said in them.

Francois Barton is chief executive of the Business Leaders' Health and Safety Forum, New Zealand's largest CEO membership group. More than 440 chief executives, representing over a quarter of the country's workforce, are part of it. Francois helped found the Forum back in 2009 and has led it since 2015. Twenty years working across business and government in policy, strategy and regulation shaped a belief that sits at the centre of his work: progress only comes when leaders confront difficult realities together.

You'll hear:

• Why Francois thinks of himself as a curator, not an expert
• How a spare afternoon with one visiting CEO turned into a Forum-wide way of connecting leaders
• What "the sweat's on the right back" taught him about caring less what people think
• Why tenure can be a strength or a trap, and what decides which
• How his partner's honest feedback exposed his own intention-impact gap
• Why he doesn't trust "skinny cooks" in leadership
• What's pulling him from hosting conversations toward challenging what's said in them

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(02:05) - Catching up, turning 53

(04:18) - What Francois is still holding onto

(06:44) - Curating vs controlling

(08:09) - The intention-impact gap

(10:35) - Inside the Business Leaders' Health and Safety Forum

(15:12) - Does tenure sharpen or dull a leader?

(21:41) - What's missing in leaders who've gone stale

(24:15) - Why Francois doesn't trust "skinny cooks"

(27:37) - How the CEO connection lunches started

(30:30) - What Francois deliberately doesn't do as host

(33:58) - Where the real value actually lives

(38:15) - Risk, relationships, and resourcing

(41:21) - From curator to challenger

(44:46) - What surfaced in this conversation

(47:57) - Where to find Francois

(48:34) - Digby's reflection and sign-off

You can find Francois at:

Website: https://www.forum.org.nz/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francois-barton-6a040b11/

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You walk into a room where nobody knows you. No shared history, nobody to vouch for you, and whatever you've built is sitting in a file the person across from you will never open. So what actually earns you credibility in the next ten minutes?

I've been living this question. Over the past few months I've been building a practice in Perth, and almost twenty years of trust earned in New Zealand counts for nothing in a room where I've just met someone. So I've been carrying a mantra with me: credibility is in the eye of the beholder. It's granted, not claimed. Which shifts the question from what you've built to what you're doing to earn it right now.

In this solocast I share what 25 senior leaders came up with when I asked them what makes someone credible, why our brains judge warmth before they judge anything else, and the three things that have to show up together.

You'll get:

• Why the person across from you is the one deciding whether you're credible
• What 25 senior leaders put on the flip chart, and the one word that only turned up once
• Why a primal part of your brain asks "friend or foe" before it asks anything else
• The Amy Cuddy and Susan Fiske research on warmth and competence
• How competence, care and character add up to credibility
• What you look like to others when one of the three is missing
• Why leading with care first is what opens the door to a second conversation

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(00:40) - The mantra: credibility is in the eye of the beholder

(01:21) - Credibility is granted, not claimed

(01:44) - What 25 senior leaders said makes someone credible

(02:30) - Care: friend or foe, and why warmth comes first

(03:09) - Character: showing who you are

(03:30) - Competence, care and character together

(03:56) - Leading with care first in a new city

(04:19) - Three questions to leave you with

Referenced in this episode:

Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick, "Universal Dimensions of Social Cognition: Warmth and Competence", Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2007

Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

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How do you know when your team needs a rebel and when they need a prefect? And what happens when you've only ever learned to lead one of them?

In this episode, I sit down with Cat Hall to explore an idea we built together years ago: rebels and prefects, and why both are essential when you're driving change. Cat brings six research-backed traits from her master's in Change and Organisational Resilience that shape how well people adapt, and partway through the conversation, she turns that research back on herself. We land on something worth sitting with: adaptability starts with psychological safety, and with giving people permission to play.

Cat Hall is a workforce strategist and change leader who helps people thrive in a rapidly changing world of work. With a background in organisational development and change, she now works at the intersection of future-of-work strategy and practical change, designing future skills frameworks and adaptive ways of working, from her early years pushing against the status quo inside a large government department, through to building a practical adaptability playbook now used by leaders and HR professionals. Her recent master's research went beyond the adaptability buzzword, focusing on what actually enables people to adapt to change and what organisations and leaders can practically do to foster it.

We get into:

• Why rebels and prefects both matter, and how to know which one your team needs right now
• How psychological safety is the real starting point for building adaptability
• Why self-efficacy and resilience show up differently when change is happening to you rather than being led by you
• How small pockets of autonomy give people permission to experiment with change
• Why a simple mantra helped Cat get through one of the hardest years of her life

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:44) - Rebels vs prefects: what do the words actually mean?

(05:38) - From "good girl" to rebel: Cat's story

(09:22) - Finding organisational development and a career-defining moment

(14:09) - Full rebel mode at Inland Revenue, and learning to bring people with you

(20:11) - Back to study: a master's in Change and Organisational Resilience

(25:13) - The six traits of adaptability, and turning the research on herself

(29:51) - Doing a master's through the hardest year of her life

(34:37) - Bringing the playbook to life

(37:06) - Where adaptability starts: psychological safety and permission to play

(39:48) - Reflections, and where to find Cat Hall

You can find Cat Hall at:

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-hall-834220199/

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When everything around your team feels uncertain, what are you actually meant to give them? Not answers you don't have. Not confidence you can't hold onto forever.

A few weeks back, working with a group of senior leaders from a New Zealand local government agency, I asked what they found hardest about leading through uncertainty. Almost every answer came back the same: it's hard to give people certainty. This episode is about why I don't think that's actually the job.

I reckon most leaders default into one of two modes when things get shaky: heroing, where you perform having the answers and end up carrying it all yourself, or hoping, where there's no answer and nothing gets handed over either. There's a third mode: hosting, where you create real room for people to find their own answers, whether or not you know the way yourself. Certainty is a promise you often can't keep. Agency is a gift you can always give, and there's real research behind why that matters, including a decades-old study where small everyday choices measurably changed how long people lived.

In this solocast, you'll get:

• Why performing certainty under pressure quietly turns you into the bottleneck
• The difference between heroing, hoping, and hosting, and why hosting is the one that lasts beyond you
• What a nursing home study from the seventies reveals about the measurable power of small choices
• Why giving away agency is still hard, even after fifteen-plus years of coaching leaders through it
• The cultural pressures, boards, media, performance systems, that quietly punish anyone who says "I don't know"
• Three practical tools you can use this week: a certainty and agency check-in, an agency audit, and a language shift
• A simple sailing metaphor for what it looks like to lead without controlling everything

Timestamps

(00:00) The question that started this: what leaders find hardest about uncertainty

(02:29) Heroing, hoping, and hosting: a sailing metaphor for leading without controlling everything

(04:35) Why giving away agency is still hard, even after fifteen-plus years of coaching

(06:47) Three practical tools: a certainty and agency check-in, an agency audit, and a language shift

(09:11) A close: the one decision you could hand over this week

I've put together a free model and a downloadable toolkit with the practical questions and language shifts from this episode. Grab it here: https://digbyscott.squarespace.com/agencytoolkit

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You've probably heard the advice: back yourself, have confidence, don't let self-doubt hold you back. But what happens when confidence tips into needing to prove something? And what happens when you're the one everyone comes to for the answer, every single time?

In this conversation, Monique Davidson traces her own shift from proving herself to improving herself, and what that's changed about how she leads. She talks about building a culture of curiosity, asking better questions instead of jumping in with answers, and about a metaphor she keeps returning to: the cape that leaders wear without realising it, and the weight of carrying it for too long.

Monique Davidson became one of New Zealand's youngest local government chief executives at 29. Nearly a decade on, she's leading Horowhenua District Council and serving as Vice President of Taituarā, Local Government Professionals Aotearoa. She's known for a candid, reflective style of leadership grounded in service rather than ego.

We get into:

• The shift from proving yourself to improving yourself, and why it changes everything
• How to build a culture of curiosity instead of always being the one with the answers
• Why leaders wear a cape without realising it, and the weight of carrying it for too long
• The cost of holding on to a hero identity, even when things are going well
• How to build a healthier relationship with your own ego
• The distinction between an ally and a confidant, and why every leader needs both

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:29) What got you to the top

(03:34) From proving to improving

(05:42) Your relationship with your ego

(10:46) Taking the cape off

(14:31) The cost of wearing the cape too long

(21:35) Imagine your actions written in the sky

(28:59) Balancing delivery and discovery

(30:08) Creating a culture of curiosity

(38:03) What she'd tell a 29-year-old

(41:19) Ally versus confidant

(43:59) The kitchen floor

(46:49) What she's learned from this conversation

You can find Monique on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moniquedavidson/

Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/

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