Team Guru Podcast

We’ve all been to one of those feel good business culture days. They can actually be quite enjoyable. You get to know your colleagues in a new way. You have the opportunity to learn some new stuff and put a few concerns on the table. They can feel great. But the next day, you're hit an overflowing inbox and a day of back to back meetings. Before you know, that great cultural day is but a blurred memory. My guest is here to make sure you, your team and your organisation doesn’t become another statistic.

Ask most people how they are – especially at work – and they will invariably answer that they’re busy. So busy. But that’s good, right? Wrong. It’s not good, and we know it. The habit our society has developed, the obsession with being busy – or at least appearing to be busy – is doing us untold damage. To us, the quality of our work, our teams and our families.

If you could guarantee just one trait for your child what would it be? Kindness? Intelligence? Enthusiasm? Those are all good choices but my guest this week says the most important human gift is curiosity. It's the key to creativity, innovation and personal growth.

Evette Cordy is the author of Cultivating Curiosity: How to Unearth Your Most Valuable Problem to Inspire Growth. A healthy dose of curiosity allows us to be both problem solvers and problem finders. The ability to ask the right questions and devise clever solutions are products of the curious mind.

Delete Facebook. You've been thinking about it for a while now. And you're not alone. But that private thought became a full blown civic movement this month. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the extent to which our personal information has been sold by Facebook to a variety of unscrupulous third parties.

Angela Lockwood joins me to talk about how people can learn to disconnect. Angela is the author of the book Switch Off : How to find calm in a noisy world. She told me that most people think that it's nearly impossible to reduce their use of social media.

Recently I was invited to host an event sponsored by Women in Resource Mining Queensland. I interviewed Tim Crossley who has had a long career with some of the biggest companies in Australia, including BHP Billiton. We discussed how he made the transition from technical doer to technical leader through the various levels of senior management. We discussed his strengths and weaknesses in the C-suite. And Tim was very open and honest about the price he paid in his personal life to achieve his professional goals.

There's been a relentless stream of news coverage over the last few years about how the robots are about to change everything. We are headed into uncharted waters when it comes to artificial intelligence and automation. But there is a tremendous upside to living in a world freed from subsistence labour. Human creativity will be the last thing to be replaced by robots. Those that are prepared for that change will be the first to succeed.

Capitalism is on the brink of significant change and a new new horizon coming into view. That's the view of Mike Edmonds who joins me this week to discuss this powerful concept. Mike is the chairman of Meerkats, an advertising company based in Perth. As a veteran of the marketing world he’s seen capitalism up close. He says change is coming and it is now possible to see what the new economy will look like. In his new book Truth. Growth. Repeat. Mike details how a company based on authenticity and honesty is the best way to ensure long term profitability.

Welcome to the first of a new format we're test driving here on the Team Guru Podcast. For the last couple of years I've been posting a new episode every two weeks. Starting today I'm going to release a minisode on the alternate weeks – bringing our total releases up to four per month. I've been lucky enough to amass over 70 hours of interviews since 2015. There are a lot of great lessons in there.

In each of these minisodes I want to pluck out one of those lessons that will have a particular resonance with the issues of the day.

Today it's all about great coaching.

Its February and that means many of you have already failed to live up to your New Year's resolutions. Don't worry you're not alone. Statistics show that 40% of people will have failed to maintain our resolutions after four weeks. By six months that number rises to 60%. Maybe you wanted to lose weight or spend more time with family or just to put the damn phone down.

Let's be honest resolutions are hard! Setting goals and trying achieving more in our personal and work lives is laudable. But without the right structure in place you're bound to fail.

I've discussed how to create that structure many times on the Team Guru Podcast. Today, I want to share some of the best lessons I've learned over the last two years.

You're about to hear a very timely conversation. In the last episode we spoke with Kerry Boulton about the importance of creating a sales mindset. Thinking big enough to develop our business in a way so that it has some value on the open market. My guest in this episode is Stephen Barnes who is an expert in turning around businesses. He's all about changing the corporate culture from labour-intensive stress factories into high-performing value machines. At this time of year when we are all full of enthusiasm for the opportunities ahead Stephen tells us the top five things we must have to ensure a flourishing company.