The Curious Choice Leader Podcast

 Being a leader is hard! Even when things are going well and there is not much changing around us there is a lot to do. Add with all the changes that are happening around our businesses, how we are working, where we are working, where our business focus needs to be, our leadership workload goes up, but we still have to keep everything else going too. We need to be doing more to lead and reassure our teams, we have more activities and team outputs to manage, quite possibly with less people and we know we need to be developing our teams too if we want to perform well now and in the future. It's something that tends to come up in most leaders careers, at least once and it's certainly magnified when we are leading change.

So how can we balance getting our work done, with leading and developing our teams? It's time to get curious and make some choices about how we do that for ourselves in our roles. 

If it ever happens at all it is very rare that in business we are only dealing with one change at a time. Our jobs as managers and leaders are to continually improve performance, even when we are not in the middle of change projects or a rapidly changing operating environment. 

So what are the implications for us as leaders of dealing with lots of different changes all at once? 

In this episode, we are going to dig into that and I'm going to share two ways to check you are doing the right things on the right projects without being totally overwhelmed as you take your team and your business through multiple overlapping waves of change. 

So are you ready? It's time to get curious and make some choices about how you can lead your team and your business through multiples changes at the same time. 

 With unemployment rising and more and more companies making people redundant, I’m having a lot of conversations with people about the merits of becoming a freelancer or a contractor. 

According to IPSE, the Association of Independent Professionals and Self Employed, approximately 6% of the UK workforce are freelancers and since typically when we see high redundancy levels we see an increase in the number of people freelancing they are expecting that percentage to go up. 

In this episode, I share the things you should consider before deciding if you should join them and become a freelancer.

No one wants to have to lead their team through a redundancy programme but when you do have to, how can you make sure its a constructive process that positions everyone for a successful future either inside or outside your organisation? 

In this week's episode we talk about how leaders can do just that, so are you ready?  It's time to get curious and make some choices about how you are going to lead when redundancies are in the air.

It's a mistake I've seen many leaders, especially inexperienced ones make more times than I can count - avoiding answering difficult and challenging questions. In this episode, I  talk about why it's such a big mistake and why leaders should love being asked those difficult questions.

So are you ready to get curious and make some choices about how you react to difficult questions? 

As the UK Government's job support scheme is being phased out, it leaves a very tricky team dynamics between those who have worked through and those who are returning from furlough, for leaders to manage.  This post furlough divide is going to provide yet another test of our leadership and given the challenging trading conditions we are all operating in, getting it right is potentially critical to the future of our businesses. 

So are you ready to get curious about the post furlough divide and make some choices about how you minimise its impact for your team? 

Right now, many of the people you work with are worried about their jobs - are they going to have to start going back into the office, how safe will it be to travel to get there, how safe will they be when they get there, how secure is their job anyway? For others, their concerns will be around what happens at the end of the furlough scheme, or maybe they are worried about contact with the public or what happens if there is a second wave of the pandemic. As well as worrying about themselves they may be worried about their friends in the organization and the future of the business too. And as leaders, we know how that feels since we are feeling it too - and it leaves us wondering how best to support our teams through this uncertainty. 

In this episode I share a practical approach to supporting your team when they are worried about their jobs and you don't have all the answers.

There is more to being successful than hitting your targets and in this episode, we turn the lens of curiosity inwards and talk about how we define success for ourselves, so we can work in alignment with our definitions and be the best leader we can be.

When we ask people to do something difficult, like change the way they work, they are very unlikely to do it unless they understand the reasons that sit behind the changes, but the rationale itself is often not enough.  Unless not changing puts people in danger, they need something more than a logical argument to be motivated to make those changes. They need to be inspired by a bigger vision or purpose, our business why.  But that’s not the only function talking about our business why has during change, it also serves as an anchor for our decisions when it seems like everything around us is changing

You can download the What's Your Why Worksheet mentioned in this episode here.

How can we possibly make decisions when everything around us is changing?

When we are in the middle of change and surrounded by uncertainty, the feeling of not being able to get your head around decisions grows, it’s very unsettling and can leave us questioning our own judgement.

And that’s not a great feeling especially when we are leading others through change - in fact, that just piles the pressure on and makes it even harder to think and make a decision.

So what can we do to help ourselves make decisions when everything around us is changing?