The Visible Leader

Dr Lee Williams is a behavioural scientist with 30 years experience helping organisations improve productivity and performance. He’s done this work across many companies – including American Express,  Tesco and Dupont. He has an undergraduate degree in Pharmacology & Physiology, an MBA and a DBA from Alliance Manchester Business School where he completed the UK's first empirical study of Business Mental Toughness.

He uses this experience to measure employee well-being in his current business, KAYA.

Topics covered:

• What  Lee means by resilience
• What are some common misconceptions people have about resilience?
• How resilience can sometimes negatively impact employee well-being and mental health
• How to get the balance right so you get fewer downsides
• Top tips for leaders who want to help increase wellbeing

Connect with Dr Lee Williams here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thewellbeingchampion/

Click here to get your free copy of my Leader’s Guide to Increasing Your Impact, Influence & Free Time

Marina Nitze is an author and a crisis engineer. She co-authored Hack Your Bureaucracy with Nick Sinai, it contains over 50 tactics, each with real-world examples, for making lasting change in bureaucracies from PTAs all the way up to the White House and Fortune 500 companies.

Marina is currently focused on improving America’s child welfare system, helping organisations solve mission-critical IT challenges. Before this she was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and helped establish the United States Digital Service. She also served as a Senior Advisor on technology in the White House under the Obama Administration.

We talked about:

• What it means to have a high-functioning bureaucracy
• What hacking your (low-functioning) bureaucracy means
• Where to start to get results
• The mistakes that keen people make
• Why Marina is obsessed with stabbing people in the chest

And much, much more.

Find out more about Marina here:

https://www.marinanitze.com/

And buy her brilliant book here:

Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on any Team https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hack-Your-Bureaucracy-Things-Matter/dp/0306827751

Harrison Ward is better known as Fell Foodie.

He’s an inspirational speaker, outdoorsman and cook who loves to recreate restaurant-style meals on minimal equipment (usually a camp stove) in remote locations.

He has a vast following across various social media platforms and has featured regularly in the media including Channel 5 and BBC. He regularly delivers talks about his personal battle with depression, suicidal thoughts and alcohol highlighting a journey from an overweight, alcoholic, smoker to the fit, mountain-loving foodie he is today.

This is what Dame Mary Berry DBE said about him - "Great, classy food".

We talked about:

• His journey and his catalyst for change
• What he needed in order to support the change
• What challenges he encountered
• What habits he developed
• What sustained his change
• And tips for someone wanting to get healthier and fitter

His debut book is Cook Out: Fell Foodie’s Guide to Over 80 Gourmet Recipes to Cook in the Great Outdoors.

Glyn Potts is the Headteacher of Saint John Henry Newman Catholic College in Oldham. Newman is a large secondary school serving a diverse community where 43% of students are in receipt of ‘Free School Meals.’

Glyn was awarded the ‘Inspirational Teacher of the Year’ award in 2010, has a masters degree in Catholic Educational Leadership and a second masters in Youth Leadership. He is an active member of the Army Cadet Force within the North West.

He is a serving Deputy Lieutenant in Greater Manchester, and he was awarded an MBE in May 2022 for Services to the Army Cadet Force and Education.

Topics we covered:

• Why retention is the new recruitment
• What leadership skills are most lacking today
• Why calling young people snowflakes isn’t accurate or fair
• The leadership theories Glyn is making a reality
• The first place to start if you want to implement change

The leadership books Glyn talked about are:

Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

L. David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

James Kerr’s Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us about the Business of Life

And here is more about Glyn’s inspiring story:

One year in a struggling British state school

Carrie helps people transform meetings and meeting culture. She has redesigned how we meet for the collaborative era, crafting meetings that are honest, focused, supportive and energising. Carrie’s PhD created an evidence-based framework for what underpins meeting success (spoiler alert: it’s not having an agenda) and her research was described as 'game-changing for meeting science'.

Topics covered:

• Why it’s time for a new meeting philosophy
• Signs of a poor meeting culture that you might not spot
• ‘Best practice’ for meetings that’s just making things worse
• Carrie’s top tips you can action straightaway

Carrie is making her Mini e-course: Get your team out of meeting gridlock available for free to my listeners. Here is the discounted link:

https://www.fewerfasterbolder.com/offers/2xFzoooP?coupon_code=VISIBLYDIFFERENT

You shouldn’t need the code separately but if you do it’s: VISIBLYDIFFERENT

Connect with Carrie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carriebedingfield/

And check out her FewerFasterBolder website: https://www.fewerfasterbolder.com/

Edited by Steve Woodward at PodcastingEditor.com

Neil Jurd is a former army officer and RMA Sandhurst instructor. He served in several operational theatres, including the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Yemen. Since leaving the army he has worked in leadership development and coaching for more than a decade, Neil has an MA from Cranfield University, is a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Lancaster University. He was awarded the British Citizen Award in 2020, and appointed OBE in 2021.

He is the author of the 5* rated ‘The Leadership Book’, written to make Leadership easy to understand and easy to apply.

Topics we covered:

• The dark side of being busy
• The ‘yes, but..’ excuses for busyness
• How to create space
• How controlling less can be the key to success

Find out more about Neil

Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neiljurd/

Find his book here: The Leadership Book: A step by step guide to excellent leadership

Watch his Ted Talk: Pause & Allow. How controlling less can be the key to success

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Testament to their belief that relationships are the source of results, Phil Burgess and Felix Koch have worked together for more than a decade.

As joint Managing Directors of marketing services agency, C Space, their people-centric leadership approach to culture transformation led to various awards including ‘Best Place to Work’, ‘Best Agency’ and ‘Learning Team of the Year’ at the Learning Performance Institute’s Global Learning Awards.

They were jointly listed on Management Today’s ‘Agents of Change’ Power List for men championing gender equity in business and in 2022, Felix was listed on the InsideOut LeaderBoard which celebrates senior-leader role models who are working to smash the stigma of mental ill-health in workplaces.

As Chief People Officer and European CEO of C Space, they commissioned an award-winning mental health and connection programme which had a phenomenal impact on participant wellbeing and their sense of connection.

This inspired them to leave their corporate careers to set up WITHIN where they now work with leaders to drive results by creating cultures of connection where people can thrive. Their award-winning, group-based approach strengthens relationships, significantly improving wellbeing and delivering sustained impact over time.

The topics we covered:

• How people feel connection and disconnection in the workplace.
• Where employee disconnection might show up in the bottom line.
• What positive impact working on connection could bring.
• How people’s best efforts often miss the mark.
• And what you can do that will really make a difference.

If you want to hear more from Phil and Felix sign up to their free workshop:

Unlearning 3 leadership habits that prevent connection. https://calendly.com/within-business/within-workshop-unlearn-3-habits-that-prevent-connection?month=2023-10

Or connect with them on LinkedIn:

Felix: www.linkedin.com/in/relationships-are-the-source-of-results/

Phil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipburgess/

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Philippa Kindon and the team at Mayden think so and they've captured their journey of creating a self-managing workplace in their recent co-authored book, 'Made without Managers'.

Mayden is a 140-person strong health-tech company based in Bath, providing market-leading software to NHS Mental Health Trusts, charities and third-sector providers. Mayden takes an agile and self-managing approach, having broken free from traditional people hierarchies and instead is organised around teams that manage themselves and their work.

The team at Mayden wanted to share their stories, not because they think they've got this way of working all right, but rather because they want to provide examples of how it can work, and also give a real account of some of the challenges.

A lifelong student of organisational behaviour, Philippa earned her PhD from the School of Management at the University of Bath with research into identity in the workplace. Passionate about people at work, she believes that everyone deserves to be happy in their work. Not the lighthearted laugh-at-a-film surface-level happiness, but a deep, fulfilling sense of purpose and joy through connection to a meaningful endeavour.

Philippa's role at Mayden spans business development, innovation, coaching and championing self-managing ways of working.

Topics include:

• What was the problem that Mayden wanted to solve with self-managing teams?
• How Mayden was able to take ways of working from software development and apply them to the entire organisation
• How career growth and progression work in self-managed teams
• Does self-management mean there are no hierarchies?
• How do work-placed investigations progress in a managerless organisation? What about interpersonal conflicts?
• Did the Mayden team face surprises or objections?

Connect with me on LinkedIn
Visit Visibly Different

Read Made Without Managers: One Company's Story of Creating a Self-Managing Workplace
Visit Mayden
Read A Brief History of the Agile Methodology (InfoWorld)

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

After over 10 years of coaching leaders and teams, I’m on a mission. Well, two missions really. I want to explore the assumptions made about the BEST or the ONLY way to be a leader. I’ll be looking at alternative approaches to see if it’s possible to get results and end up with happier, and more productive people. And second - who are the people taking leadership theory and bringing it to life in their organisation? And how can you get the same results in yours?

Join me as I talk to thought leaders and change-makers about practical ways to apply new learning and rethink the status quo.