Legal Grounds | Conversations on Life, Leadership & Law
After over three decades in the legal-trenches, Mike Bassett has learned to appreciate two things: good conversation & good coffee.
Legal Grounds is an ongoing series of interviews with the people who are shaping our world - legal or otherwise. Witty, irreverent, & always thoughtful, these brief discussions fall somewhere between “Night Court” & Hopper’s “Nighthawks At The Diner”.
With that in mind, we promise your coffee will still be warm when the podcast is done.
(Legal Grounds was written, recorded, and produced by Dust Devil Press)
Legal Grounds | Conversations on Life, Leadership & Law
Legal Grounds | Ben Morton on Developing the Currency of Leadership, Safety as a Foundation for Growth, & Embracing the Paradox of Planning
In its literal sense, the term ‘Servant Leadership’ is a bit of an oxymoron.
If you’re the one in charge, shouldn’t you be overseeing whatever ‘service’ is being done by your team?
But in the same way that Leadership is confused with the idea of Management, the word Servant in the term ‘Servant Leadership’ often gets mistaken for the idea of Subordinance.
But as my guest today discusses, Servant Leadership is about more than being willing to jump in and help your team complete a mission when a situation goes sideways, it's about making sure they know you’re doing everything you can to keep them out of that situation in the first place.
Joining the podcast this week is Ben Morton, a sought-after leadership mentor, coach and bestselling author.
A graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandurst, he served two tours in Iraq before going on to assume the Global Head of HR role at World Challenge, eventually joining the ranks at Tesco, helping to develop their Leadership Academy.
But after moving from the battlefield to the boardroom, Ben began to notice how many programs relied on ‘tools’ and models’ that turned leadership into a numbers-game.
Determined to make a change, in 2011 he founded Ben Morton Leadership under a singular principle: A leader exists to support, develop, and look after the people they have the privilege and responsibility to lead so that they can deliver the results for which the leader is accountable.
We discuss why providing a sense of safety is at the core of leadership, why telling and teaching are two separate things, and why not all leadership lessons translate from the battlefield to the boardroom.
Enjoy the show.