100 Episodes In: The Biggest Leadership Lessons So Far

Episode 100 felt like a moment worth marking.

Not with a summary.
Not with highlights.
And not with a look back.

Just a conversation — allowed to unfold.

This episode exists thanks to the generosity, creativity, and support of Kate Walker Miles and Valeriia Diakiv, whose contributions helped bring it into being.

As always, thank you for listening — and for being part of the Leading People journey since January 2021.

Here's to the next 100 episodes...

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Transcript

Setting The Stage For 100

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Leading People with me, Jerry Murray. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the penalty and themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers, and practitioners for deep dive conversations about open strategies, insights, and tools that drive personal and organizational success. And in between, I bring you one simple thing: short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought-provoking ideas, leading people is your guide to better leadership. It's hard to believe it, but this is episode 100 of Leading People, a significant milestone for any podcast. And we thought it might be a good moment to do something a little different. So for this episode, I invited someone else to step into the host chair with a guest you might not expect to hear on the other side of the microphone. Without further ado, let's have a listen.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Welcome to Leading People with Kate Walker Miles standing in for Jerry Murray. And my guest this week is Jerry Murray. Jerry, welcome. Welcome to your own podcast. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

I'm good. I'm having a surreal moment and being on this side of the equation. And I'm kind of looking forward to being interviewed on my own podcast. So I'm in capable hands, I know that.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Well, I hope so. Um it's quite meta what we're doing right now. Tell me what was the idea behind um flipping things over for this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Ah, that was a conversation with a very talented young lady who helps me with my marketing called Valeria. And we were saying, What are we going to do? What are we going to do? The hundredth episode. And the way the sequencing was working was there wouldn't be uh a formal guest, like I have every week, every second week I have a formal guest, or every second edition. And um, and she just said to me, Why don't you become the guest on your own podcast? It'll be something different. And it's uh maybe people might get to know something else about you that they don't know, or something like that. And then the search came for, yeah, who do we know that would have the background and skills and experience in broadcast and other things to maybe facilitate it. And that's how we end up in this situation today.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Everyone else said no. So you came to Kate Walker Miles. Please don't, please don't read it.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Okay, so so so that's that's a true story, yes. We begged, borrowed, and and stole, and nobody, nobody, no. I think it's uh I think uh I I'm looking forward to the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Yeah. So well, thank you very much for asking me to do this with you, Jerry. I mean, I'm delighted. And what can I just say, what an amazing accomplishment to get to the 100th episode. So lots and lots of water has flown under the podcast bridge since you began. When when was that? Tell us about the beginning of the podcast and what made you decide to even uh attempt such a thing. Loads of people in my work talk about, oh, I'm gonna do a podcast, but you actually did it. So how did it come about?

Curating Guests And Saying No

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Well, it came about during 2020. Um I I'd had yeah, health scare and had a heart attack, and I was recuperating, and you know, that was a pretty unusual time in our lives. And I was kind of thinking, how do you stay relevant in in a world that was starting to move very quickly online? Like I remember when COVID hit, uh, I had planned a couple of webinars on certain things. I was going to launch, I think I was launching a new program, and I I'd actually bumped one, I'd bumped this back by two weeks, and then COVID came in, and then within a matter of days, everybody was having webinars and promoting something. So I decided not to bother. So I felt how do you how do we get through the noise on this? Now, I'll there's a little backstory to this, and that is that I was once in the mid-2000s, I was the president of a chapter of an organization called the International Association of Business Communicators. And one of the things when I was president for two years, I used to do was I would always be testing out new stuff. And at that time, blogging was starting. So I started testing uh out blogging, and we we had this blog called the Captain's Log, kind of strange title, and we had and I started podcasting, and in those days I had a mini disc player, you know, those little square things, and I could stick a microphone into it, and we're cord people with a kind of reasonable size type of microphone, but it only lasted like a lot of podcasts, it only lasted a couple of episodes, and I didn't maintain it. And anyway, the technology wasn't there in those days. Uh, you had to have you had to have somebody who knew how to activate what was called an RSS feed, RSS feed. And it was hard enough to find somebody who can even spell it, let alone do it. So, fast forward, I'm sitting here in the summer of 2020, and I'm thinking, I grew up on talk radio in Ireland, and even when I go home now and it drove my kids nuts over the years, first thing I want to do is listen to talk radio. I want to find out what's going on in the country, what's on people's minds, people phoning in, guests talking about topical things, and also that turn of expression that Irish people have sometimes, which where they can see the world in the kind of humorous or comic way. And I thought that that could be really interesting. And the other thing that was happening was I've got an extensive uh book collection. I I like to read. And I've got hundreds and hundreds of books, and people would come in here, it's like a library, and then some people would say to me, Well, you could you recommend a book on this, or is that book any good? And that and I thought, you know what? I looked at this book collection one day and I thought, I I actually attended seminars with a whole bunch of those people. I wonder what they like to tell their backstory. And could we bring you know something else alive that particularly for people who are interested in the subject matter and you know who read books themselves, wouldn't it be cool if we could meet those people and get to know them in a different kind of a way? So I thought, oh, let me see if I can do that. And I started looking at what was it that I was doing professionally, and uh, and you know, we do a lot of work around how how to help people perform at their best, whatever that means, right? And and to do that, that's there's a lot of leadership in that, and there's there's there's the whole idea of self-leadership as well as as leading others. And I I I guess when I came up with this idea of calling it the leading people, with a little bit of a deliberate pun where Jerry Murray speaks to leading people about leading people, how to bring out the best in yourself and others. That's a little bit the backstory. And so I called up a few people or Zoomed them or whatever it was in those days, and said, I'm gonna do this. Would you be up for it? And a couple of said, Yeah, sure, I'm up for it. And so in the uh November, December of 2020, I recorded the first three episodes and they dropped the first ones dropped in January, and we broadcast every two weeks for about a year and a half nonstop.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

And and it's such a it's a crowded old space, the podcast market.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

So to now it is. It wasn't back then. Ah, of course. It wasn't. Uh now it's almost like if you haven't got a podcast, you're naked, you know. It's like you're coming up, like used to be a business card you gave out. Now you're going, uh, would you like to see my pot listen to my podcast? Um, no, the amount of people who are and and actually what I find is quite interesting is people contact me to ask for advice on how to do it. And and the first thing I say is don't. Well, I mean, I'm joking in one respect, but I I'd say you do realize what you're getting into here. Do you have a team of 10 people? And um they're going, no, not really, no. Uh it's like when I was uh you and I kind of met through Andrew Palmer, the economist, and Andrew had producers around him when we were doing the interview with him. Hello, Andrew, if you're listening. Um, and uh I think it was me jumping around being my own producer and that. So I think at the time it wasn't so crowded. Today it's very crowded. I I think that makes it challenging for the listeners as well as challenging for people like me who want to get a certain you know type of content out there in a you know, let's say a relaxed, interesting, maybe even humorous way. Um so it is a very crowded space today. Now, the thing is, when I looked up the statistics on this at the beginning, most people didn't get past the first four or five. Most people mean most people making podcasts. Most making podcasts, yeah. They didn't get past the first four or five. And they were lucky, you know, you know, to get a bit of an audience. It was really tough work. I think when COVID came, it was an ideal time to do it because I guess what a lot of people did. They went out walking a lot because they needed fresh air. Of course, maybe they had masks on or whatever, but a lot of time you you wanted to listen to something. And so I I myself was an avid podcast listener by then. And I would have certain podcasts, I'd say, Well, that's a 50-minute podcast, that's a great walk, that's going to get me around the come, you know, along the river here beside us and back again and stuff. So that's a little bit the the background to it. And at the same time, you know, I I feel quite strongly that what we talk about, what we cover uh is important, and and I'm so grateful and so lucky to have had some of some of the most amazing people as guests. It's like unbelievably uh like it's just such a fascinating thing to talk to some of these people. You watch them on YouTube or TED or whatever, and they've got 15 million views, and then they're standing in front of you on the camera here, and you're having a really interesting conversation with them, and they're you know, it's yeah, it's a great learning opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

It's such a privileged position, isn't it, to be able to follow your nose and your curiosity about who you want to talk to, but with the listener in mind, yeah, and then be able to actually then ask all those questions that you want to ask. So, how how do you go about deciding and choosing who you're going to approach? And and how do you go about getting them to come on?

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Right. Um, well, as I said earlier, part of it came from looking at the bookshelf, right? And then I I think it's it's a combination of things. It's like maybe I read a Harvard Business Review article, and then I realize there's a lot of time in the articles, there's new books coming out. I think, oh, that could be quite cool. Or somebody on LinkedIn posts, yeah. That's another way you just see it. Uh, another one is some guests recommend other guests. They say, Oh, you know, um, I remember um Stefan Meyer at Columbia Business School, he said, Oh, you need to interview Adam Galinsky, he's got a great book out. Um, and so that was one way. And um, there are a lot of PR agencies who pitch um they're they're working for uh either the publishers or maybe the authors, and I get pitched four or five people every day from the US, and some of the topics aren't that interesting for my audience. Maybe a few aren't that interesting for me. Also, the time well, yeah. I mean, I have to be interested in myself. Also, the also the time zone um yeah aspect can be a little bit of a challenge, you know, just getting the schedule in. And then to answer your question about how do I get them to to come on the program, I just ask them. I literally just I I reach out to people authors and I say, you know, I've read your book or I've just bought your book, I heard you, I saw your talk on whatever. Um this topic could fit really nicely into the podcast. Uh here's the kind of theme. Here's a link to some episodes, and I do have a guest briefing. I have a professional looking, you you've seen it, a professional looking guest briefing as reassurance that I know what I'm doing. And I say, if this is something that could interest you, and often I I I connect with them on LinkedIn first, and if if it's something that interests you, let's take it to email and I'll send you the background information. And um, yeah, I've got now some new guests lined up for uh the you know after this one airs. And yeah, no, they're quite keen to come and and and be on the program. So it's been I've been very lucky. Now, a few have been, let's say, a few have taken a little bit of persistence. Um, but what I find is sometimes I've uh I've asked an author who I've got maybe two or three books from, but there's nothing new happening. And then all of a sudden you see something new happening, like a new book is coming out, and and that the there's no no hesitation being a lot of things. Well, I mean, it's natural because of course they want people to want to get their message out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

And so tell me then, you know, you've you've done a hundred episodes, and this is a bit like you know, asking me which one of my kids I like best. But of those 100 episodes, which one really I guess I'm curious about which one really stands out for you as the one that you just the process of making it was joyful. And which one has registered best with your audience? Which one is their favorite?

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Well, that's an I I I would like to answer that with by maybe citing a couple of episodes. Like every episode, honestly, it would be unfair to to the guests uh to single out specific episodes as as favourites or better. There have been a few episodes. Um I've interviewed a couple of people who went through tragedy. Um and one of the neighbor, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Amazing.

Humour, Music, And Improvisation

SPEAKER_01 14:24

My my neighbor Julie up the street, whose whose husband, who was a fantastic guy, yeah, fell through a block of ice in Greenland. He was a polar explorer, and I I had met him a few days, just two days before he left. And I remember at the time saying, Oh, I should have asked him to come. I wanted to get him on the podcast for a while, and I forgot to ask him. I said, sure, I'll get him when he's back. And I sent an email this one Tuesday morning in June, four years ago, I think it was, and I said, Um, and Julie often dealt with these things, and I said, Julie, uh Dixie should be back very soon. Um, I'd really love to get him on the podcast. I heard nothing, and then a friend of ours sent a message saying, Have you heard the news on the radio? Uh he's so it was like a poignant moment. That that was one, that was an interesting one to to to go through because we also wanted to to highlight how Julie was making her own way in life. Now she's been on twice, but that episode was one of the most listened to episodes at the time. I also had a a wonderful young woman as a client. Um, she was working in admin roles here in Belgium, and she wanted to be a full-time fitness instructor. She was a champion swimmer and uh she was doing fitness classes at the one of the top gyms in Brussels, you know, various types of uh stretch classes and uh stuff like that. And um she hired a personal trainer to get her really she was super fit, but to get her super, super fit, where she had about six-seven percent body fat. So that that anybody who who knows about these things, that is basically all muscle. And she hired me to help her s quit her job um and and be able to have the courage to start off as a business, and she succeeded. Um, it was a wonderful moment when she invited me to the club just to have a coffee or a tea and talk about this, and then uh a few couple of months later, she was standing beside one of the suicide bombers at um yeah, Brussels Airport, and her life was shattered and her body is shattered. She survived it, and um she came on the program, and that I mean, I even get a bit emotional about it today. Um that was also uh uh a very special moment today. She's she's reinvented herself, she's doing a lot of work in the disability space because she's quite uh disabled these days as a result of that. Um, and and one thing that we talked about a lot on that program was resilience, not from a theoretical point of view, but what's it like to live in uh a world where everything that she stood for had been devastated in that one event. And yet the strength of mind, I suppose it was the strength of mind that made her a champion swimmer, it kicked in for her, and she decided that she wasn't going to let this define her life, other than the fact that uh it had affected her physically. But she decided that she was going to do the best with it, you know. So those are two, then there was there was a at the beginning, I tr I thought I needed to be very um formal and you know, just follow my little script, you know. And then I had um a chat with a guy that I did a lot of training with, he was a trainer of mine, this was in a way a uh kind of a mentor. And um in the training that I was doing with with him and several others in that space, humor was a big part of it, you know. Um, and and actually, because of my studies in neuroscience, there's so much benefit to using humor in a learning context. We got on the program and we got on a roll, and we we had lots of lots of banter and a lot of humor, you know, that kind of situational stuff, just the two of us. And we we almost lost track of time. We had over the hour, and I said, Jesus, Jesus, I think we're gonna have to we're gonna have to end this now. Um, but people started writing into me afterwards saying they really enjoyed it because it's like listening, standing at the bar listening to a couple of blokes, having a real Barney, and just be maybe even feeling like you could chip in and just enjoying, as we say in Ireland, enjoying the crack, you know. And so that then helped me realize that appropriate humour is okay. I I I don't like to have politics or you know controversial subjects like that because not because people aren't entitled to political views and that I think um it's a very complicated and complex uh part of our lives politics. So I'd ask people not to do anything with that. But for the rest, I say appropriate humour, um, why not? Because if you're out there listening to this, why not have a bit of a laugh when you're I mean you might look kind of strange go down the street laughing your head off if your neighbors are looking at you, but then when they see the head set in, they're gonna go, it must be Jerry Murray's podcast again.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

I mean, when when I guess it I had an absolute whale of a time, I think we went well over the hour, didn't we? Um I remember feeling exactly that I forgot that we were doing a podcast. I felt that we were two people who love understanding people's behaviour and the brain, having a proper good chin wagon, a bit of a lemma. And I wonder how much of that do you think comes from an I think we talked about it a little bit when we were together about your music and about the improvisation, your skills that you need as a musician? I'm curious about whether you're aware. Of those skills coming in and supporting you in this process.

Finding A Better Leadership Style

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Yes. Actually, one of the things that's I'm going to answer that question by going segueing through a slight experience. When I was at school, um I was in the class. Now maybe I wasn't, this was not unique, but I thought it was at the time. I was in the class of, I think there was 26 of us in the class. There must have been 25 comedians. Like there were people, it was you weren't safe at all, you know. Everybody was we we would get around it, it would just be one story after another. And um, so I guess I uh it was a sort of a natural way of being. And then I was when I my early days as a young guy playing music, we what would used to happen is we'd go to the parish hall, you know, and there'd be a concert, and there'd be a couple of microphones on stage, and uh musicians would come out and play for 10-15 minutes and maybe sing in that, and nobody would say anything. They would the MC would introduce them, they'd come out and they'd play, and then the audience would clap, and then they'd play again. The audience would clap. And I started going to folk clubs, you know, um, as a young fella, and part of it was yes, I was watching these like you used to get a lot of uh singer-songwriter guys, you know, because folk clubs weren't big and they couldn't afford big bands and that. So you'd go and you'd watch these guys, and like the classic thing would happen is they break string, you know. So what do they do? Did they go off and say, I'll see you later, or whatever. No, these guys were so good they'd pull the string out of they'd just say, Hold on a second, they go and breach and pull out a string, and they'd thread the string and they'd start the banter, you know. And I was as fascinated by the banter and how that helped keep the audiences engaged, you know. And you you've had these wonderful, um, I I once did a I used to play a bit with a guy here, and we used to do some stuff in Brussels, and this particular bar had a lot of wood panelling and and a lot of wooden stools in it. And so often starting off, leaving there'd be nobody there, maybe two or three people, and Noel would introduce the evening by saying, Well, ladies and gentlemen, well, welcome to the furniture exhibition, because it was more furniture than people, and you'd have you'd have all these little things, and so I was like, I'd be writing these things on my arm even when I so I I I thought this this made the evening very special. So when we started playing professionally in the 90s, um, everything had moved on, and bands were super well, you know, this idea the Irish bands were had a reputation for drinking and all that, that was all gone, you know, nobody was turning up drunk, or no, they weren't bringing alcohol on stage or anything, they were doing super professional job and presenting. And we found as a band that virtually all of us had our own little sense of presence and and uniqueness and a little bit of humor. And so, depending on the audience, uh, you know, we we we we all shared the presenting. And once you'd get a little thing going between two or three of the band members, and it worked, it'd be like a comedian stacking up their routine. And we we found that this helped an awful lot, you know, in terms of people just loved it, they'd come up and talk to you afterwards. And I remember one time uh one of the lads he introduced, we were introducing this medley of tunes, and um uh Michael had the bright idea. He says, you know, we like to write music for our children in this band. And um, I've written one for my daughter, I have one daughter, and Kieran here has three sons, and he's written one for his his three sons, a tune each, and Jerry here has written 44 tunes, you see. And and the audience, the audience fell off their seats, right? And I and then I couldn't resist. I said, and I'm still composing. So so this became a routine a lot of the time. But you know, people used to come up to me and say, Um, do you really have 44 children after the concert? Or how many do you have? You know, like it would be cute. So these little routines would emerge, and and and I remember we went out one night on on stage to do the second half of a concert. We have in the north of the Netherlands. And the the first part had a lot of banner. People started, you know, doing a little bit of you know, uh, what do you call it, jeering us a bit and you know, quipping as we came back out. And we we had an we actually had an interaction with them for yeah, they were heckling hecklers, yes. Um, but you see, people like Billy Conley teaches you how to deal with hecklers and you listen to his work and people like, but anyway, we ended up having conversation with the audience for 10 minutes, you know. Uh and so and it was funny all the time. So I think that humor, you know, what life is life would be very sad if we couldn't we couldn't laugh at things, and also life would be very sad, and I feel sad for people in cultures where music is not allowed in some cultures, yeah, where it's been banned. There's something about it that uh makes you know just moves us. And you know, if you go out to a concert, I know a lot of stars can come out on stage and they have the show, and you know, maybe they they don't always talk that much, but people don't necessarily go just for the music, they go for a good night out. And what you want to go home feeling I enjoyed myself. You might not remember what it was that you enjoyed specifically, but you want to go home and think, Oh, I enjoyed that. So that's always been an anchor point for me.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

So it's a bit like the people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, people always remember how you made them feel. A bit of Myrongelou there. And there's so much in what you've just said today. I mean, we're remembering that this title of this series is Leading People, about really brilliant leadership, actually. So for me, you know, that showing up and really being yourself on stage as you evolved as a band and being able to have that banter and just chat with the audience is creating the experience for them to get way more from the experience because you're you're being at ease, you're creating ease in them, and you're letting them get to know you. And I mean, like the other one, you were talking about the guy restringing as he and chatting the audience is restringing and setting out for the audience that things go wrong. It's fine. I'm not flustered by this. This is what we do. This is we we fail, we start again, it's all good. So that made me think as you were saying all that. Um you know, you mentioned Valeria, so you have got a team. I don't know if there's perhaps even a bigger team than just Valeria. I'm not sure what's behind the scenes for you. But what what kind of leader are you? You know, you've spoken to all these people with all their theories about leadership, and you've come with years of your own experience and research. But how would Valeria describe you as a leader?

SPEAKER_01 26:41

Oh, we'll have to call her up. Um so um actually I'm gonna answer that by by rewinding to the first proper kind of serious management job I had. They put me in charge in London as a young guy, in charge of about must have been 10 people. And I was operating from the model I'm the boss.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Yeah.

Failing Forward And The Future Of Leadership

Generational Exchange And Learning

SPEAKER_01 27:05

And uh, I'm gonna tell these people what to do because I'm the boss. I'm supposed to know. Yes, I I had worked on some building sites where the floorman tells everybody what to do. So I thought that's must be what bosses do and managers do. They tell people what to do. And I will admit this now because it's so long ago uh that I got it so horribly wrong. It was unbelievable how badly I got it wrong, to the point where I think the first time I decided to ask them to all do something different, they kind of basically almost threatened to leave, go and strike or something. And I thought, here's the here's the one thing that I I kind of has helped me over the years is if you do something and it doesn't produce the result that you were hoping it was going to produce, you can either hammer on with it again and think, well, I'll just keep going at it, or you can give up, or you can go get curious and go, I wonder what it is I missed or I might need to learn. So I remember now, people out there who can remember this book would probably laugh. And I actually know one of the people who helped develop this methodology, the One Minute Manager. Believe it or not, was the book that that totally reorientated me to going, you know, actually, it's about them, the people who work for you, not about you. It's uh it's really about the people who work for you. So, what I've tended to do is um it's funny, somebody asked me about team doing some team building the other day, and I was um putting together a little description of I I haven't done it in a while, but I used to take on these workshops in um in the Netherlands, uh, weekend workshops. A lot of adults would come who like to play Irish music, and the the whole goal of it was we'd come on a Friday evening, it was on an island, so you had to get a ferry across. And by Sunday afternoon, uh I would be working with a group of musicians, maybe 10 to 15 musicians, and on Sunday afternoon they would give a performance, totally from what we did over the weekend. And what I learned from doing that, and I think this has also helped me in in any sort of leadership role, is um I will turn up on that Friday evening, and I actually don't know what I'm going to get. Right, and you're you're an improviser, you know the the setting, right? I don't know what I'm going to get. I have a few ideas about um I'll have research some some music and I'll think, well, we could put that together with that. That'll change this one, will change the mood, it'll change the pace, etc. But I have no idea how it's going to turn out. So I throw some ideas into the room and work with what where people are, right? Not try to make them more than they are. Work with where they're at. And that's Friday's a bit of an experimental evening. By Saturday afternoon or late Saturday morning, my experience has been people go away at the coffee breaks and they come back in and they huddle together and they come back in and say, Hey, we've got an idea how we could change, could alter the arrangement on this, right? And we'll say, let's find out what how that works, explain it to the others. And and often it works. And this particular weekend, I don't actually play any music with these people. I'm the guy in the room who's supposed to be the teacher, and I'm supposed to be the kind of high-end musician. But with them, I don't play hardly any music. I I may occasionally show them something, but I don't play along with them. And I've never seen so much joy in people's faces on the Sunday afternoon when they perform what they have created together. And so I have always thought that you know, you know, this thing, if you think you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room, right? Um it's okay to know stuff, but if you're trying to do something in an organization or you're trying to build something, you you need to give the people the chance to to do it. Yes, you might orchestrate it and you might direct it and you might come in and support it and intervene and ask people to change things. But but that's that's that's my analogy for for what it's like. So with with take Valeria, for example, um who's been helping me out now. She's based in Odessa, so she has her own challenges. I'm just so pleased sometimes she's on the other end of the screen, uh, given a lot of time this last while, no electricity, she's having to improvise her own. But um, one of the things I when I asked her to come and work with me, she'd been working in an agency and then she'd left the agency. And I asked her to help define what she was going to do. She kind of knew what we were trying to do in the marketing side. But I asked her to come back to me and define uh what she, you know, what were the things that she thought we should be doing and what were the things she enjoyed most doing, right? So when I asked her to do new stuff, I always check in with her that um either first that she knows how to do it, right? Because she might need my help or input, or maybe neither of us know how to do it, we have to find a way, that she actually finds it interesting and motivating to do it, right, in the first place. And so we're also always focused on the outcome, you know. So we launched that this year what we call these live talent labs, and there was a lot of work we need to get in the first one done. And what kept us going was we're gonna feel great when that first one finishes and we can go, we got it, right? And then go into the second and third ones, and that has been easier because now we know what the outcome's going to be like, etc. etc. So um that's a very long answer, I think, to you to, but I I I feel that it's about listening, it's about asking questions, it's about helping. I always like this metaphor for questions, which is a good question helps you shine a light where the other person may not have thought of looking, you know, it's like a spotlight. And I find that uh is is really if you want to lead people, because that light might guide them where you want them to go anyway. So it's helping the leadership journey.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

It's absolutely and I couldn't concur more, but it's really interesting though to hear you say that you've found your style out of the burning embers of failure, in a way. And that's exactly the same story that I shared with you when I talked about I got it completely wrong when I was first put in a leadership position. I'm curious whether that's a theme that you've heard come up quite a few times with your guests. And I'm also curious about how do you feel now? Do you I heard you talk on a podcast recently about it being such a crowded space in terms of um leadership approaches and leadership gurus and experts and so on? But the hope from that maybe is that people at least have opportunity to, if they don't have a great role model that they've grown up with as a leader, there's opportunity now to find for yourself. I I'm wondering, how do you feel we're going uh in the world in terms of leadership?

The Dream: A Leading People Summit

Format Evolution And One Simple Thing

SPEAKER_01 34:06

Okay, um, let me quickly answer the first part of that question. There is an episode with a guy called Andy Lancaster, um, who was uh head of learning at the CIPD, you know, it's a very prominent uh institute in the UK for HR people and that. And the episode is about we have to encourage people to fail so they can learn better. And I've got a couple of people who've come on and talked about that. Um now the leadership thing, um where is it all going? Actually, there's got to be there's an interesting challenge coming along for leaders, and that is how are they going to co-lead people and technology at the same time when you look at things like agentic AI and that? And how do they how are they going to stay human throughout that process? And we we have to be careful. I've done a few episodes on on the AI thing. I'm fascinated by all technologies over the years. I'm also wary of them. I think we have to be careful to ensure that um we um have the super, you know, we are overseeing the technology, and we never let the technologies oversee us in to any major extent, right? And I know people who've worked in organizations where technology drives their day, and if they need to go for even a toilet break, if they go for longer than 10 minutes, they have to explain it in that because the technology recording it. I'm I'm I don't think that's I I just I find that discomforting a little bit. Um I think that um getting back to the leadership question, a lot of it comes down to um working with the the energy of the other person, and that means you have to have a certain antennae for sensing where somebody else is, you know. And we have lots of reference points for this in sport, in in entertainment, etc. You know, um we can give off our best if we feel good um about things, and then we if we have the skill on top of that to produce results. Um so I I would I would like to think that leaders will become more more human. Now that's uh why do I say more human? Because there's so much pressure today, partly created just by the volume of of information and technologies that come at us. But I would like to think that they see their role as drawing out the best in the people around them. And you know, that they see themselves as facilitating that as much as telling people what to do. Yes, some people we at times we all need directions. Like if you get lost in London, you're you're not not going to walk up to somebody and have them say, Well, let me coach you through how where would you like to go? Or the classic Irish one was the fellow in in County Kerry, a tourist, he stops at a local farmer and he says, I'm lost, I want to get to Dublin. And the far farmer says, If I were you, I wouldn't start from here. So so um, so you know if you want directions and you're going to try and catch a train and you're trying to get to Victoria Station, you don't want some guy coaching on the corner. Just tell me. So there's this idea of um, so there's this ability to uh see things and experience things, the empathy stuff, but there's also uh the other thing that sometimes is missing is is the ability to read context. And um it's about uh understanding context and being adaptable enough. I I I have a TED talk on adaptive capacity, which is how how how much capacity do I have to adapt to uh it's more the interpersonal stuff, but how much capacity do I have to adapt to situations? And if if I'm struggling at times, what do I need to learn about myself to be able to adapt to more and more situations I find myself in? Or perhaps the situations I need to adapt to are not situations I want to be in. Maybe I need to change something and and not put myself in situations where you know it's it's not helping me.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

And that's triggered thought around, you know, I'm of a certain generation, Jerry, and I think we may not be far apart in that respect. And people that we're now leading have grown up in a very, very different generation. And we both live in fairly multicultural areas, so we can't make assumptions that people are operating from the same schemas as us, that's they haven't grown up with the same the same guidelines as us, even necessarily. So that piece around adaptability and that adaptive capacity, I think, is even becoming even more important than potentially ever before, or maybe it was forever thus. Who knows?

SPEAKER_01 38:55

Well, uh here's my take on it. Um as you might expect, I might have a take on it. So here's my here's my take on it. Um I I I think um we so the people of a certain generation, as you call them, um there's something that they there's an exchange opportunity here. Um if let's just take Valeria, for example. I mean, she's super tech bright. I mean, I'm also quite tuned into tech, but you know, I'm not going to try and tell her how the technology works. I'm going to ask her to teach me how the technology works. What I'm noticing, maybe I hope I'm noticing this in a positive way, is that um I she has something to learn from maybe it's experience, maybe it's wisdom on my part. And um I am constantly uh asking her if how much she's learning, because for me, now a little bit that was my model of the world, but at the time, but I think it's it's always useful if she says, I'm learning loads, you know, and I'm enjoying it, and I'm I'm getting exposed. To some people, like these live labs, we've had some amazing guests on so far, and uh she's saying, uh, these people are just amazing, you know, and and and she's saying, I've been on webinars which are just boring, and you're just listening to somebody preaching at you, and I've designed it in such a way that it's a little bit part podcast, part workshop, and part webinar. So it's it's we start off with a little bit of interviewing, and then we we really discourage the pres people, the guests from putting up too many slides, and we keep it as human as we can and draw things out that way. Uh so it's just little little remarks like that. And and I I I think that there's our generation, all generations have an if they think of it as an exchange, that we all bring something to the party, then perhaps that will ease if there are tensions out there that will help ease those tensions.

SPEAKER_00 40:50

Yeah, it's a beautiful sense of living really in curiosity, isn't it? I don't have to be the expert, I have to be show up and then be curious. And I have to be able to improvise. And so, Jerry, I know we need to start thinking about bringing this glorious uh episode to a close. But I, if I may, as one improviser to another, would like to put you right on the spot. Um looking in panic.

Staying The Course And What’s Next

SPEAKER_01 41:16

I'm doing not looking for the spot. You said it was improvising.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Yeah, too shall I? Um, so you know that dinner party game where you have to design your dream dinner party, dead or alive guests. What about your dream podcast, dead or alive guests? Who would that who would it be?

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Oh do you know I'm gonna I'm going to do what an improviser probably would do. I'm going to take the first image that came into my head.

SPEAKER_00 41:49

Great. Build on it.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

And that would be the leading people summit, where they're all there.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

We're doing a leading people summit.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

Well, I've had this dream for a while. When I started this off, I'm I'm a bit like that. I'll always have the big, the big dream at the end of it. So when I would people would say to me, Why are you doing the podcast? I said one day we'll do the leading people summit and uh we'll bring as many of these people back uh as we can. So I I I I mean I would see panels and I would see others coming out just to be there and hang out. But also think of some of the wonderful uh synergies that would come out of some of these brilliant minds bouncing off each other. They might not always agree with each other, but think of some of the sparks that would fly. And this is one of the things from the music world that is is probably an interesting analogy. And it happens a lot in jazz music, but also happens a lot in Irish music, is you rarely play the same piece the same way twice. And if you play with some musicians, you'll never produce maybe the same unless it's a performance. But you know the way Irish people like to do this in the corner of a pub, those are totally unique experiences, they never get repeated. Even if you sat down and tried to reproduce it, you probably wouldn't. So there's something about that being in the moment. Um, but that's the first image came into my head, and I I always trust that unless it's a very obscene or rude thing, I always trust that that that probably is the right answer to your question.

SPEAKER_00 43:19

Yeah, I love it, and I think what a brilliant fantasy to have, because this actually could be a reality. Um so a hundred episodes, hopefully a hundred more to come. How how do you imagine it evolving from here?

SPEAKER_01 43:36

That's a very useful question because um I am following some people that um help podcasters. Uh, there's one guy in particular I follow quite a lot, and he's he's I mean, I think I'm special at 100. He's made 300 episodes of his, uh, but he's been doing it since 2015, and he's he comes from broadcast, you know. And so I've listened to a lot of his advice, and uh I feel that I probably have uh implemented well over 80% of it. It seems that I've got a lot of things that that that work. I'm kind of curious to to have a conversation with this guy just to find out what I could do to make this even better. Um I've had I've had I've I have put questions out to listeners and they've given me um ideas and suggestions, and I actually wish I'd never followed them. Sorry about that out there. Um because you know, some people said, Oh, they're too long, or you took too many, or you should take a break, or this, and and every time I followed that kind of thing, it didn't feel right, and I've done it, and then I go, or they say, Why don't you listen to that guy's podcast? Yeah, but you listen to that guy's podcast, and he has a totally different type. He's first of all, he's a different audience, and maybe he's got a different uh format, and you know, it's it's there's a different flavor, he's got a different style. Maybe it's somebody with strong opinions, but people just like it because it's strong opinions. Um, so yeah, there's some of that. No, I'm I'm going to um this will go out now, and there's some new guests lined up. Um, I'm gonna take the early part of 2026 to just step back a bit and think about the podcast. So the podcast started off as an interview format, and then to align with a lot of the um some of the training materials and courses that we had, I did introduce then a one simple thing episode, and that was actually inspired by Dr. the late Dr. Michael Mosley, um, who I was a huge fan of um for his uh work on his on nutrition and and healthy lifestyle and that and tragically he he died uh uh nearly two, was it a year or two ago, a year ago or more?

SPEAKER_00 46:00

I think it'd be two years this summer, I think.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Yeah, and um but he had started something called just one thing or that. And I thought actually, this is great. Now his was a 15-minute episode, people test out things. But I thought, well, I have a library of so many little tools that I could share with people. And one of the things I built a personal development group in Brussels over a 10-year period, it kind of unfortunately ended when COVID came. But what we did was we would uh it it grew to about a thousand people for a city that's not bad, you know, and it was all done in English, so you remember Belgium is a multilingual country, so it was attracting an international audience, and what I would do is every month I would run a seminar for an hour or two and uh charge a very small amount of money just to cover some um overhead costs, and people would say to me, Why do you do that? And I would say, because I I can practice and I can practice with a different audience every time, you know. And so I would take a little sliver of something, it could be a listening skill or it could be uh whatever, and I would just go out and teach that in the evening. So that was part of the motivation for the one simple thing. Could I create some really useful uh insights or tips for people, particularly younger managers? Can I go back to my story of screwing it up? And there's so much research out there that shows that young managers are not getting unboarded very well. They're people are put into these jobs because they they they deliver results, but they don't necessarily have those skills uh for you know actually leading people, I think pardon the expression. Uh so I started putting those out, and those are slightly different style. If you've listened to them, I I I highly produce them, I put sound effects in and stuff like that. It's also to give the audience supposing you want to you want a quick fix, and and there you have it uh on on there, it's also seeing whether it can attract a low attention, uh a low attention span group of people from some generations. Uh and I don't know, I've seen older people, uh, you know, people who've retired. I've never seen people doom scroll as much through Instagram as some of the people who are because they have nothing else to do and they're just going up and down. So so I'm not saying attention spans are unique to any generation. But I thought maybe the the five-minute uh episodes would would help that. So I'm doing both of those, and I would I I might go out and see if I can get some uh extra insights and tips about what I could do to make it more interesting or better for the listener.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

Well, we'll miss you when you take your little break. Um, but I hope it's really, really fruitful, Jerry, because um, as you know, I am an avid listener, and and I'm sure that um I um there's loads of people like me um around the world as I take it from your listening base.

SPEAKER_01 48:47

That's right, yeah. I I'm not gonna stop that, by the way. I I if I'm going to do this, if I'm going to make some uh uh alterations, like you know, when you go to the the the shop and buy a pair of trousers and they don't quite fit, you're gonna alter them. You're not gonna just say I'm not wearing any trousers for the next three minutes. Go naked. No, you're going, I'm gonna still wear trousers. So my I my aim is to to um continue because I actually had people reaching out to me telling me that they've got new books coming out, and I've said, Oh, sure, well, let's keep going. But I am going, I am going to look at the format and the approach a little bit. I see. Uh I I'm gonna get some professional, uh let's say some professional uh advice, I hope, around a few things just to see am I missing something or uh is there something else I could be doing, or maybe it works quite well and and I should do just continue as as I am. But so so I'm gonna take a little rain check, but I'm not gonna stop because the last time I stopped, it wasn't a good idea. I did I did take a break. I thought it was breaking for a month, and I ended up breaking for about four months, and there was a lost momentum. Uh uh, you know, there was a lot of flow I lost and everything else at that time. Um, so I I I'm gonna keep going. Uh I think it's worth it. I I think the next hundred episodes will be, you know. I'm sure there's gonna be some amazingly uh interesting people because people are starting to write books all the time. So the next the next new authors out there will pop up and I I'll invite them on the show.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

Well, I'll be back, Jerry, when you've written your book, uh and I'll be interviewing you again. Uh we probably um need to say goodbye, Jerry, but thank you, really thank you for putting your trust in me to do this episode with you. It's been very strange being on the other um side of the stool, but um thank you and absolute best of luck. May there be many, many hundred more episodes.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Thank you, thank you for stepping in and being from it. Thanks for listening, and a huge thank you for being part of the Leading People journey since that first episode of Web in January 2021. I really appreciate your support over the years, and there's much more to come on leading people. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another one simple thing episode waiting for you. A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast. Until next time.