Leaving the Party While It’s Still Fun with Tim Davenport Director of OzFish Limited

This week’s podcast features an interview with Tim Davenport, the Director of Fundraising & Sponsorship at OzFish Unlimited.

Tim spent a significant part of his career as a senior executive in the media. After a period of stability, the organisation changed constantly and rapidly. That involved a succession of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers - each coming with change and a clash of workplace culture. His insights for leaders dealing with change (so all leaders!) are invaluable.

The Good, The Bad or The What-The?
Really Elon? When Space -X blew up their own rocket shortly after take-off last week (another Elon inspired act of self destruction), the company described it as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Leaders everywhere - please just say what you mean, don’t hide behind slippery talk.. No-one trusts language like that, nor do they trust the people who use it.

Words of Authenticity
Rules prevent poor performance, values inspire high performance (Simon Thiessen)

Worth The Time
The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life - Boyd Varty

Interview Summary
Our interviews are conversational, and not always linear. These are the main points, roughly in order.

• Sitting in a boardroom making decisions that affected other people’s lives
• Helping people get comfortable being uncomfortable
• Communicating to team members about change
• Conveying clinical decisions in humanistic ways
• Being the guy who has to deliver decisions that were imposed on you
• Stay mentally healthy as the leader delivering challenging messages
• Taking time out in a busy leadership routine to reflect and learn
• A strategy to have your partner be a sounding board without making home a place where the stresses of work derail the rest of your life
• A story of delivering bad news with incredible humanity
• When people thank you for taking away their jobs
• How visionary leadership transformed the outcomes of a basket case
• Taking a year off (paid work) and growing as a leader and as a human
• Leaving the party when it’s still fun
• The greatest success as a leader - growing others
• The importance of an excellent mentor

The debrief–what we learned from Tim
For Kirralea, Tim's willingness to sit in the uncomfortable while he worked out his next moves was the standout.

Simon enjoyed the humanity Tim brings to uncomfortable situations - he doesn’t avoid the difficult things but he approaches them with compassion, empathy and a concern for people’s dignity.

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Thanks to our Podcasting producer, Josh at Deadset Podcasting for all his work behind the scenes.

Thanks for listening!