Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Exploring Virtue-Based Leadership with Dr. Toby Newstead

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 280

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Dr. Toby Newstead is a respected leadership scholar and practitioner at the University of Tasmania, located in lutruwita on the lands of the palawa and pakana people. With a background in corporate change, leadership development, and professional communications, she brings practical expertise to her academic, coaching, and consulting work.

An internationally recognized researcher, Dr. Newstead specializes in virtues-based leadership development, leadership ethics, and leadership in the volunteer sector. Her research appears in top journals. In 2023, she published a book titled Leadership and Virtues: Understanding and Practicing Good Leadership.

Dr. Newstead is an established executive leadership coach and deeply engaged with industry and community. She regularly delivers impactful workshops, keynotes, and facilitation sessions. Dr Newstead’s research, teaching, coaching and facilitation has local and international impact, shaping the leaders of today and tomorrow.

A Quote From This Episode

  • “If we can insert virtues between stimulus and response, we can be more intentional about who we are and how we show up as leaders.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.




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Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. We are joined today by Dr. Toby Newstead. She is a respected leadership scholar and practitioner at the University of Tasmania, located in the lutruwita, on the lands of the palawa and the pakana people. With a background in corporate change, leadership development, and professional communications, she brings practical expertise to her academic coaching and consulting work. An internationally recognized researcher, Dr. Newstead specializes in virtue-based leadership development, leadership ethics, and leadership in the volunteer sector. Her research appears in the world's best underlined journals. Dr. Newstead is an established executive leadership coach and deeply engaged with industry and community. She regularly delivers impactful workshops, keynotes, and facilitation sessions. Dr. Newsted’s research, teaching, coaching, and facilitation has local and international impact; shaping the leaders of today and tomorrow. Toby, thank you so much for joining me. I have seen your name, I have read your work, and now you are in front of me and I'm so excited for this conversation. So, what's not in your bio? What do people need to know about you? 

 

Toby Newstead  1:15 

Well, I don't know if they need to know it, but I guess one little addition is that I am in Tasmania now, and have been for some time. But I actually originate from -- well, loosely, your neck of the woods -- I come from a tiny little island in the Pacific Northwest called Lasqueti Island, and some of my fellow Lasquetians might not like me naming it because it's a pretty intentionally isolated little island. It's off-grid and a tiny little population of about 3 to 400 people. And so, I grew up very much in the bush. We had to make our own electricity, and grow a lot of our own food. And there was no car ferry, and no hospital, no police, no doctors, none of that. A very sort of funny, quirky, perhaps, unexpected upbringing before I then found my way to Tasmania and into academia. 

 

Scott Allen  2:00 

Okay. So, now I'm intrigued. Are you American or are you Canadian? 

 

Toby Newstead  2:05 

Canadian. Yeah. So, it's on the very southwest corner of Canada.

 

Scott Allen  2:09 

Southwest corner. Okay. So, in British Columbia, BC.

 

Toby Newstead  2:13 

Yes.

 

Scott Allen  2:13

That is so awesome. So, you had to… Okay. There was a phrasing there, ‘make our own electricity.’ Is that accurate?

 

Toby Newstead  2:21 

Mm-hmm. Well, generate. Yeah.

 

Scott Allen  2:25

Okay. How did you generate your… Was it a generator? Solar? 

 

Toby Newstead  2:29 

Oh, only on the shoulder seasons. So, in the summer, we had solar panels way before solar panels were cool. And, in the winter, there's a lot of very inventive, industrious people on Lasqueti, and one of them invented a little gravity-fed water turbine that, actually, the turbine is constructed out of teaspoons. So, we had a little water wheel that generated our power in the winter. 

 

Scott Allen  2:52

How did school work? 

 

Toby Newstead  2:53

Oh, well, we had an amazing program of field trips. I think when I was in grade three or four, we spent a week kayaking and camping on the west coast on a series of little islands for a week. Another class rode their bikes through the Rocky Mountains. So, we had a hugely wild and wonderful field trip program, which was spearheaded by the principal we had at the time, who, actually, here's a segue and it's accidental, but that principal of my school on Lasqueti… I left, I moved off. My parents moved me off probably through high school because they recognized the field trips were amazing, but I was basically illiterate by the end of grade five. The principal we had on Lasqueti actually was trained in The Virtues Project. And it was The Virtues Project that I then serendipitously came into contact with again in high school, and then again tracked down when I was doing my consulting work, pre PhD. And that sort of led me into the academic space because it was The Virtues Project and virtues-based approaches to developing character and community that made me interested in leadership and leadership development.

 

Scott Allen  3:57 

I love it. So cool. That's so fascinating. Well, let's go there. Let's talk about virtues-based leadership development. What do listeners need to know about this space? We've never had a conversation about this specific topic on the podcast. So, what are a few things? Where do you want to take us? 

 

Toby Newstead  4:15 

So, in addition to this sort of lingering, and rather, organic personal association that I had with virtues and this sort of grassroots program that is out there called The Virtues Project, when I ended up then, and I had a background in professional communications, and that's what sort of got me into the corporate consulting space and doing leadership development and workplace culture change projects. And I kind of had this inkling that we needed to go back to virtues. And I had no academic understanding of it, no theoretical or philosophical understanding of it, but I had experienced it, like, what it did for me as a young kid, as a teenager, being in a place, in a community, a school community where virtues were the means through which we recognized what was best about each other and recognized how to fix things when we were doing things that weren't in alignment with what is best about ourselves and each other. And so, I was trying to feed this into the work we were doing in the corporate consulting space. And, as you might imagine, when you're talking to corporate clients about things like virtues, there's a little bit of reluctance, and it's a bit of a, “What?” Like, they think you're going to drag them off to Sunday school, or something. And so, that sort of made me, I was like, “Well, surely it's not that.” So, that's what sort of prompted me to take it into the academic realm and start doing a bit more research around it, and how virtues do fit into the leader and leadership development puzzle, something that I've come back to the more comfortable I get in the research space. And this is one of the reasons I absolutely adore your podcast because you do such an elegant job of bridging the research-practice gap. And it isn't entirely a gap, and it shouldn't be a gap. But I think, when we're looking to bridge research and practice, there might be a temptation to dumb down research, which I don't think we need to do. Practitioners are super switched on, bright people, and they might be time poor and virtues, to me, is something that tends to be dumbed down when we're talking to practitioners. And a lot of people want to call them something else, “Oh, practitioners don't like the word ‘virtues,’ so we'll call them something else.” And that, I think, underestimates the wisdom of practitioners, and then, undersells, which is a crude word to use when we're talking about virtues, but undersells the value of what virtues are and what they can bring to leaders and leadership development.

 

Scott Allen  6:45 

Well, you said that it's foundational, or you said that it's kind of a piece of the puzzle and important. It seems to me like it's almost the border pieces of the puzzle. Would you agree or disagree? Or how do you think about that? It seems foundational, that's another way for me to think about this. It seems like a pretty darn important starting point, and then through line in the work. Would you agree? 

 

Toby Newstead  7:09 

Absolutely. I totally agree. And foundational. In every sense, foundational because it is a part of leader and leadership development that we can start working on when we're very young. We're both parents, and when we're thinking about, well, ourselves when we were children, and then trying to raise children and bring them up to be decent, contributing, happy, whole humans, developing virtues and character is probably the most fundamental or foundational thing that we need to do. And then that's developing their capacity to lead in the future. And, for us as individuals, our virtues and character is, in my view, absolutely foundational to our potential to lead. At least to lead in ways that are both effective and ethical.

 

Scott Allen  7:53 

Yeah. Well, you mentioned the children. It's such an interesting thing when you look at just even social learning theory, Bandura. And for probably, what, a child becomes somewhat present with the world? Let's just go two and a half, I don't know the exact age, but between there and probably, well, maybe around your children's age, around 12, 11, you're the center of gravity as far as what's shaping their lived environment. And if those have been baked into, like, in some ways, it was baked into your education early on, and are a part of the conversation and a part of the existence, think of that foundation that we're setting for people. But oftentimes, it's not.

 

Toby Newstead  8:31 

I say it, and it is a simple premise, but it's so incredibly difficult. I don't mean to suggest that I do anywhere near a good job of it, but even just starting to circle back to this idea that we shouldn't be reticent to speak of virtues. My children are very familiar with the term ‘virtues,’ and with different virtues. And can call me out and call each other out, which I think is a big part of it. It's not about being perfect, it's about having something to come back to. 

 

Scott Allen  8:58 

Well, that's awesome. The fact that you have given them permission to call you out, again, family, parenting is one of the ultimate leadership opportunities, and it's a mirror. And so, I had my daughter call me out about a week and a half ago. She said, “You interrupted me.” I said, “Okay. I apologize. Continue.” But I think that's empowering for them. We have to be modeling what it is we espouse. And so, it's an opportunity for us to learn and develop and grow as well. Ultimately, if you look at it through that lens, we can be learning and developing and modeling that, or failing at that and then acknowledging we've failed. And that's all great lessons for children.

 

Toby Newstead  9:41 

And that really is the crux of virtues-based leader and leadership development, is the idea of role modeling. So, when I'm working with students or working with industry partners, it really does. One of the ways to come at understanding how virtues inform leadership is just to think about a leader that has had some sort of positive or profound impact on us. Maybe someone very close to us like a parent or a family member, maybe someone from the workplace, maybe someone even quite distant to us that we met once or that is a media figure or sports coach or whatever. Usually, when we think about just simple single words that describe that person, usually, we're going to use character, logical words. Which speaks to the power of character, which is grounded in these sort of virtuous habits, or how virtues comprise character. So, that's one way that I find is quite a nice entry point to considering virtues and character, and how they lead to leadership that might enable us to be a little more effective and ethical. So, that sort of speaks to the role modeling part. And then the other part that I think is very foundational to a virtues-based approach is the power of language. And much like you say, like any interaction. Not just that you got to give a good speech at the annual company-wide Christmas gala, or whatever it is, but it's those daily, frequent interactions. And again, this is not something that's easy, but it is something that is simple. And with practice, it can become more of a habit. And when we try to infuse our language with virtues words and use virtues as recognition of what we want to see more of, when we use virtues as invitations for what we would like to see more of when, perhaps, we're not seeing it, and when we use virtues to set up expectations of how we want to be in work and live together, those are things we do anyways, and if we just infuse it with the virtues language, then, all of a sudden, we're speaking to a person's character, and we're sort of drawing their attention to their capacity to develop virtues, and therefore, sort of supporting our own and their leadership development and character development.

 

Scott Allen  11:47 

Well, and I don't know the year that some of these concepts go back to, you probably know that better than I do, but it's ancient wisdom in many ways. And so, you have a Ryan Holiday who has made stoicism very sexy. But it's so interesting because I've been exploring this space, Toby, and it's a really interesting space. And, coming out of industry, you'll appreciate this in a really nice way. You called it the research practitioner gap. And again, I don't know that that's the right phrasing, like you said, but there is this middle space. There's this middle space. Because your average practitioner is not reading Leadership Quarterly, nor do they know it exists. They're reading, maybe, Harvard Business Review, probably Fortune, maybe Inc, and that's kind of what's being consumed. And maybe they're not reading Heifetz and Linsky or Margaret Wheatley. They're reading Jocko Willink, and Ryan Holiday, and a number of other kind of influencer type individuals, John Maxwell, who, again, in many ways, I always say on the podcast, there's value in that work, and there's this middle space that I think is missing. A little more complexity, not so inaccessible that we lose folks. But I think a challenge at times is existing in that middle space. I struggle with it sometimes even in this podcast, where, for instance, Toby, I have a newsletter, and what's been so interesting about that project is that… Because the goal of the newsletter was the same thing, can I get good content into the hands of practitioners? I want them to read Ron Riggio’s little piece in Psychology Today. I want them to understand that Barbara Kellerman has a blog. I want them to know that there's other pieces out there that are leaders that, I think, kind of exist in that middle ground pretty nicely. They understand the literature like a wizard, but they communicate it in a way that it's accessible. I can't find scholars. I can't find them. Who blogs that are some of our world's best scholars? Who's blogging on a consistent basis? And it's few and… Adam Grant, maybe. And maybe Brené Brown, and maybe Amy Edmondson, and Ron Riggio. And there's some others that I've kind of come across, but it's fascinating. So, what fills that space is Korn Ferry, Center for Creative Leadership, McKinsey. A lot of that type of content. And then, again, that stuff from Inc, Bloomberg, Businessweek, and stuff like that. So, there's this really, really interesting opportunity, I think. The ILA has some blogs where some scholars, Richard Bolden, will write an article for the ILA, and there'll be a blog post there, and I'll include those as well. But there's just this gap. There’s this really interesting gap that, I don't know, I'd love to hear your perspective on that, because, again, coming out of industry, you have to have a really interesting perspective on that question. 

 

Toby Newstead  14:47 

Yes. I think you're absolutely right. And there's so many different ways we could look at exploring why that gap exists. And one very, I think, fundamental, and, perhaps, crude reason is that when we are research active, we are not incentivized to translate our research into anything palatable or even meaningful to people who are actually doing the work that we're researching. That's sort of a structural answer. And there are some outlets, like, there's HBR, there's also Org Dynamics. There's a couple who are… California Management Review. There are a few publications that a university will recognize, so that still helps the instrumental academic progress, their career. But, as you say, a lot of them are still behind paywalls, so I don't actually know who's reading them.

 

Scott Allen  15:33 

Yeah. The articles I can find are, again, it's Deloitte, it's McKinsey, it's Gallup, it's all of it kind of… Becomes the center of gravity for practitioners because I can go to the blog, I can access that content. It displaces us as a center of gravity for that practitioner. And I couldn't agree with you more that it's very structural in how we are set up as institutions. And all that incredible work. Because I know that there's incredible work. It's missed. It's not there.

 

Toby Newstead  16:05 

Yeah. Another opportunity, and this would vary discipline by discipline, institution by institution, is the opportunity to have ongoing relationships with industry bodies, or peaks, or some form of industry that then has tentacles or some influence on what else is happening. You said in my bio that I do a lot of work on leadership in the volunteering sector, which is a fascinating arena within which to look at leadership. And, you know this, most of our leadership research assumes that when we're talking leader-follower, we're talking manager, subordinate, employee. We're looking at paid contexts, which actually, around the world, more people are engaged in volunteering than paid work. So, that's actually a bigger arena within which we can look at leadership. But anyways, within my work in the leadership and volunteering contexts, I work with our peak bodies. So, we have peak bodies within each state and then across the country, which then means that I'm allowed to hear what's happening within their industry without having to talk to every single volunteer involving organization, and they, in turn, get to some access some of our work in a way that they can help us translate so that it's meaningful for them and all of their members. So, that takes time. And again, that's not always incentivized, and that's not always sort of within the remit of people who are really exceptional at research. So, it is a funny space. And it's not one wish, but I do wish that practitioners had just a little bit more sense of what it means to be a piece of research, and the difference between a report commissioned by McKinsey and something that has gone through a rigorous peer review process. And just what that means. They've probably heard those words before, but what that means in terms of validity, and rigor, and the fact that when we're publishing peer-reviewed research, we're not trying to sell anything.

 

Scott Allen  18:01 

Mmm. Yes. Nicely said. That's very, very well said. What else are you thinking about right now? What's top of mind for you? I love the kind of work in the space of virtue. I love the interface with practitioners and in the community, and kind of looking at this from that perspective. Obviously, from a research standpoint, you've published in the world's best journals. What's keeping you intrigued right now as you do the work?

 

Toby Newstead  18:26 

A couple of years ago, and it's actually when we were locked down during COVID and I couldn't collect any data from actual human beings, one of my favorite scholars in the virtues and leadership ethics space is Joanne Ciulla. Have you had Joanne? 

 

Scott Allen  18:39 

Oh yeah. We did an entire episode on the emotion of resentment. 

 

Toby Newstead  18:44 

Oh, awesome. Yes. I remember when she was… Yep. [Inaudible 18:49] Look at that. And she once said to me, “If you want to be taken seriously in the field, you have to solo author.” So I thought, “Okay. Well, I'm locked down. It's COVID. I can't work with anyone, really, so I may as well try to do this solo authoring thing.” And it was very lonely. And I've done it, and I'm not in a hurry to do it again. But what I did, again, because I couldn't collect data from humans, and because of this sort of research practice, sort of, interface thing, and I know I came into academia because I know that virtues were not palatable within the corporate space, at least, at that time, in the corporate space I was playing in, so I took virtues based on the philosophy of virtue ethics and based on fairly robust frameworks of virtues, and I used them to look at the top TED talks on leadership and those lists. So, I didn't decide which the top talks were, I just went to… And it was Inc, and it was Ted, and it was Forbes, I think, who said, “These are the talks. If you want to be a good leader, you've got to listen to these TED Talks.” So, I analyzed them to see how they were explicitly and implicitly referencing virtues when they were describing what a good leader is or does and what good leadership may be. And it was fun that's in [Inaudible 20:00] with business ethics. And it was a fun paper to write. And it was fun because I got to read the transcripts and watch these TED Talks. But what was interesting, and I think when we talk about virtues, and if we start to think about what virtues are, we very quickly see their role in enabling us to be the best of ourselves and to connect to one another, that human community and the sustainability of human community goes really back Peterson and Seligman, and their sort of tome of positive psychology is all about virtues and the role of virtues in sustaining human communities. What was interesting in that paper I wrote based on the TED talks, which some might be loosely informed by research and some weren't, what I found interesting was the prevalence with which transcendence, which is a virtue, was referenced, usually implicitly. And so, transcendence is about our connection to the intangible. So, humanity is more the virtue of how you and I connect as humans and our human communities. Transcendence is more… I don't subscribe to a religion myself, and I've already said that I think that is something that almost makes people reluctant to engage in virtues because they think it's going to be religious. And,  when I was working on that paper, that helped me understand that reluctance comes back to the separation of church and state, and virtues and ethics were sort of left to the church, and therefore, out of scope for business and politics.

 

Scott Allen  21:24

Interesting.

 

Toby Newstead  21:24 

But I think this idea of transcendence, and again, not necessarily religion, but something greater than ourselves, and something being in nature, or mindfulness, or connection to country, or something bigger than us just as humans… And when you listen to TED talks with that in mind, you'll hear it. Everyone's talking about meaning, and purpose, and higher purpose, and that's this virtue of transcendence. And I just find that really fascinating. That's something that I'm mulling over because I think, yes, we need to be connected to one another, absolutely, as humans and in community, but also this without being secular, something. We need to recognize that there is another element to what it means to be and achieve our potential together. 

 

Scott Allen  22:08 

Well, it almost seems like, with your eye, and with the knowledge of what you have and then your eye, you can probably see these concepts, literally, everywhere, because they're basic human, and again, it's ancient wisdom that didn't just come from someone's mind, and it stood the test of time. And you probably see these all over the place, they're just not being called what they are. Is that accurate?

 

Toby Newstead  22:35 

Well, we call them what they are often if we're talking about someone being wise or someone being courageous, and, “That was fair, just.” We do use virtues words, but I don't think we always understand that these disparate words actually fit within a very sort of comprehensive umbrella. And when you talk about ancient, I think, especially if we sit sort of in the western Aristotelian virtue ethics approach, we think, “Oh, ancient,” because Aristotle and Plato and all them were a few thousand years ago. But, actually, they're like new kids on the block when we think about indigenous traditions. 

 

Scott Allen  23:09

(Laughs) Yes.

 

Toby Newstead  23:10

And Ron and I edited a book on leadership and virtues a couple of years ago, and we had submissions from two amazing Aboriginal Australian women, and they're talking about their virtues, traditions that go back 60,000.

 

Scott Allen  23:21 

Yeah. They're like, “Sit down for a sec.”

 

(Laughter)

 

Toby Newstead  23:26

Yeah. Back in the bus. Aristotle.

 

Scott Allen  23:31 

That’s so awesome. That's so fascinating. What else is kind of keeping your mind cooking right now?

 

Toby Newstead  23:36 

So, when we're thinking, again, in more of a sort of a practical sense, how virtues can inform our leadership and our leadership development -- and again, I'm sort of phrasing this in very lay terms, but I don't think that undersells the rigor of what it is, and again, simple doesn't mean easy, but it is quite simple -- another thing that we can do to sort of use virtues to develop ourselves and our leadership. And that's this idea that once we start to familiarize ourselves with virtues and with the virtues that comprise our character, then our challenge is to use the virtues of our character to inform what we do, and how we decide, and sort of the actions that we take in the world. And a way that, I think, again, is simple but not easy to think about this is that, and we've all heard the stimuli response, you know how that works, and really, what we can think about is in between the stimuli and response is inserting virtues of character, or inserting what is best about us. So, if we can sort of expand this space just a little bit, just enough between stimuli in response to be like, “Wait a minute, who do I actually want to be? What part of my character do I want to call on here so that I'm deciding and being and acting in accordance with the person I actually want to be in the world? Is this an opportunity for me to be wise, or for me to be humble, or for me to be kind, or for me to be generous, or for me to be courageous, or for me to be…?” And the more we can just insert that reflection between stimuli and response, then that's us starting to learn, develop, practice, and habituate virtues which will help enhance us as leaders and our practice of leadership.

 

Scott Allen  25:14 

Learn, develop, and habituate. I loved that. That was incredible phrasing right there because it can be done. It very much can be done. But I think a lot of our leader development programming, oftentimes, it goes from kind of one topic to another topic to another topic, and we never really go all that deep in any one thing. So, we don't get to a place of habituation. We don't necessarily get… It might be a semester class where they have you for a professor, and you challenge them to do that, but then that's gone six months later or five months later. Not to diminish your work. Please, don't take it that way. If it's not being reinforced. And so, it's just such an interesting space, the whole leader development conversation, because I think, sometimes, there's all the opportunity in the world for us to do this well, and the closest we probably get are some of our military institutions because they kind of have a person for four, to eight, to 10 or 12 years, and they can take them through a process in normal day to day life. One of the puzzles I love to think about is, how do we do that? How do we do that outside of some of these contexts where that's the case so that we truly can habituate that and a whole bunch of other things, so that the person is better prepared to serve in these really, really complex roles? And I love that puzzle. I absolutely love that puzzle. 

 

Toby Newstead  26:35 

Yeah. Well, I think we've mentioned both Ron Riggio and David Day, but when you're talking leader and leadership development, you kind of have to mention those two. And I think that they both have made very profound contributions. And it was actually a recent conversation with David that prompted me to restructure all of my assessments in my teaching so that now, instead of producing a report and an essay and a presentation and a debate, whatever it might be your case analysis, now what I'm trying to do is build in an assessment around my students developing their own personal leadership development plan. That idea of owning your own leadership development, I think, is… When we only have them, like you say, for a semester or maybe a course, some of my students I get for a couple of years, but I only teach them once or twice, but the more I think we can impart that, “You are the one that owns your leadership development.” Yeah, I think that's, for those of us in the space that we're in, I think that's something we can.

 

Scott Allen  27:36 

Oh, it's so interesting. And we could geek out on this, and it would probably be a really long podcast episode, but I do wonder, I've had this conversation with a friend, David Rush, and it's, are we approaching leader development wrong? Should we, in some of our courses, at least in the beginning, be more intentional about building the habits of mind, building the practices of mindfulness? What are the critical reflection? What are the five or six base level tools that will serve me for the rest of my life and keep me in a place of, again, critical reflection, reflexivity? You know what I'm saying? Mindfulness, presence. 

 

Toby Newstead  28:18

Yeah. 

 

Scott Allen  28:19 

Those things, rather than teaching path-goal theory, if you're going to own your development, let's give you some tools in the very beginning to kind of start off engaging in dialog with people with differences, and training that, and really building that in. That's a different way of getting at leader development.

 

Toby Newstead  28:39 

Yeah. Totally. And I actually think, maybe it's out there and I've missed it, but one thing, the work on developmental readiness I think is something that could and should be baked in so much more into our efforts. Like you say, if there's a foundation to a university leader development, or even just straight up leadership course, or if we're doing in-house programs, or if we're doing community programs, I don't think, personally, and this is whole nother sort of can of worms, but I don't think we should be picking high potential. I think we should be looking for developmental readiness, and we should be working to develop the indicators of developmental readiness. Because, once we're ready, anything will work to develop us. But if we're not ready, nothing will work. And I think we can be high potential within whatever sphere and not ready to develop as leaders, especially ethical leaders.

 

Scott Allen  29:32 

100%. Because the high potentials may have any number of different motivations for choosing to be engaged in that. Okay. As we begin to wind down our time, I always ask guests what you've been listening to streaming. What's caught your attention in recent times? It could be something you've been listening to and it could have nothing to do with what we've just discussed. What has caught your attention recently that listeners might be interested in?

 

Toby Newstead  29:59 

Maybe all of your listeners have already read this book, or listened to this book, and I think I'm late to the party, but my holiday reading was ‘Lessons in Chemistry,’ which I absolutely adored. Have you read it? 

 

Scott Allen  30:10 

I haven't. Was that made into a television show?

 

Toby Newstead  30:15 

Oh, I don't know. Maybe. I don’t know. But I absolutely adored it. That was my indulgence over the holidays because I tend to read mainly peer-reviewed journal articles, which is pretty boring. Sorry to all my brilliant scholar friends, but it's a very different way of reading than sitting on the beach reading ‘Lessons in Chemistry.’ But I loved that. That was fantastic, and I loved it for many reasons, because I'm a rower, and the home chef, cook, and an academic, and a bit of a feminist. So, love that book. Highly recommend it. Yeah. The other is [Inaudible 30:50] And this sort of goes back to our conversation around ancient wisdom. And I am reading a book called ‘The Dreaming Path’ by Paul Callaghan and Raghu Markus, who are two Aboriginal men from here in Australia. And I'm finding it really fascinating, and maybe this will resonate with you, but working in knowledge creation, being researchers, and our whole mandate is to generate and disseminate knowledge, one of the things that I'm finding really fascinating as I try to learn more about Aboriginal Australian culture and traditions and wisdom and history is a very different approach to knowledge. So, I've heard a few different times in conversations in my reading, including this book called ‘The Dreaming Path,’ that knowledge is not a buffet. It's not a ‘come and serve yourself and help yourself to whatever you want and get as much as you want,’ it is very much curated, and you get the knowledge that is deemed appropriate at the point in time that is deemed appropriate when you're ready. And it's a much slower, more curated pace to the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom. And I just think, in our very frenetic world, that's, for me, it's kind of like a deep breath or bit of reprieve to be reminded of the wisdom in slowing down.

 

Scott Allen  32:11 

Well, in some ways, at least, for me, what came to me when you just said that was, it goes back to your childhood in some ways. You had this slower-paced education designed to spark curiosity. Back to what I just said about leader development, should we be sparking curiosity rather than jumping into two plus two equals four? Should we be getting people just on fire about learning, and curiosity about the world, and exploring the world, and experiencing? And then they're in. And so, at least that came to mind for me; slowing down and approaching the work in a little bit of a different way, because you strike me as a very curious person. That's something you very much value and want to pursue, right? 

 

Toby Newstead  32:57 

Yeah. Absolutely. When I was starting out my PhD and having a moment of, “Oh my God, can I do this? What am I thinking?” I had just… And it was a fleeting conversation. He probably doesn't even remember it, but a childhood friend, and he said, “Of course, you can do it. You're the most curious person I know.” And then that was it. And I go back to that all the time, and I think… And in a virtues frame, we can see that curiosity is sort of a precursor to wisdom. So, it's the only way to learn and glean any wisdom, is to remain ever curious.

 

Scott Allen  33:26 

Yep. Love it. Maybe that's what we'll call the episode; Ever Curious. Toby, thank you so much. So good to be with you. I appreciate your time today. Thank you very, very much. We'll do it again. And, you know what? I'll look forward to seeing you soon.

 

Scott Allen  33:41 

Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Scott. It's been great.

 

 

[End Of Recording]