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Yiuwin Tsang
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast brought to you by The Wow Company. I'm your host Yiuwin Tsang, and this week we are joined by Dene Stuart. Dene is the founder of The Exceptional Leader Academy, which delivers leadership training, development and coaching to his clients. He also works as a senior consultant to One Performance, a consultancy working with global organisations, and professional speakers Academy as a senior coach and mentor. Dene has over 25 years experience of senior management within major national and regional media companies. As operational director of Trinity Mirror, he had direct profit responsibility for the Daily Mirror with revenue responsibility of 100 million, and as commercial director for Newsquest led a sales team of over 100. This experience was gained through a time of acute and rapid change in one of the most competitive and challenging marketplaces, both locally and nationally. His tenure as commercial director of a digital startup, exposed him to the challenges of working with venture capitalists and shareholders. Since becoming a leadership coach in 2012, he has trained, coached and mentored over 500 people from C suite executives and large corporate clients, to individuals at the very start of their business journey. Dene is a three times published author, his books are about the practical application of the latest psychological theory to decision making, and leadership. He has a degree in Management Sciences from Manchester University, and he is also a certified personality profiling practitioner of Thomas International. In this interview, Dene spoke about how we can be better leveraging our times leaders through getting better letting go of power, and also how we need to embrace our own vulnerabilities to get the best out of others. Let's jump straight in.
Yiuwin Tsang
We're going to talk a little bit about leveraging time as a leader the choices that you make. And we'll speak a bit about comfort zones as well. But before we kind of get into that, you want to give us a bit of background to The Exceptional Leader Academy. What's the story there? And what is it you do?
Dene Stuart
Sure, so the idea of the academy comes back to my motivation to help people in I hate this phrase, but I haven't come up with a better one, like ordinary leadership roles. You know, it's like that person trying to build a career for themselves, whether it's in their own business or whether it's in you know, working for someone else, who perhaps recognises they need to have some sort of help and support and development, but they don't know where to go for it. And that's the idea behind the exceptional leader Academy. And the reason I use the word exceptional, is that you only have to do a few things well, as a leader, to actually set yourself apart from all the other leaders who don't do those things well. So the context of the word exceptional is not the person that's going to build the unicorn billion dollar business, it's not that aspect of exceptional, it's just the idea that actually, most people in leadership roles still don't lead really well. You know, this doesn't mean that bad people, it doesn't mean that they aren't trying to do a good job. But because most people still shy away from this more introspective way of thinking about themselves, you know, understanding how they react in the moment, it means that they're not in control of their emotional reactions. And therefore, if you can become in control of your emotional reactions, you can start to develop the way in which you respond and behave under pressure, you make yourself exceptional, from the majority. So that's where the word exceptional comes from. So I hope that makes sense.
Yiuwin Tsang
Makes a lot of sense. And I am a big fan of it as well, in the sense that, you know, the impact that you can make, that whole concept of kind of unicorn kind of businesses is so elitist was the wrong sort of word. But it's, you know, by definition, you know, unicorn, incredibly rare. And I think according to folklore, you know, unicorns can only be caught by a virgin. Just makes it even more improbable that you'll run it. But you know, there are hundreds of 1000s of small, medium sized enterprises in the UK, hundreds of 1000s of businesses, with managers with leaders within them. And as you say, it isn't the most romantic of terms in terms of ordinary, but you know, they're the backbone, you know, they are absolutely in the UK. So I love that. And also, as you say, we mentioned before about the slightly kind of the fluffier kind of element of it. But this kind of self awareness, this kind of emotional awareness as well, which so often gets overlooked, we talk about and we've got a common contact in Chris shore as well. And I know how much he loves models. He loves flow. And it really does kind of shine a light, I think on things when and we'll talk about leveraging time in just a second. But when you lead a business, how these kinds of models and these frameworks are all well and good for you know, that point of delivery, that point of administration, but there is all of this work that needs to happen ahead of that on yourself on what you do. and how you process things? Yeah, which is so critical. It's so important. And I imagine, you know, if we can unlock 5% 10% performance increase in our roles as managers and leaders, what impact would that have on the rest of the business?
Dene Stuart
And so the other way of thinking about this is the way these skills are described as hard and soft skills. So most businesses are very, very happy to invest in training and what they call the hard skills, because you can sort of identify return on that investment. And, of course, most businesses, looking at the numbers, looking at the returns, and all that sort of stuff, it is crucial to running a business, it's much harder to do that, when you're investing in the development of what are called the soft skills. And when I said earlier that, you know, that's a phraseology, you know, the pink and fluffy stuff, the hard and soft skills. The reason it annoys me so much is it is way, way harder to work on the soft skills, and it is on the hard skills way harder, because it means you've got to take a good, long, hard look at yourself in the mirror, and accept responsibility for your role in whatever happens. And that's what people don't like doing.
Yiuwin Tsang
I guess there's a element of safety or ease when it comes to hard skills in the sense that as you say, they come out with tangible outputs, don't they, in terms of like measurement, I think that's what it comes down to measurement. And there's all kinds of adage of you can't manage what you don't measure. I think the challenge that certainly I've come across and I guess lots of business owners and business leaders have is that when it comes to softer skills, it's not straightforward to measure that it's not as easy. And because of it being harder to measure, it becomes harder to manage that sort of softer skill kind of development, I suppose. And in your experience in what are ways to kind of go, I guess the first thing to do is to overcome it is to accept that it will be harder to manage. And to approach it in with that kind of mentality of you know, this isn't as straightforward as counting the number of boxes that have been ticked over here, or the number of documents that have been filed over there, and to approach it with a more open kind of mind. But other than that, how can we go about, you know, I suppose, with a mindset to develop the softer skills?
Dene Stuart
Well, I think one of the useful ways to think about it is the cost of recruitment and the cost of failure of recruitment. And when you think about the impact of poor recruitment decisions on a small business, they're much, much greater on a percentage basis than they are for a large organisation, you can make a poor decision if you're a large organisation, and you've got the padding there to be able to cope with it. But when you're a small organisation, you don't. And the impact of making a poor decision at the recruitment level is huge. It's disruption of time, it costs money, it's expensive to recruit good people now, and if that person doesn't work out, then you've got the cost of maybe having to get rid of them. And that can be substantial. And then you've got the costs of having to recruit again. So I think for me, this is the useful way to start thinking about the benefits of developing these skills. Because if you are helping the people in your organisation to understand the dynamics of working well together, the so called soft skills, and using things like personality testing, or profiling, should I say, rather than testing, personality profiling, things like this, or, you know, there's lots and lots of different profiling methodologies out there. So that people can sort of understand how different personality types work together, what causes them to get into conflict, and if they do get into conflict, you give them the skills to be able to resolve those conflicts without an actually come out of it with stronger relationships. You know, as long as your mindset is one, well, that's the pink and fluffy stuff, we just got to get on with the job just getting on do the job, you know, don't bring me your problems, just get on and do that. That's what I pay for I pay to do the job, just do it, you know, and there's so much of that mentality still out there. Because people are scared, because they don't have the skills. They haven't developed the skills of understanding interpersonal relationships, because ultimately, that's what leadership, there's two aspects of leadership. You know, you can say there's the hard aspects of leadership, which is your corporate strategy, your sales strategy, your financial strategy, and all that sort of stuff. And then there's the soft side of leadership, which is your relationships of how all those people in those different teams work together, or don't work together. You know, and what are you going to do about it? If they're not working together in the best possible way? How can you facilitate that, so that you reduce these potential costs related to recruitment? And, you know, I'm in disciplinaries. Nowadays, I got involved in so many grievances and complaints, you know, it's time consuming, it's energy consuming, it's resource consuming, and it undermines the productivity of your business, you know, so these are not soft skills, please, if I can get one message across, please stop thinking about these as as soft skills, they have real impact on any business of any size.
Yiuwin Tsang
I guess this comes back to the fact that when we talk about soft skills, or interpersonal skills and emotional awareness, these can be quite uncomfortable places to be in terms of discussions in terms of kind of self analysis, there's an element of vulnerability that you have to kind of accept when you like, start this conversation or introspectively, looking at yourself, and certainly kind of like having these conversations with members of your team, with your board with your management team and things like that. They need to need to accept a degree of vulnerability that there are certain things which kind of, you know, they strike quite deeply inside you as a person are well people get on with you, I suppose, on that kind of surface level. But how do you navigate those discomfort zones? And what are the changes, I suppose a flip over of this is, you know, the kind of blinkered leader will be well, that's our way outside of my comfort zone to talk about how people get on and, you know, chemistry between individuals and things like this. So I'm going to shy away from it. How do you overcome these anxieties, either in terms of your own soft skills, or certainly in terms of approaching that kind of dialogue with your team?
Dene Stuart
Yeah, so really good question and a difficult one to answer actually, because it's sort of it's a bit of a circular thing, it goes back to that position at the beginning of being willing to look inward. So that's the start point. But I'm going to say something that's probably a bit odd. You might find a bit odd. I'm going to say things like stop watching things like Dragon's Den, you know, don't watch the apprentice stop watching these dramatised reality shows which, you know, show business leaders in this completely aggressive and unrealistic light. And, you know, people like Alan Sugar didn't build his business to the level it is without being able to develop strong relationships with people who wanted to work with him. And the way in which the apprentice is sort of shown and publicised and dramatised for TV is, you know, he's portrayed as this aggressive, you know, you're fired, and all that sort of stuff. It's TV, it's not real. And yet, so much of business leadership, you know, you see it in movies, you see it on TV series is portrayed in this unrealistic way, if you're going to be a leader, and you're going to be effective, you have to be able to build sustainable relationships. I was listening to a podcast yesterday, and a guy was talking about Trump. And he's saying that one of the reasons that Trump has to move around from state to state, like and start and find new places to do business is that he's such a, an aggressive character, when it comes to his negotiation style. You know, he screws the other person, they don't want to do business with him again, you know, so he built one big building in New York, no one else wants to work with them. He's only got one building in New York, you know, he's built a golf course, in Scotland, no one wants to work with him again, you know, it's like, this was what this guy on the podcast was saying. So there's consequences to acting in that stereotypical way that you see portrayed on TV, if you want to be a great leader, you've got to have the skills to develop great relationships.
Yiuwin Tsang
That applies like outside, as you say, with business clients, and with partners, suppliers and so forth. And also, obviously, it's so critical internally as well. Yeah, the people, we've talked previously about unlocking this kind of discretionary productivity, and people aren't going to do that the people aren't going to, as you say, dig deep if you don't have the connection, and this kind of brings us back round to leveraging time or kind of segues into it somewhat. So I came across this concept. It was actually I was doing a bit of work for a client who was one of the big four accountancy firms. And every day he would say to me, you are you leveraging? are you leveraging and what do you mean when you say that to me, Mike? Yeah. And then he explained and he said, you know, if you're doing work, like one day of work, you get paid for that one day, that's not leveraging you're getting one to one, what can you do to leverage your time so that you put a day's worth of work in but you get more than a day's worth of value out of it? And that was when the penny dropped with me. So it's one of the best lessons that I've learned, but in I suppose in your world, that concept of leveraging time, what have you seen in terms of Trump's that leaders kind of fall into and then not being able to leverage their time? Because, again, you know, you'd imagine these leaders within these organisations, they're probably going to be some of the better paid and under salary and renumeration, so you'd want to amplify the value that they create. So enabling them to leverage their time is really important, but it's not always easy and straightforward. So what are the similar trends that you've seen?
Dene Stuart
It comes back to what I was saying earlier, and it's one big trap, really, and it's the trap of not being able to delegate you know, to feel that you only you are good enough and trustworthy enough to be able to handle that particular client or that particular challenge or deal with that problem. When you have that mindset, that it's just easier and quicker for you to do it yourself, you're done for, because that is the killer of leverage, because the only way you can leverage time is to have people that are doing things for you, which frees you up to then do more important things. So one of the ways in which I talk to my clients about this is I talked to them about the idea of five pound jobs, 10 pound jobs, and 100 pound jobs. And it's really, really easy to do a five pound job. So what happens is, and what I mean by five, you know, imagine that as the hourly rate, right, or you could magnify it and say, you know, there's 10 pound jobs, 100 pound jobs and 1000 pound jobs, right. So maybe create that as the differential, as a CEO, as a business owner or managing director, whatever you are, you should only be working on the 1000 pound jobs. And you should have a team that can handle the 10 pound and the 100 pound jobs. And your job is to make sure that your team is trained on how to handle those 10 pound and 100 pound jobs effectively. So you don't get sucked down into having to do it. Because when you're sucked down into dealing with 10 pound and 100 pound jobs, you're not dealing with 1000 pound jobs. And that's the 1000 pound jobs that drive the business forward. So that's how I tend to try and illustrate the idea of time leverage, and get people to start thinking about, okay, what are the 1000 pound jobs that only I can do in my business? What are the 10 pound and 100 pound jobs that I can find other people to do? And of course, the challenge for that as your business has to be at a point where you can afford to pay people to do that. And so that does become the trap. It's like, how do you break out of that financial trap of having the money to start that process? Nowadays, that's a lot easier than it was because we've got resources like Fiverr, or Upsource, or whatever they're up work, you know, we can outsource a lot of these things. Nowadays, I've got clients and people I know they're small businesses in the local town, but they're outsourcing some of their services out to the Far East. They're leveraging their time that way. Okay. So it's about becoming creative and thinking about, you know, what are the resources out there now, that helped me to leverage and, of course, the big one that is on everyone's lips at the moment, of course, is artificial intelligence, AI and chat GBT. And, of course, there's a lot of ways in which that can be used to help leverage time.
Yiuwin Tsang
And as a business grows, team as it expands. And as a team kind of grows as well, I guess there's always that risk of falling into that comfort zone or versus a kind of like taking stuff on, you know, especially if you are in a business where you promoted into a role. So again, a lot of our listeners are within organisations, you know, up to kind of 50 in size. So they've got a lot of managers or leaders that have kind of progressed within those organisations. So they're probably in a position where they literally could do a very good job of the 10s. And the 100 pound jobs, given that they have kind of progressed through, have you found that with the people you work with that there is this kind of tendency to kind of slip into the doing of that, and what can leaders do to try to make sure that kind of doesn't happen, because I think what's coming through is, as you say, You escaped that kind of like gravitational velocity that you need, so that you can kind of break out of orbit, and you don't have that financial restraint of having to do the work yourself, you can start building the team, you have built your team, then it becomes that challenge as opposed of self discipline, and not falling into that comfort zone of I can do that I can do that set up the council really quickly. I can do that actual animation in half a day or whatever. What can you do, because as I say, we've spoken to a number of clients who are you know, they're in that they feel like they're in this kind of loop. And it's harder to kind of let go than it is what are the good habits and get into? Well, you use the really important word earlier vulnerability.
Dene Stuart
So one of the things that I always say to people in a leadership role is, if you're going to be a true leader, it's going to take courage, and it's going to make you feel vulnerable. And there's no escaping that. And, again, it comes back to self awareness. So when you're in a situation where you're feeling vulnerable, that's going to trigger your emotions. And in that moment of feeling vulnerable and becoming, you know, if you can develop your awareness of your emotional state, so that in that moment of feeling vulnerable, you can develop that Viktor Frankl skill of building that little bit of space between the stimulus of this making you feel vulnerable and the way in which you react or respond. Yeah. So which gives you the freedom to choose how you're going to behave in that moment. And it sounds all like great and easy not right, because the whole point about us feeling vulnerable. Vulnerability is an emotional state, it's a state of the mind and body creates, because we're feeling in a place which of uncertainty, we're not sure how things are going to play out. And therefore that makes us feel unsafe. And therefore, we're internally driven to try and resolve that and get to a place of safety in the fastest way. So the more able you are to recognise that happening within yourself, and to have developed your ability to sidestep it, so that you don't get sucked into the old habits. Now, if you're going to avoid getting sucked into old habits, it means you have to have thought about what are the new habits I want to develop in these scenarios. So when these things happen, what is it I want to do? How do I want to behave in that moment? What do I want to have in place? What systems do I need in my business? Who can I call on in those moments, you've got to pre plan you've got to think about it. This is why I say these are skills and abilities to be developed. You know, doing it in the moment is virtually impossible. You've got to pre plan it, you got to think about it from your own perspective. And you've got to be aware in the moment of when it's happening. And there'll be times when you don't do it, you know, it's like, we're human beings, right? We get some stuff we do really well. And there's other stuff we're not so good at. And it's like, be kind to yourself, it's like okay, God, that was an opportunity. I could have done that. Okay, I'll learn for next time. Don't be too hard on yourself. But be aware of that. If you're going to be a leader, it's going to take your courage, you're going to feel vulnerable. But if you are aware of it, you can plan to have a different outcome. You can become intentional about what you want to create and what you want to achieve, and not do it unintentionally.
Yiuwin Tsang
A big thank you to Dene Stewart from The Exceptional Leader Academy for sharing his knowledge. And a big thank you to you, our listeners for listening to this week's Beautiful Business Podcast. Beautiful Business is powered by The Wow Company who believe that business can be beautiful that doing the right thing gets results. Wow believes that having a clear purpose and standing up for what you believe in is the secret to building a beautiful, sustainable business. Something to be really proud of. If you're dedicated to building a beautiful business, check out https://www.thewowcompany.com/beautiful-business-manifesto
Dene Stuart
Yeah.