In this debut episode of Unleash Your Impact: Unlock Others, hosts Dave Morris and Rich Horton introduce their vision for inspiring leadership. They discuss the importance of emotionally intelligent leadership, creating thriving cultures, and the practical ways leaders can unlock their team's potential. Learn about the philosophy behind Zentano’s Connected Leadership model, their personal leadership journeys, and what to expect from this podcast series.

Key Topics:

·     The connection between leadership, culture, and performance.

·     How micro-behaviors shape workplace environments.

·     The role of emotional intelligence in leadership.

·     The personal leadership journeys of Dave and Rich.

·     An introduction to the Connected Leadership model.

Takeaways:

• Leaders play a crucial role in shaping organizational culture, impacting employee performance significantly.
• Emotional intelligence is essential for creating a thriving team environment where people excel.
• Micro behaviors, such as eye contact and body language, can greatly influence workplace dynamics.
• Understanding and leveraging personal strengths can help leaders overcome feelings of imposter syndrome.
• The podcast aims to provide practical tips grounded in solid leadership theories and frameworks.
• Reflecting on one's leadership impact can help unlock potential in both leaders and teams.

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership.

We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders and leave you feeling inspired.

Let's dive in.

Welcome to episode one of Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, the podcast about inspiring leadership.

We have a belief at Zentano you will achieve a better world through better leadership.

In this podcast, we will discuss how to make that happen.

I'm your host, Dave Morris, and my guest today and in future podcasts is Rich Horton.

Hi, Rich.

Hi, Dave.

How are you?

I'm good, thank you.

Good.

So Rich and I developed this belief that better leaders make better organisations and in turn that makes a better world.

Rich, that's the reason why our business exists.

That's why we get out of bed and do what we do for a living.

In a business, you want people to perform at their best and environment and context has a profound impact on the way people perform.

So if you think about the culture you create inside an organization, that's a huge impact or inhibitor on how people perform.

And leaders have fundamental role to play in how they shape the culture of the organisation and hence how they create the environment for people to thrive.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And I think if you look at some of the metrics for leadership in this country at the moment, around well, being, around productivity and around employee engagement, they probably could be better reading for people, couldn't they?

Yeah, yeah.

And I think with leaders, I mean, sometimes you think about the obvious big behaviours that can have an impact on the way people perform.

For example, if you shout at somebody, that can be a huge, huge inhibitor on somebody's confidence and their self esteem.

But even just what I call micro behaviours, we talk about micro behaviours in our leadership courses, don't we?

Those micro behaviors like raising of the eyebrows or just the sighing or the huffing, those also have impact on the culture and the environment in which people work.

So leaders becoming more aware of that, I think is super important.

Absolutely.

And we've developed an approach to what it means to be a leader now in the world we live in now, but also what it will mean to be a leader in the world of the future.

And I think through this podcast series, we will start to explain to people exactly what that is like, both from a theoretical standpoint, but more importantly from a practical standpoint.

We want this to be a podcast of practical tips.

Yeah.

When we set up Sentana, we talked about, if you like, our philosophy on how we're going to work.

So I think good theory is super important.

But I remember my supervisor on my master, she said something like, there is nothing as practical as a good theory.

And I think good theory has to be grounded by being down to earth and being practical.

You know, part of the way we work is hopefully to take some of the latest research and to boil that down into very practical, accessible tips and tools.

I agree, and I think that hopefully will be a great takeaway for anybody listening.

So as this is an introductory or trailer episode, I think we should introduce ourselves and our background so people know we're not famous names, we're not famous faces, but we have a huge amount of expertise and experience with which we can draw on and share with people.

The format of the podcast will be specific topics, whether they be sort of trending or stuff that we know is important.

But we'll also interview some guests with some really interesting backgrounds on some topics as well.

So that will be the format.

We're going to split the podcasts into two types of formats.

This format, which is Dave and I talking, I'm going to call that Leadership Unscripted.

We're also going to invite, as you said, some leaders in the industry and in the field onto our podcast to talk about their experience of leadership.

And we're going to call that Voices of Leadership.

Yes, Rich, that is the plan.

There'll be podcasts coming out weekly.

The Voices of Leadership probably be at least once or twice a month.

The unscripted episodes filling the gaps between those.

And we want to make these, as you said, topical, practical and strong theoretical underpin.

Yeah, I like a good theory and I like to dig deep.

You certainly do.

I do.

But in my experience, what I found is I like to be grounded and down to earth when I communicate to people.

Communicate in a way that doesn't leave people cold.

And I think making this stuff really applicable in leadership is so important.

I mean, leadership's hard enough without having to sort of wade through theoretical textbooks to think about how you're going to have your one to one with people, for example.

I think that's good.

I'd like to pick up on that in a bit, but I think perhaps we should introduce ourselves first of all.

So would you like to give the listeners a little bit of a history of your background, who you are, where you came from in life, and particularly how you developed your leadership capability and style?

Because I think that's really important to people.

Understand who you are.

Yeah.

So you can probably tell from the accent, I'm from Gloucestershire.

And you can tell you're From Bristol.

I am so two west country boys, actually.

I started my career in Gloucestershire County Council the age of around 17.

I left school with little idea what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do, and I fell into career in it.

I think I did computer studies at school and I ended up in an office in the council where they needed somebody to program one of these really old computers.

I think it was a Tandy TRS 80, I think, with nine inch floppy disk drives.

You've lost me already, but carry on.

In total, probably my leadership experience spanned from a couple of years before that in the County Council to I can't remember exactly how many years it was probably 15 years inside.

It was a challenging environment in which to work actually politically and organisationally.

At the time, there were seven sister research councils.

Part of my role required me to work across silos and across boundaries.

And one of the things early on in my career that particularly I think drove me in terms of what I think good leadership should look like, is the ability to collaborate, not to be driven by your own agenda and to work across boundaries and also to create relationships inside your team where people feel relaxed, they can have fun, but also they get the job done.

I think I had a very people focused approach to leadership, as we'll explore in later podcasts.

Some of that is foundational to the eventual leadership model that we created.

Yeah, and I think you probably ought to explain from a credibility point of view that whilst you're at the research councils, you did a degree in executive coaching and leadership mentoring.

Yes, essentially somebody offered me free leadership coaching, which I happily took up when I was enrolled there.

And I was really struck by the power of the coaching process and how that can unlock stuff within you.

I mean, for me, it unlocked my confidence hugely.

So as a result, the organisation very kindly funded me doing a master's in coaching and mentoring.

I did my dissertation eventually in the masters on unlocking confidence and self esteem in coaching practice.

So if you like, one of my specialist subjects when I coach people is around the area of confidence in leadership, particularly because I've come on my own journey, my own learning and my own experience sort of feed the way I coach and feeds the way I work with people.

Okay, great.

I think that gives somebody a really good flavor of who you are and what you bring to your role as a coach and as a mentor and a facilitator.

I think it also speaks to the title of the podcast because you talked about someone unleash their impact in terms of coaching you.

And that unlocked you.

And that's exactly what this is all.

About, to unleash your impact.

If you're fearful, if you don't recognize the strengths that you have inherent within you, that if you like, that locks down your potential.

Yeah, true confidence.

It means we have a healthy relationship with our strengths and our weaknesses.

And if we recognize and value our strengths, we're going to use those with confidence and, you know, be much more impactful as a result.

And that's exactly what we want to try and help people do, is, as you say, to be impactful in their leadership roles.

Thanks for that, Rich.

So my background quite different to yours.

I would probably start my story a little bit further back into my childhood.

I had a few experiences in childhood where it was a bit tough growing up.

Death of a parent, divorce also as well of my birth parents and a bit of bullying at school that I was actually subjected to.

So I think I had the most amazing grandparent, my grandfather, who became my sort of, if you like, coach and mentor and guide.

I didn't realize till I was much older quite how profound that impact was on me, but now I realize that I think if you can have somebody who has got your back, wants the best for you and is willing to help you find that best, surely isn't that what great leadership is about?

And certainly that was the role that my grandfather played for me.

So when I went into the world of work, I gravitated into the world of Insurance.

Broking with NatWest Insurance Services in Bristol.

Great place to work.

Lots of really young people, had a great time.

And at that point, the banks were expanding into financial services.

So I became a financial advisor working for a bank.

Oh, wow.

Which effectively is money coaching.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

Did you wear shiny pointy shoes?

No, I didn't.

No.

No, I didn't.

I may have had some font hair, though.

That's not what some other people have told me.

Anyway, carry on.

Don't believe everything you get told.

But no, I think I was quite suited to that because a bit like you explained about yourself, I believe in collaboration.

I believe in the power of achieving things through people and felt that at the time it was a great use of my skills to help other people sort out their finances and their financial planning.

And I learned a great deal.

I have to say I learned some brilliant skills and some great knowledge and it gave me some great experience.

I gravitated through into sales management, which again was about coaching and developing team.

And then my latter roles were change and implementation management and head of professional development for a wealth management company.

And some of those roles became more senior.

I was sat on senior leadership teams and you see all sorts of stuff then that, you know, you see some good stuff, you think that's great leadership behavior.

I have to be honest, I also saw some stuff, I think I'm not sure that's great leadership behavior.

And I think I also.

You talked about confidence.

It was in that particular time where I probably experienced imposter syndrome for the first time, where I really recognized and that's really common.

What I mean by that is I was sat on a senior team of leaders where I thought, why am I on this team?

They've all built up businesses, sold businesses, achieved a lot more than I have in terms of their leadership.

Why am I here?

But very quickly I realized I had expertise.

I had expertise in leadership learning and coaching and developing and that's exactly why I was there.

And actually these people didn't always understand the stuff that I understood.

And I think for me that was a massive learning point in terms of actually, as you said, understand what your strengths are, have the courage to use your experience, to use your skills to help a business grow and help a business flourish.

So, yeah, I think it's very common.

A lot of people suffer from imposter syndrome.

Yeah, I think it's fair to say.

Just going back to your financial services background, I think you shared with me that when you engage with clients, you used a coaching approach in terms of how you engaged them and you encouraged the people who reported to you to use a coaching approach.

So, you know, we're a company that's big on coaching in leadership.

Coaching can do so much to unlock people and it doesn't have to be just in the leader to team member relationship.

You can use coaching in sales, you can use it in customer relations.

You know, it's applicable across a whole range of things and it's a, it's a skill and a mindset that's really difficult to get right, I think.

Yeah, Well, I look back on my days in sales and what we were effectively doing is what I call consultative selling.

We weren't flogging products.

Okay.

So with a consultative selling approach, your job is to go and understand the needs of the person that you're engaging with.

And that is best served by a really curious mindset.

So don't go in with any preconceptions, Use curiosity.

But you're dead right, you're going in and you are trying to help people.

Yeah.

By being curious and asking them questions.

And that is what good coaching is.

You can apply that in so many different scenarios.

Sales is one, leadership's another.

But you can be.

You can apply that as a parent, you can apply as, you know, whatever.

Exactly.

So that's a bit about us.

Wow.

Is it that long?

Is it?

It's that long.

You're enjoying it so much you haven't realised how long it is.

And we've got a lot more work to do.

You know, you talked about collaboration, the importance of that.

My concern is when you look at some of the leadership going on, on the world stage, it's becoming very autocratic, it's becoming very, very non collaborative and I think that's a worry.

At the heart of good leadership is somebody who's emotionally intelligent.

Agreed.

In our leadership model, it's what we call working from the connected centre.

So we're not going to talk about that so much today and we'll talk about that in a future podcast.

But essentially somebody operates from a connected centre.

It is not driven by ego, it's not driven by getting their own way, it's driven by understanding how their behaviours, their emotions impact others around them and they're able to be aware of those and to manage those in a really effective way.

And in my view, the best leaders are those that are emotionally intelligent and there's just a huge lack, I think if you look at the world stage and politicians at the moment, of emotionally intelligent leaders, I think.

Totally agree.

And I think we can't run our companies like that.

We have to run our companies.

As you said, you know, for companies to thrive, people need to thrive and for people to thrive, we need to manage them in an emotionally intelligent way or lead them in an emotionally intelligent way.

So totally agree with that.

So that's it for today.

We will very shortly send out our first episode.

We will share lots of thoughts based around, as Rich said, our leadership model we've created, and the reason we created a leadership model was we didn't feel there was an overarching framework that, that help people understand what being a good leader is like.

So we will start to share some of our thoughts around that in future episodes.

Yeah, and we call that model connected leadership and the connected leadership model underpins everything we do.

And actually at the moment, we're in the process of writing a field guide and a book which hopefully will hit the shelves at some point next year.

Next year.

So thank you all for listening.

Yeah, thank you.

We would love to hear from you.

Please find us on LinkedIn.

Please find us on our website, www.zentanogroup.com.

please leave comments.

If you have any questions about leadership that in future episodes you'd like Rich and I to answer, we're more than happy to take questions.

So, Rich, thank you for your time today.

In future episodes, we will summarize some of the key insights and key learnings and leave people with some practical tips.

But I think for the day, just maybe a couple of personal reflection exercises to do.

For me, I would just say this podcast is called Unleash youh Impact.

Unlock Others.

What does that mean for you as a leader?

Reflect on that.

For you, Rich, what's the takeaway reflection for you?

I would just say reflect on emotional intelligence.

Perhaps even ask some of your team for feedback.

Great idea.

Well, let's leave it on that blockbuster and we will see you again very shortly.

Thank you.