Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

From Top Gun Dreams to Ignited leadership, Leon Purton on Unlocking Potential in people and teams. Welcome back to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host Anthony Pearl, and today we’re sitting down with Leon Purton. He’s a former Royal Australian Air Force engineer turned award-winning leadership expert and author of The Ignited Leader, which just won the Gold Medal for Leadership and Management in the Axiom Book Awards 2025.

Leon’s about to share some valuable information about why leading yourself is the foundation of all great leadership and how to see the shape of potential and fit them to problems and why we are not logical beings influenced by emotion, where emotional beings influenced by logic. We’ll explore all three dimensions of leadership, the power of creating vacuums for growth, and how one book read over a weekend in Canberra changed his entire career trajectory.

So looking forward to unpacking this and so much more. It’s gonna shift your mindset. It’s going to give you some one percenters that will guarantee to change the way you think and the way you do business and the way you lead. So let’s get into it.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bytes and I am delighted to have joining me today ’cause we’re gonna talk all things leadership, but firstly, welcome to the program. Thanks so much Anthony. Looking forward to it. I think firstly the thing I like to do with all my guests is allow them to introduce themselves.

Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about you. Fantastic, Anthony. Yeah, I I grew up in a small town on the northwest coast of Tasmania. We had about 10 cows, 20 sheep and 40 chickens with my two younger brothers. And we lived a pretty low drag life down there. But one thing I recognized about Tasmania is it’s, it is quite a relaxed community and I didn’t think that was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

In year nine I had a sleepover at a friend’s house and we watched the movie Top Gun Together and become. He became inspired. He goes, all right, I’m gonna be maverick and you can be Goose and we’re gonna go flying around in the skies together. Now, that never actually played out in year 11. He dropped outta high school and joined the Navy and I left a bit listless, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have an interest in electronics.

And this idea of being in the Air Force was still somewhat appealing to me. So I joined the Air Force at 18 as an avionics technician, so I worked on the electronics on. On the aircraft in the Air Force. I did that for a few years, but I knew I wanted a little bit more. So I ended up going to university and getting electronic engineering degree.

And then after that sort of did, 20 years in this Royal Australian Air Force mostly on fighter aircraft and strike aircraft. I moved around a over the place. But over that time I learned a lot, got exposed to a lot of different leaders and teams and saw a lot of different things that, that really inspired me and some things that didn’t.

And during that period I started to think a bit more deeply about what gave me energy at work, and I realized it was seeing a potential in people and helping them reach that. So in 2015 I started writing a leadership blog. And over the last. Five to 10 years of continued writing and culminating in release of a book in May this year called The Ignited Leader, which tries to summarize that handbook that I wish I could go back to 2015 and give to myself and go, here’s some really important information that, that should help you out.

Now live on the Gold Coast. Got two teenage kids. An ex-wife and a new wife. And so there was some trials and tribulations that I had to go through as part of my own personal journey there as well. Still like to stay fit, but I generally get a lot of energy and enthusiasm about that, seeing the potential of people and try to help them unlock it.

So that’s that’s the area I try and focus on now. Wow. That’s a lot. I love that. It’s such a great story. Now, before we get into your details, I’ve gotta ask a question that I don’t think I’ve asked anyone before, but you mentioned your mate who went into the Navy. Yeah. You are in the Air Force, you’re in the Navy.

What’s the relationship between the Air Force and the Navy? And have you still caught up with him since those days? Yeah we try and keep in contact, although the last couple of years it’s been a little bit more challenging. But it weirdly might. My two best friends from high school, one joined the Navy and one joined the Army and I joined the Air Force.

So it’s I grew up in a household where I was the oldest of two younger brothers. It’s like having brothers. There’s this rivalry that exists between you and you’re always trying to one up each other. But at the end of the day, you’ve always got a lot of love and appreciation for each other, and that’s what the Air Force and the Army and the Navy are like.

Together. There’s this. The Air Force is better, know the Army’s better, know the Navy’s better. But at the end of the day, we’re all trying to do it and achieve the same things. And so there’s just a genuine love and appreciation for each of the services. But it’s a funny little place to live.

And what a crazy situation that you’ve I don’t know how many people would end up in that situation where. Where you’ve got three mates and all take a different course in the military that’s, I think that’d be fairly unusual. You mean I, I suspect there’s a number where they’ve gone to the same, but to go to three different ones that’s a little bit different.

It was all, it was unusual. I think one thing I did hear though, when I was going through my recruitment process, I mentioned I grew up on the northwest coast of Tasmania. Very small. Part of Australia. But what I’ve discovered through the recruitment process is that the recruitment population into the Australian Defense Force, the northwest coast of Tasmania, so a tiny little bit and a tiny little island made up 6% of the Australian defense force.

So there was a lot of people that ended up joining the military from outta that little, I dunno if their recruitment was really good or something in the water down there. But it was a little bit unusual that three, three friends all joined the military. But like you say, that. That, that we hit all three arms is a little bit unusual.

I hear the water’s good for the whiskey as well down there. So yeah. Whiskey and wine and apples. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Look let’s fast forward from all of that journey because you’ve definitely been through a fair amount and how do you transform from working in the military, in the electronics area to leadership?

How does that process come about for you? Yeah, it’s one, it’s a really good question, Anthony. The a lot of people who are, heavily technical in their backgrounds and their roles at work really take that on as part of their identity. You don’t. Say you’re a project manager or something, you don’t take on project manager as a core part of your identity.

It’s a job that you do. But engineers and technicians tend to take that on as part of a core part of their identity. And what’s often hard to let go of is that core, ability to reach down and touch and influence the technical solution as you start to move through the different levels within the organization.

And what I learned was that the military itself doesn’t do a fantastic job at preparing people for those different levels. So I started to get into those positions of influence inside the military. And realize that the people behind me weren’t perhaps being exposed to the same information and the same, mindset shifts that are really important as you transition through those levels in the military.

So for me whilst I’m a, I’m an engineer I feel like I’m a bit of a different flavor and engineer where I’m heavily people focused, not technical and solution focused, which is often a distinguisher. With the really hardcore engineers and technical people versus those that, that make their way through into leadership.

Now, both paths three are valuable, but what I realized was that we weren’t doing a very good job of supporting people as they move from one role to the next. I wanted to try and unlock that. It was a moment vividly remember it, I was on a promotion course in the military, so they take. All of the people, all the high achievers that are promoted, and they put them on a course together for two weeks in Canberra.

And we learn about military MA management and the historical military campaigns and the administrative processes that you need to understand within the military. But it didn’t, I didn’t feel like it prepared me for the next role. But a fellow attendee on that course, an air traffic controller.

Gave me a book. He goes, I hear you Leon speaking about leadership, and you’re like, really passionate about it. I’ve been reading this book and I think you really like it. And he gave me that book. And on the Thursday afternoon and all my spare time on Friday, my Saturday and Sunday in military accommodation down in Canberra was spent just reading this book across the whole weekend.

And I gave it back to him on Monday. And I said, I think that’s the most succinct. Message that’s ever reached me about what we need to change for leadership, and it was a book called turn the Ship Around by David Marque, who was a US Navy submarine commander. And still influential to me to this day, so much so that when I wrote my book, I reached out to David Marque and asked him to write the forward to my book to which he agreed, which is a fantastic privilege.

But instrumental to my journey was that choice from an air traffic controller. At a room in Canberra just going here. I think you’d like this book. And it really, it just un unlock this spark in my mind about how to think about things differently. I’m like, if I can think differently about leadership in this way, then perhaps I can help other people also start to think about things differently.

It felt like a really long-winded answer, but I feel no. And I think, but I think it’s a really fascinating combination of the engineering and the military that, on the face of it would think that, okay, it’s gotta be about precision and getting things done. And there is an element of that.

But it’s at the end of the day, you’re dealing with people and I think that’s the interesting, cross section that you have there, that pillar. People are so intrinsic to what happens in the military because they’re the variable, right? Yeah. And and understanding them is really important.

And I can see how that has been a huge influence on where you’ve taken things. Yeah, since I I was in the military for, I took over 20 years, which is a long period of life. All your formative years and in the last six years since I’ve left the military, but I’m still near it in the work that I do.

I’ve noticed even more that the, the people are the capability. People talk about the military for the hardware and the things that it can do, but the people really are the capability, the thinking, feeling doing humans, that, that make up and comprise the armed forces. And in fact, any of your workforces out there, they’re the real capability.

And if you can reach. Each individual person and unlock just an extra small percentage of their potential, then your ability to achieve more, do more and be more happy and productive at the end of the day is magnified. I noticed that in the military, and it’s still true for the work that I do now with organizations and how frustrating.

Did you get, or do you still get perhaps in the comparison between where you’ve got elec in the electronic engineering space, you’ve got things that you can find a solution for, right? If it’s at, if the solution will either exist or you can in. Develop something that can exist, but that’s not so easy in people you can see potentially.

Okay, there are the, this is where the issues are, but change is a difficult thing to implement in people. So there’s a, there is, on the other hand to what we were saying before, there is a vast difference between those 200%. Anthony, you’ve nailed it. The, a couple of threads that I’ll pull on there.

The first is that oftentimes technical minded people or solution focused people always try and step into the, to the gap, right? There’s a problem and there’s a gap of understanding to get to the resolution and the solution focused people always try and fill that gap. And it helps you move from problem to resolution.

So it streamlines the process, but in that gap, that, that gap that exists between problem and resolution is the growth opportunity for the people around you. And often to times those technical focus people can rush to fill that gap and not leave space for the other people around them to potentially grow and evolve and work out what needs to be done to fill that gap themselves.

So that there is the magic, in leadership is that transition from technical or tactical expert to, to growing people who can be technical or tactical experts is allowing other people to work out how they might fill that gap themselves. The second thing Anthony, you may have heard this before, is that, I forget who said it, but we.

Believe that we are logical beings influenced by emotion. The truth of the matter is that we are emotional beings influenced by logic. And so too often engineers think we are the former. We are logical. Everyone’s logical, everyone believes and sees the same things. Emotions sometimes get in the way, but that’s not the truth.

So if you can make that pivot from understanding that you don’t need to be the answer to every problem and. That emotions are real and people are influenced by them, and you need to acknowledge them and work out where they are and where they need to move to. Then you can be a little bit more successful in growing teams that can achieve outcomes or changing things that were in one way and need to be in another.

I’m interested as well that, having come from a military background means that you are effectively employed. You are, and you’re following orders as you do even in business. How does that transition to then becoming business owner and then in a, in what you do day to day in overseeing people who in themselves own businesses?

How do you build that? Space of understanding and relatability. I think the thought that goes through my mind, Anthony, when you start to talk about that, is what I call the, I guess the cornerstone or the foundation of the if you get this right, then you can achieve in whatever. Area that you try and set out to achieve in and too often what happens in the, in parts of the military or certain parts of the workforce is that you’re often always, like you mentioned, told what to do.

You need to. Do this thing by this time, and you go and do the thing and then you come back to them and they go, okay, now you gotta do this thing by this time. And that keeps going on and on again. And that, you achieve outcomes, you’re productive. But the pivot comes when you start to acknowledge that you are leading yourself, so you’re not taking.

You’re not just taking the information and the guidance and doing the thing you’re thinking about, why am I doing the thing? Why is it important? Why is this timeline important? How does my contribution assist the other people in the organization? You start to scale your thinking from doing to leading in achieving your own personal outcomes.

And if you can get that foundation right, you can lead yourself. That’s like the you throw a rock into a pond. And there’s a big impact point in the pond, but then everything ripples out from there. But if you get that leading yourself done, you can learn how to get stuff done by yourself under your own motivation without being told.

And you can identify why it’s important and how it fits into the bigger picture. You start to lead yourself. Then you can start to lead teams, and you can start to lead organizations, and then you can start to lead business outcomes. And so that shift from, extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation is essential in unlocking that ability to lead yourself.

So don’t just be carrot or stick somebody telling you to do something or you get punished or do something well and you get rewarded. If you can shift to that intrinsic mo motivation that I’m doing this because this is important and I want to do a good job that’s the foundational pit, that’s the rock as it hits the pond.

It’s an interesting visual. Yeah. And which, which also brings me to that idea as well. Is that, how much of an influence is the visual in teaching people for you? Because I imagine particularly it from an engineering background that is very visual. Yeah. I have a lot of, the people I work with have started calling them Leon Iss Anthony. They’re little anana analogies or metaphors that I try and use all the time to try and make a point. And people have picked up on the fact that I use them a lot. And I think you’re a hundred percent right, Anthony. Words don’t often connect with ideas.

In fact, let me just step back a little bit. The most important skill I think you can have in today’s workforce, Anthony, is the ability to quickly take new data. Turn it into information and turn it into knowledge, and then turn it into wisdom. And the quicker you can get new data through to wisdom, the more effective you can be in the workplace.

Because the work is changing so much, there’s so much rapid change in the world. Every new data point is an opportunity for you to work out how it impacts you and what you are trying to achieve, or how it impacts the people you care about and what they’re trying to achieve. So that transition from data to information to knowledge to wisdom is the most important part to get through.

And what I found is if you can couple data and information with a visual, it makes it easier for people connected into their own knowledge and wisdom databases in their heads. So one of the reasons I always try and use those visual metaphors. Even in spoken word, if you’re not drawing it on a board or whatever it might be, but even in, just in spoken word is because it helps people better connect this new information with the wisdom they already know and understand, because it gives them a foundation to couple it onto.

Again, I’ve used another little metaphor in my explanation of metaphors, Anthony, that might be a bit meta, but the I think it’s really important to acknowledge that humans, store information in a very structured and coherent way, and everything couples to something else.

That’s how it’s stored in there. And so if you can help paint the picture of why it’s important and how it fits together, it helps them store it away. I agree. I think it’s often that people get caught up in their own way of learning and forget that others may be different. And here we are largely on a on a mostly audio.

Medium. Yeah. And most people listening to most people will be listening to the podcast. Those of you that are watching on YouTube, fantastic. ’cause you are watching. Yeah. And, there’s also then we produce other materials out of it in the written format, et cetera, because people learn and take things in a different way.

But is there a commonality in terms of leadership where you find that there’s a particular way that works better than others? Or is it really just different for different people? I think it’s one of those, it depends answers, Anthony, which isn’t exceptionally useful, but let me give a small piece of information that might help you.

I think the call it the art of leadership is that, in fact, my own personal leadership philosophy, Anthony, is to try and see the shape of people and the space in problems and then fit the people to the problems. And if the space you leave is too big. That, that person has got too much of a gap, too much of a stretch to fill that space then you fail them.

And if the gap is too small, then you’ve also failed them. And so what I found, Anthony, is that if you get better at recognizing the shape of people, so what are their competence, character, attitude, aptitudes, all those different things, elements that make up the human. Sometimes you need to reach each individual person in a slightly different way so you can help them understand what they need to sh how they need to grow.

To answer your question it, that, it depends. Answer is really around. You need to know your people, and you need to know what, what motivates them, what their aspirations are why are they working in your team? What, how do they like to get shown appreciation? What are all these different facets of the human that you’re interacting with?

And then from that, you can start to better understand, okay, things or facets are part of a leader’s role in starting to learn about the people in their team and starting to unlock the individual brilliance that each of those people have and how to best access it. So you talk about. Different strikes for different folks for want of a, for want of a better term.

Perfect. And but I’m interested then in terms of leadership, right? Because I imagine this is a bit of a double barreled thing where on one hand, do people have to be ready and say, and put their hands up to say, I want to step into leadership, or, I am a leader, but I need to get better. And then on the other side of things is how willing are they to.

From corporate burnout to seven Figure Business re’s journey. Welcome back to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Perl, and today we are sitting down with Srimoyee who just launched Lumen, an employee branding and talent strategy firm that’s only a few months old, but already making waves.

She’s about to share why companies spend millions marketing their products, but. Get about the important product their people. We’ll explore how talent marketing isn’t just about hiring. It’s about building trust, retention, reputation, and so many more things to make sure it aligns with your values, your ethics.

So much detail in this episode. Have pen and paper ready for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. And hey, don’t forget to subscribe while you are there.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and I’m delighted to have SRI joining me today, and I know we’re gonna have an amazing discussion about all things marketing and the fact that her business is very new, which is a little bit different for biz bites for thought leaders.

But I thought this was a great journey to take people on. So welcome to the program. Thank you so much Anthony. It’s great to be here. Lumen is an employer branding and talent strategy firm that I just started. It’s just been three months for me. And yes, it’s not a recruitment agency like most think it to be.

We try to help organizations attract, engage, and convert the right people by communicating what makes them a great place to work. And so happy to be here with you today. No, look and it’s great and there’s so much there to unpack as a starting point before we even get into your journey is to taking you there because, we hear a lot of people talking about cultural fits and things these days, but it’s it, there’s a difference between using the words and it actually meaning something. And I think that’s the key here, isn’t it? Because it’s the difference between marketing that is just made up terms because we think that’s the right thing and authentic based content. And that’s really what you are talking about here.

Absolutely. You know what we spend like millions marketing our products, right? But too often I feel, and many of us feel that we forget the most important product we have, which is our people. And talent is the engine of every business. You can have the best product, but if it’s your people.

Who make it real, authentic. And most companies I think invest heavily in marketing their products, ex and experience working in So your employer brand, it’s just not a campaign, it’s like one of campaign. It’s actually the foundation of trust, the retention, and the reputation as well. Yeah. And it’s something that is.

Underestimated, I think is probably the best way of describing in value. And I think part of that is business, has been very cautious previously about marketing team because they’re worried that they might move on. They’re worried what happens if they do move on. And so it’s just been kept very, close to their heart and not including other people.

And then other people’s voices don’t seem to count as much and it’s and it’s this steamroll effect of really what is. Old fashioned ideas and ones that in this day and age when it’s so important to build relationships, I think more important than ever before marketing is about relationship building with your audience.

And hence the reason why we’re doing podcasting for a lot of people as well, because it’s such a fundamental thing to be doing, including internally as well as externally. Absolutely. And I think talent marketing, like we call, is, it just doesn’t help someone to hire, it shapes who stays with you, what kind of experience a candidate is experiencing with your brand.

So when I feel that when talent marketing is treated like as a business strategy, hiring stops becoming reactive. So it becomes intentional brand driven and aligned with broader business goals. So it’s so important like a product marketing. Now think of a product that you would launch, right?

When you do launch the product, it’s important for you to understand your audience, the messaging. You would do some product testing. It’s the same way when you’re trying to hire, we need to do those tests in places to understand the audience, what they’re thinking. What is the candidate going through, and why should they apply to your organization?

Yeah, and I think this is the really important thing for business to remember is that. The right talent is everything. I know we’ve spoken a little bit about this in the past on the program how, having the right people is not necessarily about having technically the best person in the, in a particular role there, because if they are not a cultural fit with the organization, it can have much more of a negative impact than the positive of the fact that they may be brilliant at what they do.

Absolutely. And here’s where the strategy portion comes in. Now, suppose, we are trying to hire a key team. You, we could just do a job post and we hope that, the right people are coming in or we do something like a talent brand study Know, which is so important, which tells you what the candidates or employees perceive about the company.

What’s real, what’s aspirational, what are the gaps? And once you do that, you could craft employee value proposition or EVP. The, that’s just not a promise in words, right? So you are living that experience that you are going to give to people when this is like, when it’s clear people join for the right reason.

Your culture becomes tangible and candidate, especially Gen Z, trust you before they even apply. And today’s candidates the Gen Zs specifically are evaluating companies through a very different lens. They’re, they are just not looking at job ads. They’re not, they’re actually looking at some values, purpose and proof, and I’ll be happy to share some stats that, I came over while doing some research as we move on.

Yeah, absolutely, definitely. Definitely interested in those. And I think just to pick up on that point though, that I think there have been this kind of, this ideal, supposed, ideal working place that was constructed by big companies like Google, for example, where there’s perception that, you go and there’s rooms where you can, I don’t play pool and you can sit in different chairs and you can have coffee and whatever else it is that, that whole perception of what a workplace should.

Be like, has changed and therefore the younger generations have grown up with that perception that it should be different. And indeed, since COVID, we’ve obviously undergone this change again, where well do I actually have to be in an office, whatever that office looks like, and do I, if I do I have to be there nine to five, Monday to Friday?

Or can it look like something different? And I think the expectation of people out there is completely different to what it was, six or seven years ago, let alone what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Absolutely. In fact, my previous workplace, we worked remotely. So I was handling the talent marketing for apac as well as Americas.

And we were all connected virtually, right? It was never an expectation, and that was something that was driven from the leadership itself that, if you could get the work done. In a small, smarter ways. It’s not necessarily we would have to come to work. So it gave us a lot of flexibility because time zones was different for me based in Australia, we are much ahead in the time zone.

So it definitely gave that space and a comfort zone as well to finish certain things that you would like to do. It could be your person’s space before you could just come in and start your day. So I think that has been amazing and candidates are looking into those flexible options as well as we speak.

Yeah. Yeah. I like to think I was probably the lucky enough to be the forerunner to some of this and I wouldn’t say I was well among the first, I definitely wasn’t because I remember many years ago hearing an interview. With someone, and I’m sure it was someone who worked in a higher level at Channel nine at the time, who was spending quite a bit of time working from home.

And I thought, oh, that’s an interesting idea. And I was employed at a particular time to work in a in an office that was 45 minutes to an hour away from where I lived, depending on traffic that could increase even further. And I went to the CEO at the time and I said, look. It’s not very efficient for me to try and be here at nine o’clock in the morning if you allow me to work from home until nine 30 in the morning when the school zones are finished.

I can get an hour and a half work in. I can work for the 45 minutes while I’m in the car by taking phone calls and. Similarly, if I leave at the end of the day a little bit earlier to avoid that peak hour traffic, you’ll get more benefit out of that. And we trialed it and it unfortunately, it worked and it was great for a while and it was.

So I think that’s an important thing as well with all of this, is that with. The mix isn’t cut and dry as it used to be. It, it used to be literally you’re in the office nine to five, Monday to Friday. That’s what we pay you for and that’s what you’ll be, and and certain offices you’ll be there till six or seven o’clock at night and certain off certain offices, you’ll be there from seven 30 in the morning.

But whatever it is, that was the expectation. But now that blend of I can go and do a few things for a couple of hours. I can come back to work and work later in the evening. That flexibility is there. But the balance with that is what the expectation of the employer is as well, because the danger is that they expect that you’re now available 24 7.

And so we haven’t quite found that really nice way of making it work for everyone and designing it differently almost for everyone. That’s exactly like a great point that you you know. You’ve taken up here. Like I was talking about the stats, there is some interesting proof points which says that the current sort of talent, which is the Gen Zs right, are completely different.

And in fact, there are 44% of this group have rejected an employer because the company did align with their ethics. Now imagine you mentioned on your career site or somewhere about this, that we are flexible and, all of those words. But when it comes to implementation, it’s not they see and it’s just not about Gen Z.

So whatever promises you give on your marketing strategy, your career site, your social media, it’s the living proof of what you’re trying to say. And the minute there is a disconnect things just fall apart. So it’s important that, how do we ensure that, okay, if we are saying, talking about flexibility, that it is there, and to what extent should that be is something that the younger generation, they are, they live by that actually.

So yes, it’s so very important. And I think it’s almost like we’re writing new rules of the game. Yes. As far as marketing is concerned, isn’t it? Because it used to be that this was the trendy word, so we’ll throw it out there. It’s like one of my biggest bugbears in, in marketing is that every other business has, we are the leading.

In whatever it might be. Who says you’re the leading in it? What actual criteria have you met to suggest that you are the leader? Some can genuinely say that I get that, but that is a very small handful that have actually been through a process that says that they are the leading, because even a, even an award, even a competition, okay, you might have been the leader of the people that entered it.

But doesn’t make you necessarily the industry leader or the leader in a particular space and in what context that people don’t usually give it. I’m the leading whatever, but yeah, I might be the leading one in this street. That’s the, that’s, that might be true, but it’s, it doesn’t wash anymore.

I think that kind of phrasing and terminology doesn’t wash because people are looking for support to see that and saying, okay, if you’re the leader, where am I seeing that? That is actually evident. And I think the same applies to all of that marketing terminology that exists in different areas. Bang on I couldn’t just, we’ll talk about this more when it comes to certain words that we keep on using repeatedly.

Things like innovation, and these are very cliched in today’s word. And if you take that to a job description, say, where would we use those words? Because the job descriptions are so heavy and it already gives and an imposter syndrome to many when they read, even if they’re confident in applying, the minute these heavy words come into flow, it just am I too good to even apply?

Am I good enough to apply for these roles? So I think it’s time to shift, make. Easy. Some things that as per the job, what the skills are required, we have them do the real talks, have those real things that you know, matters. For example, that survey with the Gen Z also said that they need 88%.

They would need a clear purpose what they would like to do in the job and feel satisfied. So it’s just not about Gen Z. I think if today, me and you would read a job description. And it should be, wow, you know what? I feel connected and I think that’s what it is. And not glorified words so to speak.

Yeah. I, and I think it, it is so important to choose the phrasing correctly that matches in, I know, and I’m sure you’ve got examples of well as well of where, if you use the wrong terminology, the expectations of the people are different. That are applying to be with you and it ends in tears. I’ve definitely seen it.

I remember an organization I was dealing with a few years ago, and they used a particular word quite heavily in a lot of their materials. And despite me having conversations with the CEO at the time saying, it’s just not the right word for your business. It’s not a criticism of your business. It’s just not the right word for it.

No. It’s the right word. And I saw over a two year period, the the turnover in staff was astronomical. And when that word changed, so too, did the trend for staff to come and go as often as they were because they were attracted by something that wasn’t really. True to the business.

And again, not a criticism of the business or the person that was in charge of it, merely just the wrong word, reflecting something that they perhaps thought they should be rather than what they actually are. I completely, agree here to that and coming from I was attending a conference and it wasn’t.

It would, it was a networking event wherein this young graduate spoke up and said, you know what? I do pretty good in my college. I get good numbers, I get everything, and she’s now applying for jobs. And she mentioned this. The minute I open the jobs to apply, I pause and think if I’m good at it because.

It’s not even matching to what my, it’s, it might be the role that you open up, but then again, those heavy words make me feel like doubt myself even to applaud. So I think it has to be, those real insight has to be those authentic messaging and. The best people are your employees. So if they are the ones who come out and they are sharing their experience, that authenticity matters a lot.

So it becomes more credible and people are able to resonate to what they are saying and they are applying to you. Yeah and so I guess that’s the thing where we maybe start looking at some of the statistics and things that you’ve got there because. Again, we wanna put some authenticity to what you’re saying here because it is a very different landscape and I think many many businesses are not hearing it because.

They’ve got a mix of staff, right? They’ve got, it’s, they’ve got people that are old and young, different generations, so they’re catering to all of those. And that in itself can be a difficult thing because there can be a huge difference between it. I just while you are bringing up some of those stats.

I certainly recall a time when I was working for an organization and I hired someone. I had was just a three person team, so it was quite small. And I had someone who was working under me that was close to my age, and then we hired someone younger and I remember we were just having a casual conversation about influencers and TV shows and music and stuff, and this poor.

A younger woman was looking at us just very blankly and completely lost. We were talking another language to her and equally she would be talking about stuff and we’d going, what are you saying? And that makes it hard when you’re trying to build a culture and you’re trying to show these different things.

But I’m interested in some of the stats that you’ve got there as well. Yep. So this survey or the study report that I was looking through, they specifically focused on Gen Z. So today’s candidates how they are evaluating pri primarily our younger generation here. So I’ll just read this through to you.

They are, most of the Gen Zs are evaluating companies through a very different lens, as I mentioned earlier to you. So it’s beyond even the job act. So 44% of Gen Zs are, je have rejected a employer because a company didn’t align with their ethics. Now, that’s a very big thing. I would have in my so many years of experience, ethics was always there, but it never played such a huge role.

Right then you would have about 86% who said that they need a clear sense of purpose in their job to feel satisfied. Yes. We always wanted to be of, have that satisfaction to the kind of job that I was looking for too, but it was not predominantly on my top list. It was maybe on the fourth fifth.

But looking at the way things are changing with the new generation, it is good for employers now to look and think how their messaging should be. Now, if the report also said that, 75% of them, they actively weigh community engagement engagement and societal impact, not that heavy. We wouldn’t have thought that would play such a huge role in their mindset while applying a job.

So these are some very interesting data points for employers to consider because of the way hiring is now happening. And more we could talk about. How is the landscape of social media and content changing predominantly for this in a younger mindset as well as we speak? Absolutely.

Because the thing about anyone that’s looking for somewhere to work, they’re all a, they’re almost interviewing you as the employer rather than the other way around these days. And they’re looking at what you are talking about on social media in other places. And making some judgment calls around there because they’re seeing through what might just be the marketing terminology and what is the reality there and.

You talk about ethics and impact as well out beyond the actual job. I think that is an important thing to people as well. That there is a culture of giving in some way, shape, or form. We’ve certainly had on this program in the past, a shout out as I do every now and then to Paul Dunn from B one G one because B one G one is a great way that you can make an impact through a business and giving something to other parts of the world, but it is important.

When I talk about ethics, that it’s that it’s beyond just you are doing the right thing in the way that you work. It’s actually, you’re going beyond that. It’s not just ticking boxes. Absolutely. Most organizations, we always have a part of corporate responsibility or CSR activities that we all do.

But does it define me when I’m looking at a job, does it define that, okay how much of contribution this company is making? And it gives me then the deciding power to join a company. So I felt that it’s a big shift. Nobody would, and when they’re making a social media strategy, for example, to attract talent, then this plays a big role that you know, what CSR activities that they’re doing, they make it as part of their content strategy too.

So whoever is looking at applying, they would know, Hey, you know what this organization does. Do a lot in this space. So it is one of my decision making process of thought when I apply. Yeah and I think that when you are looking through all of those things, it’s important that they’re aligned with the business and that.

Is where I think is a lot of businesses fall apart as well. I’ve certainly, again, we’re going back into the past, but I remember working at an a fairly large organization and on the whim of the then marketing director who was. Personally very involved with a particular charity and for very valid reasons, and a very great charity at that, an international charity dragged the organization into a relationship with that charity.

And it was a failure because it had no alignment with the business itself, as wonderful an organization as it was. It just didn’t have any relevance. To the business and therefore nobody bought into it. And I think that’s an important message as well, is that if you’re going to align a business with something and a charity is one idea, but not the only idea, it whatever you are doing in marketing sense, it needs to be aligned with the business and where it’s going and the core audience and what they think as well.

Absolutely. True that because. It’s just not about the candidates. And the business impact that you’re mentioning here end of the day is the people who are making the changes as well. While we are looking at the content strategy with regards to CSR to probably attract talent, it’s also client strategy as well.

I’m sure clients would also be interested to see where we are contributing with regards to the society overall. Yeah, and I think it’s so critical. That businesses think about all of these things because it also impacts their own course of action and their success. Because we’ve been talking about it in the context of employees, but the truth is that this has an impact in the context of clients and whoever is buying from them and partners and those things as well, because you want to be in a relationship with someone.

That shares the same values as you, because the reality is you have competitors. We all have competitors. Why people choose you. Is because of you and who you are as a person, as a brand, as a business, and that filters out into the bigger world. And I believe that’s becoming more and more important. I think AI is making it more important because yes, people are looking for that, which is different.

That is true to who they are. That stands out from what is the AI driven content. Absolutely true that as well because in this aspect, specifically because you brought up the space of competitors everybody is looking into the, so your. Competition as to what they’re doing.

And specifically there is when you strategically do things with regards to keeping in mind the client perspective, the, the future candidate perspective, that’s when everything that’s what the strategy is all about. So I would again, reiterate that talent marketing is all about that.

It is a strategy with regards to keeping business in mind. And now, in one of, one of the times where there could be a lot of content strategy build with regards to the client stories that you have in a way that your future candidates get. Attracted and say, wow, you know what, they have these kind of clients and this is what the employees, so it’s, I feel it’s like a holistic approach from business from client perspective, where then your employees and your future candidates, one in a hardship.

Yeah. It’s such an area of underestimated value, and that’s where I think it’s about businesses knowing where to start from with this. Because we’ve been talking all around the idea of this, but the question is how do they actually get started on this and put, meat on the bone as it were, of what is really driving them and where that authenticity is because.

It needs to come from a place of authenticity and there needs to be, people like yourself that is going to find what that is and take them through a process. Absolutely. And it is. That’s what the beauty of talent marketing or recruitment marketing, employer branding is all about. It is about saying that as important is your product marketing or your client marketing.

So is your talent marketing. How would you shape talents to ensure that they are the right people, you are trying to attract them while you are trying to it’s even before you sit and you think about promoting those jobs outside, it’s a step much ahead of that. Like even your thinking of the job ads that you would write.

You, you keep thinking about how to ensure that this entire process comes into place. It is, it’s about everything. So if you are giving the product client marketing importance, talent marketing has an equal space completely out to your. So let’s go back a little bit because I want to give people a bit of a sense of your journey.

’cause we talked in the beginning of the fact that this is a fairly new venture for you. So talk to me a little bit about where this journey came from and how you got to the point of establishing this where you saw the gap that was in the market. So you’ve been, actually was born out of redundancy and I think I give a lot to my journey.

Of being redundant. I don’t think otherwise. Human, which means light would come into being Now after the journey of being redundant, I was like, okay, you have very less, because the space is very niche. Not all organization are heavily investing on employee branding services and.

That’s where my story is to most organizations or talent leaders are that do not treat talent marketing or employ branding as a cosmetic afterthought. It has to be something that you blend in your process just like you would advertise or do marketing with any product out there.

So I did see that, there was. Not, there was client marketing, there was product marketing, but the talent space is where it was missing. And of course there was less of roles in this EV space or employee branding space is when I thought that, I have had 15 years, 16 years of experience in this from starting employer branded services from ground up, so everything like, how should.

The EVP messaging be how should a career side be? How should the candidate experience be? And of course, engage, attract everything together. So I was like, why not do something for the talent acquisition team? So I think Lumen is a solid partner to a talent acquisition team, the strategic partners.

We try to tell you authentically how this could help you instead of that constant rush through applying chasing applications rather. Yeah, I think it’s it’s a wonderful thing that you’re doing and it’s interesting to me how you talk so openly about it coming out of redundancy, but it’s amazing how.

Often the great ideas come from there. And as, and I can’t remember who to attribute this to, so apologies out there, but I know someone who told first told me this little piece, which says that, have you noticed how when things break they open? And I think it’s so true that some of the best ideas have come out of exactly the kind of situation that you find yourself in.

So tell me businesses that are sitting out there at the moment going, okay, I hear you. What are the immediate steps that they can and should be doing? So the first thing that you know, I tell any of the talent acquisition leaders or employer employers, whoever I meet, is that you can’t fix hiring with more job ads.

You fix it with clarity. So that’s where I do a discovery session. And I try to take them through a journey of trying to understand what’s taking them or what keeps them awake the night to fill in those numbers. Because I’ve been a recruiter myself in my earlier days, so I know when, businesses give you the requisition and you have to fill in certain roles and specifically in the tech.

Space. It’s not easy. So what I do is I do a discovery session where I ask them a whole lot of questions and try to understand what is there. Do they have a EVP? They don’t have a EVP. Is it the candidate experience? Or sometimes I had a TA leader who said, Sri, I have a whole lot of applications coming in.

So I said that’s a great problem to have. But his challenge was something different. From having a whole lot of people applying, how does the candidate experience can feel broken when you have a lot of applications, right? So that clarity is where I’d like and I help TA leaders then think through coming back from the discovery sessions that I think this is what needs are fixed.

These 1, 2, 3 things could help you fix it. Now some things can be. A little longer process. Some can be a quick fix. So that’s accordingly how we shape it out for the leaders. Fantastic. We’re gonna include some links on how people can get in touch with you in the show notes and some of the, that initial discovery session I think is an important thing for businesses to be doing, like dealing with to work with you on.

So talk to me a little bit about the kind of. Ideal organizations that you are looking to work with, because of course there’s a, there’s such a range, right? I think what you’ve said today is relevant to someone who’s having their first hire to someone that’s, got hundreds of team. It’s would be for each and any organizations.

That is for my ideal customer, I would say, or a client would definitely be, I am focused very much on, the it and the tech world because that’s where I’ve done most of my my work experience is there, but then it’s just like shifting the coin if it is like an FMCG or if it’s some other clients coming and they want to fix their hiring.

So anybody who’s trying to hire in, every situation is very different. Every TA leader that I speak has a very unique challenge that they come up with. It could be from hiring, they’re having hiring problem. It could be candidate experience problem, it could be career sites. So depending on what that discovery session leads to, the solutions are given.

But mostly anybody’s trying to hire a hundred thousand, or they’re trying to set up. Probably a center offshore because we are with my ki, with my experience over across multiple countries and regions, I do have that lens of how the local experience or the local candidates would actually look at or what would help them to get them going.

Those numbers. Look, there’s so many more things that we can talk about in this space, and I think it’s a fascinating area. Again, reminded of people to check out the show notes of how to get in touch with Sri. Just one final question that I wanna ask you, and I ask this of all of my guests, and this is an interesting one to ask you because you’re so new in the journey.

So maybe it’s a little bit more about what you wish than what is actually happening at the moment. ’cause it’s so early on. But the question is. What is the at heart moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish and hope more people will know about in the future? So you’ll have more people coming to knock on your door.

I’d say this Anthony, that instead of, like treating the recruitment marketing or talent marketing, like as I mentioned as a cosmetic afterthought we need to see it as a strategic partner. And I think that wow moment is that the talent acquisition team feels, oh, she’s one of us because she knows the trenches.

There is something that I have dealt it in and out. So of course there are a lot of agencies who you can probably give your work outsource to, but unless you’ve been in that trenches of hiring or recruitment, you wouldn’t understand the pain of the talent acquisition leaders. Like what it takes them to fill those roles and everything.

A snap of a finger probably. So yes, I said that would be the aha. Wow. Movement. Fantastic. I love that. I love everything that you’ve talked about today. It’s so relevant and important. It stretches beyond just the internal employees. It also looks to outside relationships and it’s a very specific kind of marketing that is becoming more and more important to organizations.

So thank you for being an amazing guest on the program. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Anthony. It was great talking to you. Thank you so much and to everyone listen in. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Until next time, we look forward to your company then.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.

We look forward to your company next time on biz.

Trust is your leadership superpower. Dr. Darryl Stickel reveals the three core pillars that build unbreakable teams. Welcome to another powerful episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Today we are diving deep into the currency that makes or breaks every business relationship trust. Joining us is Dr.

Darryl Stickel, who is the founder of Trust Unlimited, the author of the groundbreaking book. Building trust, exceptional leadership in an uncertain world. And he’s also the host of the Imperfect Cafe podcast. He spent decades helping leaders from Fortune 500 companies right through to smaller businesses, build unshakeable trust in the most hostile business environments.

In the next 50 minutes, you are going to discover why 95% of leaders overestimate their trustworthiness, how vulnerability actually strengthens your authority, and the three core pillars that underpin trust in any relationship. Plus, we’ll explore practical levers you can pull to close the gap between how trusted you think you are.

And how trusted you actually are. This is an amazing episode play. Please pay special attention to the way Darrell introduces himself as well. We’ll reveal more as the episode goes on. A lot of value from this one for every single person in business.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and today we are going to have, I know a very interesting discussion about trust. How do we build it? Where does it come from? What are the implications of it? So many things to unpack in this short word. That people hear all the time in business, but what does it really mean?

We have I would say one of the foremost experts in the world on this topic. Darryl Stickel joining us. Darryl, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you and with our listeners.

And I know you’re a podcaster as well, but I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself to the audience so everyone understands a little bit more about who you are and what you’re about.

Sure. So I grew up in Northern Canada. In a small community, and it was isolated, harsh. Winters minus 40 was not unusual. And so people had to rely on each other. And so I got a sense that if I could be helpful, I should, and growing up there you developed a strong sense of community. When I was 17, I was playing hockey and I got attacked by a fan with a club shattered my helmet, knocked me unconscious.

I apparently stopped breathing three times on the way to the hospital. Wow. And when I was growing up I had a. Retinal disorder, hereditary retinal disorder. I knew I was gonna eventually lose my sight, that I’d become legally blind. My intent had been to think for a living, and now all of a sudden, here I am, I can’t think I’ve got the attention span of a fruit fly.

And so there was this long stretch of helplessness and hopelessness, and what it provoked in me was a really strong sense of empathy. And it took me a couple of years to really recover. But what I did. Strange things started happening. So I would be sitting on a bus and a complete stranger would come up and sit next to me and say, I’m really having a hard time.

And people would open up to me quickly. And I wanted to understand why that was happening and it felt like maybe I was destined for a life working as a clinical counselor. So I started working with street kids and families in crisis and troubled teens and working on crisis lines. To further hone those skills and gain a better understanding of what was going on for me.

And I, I came this close to becoming a clinical psychologist and I realized that, it would, it had taken these people a long time to get where they were. It was gonna take a long time for them to find their way out of it, and then it would drive me crazy. And so I transitioned. It ended up in public administration doing a master’s degree in public admin, working in native land claims in British Columbia.

And they would ask me these deep philosophical questions like, what is self-government? Or What will the province look like 50 years after claims are settled? The last question they asked me was, how do we convince a group of people we’ve shafted for over a hundred years? They should trust us. And man, that just seemed like such a good question.

And it gets to the heart of these long-term disputes, why they’re so resilient, even when they’re not doing anyone any good anymore. So I went to Duke and wrote my doctoral thesis on building trust in hostile environments. And I had two incredible academics on my committee who were both experts on trust.

And they sat me down after I finished and they said, when you first came to us. We had a conversation with each other. We said, it’s too big, too complicated. He’s never gonna solve it. We’ll give him six months and then he’ll come crawling back and that’ll be his thesis. We’ll let him just shave off a little piece of this.

They said six months in, you’re so far beyond us. We couldn’t help anymore. All we could do is sit and watch. Said here we’re a few years later, we think you’ve solved it.

So I left academia, went into consulting. I got hired by McKinsey Company, a big management consulting firm. Now all of a sudden, I’m getting a chance to apply these concepts that I’ve theorized about and they recognized, they said, wow, you got great client hands. Let’s send you to the worst places possible.

So places where there had been strikes or hostile takeovers, they would send me in to work with clients. And I’m getting a chance to apply these concepts and having success doing it, and then I get injured on the way to a client site. The car on me rear ends another vehicle. I end up with a really bad concussion again, and I can’t work 80 hours a week anymore.

And so I start my own little company called Trust Unlimited, and I start helping people better understand what trust is, how it works, and how to build it. And over the next 20 years, my learning curve is almost vertical. As I’m applying these concepts, formulating better ideas, learning how to help people understand the concepts better and how to prob problem solve with them.

So that’s brings us up to today.

That is quite a journey. Yeah. I love, I love that. You know what’s fascinating to me as I was sitting there listening to you and I asked the same question of everyone coming on the show to introduce themselves, and we get a variation of people that give me the 15 second version to what you did, to the more elaborate one and the interesting thing about what you’ve just.

Given us is a story, a journey of your life and where you’ve got to, and you can feel already, and I, it’s not a matter of what you feel because there’s a mixture of different things in there. There’s admiration, there’s empathy, there’s lots of different things that are going on. But immediately with that, what’s interesting to me is I feel like I wanna trust you already.

How much. Of building trust is emotional.

It’s a really big part. And man, that’s good insight because that was the core of my thesis. One of the things that really differentiated most of the 99% of the trust research treats people like they’re rational actors. And you’ve met people before, right? We’re not always rational and the more emotional we become, the less rational we are.

And so for me I developed a full fledge model for how the trust decision works and how we can actually take practical applied steps to build it. But in the heart of this whole thing is our emotional states, whether we like or dislike somebody else. ’cause if we like people, we have this positive story about them.

We want to find reasons to trust them. We’re more likely to trust them, we’re more likely to evaluate the outcomes we have with them positively, and that makes us like them even more. It creates these virtuous cycles.

It’s really fascinating to me that. The, we live in these two sides of our brain.

In fact, we probably live most of our time in our very rational side of the brain. Yet from a marketing perspective, we always say that 90% of decision making is is, is the emotional side and 10% is justifying the emotion. With that in mind is that. The key to the formula for trust is it really building that emotional connection first before you can start to rationalize it in some way?

For me it’s about resetting those emotional states if they’re negative, right? And we can start a positive cycle fairly easily by finding things that we like about the other person, having a positive narrative about them, a positive story. When it comes to my sons, I have a relentlessly positive story about them, which means that new information that comes to me, I interpret it through that lens, right?

And so when they were younger and they were in school and their teachers would say, yeah, he’s misbehaving. I would start to get curious, what’s provoking that? Because I’m not prepared to just blame him and say he’s dysfunctional. I’m more curious about what are the settings, what are the triggering events?

What’s the environment that you’ve created that’s bringing that out in him? Because I don’t see it. But I think for me, we just need to be aware that these negative emotions, if they’re really strong, are gonna trump any kind rational approach that we take to try to build trust with somebody else.

We need to at least be aware of them and try to reset those emotional states. First, if they exist.

It’s really intriguing when you talk about some of these areas, because we do have a lens that is. What our life is, right? The, our experiences and things that we’ve been through, right? It is going to impact our ability to trust someone we’ve just met, for example, right?

Because I’m gonna give you an example. I was brought up in a time when very few people had tattoos, okay? And so you were brought up with a lens that if they had tattoos, they were probably from the wrong side of the street. Now fast forward to Australia. Now I watch a lot of football. There’s barely a player that doesn’t have tattoos.

The whole it used to be that you couldn’t get a job if you had them. You had to cover them up all those sorts of things. And that’s completely changed. So it’s very interesting how things change, but it’s interesting. But I was very aware when that transition started happening in society, that became more common, became very aware that I had this lens.

That said, don’t trust these people. It wasn’t a rational one. It was just brought up on, people don’t have tattoos and therefore if they do, they must be this kind of person. And it’s interesting how those things not only, I became very self-aware of it, but also how it can change when you are aware how it can change the way you think and how indeed.

Those things change. I suppose one other obvious example is, it wasn’t that long ago that people would say, don’t trust anything where you have to buy it online. We, don’t trust putting your credit card down online. Now you would argue that it’s probably more trustworthy to do it in some online secure environments than it might be to do it in person.

So again. Things change. So how do you accommodate that and how important is being self-aware and noticing those changes that happen?

Wow. So you’re opening up all kinds of things for me here. And it’s gotta be because you’re from down under, because you’re taking me in reverse order. Through what I normally talk about context is I hope that’s a good

thing.

Make it more fun.

Yeah, absolutely. So you’re talking about context in some respects, which is the formal and informal rules of the game. And context is one of the other pieces that I added in my doctoral thesis because I needed a way to explain why we trust or mistrust some people without knowing anything about them.

And overwhelmingly the literature talks about trust from an individual perspective, but it ignores the elements of context. And a lot of times what I would do is, I would say to people, if you could be anywhere with anyone doing anything right now, how many of you would be sitting here listening to me speak?

And I had to stop doing that ’cause it wasn’t good for my self-esteem. But, because the question becomes, then why are you here? And they’re there because it’s their job or they’ve got something else on the go, or they’re traveling somewhere and they’re listening to the podcast context explains why we go into a doctor’s office and the doctor says, take off your clothes.

And we do. I’ve tried that. In other places it doesn’t work. And if we change the context, we could have the same two people with the exact same dialogue, but move them from a doctor’s office to a gas station restroom. And it goes from credible to creepy in a heartbeat.

Yep.

And so what you’re referring to is the fact that perceptions and values have changed over time.

Norms and expectations have changed over time. And you’re right, a lot of times we’re not even aware of our own context until we start to become thoughtful about it. And one of the exercises I got a of senior executives to do was. I sit down and I want you to think about how the CEO is constrained and each of the VPs is gonna write down how they think.

The CEO is constrained by the context. And then I want the CEO to do the same for the for, for themselves. And at the end, we started going through and having a conversation. What have you written down? What did, what were the takeaways for you? And. It provoked this really interesting conversation because they had different perspectives than the CEO did.

I’ve done the same thing with a captain on a naval vessel when I was doing some training with the military. We have very different understanding is how of how each of us is constrained and making that surfacing, that making people more aware of it is a great way to help reduce uncertainty because.

For me, trust is the willingness to make yourself vulnerable when you can’t completely predict how someone else is gonna behave. And that definition includes elements of vulnerability and uncertainty. And so in my model, it’s uncertainty times, vulnerability gives us a level of perceived risk, and we each have a threshold of risk that we can tolerate.

If we go beyond that threshold, we don’t trust. If we’re beneath it, then we do. So what that means is that if uncertainty is really high, then vulnerability has to be low to still fit beneath that threshold. And as our relationships get deeper, the uncertainty goes down and the range of vulnerability we can tolerate cts to grow.

And so if we want to build trust, it’s actually fairly simple. It’s where does uncertainty come from and how do we take steps to reduce it? And where does vulnerability come from and how do we take steps to help the other person manage it? And so uncertainty comes from us as individuals, and it comes from the context we’re embedded in, and the better able we are to describe or outline our context, the less uncertainty there is for somebody else, the easier it is for them to trust us.

Interesting. I, so with all of that in mind and I’m interested as to whether the introduction that you gave. Is part partly because of the formula that you have in mind, because you were quite vulnerable in what you gave over about the journey that you’ve had in your life Because it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a, you didn’t gimme a resume.

Put it that way. You gave me a story in which you were quite vulnerable about, having been on death door at one point. And other things that have happened to you throughout your life. Is that a deliberate strategy to build trust or is that just something that’s become a reaction that you know to everything that you’ve done?

So partly I try to live the model. I use it when I raise my sons. I use it when I teach. And I, until you just asked me that question, I hadn’t thought about the reason I tell the story, but part of, you’re right, part of what I do is I make myself vulnerable and that initiates a norm of reciprocity in others.

They feel like if Darryl’s willing to be vulnerable with me, that it’s okay for me to be vulnerable back. And partly I get a lot of practice. I’m legally blind and my guide dog, Drake, and I wander the world trying to make it a better place. I need help often. And I have realized that it doesn’t make me less than that.

That there is the potential for people to take advantage of me. Of my vision and the challenges I have, but I’ve been overwhelmed at how wonderful people are and how willing to help they are. And I’ve had really positive experiences with being vulnerable and it may be part of what makes people comfortable being vulnerable back to me.

It is interesting, isn’t it? Because you are, as you say, you are being forced to, particularly if you are, in a situation outside where you’ve got your D guide dog with you, it’s very obvious what your vulnerability is, right? And wearing that on your sleeve is a difficult thing, but you don’t have a choice and.

It’s interesting though that today people are generally speaking more and more guarded, aren’t they? Yeah. And I find this an interesting dilemma in business and I remember back even to the, I think to the very first episode of this podcast for those that wanna go back, we had a discussion with with Karen at the time and talking about this idea that.

Is outdated notion that it used to be when you rocked up to business that you had to leave your personal life outside the door, and that it was all focused on business until you walk back in. Nowadays that attitude seems to be that you, the recognition that you carry it with you. And particularly if people work from home, but yet the guards are very much up.

There’s, AI I think is making things more and more. Polished and putting more and more barriers up and trying to separate that. And so that, allowing that vulnerability, it’s becoming challenging. It is.

Yeah. And you’re bang on. So you, your instincts are so good around this stuff. You’re doing a magnificent job, by the way.

Thank you. When I think about, trust is at some of the lowest levels we’ve ever measured. If we think about it using the model I described before, our vulnerability certainly hasn’t gone down. We feel just as vulnerable as we used to, or maybe a little more but our uncertainty is bouncing all over the place, right?

We’ve seen pandemics, we’ve seen. Changes in norms and values. We see technological changes at an increasing pace. We see political instability and conflict around the world. These massive fluctuations and uncertainty make us incredibly uncomfortable, and so the ask, asking you to be just a little more vulnerable to me by trusting me is harder than it’s ever been.

And this is part of the, I’ve started working on a project called the Aspiring Men’s Program because the statistics for young men right now are horrific. They make up 80% of the suicide rate. They’re trending down in terms of educational outcomes, mental health outcomes, addiction. They’re really in a time of crisis and they are struggling to be vulnerable in a profound way.

They are the hardest group to reach because they don’t ask for help and they don’t send signals. They are reluctant to accept help. They isolate. And so you’re right, it’s becoming harder and harder for us to be. Vulnerable with one another because it feels like we’re raw and already over overexposed.

And it’s, we live in a society where there’s an expectation of performance and I know it’s actually interesting that around me in the last year 2, 3, 4, even. Reasonably close friends that have. Found themselves lost out of work. That they’ve lost their, they’ve lost their position and mostly it’s been through no fault of their own.

It’s a, restructuring situation, whatever’s happening in different businesses and things. And I was actually thinking about this the other day, that’s, that is so vulnerable to tell people about that because there’s an expectation that you’ll always be employed and you’ll always be aspiring at a high level and you’ll keep going up and up.

And that’s not always the case. And but even that for, I think particularly for men, is actually a it’s very, it’s very vulnerable because there’s an expectation, particularly not just around performance, but around, financial side of things,

right? Yeah. It’s a real challenge for men.

And when I was teaching in Luxembourg and one of my students, I think he was from Russia, he was definitely from Eastern Europe. He said, any man who makes himself vulnerable isn’t a real man. And so there’s this very strong mindset around you gotta be perfect. You can’t make mistakes. And you don’t ever admit that you’re struggling or need help.

And I challenged that idea, right? I said, look I’m teaching here. I’m making myself vulnerable all the time. I’m sharing stories about myself, imperfections about myself. Are you suggesting I’m not a real man? And he went, I said, ’cause we could go outside and have a f. Fairly serious discussion about that.

He was like no. I said, okay. Because I think it’s actually a sign of strength to be able to be vulnerable, to ask for help. And I was working with a group of senior executives and we were talking about benevolence, which is one of the levers we can pull, right? So from the individual perspective, we’ve talked about context, but from the individual perspective, there’s three levers.

I can pull to make you think I’m trustworthy. One is benevolence, which is the belief you have got your best interest at heart. Two is integrity. Do I follow through on my commitments and do my actions line up with my values? And three is ability. Do I have the confidence to do what I say I’m gonna do?

And so I’m getting them to tell stories about times when they’ve helped someone when they’ve been benevolent. And there’s six of them in the room. And they go around and they tell these powerful stories and they’re all smiling, and the mood is just buzzing, right? You can just feel the intensity. And I said, this is fantastic.

Now if you could just explain to me why you’re so effing selfish. And they go, what? What are you talking about? I said, even years later, you describe how powerful a moment it was for you to help somebody. To show up when they needed you. And you feel the positive energy that in this exact moment, but you never let anyone have that experience with you.

You never ask for help. You never admit you don’t know something. You never reach out.

Interesting. It’s I can immediately thinking of many situations where I think I’ve seen that. I think we all can. Yeah. And what fascinates me about vulnerability is that saying before that the walls are up so often, and I mentioned to you before we came on air and those listening to the program are very aware that my primary business is podcast done for you.

Great. And so podcasting is very much about, building trust with your audience and vulnerability is a key part of that. And it comes into telling stories because it’s a learning curve. It’s showing that you’ve learned. I think it’s one of the differences between a podcast and a webinar. Webinar is very much a, these are my learnings.

This is what you’ve gotta do come by from me. Whereas a podcast is. Get to know me, let me share some things, let me share some how I’ve gone on this journey and these different things along the way. And I think that’s what makes a truly great podcast is when that is open and you hear that all the time.

Whether it’s a celebrity based podcast where you’ve got actors telling about auditions and things that happen early on in their career, et cetera to. A business. I’ve a podcast I’ve got with a particular client that I’m thinking of and was talking about, his early days of teaching and how things went wrong, in a particular episode that he talked about.

And I think that sort of vulnerability is rarer than what you, than what people think that these barriers are up. And yet we want people to do business with us. We want them to trust us. How do you actually get that message through that vulnerability is so important. Yeah. And this is

part of the challenge.

My podcast is called The Imperfect Cafe. And it’s around leadership. And I agree with you. We’re trying to build trust with our audience so that we can engage with them so that we hopefully have impact. We have a positive impact on their lives. And. When I talk to people about pulling these levers, the ability lever tends to be our favorite lever.

And so we’ll say, I have these much, this much experience, these credentials, this position in the world. But if I really wanted to know what good look I’d actually include you in the conversation. And

yeah,

something I normally do is I’ll say, I wanna be the best guest you’ve ever had, or one of the best guests you’ve ever had.

How do I do that? And so if I asked you that you’d say you’d help my listeners be better off than they are today before they’ve listened to the podcast. You’d be. Engaging and genuine. And you think about my audience, not just yourself.

Absolutely. And so I’m trying to be the best I can be for your audience. And one of the interesting challenges that you face is you’re helping people with vastly different audiences. And so you should be having conversations. ’cause in a perfect world, you and I would actually talk to some of your listeners and say, what’s compelling for you?

How do I speak in a way that helps make your life better, that makes you want to listen to this podcast that makes it change your life in a positive way.

It’s, and it’s really interesting you say that and you. May not be able to see what is behind me. And there’s a sign that says and for those that are listening and not watching as well, it’s worthwhile pointing out. There’s a sign behind me that says, being the voice of brilliance. Brilliance is something that I talk very much about in, in podcast Done for You.

That’s what we are seeking to do, is to allow other people’s brilliance to be heard. It’s part of what we’re doing on this program is allowing our guest brilliance to be heard and brilliance can be mistaken for perfection. But it’s not right. Brilliance comes from stories and vulnerability as much as anything else.

And I think, if I certainly, in, in ticking the boxes for what makes a great guest for this program, there’s two probably critical elements and the one we most commonly talk about is giving those little one percenters that will make a difference to people listening that can act on things and improve their life, their business as a result of some ideas that have come across on the program.

But just giving those ideas on their own without context and story is useless because why would you trust that person? Why would you believe them? When you hear the story around it and you understand the thought and the processes that have gone into it, and the insights that have happened along the way, then the trust factor increases and the desire.

Therefore to enact on some of those things and potentially also then to want to engage directly with the guest increases.

Yeah,

I’m definitely hoping that people are going to tune in and listen to your podcast as well, and we’ll make sure we include some links to that in the in the show notes.

Yeah, that’d be brilliant. Part of my mission is to get the signal through the noise. Because, ’cause when I talk to real people and I show them the model, they go, this just feels obvious. It feels like common sense. Like how is, how’d you get a PhD? And when I talk to trust experts, they go, nobody else on the planet is talking about it this way.

This is so practical and applied. You’re talking about, I have 10 levers in my model. We all have the ability to build trust. Some are just better than others. Those who aren’t very good have a lever that they pull. Usually it’s the ability lever. Those who are better have multiple levers, and those who are really good have multiple levers and they know when to pull which one.

So you and I just role modeled the ability lever. Trying to pull that and having a discussion about what good looks like for you, what good looks like for your audience so they can have a conversation. Because a lot of times leaders, I’ll tell them benevolence, integrity and ability, and they’ll go, I do those things.

Yep.

And I’ll say, says who? Because if it’s me telling you I’ve got your best interest at heart, it doesn’t land nearly as well as you believing it.

Yep.

And for you to believe it, I have to include you in the conversation

And it’s so interesting with all of that because one of the things that I talk about. And again, this is not what this conversation tool will be about podcasting, but I think it’s an important thing point to make here is that the best podcasts are a conversation where the people that are listening feel like you are talking to them,

right?

And that is what the key is. Is that, I’ve worked in radio for a long time. I’ve built large audiences in radio and the key thing that I learned very early on in the piece was you don’t think about the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people that might be listening. It just has to be one person that is sitting there going, they’re talking to me.

And if that’s the case, then you are building, as you said, you’re building trust.

Yeah, and I try to role model the model, so I try to show benevolence, right? There’s nothing I’m holding back. There’s no, buy this for 10 easy lessons or here’s the secret. I’m telling you everything that comes to mind.

When I wrote the book, I wrote it so that if I go away, what I know doesn’t, and I. I’m trying to help your audience be better prepared to have conversations about trust than they were before they listened.

I find it fascinating when you read a lot of content that’s posted online, and particularly now with the advent of ai.

It’s tries to talk in some respects, to an emotion. You need this very rarely. Are there stories that are built into the component and very rarely are there vulnerable stories that are built into it.

And that’s where I think the difference is. It’s fascinating. Even when you look at some of the well-known entrepreneurs the.

The big people over the years that and pick any number of different ones from a, Richard Branson onwards. There is a degree of vulnerability with what they give over as well. And I think that we lose that because everyone’s striving for the perfection and forget that a perfection’s not achievable.

But b, that it’s. It’s the journey which entices people along the way. That’s what’s fascinating about speaking to those people.

Yeah, and every leader I talked to, I ask them, are you the same leader now? You were five years ago? And they all say, no. I’ve learned and grown and developed. And I’ll say, are you gonna be the same leader five years from now?

No I hope not. So that means you’re gonna let go of some of the things that got you here, some of the things you’re good at, and step into the things that would make you great as you evolve. And anytime you try something new, you make mistakes. And so how do we prepare the people around us for the fact that we’re gonna stumble?

And I tell ’em they should be thinking about having a conversation with those they lead and saying we’re all gonna be learning and adapting and evolving because the world’s moving too fast for us to stand still. And on that journey, we’re all gonna make mistakes, including me. I will stumble and I may fall.

When I do that, my expectation is that you’re gonna be standing beside me, helping me back up, helping me learn from that experience. ’cause that’s exactly what I’m gonna be doing for you. Sure.

It’s, that idea is so simple, but yet. It seems like a, there’s a, there are many brick walls in between it for the majority of people. Yeah. And I imagine that when you’ve gone into businesses small to large, that it’s those walls being up, which is usually the cause of the problem.

Yeah. It’s often the inability to accept responsibility for our own mistakes.

Or to tolerate the mistakes of others. I’ve heard so many senior leaders say, if I make one mistake, I’m done. And that can’t be true because we all make mistakes on a regular basis. And so what I try to convince leaders to do is to actually talk about the fact that. They haven’t been perfect the whole time they’ve been around, but they’ve made mistakes and when they were in other roles that there was a learning curve that was involved.

It helps humanize them because if we wander around with this mindset that I have to be perfect, it means we need everyone else to be perfect too. And that leads to micromanaging and squelching of innovation and adaptation. It means that people become incredibly cautious. And one of my favorite papers is by one of my advisors, SIM Kin, and it, the concept is the gains of small losses.

And in that paper he says that if your people are pushing to the limit of their abilities, they should be making mistakes. And if they aren’t, it’s a sign that they’re being cautious, too conservative.

It’s there are, when you talk about businesses at that level, it’s amazing to me how many times you have A-A-C-E-O that commissions some research and when the research comes back that says. They might be the problem, how quickly they quash that and move to other areas because they can’t possibly be the problem and they’re not allowed to be the problem because they’re the CEO or the business owner.

And it just, that’s not what, it’s just not what they’re looking for as the answer, right?

Yeah. Or resistance to getting that kind of information in the first place. Because I’ve been involved in situations where we’ve said we could measure trust levels. And senior executives are quick to say, you could do that for middle management, but not for us.

And this gets us to one of the challenges that we face. Trust has incredible value. We’ve seen that it leads to world breaking performance leads to incredible outcomes if it’s high enough. Within teams and organizations, it leads to higher returns to shareholders, higher retention rates, all these things.

Yet it’s at some of the lowest levels we’ve ever measured. The biggest gap we tend to find is between how much CEOs believe they’re trusted senior executives, and how much they actually are. And so there’s this delusion, 95% of us believe we’re more trustworthy than average, and that’s not just statistically impossible.

It’s problematic. Yeah. Because it means that if something came up between you and I, we would both think be thinking it’s the other person’s fault. Yep. It means we’re not able to resolve those conversations or challenges that we run into. And I talk to people about the locus of control challenge, an internal versus an external locus of control.

And for your listeners, an internal looks of control means you’re master of your own destiny. You make things happen in the world you’re an actor. External looks of control means you’re buffeted by the winds of fate. Things happen to you. Yep. And so when I used to teach undergrads, I’d say to them, I’d explain that and I’d say, who here has an internal of control?

And all the hands would go up stirring site, and I’d say, this is awesome. This means that if you fail the class or do poorly, it’s not because I didn’t teach it properly. The test was too hard. It’s all you baby. And they’d all go, oh, wait a minute. I said, that’s right. We tend to have an internal lo of control and we’re successful and an external locus of control when we fail.

And my sons were heavily involved in sports. They never lost a game where the ref didn’t suck. And this is one of the challenges we have with learning, right? Because what we should be doing is looking at those situations when we’re successful and saying, what role did the environment play? So that I can look for environments like that in the future to improve my chances of being successful.

And when we fail, we should be looking at our own behavior and saying, what are some of the things I could have done differently? How could I learn?

I, it’s a fascinating analogy. I think for what you’ve just described is actually sport and football in particular, and it doesn’t matter which kind of football code you follow, we’ve all heard this.

The team has lost, they blame the, there’s a, particularly the fans, I wouldn’t say necessarily the coaches, but the fans often blame the referee. Sometimes the coaches do as well. Yep. If this had have been ruled this way, then we would’ve won the game and. But I think actually the truly great coaches might question some decisions, but still say that there’s so much that we can take out of the game.

It wasn’t that one, two second moment where the ref blew the whistle. That actually changed the fate of the game because there were, there were x number of minutes of other times that things happened that the game could have been won. And that’s the difference isn’t it as well in business It is that you can focus on those little things, but it is actually going back to being more vulnerable and looking at what were the other things that went wrong.

It wasn’t just that moment.

And we can also see the forwards blame the defense for not getting the ball to them or everyone blaming the goalie. ’cause he only stopped 30 of the 35 shots that came at him. And we could see that happen within organizations, right? Where we blame it on sales or marketing or operations or distribution.

We create these us and them scenarios when it should be we, and we should be creating an environment where if there are problems we need to solve them.

I think it’s. So important to not only be vulnerable as we’ve talked about here, but also to be willing to give in a way that makes an impact.

Yeah.

I think that’s such an important thing that often businesses hold back say we’re the leader. I hate that. Determined because so many businesses say that we are the leader.

I don’t know how you justify that. Who’s actually given that particular honor ’cause I’ve never seen it in a particular space. Therefore, you must trust us and we will do stuff for you without actually giving anything over, right? Because if you can’t be a little bit impactful with what you deliver, and you’ve given plenty of insights today in this in this conversation of what things people can do and the impact that they can make, then you can’t possibly expect to build.

Trust as well. And it’s one of the things I like doing and I often do this in business as well, and we’ve had a person behind this on the program in the past. It’s a terrific organization called B one G one, and it’s very easy to show when you have. Interactions with people, how you can make an impact somewhere else in the world as well as a result of simply having a conversation.

And I and that’s a positive impact through a charity. And it can happen from a few cents to hundreds of dollars, whatever it, whatever you choose to do. And I think impact for business. Doesn’t have to be necessarily just about what you do. ’cause that can sometimes be difficult to pull off, right?

But you can make an impact in some way, shape, or form to build that level of trust.

And as a leader, I tend to think that one of the strongest levers we can pull is the benevolence lever, right? So benevolence integrity and ability are the three sort of individual levers, and that’s where most of the trust literature sits.

A ability is a moving target. What made a great leader 10 years ago is probably not the same thing that makes them great today. And integrity is getting harder and harder to maintain because norms and values are shifting and the world is moving so fast, it’s hard to make long-term commitments, but we can always have each other’s best interests at heart.

We can always try to look out for each other. And, there’s a number of ways we can do that. Again, I was teaching in Luxembourg. I was sitting with a group of students. I said to them, I said to one of them, tell me a relationship that matters to you. One, that’s important. He said, one girlfriend.

I said, great, and what matters to her? And he said, her family. I think her family’s the most important thing. I said, tonight, you’re gonna go home. You’re gonna have a conversation with your girlfriend. You’re gonna say in class today, the professor was asking us about a relationship that really mattered, and I thought about you.

That’s step one. You’re showing her that you’re thinking about her and that she matters to you. I said, and then you’re gonna say to her, he asked me what was most important to you? And I said, family. Is that right? Step two, you’re thinking about what matters to her, but you’re open to her input. You are open to being wrong if you didn’t get it right.

Said when she says, yes, my family’s really important to me, then you engage in step three, which is saying, because your family matters so much to you, I’m gonna assume that it matters to you that I get along well with them too. And so I’m gonna start spending more time trying to build a stronger relationship with your family.

I’m gonna have dinners with them. I’m gonna have conversations with them. I’m gonna share more parts of my life with them because it matters to you. And that’s showing her benevolence and being transparent about it. He showed up the next day in class with a huge grin on his face. He said, I’m allowed to talk to you whenever I want.

And it’s about being transparent when we’re trying to show benevolence to one another. And I’d like to give your audience a brief framework that they can use to try this out

place.

Say that you were listening to the Biz Bytes podcast. ’cause that’s good for all of us. And that you heard somebody talking about trust and they said benevolence was really important.

And really, that’s just a fancy word. That means having someone’s back or having their best interest at heart. And then you’re gonna say, I think I do that, but it doesn’t always seem to land that way. Have you ever experienced that? 99% of people are gonna say, oh God, yes. You’re gonna get curious about that.

What did they do? What did they try? How did it not work out the way they intended? Then you’re gonna narrow the funnel and you’re gonna say, have you ever had a time when somebody really had your back really looked out for you? What did they do? What did it feel like? And they’re gonna get a smile on their face as they’re thinking about a moment when someone really looked out for them.

You’re priming them for the next stage of the conversation. You’re getting hints about what benevolence actually looks like to them. What, what matters to them. Then you’re gonna narrow the funnel further and you’re gonna say, what is success for you? How do I help you get there? What would it look like if I had your best interest at heart?

Now you’ve created an opportunity for transparency because later on when you follow up and try to act in their best interest, you can say to them, you remember when you told me that this is what good looked like for you? What success was for you? This is me trying to help you get there.

I love that. Thank you so much for that. And everything else in the discussion, I feel as though we could talk for hours and hours on this topic. Just want to wrap things up with one final question that I like to ask all of my guests who come on the program. What’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish they were, they knew in advance they were going to have?

So when people hear that we’re gonna do trust training, they often think about hot calls and blindfolds and falling off of things. Trust building is a skill that we can all get better at and. I wish I didn’t have to take quite as long explaining that to them, making it clear to them, because we need to be more intentional about building trust now than we’ve ever had to be in the past.

Our relationships tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep, and we’re losing the ability to build deeper, more resilient relationships. So I wish that people could realize right from the start that this is a skill that they can invest time and energy and to get better at.

I love that. And I will go on the back of that and say, I think that extends as well to when people are starting or building personal relationships in terms of just interactions on a direct messaging service, on a LinkedIn for example. Don’t go straight out and start selling your stuff. Build a relationship.

Find something that makes you vulnerable or an interest with people so that. When it gets to the point of curiosity about what you do, there’s already a trust factor that’s built in there. You really have to know that every time someone sends a message that says, oh, thank you for connecting, here’s all the stuff I do buy from me, right?

It just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t, and I tend to respond by saying, you could really use some trust training. Buy from me.

Yeah, I love it. And just in and I do wanna mention as well for everyone listening in that there’s a couple of things that you can get in touch with Daryl on. Firstly, as we mentioned, is the Imperfect Cafe, the podcast, and also there’s the book Building Trust, exceptional Leadership In an Uncertain World.

You can learn lots more from there. Darryl, I thank you for being so vulnerable, so generous, and for. Showing us all how trust can be built, and I look forward to having future discussions with you.

I’d love to stay connected and thank you for having me.

To everyone listening in, thank you so much for being a part of the program this time, and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

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