Imi Podcast Talking Business

What does it mean to be agile? Can you really make an organisation more agile? Or can you only make individuals more agile? Today we’re joined by Kaihan Krippendorff, a Strategy and Innovation Expert - writing multiple best-selling books on the subject - and also IMI’s first Masterclass speaker of the year. We talked about the biggest blockers of agility and innovation in an organisation, how an individual can become more agile, and how you can draw out innovation from the frontlines to keep delivering for your customers. For more upcoming IMI Member events, go to www.imi/events.

For BT, improving their customer service was a marathon journey, not a sprint. Over the course of 3 years, a radically new customer-centric culture delivered a 40-point NPS (Net Promoter Score) improvement, moving from the bottom 10% to the top 10% in customer satisfaction. By genuinely putting client feedback and the customers themselves at the heart of their business, the BT leadership team modelled the behaviour they wanted to see in their organisation – and in the process built a remarkable case study in customer experience transformation. We talked with Shay Walsh, MD of BT Ireland and John O’Connor, CEO of Deep-Insight and author of ‘Customer at the Heart: How B2B Leaders Build Successful Customer-Centric Organisations’, on the marathon BT took towards brilliant customer experience. More on BT Deep Insight here: https://www.deep-insight.com/the-bt-ireland-story/.

Today’s leaders must be agile. In the current economic environment, individuals are expected to be highly adaptable and rise to many unseen challenges. A fresh but proven approach to team building, improvisation (improv) encourages participants to develop the key components of being part of a high performing team. Neil Curran is a teaching and performing improv expert with over 18 years of management and corporate experience. Neil has worked with organisations including Google, Facebook and Dropbox, using Improv techniques to encourage individuals to be more adaptable by learning to react without pre-planning.

This episode we’re talking about Higher-Ambition (or ‘Dual-Purpose) leadership – a way of evaluating success beyond profits that is gaining major traction and attention in the business world. After hosting the 2019 Higher Ambition CEO Summit, we sat down with Tobias Fredberg, Executive Director at the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership Europe and Colm Foster, Director of Executive Education here at IMI. We talked about why the practices behind higher-ambition leadership are permeating the highest levels, and how you as a business leader can make your business a ‘higher-purpose’ organisation. For more, go to www.imi.ie/insight/.

A key element of maximising leadership resilience, impact and success is making sure you have a healthy relationship with being busy – something which can be challenging in the modern culture of speed, ‘doing’ and distraction. Being too busy can seriously affect the performance and impact of leaders – their focus, clarity of thought, creativity and impact on others. It also often affects their health, wellbeing and work-life balance – critical components for long-term, sustainable success. Based on 18 years’ working with top global organisations, busy CEOs, entrepreneurs and C suite executives, psychologist and transformative coach Dr. Jill Walker challenges our relationship with being busy. In this episode Jill provides practical ways to help us create space in our fast-paced world, as well as how think about your work from a new perspective.

What can business leaders to tackle the climate crisis while continuing to sustainably grow their business? In this special episode of IMI Talking Leadership, we talked to two world-leading experts that come to the issue of sustainability from very different angles – Dr. Katherine Wilkinson, lead author on the New York Times’ Bestseller, Project Drawdown – the 'most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming' and Dr. John Briffa, a practising doctor and award-winning health writer, who cuts through the myths when it comes to leadership wellbeing and how you can adapt strategies to optimise performance and productivity.

In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company. The Exponential Organisation has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology and transformational leadership. An Exponential Organisation can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology. Yuri van Geest is an international keynote speaker on exponential emerging technologies, digital transformation and technology trends. During his IMI Masterclass, Yuri explained why some organisations are able to grow exponentially and the fundamentally new ways corporations are organised to deal with disruption, exponential technologies and accelerated change through transformational leadership. For more on IMI events, go to https://bit.ly/2vB64W9.

Context is king, especially when everything keeps changing. In this week’s IMI Talking Leadership episode we talk to Marco Mancesti, R&D Director at IMD Business School, about the ‘disruption-fit’ leader. This is a leader who constantly questions what is happening around them and is both agile and people-centric enough to do something about it. For leaders to succeed in a disruptive environment, they need to learn to put context at the centre of their professional armoury. Marco was a speaker for an IMI Talent Forum event for members. For more on IMI events, go to https://bit.ly/2Go2IvO.

In a world of unimaginable complexity, how are leaders today supposed to make consistently great decisions, especially in the absence of tangible information? How can a leader operate across different cultures and marketplaces and not let their inherent biases affect their decision-making? On this episode of IMI’s Talking Leadership podcast we’re joined by Kriti Jain, a behavioural scientist passionate about developing research and training leaders in making better decisions. Kriti is a programme director on Leadership Decision Making - a programme from the IMI Executive Series for senior leaders. Go to www.imi.ie/product-category/executive-series/ for more.

How can leaders achieve peak performance? Can we activate our minds in a way that allows us to perform at pace in the long-term? This week we talk to Friederike Fabritius about the neuroscience behind peak performance, and how getting the mixture between ‘fun’, ‘fear’ and ‘focus’ right can make you and your organisation perform brilliantly. Friederike is a lead designer on the Mastering the Performance Mindset programme for senior leaders. Find out more at www.imi.ie/courses/mastering-performance-mindset.

How does a leader drive greater diversity within their organisation? Why does it matter? And where does Ireland stand in the world when it comes to comparable economies? On International Women’s Day, we sat down with Brid Horan and Carol Andrews from the 30% Club to talk about diversity in the working environment.

In 2018, IMI partnered with Goal to support the development of Goal workers around the world. In this special episode, we talked to Nebras in Syria and Vincent in Uganda about how completing an IMI programme has impacted their work, and what difference it's making to vulnerable people where they work. We also met with Siobhan Walsh, CEO of Goal, and Janet Humphreys, Head of Group Services at Goal, to take a look at what work the charity is doing around the world and what difference developing their leaders makes to the work being done on the front lines.

IMI's National Management Conference was about 'Equipping Leaders to Build the Future' and we sat down with the three keynote speakers to get their opinion on what will take to lead tomorrow. We were joined by Deborah Rowland, author of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works, who spoke about large complex change and how to manage it in this climate. Terence Mauri, currently writing a book for the Financial Times called Leaders who Dare and talked at the conference about ‘The Leaders Mindset: Leading with Purpose’. American professor, Nathan Furr, examined the topic of Innovative Capital and how leaders can innovate in creating a future for their businesses.

As the business environment becomes ever more competitive, disruptive and complex, future-fit leaders are required to be agile in how they think about problems, and how they deliver solutions. This week we talk to Danica Murphy about the performance mindset; what it is, how leaders today can benefit from the thinking and development behind it, and why it’s necessary in the modern business environment. In the conversation we cover topics such as the importance of Focus, Resilience and Wellness for senior leaders.

Decisions, decisions, decisions… leaders make thousand every day, and their organisations make millions, but how can you improve a process as complex as decision-making? In this episode we sit down with Dr. Simon Haslam, one of the lead associates on the new IMI Navigating Complex Decisions programme, and talked about what clouds decision-making, how to improve it as a leader and organisation, and why algorithms will have a hard task completely replacing humans.

This week we talk to Margit Takacs, change management consultant, on how leaders should drive, influence and support change initiatives within their organisation. We cover communication best practices and techniques, how to structure initiatives so leaders receive timely and accurate information, how to measure results, and the common missteps leaders make during a change initiative.

Dr. Trish Gorman is one of the world's leading thinkers about strategy. From serving as Dean of the Jack Welch Management Institute to being McKinsey’s Director of Global Strategy Learning, Trish has also developed and delivered learning programmes for some of the world's foremost multinationals. In this week's episode we talk to Trish about what the role of a leader is during the strategy execution process, from common missteps, creating a strategic dialogue, getting the right information and being flexible and agile when your plan meets reality.

Authentic leaders are in high demand. For the collaborative, team-orientated approach to tackling strategic challenges that dominates the modern work culture, authentic leaders are key in creating the environment for successful execution. In this week's episode we talk to Billy Byrne, executive coach and leadership development specialist, about what happens in organisations lacking in authentic leadership, how to build a culture of authenticity and why President Trump has a lot of work to do.

Zoe Chance is a master of influence and persuasion. During the IMI Masterclass, Zoe explored how human beings really make decisions – including how they decide to spend their money – and how leaders can influence behaviours of both their employees and their customers. In this week’s podcast, we sat down with Zoe to talk through her insights into the human mind, her favourite tactics and methods to capture attention and tells us about ‘the magic question’ – the simple technique to influence people around you. A Yale School of Management professor, Zoe was named in the Thinkers50 Radar list for 2016, developed an executive education leadership program at Harvard University and marketed a $200 million segment of Barbie.

An actively engaged worker will be 17% more productive than their disengaged counterpart - the equivalent of an extra working day every week - but 87% of Irish employees are not engaged at work. In this week's episode, we talk to Bruce Young, Senior Workplace Consultant at Gallup and IMI Talent Forum speaker, about the incredible data Gallup have collected on the subject, how they recommend tackling the problem, and what effects it can have on performance for those organisations that get it right.