This episode's guest is Chris Rainsforth, an award-winning Customer Contact Specialist who has been in the Industry for over 15 years working in both in-house and outsourced contact centres, holding roles in Operations, Training and Support Functions across Front & Back Offices. Chris has experience in developing multi-site, multi-culture and multi-channel change programmes, working across global regions to deliver successful initiatives including enablement, quality assurance, speech analyt...
Nov 21, 2022•48 min•Ep. 210
This episode's guest is Matt Grady. Born in Leeds, Matt is a thoroughly sporty chap and became a professional golfer which took him to the PGA and via Oxford to Dubai and the United Arab Emirates setting up golf courses until the financial crash of 2008. Returning to the UK and quitting golf, Matt found employment in Sales, particularly in Recruitment, and in the last 11 years has progressed to working for international Biotech and Pharmaceutical Companies. A specialist in solving leadership cha...
Nov 14, 2022•55 min•Ep. 209
Lee needs a favour. He has started to write a book. A work in progress with a working title of ‘The Leadership Cheat Code.’ Be Lee’s writing accountability partner and ensure that he creates real actionable content and go to bit.ly/theleadershipcheatcode and sign up for progress updates and keep him on track. KEY TAKEAWAYS The book will be a practical guide to help leaders of people and change and create high performing teams. The acronym C.H.E.A.T currently stands for Communication, Humility, E...
Nov 07, 2022•11 min•Ep. 208
Lee relates his journey and career as an Improvement Coach. An immense learning experience and the best and worst job he’s ever had, Lee explains how he has got to where he is now in the career that has given him the greatest satisfaction. KEY TAKEAWAYS In 2006 Lee was offered a job that included training in workplace organisation, visual management, standards and problem solving and then presenting it as improvement to teams. Lee then spent ten years on projects and programs on problem solving,...
Oct 31, 2022•17 min•Ep. 207
As leaders of people and change, we are always trying to get people to do the right thing at the right time, every time. Rather than repeatedly just telling or ordering them to do so, which requires intervention from you constantly, there are other ways to persuade people to continuously commit to action which Lee explains to you in this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS If someone is working a process they have to be either really well trained to the point where the actions become habitual, but not everyt...
Oct 23, 2022•15 min•Ep. 206
Lee speaks on the importance of understanding not only the way your own head works but also the thoughts of people you work with. Are you getting in your own way, becoming stuck in your own mind in meetings? Do you make assumptions about what others are thinking which alter your attitude and actions, often incorrectly? Lee explains how perceiving your own internal habits and perceptions can be essential to communication and knowing others thoughts crucial to understanding. KEY TAKEAWAYS Your own...
Oct 16, 2022•16 min•Ep. 205
In a lot of teams and businesses when you try to influence one or all of your staff to move faster or push harder you often find you encounter resistance. Lee explains this thorny issue and what you can do to circumvent it.KEY TAKEAWAYS Deadlines are often set in isolation and that means absolutely nothing to the staff member that is required to meet it. It is important that people connect on three different levels. To you as a person, to the problem that needs to be solved, and to the solution....
Oct 09, 2022•13 min•Ep. 204
Understanding the end destination and result is fundamental in successful leadership, business improvement and change. Lee explains the steps to achievement by asking the question ‘What needs to be true?”.KEY TAKEAWAYS What are the tangible signs as well as key measures that will let you know when you have achieved your target, destination, vision or change? Just because you have achieved a measurable result does not mean it is sustainable. A short term result is not necessarily going to make a ...
Oct 02, 2022•14 min•Ep. 203
Flourish ; To grow and develop in a healthy or vigorous way especially as a result of a particular environment. Isn’t this what we want for all our people? We need a welcoming and encouraging environment to allow our team to develop their skills, express their ideas and creativity and effect positive changes to their workplace. Lee takes a look at how we can accomplish this. KEY TAKEAWAYS We need to concentrate on people and process capability. Develop these two things together and you can creat...
Sep 25, 2022•16 min•Ep. 202
Which statement resonates best with you ; “I will be successful if I can” or “I will be successful if I want”? No one expects to go to work and do a bad job but we don’t provide the environment for people to flourish. Lee discusses the differences in motivations that can drive your team in this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS These questions are to encourage discussion on the nature of motivation for people in their workplace. If the answer is “want”, the outcome is dependent on motivations utilised by th...
Sep 18, 2022•11 min•Ep. 201
Welcome to episode 200! To mark this event Lee has a fascinating interview with Jim Longton, former senior executive, CEO/MD of major manufacturing businesses in the United Kingdom, USA, Portugal and South Africa. Jim has had a long career starting in engineering in the 70’s, with experience of the turbulent working environment of poor industrial relations, change resistant work practices and aggressive uncooperative work environments. Jim was intrinsic in changing the culture of the places he w...
Sep 11, 2022•2 hr 8 min•Ep. 200
Meetings play a fundamental part in a lot of peoples roles and are a huge opportunity if we keep them for just the two key occasions required. Lee details those two circumstances and how you can make the most of a meeting when it occurs. KEY TAKEAWAYS Communication. To pass information back and forth ensuring the right people are present and the correct data is shared. Collaboration. When a task requiring more than one team member requires completion. There are no other reasons in a business con...
Sep 04, 2022•13 min•Ep. 199
Lee explains one of the main reasons why Improvement Teams, Change Teams and Lean Teams fail within an organisation and the link between physical fitness and organisational fitness. KEY TAKEAWAYS If we want to permanently improve our health then we have to make permanent changes to our lifestyle to achieve this. Often improvement is treated like a finite project but it reverts at the end so it is best to think of improvement as a permanent change, much like our health. We need to change people t...
Aug 28, 2022•11 min•Ep. 198
Lee has placed a pole on LinkedIn asking when you start your lean journey what is the ultimate measure of success? Is it the tools that you introduce? Is it how people feel? Is it about the output or performance of the process? Currently there are two leaders, feelings and output. An interesting result bearing in mind not many people start a change process to improve the engagement of their people. When we acknowledge the importance and engagement of people, do we really honestly respect them an...
Aug 21, 2022•12 min•Ep. 197
Lee chats to the multitalented Ray Newland. With a very successful goalkeeping career under his belt, Ray setup Just 4 Keepers training schools to prepare young talented goalkeepers for work in the football industry. He also brought to market his own goalkeeper sports brand J4K. Alongside all of this, Ray has become a business coach and published six books on mental resilience and self help. Lee and Ray talk about how he started out, his entrepreneurial career, his international sports training ...
Aug 14, 2022•49 min•Ep. 196
In this episode Lee talks to David Holmes who has worked in Contact Centres and Customer Operations across Sales, Customer Service and Digital for some of the biggest companies in the UK, currently Operations Director at Cigna Healthcare. Lee and David chat about success and its definition, “harmonious friction”, the team leader role and how open mindedness can make the difference. KEY TAKEAWAYS Find the job that generates enthusiasm in you. Learn to enjoy challenges to your methods and thinking...
Aug 07, 2022•44 min•Ep. 195
Lee's guest in this episode is Phillip Holt, author, operational excellence guru and senior Vice President at GKN Aerospace and a Board Member of the Operational Excellence Society. He studied Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University and Management at the Wharton School of Pennsylvania and the University of Warwick, was an engineer at Gillette and led the Lean Deployment worldwide at Philips for over twelve years. He achieved Lean Master status and has now authored three books, Leading ...
Jul 31, 2022•45 min•Ep. 194
Once again, inspiration has struck, this time while cooking the kids tea. Lee, in tasting a single piece of pasta, assumed all the other pasta were cooked. Let's face it, he was probably right. But not when it comes to people….people are most definitely not like pasta. KEY TAKEAWAYS There are some people and places that try to treat everybody the same. When we try to effect change we give the business reason for that change but that does not enthuse everyone. We need to create personal motivatio...
Jul 24, 2022•13 min•Ep. 193
When we celebrate success are we considering what we are celebrating enough? Do we congratulate our successes enough? In this episode Lee tackles how we should be celebrating success not just more often but changing its focus to good skills and habits. KEY TAKEAWAYS We typically celebrate end results, above and beyond, things that exceed expectations. However, we see it as instant failure when they fail to meet our expectations or standards when things are not going as planned. There is as much ...
Jul 17, 2022•15 min•Ep. 192
Lee has recently suffered a bereavement with the loss of his best friend. Upon his passing Lee asked about life lessons and Lee has shared these lessons with many people including via this podcast. After using these lessons to bring extra value to those he helps and supports he has added real value to his coaching. However, one 4th, hidden lesson has been revealed to help you stay true to these three principles. KEY TAKEAWAYS The three lessons were be yourself, make good friends and time is limi...
Jul 11, 2022•16 min•Ep. 191
Lee talks with Lisa Moody, a Senior Change Manager in the Land Registry. She has been in change management for ten years, previously working in local government in service improvement and customer service. People focused skills have led her to her current role. Lee and Lisa discuss her move into change management, ambition, her civil service role, and how to create a change team with the concept of ‘The Invisible Change Manager.’ KEY TAKEAWAYS Ambition doesn’t mean striving for the next opportun...
Jul 03, 2022•53 min•Ep. 190
Lee chats to Mark Drager, marketing expert and Canadian fine-haired business consultancy owner. He has worked on thousands of projects for hundreds of different companies ranging from international brands and airlines to small pre start ups. He is also a podcast host of “We Do Hard Things”, brand strategist and speaker. KEY TAKEAWAYS Mark originally went to film school and left to work in television and eventually a corporate environment producing training materials and marketing. To build a com...
Jun 27, 2022•35 min•Ep. 189
Lee’s job is to get organisations to adopt continuous improvement and problem solving cultures for the long term. There are three high level categories within this process and Rob explains them in this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS Finding Problems. You may know your problems or survey your employees or customers to find problems. Find them when they are small by increasing discussion and communication between everyone involved in processes and asking better questions. Solving Problems. These are the t...
Jun 19, 2022•18 min•Ep. 188
Lee chats to Jared, speaker at the Virtual Lean Summit, an online event bringing together experts and leaders from all over the business industry to educate and share their methods on customer care and service, team building and efficient business problem solving. Jared works for the Port of Seattle as the Continuous Process and Improvement Program Manager. KEY TAKEAWAYS ‘Lean thinking’ is a transformational framework that aims to provide a new way to think about how to organise human activities...
Jun 12, 2022•51 min•Ep. 187
There are certain words that people believe are negative which can, in fact, in the correct context, be considered very positive. Language itself is a challenge due to the understanding and definitions of words changing depending on personal experience and how they are used. Lee discusses how important it is to consider this when communicating effectively. KEY TAKEAWAYS To understand what has been heard by the person listening to you communicate, one must understand the experience of that person...
Jun 06, 2022•13 min•Ep. 186
Asking the right questions can be a great and essential method of becoming an efficient and effective leader. Often we fall into habits of asking the same questions but what approach should we be taking to affect change and motivate? KEY TAKEAWAYS The secret of problem solving is are we finding enough problems? Listening is the best way to formulate our questions. If you are attentive then your team will know you value their time and opinion. If we want to develop our people and encourage their ...
May 29, 2022•13 min•Ep. 185
Lee, through his work with teams, has been asked for feedback on how he would assess the teams performance. When reducing the time from thought to conversation to action there are three biases that characterise different groups' approach to actioning ideas. KEY TAKEAWAYS The Silent Bias. This is when we don’t feel comfortable or confident enough to share what we think The Conversation Bias. We are happy to share ideas but tend to stick at the discussion stage, reluctant to commit and action the ...
May 22, 2022•13 min•Ep. 184
The Golden Circle is a model applied by influential speaker and author Simon Sinek to explain the success of leaders in fields ranging from invention to politics. In this episode Lee explains and contextualises The Golden Circle so you can apply it to your business role. KEY TAKEAWAYS Simon Sinek is critical of businesses who apply the following in the wrong order. We should start with ‘why’, move to ‘how’ and then to ‘what’. Why is it important for the senior leadership team or the change team,...
May 15, 2022•16 min•Ep. 183
Lee chats with Josh Gain, founder of The 10x Manager Community, an organised skill sharing group dedicated to helping managers be the best in their current leadership role and preparing them for the next. One of 10x leaderships philosophies is “Management is a title given to you by a company. Leadership is when somebody decides that they are going to create change and impact their team, their business, their industry and beyond. Leadership has nothing to do with job titles, it's all to do with p...
May 08, 2022•49 min•Ep. 182
In this episode Lee details two key factors that are essential to driving your improvement project forward. Creating change can be achieved much more quickly by applying these two methods. KEY TAKEAWAYS We need to be more aware and understanding of the process of forming ideas, expression of ideas and actualisation. The length of time from thought to actualisation, the lead time from idea to action, should be discovered. We should do what we can to reduce that time span. Increase the number of c...
May 01, 2022•17 min•Ep. 181
