Hello, thank you for joining us today. A question for you, who inspired your coaching journey? So if you get in your mind and kind of go back, just have a look in your head at all the people, one or two or three, who inspired you to be the person that you are today. Today's episode, Johnny Craike tells the most wonderful story about Linda, who inspired him to be a coach.
He talks to us about the structure of his business, which is going to be really interesting to you because it's about sustainability. He runs a B Corp and he talks about how he did that and what is a B Corp. And he is fascinated and intrigued and engaged by games and designs games to work in organizations including escape rooms. And if you don't know what an escape room is, listen up. you're about to find out. Here we are. Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn.
I'm your host, Claire Pedrick. And today my guest, well, I got a message from Mark Bixter who said, you must meet Johnny Craike. So if you've heard the episodes with Mark Bixter, you'll know exactly why I sent an email to Johnny and said, you better come to The Coaching Inn then, because Mark says you should come. So Johnny Craike, welcome to The Coaching Inn. Thank you very much, Claire. I'm very happy to be here. Yeah, and any recommendation of Mark is a good thing.
Well, yes, I I guess I feel a slightly red face the fact that he has recommended me, uh Mark's a wonderful person. yeah, I will always prioritise reading anything he has to say or listening to anything he has to say as well. So, yes, thank you for inviting me. Well, thank you for coming. And I understand you run a company called Lightbulb Moments Coaching. I do, yes. In actual fact, I run a company called Lightbulb Moments Coaching and Events.
m And the only reason I'm adding that is that my company, we coach and we also facilitate leadership programs. m We create games for organizations as well. And the kind of events bit was me trying to differentiate ourselves when I set it up, guess, to say there's kind of, it's coaching, yes, and there's some other things as well. Cool. So tell us about your journey to get to you to this moment. Yeah well okay my journey, m so my background m is in the civil service.
I started my career proper in the civil service, I was a fast streamer back in 2008 m and spent a few years in the civil service m before realising I wasn't very good at being a civil servant Claire. think civil servants are... kind of we only ever really hear about when things go wrong, but I think there's a real art to being a good civil servant, being diplomatic and calm and able to cope with U-turns.
And I decided it wasn't for me and I went to work in m a senior leadership role in a housing association. And that was very much about connecting frontline staff and senior leaders in the organization and really focusing on yeah, connecting people really. So the human side of work really. And I had this most amazing line manager called Linda, who firstly, she completely charmed me for the fact I went to them in the first place.
I'd already agreed to take a different job and went for an interview with her and she was just so wonderful and I thought I've got to go and work for this person. And then when I did work for her, she just was able to spot things in me and in other people. And she helped to kind of create the role that I was doing, a head of staff engagement role, which, like I say, was about kind of connecting people up because she said, look, I can see you're really good with people.
m And the coaching part of it came about when she says, look, Johnny, I think you've got quite a natural coaching style and we're running a coaching program for managers in the company at the moment. And I wondered if you want to go on it. And I'd never heard of it, Claire, before, you know. never really thought about coaching.
But the fact that Linda had said it about me and the fact that she'd been so brilliant at spotting things in me and other people made me go, okay, yeah, go on, I'll give it a go. And em I went to my first em coaching training session and we were doing some practice coaching towards the end of it. And I can remember sitting with one of my colleagues, Caroline, and I asked her a question and she just... she just came alive. It was amazing.
She sort of shifted her body language and sat up straight and sort of looked up to the sky. And it was almost like a light bulb had gone off above her head. And she's like, oh, yeah, that's what I need to do. And I have no idea what the question was. It was probably something insanely simple. I probably just reflected back to her exactly what she'd said to me. I don't think it was even a particularly great. question that I asked, but her reaction to it was, it was so good. I loved it.
And m that second, I thought I have to make coaching part of my life in some way. And I don't know exactly how, but I will make it part of my career. And that was back in 2012. m And eh I eventually set up my own business in 2015. convinced the organisation I was working for to pay for me to become qualified.
In return, I coached people within the organisation, so you sort of aspiring leaders of the future and people who were struggling to get promotions and struggling with their workload and things like that. So that helped me build up my experience. then, like I said, I up my business in 2015. So this is my 10th year of running it. Thank you very much. Yeah, I kept joking with my wife that I needed to have ticker tape come down from the ceiling or something, but yeah, nothing like that.
Maybe a few balloons. And I went full time on my business in 2018 and I've not looked back. I love it. I couldn't dream of working for someone ever again, really. I love working for myself. I love the work that I do. and get great joy out of it. uh So it sounds like you had a little bridge. Yeah, and I think I feel forever thankful actually to Linda for helping me to find that bridge because I, you know, who knows, I may never have discovered coaching if it hadn't been for her.
I love you describing a transformation moment in Coaching with Caroline where you go, well, I don't know really what I did, but isn't that true that often that's where transformation comes from some just very ordinary something that's not memorable. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think we can put so much pressure on ourselves as coaches to come up with new things or to, you sometimes I remember when I was training, I was thinking, what are the killer questions?
I almost wanted to have this book of killer questions I was going to take around with me, Claire, and I'll pull out one of these questions every so often. It would be like this transformational moment. And you can almost guarantee that if you even if you did have a list of great questions. The very fact that you're thinking about, which question should I go to? It probably means it's not going to be a killer question.
And your response in that moment, even just a look that you could give someone, or a one word question, or repeating back to something they've said, those are the things that really end up landing with people. I'm so delighted that you never read the book that I never wrote. Because I kind of had that book at the back of my mind for a while. It was going to be called The Art of Powerful Questions. But then there was nothing to put in it, so I didn't write it.
I think there's an art to thinking about how you structure a question. think, you know, when we first trained as coaches, that ability, the basic ability is to just sort of think about open questions and not lead and so on. But yeah, it's tempting, isn't it, to kind of think that there's something there that's amazing. that we could just grab hold of but there is but we can't write we can't all just write them down.
when I do recording reviews with coaches I often say to them that was a fantastic question because you will never be able to use it again. Because they're specific and it's usually because they're using the words that the thinker said and you're not going to be in a conversation where somebody says that again. And that's what makes them so wonderful.
Yeah, it makes me think actually one of the leadership programs that I'm running at the moment m with a government department, we teach people coaching skills and we always do this live fishbowl coaching session where every time I come up with a new topic to be coached on, mainly because I don't want to bore my co-facilitator, know, don't want always have the same thing.
And there's something a bit vulnerable about it, you know, sitting in front of 16 people and they're all kind of sharing their questions with me and it's really interesting because it's always a left field question that really lands with me and I remember the last time, again I don't remember the exact question but it just made me think about things completely differently and I think I probably could have made a list at
the beginning of the things I thought I was going to get out of the session and that absolutely wasn't what I got out of it and that was what was magical about it. Yeah, it's the unknown. Hmm. the unexpected. Mm-hmm. do listen back to The Fax Club Experiment episode because that's all about counterintuitive, unexpected, amazing things. That sounds right up my street there. Yeah, I've written it down because I forget everything unless I write things down. sounds like a very good habit to have.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, as long as I remember to look back at it. That's true. That's true. So you do games. I do, I do. m My wife, it might seem a bit strange that I'm starting with talking about my wife when you said about games, but when eh we were married, m I sort of joked with her that our wedding was going to be a wedding themed away day experience because I'd always... planned away days for big organisations. I love creating games and fun and activities and getting people working together.
And it definitely was a wedding, but it had lots of games in it. And in her wedding speech, she said, know, Johnny can be just so enthusiastic about everything and can turn everything into a game, which is great fun and can be absolutely exhausting at times, actually, at the same time. And so I think, you know, you can see there that it's something that I love doing em and you need to always, you know, check your audience that you make sure that they want to do it as much as you do.
But yeah, I create games for organisations. And so that ranges from just little icebreakers and energisers that relate very specifically to the thing that we're working with them on. I like it to feel like there's a golden thread. going through things so people can see there's a reason for doing it. It's not just, right, we're going to run around and jump and have fun. There's a point to it as well. So your theorists and your reflectors can learn from it too.
So right through from those kind of small interventions through to uh all day board games, specifically about organizations. It could be about their customer service or living their values. leadership within the organisation. em I've also worked with escape rooms as well. em I love escape rooms, absolutely love them. I think I've done about 20 in my time.
And yeah, I did some work with a couple of escape rooms where I got to go into their control room and watch people in there and em be able to notice things about them, which I then used things like personality profiling, so insights discovery as an example.
and to help them understand how they were behaving under pressure and to give them tasks to do in a safe environment where they feel stressed but it's a manageable stress and it can bring out some of that way that we behave so they can then have really accessible conversations about how to then take that back into the workplace. I love escape rooms. went last year for the first time. For the benefit of our listeners who don't know what an escape room is, can you just give us a headline?
Of course, so imagine being locked in a room with clues all around you that don't necessarily look like clues, it might just look like a regular room and the aim is you have to escape from the room within generally 60 minutes and they are so fun, they're so good at helping people to work together and to create connections with each other. Where was yours, Clare? Northampton. What kind of thing was it? Do you remember the subject matter? heist and none of us had been before.
So we learnt we want to go again because we nearly did it. We were about to do the last thing when the time was out. But we got lost at the beginning. We didn't understand that everything was a clue. Did you have no one that had done an escape room in your team? ah That's quite impressive to get so close on your first go. We had to ask the man in the control room a couple of times for little bit of help but we were always on the right track but we just a little bit lost. That is the norm.
You do generally have to ask for a bit of help. I think they have to make it so that it's challenging enough for the people who've done a thousand escape rooms, but also the people who were doing their first one, they could ask a few clues. Yeah, and in fact I've done two because somebody got one in a box for Christmas and we did it in someone's house and that was also fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what a beautiful way of bespoke development. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I love bespoke.
think I, the moment I feel like I'm sort of rolling something off the shelf or I'm doing it like I've done it lots of times before, I start to lose interest a bit. And then, yeah, I really, I love feeling like I'm doing something which is as good as it possibly can be for that person or that group. Nice. You're sort of describing every coaching conversation, aren't you? Yes, I am, as long as you don't go along with your list of killer questions that you go to each time.
Yeah, so even though I love doing that, there was still that urge. guess it was this sort of wanting to be good as well when I first started out. I wanted to be good at what I was doing. And it's such a strange journey, isn't it? Because to want to be good, I feel I need to be good. But actually we need to be good and therefore it's a bit different.
Mm. Yeah, and if we put it all on us, you know, if it's just about, right, well, my performance, you know, how am I as a coach actually, it's not enough, is it? We need to create the environment. and then they make it about us and then it is about us. And actually it's not about both of us, isn't it? And it's about how we facilitate them. I've got so many questions, I could talk to you about games all day.
But I'd like to talk to you about your company, because I understand that you're a B Corp. I'm in the process of m hopefully becoming a B Corp. Yeah. And funnily enough, I've been working on that today. And yes, what was your name? one of those for those who don't know and how do you get there? Yeah, so a B Corp is a company that has made public pledges to put people and planets as equally as important as profit. So not a charity, it has to be a profit making company.
But in order to officially be recognised as a B Corp, you have to go through a really stringent m range of different criteria. from promising to donate a certain percentage of your revenue to charity each year to ethical purchasing, paying fair wages to staff and contractors, monitoring your carbon footprint and finding every way possible to try and reduce that. and lots and lots of other things.
I mean, it's one of these incredibly stringent processes and there's probably about 300 or so questions that you work through and you don't have to score on every single one. You could say, well, actually our company is not going to donate money to charity each year, but you're given points for each of the things that you sign up to.
And if you score over a certain amount, then... they will say, yeah, you qualify as a B Corp. And anyone that's not heard of it before, if you just look out for the B Corp stamp on products, there's some really amazing brands that have done this. Things like, how is it that names just pop up? had Patagonia is a good example. Patagonia clothing who m have a really clear purpose that they're not trying to sell you lots of new brands and new new styles.
It's very much buy something from us and we'll try and make sure it lasts for 10 years because we don't want you to be buying lots of clothes from us. There's some food manufacturers and lots of other types of companies that have become B Corps but I'm really taken with them and I will hunt out a B Corp to buy things from rather than going to another company because I think the purpose behind it is so fantastic. about the inside as well as the outside isn't it?
Yeah, inside of the company or inside of... if you and the inside of the company, it's about, it's about really going with the soul of their business and the soul of the individual. Yeah, definitely. I felt really strongly about this since probably about a year ago, almost exactly aligning with the American election.
I think I felt so flat about what was going on in the world when Trump got back in, feeling that actually m there's a lot of people backtracking on climate pledges around the world and you know have two young kids and I want to know that I'm doing everything I can to make a world that's as good as it possibly can be for them and that was sort of a lot of the rationale for trying to have a bigger impact on the planet and becoming a B Corp is something I feel would would help with that at least.
Yeah, ethics. Nice. Now the other little piece of information that Mark Bixter spilt to me was that you're interested in wisdom. Say more about wisdom. I mean it's coming through in everything you're saying but I'm just curious about your interest. Oh, well, it's very kind of you to say it's coming through. I don't know. I don't always feel... When you're in the thick of it, you don't always feel very wise, you?
But that's nice of you to say, Well, think what I think wisdom is something we don't say about ourselves, right? We always, you know, I think it's for someone else. If you told me you were wise, I probably would have ended this It probably means you're not wise if you're walking around saying you're wise really, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, so my interest in wisdom came about from a dearly loved co-facilitator who I work with called Jane Gaukroger She'd be a great person to have on your podcast by the regular, but I will. introduction. I will do. And she and I have worked together for probably about four years now, largely co facilitating leadership programs. Often those programs have coaching involved in them as well. And she really majors in wisdom.
She has a PhD in cultivating organisational wisdom, which I didn't know was a thing, Claire, you know. But yeah, she's completely fascinated by the whole concept of how we can encourage people to make wise decisions, make decisions that are probably fairly in line with what I've been saying about kind of B-Corp principles, that we're not just trying to do things because we're making a profit, we're trying to have a longer-term impact on our people and on the environment around us.
And she really got me interested in wisdom. and we did some research together last year for the EMCC into how coaching can help lead us to be wise effectively. And yeah, I what do I have to say about it? I think it's one of the challenges with wisdom is I think it's not a term that everyone immediately knows what we mean by it. And I think people have different kind of versions of what it means.
We've stood up in front of crowds before and audiences before and given them a list of world leaders and said, know, how wise do you think these world leaders are? And you'll see, you know, let's say someone like Putin or someone like that, Claire, who when we've made that list, we would probably expect that Putin would not be rated as a particularly wise person compared to, say, Nelson Mandela, you know, when we've put that question to people.
But then you see the vote breakdown and you can see some people sort of rating Putin as 10 out of 10 wise. And it's really interesting because, I think sometimes people think of wisdom and intelligence in the same way. But, you know, someone can be extremely clever and actually very manipulative, but we don't think that's wisdom. We think that's people who are potentially in it for themselves or are using nefarious, have nefarious motives.
And we think wisdom is always done in a positive way, in a good way, in a way that's designed for the good of more people. So it's connected or it's systemic or it's joined up to other things. m Yeah, I think you can't really think of wisdom in isolation. You can't think of wisdom in just what's... what's the, I guess you could say, you know, what's the right decision for me right now? What would a wise decision be for me?
But I think if I was ever trying to make a wise decision, I think it would always be on the basis of what do I need right now? But also what's the right thing, you know, the right thing for the people around me and the right thing for em probably the planet. I'm not saying I think about every single decision I ever make, but you know, a lot of things I am thinking that way. So what difference has your journey into thinking, considering wisdom, more?
What difference has that made to the rest of your work? It's hard to say Claire, because I think it's still very early. I think with both the wisdom work and with m the climate work that I've been doing, I'm still trying to define it fully. with both of those areas, I've worked with clients, we've used some of the... models and things that we created through the EMCC research.
I was trained as a climate coach earlier this year and so that's not about wisdom specifically but I think they're in a very similar space really m in terms of how I think about them. m And I'm probably still trying to fully get to the bottom of how I'm explaining it to clients. We're working on your topics, but I'd also like us to consider, you know, bigger things in this room. You know, how can you make wise decisions?
How can you make decisions that are going to be good for you and good for the people around you and the environment around you? So it's, what difference has it made? It certainly shifted how I'm thinking about things. And I think some of my clients, you know, have have arrived and gone, that sounds really interesting. I'd like to focus on that. em But it hasn't been a sort of big bang. Suddenly, everything's completely transformed in how I'm working with all of my clients.
I wonder whether part of it is how people experience you, how people experience, because people experience wisdom, don't they? They don't get it delivered to them. Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it would be interesting to know, actually. I don't know. I actually don't know how people, whether people have experienced me differently before I discovered anything about wisdom or really thought about kind of the bigger impact that we're, that I would like us to have. um I think I give more of myself.
I think it's enabled me to feel okay with bringing more of myself into coaching. em I think there is a uh feeling when you first train as a coach, and lots of people hold on to this for the entire time they're coaching, that we can't possibly bring anything of ourselves really as a coach. We are merely there to listen and to not judge and to reflect back. And I think all of those things are true and I think it's ludicrous to think that we can't.
that we're not going to bring anything of ourselves into a coaching space. So I've probably felt a bit more permission actually to kind of to say, there are these topics that I think are really important and I'm going to voice them because I think lots of people feel that way.
We don't have to work on them, but you know, they're there em and it may be that, you know, there's points where I sort of say, well, actually that feels really relevant with is actually what you're talking about right now. Yeah, so interesting. It makes me think about inclusion. No, I think inclusion is really important and actually how maybe I need to say that more. Yeah, I mean, think...
Just knowing that people have a space where they can talk about what they want to talk about is such a key part of coaching and the act of... highlighting that that is something that you're interested in that you think is important, and I guess gives the client that opportunity to to say, yeah, actually, that's really that's funny. said that because I really feel that too.
And or not, you know, or, you know, to go, actually, I'm drowning here, you know, I'm really struggling with my own work life balance and as much I love the concept of trying to have a huge impact on my carbon footprint actually right now what I need to just do is you know get better sleep which is fine as well which is is absolutely fine. Yeah. Yeah. So many interesting things. And how many people work for you now?
Well, I have 12 associates and they're brilliant and I wish I could give them more work, Claire. I am always on the lookout for public tenders and I probably tender once or twice a month at the moment, which is one of my least favourite things to do, if I'm totally honest. It's painful, isn't it? But what I keep hold of is that I... love my group of associates.
I've handpicked them because I think they're brilliant and any opportunities I get to involve them in work where it's not just me contracting with an organisation, it's not just me coaching that we can have a pool of us and we can come together and we can talk about how it's going m and I know that they're so good at what they do. m So that kind of keeps me going I think when I'm on reading page 99 of documentation for a tender and thinking, oh, this is so painful.
But yes, it's worth it when you get something, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we also have a team of associates and I would be with you on that. How many do you have on your team, Claire? eh Ups and downs. So we have associates and we have friends. I think we have six associates, six or seven. like that term friends. I think there's certainly, I mean, I probably call a lot of my associates friends actually.
There's some of my associates, actually there's a podcast I should probably not do, speech marks with my fingers should I, but if I call someone an associate, actually I maybe think of them as some of them more like partners. Actually, Jane Gawkroj, a great example, I mentioned to her before about wisdom, and she and I have gone together on a few tenders very much as equal partners. It's not, I'm contracting for this and you would receive this associate rate.
It's, we'll go together on this because I think we're very equal parties on it. And yeah, that's probably more like the friends, I guess, that you're talking about there. Yeah, we have, yes, and we have different financial models depending on how we're and it depends if they're bringing in their stuff or whether they're doing our stuff. And it's sort of emerging all the time. uh Because it is emergent, isn't it, this work we do? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if I tried to write it all at the beginning, it would have been useless. You if I'd said right at the beginning, this is the in 10 years time, I'm going to have a group of this many associates and this is, this is what I'm going to pay them. And this is the kind of work we do. I'd be doing nothing like what I'm doing right now. And I think that's actually something that's helped me to thrive in my business actually is, is that I've, I sort of went.
with the things that interested me. And I would be very open to new things, um excited by new things, probably a bit over excited by new things, really Claire. Sometimes I should probably just go, actually, I don't need to reinvent things all the time.
Yeah. When I started coaching in the last century, ah you know, you need to have associates and I can remember those first few associates got almost no work because it was like you have associates because you have associates but then what do do with them? And then there've been seasons when there's been quite, you know, when there's been plenty of work and lots to share and other seasons when there isn't so much to share and that's kind of how it is. Yeah, what's your season like at the moment?
uh We're coming into a very flourishing season because we just won a big tender. Thank you. Actually, I had nothing to do with it. It was all my colleagues. So yeah, but that back office stuff is tricky, isn't it? Really tricky. And in fact, I just got a request the other day from someone who said, if you know any good associates, do pass them my way, which was a lovely thing to hear because that's not something I hear very often. Um, we should do a podcast on being a good associate.
That'd be another episode. Yeah, I'd be very happy to. I mean, don't know that I've got it. I think your description that you just said there about when you first started out and some of the associates got virtually no, that could be a good description of some of my associates right now, if I'm totally honest. I just took on two new associates about three or four months ago and we haven't. won a tender since, m so they've received nothing.
But I know I'm on borrowed time with all of my associates. They're great. They're all building big, big things. They'll probably be coming back to me in five years time and saying, Johnny, do you want to come be an associate for me? So I'd love to give them as much work as I can until they turn around and say, actually, I've got. I've got to turn on Johnny. I need to give, associates to give work too. Nice nice what a beautiful table to turn.
Mmm. Well, it's been such a wonderful thing to talk to you. eh How do people find out about your company if they want to be in touch about? Not to be an associate, lovely listeners, if you want to be in touch with Johnny about actually doing some work. oh m Well, my most up-to-date place is LinkedIn at the moment, and I am the only Johnny Craike on LinkedIn. m Nice and easy to find me. m I am just updating my website actually at the moment as well.
m So... m I'll put the LinkedIn profile in the show notes. People will find you the only Johnny Craike on LinkedIn. The only Johnny Craike I've looked at. It's probably worth putting the website in there as well. Nice, but it's got a name so that's good. Lovely. Well thank you, Johnny, for coming to The Coaching Inn. No problem and thank you for inviting me. It's been lovely to chat to you. And thank you everyone for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. Bye bye. Goodbye.