Walking Your Talk

To be agile demands teams to be empowered, and that can be a stretch for both the empowerer and the empoweree. Find out more in this episode. Buy the Walking the Talk book - https://amzn.to/3WunDBA Website: www.carolyntaylorculture.com Podcast: www.carolyntaylorculture.com/podcast Walking the Talk: www.walkingthetalk.com

Constant interaction with the customer is one of the features of agility, and requires some particular patterns of thinking from those who which to become more agile. Find out what these are in this episode, and how to practice them.

How to be faster, more flexible, more adaptable. Agile work practices have been introduced by many organisations, but they need agile mindsets to make them work. And these four mindsets can help to make all of us more agile, whether we work for an organisation who is practising agility or not.

Who you choose to fill an empty role sends such a strong message about what you truly value. Here Carolyn talks about how to use both external and internal hires to reinforce your reinforce the culture you aspire to.

In a very practical way, this episode outlines four dimensions through which you can make changes to those meetings you influence, so they become a better symbol of the culture you want to create in your team.

In this episode, Carolyn explores how to get engaged in a cultural goal even if you were not a part of creating it. And for those designing the best way to involve others, some tips on the best approach.

In this episode, Carolyn provides some tips on what it takes to both describe your aspirational culture and then get others aligned to what it means.

In this final episode of the series Carolyn explores the most powerful contributor to being trusted, or not: whether others see us as putting our own interests way ahead of their's. Find out what you can do to reverse that perception, were it to exist about you, and thus create all the mutual benefits that come from relationships of trust.

Building the human side of a trusting relationship has become even more challenging given the transactional nature of most of our virtual meetings. Showing more of who you really are, including the less than perfect sides, takes work and some courage. And pays off as trust builds.

What does it take to build trust with others because you are someone who can be relied on to do what you say you will, be consistent in the way you respond to situations and make others feel safe that they can lean on you? Find out in this second episode on the trust equations

The first episode in which Carolyn explores the power of David Maister's Trust Equation, and shows how to build credibility with others as a part of building their trust. Credible people ‘just know their stuff'. What can you do to have others experience you that way and thus build trust with your team, your clients and your boss?

The Walking Your Talk podcast will return on November 18th. In this short trailer, Carolyn explains some of the themes to look forward to. This podcast is about leadership, authenticity and courage. Every episode is a personal development experience showing you how you can transform yourself and thus transform those around you and ultimately the organisation within which you work. Take a stand, choose a value - accountability, one-team, customer-centric, and many more - and come away with insights and practical tips on what it takes to authentically live that day-to-day. Many people and organisations hold these values, but don't practise them. Through this podcast you will close that gap and as a result earn higher trust from your clients and colleagues, because they see you walking your talk. Carolyn Taylor is a global thought leader in personal development and culture change, with a reputation for having a practical, insightful and do-able approach. She has coached thousands of leaders and helped hundreds of organisations change their culture, and is the author of the classic best-selling handbook Walking the Talk: How to Build a culture for success and her latest book Accountability@work.

Carolyn talks with Siobhan McHale, author of 'The Insiders' Guide to Culture Change', about how by understanding and adapting the roles we play, we can enhance our own performance and that of others.

How can you achieve both stretch performance and reliability – that sweet spot where you can continue to stretch without jeopardising your promises? By changing the way you work with risk.

Steve Cunningham, Director of Talent at BT shares with us the work done at BT to embed more accountability into their culture, and how this has been helped by a strong purpose.

Accountability goes up when the right conversations occur. Carolyn explains why, and how you can hold those conversations yourself.

Carolyn explores the trait which needs to be present to fuel every pursuit of excellence. Is this an inherent trait or can it be awakened in ourselves and in others when provided with the right ambition?

Turning your pursuit into action is given more urgency with an ambition. In this episode, Carolyn describes different types of ambition and shows how to design one best suited to what excellence means for you.

An external orientation is essential to truly pursue excellence, because it is only by going beyond what is familiar to you that you will discover what excellence means in your field. Otherwise what you call excellence may actually turn out to be mediocracy.

Pursuing excellence should be such a natural thing to do with a team of people, and yet it can be remarkably elusive amongst the anxieties, pressures and expectations of day to day working life. This episode starts a journey of re-finding the satisfaction that is possible in such a pursuit.

This episode explores the paradox between our curiosity and attraction to explore new possibilities and the value in prioritising and focussing on what really matters. Both are important, but the former can also offer way too many distractions.

Do you ever feel you do a little bit of everything, but struggle to fully commit attention to the things that matter most? Making a judgement call risks of making the wrong move, but the bigger mistake is the opportunity lost. Pick up ideas in this episode to hone your skills in prioritising and backing your own decisions.

Selecting good choices over bad ones is easy. But when every option is a good one, it’s much harder. What do you do when your work serves the needs of to many people, everyone you want to please and make happy?

Special guest Paula Harraca, Head of People & Innovation at ArcelorMittal Long in Brazil, explains how she was able to build top team buy in to a culture strategy which has enabled a very successful business to gain an additional competitive advantage.

Do you play the hero? Try to take on everything and solve every problem? Or do you live in a culture where this is the norm. In this episode Carolyn explores how by taking on more and more, prioritisation gets postponed, and in the end, the benefits of focused action is lost. Lose your hero persona and transform your ability to prioritise.

At every level – personal, team and organisation - becoming clearer on purpose is the start to making better choices. And prioritisation is always about choices on how you allocate precious resource such as time, money, people.

This episode of Walking Your Talk uses a new format to hear how one company are taking some radical moves to pursue deep adult development for leaders in pursuit of a new culture to support their purpose.

Carolyn draws on what goes on in Netflix to challenge listeners to make some moves that are remarkable – sufficiently radical to really demonstrate the new culture in action. And warns against being too bland in the way you as a leader engage others in the intended culture.

Leaders everywhere are being held accountable for the behaviour of those who work for them, and yet worry about how they can be confident that their people will live up to the expected standards. In this episode Carolyn shows how shared values, more than controls, are the key to building that confidence.

Carolyn tells the stories of two leaders who have mastered the skill of building high standards of behaviour in the culture they are shaping by using the lightest touch, but with a consistency which uses peer pressure to make it clear what is tolerated and what is not.

Leaders feel they need to demonstrate that they always role model the culture they aspire to. And yet some of the most powerful stories come from leaders who are willing to acknowledge when they got something wrong. In this way, they show that everyone has to grow and learn to build the best culture.

Who is appointed, who is promoted are such strong symbols of what is really valued in the emerging new culture. Learn how to capitalise on this opportunity, whether you are the leader, a colleague, the new member yourself, or an advisor.

Carolyn shares a story of best practice in culture, where you can be confident that everyone in your organisation will behave to the same standard in specific situations. And what it takes to achieve that.

As you prepare to emerge from the lockdown period, Carolyn provides some ideas on how to capture with your team the patterns of behaviour you recently established that served you well and you want to hold onto.

COVID has jolted us from our normal patterns of behaviour, and provides the opportunity to choose and practise some new ones to take into the new (ab)normal. Starting with yourself, what new habits will you adopt?

The opportunity to build new habits and a new culture is right in front of us. Start with a simple inventory. In this episode, Carolyn explains how.

The shift from good to great requires a mindset of humility, learning and curiosity. Without that, we can be good, but we will always stop short of greatness. In this final episode of the first series, Carolyn show us how setting an aspiration to pursue excellence means we always need to be in a state of reinventing and examining where we are with a humble mind.

Want to create an empowered culture, a curious culture or a learning culture? It starts with three simple but humbling words: “I don’t know.”

Not too little, not too much, let’s explore what changes if we get the optimal perspective on our own importance, and how that humility changes how we approach customers, competitors, colleagues and our own levels of curiosity and open-ness to learn.

In this episode, Carolyn turns our attention inward to how we build (or lose) trust in ourselves. How this impacts the trust others have in us, and what we can do to improve it.

What makes you trustworthy to others? Reliability, authenticity, and intention. This episode shows how you can work on each of these three and thus become the trustworthy colleague, supplier or boss for whom the doors to success are opened wide.

Trust between functions, between teams, between roles in any organisation is the oil that makes the whole system flow. Learn how helping others play their role successfully, rather than judging them from the sidelines, will build a culture of collaboration.

The presence of vulnerability builds more trust in a team than any other feature. This episode explores many ways that any team member can open up just a little bit more. Showing this vulnerability can dramatically improve the effectiveness of the team.

Most of us have a bias towards either under-trusting or over-trusting. In this episode, Carolyn shows you how to understand your personal bias and how you can balance it so that your trust instincts become an asset rather than a liability.

If you approach the ocean with a cup, you take away a cupful. If you approach it with a bucket, you can extract a whole bucketful. How do you shift your world view to build an enabling mindset that liberates your purpose and enhances your contribution to the world?

How to create a purpose for your team or organisation which will provide motivation, direction and meaning.

A practical approach to starting or enhancing the discovery of your own purpose. Reframe what you do every day and see the patterns of beneficial behaviour and thinking which emerge as a result.

Carolyn embarks on a new series about how we can become more purpose-led. In this episode, you'll hear the story of how she discovered her own purpose, how it has shaped her life, and the benefits for others and ourselves when we start living a more purpose-led life.

Imagine you are on a small stage playing to a large audience. Everything you do to role model the culture you want has to be broadcast in larger than life letters. Otherwise, a lot of your efforts will be wasted.

What gets tolerated establishes the lowest common dominator of your culture. However hard it may be, not tolerating poor behaviour is an essential part of culture leadership. This episode shows how.

We all want to fit into the community of which we are a member. So we look for signals about how to behave. Find out how, by encouraging the behaviour you want in your culture, you can shape things to be the way they need to be to support your success.