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The Intentional Leadership Inventory– a conversation with Dene Stuart
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Dene Stuart is the founder of the Exceptional Leadership Academy, and the creator of the Intentional Leadership Inventory.
Looking back on his 30 years in business, firstly in management roles in corporations and then in his own businesses, Dene lamented on the numerous mistakes he had made when trying to provide leadership to his team.
After accepting that these mistakes were the result of a lack of training he embarked on his own learning journey.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds, Dene explains to host Michael Millward what he learnt on that journey and how he turned that learning into the Exceptional Leader Academy.
Dene explains that successful leaders have a leadership mindset and act with intention, and that this resulted in him creating the Intentional Leadership Inventory.
More information about Dene Stuart and Michael Millward is available at abeceder.
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Transcript
Introduction of 'Independent Minds' Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abysida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Host and Guest Introduction
00:00:23
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abysida. Today, i am joined by Dean Stewart, the founder of the Exceptional Leader Academy.
00:00:35
Speaker
As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
Zencastr and Promotion Discussion
00:00:42
Speaker
Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can make your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google YouTube Music.
00:00:55
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Zencastr really does make making content so easy. If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr, visit zencastr.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code, Abysida.
00:01:10
Speaker
All the details are in the description. Now that I have told you how wonderful Zencastr is for making podcasts, we should make one.
Podcast's Purpose: Provoking Thought
00:01:18
Speaker
One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:24
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.
Dean Stewart's Leadership Journey Begins
00:01:32
Speaker
Today i am joined by Dean Stewart, the founder of the Exceptional Leader Academy.
00:01:39
Speaker
Hello, Dean. Hello, Michael. Thank you for inviting me in today. It's a pleasure. I know you're very busy, but I do appreciate you making the time available. Thank you very much. Please could we start by you telling us a bit about the Exceptional Leader Academy? Sure.
00:01:55
Speaker
Thank you for the opportunity. I founded the Exceptional Leader Academy because having had a 20-year corporate experience and then about 10 years of running my own businesses and and in various areas, I had never had a single day's leadership training in my life.
00:02:14
Speaker
And in my corporate role, I reached a position where I was leading big teams, ah hundreds of people, revenue responsibilities in the hundreds of millions of pounds.
00:02:28
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Then in in my own businesses, they were much smaller, but I was still having to lead people. the consequence of not having had any formal training was that I made mistakes.
00:02:40
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And when you make mistakes as a leader, ah you end up hurting people. ah Not because you're a bad person, not because you do things badly, but like anything, like any skill, if you haven't learned what it takes to do something well,
00:02:55
Speaker
you're going to struggle to do that thing well. So ah when I found myself in ah in a situation where i I needed to make a decision about ah my future direction, which which was about 10 years ago, um ah I decided to have a look into leadership.
00:03:10
Speaker
And as I looked into leadership, I found it to be very formulaic, in some cases quite intellectual and academic. um And although there are literally, when you put together all the books, the research, the podcast, the YouTube videos, millions and millions of ah different resources around leadership,
00:03:34
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A lot of it I found to be impractical. So I decided to fix that by putting my own model together. And that's what lies at the heart of Exceptional
Experiences with Leadership and Its Challenges
00:03:44
Speaker
Leader Academy. Right. And you've been developing this for 10 years?
00:03:48
Speaker
Yes. I got to the point where it had been developed in its core idea about five or six years ago. And since then, I've been working with people. So I've worked with about 500 people ah business leaders at various levels from one man bands through to chief executives of multinational corporates. So I've had now quite a broad range of experience in terms of trialing and putting into practice the Exceptional Leader Academy model and and getting the results on the back of that. point I want to make I think is that this isn't just some idea this is well researched and has been put into practice by a large number of people from different sorts of organizations with different levels of responsibility and different stages in their careers yeah absolutely I get a bit nervous about the word research to be honest with you because that sort of implies
00:04:48
Speaker
Academia. It's academia and scientific rigor. And it wouldn't be true to say that what I've developed has gone through that process. So I wouldn't want to mislead anyone from that point of view. Where it's come from is and I say this without sort of wanting to sound arrogant or big headed, but you know I'm quite an intelligent bloke.
00:05:07
Speaker
Various times in my life, I've done IQ tests and you know come out around about the 120 mark. But even with that in place, in my corporate career, particularly, but again, in my own businesses, you just reemphasize this point because I didn't have the training in how to be a good leader, even with that sort of, let's say native ability, I ended up making mistakes. So, um, what I, what I did was I used my, I do enjoy researching. So I've read lots, I've listened to lots, I've attended lots of seminars and webinars and
00:05:45
Speaker
matching that and putting that together with my own experience of what it's like to work with people. And I've been on the receiving end of some of appalling leadership. and And really, it was that experience that caused me to leave the corporate world for a while.
00:06:00
Speaker
My experiences were so bad. ah But then I decided to get back into it.
Intentional Leadership Model Introduction
00:06:05
Speaker
So that the model and the accept the ideas that underpin the Exceptional Leader Academy come from mixing all of that together and me making sense of it all and coming up with something that is eminently practical for people who have that immense responsibility of having other people's lives and careers in their hands because they employ them.
00:06:29
Speaker
I know what you mean about receiving bad leadership. It is one of the reasons why I decided to set up my own business as well. Once you've had a good leader, to then end up with ah bad leader seems to make the bad leader even worse.
00:06:44
Speaker
And you can see what they're doing wrong, but a bad leader lacks two things, ears, in many ways. I certainly get that. In fact, in many ways, a bad leader is someone who doesn't listen, doesn't see, doesn't understand, doesn't see anything from anybody else's perspective other than their their own and works in isolation of the people that they're trying to lead, which was my experience of working with people who didn't have the job competence or the leadership competence.
00:07:14
Speaker
Well, I think what you've just described there is somebody who has the position of authority but without the skills of leadership. Yes. And I think that most people experience that at some point in their career.
00:07:28
Speaker
When someone has authority, but without the skill of leadership, what tends to happen is they fall back on some very damaging things techniques to try and get people to do the things they want. So this is when you get the experience of feeling like you've been emotionally manipulated or you're being bullied or you're just being told what to do.
00:07:50
Speaker
You're not being given any leeway to use your own initiative. All those sorts of negative feelings that so often a lot of people experience in the workplace. Yes.
00:08:01
Speaker
Before I turn to your shoulder and and reminisce in ways I really don't want to, I'm interested about how you've taken lots of different ideas.
00:08:12
Speaker
Well, tell me about the model. Tell me about the exceptional leader academy model that has proved so successful for so many people. Well, the model is called the intentional leader inventory, and it's a series of eight training modules.
00:08:29
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Where it comes from is an idea that came to me as I was thinking about all of these various issues that which is this, most people end up managing the unintentional consequences of their unintentional thinking and the unintentional decisions they make.
00:08:49
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What happens when people fall into that trap is they end up wasting time and other resource like money and and also the people they have in their business. They literally waste that resource because they're not being intentional about what they want to achieve.
00:09:05
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you might be thinking, well, how can you be unintentional? Uh, and that's because it ties back into something that you were saying earlier, where a lot of people in these leadership positions, they don't have the self-awareness to actually recognize the impact they're having.
00:09:22
Speaker
And that's what unintentional leadership's all about. So the model that I developed is called the intentional leader inventory. And it's specifically designed to help people to become intentional about creating the results they really want.
00:09:37
Speaker
And the the crucial word in that is really because we're always creating results. The question is, are we creating are we creating the results we really want? Very interesting point.
00:09:50
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I'm thinking back to Yeah, the various different leaders that I have had. When you make the distinction between unintentional and intentional, I can start to put them into those two categories.
00:10:04
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The intentional leadership, not got many people in it, but there's an awful lot of people in the unintentional leadership yeah ah box at the moment. Just making that distinction really very interesting.
00:10:18
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What is the first part of this intentional leadership
Self-Identity and Leadership Dynamics
00:10:21
Speaker
inventory? Well, the first part is ah what i call identity. So there's there's eight parts to it in total.
00:10:29
Speaker
It's not a step process. These things, they all work in parallel. They're all sort of active at the same time. But you have to understand all of them and and how they interplay with each other. so the But the first one, the foundation, is is absolutely crucial. it's It's your identity. It's your self-awareness of,
00:10:47
Speaker
of how you see yourself. Because there's an old adage that people get promoted to the level of their incompetence, the Peter Principle. have you come across that? Yes. Yes.
00:10:57
Speaker
and And that really stems from the idea of identity. we We're all limited by the picture we have in our own minds of who we are and how we want to show up in the world and what we think we're capable of.
00:11:11
Speaker
So if you have an identity in your mind which says you're somebody capable of running a business with five to 10 people turning over half a million pound a year then that's going to be the limit of your achievement but if you hold ah an identity that you can run a 10 million or a hundred million or a billion pound business then you've got the potential of being able to get there but if you don't have that image and you don't hold that image of yourself as a true belief within you you'll never get there
00:11:42
Speaker
So what I came to see, and it certainly was true of me and in in the jobs that I had and the the roles i had is most people don't stop to think about their identity quite frankly, because it's quite uncomfortable to do that.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah.
Transitioning to Leadership Roles
00:11:59
Speaker
So someone could be working in the factory, be made the supervisor, but the first part of being successful in that supervisory role as a leader is to start believing that that is the role that they are capable of, that they're supposed to be there. It wasn't an accident that they were appointed to that job.
00:12:20
Speaker
Absolutely. and And you've hit on a an area where this is a real barrier for a lot of people because, you know particularly if you're in that sort of environment where one minute you're working, you're part of the team, you've got that sort of buddy feeling going on and it all you know you've you've you've got mates and got that sense of camaraderie,
00:12:40
Speaker
You get promoted out of that to lead that team. And where is your identity? You know, it's it's in the team. And it's very difficult to lead a team when you your mind is still that you're part of that team. Because as a leader, you know, quite often you have to have difficult conversations with people.
00:12:57
Speaker
That all makes sense. Yes, extremely. Yeah, makes an awful lot of sense. Yeah. Thank you. What's the second stage? Just to point out for a second that we're already 13, 14 minutes in. Oh, wow. And we're, do you want to do?
00:13:12
Speaker
I'll go, I'll go quicker. Wow. Okay. So Dean, what are the eight elements of the intentional leadership inventory? The foundation is identity.
00:13:24
Speaker
What comes after that is imagination. Then it's initiation. then invention, inspiration, inhibition, influence, and invigoration.
00:13:37
Speaker
So they all begin with I. Yes, it took me a long time to come up with that. Very creative. I don't think in the time that we've got, we can actually go through each individual one, but I will put a link in the and the text below to your website where I'm sure you've got more of an explanation about them. But there are some words there that sort of jump out.
00:13:54
Speaker
Yeah. you help me a little bit? The first one is, of course, the identity and how we start off, I suppose. But then words like kim yeah initiation. Tell me a little bit about initiation. What does that mean in in terms of the model?
00:14:08
Speaker
Well, it's about getting started because... very often we have ideas about what we want to do, which is the imagination piece. But then we have those sort of self-doubts come in, you know, that little voice in our head which says, oh my God, that's never going to work. Or, you know, who are you to have that sort of idea? or that's only for someone like Bill Gates or, you know, Steve Jobs, all those big names.
00:14:32
Speaker
So we never get started. And, you know, there's there's a ah a phrase that I love or an old saying, which is, you know, the graveyard is full of brilliant ideas, you know. And also full of indispensable people.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. like Great ideas and indispensable people fill every graveyard, but sir one of those lessons we need to learn. But the initiation is about getting started. You have to, i suppose, believe that you're in the right place, decide what it is that you want to do. There's the identity and imagination, and then believe that you can do it. And actually, no matter how big the objective, no matter how big the target, it all starts with that first step towards achieving it.
00:15:15
Speaker
Absolutely. As Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, said, the longest journey starts with the smallest step. Yeah. So with the initiation, I'm thinking, what sort of challenges do people face with that?
00:15:28
Speaker
Is it all about self-belief or is it about the first stage of leading people is to get them to buy into what you've imagined the organization should be like tomorrow?
00:15:39
Speaker
It's both. So it's it's about overcoming your own doubts. But then, as you rightly pointed out there, it's about getting people to come along on that journey with you, which is, it then links into the influence piece.
00:15:52
Speaker
And this is where people not understanding how to be influential and that influential being influential is a key skill of leadership, uh, because it's the skill of influence that enables you to ah do some of those things that you talked about earlier that a lot of bad leaders don't, you know, and that is listen, take into account other people's points of view.
00:16:15
Speaker
Because if you don't do those two things, you can never influence other people. ah You'll always be in a position where you're telling people what to do and commanding them. So it's the old command and control style of leadership, which most people acknowledge today is isn't the yeah isn't leadership and is effective in ah only a very, very small number of circumstances. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So this is where you start to get the interconnection between the eight skills. What describing there with the influence is I always remember Barack Obama, the former president of the United States, who said like leadership is a vision followed with communication, being able to communicate a vision of what you want the world or your organization the job to be like.
00:16:58
Speaker
That's the the influence stage. You've got to be able to tell people in a way that means something to them. Correct. Absolutely. What it is that you're trying to achieve. So explain what's in it for them rather than just this is what I want you to do.
00:17:13
Speaker
Could I just pick up on ah the language that you used there, Michael? ah You said what's in it for them. um i would use a different way of describing it and say why it's important for them. Yes.
00:17:24
Speaker
Because not not everything has a payoff in a way. If people don't think it's important for them, it doesn't matter what the payoff That's true. So for example, a lot of people think, okay, well, if I give a bigger bonus, then they'll work harder or they'll do this for me.
00:17:42
Speaker
And actually it doesn't work that way because they give the bonus, but they still don't get the behaviors they want because actually what they haven't worked out is what's important as opposed to what's in it for the other person.
00:17:52
Speaker
Leadership is much more emotional than management, which is management is that
Emotional vs Practical Leadership Aspects
00:17:58
Speaker
tangible. What is it that somebody needs in terms of money to be able to do what they want to do? Whereas leadership, if I'm correct in understanding what you're saying, is much more about the emotional side of the relationship that exists between an organization, an employer, or if it's a charity volunteers, the relationship between the two is much more emotional than simply the practical exchange of labor for money.
00:18:25
Speaker
Absolutely. That's become more and more true as we've migrated from you know most work being based on manual labor to You know, most work nowadays has ah very strong mental element to it or a very large mental element to it, particularly in the West.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yes, we're expecting more people to make more decisions about how they do their job than we did when it was simply a manual process. Absolutely. Even in customer service, customer care, we expect people to make decisions based upon the conversation that they're having with that individual, which means a supposed effect that when you talk about management, that works in an environment where it's a repetitive task and everybody knows what it is that they're supposed to
Staying Relevant as a Leader
00:19:13
Speaker
do.
00:19:13
Speaker
Correct. What you're saying in the exceptional leader academy is that as we progress to want to wear a situation where we want people to make more decisions management doesn't work leadership works and that's where we have to start thinking about the relationship and what is important to the individual that we want to lead rather than simply what is important to us or the organization yeah i think management is an important concept the the
00:19:44
Speaker
the The best way I've heard it described is by Peter Drucker, the legendary management guru. and and And he said, management is doing things right and leadership is making sure you're doing the right things.
00:19:56
Speaker
He then added to that by saying, and there's nothing so useless as doing the doing right something that shouldn't be being done at all. That's where the difficulty between management and leadership often comes in is we get trapped into doing things because we've always done it that way.
00:20:13
Speaker
ah but life has moved on and we haven't evolved. and And that's where the last piece of the model, invigoration, comes in. you know You've got to keep looking are we doing the right things? you know ah Because we live in a very fast-moving world. For some people, it's moving too fast.
00:20:28
Speaker
um You know, when you think about how technology is is enabling us to do so many more things so much more quickly quickly nowadays. Yes, but the key element is the the invigoration stage is not to simply just accept today. You've constantly got to be rethinking what it is that you're doing, making sure that you're adapting to the environment, and the work environment, the customers, all this sort stuff, and make sure that you're constantly adapting on the mark one step ahead so that the organization that you work for can thrive the principle that i i talk about here is the idea of staying relevant because if we don't stay relevant this sounds like an obvious thing to say we become irrelevant
00:21:11
Speaker
And it's the point in which we become i irrelevant that customers start to leave us, employees start to leave us.
Recruitment Challenges for Small Businesses
00:21:18
Speaker
You know, one of the things that I bump up against all the time, and I work mostly in the small to medium enterprise space up to about 50, 60 employees, is those businesses find it very, very hard to recruit good people.
00:21:31
Speaker
I mean, recruitment is an issue for any organization, but smaller businesses in particular find it hard to recruit good people. But what they never stopped to really think about is, well, how can I get the message across that I'm relevant to these good people who want good careers, who have something great to offer?
00:21:48
Speaker
And there are lots of good people out there. one of the things that really frustrates me is when I hear business owners say, oh, there's no good people out there. It's simply not true. There's lots of good people out there.
00:21:59
Speaker
What it is, is as a business owner, you haven't worked out a way of appealing and attracting appealing to them and attracting them. It's very true. And that's, again, part of the invigoration piece. Yeah, very true. It's very interesting, Dean.
00:22:12
Speaker
Thank you very much for sharing your time with us. We don't have in our time enough time to go into everything, but could you just recap what the eight elements of the intentional leadership inventory are, please?
00:22:26
Speaker
Yep. So these are all skills and the eight skills are identity, imagination, initiation, invention, inspiration, inhibition, influence, and invigoration.
00:22:41
Speaker
Right. And where can people find out more information about all of those? ah they can go to exceptionalleaderacademy.com, the website. Great. Brilliant. Thank you very much, Dean. I'm sure we'll have more opportunities to go into this in in more detail at some point. But for the moment, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. It's been great.
00:23:01
Speaker
Thank you, Michael. And I really appreciate the opportunity of going through the model with you. Thank you. Thank you. It's been very interesting. I am Michael Millward, Managing Director of Abbasida.
00:23:12
Speaker
And I have been having a conversation with the independent mind Dean Stewart, the founder of the Exceptional Leader Academy. You can find out more about both of us at aposida.co.uk.
00:23:25
Speaker
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00:23:45
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Conclusion and Call to Action
00:23:58
Speaker
I'm sure you've liked this episode of The Independent Minds, so please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe.
00:24:10
Speaker
Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.