Empowering your Team with Ali Adams

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode, I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

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Foreign.

Is slightly different. That's because it was recorded in front of a live audience. It's from one of the days of my High Performance Leadership program back in October 2022. Today's special guest is Ali Adams and you're going to gain so many great insights from her. I want to take a moment just to say a massive thank you to our two platinum partners for the High Performance Leadership Program. And that is VVV Real Estate and Brannigan's. We sincerely appreciate your support and just to let you know, if you're keen to come to our HPL Live event in 2023, you can go and add yourself to the waiting list so you're the first to hear about it. We will likely sell out again very quickly, so if you'd like to be there, you will hear about it first. We will email everyone on that waiting list first and any of our existing clients. So head over to jjlochlund.com and you'll see that there's a leadership training tab. Please go there and you can Add yourself to the list now. Ali Adams is the Chief Executive of Christchurch, nz. She leads the city's economic development agency with the support of six general managers who lead teams in pillars that each support a vital part of the agency's work. Ali has a background in economic development, having led New Zealand trade and enterprises work in Europe and before that in the South Island. She has also worked in marketing, tourism, sports leadership, spending four years as the domestic manager for New Zealand cricket. Ali is a powerhouse and I'm so excited to see what she brings to the beautiful city of Christchurch over the coming years. So please enjoy today's show and as I say, it was recorded live, so sit back and enjoy.

So, no, I'm very humbled to be here and looking forward to having a chat and hopefully sharing a few insights. And if, look, if one thing I say resonates, then that's a success for me. Hopefully there'll be a few things in there that make sense and feel like the right bit of insight at the right time for you on your journeys.

Fantastic. Well, let's have a bit of fun. So I guess a great place to start this. So when you think of leadership, what comes to mind for you when you think of that term, leadership?

So I think.

It'S a huge word and it's a huge responsibility being a leader, and it's something that doesn't sit comfortably when you first start out. For many of us on our leadership journey, it's something you have to learn to live with. It's a bit like a coat you try on and kind of spend a bit of time with. And for me, the biggest shift in leadership was when I moved from, you know, like, if you think on your leadership journey, very often you're a doer when you first start work and then your first leadership role, you might lead one or two people that do the same job as you. And it's pretty comfortable because you know what they do. And then maybe you lead a bigger team of people that do the stuff that you used to do and you're still reasonably comfortable because they're still doing the stuff that you do. The big shift as a leader for me is when you lead leaders and all of a sudden you're leading people who do things that you don't know what they do. And for me, that's where you really start to define what leadership is.

I would define it in its rawest sense as really clear context, really clear, light on the hill, giving that vision and that goal so that everybody can see the direction that you're pulling in some really clear guardrails and then letting people go. It's all about empowering people to be the best that they can be. And actually, if I think of.

Probably the biggest superpower I think I have, I don't know if people here may have done strength finders. Many of you will have done the cliftonstrengthfinders. If you haven't, it's a great tool. Bit of fun. My number one strength finder is individualization. And another way that I would explain that is it's very much about believing the highest thoughts of people and enabling them to achieve their way. Getting people to be able to deliver the best that they can be is what I think a truly great leader does. And it's not easy. You have to actually really invest a lot of time and effort in order to make that happen. It's quite draining. Being a leader is a lot of energy.

Fascinating. And I want to look at your leadership journey because someone once said to me, hey, James, do you believe that leaders are born? I'm like, well, I'm yet to meet an unborn leader. Everyone has to be born. You know what I mean? So I believe it's a skill that we can develop. Some people have a bent and inclination towards leadership and influence with others. What about your leadership? Where did you start developing those leadership traits?

Oh, that's a great question. I, I look at my leadership style now versus my leadership style in my 20s, and it is just chalk and cheese. I, I am a very different leader and, and you have to kind of grow into the different leadership roles that you have. I tried very hard on my leadership journey. You know, like in a, in a, in a career, there's, it's. Everything has a bell curve, doesn't it? Sorry, the scientists in me can't resist it. But everything has a bell curve. When job you're in that kind of drinking from the fire hose bit and then you get to that bit where it starts to flatten off and you can do it before you start to slip into apathy and then ultimately cynicism, which is when you should be absolutely leaving that role. I try and stay on that upward bit. And then you're constantly growing. So that growth is such an important thing for me when I'm looking for a role and I look at the way that my leadership has developed, I think several things have happened during that time. To me, I think the first is it hasn't happened by accident. So what you're all doing here today is so important. And it's so easy not to invest in yourself as a leader. But actually the time that I have spent on courses like this and I've been very fortunate. I've had a lot of fantastic personal development. Investment through my career has been the best time I've ever spent. Because you cannot be a good leader if you don't know yourself. Your starting point has you've got to know what your strengths and your weaknesses are. And every strength has a shadow side and you've got to understand how to dial those up and down in different situations. Situations. And that starts with self awareness and it starts with investing in yourself so it's not happened by accident. I think the other thing that I think is really interesting is a growth in confidence. It's taken. I was saying to James before, I'm 51, depressing but true. And only I would say in the last three or four years have I been comfortable issuing the phrase I am a leader. I am a good leader. I can even say that now. And it's taken me a very long time together. I have that classic imposter syndrome that many of us have. But actually, you know what? I'm quite good at this. And it's really good to have that confidence. It's not complacency, but a confidence that you can do. This is a really good place to start as a leader. So that's probably been the two big insights from my journey so far.

Thank you for sharing that. Not everyone can admit that imposter syndrome is something that I've experienced. But I would say the greatest leaders, when you get talking to them intimately. Yeah, I didn't think I could do that job and I struggled to think I could be the person that could step into it. What was the transition for you going? I'm not sure I can lead. I'm not sure I am a great leader too. No, no. I know who I am. I know what I stand for and I'm a good leader. What happened there?

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team, carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in, in the show notes.

So it probably happened. I had a bit of a kind of a leadership crisis which I think many of us have. I used to work for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, central government, fantastic organization and wonderful leaders and invested very heavily in me as a leader and I made the mistake of setting my heart on a job a long way out. So New Zealand Trade and Enterprise has these cycles of jobs and I wanted to be the head of the European. I'd set my goal on this and I kind of got over invested and it's a really dangerous thing to do. And.

It was a very traumatic interview process that I went through and I started to really doubt myself. I started to doubt that I was the right person for it. I started to doubt that I was going to get it and I stopped being my authentic self. And that process was quite transformative for me. I happened to finish that process process knowing I'd got the job after a very painful long interview process. It's kind of quite broken. And then I went on a course similar to this. So Nzte ran a course called Leaders for Impact where we went and spent four days in the wilderness, really just investing in ourselves. And that to me, all of a sudden I was like, actually you know what, they've, they've picked me for this job and I have got this job and now I'm going to prove that I can do it. And it was a bit like a switch went on. There was a confidence in me. I realized that a lot of the trauma that I'd gone through during this horrendous interview process, well, nearly all of it was of my own making. And that's quite liberating because when it's your own making, you can change it. One of my favorite leadership insights is that you are your habits. So anyone that likes sports here? I'm a big NBA fan and there's a guy called Jeff Van Gundy, he used to coach the U.S. basketball team and I was watching a game one day and he talked about how you are your habits. I used to bite my nails and, and I'm so proud I just have to do this. I'm still kind of ridiculously proud of my nails because I've controlled it. I remember one day being in, I was in Hamburg, having got this job in Europe and I got in the shower one morning and classic old imposter syndrome hadn't quite gone away at this point still hasn't gone away, will never go away. But I was in the shower listing the top 10 things I hated about myself. Classic way to start the day. Always good. It's like, yeah, what I hate about myself. God, I wish I wasn't so fat. And I wish I got up earlier. And I wish I was a bit fitter. I wish I didn't buy my nails. And honestly, I got to about number six and then realized A, that this was not a great habit. So just good that I noticed it, but B, that actually they were pretty much all in my control. And that's quite a liberating thing as a leader. And all of a sudden when I realized that, I was like, actually, I think I probably can do this. So, yeah, that was probably a long answer to your question.

That's incredible.

But I managed to get my nails in.

They look beautiful.

Thank you.

I love it. And now that you're leading leaders, so you've overcome this imposter syndrome, which arguably ish. I think everyone will always have a level of that. You know, you look at the top five regrets of the dying. So it was Bronnie Ware who wrote this book. She's a palliative care nurse. And the number one regret of people on their deathbed is I regret living my life based upon what other people think about how I'm living my life. And imposter syndrome really ties into that. So now that you're leading leaders, you've overcome that, you've learned how to compartmentalize that and manage it. How do you empower others who are in the earlier stages of their leadership careers who are almost crippled by that imposter syndrome? How do you lead them and empower them to think the way you think?

Well, I don't necessarily want them to think the way I think. I want them to think the way that they think. But I do want them to.

Do it with confidence. And I think I have. I'm an extrovert, I like to talk. I have an answer to everything, according to my husband. So he told me.

But I've really learned to coach. And coaching is if you, if you can get one skill as a leader, learn to coach, learn to ask fabulous open ended questions and link it with this second skill, which to me is trust your instincts. Now if you can encourage people to trust their instincts and you can coach them, then that is a very powerful combination. So I would say that good leaders have good instincts nearly always. You know, we all have our spidey senses. When you're Recruiting someone. And yeah, they've ticked every box on paper and, you know, they could do the job, but actually there's just something. Don't ignore that ever. So you'll be right. And you know what, if you're thinking it, someone else is thinking it. So what I always say to my team is, what what's your gut telling you? What, what is your gut? And I will always say, and what could you do about that? How, you know, tell me how that went. Tell me a little bit about that meeting. So what are your thoughts? You know, it's. And by doing, people have all got the answers within. So. And the more that they come up with their own solutions, the more their confidence grows. And then you start to see that imposter syndrome start to drift away a little bit in parallel. As a leader, don't, don't ignore the power of positive feedback. When someone does something great, let them know they've done something great. Because, you know, just like parenting and there are so many. In fact, actually I would say 90% of my leadership kind of insights come either from TED Lasso, which if you haven't watched, watch, it's great. So. Or from being a parent because there's a lot of parallels. So. And if you say something positive to one of your children, they're going to do that again. And you know what, that's true with people. People were really simple, you know, we want to do a good job. And if someone says you've done a great job, you're going to do it again. And then you start to trust yourself and that confidence will grow.

And what's the opposite of that? So as a leader, if you're not taking a coaching approach where you're really eliciting information and being curious, what does that look like? And what have your experience has been of not being coached, but the opposite of that.

So one of the most difficult periods in my career was towards the end of my time. I'm going to be really honest here, by the way, please don't share anything. And I will never be described as enigmatic, much to my disappointment. So what you see is what you get. So I'm going to tell you all my kind of dirty secrets here. I've just remembered on a podcast, maybe I should be a bit careful.

We can take that bit off.

One of my most difficult times was towards the end of my time at nzt. I had my boss left and was replaced by someone who was a micromanager. Now that's. To me, that's really hard because the most important thing for me is to feel trusted. I need to feel that people trust me. I need to feel that they think I've got it. And I find it very difficult when I'm micromanaged or over questioned. And so to me that's what it looks like and that's what, you know, that really telling someone what they should do, that double checking, asking mom, all of that stuff is the total opposite. And that's just going to lead to imposter syndrome because people lose their confidence. When I started at Christchurch nz, there was a lot of people who had become quite unconfident in their decision making. And I describe a couple of them. A bit like hermit cramps. It's a bit like, you can actually see that kind, they put a claw out and kind of go, they want to chop that off, maybe I'll put another one out. It's kind of actually quite exciting to watch that unfurling.

And often in your career you'll come into a role where you're taking over from a leader that's had a really different style to you and it doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just a different style to you. And your team need to come with you on that journey.

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Oscar de.

La Renta put it perfectly.

Fashion is about dressing according to what's fashionable.

Style is more about being yourself. And that's one thing I always try.

To do, is try to be myself.

Whether I'm interviewing a former head of state, hanging with my family on the weekend or working with some of my.

Incredible clients, I try to always just be myself.

As much as possible.

And part of that is dressing accordingly.

But every now and then, a special.

Occasion will call for some special fashion. And I am by no means any expert on fashion.

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And in terms of leadership style, so we've got all these terms, affiliative, democratic, autocratic. When you think of a style, do you have a style that you lean to or do you feel it's more situational leadership?

A bit of both. I love situational leadership.

I'm trying to think of things that I can say that are okay on a podcast.

I do do quite a lot of situational leadership and learned this the hard way. So I'm gonna. I worked with someone who was quite an. I don't know if I can use the word alpha male, the phrase, of course you can. Quite an alpha male. And my leadership style tends to be quite vulnerable, open, really happy to say when I've made a mistake. Really comfortable kind of owning it. You know, I'm not. Not kind of trying to prove anything. I found that with this particular person, and actually often with alpha males, that doesn't work. It's seen as a bit of a weakness. And so I have adapted my style. And it was funny, the other day a guy came into our office for a meeting and he's classic alpha male. And one of my team sat with me and she came out of the meeting afterwards and said, who the hell were you? And I was kind of like, yeah, it was very, very deliberate that I dialed up certain aspects of my leadership style with that person because actually, that's how you need to get the credibility and respect there. Or that's how I judged it. That comes back to trusting your instincts, actually. You know, like your instincts tell what the right thing to do is. So just don't ignore them. Often think of it like a quiver of arrows. I don't know if I often have this kind of visual in my quiver of arrows. And I think, which one I'm going to pull out, actually, I know I'm going to pull out that one.

And.

It'S kind of great. You know, actually it's really helpful with the imposter syndrome thing.

I love that. And often we can be boxed in in terms of, oh, you're a democratic leader, you're affiliative. It's nice to know that actually successful leadership can be situational and we can move as required. I think Covid of anything has taught us that we need to be flexible.

Yeah.

Now Christchurch nz, let's chat a little bit about that. So I guess first you know, what is Christchurch nz? And then we'll unpack. When you walked in as a new leader to an existing company, what were your greatest challenges? So what is Christchurch nz?

So Christchurch NZ is fully council owned. So we're a council control entity and we are the economic development agency for Christchurch. So in short, we attract people to Christchurch to make it a more prosperous place for people that live here. We bring wealth into the city and that might be by attracting visitors, it might be by attracting businesses, investors, immigrants and workers. Major events, business events. We do a whole heap of stuff, but essentially we're attracting wealth to the city for the benefit of all.

What were my biggest challenges?

Quite a few. One was. So Christchurch NZ is one of those organisations, a bit like NZTE where it's very purpose driven, it's cause driven. So our salaries are disappointingly not enormous because we're a ratepayer funded organization. And so most people that come there come there for other reasons. They come there because they care about giving back, they care about the cause. Now that's a fantastic thing as a leader because you've got the opposite of apathy. There's nothing worse as a leader than coming into an organization where people really don't care. What's that horrible word that I heard? The work where people turn off at work. I can't remember, it's a new buzzword anyway, where people literally. Yeah, that's right, yeah. So.

So I, I had this amazing group of people who really cared. The downside of that is they say yes to everything. And so we were an inter thick and a mile wide and we still do say yes to too many things and we'd become that agency at council where. Oh, they'll do that. They'll do that. Yeah. So we were really not delivering as well as I would like. So I was very keen to. I called it tidying up our blurry edges. So being really clear about what we do and what we don't do and about empowering the people in my team to say no and making it safe for them to say no. So because we have some really strong stakeholders and one of the things I've learned in my transition from central government to local government is central government's actually quite unified, so you get really one voice in local government, that kind of parochialism. And you go to present to the councils and people are very. Each councillor is very passionate about what's going on in their ward. And so, you know, for example, if we're talking about doing some urban development, you know, why aren't you doing something in Phillipstown? Why aren't you doing something in Rickerton? Why aren't you doing. It's like, actually, we've got $18 million, it's a lot for urban development. So you've actually got to manage those nos and you've got to enable your team to say in a way that is acceptable to your stakeholders without losing them along the way. So that was probably the biggest challenge. I think the second challenge I had was my leadership team needed to focus on the right things. My leadership team was very much in the weeds.

Very focused on dealing with operational things. And.

It'S quite important that we stepped up a level to create that space for the people below to be able to feel like they're experts and also for us to think about the direction of travel of the organization. It very much felt like a leadership team where people came in with their functional hat on and so very much getting people to take that hat off and think about actually what's the best. They were probably the two biggest challenges we faced.

That's huge. So boundaries, like enforcing those boundaries, but also being able to sit and detach from everything in the weeds, as you said. So I know there's so many other leaders in the room right now that are busy being busy and keeping things moving. There's been so much challenge during COVID now post Covid, the economy doing what it's doing. So how does one, while there's busyness happening, actually take a team and go, hey, let's breathe, let's sit up here and let's look at it whilst things are still being maintained here, how did you manage to achieve that?

So I think the first thing was leading by example. I say, I don't need to see that. Why are you showing me that? Stop. I don't need to see every media release that goes out. I don't need to see every board paper. Why is that wallpaper from you rather than the subject matter expert? So actually just leading by example was a very big part of it. And then leaning into a couple of quick wins. So we had an event that we had for A long time. It was a major event that someone had said they wanted to host here in Christchurch. And.

Because we're cause driven and we're nice, we'd said, oh, we'll try, we'll try, we'll try. And we'd done a bit of a feasibility study that had showed us that this thing was going to cost us a fortune. It was going to be really an enormous amount of money and was clearly never going to happen. But we hadn't really said no. And so we managed all our stakeholders, we told everyone we're going to say no and why before we did it. And we checked everyone that had kind of been brought on this journey with us and then we wrote our letter saying no and it went down fine. And all of a sudden everyone kind of went, oh, oh, that's okay. We said no. And that worked and that started to lift it. I think the other thing that we did was.

I think leadership teams are often seen as a bit of an ivory tower and people don't know what you're discussing and doing in there. And that can kind of cause some sort of cultural challenges. So we were very transparent. So we invited, every quarter, I invite someone from the team to come and sit on our leadership team and they just become a full member of our leadership team every quarter. And it rotates and we choose people that are. We have. I've introduced a talent matrix so that we can start to look at our talent from within. We can start to make sure that our performance development is really tailored to where individual people are. And that kind of started to remove some of the.

The gossip about what we were and weren't discussing some of that frustration. And when the culture starts to shift, I mean, it's such a cliche that culture eats strategy for breakfast, but it really, really is true. You've got to get that culture shifting. You've got to get people to really believe that they are valued and that the work they do is heading in the right direction. And then you can start to really shift it. But leading by example probably is the biggest thing that we do.

It's amazing. And I hear it's a shift from me to we. And it's us versus them. It's us. We're in this together. So in terms of a sense of belonging, so I really think any team, whether it's a sports team or a company organization, their success or their winning or achieving results is directly in correlation to everyone's personal meaning that's attached to being a part of that team. A sense of belonging at Christchurch NZ or even in another area that you've worked and led. How do you create that sense of belonging for your people?

We spend a lot of time at work, right. There's a guy called Wayne Norrie, good guy. He drew a really terrifying graph a few years ago and as I said, I'm 51, so I'm at the wrong end of this. He drew a graph where it was like 24 hours and 90 years. And then he drew a line, he said, well, that's all gone.

And then he drew the amount that you're asleep and then the bits that you're retired and potentially not able to move much. And there's this tiny little box in the middle that's left of your life and most of it you're at work. And it was quite a moment for me. I was like, actually you've got to love what you do. You have got to enjoy work. Nobody, you know, you've got to enjoy it. And so you've got to have a bit of fun. I think that's really important. So. And people are human, people do business with people. So when I first joined Christchurch nz, I wanted to know who I work with. And we have about 95 employees. I've had a one on one with every single person. And it's really funny, they all turn up with a book to make notes. So. And I'm just like, I'm just going to ask you whether you've got any chickens and what you like to do on a Saturday. And so it's like, and it's great, you know, because I actually care, I want to know who they are. And I've finished those one on ones now and I'm just starting again because they're so energizing for me as an extrovert. They're gold. So I'm just gonna, we're just gonna go round and round and round and people really feel heard. And the moment you've got that people actually, they're like, actually she cares about me. You know, it takes me 25 minutes to get coffee because I stop at every desk on the way to the office. And I'm sure Hannah works in our office. She'll probably. I'm very loud, you know, when I'm in the office. Now I'm not saying that's the only type of leadership style, but actually being a visible leader and being human is so important in getting people to love what they do and enjoy coming to work. You know, I know that my team are proud of me and I know that they're proud to work for Christchurch nz. And part of that is because I'm one of them, you know, I represent them and that's really important. I think you can't underestimate the power of being a visible human leader.

And I think when you talk to leaders and they talk about this lonely at the top thing, so a lot of leaders will come, say, James, actually quite lonely at the top. Well, the more I've thought about that is if you're feeling lonely, then jump off that big high chair you're sitting on, get out of your corner office, get amongst your people, rub shoulders, get to know them. And so it sounds like that's exactly. Really what you're doing, is you're getting amongst your people.

Exactly. And it's energizing for you as a leader. Honestly, I get such a kick of work, I can quite. Even though you were doing that, you know, and like we have a staff meeting every couple of weeks and it runs itself, the staff, you know, I don't drive that agenda. Things come up at that meeting and I just sit there going, whoa, that's so cool. We've got such cool people and that's them, you know, you don't need to know what's going on, you just need to enable it to happen.

And that to me is it's a win win.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say one of the biggest topics that comes up at the minute is this whole great resignation. Why are people leaving? Why can we not keep talent? There's such churn people are leaving for money. What do you believe about culture and retaining good staff? How do we keep great staff?

Well, I think the first answer is you can't always, and that's okay.

I have come to terms with that the hard way. It's hard. You can't always keep everyone you want.

And you can't always get everyone that you want to when you're recruiting, and that's okay.

How can you keep them? I think you can make people feel really valued and really heard and really invested in. So at nzte, Pete Crisp was my ce. NZT is a great guy, fantastic leader, and he always used to say, look, we can't, we can't pay you the big bucks, but we can guarantee that you'll leave this organization with a better CV than you came into it with. And I have that in my mind. That's a gift that I can give to everyone that works for me or for us at Christchurch nz.

And it's a question of trying to make sure that you really tailor that personal development to what they need. So if I come back to the talent, the talent management, if you haven't got one of these, to me it's the best tool. I have a little nine box matrix, the old nine box matrix, which basically has potential on one side and performance along the other. So you can google them, there's plenty of them. You like your star and you're ready for promotion in here and you've got your underperformers, you don't want anyone in there or if you do, you need to move them up or out. But then you've got people elsewhere. Now if you're down in the bottom right where you are a very high performer, but you're not ready for, you don't want to move. We've all got these in our organization. They're really important. They're people that have been there 25 years doing the same job and they love it and they do a really great job. It doesn't mean they don't want to grow, it doesn't mean they don't deserve to be invested in. It's just different. So what can you do to invest in people like that, to make sure that you retain them and that they feel valued and that they feel like you care. And so these models are really, for me, really useful because they give you really practical ways of being able to think about, you know, maybe it's a secondment, maybe it's actually, you know, what are the things that that person might be looking. They're going to mentor someone within the organization or learn a language or whatever it might be that floats their boat because that's actually what really we all just want to feel like we're contributing and that we're valued again.

When you look at the human needs psychology, you want to feel valued, you want to feel connected, some degree of certainty around your place in whether it's an organization or in your family. And I guess because you spend so much time with your staff, one to one, you actually do know their needs, more so than imagining what they want. You're in amongst the asking them those questions, questions about their aspirations professionally and personally.

Yeah. And I think here's another for me, I think something that I've learned about myself, something I did quite naturally, but I had a wonderful coach when I was in the UK.

And she unlocked this insight for me, which is about the power of alchemy as a leader. So I'm a chemist by background and it's very typical in England that You do a degree in something that's got nothing to do with business and then end up in business. So I did a degree in organic chemistry, and there's a little bit of me that's still a bit of a tragic scientist.

And I honestly think, very deliberately, as a leader, about the alchemy of putting people together. So when I was in Europe, I had a particular leader in Southern Europe who was not particularly getting on with one of my leaders in Northern Europe. It was just. They were always clashing at leadership meetings. There's a bit of tension, bit of conflict there. Now conflict excites me because conflict is innovation. Right. For all agreeing with each other, nothing's changing. So that's interesting. There's something interesting there. What would happen if I put them on a project together? So I very deliberately gave them a project together, knowing that it would probably blow up, which it did, obviously, and then that you pick the pieces up and help them manage through that conflict. And honestly, the magic that happens when you do that is incredible. So that kind of very deliberate alchemy as a leader, I think, is quite a powerful, powerful tool. So if you always be looking and watching and noticing and think watches a little bit of them with a little bit of them on a little bit of that project, and it won't always work, but it's. It's quite fun to be experimental, I think.

Yeah.

Sounds a bit like Machiavellian. And Dylan's like, yeah, I think there's.

A lot of people that could relate to that.

Yeah.

And you talked a little bit about micromanaging. None of us like to be micromanaged, let's face it. So if you're new and you're walking into an organization and you're not the leader and you don't want to be micromanaged, what has to happen for you to have that level of trust from your leaders? So you're not micromanaged. What are the ingredients that have got to be put together before you can work independently and autonomously?

I will have a crack at answering them. My instinct is to say, what do you all think? Think so. Because actually, that is exactly the kind of question I would say to my team. If you want that trust, how are you going to get there? What have you tried? What's worked, what hasn't? So actually, you will all have the answer to that question within. What I would do, absolutely, is I would prove by being able to deliver. And then if I felt that the boundaries were being crossed, I would very openly and honestly share how I was feeling there's a man called Edgar Papke. I don't read business books ever, but I have have kind of skimmed this one. It's called the Elephant in the Boardroom. And Ed Karpapke is a wonderful man, and he talks about conflict quite a lot. And he talks about conflict being basically just where there's a difference of opinion or a miscommunication. And this is a really great tool, particularly when you're talking up. So if you're going to your boss to raise something that's not quite working for you, and what he talks about is the power of actually just saying what your intention is. So you start by saying, hey, look, my intention is for us to work really well together and for me to be able to deliver so well that you don't feel that, you know, you need to get involved, whatever it might be. You make it very safe for that person to have the conversation. And then you share your truth. And this is the key. You use language. So I'm probably teaching you all to suck heads, but you use language like, I feel when you do this, I feel when you do that, it makes me think. Or, you know, you don't pass it. You don't say, you're really a micromanager or, you know, you're really. You attack me when you do that. She says, actually, it just makes me feel a bit like you don't trust me or a bit, you know, use your truth because it's actually something they can't argue with. If you're feeling that, then it's true. And then this is the hard bit. You then say, what's the truth for you? And that's where you actually hear some things you might not. Like your manager might say to you. Actually, it's because you had 25 spelling mistakes, or you always do this or you always do that. And you might hear some things that actually start to help you understand why they're not trusting you to do this. But that's when the magic happens, because then, you know, then you could start to move forward. So that's what I would do. But everyone will have their own answer to that.

Thank you for sharing it. And I absolutely agree in that when someone says, I feel we have no right to challenge how someone feels. But what we can do is behind the feeling is a thought. And we can challenge people's thoughts and we can engage and converse around what thinking is driving that feeling.

That's right. Yeah. And be curious to do that. I think, to me, it's A very liberating tool, the Edgar Papke model. And it's really simple, but it just, it diffuses tension into a conversation because 99.9% of the time it's just a miscommunication 100%.

And for you personally, what has been your greatest leadership challenge over the last few years?

Oh, look, there's lots of them. And I love that. I love that there's lots. I'm not going to say Covid. Actually, I think probably my most difficult challenge was I closed an office and I closed. So when I went to Europe, I was based in Hamburg in the consulate there. And we had a team of 12. And it was an underperforming team. And I knew it was an underperforming team and I knew that people had avoided looking at the fact that this team wasn't delivering. And it wasn't that the people hadn't been great, because they probably had been. They just kind of practiced. Perhaps the organization had moved forward at a pace that this team hadn't. And so I decided that the best thing was to close that office and to move a smaller team up to Berlin. And it had a big impact on a lot of people's lives. It's very challenging if you're a people driven, heart driven kind of leader. And I remember very clearly a moment where after we'd done it, so we planned it very carefully, there was an awful lot of background went into it and I'm very, very proud of it. It actually is something that went.

But I do remember that moment where you talked about the loneliness of being a leader. It was the Wednesday, the week after, we'd had the conversation the week before. And it was the week after and I was in the office and I was in the office a bit late and people kept coming past my desk saying, oh, you know, I'm going home now, I'm off to have dinner with a friend and someone else had come, I'm just off to, I'm off to the supermarket. And they must have all been going, is she ever going to leave? And I didn't know that. So they were all kind of fine. Mostly they've all gone. I jump in the car, my husband picks me up, we drive around the corner and there's my entire team at the pub.

And it's a very confronting thing as a leader. My kids said, oh, mum, that's your team. And I was like, yep, yep. And you gotta keep going, right? That's a big grown up moment. That's your big girl's Pants are on that day. Cause you know that they're all going, what a bitch. So. Because you are to them. And that's okay. We've all had those people in our lives. But actually that was probably pivotal but very important. And you know, you asked me what the toughest leadership challenge is. They're the best. No pressure, no diamonds. So you think about job interviews that you go for. You don't talk about all the stuff that went easily. You talk about the great stuff that went wrong. And even as it's going wrong, you kind of go, oh, this is going to be a good dinner party story. You know, gobble them up, they're great. Collect them. They're the things that are going to make you the leader that you are. You know, if it all goes really well, then you're not growing.

I love that. And let's just take a moment before we pass it over to Q and A. I'm going to pass it over for a little bit. If anybody wants to ask any questions, we'll bring a mic out. But to be such a high performing leader and to have the ups and downs and the roller coaster that is working as a leader. How have you managed to balance the family side of things?

You should probably ask my husband that and he would probably say I haven't.

I know myself quite well and I think that's quite important. I know my triggers, I know when I am burning out and I'm quite good at stopping and taking the time I need to recover. I don't manage my hours, I manage my energy and I'm very, you know that for me that works. So I do work long hours and that's difficult. But I try and gobble little bits wherever I can have my nails done at three in the afternoon and not feel guilty about it because I know that I've worked till 10 o', clock, three days that week. What else do I do?

I'm very fortunate. I have an amazing husband who runs the family for us as a team and that's amazing. I'm very lucky to have that. I don't think I could have done that without him to be able to do that. And I, I try and make, make the most of the downtime I've got. I know what is my good mindful downtime. I have some terrible guilty pleasures. I love Love island. Right? So I love true crime podcasts. I like to walk a lot and garden and I kind of just try and, you know, give my, my brain is either on or off. That's me everyone's different. But for me, it's either fully on or I'm lying on the couch like a cabbage.

I love it. That's great. And look, before we do hand it over to Q and A, if we were to fast forward to the end of your life many, many years into the future.

I hope.

We all hope. And a loved one in your family or a close friend who's very young, they could be five or six years old. And they come up to you and they say, ali, how can I lead my life on purpose? What would your wisdom or insights be for them?

It's a really good question. And when we did the NZTE the four days away, we were asked to visualize our 80th birthday and do the same. It's a very, very, very powerful exercise. What would I say? I would say.

Be kind to yourself. Don't.

Accept what you're great at, but know that it has a shadow side. So it's that scale. Think I'm explaining this very poorly, but there's something about learning to love yourself and the things that you're great. I don't try and change them. You know, I am a loud, noisy pain in the ass. That's okay. That's, you know, it's like, I'm okay with that. For lots of people it works and lots of the time it's fine and other times it doesn't. And that's good for me to be aware of and I want to be aware of it and I want to be able to tone it down at times that I need to, but I don't want to change that. And. And there's an acceptance of who you are and the fact that your style is your style. Don't try and change it. Try and leverage your strengths and minimize those weaknesses. That would be probably my biggest piece of advice. Love yourself a bit.

I love it. Thank you so much for sharing that. Put our hands together for Ali Adams. Thank you. Amazing.

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