Walking Your Talk: Recent Episodes
Carolyn Taylor
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.
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.
The first skill to shaping the behaviour of others is to become role model of that behaviour yourself. In this episode, we look at ways to make it easier to do that, and do so in a way that others notice and are moved to adopt that behaviour themselves.
In this first episode of a new series on how to shape the behaviour of others, and thus build a culture, Carolyn explores the benefits of learning to lead and shape the behaviours of a group. Plus, the importance of being very clear on the behaviour you want to build as the norm in your team, family or organisation.
It is better to be hurt by the truth than comforted by a lie. We have to really probe to discover how customers are feeling about our products and services. In this final episode of the year, Carolyn explores how we can work against our tendency to avoid bad news in order to attract, retain and delight more customers.
What would you like to hear more (or less) of on the podcast in 2020?
Start a conversation with Carolyn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolyntaylorculture/
In a truly customer-centric organisation, delighting customers is everyone’s job, not just those who have direct contact with them. Find out what that could mean for you, whatever role you play.
A product focused mindset can block the empathy that's needed to see your offering within the context of the customer’s broader life and what is important to them. The technique of seeing the world through your customer’s eyes is harder than it appears. Find out more in this episode.
How good is it when we feel we are the most important person in someone else’s world? That’s what we want our customers to feel. But self-absorption leads to a focus on our own priorities and pressures, and customers quickly feel like one more thing to deal with. This episode covers some ideas for turning this around.
'Know your customer’ is often too superficial an expression to describe the deep curiosity about a customer’s life that differentiates the truly customer centric individual. In this first episode in a series on customer-centricity covers what it takes to understand your customer well enough that is changes what you do and how you think.
Increasing empowerment makes demands on both parties, the empowerer and the empoweree. This episode on Empowerment covers some of the challenges an empowerer faces, in particular because the very characteristics that served to advance our career as a leader in the past can become barriers to empowerment in the future unless they're faced and overcome.
There is an incremental path to empowering others, which, when follows leaves both parties feeling confident and business risks taken care of. Empowerment is not about jumping from full control to abdication. In instead by assessing each situation and each person individually, leader can use empowerment to deliver the best results.
Choice is empowering. Specific language - such as "I choose to", "I will", is much more empowering than others - "I should", "I have to". When you change your use of language, you force your own mind to realign its assumptions about choice, move away from feeling trapped or a victim, and open up a world where there are many more options and solutions.
We have more power to feel empowered than we think. In particular, we can design many elements of our life around the people and circumstances which give us power. In this episode Carolyn tells a very personal story of her route to empowerment under difficult circumstances, and shows how everyone has options in terms what they allow in their life and what they wak away from.
Empowerment should not something that is granted to you, it starts as something you claim for yourself. This new series on empowerment starts with the necessary change in mental model that needs to occur to feel empowered in your life, rather than a victim to the whims of others. Remarkable transformation can happen when we find that empowered place for ourselves, and act accordingly.
So many teams get stuck trying to achieve agreement, when to have a large number of people hold shared opinion is close to impossible. But to achieve alignment, now that is something altogether more exciting, because alignment is about shared intent. Make a decision together, and then make it the right decision.
To give first, to offer help, to listen to another person’s needs and see the world through their eyes, without an ulterior motive, changes the dynamic in organisations and sets the groundwork for One-Team. Generosity and selflessness are not commonly expressed values in organisations and groups, and yet the build the trust and good will on which the practical elements of working across boundaries can take place.
There is one common trait to be overcome to truly thrive as One-Team and that is the need to look better than others, to promote one-upmanship and thus to undervalue the power of the collective. This episode draws on Carolyn’s long experience of working with people who display this trait, and provides tips on how to make the shared achievements more important than the individual glory.
One-Team is more than a set of collaboration and alignment skills, it is a way of thinking and observing the world where you rise up, take the helicopter view and see yourself as part of a broader community to which you are linked by affiliation, purpose, brand or values. The start of this series covers how to shift your world view to see and act on connections to achieve a greater good.
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment" (Ralph Waldo Emerson). There is great courage in taking a stand, and our willingness to do so is a measure of the strength of our values. What will you stand for?
We all aspire to be values driven, but we are also driven by other needs: survival needs such as the need for control, to be liked, or for security. Often the two conflict, and this results in a perception that you are not walking your talk. How can you rebalance this and thus become more credible?
What is so important to you that you will hold true to it even if it means some personal, or organisational, sacrifice? At the heart of being values driven is answering this, and then having the courage to stick with it in the face of other temptations.
Not all values can be treated equally. Changing what you think is most important involves making new trade-offs, different decisions and some sacrifices. This episode makes values very practical, and shows what it takes to demonstrate a change to others, and how this is essential to changing culture.
What happens when you don’t like what you see, feel you have a valuable point of view to express, or feel wronged in some way? It takes courage to speak up and to take responsibility for being heard. And it usually involves a “difficult conversation”. What are the pay offs, and how can you make it easier to take that step? This episode offers Carolyn's coaching advice on finding the courage you need to speak up.
Sometimes being courageous is not about doing something different, but rather about revealing something about yourself you have previously felt you had to keep hidden. By keeping up appearances, portraying a shinier image of yourself than you feel inside, you gradually close yourself off from others and reduce their trust in you. This episode covers the courage that it takes to show some vulnerability.
What would represent stepping several steps outside your comfort zone for you? What are the risks you have been unwilling to take? The opportunities you have not yet grabbed? In this episode Carolyn helps you to challenge the stories you tell yourself about risk, and tests whether you can change them so you are able to take more courageous steps than you have before.
To act in the face of feeling anxious, or even fearful, is the sign of courage. Anxiety and fear are signals that you are moving outside of your comfort zone and into a zone where your career, your business, and your life can start to accelerate. In this, the first of a four-part series on becoming more courageous, Carolyn defines courage as fear plus action, and challenges you to embrace what that represents for you.
It is easy to blame others when they do not deliver what you expect. But the responsibility also lies with the asker, person who set the expectations in the first place. This final episode in the accountability series covers what you can do to increase the likelihood that someone will deliver to your expectations, and what you need to do if they do not.
My word is my bond. I am a man or woman of my word. She is as good as her word. There is so much caught up in the power of giving and keeping our word. This episode throws light on what it takes to be someone whose word can be trusted – and how important is that for customer relationships and colleague relationship. Crucial skills to build an enviable reputation of reliability.
Those who consistently keep their word learn early that it becomes essential to give your word with care. Many just say yes to everything and then gain a reputation of being unreliable. Make your word count, promise deliberately, learn to negotiate when you think what is being asked of you is not achievable.
If in every accountability ‘contract’ there is an asker and a giver, it is the role of the asker that is often underrated and under-emphasised. Skilful asking, clear negotiation of commitments, and active engagement at the start, dramatically increases the likelihood that what is expected is delivered at the end. This episode describes the role and responsibilities of a skilful asker, the person who is hoping that others will deliver to them what they want. Turn a hope into a near certain expectation through the techniques covered in this episode.
At its core accountability is a contract between two people, one the asker, one the giver. When both of working in harmony, good accountability produces consistent performance, heightened trust, no unexpected surprises. In this, the first in the series on accountability, Carolyn describes a new and exciting way of thinking about accountability that is empowering and exciting, rather than evoking traditional concerns of consequences, pressure or punishment.
How to reduce the syndrome of “piling on” and embed a culture of simplicity. Most leaders who lack credibility in espousing aspirations of simplicity and focus hold deeply held beliefs that more is always better. If you tend to say “yes” to more and more, adding workload to yourself and to others, then this episode is for you. The final in the Walking the Talk series on Simplicity, you will learn what it means to add and subtract with purpose, and how clarity of purpose can change your relationship with saying “yes” to everything that comes along and looks like the silver bullet that will solve everything.
How to increase agility and simplicity by speeding up decisions. Do you procrastinate? Or seek more and more information before making difficult decisions? Your behaviour will be creating workload for others, and making your organisation less agile, less easy to do business with, slower to market. In this third episode in Walking the Talk’s series on Simplicity, Carolyn will show you how to observe where your own reluctance to make certain types of decision will lead others to perceive you as not walking your talk when you aspire for more simplicity. They will blame you for complexity, and they may be right. Learn how to turn this around.
How to reduce your own perfectionism and create a simpler, agile organisation. Do you struggle to reduce complexity? Are you working for an organisation that is driving to achieve this? In this second episode in Walking your Talk’s series on simplicity, Carolyn will show you how to reduce your own perfectionistic tendencies, and by doing so reduce complexity for yourself and those around you. Learn what ‘fit for purpose’ means in any situation, and how it frees you to distinguish between what really needs to be perfect, and where good enough really is...good enough. . This episode gives you a path to avoid this, and instead become a leader who “walks your simplicity talk”.
Focus, prioritisation, speed, agility - mastering simplicity makes all of these achievable and transforms your working life. Steve Jobs made it a way of life at Apple, and we have all benefited as a result. Simplicity efforts in organisations tend to focus just on processes. Most leaders do not see how they themselves create a culture of complexity around them, and how their own patterns of thinking and behaviour make it impossible to create a simpler, streamlined organisation. To master simplicity it has become a value, something so important that you will make personal sacrifices to achieve. Simplicity requires courage, but it is achievable. In this episode, the first in a series of four on Simplicity, Carolyn outlines the three personal drivers of simplicity, and how each of them is within your grasp.
Use symbols to change your culture. There a hundreds of symbols that you can use to demonstrate that you are a leader who walks your talk. Whichever culture goals and values you and your organisation aspire to, being smart about how you use symbols is the fastest way to signal change. And the great thing, most of these are 100% in your control. Whenever you make choices about how you use your time, or how you spend money, for example, you are making symbolic decisions. This episode shows you how to pick good symbols and how to amplify what you are doing to send messages about what you value.
Do you want to be seen as an authentic leader? That means living by the values you and your organisation espouse. “Be the change you want to see in the world”, said Gandhi, and when it comes to changing an organisation’s culture, that means translating aspirational goals like accountability, customer-centricity or one-team into day to day behaviours and actions. Many leaders are criticised for not walking their talk because they are not able to make this transition. This episode starts you on a practical, courageous journey to authenticity, one in which you can become a leader who can shape the culture you want.