In this episode, Gordon Tredgold, CEO of Leadership Principles limited talks to Anoop Suresh, VP of Sales and Naman Chaturvedi, a marketing intern about how success is about having the right motivation, the right plan, and the right leadership. We discussed the culture that workplaces should maintain to help their employees thrive, especially during remote work settings.
His first passion was rugby and he started playing when he was 9 years old. He continued to play until he was 43. As he moved into his professional career, he discovered his real passion was actually for building winning teams, coaching and developing people. He Successfully led high profile Data Center Migration Programs at fujitsu and contributed to a few online media such as Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur media.
Now with that mix of passion and ability, he has been ranked by Global Gurus as one of the Top 10 Leadership Experts, Speakers, and Trainers in the world.
Culture contributes to building high-performance teams
Culture creates the environment of a workspace. It sets the expectations and holds people accountable for the performance that they deliver.
Gordon expressed his views on this with a Cricket analogy. He mentioned that when cricket teams such as England lose the match, they are told, “You did your best” or, “you were valiant in defeat”. However, when teams like New Zealand and Australia lose the Test series, they are not keen on the plan to set back because they know the expectations from there.
And this is where culture drives excellence. It may sound negative, but actually it is a positive reinforcing way. Massive man culture is what people do when we’re not looking. So for New Zealand, it’s probably about them doing extra training, to get fitter and perform better. They’re not told, \ but inspired to do so by the culture they have been in.
2020 was a year of addressing organizational concerns
Gordon probably booked more speaking gigs in 2020 than any other year because all of the conferences closed down. He ended up leading a program for Fujitsu and doing a few webinars as well.
And the interesting thing is that all of them were 100% remote. Gordon has generally led hybrid teams, but this was the first time when he never met anybody from the team.
Leaders should start adapting to the new normal
Gordon has observed the evolution of leadership over the years. He explained how earlier, it was 90% command and control, and 10% leadership. However, over the years, he has seen that percentage coming down. But there are still 30-40% of people who are in command and control, and it doesn’t really work.
With the pandemic and remote working, command and control is dead in the water. Many leaders are having to transition from command and control.
People are not working in the same office, same building, same consciousness, and possibly the same time zones as well. So we need to be much more inspiring and engaging leaders.
It is important to add collaborative style of approach to your leadership
Gordon explained this well with a simple yet good example, considering the situation of a a guy who wants to lose 20 pounds. One way can be coaching him and keeping a regular check on his weight. This is a good way to get some detailed monitoring of his performance. However, if the only way to coach him would be to accuse him and ask him to stop eating much, then you are just going to create disengagement.
Doing that in a supportive way is going to help him to become better.
Thus, leaders should never have a problem with performance measurement. If they do, it’s difficult for them to do the measurement, that is, to make the employees perform better.
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: An