Episode 271 Courageous Culture with Karin Hurt and David Dye
On this episode of The Lead Up Podcast, Mike is joined by Karin Hurt and David Dye. Karin and David speak about their book Courageous Cultures which you can find here. This book is a practical user guide that allows leaders to create a culture for their teams. Mike mentions how culture is everything and how culture eats everything else for breakfast so it’s extremely important that you create the right culture for your team.
Karin and David provide us with an insight into their lives before courageous cultures and how they both have the practical experiences that aided them to write this book. Karin and David talk about why having a courageous culture within your team is so important as it can lead to breakthrough results and will enable you to create intensive connections and trust with your team.
David and Karin are focused on human-centered leadership and share some of their top tips for us as leaders to use to create a positive leadership culture;
- Allocate time to be human beings
- Create time to talk as humans as opposed to just having a task
- Use the reflect to connect method, focus on emotion and start your connections on an emotional level
- Bring healthy transparency as a leader to your team
- Use the four C’s: Curiosity, clarity, connection, and capacity
Leaders navigate the narrative and create clarity so it’s important as leaders that we define the following with our teams so that they feel engaged and important;
- What does courage mean to you?
- What is culture to you?
- What is it that people like us do?
It is also extremely important that we as leaders encourage our teams to share their ideas and don’t back away from difficult conversations. David states that they wrote this book because they were seeing a consistent pattern when with their clients. Leaders asked ‘Why aren’t more people speaking up and why are they not sharing their ideas, why do I have to discover a good practice?’ and their teams were saying ‘Nobody wants my ideas, the last time I spoke up I got in trouble, nothing happens anyways’. David states that 40% of people lack the confidence to share an idea and that is why it is vital for us as leaders to understand that people hang onto past negative experiences and that we as humans underestimate the benefit that comes from sharing ideas.
Karin and David share some tools we as leaders need to do in order to create a space for our team to share their ideas;
- Understand where your team is at as a team and as individuals on the team in terms of fear
- Build your team up one person at a time
- Create a safe environment; ask new hires for their opinions and come back to them with the same question 30 days later
- Ask your team to write down their suggestions/answers/thoughts on paper – their response will be anonymous and everyone will contribute
- Respond with gratitude
They also, speak about systemizing courage and how the secret to success is in the system. David states that if we can systemize courage, it will help remove some of those fears. Karin and David talk about the power of one leader. If we as leaders are sharing our ideas, asking for ideas in safe spaces, engaging openly, honestly, and vulnerably with our teams we can expect to see the same in return.
For more information visit; Let's Grow Leaders where you will find a weekly blog and all the other information you need.
David has a podcast which you can find here.
Karin hosts a live show, Asking for A Friend, on LinkedIn which you can find here.
