Agile Leadership and the Flow System with Nigel Thurlow

Speaker A: For my organization to grow, I had to get out of the way. I had to stop turning up and being the man in the front of the room, the person in the room who was always on the mic. And that was a real hard lesson to learn. And it's really, really hard when you know that you're good at something to actually stop doing it so others can get good at doing those things. And even if they don't do it as well as you immediately, they will eventually do better than you. And that's the whole point. I think that's the mark of success, is you as a leader.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Mind you'd Leadership podcast. I'm Karen Souk and in this episode I will be speaking with Naedel Toronto, Toyota's first Chief of Agile and co creator of the Flow System. We talk about his groundbreaking work in Lean Agile and flow methodologies. We'll explore how these approaches drive organizational success, align with conscious leadership principles, and prepare leaders to navigate the complexities of the future. So, Nigel, thank you for joining.

Speaker A: Um, very grateful to be here. Uh, thank you for having me along.

Speaker B: So, you know, you had an incredible career from being Toyota's first Chief of Agile that I didn't know there's a title Chief of Agile kind of job description. So that would be interesting to hear about it, to talk to creating the Flow System. I, uh, would be happy to hear your journey. What inspired you to go this path and did you always see yourself in this line of work or it emerged during your, uh, that, uh.

Speaker A: Well, uh, it's interesting because the Chief of Agile title was a title that was created for me when I went back to Toyota after a period of absence. I'd started with Toyota many years ago in the early 2000s when I'd, uh, gone into Toyota, uh, Motor Europe as a consultant. And I actually describe it as the best learning years of my entire career. Toyota completely transformed the way I think about things, I approach things, I think about value, I think about leadership. And then over the years, I was fortun fortunate to work with Toyota on and off in a number of different capacities. And when I moved to the usa, I left Europe, moved to the USA because I married my wife. And so we moved to the usa. She's American. And as I started to settle here, we got a call. I was doing some work in the Agile space, which is for people who aren't familiar with, I.e. techniques and methods that are used predominantly in software development, but product development, new product development, product enhancements. We got a call from Toyota asking if uh, somebody could come talk to them about this Agile thing. Well, I just happened to know the people. So I went in, did a leadership workshop, fast forward a little while. I ended up back consulting at Toyota and then I got the opportunity to go back and work for Toyota as a team member, what they call their employees. And uh, I rejoined them as a, in a senior leadership position as the chief of Agile. And uh, it has helped me significantly. I will never ever say that Toyota hasn't been one of the key catalysts of my career. There's a lot of stuff I missed out there, but that was the fast version of how I got to where I was with Toyota.

Speaker B: And what do you most love about your work and bringing Agile to the workplace?

Speaker A: So it's not just about Agile. I mean my work's diversified a lot. I mean I learned a lot with Toyota of course from lean thinking, the Toyota production system, customer first, respect for people, these types of key tenants. The Agile stuff came along because uh, my whole background's in IT and software development. So it was natural progression. But business agility separate from sort of software development methodologies is more about how fast companies can pivot, change direction, make decisions more biased towards action versus action bias, being seen to act because you're expected to act versus acting in the most appropriate way for product, services, customer value. And so uh, I sort of started to bring these worlds together and started to realize that one was the underpinning of the other and that's indeed how it's taught by many people. But then I started to realize there was a lot of challenges in the way we do things. And it really wasn't about methodologies anymore, it was about behaviors, about attitudes, about approach and it is really all about people. And uh, there's a lot of challenges in what we term leadership nowadays and how organizations function and run. But when I started to look at this, we started to realize it was about human factors. And through my associations with ah, a number of different people in industry and I've been fortunate to work with, we started to look at complexity as a science, as what we mean by complex problems. We started to look at different leadership techniques, which is where the distributed leadership came in, the intent based leadership and of course team science. One of my uh, key business partners and colleagues and co authors is a professor of these topics at one of the major universities in the usa now Texas A and M. Um, it was originally at the University of North Texas when we first met. So we started to look at these different Disciplines and these different subjects and how they interconnected and intertwined with each other and how actually we were trying to solve. I think we were trying to solve the wrong problem. We just kept throwing methodologies and techniques and more frameworks and trying to solution ourselves out of messes we'd put ourselves into. But when we actually started to study this, we realized it was all about attitudes, behaviors and human factors.

Speaker B: Interesting. Can you give us an example? What do you mean by that?

Speaker A: You know, when I was thinking of coming onto the show and I was looking at your work and looking at some of the topics we could discuss, I started to think to myself, you know, what is the real problem we're trying to solve here? And, um, I live in the US and corporate life here is different than some other parts of the world, but it's very much driven by profit and loss. It's very much driven by revenue. You know, I'd often talk about greed and how organizations are focused on making more money, achieving more power, more domination within the marketplace. And for many years people have talked about how to avoid that type of behavior and talk more about the customer first approach. And indeed I have myself for years because that's the sort of key tenant of lean thinking from Toyota, to always put the customer at, uh, the point of all your decision making. To focus on what we describe in my work as the flow of value, which is creating value for the receiver, for the recipient of the products and services. But I've started sort of not rethinking, but starting to consider, well, you know, most companies are out there to make money. Most companies are incentivizing their leaders to make money. Most companies are setting targets and measurements and performance indicators for individuals within organizations that drive the certain types of behaviors that we see within those organizations. And it's extremely hard to break that, no matter how much time I spend with organizations talking about, you know, improving value for customers. And if you improve the value for the customer, you get greater adoption and convergence across your product. You get retention. These things become sustainable over time. And if we start to look at eliminating the cost of delivering work, uh, so we can bring down the cost of capacity, the cost of delivery, we start to get the benefits we crave. Yet companies are still driven on quarterly targets, sometimes even monthly, but definitely quarterly targets and certainly annual targets which drive certain types of behavior behaviors. And if we want to actually create organizations that are more sustainable, that don't have the boom, bust sort of cycles of an economy and have a sustainable, uh, structure and a sustainable base over time we have to address the way we incentivize and the way we drive organizational behavior. I mean that's one example that we see all the time. And as I say, when I start to look at this, I'm wondering, are we trying to solve a problem that's not solvable because organizations want to compete, they want to be more competitive, want to be more profitable. And we reward people on the financial income and the gains that organizations make. And I wonder therefore whether we should abandon any hope of trying to solve these challenges and start to think, well, if this is what the organizations want, maybe want to refocus our efforts there. But then we lose the focus on the people, the individuals, the humans, the few people who drive the many to certain behaviors because those few people benefit from those behaviors they're creating within the organization.

Speaker B: You're talking about a big paradigm, right? About a paradigm shift in the workplace. And I think we are living in transformative times because on the AI that increases the speed of light and technology will suppress us, right? So I think what will distinguish us as ah, human beings is our being humans and being connected to our emotional aspects, to our compassion, passion, creativity. Otherwise I think bad things can happen. And you talk about. So I think it's, we are in the midst of this transformation because I agree with you that companies usually, you look at the bottom line, right? But we need to embrace a new paradigm that talks about people, planet profit. Okay? Uh, we can nourish our people in order to increase their talent and that they will be able to bring their added value to the company and then we can bring our uh, added value to the customers and then the profit will come, right? Not the opposite way. So what do you think about it?

Speaker A: And this is really the teachings that we write about that if you create the right value, the right flow of value for a customer, and I have a simple definition of a customer, they give you money. I mean in the current world that's how we view our uh, customers. They are the way we are sustained from a financial point of view. But it's the way we deliver that value and we focus on those customers that's actually crucial. And you mentioned people plan it in profit and in this day and age, and you mentioned technology, when we start to see the acceleration of AI. I was reading about self learning, self generating large learning models today where the LLMs are going to be able to self sustain, self teach and self develop. So we're sort of even eliminating, I mean apart from the fact we can unplug the computers, I guess, at some point. But if we, if we just look at it from the point of view, the technology is going to be self sustaining and self evolving, which is a scary thought for some, maybe my, in my age group, you know, I'm the last of the boomers basically that are coming through. I just turned 62 at the time of this recording. So when we start to think about this, that, you know, this insatiable chase for profit, for dominance, for power, for control that we see in many corporations and certainly in American business in today's day and age, I start to wonder what's going to happen to the people? What's going to happen to the planet now? Profit. Great. Everybody's making a, uh, ton of profit. But at what cost? I mean whether you believe or challenge the environmental changes, I've seen, just looking at the news this morning, back in my home country in the United Kingdom, massive floods, villages have been washed out by torrential rain. I'm seeing the same sort of thing that's happening in California, we've just seen it in Spain and Italy, these freak weather events. So we start to think this insatiable drive for more and more profit. The challenge in the US currently with the new administration coming in, uh, the challenge between fossil fuel generation and gasoline powered vehicles versus the electrical sort of generation and pushing towards battery electric vehicle and more sustainable vehicles. And having worked in the automotive trail, I find this all very interesting. Some of the dichotomies out there and some of the sort of oxymorons that we've got an administration that's been backed by the world's richest man that manufactures electric vehicles. But the administration is all about drilling for more oil and sustaining, you know, the oil and gas industry, which is going to set up some interesting dilemmas I think in the, in the coming months when we see that unfold. And I was reading yesterday that Bosch in Germany are laying off 5,500 people because there isn't the sales, uh, in the electric vehicle marketplace we're seeing the drop in electric vehicle sales, yet we're seeing the UK government are uh, sticking firm to their target to ban the sale of all gasoline and diesel engines by 20, 35 years from now, literally. So we're seeing some real challenges to what we want as organizations and what we need from a planetary point of view. And uh, both of these have a significant effect on people. The race for technology and the sort of the AI boom which may all fall and be nothing. I mean there's different pundits that Sort of talk about it being the next big thing. And there's other people now predicting companies like Nvidia have ridden the wave of this and are going to sort of fall back and struggle. But we are in a uh, in a world that there are some foundational and fundamental changes happening which could affect future generations. And it's really interesting to know whether or not this is the leadership that we are seeing that are uh, driving us this in this direction or it's just natural evolution and whatever happens will happen.

Speaker B: So to be continued, as we said, what's interesting is what is in our power to impact the workplace and the leaders in the business world. And so this is what interests me to hear. First of all, I believe that leadership impacts the direction and we need to create more humanized workplaces. The talent people we want to work with that to engage them. Otherwise they will go to our uh, competitors and then will we lose the ride. But I'm interested in the Agile piece. From my knowledge, Agile is the ability to be m more spontaneous, to use the wisdom of the crowd, to really react to the needs of the client in the moment. If not create a project for one month and after one month the project already ready, come to the client and show them the project and say I did it. It's not in our, what we thought about and we need to change all the projects. So this is the principles that I know that agile mindset, being flexible, spontaneous, listening. I'll be happy to hear from you. How do you use the methodology with your clients in this challenging and transformative time in order to create this workplaces that we are talking about?

Speaker A: It's, it's interesting because you use the word humanizing or more humanized in the workplace and, and that brings us very much into psychological safety and the ability for people to be innovative and creative and be able to have critical thinking and critical feedback and to challenge the status quo and to do things. We describe in what the military developed techniques have called red teaming, which is the ability for us to challenge plans and behaviors and things we see in a way that helps us improve. And it's a uh, critical leadership skill to be able to create the environment. You can't just tell people you're psychologically safe and you can give feedback. You've got to create the environment that make people feel that they're safe in that. And you talk about of course the wisdom of the crowds, which is the opposite to group think where everybody just does what the most important person in the room says. But the challenge With a lot of this again is going to be, what are the motivations of these leaders to develop these people in a certain, uh, way. I was having a conversation yesterday when we're talking about the younger generation, the, you know, my son's a millennial, he's doing his master's degree, funnily enough. You mentioned business schools and MBA programs. A lot of improvement necessary there to teach them how the real world operates. But when we look at the, you know, the Gen Z as the Gen Alphas, as are now being called, that are coming through, how do we attract them, um, into our organizations? How do we stimulate their interest? Their expectations are very different than my expectations when I was their age. And I think that some of those expectations and some of those behaviors predominantly driven by social media, a lot at the moment will change over time as those people grow older and mature and their lives change and their, their priorities change. That I think some of that, the behaviors that we look at and you know, people of my age group may frown, it will go away. I'm sure people frown at me when I was a young man. But there is a need for us to create the environment that attracts these people to the workplace. If they're coming into an environment that is very rigid, very structured, very rule based, a lot of them aren't used to that and that's not the type of environment they're wanting to move into. So when we start to talk about agility, and there's this thing called Agile, which was a Manifesto written in 2001 by a bunch of software folks that sort of laid out some values and principles about building software and software based products. But then when we start to look at it from a business agility point of view, the ability for companies to make more rapid decisions, to pivot, to change direction and to actually stay relevant when the markets, the customers, the environment, geopolitical effects, whatever's happening are uh, changing. But also then from when we talk about attracting the right type of talent and retaining that type of talent, how easy do we make it for those people to spot opportunities, to spot challenges, and to react to those rapidly in a way that benefits the organization and ultimately benefits the customer, it's creating that environment that's important. But when we're driven continuously to achieve ever unsustainable targets, then it creates a set of behaviors. We set up a set of behaviors that actually suppresses innovation, suppress, suppresses creativity, suppresses agility. There's been this big wave over the last 10, 15 years of large consulting organizations pushing through people through these agile transformations. But all that really was was teaching them new methodologies to go develop software and trying to control organizational design and organizational behavior using tools and techniques which were ill equipped for that. Something we describe as bounded applicability, which means that everything has a utility, but everything has a limit to that utility. But for last few years, the big consulting houses sold organizations these transformational journeys which were, if you implement this methodology, this framework, things will miraculously change in the organization. But it failed to address any of the human factors elements, any of the behavioral elements. But if companies can actually start to think how they can create an environment that allows people to thrive in their organization, not just survive, then the agility is an emergent feature. So now I talk about culture being a, uh, product of our behaviors. It emerges based on how we behave and act towards each other and towards the work. But agility also emerges. Depending on how we act and behave, and we approach different challenges and problems, agility will emerge. And that will give the businesses and the organizations greater flexibility, greater adaptability, and greater chance of survivability.

Speaker B: Can you give me an example from a client you worked with implementing the agile mindset and the methodology? I want, uh, to understand practically what does it mean? I am listening, and I want to start implementing this paradigm in my company, but I don't understand, what should I do tomorrow morning?

Speaker A: So I park the, the word mindset, because that's a loaded terminology, but I understand what you meant. It's the approach, the attitude towards that. So I work with several very large clients, and one of my most favorite clients over in Europe, I've just come back from an extended trip with them. We sat down about a year and a half ago and we said, there's a few things we need to get under control here. Number one is prioritization. We're always trying to do all the things all the time. There's a great phrase, productivity theater, where everything seems to be moving because everybody's busy, they're all running around, and the status reports are moving a little bit each week. But it's just productivity theater. It's the most ineffective, inefficient use of people, time, resource, etc. So we needed to get priority under control. And that is the perennial problem in all organizations. Everybody wants their priority push forward, and they'll use whatever techniques to ensure that happens. But then we get into a lot of challenges with context switching and the inefficient use of people and other resources and other technologies. So we need to get them under Control. The next thing was we needed to start thinking from a value stream point of view. Now, the easiest definition of a value stream is wherever there is a customer, there is a flow of value, because all the tools, technology, people, what we call the agents in the system, all the elements of the system that takes customer demand to customer fulfillment is a value stream. So we needed to start thinking like that. We needed to start thinking from who are our customers, what are our key demographics, our key, uh, archetypes of our customers, and how would we group them and how would they form naturally into a flow of value? These are the agents in the system delivering this value to this archetype set of customers, these Personas. And then how do we, once we've got our priorities under, um, control and we understand who our customers are, how do we then better organize ourselves so these value streams are focused and dedicated and have all the right people? And so what we did, we did an experiment where we said we wanted to make all the people available for this value stream 100% of the time with 100% of the skills, and we wanted to get away from this constant change control mechanism where we're constantly asking for money or asking for continuous funding. So we funded it for a whole period of time, in this case a year. So we got fully funded with 100% of the people 100% of the time. And we focused and prioritized the way we work. We used some of the techniques from the Agile methodology world. So we used a thing called a product owner, which is a, uh, subset of product management, where this person is responsible both for the P and L of the products and services, as well as all the work that flows in the process, priorities of the work that's being done. And there's always more demand than there is going to be available capacity. So there's some tough decisions to be done and without implementing any other changes. We ran this as an experiment and we saw a 40% acceleration in work, in throughput, in the flow of value. We got the right work that was being done because it's prioritized and because we organized the people in the right way and created the right environments, we got an increase in throughput of around 40% without even starting to look the ways the people were doing the work, the methodologies that we're using. Just by containerizing this in such a way, controlling priority, understanding our customer, and, um, creating a container for building the value to the customer.

Speaker B: So if I understand it correctly, you actually connected the people to the broader picture, to See to have clarity about the priorities. And was it self emergent like people were connecting themselves spontaneously to a specific team or it was managed by the leader. How did it happen?

Speaker A: No, so we structured it of course, so we had to identify what was necessary. There are tools and techniques out uh, there, Wardley mapping, Valley Stream mapping, other types of techniques which allow us to understand the. The key question is that I ask a lot of ladies is how does work get done? And people have a, uh, you know a lot of leaders have a vague idea. They know what we've sell, what we build, what we create, but they don't actually always understand how do we do what we do, what are all the steps, the nuances, the, the we break it all down, how does work get done? And they also don't understand the information flows which is once we're starting the, to work on the workflows, there's all these flow of information running in all sorts of different directions and um, the amount of non value added activity that's actually built into the work we do. So we spend some time to understand how work gets done within this context. We started then to design the organizational containers, the teams, the way people interacted and worked together to be able to create this value. But we listened to the people because it's the people who are closest to the work. Dave Marquet and his work have turned the ship around and intent based leadership from his work in the US military, he talks about moving the authority to the information. The information is where the work is done. The people closest to the work understand what the problems and challenges are. And indeed my whole background in Toyota is all about transferring ownership and control to the people who are actually building the vehicles, the people closest to the work. So we needed to make sure that we were listening and understanding how the work got done. But also beyond that, to your point as well, do these people understand why they're doing what they're doing? What is the mission, what is the direction, what is the outcome we're trying to achieve? What's their role in creating the value? And that's goal setting theory. We talk about things like proximal and distal goals. What are the goals closest to the teams that are working on something right now versus what are the larger goals for the product, the service, the organization, the direction of the customer. And we need to connect that. So everybody knows the work I'm doing today is an incremental part of this greater uh, vision for the product or service or for the customer. So a lot of those were the sort of behaviors that we had to train. Now what we're doing is we're starting to use some more of the methods and the techniques from the agile world to enable teams to work more effectively together in rapid iterations, in small batch work, so that they can change direction quickly as we discover different things. And that enables this greater emergence of agility at a, uh, business level where these people are in charge of the biggest strategic decisions, can make decisions about how to change direction more rapidly based upon the knowledge that's coming from the people who are doing the work and the greater knowledge of how work actually gets done day to day.

Speaker B: So if I heard you correctly, there are a few principles that you talked about. The first one is enabling, like creating a, uh, culture of enablement. Enabling people to show up, to listen, to connect, to bring their knowledge and wisdom from the connection with their clients. Right, because they have the wisdom, as we said, the wisdom of the crowd. The second thing that is crucial, especially in creating agile workplaces, is the communication part, right? Really communicating all day long, listening to our clients, to our colleagues and being able to process the information and to work with it instead of being attached to the first assumption that we started running with. Right. This is crucial in agile work. And then third thing that I heard is taking ownership. Like I have a project, I need to take ownership on it and to go with it and to interact with people, my clients, my co workers, in order to, to make it happen. So we need to be active and proactive in this culture. You, it's not one leader that leads the company, it's each and every one of us is a leader and needs to take responsibility in his own area. Am I right?

Speaker A: Yeah. And actually it's a really important point when you say everybody's a leader because the challenge we've got, especially in the States, is that we've created job titles, seniority by using the word leader and leadership. And there's a difference between leader and leadership. Leaders tends to be sort of a very clear, follow me, do as I say type of role. Whereas leadership is sort of an emergent property. And actually we see leadership emergent in all different levels of the organization. And I think giving people a leadership title is probably a bad thing. We've created. We need management and leadership. We don't want, you know, the lunatics running the asylum, as they say. We want, we need control, we need enabling constraints, guardrails. We need certain things to ensure that we run things appropriately and correctly. But what we want to do is create an Environment. If you are a senior person in an organization, you want to be a great leader, you need to create the environment for others to emerge as leaders. And then collective leadership, which informs the strategic leadership of the company because leadership's multi level and multi level dimensional. But if you're, if you are strong leaders at a senior level in the organization, you've created the environment. So the collective leadership, as I say, the wisdom of the crowds, as you describe it, this collective leadership informs strategic and global leadership so they make the right decisions, the right choices, and they're able to make better decisions. Bias towards action as it's described. But distributed leadership is more than just delegation. And a lot of people say, well I delegate, but delegation is different to truly empowering people which is transferring the ownership of that decision making. You relinquish the ownership of the decision making. You no longer make the decisions, you give that ability for others to make the decisions because they understand the decisions that need to be made better than you because they're closer to the work, closer to the reality. But then you use the enabling constraints which are the guardrails where you allow the people in the system, the agents in the system to move freely within these guardrails that have been set. That gives us the controls we need, but it gives us the freedom so we can make better, more rapid decisions. And that's when we start to really truly leverage what we talk about, when we talk about agile and business agility, not just some methodology. In the software development world, the essence

Speaker B: of leadership is self management. We need to be able to manage our own internal reality, our thoughts, our emotions, our time, right? In order to lead by example. Because uh, agile workplaces require us to be in an interaction all day long and people are triggering us, or the clients can trigger me. And I need to be able to manage myself and I manage my stress and manage my priorities in order to be able to engage people in my project, in my things that I promoting in order to succeed doing it. This is actually the foundation, as I see it, of conscious leadership. The ability to be conscious to our decisions, to our behaviors, to our attitude in order to create this conscious workplace and agile workplace. Because when I'm conscious, I'm creating this space between the stimulation and the response and I have a free choice to choose my behavior and not be triggered by the reality. And from this place we can create a really space of emergence, of creativity, of innovation because we are really listening to what's happening, we're not closing the uncertainty, the ambiguity. Um, we can Handle it, we can be present with it. And if this is the task of the leaders, I see it to be present and to hold the uncertain. And once I'm being able to be present with this, a new solution will emerge, a more accurate one will emerge, a new product will emerge, because I'm creating this safe space and inviting people to be present with their own experience. What do you think about it?

Speaker A: No, I think you're right. And actually my colleague, Professor Turner talks about self leadership as one of the things you have to master first. You have to be able to have that self leadership and that capability before you can lead others. And of course we talk about followership, which is the ability to create the environment where people choose to follow you. And this is an important thing that senior leaders need to understand is that people choose to follow you. You can't make them follow you. Now, if you're their boss, their manager and directing their work, they will do as you bid because that's required of them through their contract of employment. But also, but if you truly want them to follow you, to be listened to, listen to you, to be mentored by you, to get your guidance and sort of coaching, they have to choose to follow you to do that. And one of my key tests for leaders is if you stop paying them, would they still follow you? Because we follow a lot of great people in the world, whether it's a rabbi, a priest, an uh, Iman, or somebody who was a friend or a colleague, maybe a celebrity or a sports star. You may be following Instagram, you know, influencer, but you choose to follow, follow people who don't give you money. They're not paying you to follow them, but you're following them because you believe in what they're saying, or you are. They're modeling a behavior that you want to give. And I think that's crucial and critical. But to my, one of my earlier points, how we incentivize people in organizations will dramatically affect how they show up, the behaviors they model. And um, then the benefit we get from the other people within the organization based upon that model behavior. And if we incentivize them purely to hit targets continuously and incentivize their behaviors because of this financial drive, then we're going to start to model a type of behavior that isn't sustainable long term. And I think that's when you see that in certain organizations today.

Speaker B: Yeah, and this is where we see the gap, right? Because we want them to cooperate, but we incentivize us. But walk in silos so this is a gap and you. They won't work as we want.

Speaker A: And uh, the working in silos is a huge, huge, huge problem. As long organizations scale and grow larger and larger, these vertical silos form these, we call them, you know, islands of disconnected effort or fiefdoms, tower of power. And then we incentivize the leaders or the senior executives of each of these silos to perform in a certain way. What they feel fail to realize is very rarely are companies truly vertically integrated. So the value flows horizontally. So they need horizontal collaboration. And that's why this whole concept I was talking about earlier value streams is critically important because you define and understand those horizontal flows and then you build the capability across these different silos so people work together and collaborate together. But to your earlier point about communication, you know, I used to say many years ago in project management there were three Cs, communication, communication and communication. And if you truly want collaboration and cooperation, subtly different things, you need that communication. And these agile ways of working and these agile behaviors are never going to be, uh, available to you or sustainable unless you have that amazing level of communication within the organization.

Speaker B: I couldn't agree more. Communication is a key in order to succeed. Nigel, it's really interesting and we can continue for hours, but we need to wrap up. So before we wrap up, I want to ask you if there's any question that I didn't ask you that you want to share with our listeners.

Speaker A: No, I don't think so. I think one of the lessons, and I was talking about this on a different show a few days ago, one of the biggest lessons I learned, and by all means don't think I'm perfect, was I. I suddenly realized I was the problem. I was getting in the way of the growth of the people that worked for me at the time. And I had to actually stop going to events or to different, you know, where we were delivering training or coaching or workshops. I had to stop being present because whenever I was present, I was the. I was showboating. You know, I loved what I did and I enjoyed it. And I still do it to this day. Now I still enjoy what I do, of course, but if I was only, if I was always the guy with the microphone in his hand, then the people who were with my team who were equally as capable as me, they weren't being allowed to grow and to thrive and to have those opportunities. So I stopped going. I just said, look, look guys, you're going to do this and if you need my help, I'm on speed dial, you've got WhatsApp or whatever, just text me. But I need to get out of the way. And it was the hardest thing for me to do to realize that for the, for my organization to grow, I had to get out of the way. I had to stop turning up and being the man in the front of the room, the person in the room who was always on the mic. And that was a real hard lesson to learn. And it's really, really hard when you know that you're good at something to actually stop doing it. So others can get good at doing those things. And even if they don't do it as well as you immediately, they will eventually do better than you. And that's the whole point. I think that's the mark of success, is you as a leader, that you can get out of the way and allow others to grow and be there then as a mentor rather than sort of being in control. And that's when I think you truly do develop followership because people choose to follow you even though you're no longer telling them what to do.

Speaker B: Amazing. It's leading from humbleness, right? Like creating. Being aware of who you are, what you do, and what you want to be for others and to create the space for them. And sometimes it's putting our ego aside. Right. And enabling others to flourish. So thank you very much. I really love this closure. Nigel, if people want, companies and leaders want to reach out, where can they find you?

Speaker A: Well, you can find me, of course. I'm always on LinkedIn in the US I have a lot of fun on there. But you can go to my personal website, nigelthurlow.com or you can go to flowconsortium.comm or just google me and you'll find, uh, enough links out there to try and find a way to engage with me.

Speaker B: Nadjaj, thank you very much for sharing your experience and wisdom with us.

Speaker A: Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me along.

Speaker B: Hope you enjoyed our conversation. You're invited to subscribe to our podcast in order to know when we upload a new episode and follow us on social media. Thank you for listening. Until next time. Take care and bye bye.