Welcome to the Curious Choice Leader Podcast

Hello and welcome to the Curious Choice Leader Podcast!  I’m thrilled you have joined me for this first episode where I’m going to introduce myself and the Podcast to you.  

I’m your host Bekka Prideaux, I’m a leadership development coach and consultant and I work with technical experts and business owners who, like you, are brilliant at what they do and want to keep doing it. but their success means they now have a bigger role and a team to go with it.  Now they are facing a new challenge - leadership!  And it’s a challenge that keeps changing and growing.  Studying leadership is all very well but what are you meant to actually do every day, knowing you want to inspire your team doesn’t help you know what to put on your to-do list!

About The Curious Choice Leader Podcast

I’ve been wanting to bring you a podcast for a while, to talk about leadership and to share practical hints, tips and ideas that you could apply to your situation and take action on right away.  I was planning to launch at early in the quarter, but then the world turned itself upside down and it didn’t feel right or even that important so I pressed pause and focused right in on how I could support my family, my clients,  my work friends and my friends, making sure they all had what they needed to feel safe, secure and able to function.

Suddenly I found myself having an experience I hadn’t had in a long time and certainly not to the degree I was having it.  Not knowing how to function or what to do for the best, even the basic things we had taken for granted like knowing how to get food supplies didn’t or couldn’t work.As someone who has lead many major change initiatives and worked on countless change programmes now, I found myself the one who was having change done to them and it wasn’t good!  I felt lost, angry, hurt, sad, frustrated, unproductive, rebellious, scared, helpless - the list goes on - if it’s not helpful or good you name it I felt it!  Yep almost without warning, we were all slap bang in the middle of a huge immersive learning experience about change.

There were some conversations I found myself having over and over, digging deep into that change management experience and when I paused for breath and gave myself a little time to think I realised that actually the one thing we do know about our future is that we are going to be dealing with a lot more change.Here’s the thing, these the experiences we are having now can make us better at dealing with change and leading others through change, if we press pause, review what has happened, reflect on it and use those lessons as we reset and go on to whatever comes next.

So no, this isn’t the podcast I was planning to bring you, those topics can wait, they’re still great topics, but I hope it’s a podcast that will serve you well and help you as you lead through the changing world we are all experiencing. It’s not going to be all about Covid, there is an overwhelming amount of Covid talk as it is, but the changes Covid has forced on our lives are a shared experience and one we can all grow from.  It is going to be about what we are learning about leading change and how we can apply those lessons.

Leading Change

I think everyone remembers the first time they had to lead a team through change - I know I do, the memory is vivid and not that pretty! The opening felt a bit like a bad horror movie.

Imagine the scene, it’s a run-down office of a small manufacturing company, the machines pounding away menacingly in the background.  A nieve girl walks into the bosses office and asks what she thinks is an innocent question - she was not expecting the reply she got.  The boss told her that the computer systems implementation that needed to be completed by the end of the next week was in chaos, and it wasn’t just her training in how to use it that was off track.  

The internal project manager had just been sacked for fraud and the police were due any time, the external project manager had been rushed into hospital and wouldn’t be back and no one else knew what was happening.  Having asked how she could help, the girl found herself wrestling computers, wrangling people and making friends with the project management monster, and before she knew it she was leading this and many more changes.  

And yes, with the support of an amazing boss, that girl was me!Not that I knew it at the time, but my desire to learn and the curiosity I brought to what I was doing turned out to be a real asset.  By talking to people and gathering information I was able to find ways to make things work, make smart choices for the company that people understood and help people transition into a new way of working.

Years and years of leading change and working with leaders later (just over 30 years if you need to know) those core skills of being curious and making choices are still at the heart of what I do and what the amazing leaders I work with do day in day out as they take their businesses and their teams where they need to go and as they do it in a way that works for them.

My Hopes For The Curious Choice Leader Podcast

So, this show is dedicated to helping experts like you become the leader you want to be, to create working worlds that work for you, your business and everyone connected with it, either in your own business or as a leader in an organisation.

We know there is more change coming, it’s about the only certainty we have at the moment, so I’m going to be sharing the lessons I’m learning for myself and from discussions with my clients, I’m going to share hints, tips and ideas that you can apply to your work and as you lead through change and changing times.  My hope is that this will challenge and grow your thinking and encourage you to step into your leadership.

The things I share will be based on my experiences and some will be more relevant to you than others - it’s up to you to decide what you take and apply from this podcast.  That’s what curious choice leadership is all about - getting curious and building our understanding then evaluating what we find and making choices about what’s right for us and our business.  

Now that you know what you might be in for, join me on the next episode and let’s get curious and make some choices.