Dave’s guest in S02: E03 is Colin Hunter, the CEO & Founder of Potential Squared – a business created to inspire leaders to think differently about how they engage and develop people. He’s also an author, with a new book called BE MORE WRONG – how failure can make you an outstanding leader.
Innovation in sports is about finding new ways to unlocking higher levels of human performance. Like the world of sports, the world of business continues to become more competitive, leaders are looking to find marginal gains that give them an edge wherever they can. Companies looking to improve their ability to innovate often look to the world of sports for insight and inspiration.
Colin’s business was created to inspire leaders by disrupting the way they engage and develop their people, pioneering the concept of “creating playgrounds” to inspire new habits and ways of thinking.
Dave and Colin explore the “executive athlete” archetype, how vulnerability, openness, and emotional intelligence are crucial traits for every leader, and why leaders who look to drive peak performance without a high EQ not only won’t succeed – they will fail spectacularly. They also dig into Colin’s new book, Be More Wrong, and how it brings together the concepts of the Hero’s Journey, Design Thinking methodology, storytelling, personal resilience, psychological safety, strategic presence, and the blended skills of coaching and mentoring into a leadership framework.
Podcast Highlights
3:40 – What Potential Squared does and how it is doing something different in the leadership space by helping maximize potential through helping leaders embrace failure: “The company changed to potential squared because I wanted to shift to a different way of operating.”
5:23 – How Design Thinking / Fail Fast / Iterate rapidly transformed P2’s business
10:38 – Creating Playgrounds + Design Thinking = getting people to leave their comfort zone and developing leadership skills while having fun: “It’s fascinating for me because we’ve got a project coming up in 2018 which we’re working on at the moment. And it’s this concept of building equity for giving opportunities for people between the age of 18 to 30 to get careers.”
24:27 – Overcoming Imposter Syndrome – judging ourselves and others; why it’s OK to be wrong and to fail: “I do my own development and I’m doing something called positive intelligence at the moment. And I’m learning from this work and positive intelligence and we all have an inner judge and it’s the judge of yourself.”
32:00 – How Design Thinking at the core of Accenture and P&G’s success
34:33 – Problems with using money as your metric for performance
35:42 – What set Colin on his journey?
43:42 – Colin’s hacks for getting through the week: “So one of them is an afternoon nap.”
46:15 – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is an inspiration: “I love his roots as well. So when you look back to where he’s come from, how connected he is, he’s amidst his failures as well, you go back to the authenticity and the humility. He admits what he was like when he was younger. And a lot of people might not like him. That’s a high level of self-awareness for sure.”
