Playing The Leadership Card Game, With Lean Expert Phil Preston

You may have heard about the Leadership Card Deck – an incredible card deck (and associated, collaborative game and ice-breaker with your teams) that teaches ways to increase motivation and engagement within your teams, as a leader.  And everyone can be a leader.

You can now buy your very own copy of the Leadership Card Deck to improve the leadership ability of the people around you, from almost anywhere in the world on beautiful linen-card paper.  They really are a pleasure to use.

Transcript:

David McLachlan:  Hey everyone I just wanted to show you something that we worked on over the last couple of months and it relates to ease-of-use and it relates to engagement and it relates to disrupting companies, creating disruptive companies and all of those things that come from
ease-of-use and making things easy to do and easy to use.

And come out of it is the the leadership card deck which helps improve the
engagement of your teams, that has huge flow-on effects like improving the
profitability and productivity of your people, making people want to come to
work and do a good job and I had to bring Phil along –

Phil Preston:  Hello!

David:  – because as we’ve been playing we’ve sort of evolved this game from the leadership card deck just by playing it over the last couple of weeks.  And the way it’s evolved is really really great, you’re gonna love playing it as well.  And Phil’s probably one of the best people to play this because he’s probably one of the most hardcore lean practitioners in the southern hemisphere I would say.  He’s had training at Ford, from Toyota guys, he has a manufacturing background but also financial services, formal stuff like Six Sigma and not only that Phil does that as a day job and then teaches lean on the weekends as well, so he can’t get enough of it.

Phil: I am so passionate David.

David:  But also so good at it.

Phil:  Thank you.

David: And that’s how this sort of evolved over the last couple of weeks.

Phil:  I love the game, I’m ready to go.

David:  So did you want to walk people through how we’ve been playing?

Phil: Okay, so we started off with the cards, and on each of the cards is – how would you describe it David?

David:  Oh it’s just a tip, a bit of research or a trick, how to improve engagement how to get the most out of your teams, that sort of thing.

Phil:  So when we initially started playing the game we just picked three cards each and then we would try to make them flow.  But the game’s evolved, where we originally thought it would all start off with the root cause and end up with a solution, but sometimes that’s not always the case.  Anyway we’ll demonstrate to you how this works.

David:  Let’s do it and yeah and that’s why playing with Phil in this manner is such a pleasure because he totally gets it and he gets that improving things just makes the way for making happier staff as well so that’s really one of the greatest treasures that you’ll get out of this I think.  So you said take three cards – one two three – and when Phil says you “make it flow”,  what we’re doing is we’re just arranging the cards in the order that we believe they fit, and you’ll see you can ask your people to do so and you can use this as an icebreaker for a meeting for any sort of you know improvement situation or a talk that you’re giving, you can use this as a great icebreaker for your teams and get them thinking about improvements before you delve into those things or any other meeting that you’re running and you just have your people take the three cards and read out the cards that they get.

Phil:  Okay so I’ll go first – so Not Invented Here.  Okay and could you just read that little description there David?

David:  Not invented here, the tendency to rate our own business ideas as more successful than other people’s concepts.  So it’s just hard for us to to rate other people’s ideas as better than our own, or take them on board even when sometimes they might be better.  I think we’ve all been there but yeah that’s a really good one.

Phil:  So an unusual mix this time to be fair.  So this is a difficult one!  So not invented here how do we make that consistent with the view to try and improve that concept?

David: So let’s find the cards that work around, that are similar.

Phil:  Okay with this so let’s “make it repeatable”, even though it is a concept and almost the culture of thinking but if we can repeat and embed some form of consistency around that thinking we’ll make it repeatable –

David: – And that helps the not invented here.

Phil:  I think so.

David: I’ve got this one, which I want to sort of bring into the mix as well and it’s the curse of knowledge.  So once you have knowledge of a particular
subject it’s hard to imagine others not having that same knowledge and I
think I mean where where would we put that before or after not invented here?

Phil: I would put it after yeah.

David:  Not invented here caused from the curse of knowledge, solved by making it repeatable in your teams, and then what else have you got?

Phil: To improve the repeatability make it visual.

David: Make it visual so people can clearly see what’s expected of them, that’s fantastic!  Is that all yours?  Phil’s done already. I’ve got two more – mastery which is when your team is able to be to working continuously towards mastering a worthy skill, it’s an intrinsic motivator and it actually motivates people more than money in some cases so working towards a worthy skill if you’ve put all of this in place then you’re working towards mastery, it’s more
of an intrinsic motivator than than money or gifts or bonuses or rewards in
many cases.

Phil:  Yeah that could hover across quite a few to be honest.  Leave it there but I think we leave it at the end because that’s pretty much to where we’re aspiring towards.

David:  I like it!  And lastly sales and satisfaction, as the effects of engagement. I don’t know if you can see that but companies in the top quartile of engagement achieved 10% higher customer satisfaction than companies in the lowest quartile of staff engagement,

Phil: Which leads into mastery because you’ve got autonomy and intrinsically motivated teams.

David:  So your team mates are more engaged, they’re happy to come to work, they’re working on something that’s of value to them and now all of a sudden that impacts the sales and satisfaction of the company as well.

Phil: Yeah so you know you’ve got the – you started off with not invented here which is a sort of culture – a cultural waste in a way – you’ve then got the curse of knowledge as well which how would you interpret the curse of knowledge following that one?

David:   In that people find it hard to see the value in other people’s ideas
above their own.

Phil:  So this is the view together – so make it repeatable then make the thinking repeatable or make the culture repeatable – make the process repeatable – to provide the consistency.

David: And then we’re back into making the process visual, helps people work towards mastery continuously, brings in satisfaction.  And see the way that
that evolved was that and this could go any way because all it is is a discussion around the way we think that it should flow and sometimes people play
it differently.

Phil:  They do but I think that if you look at the real sort of standout aspects of this, is make it repeatable, make it visual, and then master it. I love it, that’s really good.

David:  Thanks Phil, I love your work!

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