Building Strong Connections Effortlessly, with Neil Jurd

Welcome to Amplify, the personal brand business show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Neil Jird. I think I say in the beginning of the book, and it's a couple of years since I wrote it, actually. But I think I start by saying exactly that good leadership, quite simply, makes the world a better place. And I believe that. The more I work in this business, the the more sure I am that the effect of good leadership is worth it. It justifies the effort. Hi there and welcome back to the Personal Brand Business Show. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise, intentionally growing a unique personal brand and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then while you still have your device in your hand, hit the subscribe button. That way you won't miss a single episode. So this week, I am really excited to meet, honestly, today for the first time, this week's guest. I'll back up. This week we're talking leadership, and I know lots of people who talk about leadership, but there's a big difference between talking about leadership and having led and having led leaders, and particularly having led leaders in the military. So Neil Jard, welcome to the show. Hello, Bob. Thank you very much for having me. Neil, welcome to the show. I am really glad to speak to you. You've written a book called The Leadership Book. Talk about calling a spade a spade. You're the founder of Leader Connect, and you had a 26-year army career. Twenty-six years is a long time for anybody in the army in the UK. Do you want to maybe just tell us a little bit about what that looked your career in general, and then how the book came about, and then maybe we can roll from there. Yes, of course. Well, my army career, actually, my regular army career was less than that. I think the 26 years includes my time as a Cadet Force Commandant as well. But my regular army career started in 1992, and I went all over the place. I enjoyed hot weather, so I went for I did interesting overseas tours. I spent a year in Belize. I spent time in, well, two years in Cyprus. I did a tour in Yemen. Then I also served on various operational tours, Iraq, Sierra Leone, former Yugoslavia. I was an instructor at Sandhurst. Those are probably the highlights of my military career. Then later as a civilian, but I I was Commandant of Lancashire Army Cadet Force, so I ran a large youth organisation, really, about a thousand young people, which I did for five years. I think one of the One of the things I have noticed about army officers is they tend to come in two shades, if you like. Obviously, this is your area, not mine. So feel free to tell me I'm wrong. But I You spent a little bit of time as a reservist, and there were those officers that you would follow. Then there were those officers that you would look sideways at and think, Really? They tended not to stick around for all that long. They tended to be quite young officers. I'm curious to know, I never really experienced officer training or Sandhurst or anything like that. But when you're training officers, how How do you cultivate this quality of leadership? That sounds such a simple question, but what I mean is, leaders don't simply lead by telling people what to do. They lead by becoming people that you want to follow. I think this is really what I'd like to speak about today. But from your experience within the Sandhurst Training Arena, how does that actually shape up? Well, I think the Army is unusual in the fact that it does teach leadership, and it teaches a lot of leadership, or it teaches leadership a lot. My experience in the last 15 years of delivering leadership training outside the Army is that It's actually very rare. Most people in senior roles, management roles, even director-level roles, have had no leadership training. The first thing I'd say is that Sanctus does teach people leadership. I think that the essence of it in the way that we learn leadership there is very practical. You get taught some theory, but then you have a lot of exercises in which you're given command appointments, you're put in a leadership position, and you lead a group of 30 other cadets through whatever it is, whether it's a patrol or an attack or a night march. And then you're assessed on it. And everybody else will chip in and always invited to chip in and say how you've done and what you could do better. So it's a very experiential process and it works really well. And Again, that's something which I now do with Leader Connect. When we run courses for organisations, they're very experiential. We put people through an activity and then they are invited reflect on how it went and what they could improve. That's very much the sandhurst way, but the experiential learning cycle is really effective. You wrote the leadership book, and I think maybe we should focus on that for a little bit. Number one, whenever I've met somebody who's written a book, and I've just about finished one, which is a different topic, but I know it's a painful exercise, within the spectrum of an authority piece, if If you've actually written a book about something, people know you're serious about it. I'm sure that wasn't your reason for writing it, but I am curious to know what impact the book has had on your ability to own the space of being an actual leadership expert. Is that something that... I'm mincing my questions here. Was writing the book an intentional part of positioning yourself as an authority, or was it a method of organising process? I think you probably give me credit for more foresight than I've got there, Bob. I wrote the book because of COVID, and my business, like probably lots of people who work in coaching or leadership development, my business was pretty ruthlessly crushed in the first few weeks of COVID, and I literally had almost nothing to do. And for years, I've kept notes. I've always enjoyed writing, and I've always felt it would be useful for me, and also to give to clients, to have some a précis of what I think, what I think I know, or where my thoughts are at at that time. So initially, I just started capturing what I thought was important. And then it developed into the series of scripts for what has become Leader Connect, the online video platform. I mean, we've got hundreds of videos on there now, or maybe even thousands, actually. But the first 30 were ones that I wrote as scripts. And then having written them as scripts, I thought, Well, I'm never going to write this much again, but I've said everything that I believe at this moment in time. This is probably the book. So I went back through it and repurposed it, and it became the book. But I think the fact that I wrote it as a series of scripts has made it really economical. I don't waste words. If you write something as if you're going to read it looking into a camera, it makes it very succinct, which I think is one of the features of the book. It's I hope, and this is the feedback that certainly the reviews suggest, it's very clear, very easy to understand. My aim has been to simplify leadership because I think leadership is really not very complicated. I think it's easily understood and easily learned. That's what the book aimed to do. I think I've read your Amazon reviews for the book, and one of the things that shone through it was there was very little filler, which is actually quite unusual for any business-related book. It's often 20% content and 80% I need to hit my word count. I know. That's so frustrating. I've read books which start brilliantly, like the first the first fifth of the book or whatever is absolutely great. And you think, Gosh, I'm looking forward to reading the rest. And then when you do read the rest, you find it's just a rehash of what was in the first few chapters. I think I know a lot authors, and they all come at it from such different perspectives. But what's interesting is if you look at some of the most popular business books of the 20th century, they were actually very small books, under 10,000 words sometimes. It's your ability to get to the point, I think, is quite important. Well, I was inspired by a few books, but the Coaching Habit. I don't know whether you've come across that, but that's a very pithy teaches seven questions which are useful for coaches. I think I'd read that the year before, so that was very much in my mind when I put mine together, that less is more or exactly the right amount, but no more is what you're aiming for. If somebody picks up your book, reads it, walks away from it, what should they have taken away from the book if they've read it correctly? That leadership is simple and that it comes down really to two things. I summarise it as connexion and direction, although I don't actually use those words in the book. But if I was to really pair the book down to the essentials, connexion and direction. And connexion is about building strong, positive relationships with people. And And direction is about knowing where you're going. And I don't mean giving direction, really. I mean being clear what the direction is, where you're aiming to get to. But then it's all about these great relationships. And you connect with people and inspire them to work towards that direction. So connexion and direction. And if I can add one other thing, I did a TEDx Talk last year, and the title of that was Pause and allow. I guess that's the other thing I think is really important for leaders, that leadership doesn't need to be hard, and the taking time, taking that time to pause and to think and allowing, and by allow, I mean creating the conditions and the space for others to to think and decide and act for others to lead. That's a key part of leadership. A lot of leadership is actually getting out of the way, setting the right conditions and the right objective, and then being brave enough to get out the way, not to meddle. What's interesting is listening to you speak there, I'm thinking about the definition of leader. The most obvious This instance of leadership is in management. Fair enough. I think anybody who has had a team to manage will be familiar with the need to lead. But actually, if we widen out the context a little bit? I'm looking at a social media context, for example. We all want, perhaps we don't, but one of the key metrics a lot of people give in their business is a social media following. If there's a following, then by definition, there needs to be a leader. If we want our clients to do things that they might find uncomfortable, again, that's something that might need a little bit of leadership. If you want me to sleep on a rocky mountain, then the officer is going to have to sleep on the rocky mountain, too. It's not something you can just tell the guys, Go and sleep on that rocky mountain. No, you have to be there, too. And within a personal branding perspective, my clients need to see me walk the walk and not just talk the talk and avoid the things that I find uncomfortable. I'm curious for you, the leadership context, what are some of the strange ways that you've seen leadership bear fruit where it may not have been immediately obvious. I think leadership, as you were saying, it applies in pretty much all human relationships if you have something that you want to achieve. Because a key element of leadership is having a clear and compelling purpose. You can have a clear and compelling purpose in any relationship relationship in any situation. I think leadership in the classroom is really important. The definition I use in the book is about increasing your impact by engaging others intellectually and emotionally in pursuit of a a clear and compelling purpose. A teacher could do that with their class. I founded a charity in memory of my wife about 15 years ago. I have to say running a small charity, and I don't run it now, I'm a trustee of it, but that experience of working with volunteers to achieve something, to create something. Our charity is the Michelle Jury Trust, and we promoted adventurous training for schools and support service charities. But you certainly need leadership there because there are no leavers, really. I mean, there's no pay to motivate charity volunteers. There's no promotion. It's really all about what you're trying to achieve and the relationships. So, yeah, I think leadership applies way, way beyond just the classic management type situations. A friend of mine, have you come across Jordan Wiley? No. At the moment, he's cycling from the leaning Tower of Pizza back to Blackpool Tower on a wooden bike, an eco friendly bike that he's had made for the purpose. But he's previously paddle boarded most of the way around the UK Coast. He's worth looking up. He's a fascinating guy. But I consider him a really effective leader, but nobody works for him, and yet he makes amazing things happen. And his energy and his purpose pulls other people in who want to support him. They've got no reason to. They just want to support him. They buy into him and what he's trying to achieve. I think that's really interesting because that's something I see in the online space all the time. There are those people who you naturally want to cheer on. You think, well, they must just have some magical quality. But actually, they have all these leadership qualities that are coming from the inside. Yes, some of it might be learned behaviour, but they embody leadership. It's really interesting for me because understanding that this is a process, this can be learned behaviour is really quite potent information. Yeah. When things go well, there's usually Well, almost always you'll find good leadership is part of it. Where things go badly, where people are unhappy, frustrated, maybe kept small, you usually find this poor leadership involved in that. I really believe in leadership as a concept, and it's got nothing to do with power or status, just this magical force that I think I say in the beginning of the book, and it's a couple of years since I wrote it actually, but I think I start by saying exactly that good leadership, quite simply, makes the world a better place. I believe that. The more I work in this business, the more sure I am that the effect of good leadership is worth it. It justifies the effort. In terms of making the world a better place then, can you tell me what is the mission of Leader Connect? Because I think there are lots of different ways of getting leadership training. One of the standout features of Leader Connect is the remote leadership training aspect of it, but that's not the entirety of what you do. So what is the mission and the means, I guess, of Leader Connect? It's experiential leadership training is what we deliver, and we deliver it. Essentially, it's what I just said, it makes the world a better place. But more specifically, it makes an organisation more effective. So we run courses, and I'll come on to the video thing, but we run live, usually residential courses. Some of our courses are accredited by the Institute of Leadership, and they're interesting. Our courses are deliberately interesting. I hate PowerPoint. One of the things I loathe, actually, is where organisations or courses, and I've been on courses like this, where they overteach, where you get 90 slides that tell you absolutely everything about a subject. And yet somehow at the end, you pass the test and you still can't do it. And I think that's nonsense. I think you should only give people the information to get on with it. You just give them enough information. So our courses, we explain a few key models of leadership. And like I said, no PowerPoint slides. We Almost all of this stuff comes from my book. And we explain the model, a little bit of theory, have a chat around it, generally very informal, sat around with a coffee. And then we will put people into one of these experiential learning projects. And these are really cleverly designed. And I'm not showing off. It's not me that designs them, but Markus, who works with me, has come up with some genius projects projects, and they create all of the tensions that you get in a work situation. Although the project isn't a work situation, all of the tensions are there. There'll be something to achieve. They will be There'll be limited resources, perhaps, or competition for resources. There'll be a hierarchy of some sort. There'll be time pressure. So we create an alternate reality, but one that will bring out people's normal behaviour, their natural behaviours. And then as they go through the project, well, we let the project run, and some of them go on for hours, like four or five hours. And then at the end, we have a... And the magic really is done in this bit at the end. We do a review where people absolutely reflect on and open up on and consider how they felt, how they behaved, and how it went, and then commit to develop or change anything that they need to. Then we go through that circle again. Over a few days, we'll complete six or seven major projects. It's really effective. It's something that I've picked up over the last 15 years, and I think we do it really well. What's the geographic footprint of the company? Because I was on LinkedIn earlier today, and you had a couple of unusual things going on. Yeah. You mean Libya Yeah, I think. Perhaps. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, mostly we run courses primarily all over the UK. So we work for quite a few big organisations. University of Sheffield is a fairly big client. We've been running a major residential for them for the last few years. Sanofi Pharmaceuticals we work for. But yes, I've also got one member of our team who is permanently based in Libya, working for a branch of the Libyan government, bringing training so far hundreds of people. But it's just an ongoing mission to really transform leadership across the government in Libya, across part of the government in Libya. So quite a spread. And then, of course, Leader Connect, our video platform, which has got, well, we've got all sorts on, but podcasts from several American ones, actually. Our subscribers, they come from all over. I mean, the bulk are probably UK, but America, Canada, Australia, I can think of, India. I guess our reach in that reflect, in that effect, is pretty international. The book has, as you probably saw on Amazon, we've sold a lot of copies. Again, that's truly international. Yeah, I think what startled me a little bit, and for the listener, maybe a good way to describe Leader Connect is it comes across as a little bit like a Netflix for leadership. Is that a fair characterisation? Yes, I think it's exactly that. It's cheaper than Netflix, too, which was also a surprise because a lot of the time people overpriced this thing, but you've pitched it, so it's very affordable, which is, again, wonderfully impressive. Well, you know why they overpriced it? Because if you do these things in in a big way with venture capital money, of course, it's very easy to keep the price down. But doing something more homely. And I think my intention with Leader Connect isn't actually that it's Netflix. It's something a bit more connected, I suppose. I suppose that's what the connect word means. And it's actually quite hard to keep the price down when you're doing something on a smaller scale. So I think that's why you'll see people to do these things and price it at £1,000 or whatever. But yeah, I think we're 89, 99 for a year's subscription, I think is the current price. The connexion aspect to leader connect, how would you characterise that? Is there a community aspect to it? Actually, not really, in terms of you can't discuss. We don't have a chat function connexion between people. I think what I meant actually by the word connexion or the reason the word connexion is there is this connexion and direction theme I see, that leadership is about connexion. So no, there isn't a chat function. I mean, certainly our courses connect people. The people who've been on our courses always become very close to each other. You grow friendships and relationships that go on for, well, potentially forever, but for years. I've seen them myself. I've been on lots of courses. I once went on a leadership course, and that's the only course I've ever been on where I'm still connected with a couple of the people that were on that course. I couldn't tell you why that is, but it is a thing. So as you've been growing Leader Connect, I'm always curious when I meet very competent people to ask them where they struggled on that particular journey, because you've done a wonderful job growing that business. Nine people, that's no mean feat to keep them all fed and watered and gainfully employed. What have been the road bumps along the way? I guess what do you continue to struggle with? Because nobody has it all to go in their own way all the time. Yeah, It's funny that because looking back, it all looks rosy. It's easy to think, Well, I'm here now. That's gone well. But of course, that isn't the reality of the journey. Certainly, I had barriers early on to growth because nobody had ever taught me how to run a business. So there was stuff that I just didn't know. And specifically, I remember years ago, VAT, I did not understand VAT, and I deliberately, and I know since I've met other people who do the same thing, I tried to stay below the VAT threshold because I couldn't get my head around what it meant to cross that threshold. And I also don't particularly enjoy that administration. It's not something I don't like it at all. Now, the reality is, of course, we've obviously crossed that and it's made no negative difference at all. But where do you get advice like that? When you've got an idea and the idea is going well, but the process, the constraints of organisational structure get in your And you have to find someone who... You need some a mentor, I guess, or you learn by experience. And I think in this case, I ask people questions. I got a very good accountant, actually, but I didn't have early on. I had an accountant who was less competent and didn't necessarily give the right advice. That was definitely a barrier. And the other thing was setting up a tech platform like Like Leader Connect, it's complicated. It's a complicated thing. How do you do it? Where do you start? If you're going to set up a video streaming platform, I mean, gosh, I don't know anyone else who's done that. I don't know who runs Netflix, but I don't know them. We're not mates. So how do we even start? And early on, I probably made a bit of a mistake with the tech partners we used initially who were enthusiastic but also just didn't know how to do this stuff. And it took me a while to spot that, to spot that we were getting just too many small errors. And if things go wrong, you lose people. If people find that when they go to login, it doesn't work or their passwords being rejected and all that nonsense, which you often get with websites. So We did, I guess you'd call it a beta version of Leader Connect that came out two years ago. And in the early days, I have to say, certainly it caused me more frustration than benefit. We changed tech provider to a lovely organisation called Big Fish Internet, and it works like clockwork now. Totally different. I think having been on the tech end of things For most of my career, I would have expected you to tell me that that was a problem, because the problem with web design companies, I'll put it this way, is when a client walks in, they'll find a way to say they can do it. I put my hand up and say, I've done it, because the problem with that industry is it's project revenue. You have to keep feeding the beast, and that never really puts the client in the driving seat, giving them a lot of confidence. Yeah, it's a shame you had that. But I'm glad that you only had to go through that once and not multiple times, as is often the case. Well, once so far. You never really know what's next either, do you? But it feels solid now. What we've got is a very solid platform. It's when you try and grow, it's when you change something, that's where you trade potential for a bit of risk, I think, every time you try and grow. Yeah. And you suddenly decide you're trying to build something with Lego when you should be using a Meccano set. Yeah. Sorry. That's a very nerdy reference for my Americans. I think one of the things that I experienced early in my business career that you touched on a little bit there is what some people would call entrepreneurial loneliness or isolation. That you don't know what you don't know, but you don't have anyone to ask. And There are enterprise agencies, there are bank managers, there are accountants, but they often don't really have the answers either. For me, one of the most powerful things was having a group of what you might call fellow travellers, Having business buddies who are in some areas light years ahead of me and in other areas where I'm perhaps leading. But it gives you a network and a safety net, I guess, to fall back on when you have knowledge gaps. And because I'm speaking to these people frequently, they will often spot my gaps or blind spots before they become a problem, which is extremely useful. But the VAT one, yes, I recognise that. I don't look after my money anymore for very good reasons. Yeah, terrifying. But you're right. Those, I don't know, critical friends, people who... So I have a guy who works with me called Tony, and he's worked with me previously in a job a few years ago before Leader Connect. He is absolutely brilliant at telling me when I'm wrong, because I have a lot of ideas. I think quite obtusely, I think. But some of my ideas are good and some of my ideas are less so. And Tony's honestly very good at, firstly, spotting the difference as to whether it's a good idea or a bad one. But then probably most importantly, he's really good at telling me when I'm wrong. The same applies in my army career, actually. The best organisations or the best people I've worked with When I was commanding a Gurkha unit in Iraq in 2006, 2007, we had a pretty hard talk. We were under fire every day, I would say, for the six or seven months we were there, but I had a brilliant second in command, a guy called Kim Gauchan, Captain Kim Gauchan. He was the same. Absolutely, we got on extremely well. We're still great friends. I'm seeing him in two weeks time, actually. But He would absolutely tell me when I was off track, and I've always valued that. I think it's really important. I think for me, this is one of the key leadership qualities, and I think something that we could all all do with paying a little bit more attention to, which is number one, actually backing our own ideas. For me, this is a really important leadership characteristic. A lot of people have ideas, but they don't really bet on themselves. But that needs to be balanced with the humility to pay attention to the feedback that's telling you you were wrong. And for me, that's far less common. Yeah. But if there's no penalty to being wrong, you see, if your ego isn't invested in being right, and that's about having the right relationships and the right culture. So I really don't mind. I'd rather be wrong and be told I was wrong early than try and push something through and find out I'm wrong through my own arrogance, find out that I'm wrong when the situation has become far more serious. And I've never thought that the person leading an organisation, I mean, statistically, they're not going to be the cleverest. They're really not. And Unless you only select thick people in order to make yourself look clever, you're not going to be. And I'm definitely not the cleverest person in your own organisation. And even if there are some things that perhaps I am better at, there'd be many others that somebody else is better at. So a big part of a team is enabling those ideas and those brains and giving people freedom, freedom within Boundaries is a concept that's quite big in my work, something I got from the military, actually, Freedom Within Boundaries. But it's a lovely term, a lovely phrase. It is. I think that probably brings us to a wonderful place to begin wrapping up. Neil, it has been an absolute pleasure to meet you. I've really enjoyed myself. It's been lovely to hear about your business, and I would really love to have you back on the show. A lot of the time when I have a guest on for the first time I've never met before, it can be really awkward. But it's been really easy with you talking about things which really matter. I think if we want people to follow us, whether that's customers, whether that's an audience, whether that's our team, if we want them to become loyal, to do things which are difficult, to go through the discomfort of creating content or doing things in our business for our. Leadership is really at the heart of that. For anybody listening wondering, why is Bob talking about leadership this week? Leadership is at the heart of success in any area of business. Neil Jird, for everything you brought to the topic We have leadership today, thank you so much. Bob, thank you. It's been my pleasure, too. I've really enjoyed our chat. As you say, I found it very easy. I'm sure we'll meet again. Thank you for having me on your show. It is my pleasure. For you, hope, that does bring us to the end of another episode. Thank you to you for listening. If you did enjoy the show, then I would invite you to leave a five-star review wherever you listen to podcast. That is five like the fingers on your hand, not four, three, two, or one. If you did enjoy the show, you will love the personal brand, the business roadmap. It's 100% free as a gift from me. It's 50 pages of everything you'll need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Just click the link in the show notes or visit amplifimee. Agency/roadmap. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Neil. See you next time.