Dig Deeper

When one of your people brings you work that's accurate, well researched and clearly argued, and it still goes nowhere, where do you look for the reason? At the decision maker who ignored the evidence? Or at what your person couldn't see from where they were sitting? In this solocast, I start with a CFO placement I lost early in my career as a recruitment consultant. I had the strongest candidate...

What if the most powerful thing you can do to lift your team's performance isn't to add more, but to remove what's getting in the way? And what does a sheep meat trade ban in Mexico have to do with how one CEO is building a high-performing city? In this conversation, David MacLennan and I get into what 15 years of diplomacy teaches you about leading without authority, a trade crisis that became hi...

Someone comes to you with a problem. What's your first move? For a lot of us, there's a pull to just solve it, hand over the answer, and feel useful. It's a natural instinct. It's also, more often than not, the least helpful thing you can do. This episode walks through a model I've used in workshops for years: five levels of intention, from combatant at the bottom right up to co-creator at the top...

How do you know if the way you're showing up as a leader is actually landing the way you mean it to? Francois Barton has spent years learning to host, not control. As chief executive of New Zealand's largest CEO group, his job isn't to have the answers, it's to set the table and get out of the way. In this conversation he talks candidly about the moment a partner pointed out the gap between his in...

You walk into a room where nobody knows you. No shared history, nobody to vouch for you, and whatever you've built is sitting in a file the person across from you will never open. So what actually earns you credibility in the next ten minutes? I've been living this question. Over the past few months I've been building a practice in Perth, and almost twenty years of trust earned in New Zealand coun...

How do you know when your team needs a rebel and when they need a prefect? And what happens when you've only ever learned to lead one of them? In this episode, I sit down with Cat Hall to explore an idea we built together years ago: rebels and prefects, and why both are essential when you're driving change. Cat brings six research-backed traits from her master's in Change and Organisational Resili...

When everything around your team feels uncertain, what are you actually meant to give them? Not answers you don't have. Not confidence you can't hold onto forever. A few weeks back, working with a group of senior leaders from a New Zealand local government agency, I asked what they found hardest about leading through uncertainty. Almost every answer came back the same: it's hard to give people cer...

You've probably heard the advice: back yourself, have confidence, don't let self-doubt hold you back. But what happens when confidence tips into needing to prove something? And what happens when you're the one everyone comes to for the answer, every single time? In this conversation, Monique Davidson traces her own shift from proving herself to improving herself, and what that's changed about how...

Do you ever act fast and call it decisive, only to find out later you were missing half the picture? Or maybe you can see exactly what's going wrong, but you're not the one who gets to change it? This episode explores why "focus on what you can control" is only half the story. Acting with agency but no awareness can set you up for exactly the mess you were trying to avoid. This episode walks throu...

How much of your energy goes into making sure everything looks perfect? Into being the leader who's got it handled, even on the days you really haven't? This episode pulls together five conversations from the Dig Deeper archive, each one built around the same discovery: the leaders who earn real trust aren't the ones with all the answers. They're the ones who let people see what they're still work...

Do you know that feeling when you're the one everyone comes to, the one with the answers, the one holding it all together? It can feel like competence. It might actually be a bottleneck with your name on the label. In this solocast I share a moment from a coaching conversation with a leader who runs a big, messy part of the health system. She described her role as owning the circus, then caught he...

What if the thing you're calling stuck is actually the moment your character is being revealed, not tested? Most of us treat the messy middle, that stretch between where we are and where we'd rather be, as something to survive rather than something to learn from. We chase the next skill, the next framework, the next fix, when the real block might be a story we've been telling ourselves for years w...

You've probably noticed that the way you lead in one room doesn't quite land in the next. The approach that makes you sharp in a crisis can fall flat in a quiet one-on-one. And most of the time you're not choosing your style at all. You're running the one that comes naturally. This solocast looks at two things that separate leaders who operate well at senior levels: fluency and fluidity. Fluency i...

Have you ever caught yourself fighting a habit, a reaction, a way of showing up that you've been trying to fix for years? There's something worth sitting with in that. What if the behaviour you want to change isn't actually broken? What if it's doing exactly what it was designed to do, but it’s now just well past the point where it's still useful? In this episode, Dr. Amy Silver and I explore the...

Right now, public sector organisations across New Zealand are losing people in numbers we haven't seen before. The redundancy figures get reported. The org chart gets updated. But what happens to the knowledge that walks out the door with them, the way someone could read a tricky stakeholder in three seconds, the history of why a system was built the way it was, the relationships that kept the whe...

How much of your energy goes into being the version of yourself you think the room expects? For many senior leaders, that performance runs quietly in the background all day, and it is exhausting. You spend years climbing toward the room where the big decisions get made, only to arrive and quietly wonder whether the person doing the job is actually you. This episode explores what changes when you s...

How much of your day do you actually choose to give your attention to? Not just your time but your attention. Because there's a difference. And most leaders are managing the wrong thing. This episode cuts through the noise around productivity to explore what's really going on when leaders feel stretched thin and constantly reactive. The answer isn't a better calendar or a tighter to-do list. It's...

How much of what you measure actually tells you whether you're making a difference? Most senior leaders can point to a dashboard full of healthy-looking numbers. Attendance is up, participation is steady, the reports come back green. And underneath it all sits a question that's easy to avoid: is any of this the thing that actually matters? Grant Yonge took a job with that exact question built into...

You know how most days go. There's the list to clear, the email that just landed, the conversation that has to happen by Friday. You sort it, and tomorrow you do it all again. Those things matter, and I'm not going to pretend they don't. But if a good day's work is only ever solving the problems of that day, I reckon you're missing a trick. Because your days become your weeks, become your years. W...

There's something seductive about being the leader who walks into the room with the answers. Leadership culture has spent decades rewarding exactly that: the person who steps up, takes charge, and makes things happen. What if that pattern, the very thing that got you here, is also quietly limiting how far your people can go? And what if the most significant move available to you right now isn't to...

Have you ever stood in front of a room with your heart thumping in your ears? Or walked away from a moment knowing you should have spoken up, and didn't? Fear runs more of our leadership than we like to admit. Powering through it works for a while, until it doesn't. Getting specific about what's actually going on underneath is where the real shift starts. In this solocast I share a three-part fram...

What if the leadership model you've inherited is the very thing standing between your team and its potential? Most of us have experienced at least once what it feels like when a team is genuinely alive. When trust is in the room. When leadership moves around naturally, and people show up as their whole selves. And yet for most leaders, most of the time, the unspoken hope remains that the right per...

You're across everything. The problems, the people, the pressure. And somehow, no matter how much you get through, there's always another thing popping up that needs your attention. Sound familiar? In this episode, Digby explores what it actually means to have a leadership identity and why most leaders are defining theirs by accident, one reactive moment at a time. Drawing on William James's obser...

You've built the career. You've hit the milestones, earned the respect, ticked the boxes that once seemed so far away. And yet there's a quiet discomfort underneath it all. Something that's hard to name but hard to ignore. A sense that the achievements are real, and yet something at the heart of it is still missing. I wonder if that feeling is more common among successful leaders than any of us le...

Have you ever missed the moment? Something shifted in a conversation or a meeting, and by the time you noticed, you were already playing catch up. In a world that's systematically eroding our capacity for sustained attention, how do we stay genuinely tuned in when it matters most? This episode introduces a practical framework for sharpening your attention in the room. Drawing on the work of philos...