IMI Talking Leadership

Today we will turn our focus to the people who make businesses go. HR is being tested like never before in our current landscape, with a fine balance between focusing on business growth and developing performance capabilities for the now – and for the future.  I am joined by Jon Ingham, a people and organisation development strategist. Jon is a HR Executive ‘Top HR Tech Influencer’, an independent...

Today we will take a closer look at leading a remote workforce, the challenges therein and the solutions that companies have moved towards during this time of change.  I am joined by Jennifer Dowling, a work and organisational psychologist and the director of Train Remote, which offers comprehensive capabilities and knowledge for your organisation to harness the potential of remote work and remote...

The IMI Talking Leadership podcast is now available on Spotify! Be sure to check back for new episodes over the coming weeks.

Today we’re joined by Filip Moriau, Founder and CEO of Stragilon, a Berlin based consultancy specialising in innovation, agility and development, and also an upcoming speaker at IMI’s last People Strategy Network event of the year. We talked about bureaucracy in organisations and how it can stifle collaboration and innovation, and how leader’s in an organisation can move agility from a word on a p...

Our 2020 National Management Conference – the first one ever to be delivered entirely virtually – featured an array of world-class speakers. In this episode, we talked to Cali Williams Yost, Founder and CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group, about the present, and future, of flexible work practices. Then we talked to Michael Jacobides, who holds the Sir Donald Gordon Chair of Entrepreneurship & Innovatio...

Today we're talking about the Foreign Direct Investment community in Ireland, from the impacts of the current crisis to how we are positioned to get back on a path to growth. A sector that employs 245,000 people directly, and many more indirectly, the change in Ireland’s economy can be quite neatly traced back to the 80’s and 90’s when a proactive policy was put in place to attract Foreign Direct...

We’re joined by one of Ireland’s most prominent business leaders – Anne O’Leary, CEO of Vodafone Ireland - to talk about lessons in leadership and what she's learnt from her professional career. We talked about resilience, purpose, how you deal with mistakes, following your instinct, ego and humility and the importance of gender diversity in business. This conversation was recorded in March 2020.

Today we’re talking collaboration – how to do it at as a team, an organisational and across borders. We're joined by Mark Mortensen, recent Masterclass speaker at IMI and Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. As someone with an engineering background, Mark approaches collaboration in a systematic way while allowing for the messy realities of life.

Today we’re joined by Paula Mullin, executive coach and IMI associate, about how to build your own executive presence in a virtual environment. From your appearance on a Zoom call to how you communicate in a virtual environment, we try and give you clear guidance on how to navigate it all as a leader and focus on those things that have changed most in the last few months and are likely to remain.

In today’s episode we're joined by Katharine Wilkinson, lead author for the New York Times’ bestseller Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. We talked about those practical things leaders can do in industries from food to government to reduce the environmental impact of their organisations, and the potential innovations out there that might change industrie...

Decisions, decisions. We’ve been asked to make a lot of them recently – some big, some small, some life-changing – but how can leaders actively improve their decision-making and get better outcomes? In this week’s episode we talk to Simon Haslam, International strategy consultant, programme lead for strategy at the Institute of Directors and visiting faculty as several business schools, including...

How can leaders discover their organisation's purpose and then, more importantly, make it operational? Purpose-led leaders achieve extraordinary results for their organisations. Acting as a central principle for people to guided by, an organisation with a strong purpose will make better, more aligned decisions, have more engaged and productive employees, and will produce stronger financial results...

What are the key elements leaders need to consider when devising their strategy in the current climate? Thomas C. Lawton, Professor of Strategy and International Business and Director of the Global Competitiveness Institute at Cork University Business School, outlines what lessons of the past can be applied today and the mindset leaders should use when looking to create their own breakout strategi...

The coronavirus pandemic has cast a harsh light on the financial security and sustainability of many organisations. Will the pandemic subtly shift how we do business and how we make ourselves financially secure? We’re joined by Cormac Lucey, a columnist on economics for the Sunday Times, a chartered accountant and lecturer in Business Finance at IMI, to talk about financial leadership in a crisis...

In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company. The Exponential Organisation has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology and transformational leadership. An Exponential Organisation can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new te...

How much coffee is too much? How much should we be moving every day? In this Lunchtime Listen, we talk to Dr. John Briffa about how leaders can achieve peak physical performance – all while breaking a few myths about health and wellbeing. Dr John Briffa is a practising doctor and award-winning health writer who has contributed to a wide variety of newspaper and magazines both in the UK and abroad....

For our lunchtime listen today we revisit our conversation with Dr Jill Walker. Originally released in November 2019. A key element of maximising leadership resilience, impact and success is making sure you have a healthy relationship with being busy – something which can be challenging in the modern culture of speed, ‘doing’ and distraction. Being too busy can seriously affect the performance and...

Is change changing? Does the modern business landscape mean we have to throw out our change toolkits and templates? Can we even devise a strategy any more? In this episode we talk to Deborah Rowland, a leading practitioner in the world of large, complex change. We explore how change will always be effected by the leader's inner state, and how 'making disturbance your friend' can lead to brilliant...

How can leaders achieve peak performance? Can we activate our minds in a way that allows us to perform at pace in the long-term? In this Lunchtime Listen we talk to Friederike Fabritius about the neuroscience behind peak performance, and how getting the mixture between ‘fun’, ‘fear’ and ‘focus’ right can make you and your organisation perform brilliantly. Friederike is a lead designer on the Maste...

With COVID-19 the majority of us have been forced to work remotely for the first time in our lives, while others are welcoming us into the experience while, in the macro sense, working remotely and leading virtual teams around the world is becoming much more common. We talked to Fiona Buckley, IMI associate and expert in the fields of work behaviour, leadership, coaching and mentoring, about how t...

Why do certain leaders have the ability to really engage, inspire and move people to act? For our lunchtime listen today, we revisit our conversation with Paula Mullin, IMI Connect Lounge Speaker and Executive Coach. Paula talks about Executive Presence and what it can teach leaders in how they should package themselves in order to drive their business, and teams, to success. Go to www.imi.ie for...

In a world of unimaginable complexity, how are leaders today supposed to make consistently great decisions, especially in the absence of tangible information? For our lunchtime listen this week, we revisit our conversation with Kriti Jain, a behavioural scientist passionate about developing research and training leaders in making better decisions. Kriti is a programme director on Leadership Decisi...

What does it mean to be agile? Can you really make an organisation more agile? Or can you only make individuals more agile? Today we’re joined by Kaihan Krippendorff, a Strategy and Innovation Expert - writing multiple best-selling books on the subject - and also IMI’s first Masterclass speaker of the year. We talked about the biggest blockers of agility and innovation in an organisation, how an i...

For BT, improving their customer service was a marathon journey, not a sprint. Over the course of 3 years, a radically new customer-centric culture delivered a 40-point NPS (Net Promoter Score) improvement, moving from the bottom 10% to the top 10% in customer satisfaction. By genuinely putting client feedback and the customers themselves at the heart of their business, the BT leadership team mode...

Today’s leaders must be agile. In the current economic environment, individuals are expected to be highly adaptable and rise to many unseen challenges. A fresh but proven approach to team building, improvisation (improv) encourages participants to develop the key components of being part of a high performing team. Neil Curran is a teaching and performing improv expert with over 18 years of managem...