Today’s interview is with Lauren Currie OBE, the CEO of Stride. They are on a mission to democratise leadership development. Lauren joins me today to talk about leadership, Stride, the problem with leadership development, what they are trying to do to solve this problem and what we should all be doing to develop their our own leadership skills and experience capabilities.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leading a digital transformation that will never end – Interview with Duncan Macdonald of UPC Switzerland – and is number 342 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on June 2nd from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation – which is more important than ever in the COVID-19 age. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Lauren:

• The average age that you are when you have your first leadership development training experience is 42 and the average age of a first time leader is 30.
• Young professionals today say that development opportunities are the number one reason that they choose one job over another.
• Existing leadership development programmes, tools and methods are expensive, they don’t scale and are often reserved for senior managers.
• Given that we are currently in a lockdown situation, the current model of leadership development doesn’t work.
• Lauren believes that there’s a big gap in the market and there is a huge opportunity to build Stride: a beautiful personal companion that lives in your pocket and helps you develop as a leader at your pace and in a way that works for you.
• Leadership is such a nebulous word.
• If you Google the word leadership, you get something ridiculous like 4479 million results all of these different definitions of leadership.
• Leadership has not got anything to do with seniority or the position you have in a company.
• Leadership is about your personal attributes.
• Leadership and management get very confused. People don’t always recognise that they’re not synonymous.
• Leadership is about social influence and creating the right conditions for people to thrive and perform. That means it can show up anywhere and is not about hierarchy and authority or title and things.
• Stride takes a mobile first, personalized, bite size content, learn by doing approach.
• The content in the app breaks down into three buckets: one, short 3-4 min lectures created by leadership experts, two, a series of assignments and assessments based on those lectures and three, reflective exercises to help embed learning and build new habits.
• The content is customised to the learner though an initial assessment which highlights their natural style.
• They are very agnostic when its comes to preferred leadership styles.
• However, the one model that they do use in their assessment is the Situational Leadership model.
• Leaders who are still trying to hold on to a kind of top down, command and control approach are finding out that it’s not feasible anymore.
• It’s fascinating to see how leaders of the world are responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Countries like Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, etc all have female leaders and those leaders are giving us a very different and very attractive way of wielding power. And, they’re doing it in different ways.
• I’m hoping that this will wake organisations up to the strength and power of this more feminine way of leading and that we hire that way and we elect more that way.
• The good and the great examples are luminous.
• Lauren’s advice: Listen, listen harder, listen better to both your employees and your customers. Most companies are still not listening to their employees and their customers.
• We should also learn to focus less on the what and more on the how.
• It’s the how that enables you to build your what. The how includes things like…..How do we show up every day? How do we talk to each other? How do we give each other feedback? How do we talk to our customers? How do we treat people who leave our organisation? How do we tell our story? …..the invisible parts of how people work together.
• One of Lauren’s most favourite questions: What is the behaviour that is most rewarded in your team meetings?
• Lauren’s Punk CX word: Rebellious
• Lauren’s company that epitomises a Punk CX approach: Gravity Payments.

About Lauren

Lauren Currie OBE is the CEO of Stride; on a mission to democratise leadership development. Lauren is the Founder of UPFRONT; on a mission to change confidence. She’s a Trustee of the Design Council and Pregnant Then Screwed. In 2017, Lauren was awarded an OBE for her services to design and diversity.

Check out Stride, say Hi to Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @_laurencurrie_ and @_laurencurrie_ and feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn here.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay