Dig Deeper

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 framework I've used for years to work with my own fear, especially before walking onto a stage: name it, frame it, tame it. It's simple, and it applies to all the everyday moments where the stakes feel higher than they probably are.Here's what I get into:The moment before I addressed a large audience for the first time, and what was actually running through my headWhy putting words to a feeling changes what your brain does nextThe difference between fears that are about survival and fears that are about social standingWhy the worst case version we play in our heads rarely shows up in real lifeA small action that builds more real confidence than another round of rehearsalWhy naming your fears out loud builds trust with the people you leadReferencesFear - Name It Frame It Tame It worksheetStart Close In | David WhyteCheck out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

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 person will arrive with the right answers and fix things. We race straight to task. We skip the human stuff. We declare a safe space and wonder why trust is still so hard to build, and so easy to lose.What if there's a fundamentally different way of meeting each other? One that's not just a nice idea, but a proven strategy for performance under the kind of pressure that matters most?In this conversation, Christian Penny brings a frame that has been tested across thousands of years on the marae and refined through decades of applying it in drama schools, Olympic programmes, and elite Super Rugby environments. It's a frame where presence and people come before task, not as an indulgence, but as the very investment that pays off when the pressure is on. Where leadership isn't a position but a question: what does this moment require, and who in the room can answer it? And where your distinct strengths, the things that only you bring, aren't optional extras but the contribution your team is quietly waiting for you to own.Christian Penny is one of New Zealand's most quietly radical leadership thinkers. A former Director of Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School, co-architect of the Ruku Ao leadership programme for senior public sector leaders, and a current adviser to the Hurricanes Super Rugby team and the Black Ferns Sevens, Christian has spent his career asking a single question across wildly different performance contexts: what really creates the conditions where people and performance can thrive? Drawing on Māori frameworks, the craft of theatre, and years at the edge of elite sport, he brings a practice that bridges indigenous wisdom and contemporary leadership with uncommon depth and warmth.In this episode, you will discover:How the myth of the hero leader persists even when we know it doesn't work, and what the marae offers as a practical, tested alternativeWhy putting people before task isn't soft leadership, it's the investment that pays off under the most intense pressureHow "go slow to go fast" transforms team performance precisely when it counts mostWhy alignment is often a fantasy, and how learning to use each other's difference is the real leadership skillHow to ask the question that changes the room: "What does this moment require, and who can lead us here?"Why trust is emergent, not declared, and what that means for how you build it deliberatelyHow knowing and naming your strengths doesn't just make you more potent, it makes life easier for everyone around youWhy courage, not confidence, is the real prerequisite for stepping up, and how that reframe changes everythingTimestamps:(00:00) - The Myth of the Hero Leader(10:25) - Presence Over Task in Leadership(17:26) - The Shift from Hero to Host Leadership(23:31) - Emergent Leadership and Dynamic Teams(30:01) - Overcoming Resistance to New Leadership Models(36:37) - The Importance of Small Victories in LeadershipOther references:Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama SchoolRuku Ao leadership programmeManutūkē Marae, RongowhakaataHigh Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ)The HurricanesBlack Ferns SevensDigby Scott's Superpowers exerciseYou can find Christian at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-penny-54016515/Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

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 observation that the ability to bring back a wandering attention is the very root of judgement and character, he makes the case that where you direct your focus is not a time management question. It's an identity question.In this episode, we cover:Why reactive leadership is like playing whack-a-mole and what it costs you over timeThe difference between solving problems and building the systems that make fewer problems inevitableHow to define a leadership identity that guides your decisions before the pressure hitsA practical exercise to help you name your purpose and start leading from itThe one question that cuts through the noise: what do you need to build so your team can thrive without you?Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

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 let on.What if the thing that's missing isn't another goal, a bigger title, or a smarter strategy, but a deeper sense of what your leadership is actually for? In this conversation, Prina Shah and I explore the idea that legacy isn't something you earn at the end of a long career and hand it over at your farewell function. It's something you can build right now, today, with this team, on this project. We also get into what it really means to manage your energy rather than just your time, and what it looks like to step back from heroic leadership and build something that genuinely doesn't depend entirely on you.Prina Shah is a coach, consultant, trainer, speaker, and the author of Make Work Meaningful: How to Create a Culture That Leaves a Legacy. She's spent years working alongside executives who have achieved extraordinary things, and she asks the question most leaders are too busy to sit with: what's missing from a heart perspective? In this conversation, we explore:How to reframe legacy as something you leave every single day, not a footnote reserved for the end of a careerWhy leaders who carry that nagging sense of something missing often haven't yet defined what will actually fulfil themHow shifting from ambition to meaning changes the quality of decisions you makeWhy managing your energy rather than your time is the more honest path to sustained performanceHow a simple "door framing" practice can keep you genuinely present across a day of back-to-back meetingsWhy becoming the indispensable go-to in your organisation might be the thing quietly holding your team backHow building a learning culture inside your team creates resilience that doesn't depend on you to sustain itWhy the question "what important things have no action steps attached to them?" might be the most useful one you haven't been askingTimestamps:(00:00) - Reframing Legacy: A Daily Consideration(05:00) - The Missing Piece: Fulfilment Beyond Achievements(12:06) - Energy Management: The Key to Effective Leadership(18:06) - Creating a Learning Culture: Empowering Teams(25:00) - Breaking the Bottleneck: Trusting Your Team(32:12) - Redefining Work: Balancing Leadership and ReflectionOther references:Make Work Meaningful: How to Create a Culture That Leaves a Legacy — Prina ShahWays to Change Your Workplace Podcast — Prina Shah (host)Simon SinekSeth Godin — "work is not working""Becoming the Boss" — Linda A. Hill, Harvard Business Review (January 2007)Prina's self-coaching journalYou can find Prina at:Website: https://www.prinashah.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prinashah/Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

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 philosopher Simone Weil, who called attention the rarest form of generosity, Digby explores why treating attention as a deliberate leadership practice is one of the most powerful things you can do right now.In this episode, we cover:Why our capacity for sustained attention is under serious pressure and what that means for leadersThe four lenses of attention: personal, relational, directional, and contextualHow to read what's happening in a room and respond well when it countsPractical ways to apply each lens in your next conversation or meetingThree reflection questions to help you identify which lens you lean on and which you tend to neglectOther referencesStolen Focus | Johan HariFour Lenses DownloadHow to Read the Room Blog versionCheck out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

Emma Gibbens, strategic communications expert and author focused on honest, courageous conversations. She talks about naming difficult truths, treating honesty as a craft guided by intention, and why silence can be as harmful as bluntness. Conversation practices as cultural infrastructure, hosting power dynamics, and practical structures to stop gossip are also explored.

How many leadership books have you read this year? Now here's the harder question: how many hours have you spent genuinely studying the people you lead?For most leaders, there's a significant gap between those two answers. And that gap, more than almost anything else, explains leadership failure. The best leaders don't just consume content about leadership. They become students of humanity, curious, patient, and unrelenting in their effort to understand what makes people tick.In this episode, you'll discover why reading the room matters more than reading the latest leadership title, how Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety points back to how well leaders understand fear in human beings, and why calibrating yourself is every bit as important as reading others.You'll walk away with:Why the gap between leadership learning and people-studying is costing you and your teamThe two directions of study that every effective leader needs to develop: outward and inwardWhat Peter Drucker's landmark Harvard Business Review essay "Managing Oneself" tells us about the rigour of self-knowledgeA surfing metaphor that reframes what it means to lead with fluency rather than forceFour practical ideas you can start using today to become a more astute student of the people around youThe distinction between caring about your people and actually studying themWhether you're leading a large organisation or a small team, this episode is an invitation to treat the people around you as your greatest source of learning. Because you can't read the room if you don't know how you distort it.Check out my services and offerings at https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter at https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

Have you ever stopped to consider that the image you project as a capable, in-control leader might actually be the very thing keeping your people from truly connecting with you? There's a particular kind of isolation that comes with always having it together. And if you're honest with yourself, I wonder how much energy it costs you to maintain that facade and what it might be costing the people around you too.What if the shift that changes everything in your leadership isn't about acquiring more knowledge or developing another competency, but about letting go of the performance? This episode is an exploration of what becomes possible when leaders trade the polished, textbook version of themselves for something more real. We dig into the relationship between authenticity and energy, vulnerability and performance, and why learning together with your team might be the most underrated leadership practice available to you right now. What's possible here when you stop trying to be the one with all the answers?Rita Cincotta is a leadership expert, coach, and consultant with 25 years of experience supporting leaders across Australia. She's the founder of The Deliberate Leader, author of two books on leadership, and is currently pursuing a PhD to rigorously test whether deliberate leadership is genuinely distinct from other leadership approaches. Rita brings rare intellectual depth and disarming human warmth to this conversation and she models everything she talks about, right from the first moment. In this episode, you'll explore:How the image of having it all together can quietly push your people further awayWhy reconnecting with your purpose as a leader is the source of the energy your team needs from youHow a single piece of feedback, being called a "textbook reader" and became a turning point in how Rita ledWhy psychological safety isn't just a culture initiative, but a daily practice that starts with youHow leading with an L plate changes the dynamic between you and your team in profound waysWhy balancing empathy with performance becomes easier, not harder, when you lead human firstHow vulnerability at a senior level creates a ripple effect that lifts the energy of an entire teamWhy contributing to the learning of others not having the answers is where lasting leadership impact livesTimestamps:(00:00) - The Burden of Perception(10:10) - The Shift to Authenticity(20:47) - Embracing Vulnerability in Leadership(26:47) - Human First: Balancing Performance and Empathy(30:06) - The Messiness of Life and Leadership(36:39) - Learning Together: The Power of ContributionOther ReferencesYou are how you lead | Rita CincottaSwinburne University of TechnologyManaaki Tāngata | Victim Support NZHome and Away TV ShowMike House Podcast EpisodeJames McCulloch Podcast EpisodeDeal In Energy Blog Upgrade your Identity BlogForget Time Management, Master These Disciplines Instead BlogLeading Lasting ImpactYou can find Rita at:Website: https://thedeliberateleader.com.au/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rita-cincotta-80a1263/Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

Have you ever left an interaction at work feeling genuinely seen? And when did you last create that feeling for someone else?Most leaders focus on strategy, capability, and performance. But the ones who build real loyalty, the ones whose people genuinely want to show up for, tend to share something far simpler: they pay attention to the human stuff. The greeting. The name. That moment of genuine connection in an otherwise ordinary day.This episode starts with a story from an ordinary morning in a coffee shop that stopped me in my tracks. It's a story about two places, two very different choices, and what it reveals about the kind of leader you're choosing to be every single day.You'll discover why attention, not talent or strategy, is the real currency of trust, how the smallest interactions shape loyalty more than most leaders realise, and why making people feel seen doesn't require anything extraordinary. It just requires intention.I'll walk you through:Why the difference between a leader people want to follow and one they don't often has nothing to do with skill or resourcesHow a headmaster in a school of 900 kids used one simple practice to shape the people around himThe distinction between doing excellent work and giving people your attention — and why both matterTwo honest questions to sit with about how seen you make your people feelWhy this doesn't need to be big stuff — it just needs to be human stuffWhether you're leading a large organisation or a small team, this episode is a gentle reminder that the most impactful thing you can do today might take less than thirty seconds.Check out my services and offerings at https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter at https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

What if the strategies gathering dust in your organisation aren't the problem, but rather the shadow strategies everyone's actually following? You know the ones. The unspoken "work harder, work longer, make more money" approach that contradicts your official commitment to innovation and people-centred leadership. That tension between what you say you're doing and what's actually happening costs more than productivity. It costs truth. And when organisations can't tell themselves the truth about what's really going on, they plateau in ways that feel both frustrating and invisible.This conversation explores a different way forward, one that honours healthy friction over comfort, embodied wisdom over abstract strategy, and possibility over certainty. Melissa Clark-Reynolds brings a rare combination of street-smart entrepreneurship and rigorous futures thinking to help leaders navigate complexity with both imagination and pragmatism. Melissa is a street smart futurist who started university at 15, built and sold multiple tech companies, and was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the tech sector. She's trained at Stanford's Institute for the Future and the UK's School for International Futures, bringing both rigorous methodology and practical wisdom to her work with organisations navigating uncertain futures. In this conversation, you'll discover:How to identify the "shadow strategy" your organisation is actually following beneath the official one, and why naming this incongruence is the first step toward real transformationWhy living in possibility rather than certainty opens more pathways forward than any five-year plan, and what questions like "I wonder" and "how might we" make possibleHow embodied strategy reveals truths that spreadsheets and presentations hide, and what happens when teams physically experience the difference between growth, transformation, and collapseWhy curiosity combined with commitment to excellence creates the conditions for continuous improvement, rather than the confident mediocrity that keeps organisations stuckHow to reframe the past as an empowering platform rather than a weight to escape from, particularly through bicultural and indigenous perspectives on whakapapa and timeWhat it means to find your tribe, the people who challenge you with love and compassion, see something more in you, and give you invitations to greatness rather than comfortable reinforcementWhy effective leadership means knowing whether you want to be right or you want to be effective, and how bringing the full triangle of inspirers, doers, planners, and storytellers creates sustainable impactHow to embrace your outlierness as a superpower rather than moderating yourself into mediocrity, and why the world needs the juiciness of your weirdnessOther References:Elisabeth Kübler-RossSohail InayatullahJennifer Garvey BergerDavid Snowden - Cynefin frameworkInstitute for the FutureStanford UniversitySchool for International FuturesCultivating LeadershipCasual Layered Analysis FrameworkEpisode 22 with Jennifer Garvey BergerEpisode 26 with Kirsten PattersonEpisode 17 with Derek SiversTimestamps:(00:00) - The Power of Healthy Friction(13:32) - Finding Your Tribe(20:39) - Embodying Strategy in Organisations(25:12) - Incongruence in Organisational Strategies(30:23) - Living in Possibility: Leadership Mindset(32:27) - Reframing Time: Past, Present, and FutureYou can find Melissa at:Website: https://www.melissaclarkreynolds.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissaclarkr/Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribeFollow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/