Be More Wrong: How Failure Creates Outstanding Leaders

Want to become a better leader? You need to fail more.

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In this episode of How to Sell More, Mark Drager and guest Colin Hunter challenge the conventional wisdom that says leaders can do no wrong and explore the power of making mistakes. Colin, the author of Be More Wrong: How Failure Makes You an Outstanding Leader, says the traditional “command and control” leadership style doesn’t cut it anymore.

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The hard truth? If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not pushing hard enough. You need to model experimentation, not perfection.

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“The Be More Wrong principle is not going out and screwing up every day. It's about learning fast towards a purpose.” - Colin Hunter

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In Episode 103, you’ll learn that the real way to improve team performance is to create safe spaces to experiment, embrace calculated risks, and learn quickly from mistakes. This strategy isn’t about celebrating screw-ups, it’s about learning fast and on purpose. 

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Listen to discover Colin’s revolutionary framework of four leadership styles that help B2B companies transform failure into a competitive advantage:

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• Host: Putting your ego aside and bringing people together.
• Energizer: Crafting an inspiring story that team members see themselves in to fuel their drive.
• Disruptor: Generating fresh ideas and embracing risk and experimentation.

• Catalyst: Facilitating growth through coaching and mentorship.

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Colin is the CEO of the global leadership development company PotentialSquared, where he’s helped leaders transform their teams for over two decades.

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How does he do it? By disrupting traditional approaches and inspiring new ways to think about leadership centered on purposeful practice. 

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Want to build a team that breaks through performance plateaus, fosters innovation, and sells more? This episode is for you.

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Connect with Colin Hunter

• Linkedin
• Get Your Copy of Be More Wrong: How Failure Makes You an Outstanding Leader
• Learn more about PotentialSquared

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More About Today's Guest, Colin Hunter

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Colin Hunter is the CEO and Lead Guide of PotentialSquared, a global leadership development company he founded in 2001. With a passion for disrupting traditional leadership approaches, Colin and his international team create immersive, measurable experiences that inspire new ways of thinking and develop sustainable leadership habits.

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Under Colin's leadership, PotentialSquared has expanded across the US, Asia, and Europe. His expertise lies in leadership experimentation, creating impact through presence, and developing systems embedded with purposeful practice.

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A published author and advocate of the "Be More Wrong" philosophy, Colin is driven by the values of "paying it forward" and "build it and they will come."

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Originally from Scotland, Colin has lived internationally throughout his career and now resides in Aldbury, England with his family.

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When not transforming leadership practices, he can be found cycling through the French countryside, traveling, watching soccer, or enjoying fine food and wine.

A Transcription of The Talk

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‍Mark Drager: So Colin, at its core, your book is really about becoming a better leader. Your friend Michael Bungay Stanier wrote in the forward of the book, “If you're considering reading this book, it's because you're a leader who's looking to become a better leader.”

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And so, we know how important strong leadership is.  We’re all looking to become better leaders ourselves. My question to you is, why does it feel like right now, in 2025, leadership is missing in so many areas of our lives?

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Colin Hunter: Whoa, powerful first question. So yeah, let me start with that. I mean, for me, there's a piece. If you take the definition, our definition of leadership is about agitating for the future. Yeah, so that's the first bit. So if we're agitating for the future, I think the biggest thing that's holding us back and why leaders are not stepping up, or as a good friend Stephen Shedletzky would talk about the Speak Up Culture has died in a lot of organizations, a lot of places in the world, is people have a fear. They have a fear of either Being More Wrong. They have a fear of starting a dialog, a conversation, in a world where, and we were talking before we came on air, where we potentially don't understand either the exam question or the answer in what we're doing.

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I think for me, it's the undiscovered and the unusual leaders who are the ones who's starting to come to the forefront. And I feel like we're almost going back to the 60s, and I'm old enough to remember that, where we're starting to get the counterculture, the counter leadership culture. And therefore my belief is, even more now with the book, people are coming to things like Be More Wrong or Define Wrong with Amy Edmondson, her book, they're coming to that because they've tried everything else and it hasn't worked, or it's they're struggling to deal with it in the environment that they're dealing with at the moment.

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So I think it's the undiscovered leaders, it's the people who have a different voice, a different approach, who are either making the better products becoming the better leaders. But I also think there's this majority of the world that is so diverse in its background and aspects that to be a leader is the most difficult thing at the moment. Firstly, to understand, engage, and adapt your style to what's going on. So we've got to lead with experimentation.

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The biggest thing we're taught at school, don't fail. So it comes back to why I wrote the book because I've had a life of screw-ups and actually been reasonably successful with it. I still have my screw-ups, but those screw-ups have led to different ways of operating, practicing, and leading. And therefore I've found, well, hold on a second. If I can do this, how can I get that practice leadership out to other people to have a go? And that's what the younger people are coming through and doing. That's what startups are starting to do. They're starting to experiment. 

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Mark Drager: Do you feel like if we go back? I remember when I started my career in the early 2000s there was this generational shift happening because of the way marketing once was, sales once was, and we were, of course, moving into digital. And I would hear, I heard for probably a decade: Oh, things are changing. You can't do things the old way. 

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And I don't really hear that so much anymore because I think many of the people have simply embraced the difference, embraced the change. But my question around leadership and even the idea of Being More Wrong, there was a time when a leader wasn't wrong and couldn't share that they were wrong, and they had command and control, and people did what they said, whether they liked it or not. And maybe we didn't get the best outcomes. Maybe we weren't all happy at work, maybe we didn't have the highest levels of productivity, but it seems like leadership today, where you have to break down and give everyone exactly what they need, when they need, how they need while maintaining, you know, a cheery face. And now you're introducing with your book, the idea that maybe showing up and making mistakes, admitting these mistakes, being wrong, learning from them, being vulnerable, like did leadership used to be easier when everyone just did what I said and shut up and got on with it?

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Colin Hunter: Yeah, I've got a good friend, John Alexander, who wrote a book called Citizens, and I use sometimes his three stories. So, we used to have the story of the subjects, and I think some people still believe that leadership is the subject story, kings and queens. We do the doffing of the hats to kings and queens. Leader, it's the authorities. Yeah, you know about kings and queens, right? Exactly. Don't ask me about that.

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So that's the first thing. And then we got the consumer story. And I think for me, the individualistic focus of the consumer story is leading us down, buy more, sell more, build more. Yeah, all of that is happening now. And actually, I believe now what's coming to the fore, he talks about is a citizen story. So how do we build communities where people are engaged? And I do believe that younger generations are starting to build community, whether it's on social media, different technologies, they're starting to work that.

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So, leadership is more difficult when you've got a community to run. And that's why politics is so difficult at the moment because there are so many diverse communities. You run a business, you got your marketing function, your sales function, and all those different functions. So, therefore, you're almost asking yourself, what type of leadership is fit for so many different communities in there? And this is where I don't think there is one shape of leadership or leadership style that is right or wrong.

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So, therefore, for me, you've got to show up with a degree of an experimental mindset. And all the research and the sciences say now that leaders need to have this experimental mindset, and the better leaders will be the ones with an experimental mindset. So I don't think that the context is massively changed for us. But I think what we're dealing with as leaders is so significantly different, yeah, that the old style of leadership, the doth in the cap, the authority and using authority doesn't work.

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It doesn't work with my daughters. One of them's neurodiverse, yeah. I mean, if you look at the neurodiverse patterns, I realized I couldn't do the same with one daughter to the other daughter. So I had to adopt, and it didn't do it well. Had to adopt different styles with my daughters. Now I look at my teams, I look at my clients, massively diverse, different backgrounds.

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So therefore, if I don't experiment and I don't try different things with people, I'm just going to have a sales number in terms of building connections, which is poor, yeah. So how do I operate in different ways? That's what leaders need to do. So you're asking me a big question. I'm giving you when I get up each morning. How do I see people, and I see individuals in front of me, like yourself, and I've got to adapt my style to that individual in front of me. That's the leader's job. One conversation at a time, he can't help but do that without experimentation.

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Mark Drager: And the reason why I ask these questions this way is because, even for myself as a leader, I often, I don't know if “struggles” is the right word, but I question how much I need to ensure that the role, that the processes, that the environment, that maybe the coaching that's provided, how much of it is really on us to be able to shift or change or adapt to be able to get the best possible outcome. And then on the other side, how much of it is like, okay, like, just show up. Fit in the box I need you to fit in. Do what I need you to do. And let's get on with it.

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And I can even illustrate this with an example. I was listening on, I think it was to Dave Ramsey's show, and a business owner called in and said, "Listen, I'm really struggling. My very top salesperson, my very top salesperson, who's been with me for four years, drives like 60% of our business is absolutely the best. I would not change a single thing about her, except for this one thing. I can't get her to fill in the reports, and I can't get this saleswoman to fill in the reports and do the CRM, and she kind of breezes in and out like she's “special."

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And it upsets all the administrative teams. It upsets everyone else in the office. I think I got to fire her. And everyone in the comment section was going, What are you talking about? Like, why wouldn't you create a special, unique bubble process, like, why wouldn't you treat this person as a unique asset? Because they're doing so much for you, and if you let them go over this one little thing, they're gonna go to the competition, or they're gonna go start their own business and they're gonna put you out of business. And so this is, I think, the tension that I'm speaking to.

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Colin Hunter: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you've heard a guy called Rich Diviney who wrote a book called Attributes, and he designed the SEALs training. So Navy SEALs training and the book Attributes was a fascinating one for me because it links him with Simon's next work around the seals principle, they'd rather drop a level of performance and have the values in a person than have that person always performing and not living the values and disrupting the team.

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So I think it's, “be careful what you wish for” in terms of what you're creating. As a salesperson, in my life, there were people who were what we would call Mavericks. They were radical in terms of what they did, very successful, but actually, they created a subculture within the business. And again, this is the risk you've got to take. One is, if you put somebody in who's recruited with that lack of humility, lack of hunger for teamwork, and the degree of the people smarts are not there as well, you're going to cause yourself problems.

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So yeah, it's a tension. How do you recruit the right person? But more importantly, and this is where culture is now coming back into fore, “how do you create a culture within an organization?” Which is the one you want versus the one you got? Because you inherited somebody, or you recruited somebody who you knew was going to get you 10 million in sales in there.

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So you've got to be careful, somebody once said, “You got to be careful, Colin.” And I react to careful. I don't like the word careful because I want to take risks. I want to light my hair on fire,and  drive 100 million miles an hour. That's where I want to go. And they said, “You misunderstood me, Colin. I said, ‘You've got to be full of care’” and that's the principle.

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So the stoics would talk about the good judgments you make, the decisions you make, you've got to live with. So how often as leaders, have we got that inkling that just says this was the wrong person? Have this inkling that this is going to cause problems, or we get the look from the receptionist in the days where we had offices, the look from the receptionist going, “you recruited that person?”

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And it is that moment where we start to go, Okay, there's a piece for us that we've got to be very careful. The culture, the style, the behaviors, the attributes coming back to Rich Diviney, his work, where he would not put the best seal in charge of the team. He would pick the attributes that were necessary for that person to be successful as a leader or a salesperson or a team head in a particular area, and that's where we got to so it is a science, yeah, in some ways, which is as a leader, we got to sit down. We got to care about how we recruit. We’ve got to care about the types of people we put in place.

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But then again, you say, “So what's the answer, Colin? What's the chemistry equation you need to put in there?” It's about you going out as a leader in experiment on your business, on your products, you know, your customers. How are you going to create that right mix, that right recipe? I'd prefer a drop in performance and a team culture that was engaged and sustainable. That's what I would go for.

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Mark Drager: And so the book is called Be More Wrong, which is a pretty counterintuitive title. As leaders, we know that every decision we make and every action we take will have consequences. We know people are watching us. And we know people are counting on us.  So if anything, aren’t we expected to make good decisions and avoid mistakes? Why would you advocate for being wrong?

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Colin Hunter: Yep. So somebody was posting today about the dumb tax. As a leader, you've got to pay the dumb tax. So in other words, if you're going to stretch yourself, you grow yourself, you're going to pay the dumb tax, which speed is something you're going to make mistakes. And this person is, is a leader of business I work with, and he adds in, which is great, happy to pay the dumb tax, but we can mitigate that dumb tax, you know?

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And the whole principle behind the Be More Wrong principle is not going out and screwing up every day and going, whatever. I'm screwing up. I wrote the book. That's what I do. For me, it's about learning fast towards a purpose. So as he talks about in his post today, he was talking about, if you know where you're going and you know how to experiment and iterate towards something, you've got to expect failure.

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So I always am a cyclist, not a very good cyclist. And there's an A group, a B group, a C group, and the D group and the cyclist group. Now my bad days, I'm aiming for the D group because I just want to go around at a slow pace, have a coffee at the end, and be there. But I've got this in my mind, that if I want to grow and I want to get better, I've got to change my group. I've got to change my zip code. I've got to play with better people.

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Great coach called Mark Green. He always talks about changes in zip code. So as a leader, as soon as I take that title, soon as I have accountability for people and products and areas, I've got to start saying, so I've got to grow, to develop, and to do that, we've got to make mistakes, because we've got to stretch. You're going to make mistakes. So if you're not making mistakes, you're not pushing hard enough. Is the philosophy behind it? You're cycling with the wrong group. Yeah, you're wrong. Not really. You're cycling rather than being a cyclist. Yeah, you're leading rather than being a leader.

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So everything around being a leader in that is about, how do I stretch? How do I agitate for the future? And therefore you've got to fail. Yeah. Now defining failure is the next question. Because, yeah. So for me, what is failure? It's finding a way that doesn't work sometimes, you know, or it's collecting the dots, joining the dots, ideating. We do a lot of work in luxury, and one of my favorite clients has perfection as his brand statement. He works in high-end hotels, perfection. But actually, when he is operating in that, he's always about driving towards it, the failure. So he doesn't see failure. He just sees another way of not working, another way of iterating, and he's stretching towards that. So define failure. Change your ground. Learn fast. Yeah, you've been running a podcast for a while. How did you learn it? Was it fast?

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Mark Drager: I'm eight years in, had four podcasts, and I still find my work embarrassing to look at sometimes.

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Colin Hunter: You're in good company. Dali wanted to destroy all his works right up until, I think, his latter years. He wanted to destroy everything. He never thought it was good enough. And that's perfection gets in the way of progress for a lot of these things. So when you look at it. For me, there's imposter syndrome. We don't believe we're good enough. We don't believe our work is good enough.

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So I did six series of a podcast, and I love the experience of doing them, but Yeah, same. I wouldn't listen to my own podcast, but people were listening to my podcast. So for me, it's about, how do we get connection before content? When we start to do that as a leader, how do we build connection? How do we build a community that people can start to talk about what you're providing as a podcast hopes it's the same as a leader.

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So, therefore, in a leadership strength, there's a piece about the team in leadership, and particularly in sales, working together, engaging together. If you can get that and you can get connection between them. There's massive leverage off the back end of it, so I think we can get out of our own way. I had a breakdown when I was 30. It was all based on believing I wasn't good enough, and my whole life since then has been built on a concept I would probably call antifragile, which is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, Antifragile, which is, how do I ingest little bits of poison into my system, like the Caesars used to do to avoid poisoning every day? How do I get up? I hate speaking keynote speeches. That's my biggest hate. Fear off the scale, fear getting on that stage.

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Mark Drager: Why? You're quite good.

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Colin Hunter: For me, it's this, how do I get up there every day to have a go at stuff to do that? So firstly, most leaders are promoted one level above their competence, or they're promoted on the background to what they've done before.

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Mark Drager: And from an entrepreneur point of view, I've also witnessed for myself and others, that we could also grow our companies to a level or two above our operations capabilities as well. So it's not just even within a corporate environment.

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Colin Hunter: And then we become player-coaches. So we believe that we can go on the pitch, we can do everything for the team, and the team are going to get off the pitch and lead me to my role. We think we can go off in the stand and be thought. I went off to try to be a thought leader. Worst decision I made, yeah.

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So how do we as a leader, firstly, stay in the touchline as a player-coach, to give our teams opportunities as one thing, yeah. And then secondly, it's this piece about when we think about scaling, we think about how we want to run and lead a business. There's a piece for us about, how do we get better at almost learning ourselves? Treating ourselves in the right way? Being properly selfish about our own ways? So we can be better leaders as we grow, or getting out of the way and letting other people take it on.

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I think there's something in this around Be More Wrong, but there's something in this about our ego. There's something as an ego as a founder, I'm a control freak. So I used to joke, if you take the control out the control freak, all you've got is the freak. Yep.

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Mark Drager: I've never heard that.

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Colin Hunter: You know, we mentioned a guy called Michael Bungay Stanier, and he's classic. He did, and his team who he lets take over his business and run his business. And Shannon, his new CEO, is brilliant, and she just had to get him out of the way. Yeah. And he'd be happy for me to say, get him out. He's just done a brilliant job in allowing Shannon to run the business, yeah. But he, just like me, is, was a control freak. Wanted to get involved. Thought he was being helpful. So, therefore, how do I get out of my own way? Let my team get on the page, do what they're good at, and work it in there? But you've said it founder, the founder syndrome, yeah, is massive in there, yeah.

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Mark Drager: Let's talk about the leadership styles you outline in your book. You've identified distinct styles that can help leaders understand their strengths and areas for growth. Can you walk us through these different styles and how leaders can determine which ones they naturally gravitate toward?

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Colin Hunter: Yeah, for me, it's every style has a benefit and has a positive outcome for it. But the best way I find to describe this is, if you think about a hero's journey, you think about Lord of the Rings. You think about Frodo and Sam setting off on the quest. Hopefully, it works. On the Lord of the Rings…people are going, “Oh no, not the Lord of the Rings reference,” but Lord of the Rings. Passionate. It's the hero's journey. You can take Harry Potter if you want to be very British. And go Harry Potter.

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But there's a piece in here that as a leader, the first thing you need to do is get your team together, your fellowship, connect, and engage with your team. So pick your fellowship, pick your dwarf, your elf, your leader, pick your hobbits. And sometimes there's an art to that sometimes it's just luck that you get that group together, whoever needs to connect and engage. So that's the first style we talk about, is hosting. So how often does our ego get in the way of actually hosting? How often do we start to tell the stories rather than getting other people to tell the stories? So that Host is the first one.

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Once you've got your fellowship, then you've got a quest. So the Energizer is this piece about, and I think this is one of the biggest areas for leaders to develop, is having a narrative, a story, a compelling story, not only a compelling story but one that people can see their part in it. Yeah, now, with that compelling story, people seeing a part in it. The other bit is the Energizer is the personal resilience. Goes back to the anti-fragile. If I've had a bad night's sleep, I'm grumpy as hell walking in the morning, I could undo two years of work by having a bad conversation with somebody in the wrong way.

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So the Energizer is a combination of personal drive and energy and this inspiring story. And now we're getting into the leader, taking a front foot, getting involved in things. The next one is the disruptor. So what's the quest? What are the choices facing good and evil? How do we make the decisions? How do we get fresh ideas? And the Disruptor is the third style, yeah, to operate in there.

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So again, it's the experimentation. Yeah, think about Gandalf with the two tunnels, and he sits there very sagely smoking his pipe and looking at the two tunnels. And eventually, he goes, we're going this way. So what's the wisdom behind your choice? He says, “The air smells fresher up this way, we'll go that way.” It's that simple choice. So using your leadership skills, your data, your insights from your history, and doing that, but the Disruptor is risking the relationship you're agitating.

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And then the final system is the growth system, as we talk about it, which is the Catalyst, so mentoring and coaching. Now hands up if you read Michael Bungay Stanier's book The Coaching Habit. Yeah, coaching is one of the most difficult things to do, because our advice monster comes out all the time. Pin your ears back. I'm going to tell you how I've done it before. Here's my advice, yeah. And therefore people get reliant on a leader operating in that mode of here's my point of view. This is what you should making decisions.

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So the Catalyst is about having this 80% pretty much as coaching. 80% is asking questions and allowing other people to grow and having the capability to grow their own role or own development. So those are the four systems” Host, connecting, engaging. Energizer, compelling story, and drive personal drive. Disrupter, fresh ideas. And then the Catalyst is about growth for people and individuals. I'll pause there and see if there's any questions.

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Mark Drager: And so if you look at those four very different attributes and skill sets, almost it seems like all of them are required from a company point of view, from a leadership point of view. So is it that we dip, we have to dip in and out of these different roles, or is it about trying to plug in maybe some of our weaknesses, with our leadership team, with maybe a great COO or partner or a really solid team under you?

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Colin Hunter: So the way I look at this is systems. So you've got four systems. So if James Clear Atomic Habits, if you…yeah, my number one book. I would read it again and again again. But he says “We don't rise to the level of objectives. We fall to the level of our systems.”

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So your answer is exactly correct, which is we need to have strength in all of these four systems. The Host is about engagement. The Energizer is about energy. The Disruptor is about fresh ideas, transformation. And the Catalyst is about growth of individuals. So you need strength in all of those. So there's two aspects. One of them is the answers you can gain other people in there to almost compensate for your weakness, yeah, in what you do as a leader. The other way of looking at, I don't know if Squash is a game that's played in Canada, yeah,

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Mark Drager: It was. I think it was quite popular in the 80s.

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Colin Hunter: Okay, so I'm showing my age here, but squash you have a T junction in the middle of the court, and you're always trained as a squash player to go back to the T so that was the place you dominated. And there, you're able to stretch in the front of the court, the back of the court. The analogy we use with the model is that the ideal thing is, you have agility and being able to be a Host, be an Energizer, be a Disruptor, be a Catalyst, and know when is the right time to stretch into those different spaces.

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We have a dysfunctional style. Yeah, we always have one. Mine is bizarrely as the Catalyst because I do a lot of executive coaching, I do a lot of mentoring, but I have to, in a lot of cases, shut myself up because I'm going to give advice. Yeah, so as an executive coach, that's my stretch. So everybody has the dysfunctional, everybody has their strength. Mine's Energizer. But the aim of this is to build the systems with the styles to replicate habits daily that actually build those systems as a leader and strength.

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So, the bottom line is, we should be on an infinite journey, as Simon Sinek talks about, to build systems that are strong, that are creating sustainable systems for us to be a leader. Yeah.

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Mark Drager: And I can almost imagine, as you went through Host and Energizer, Disruptor, Catalyst, I can almost imagine different, like, it would be, actually pretty simple to diagnose different challenges you might have in your business and what aspect of the leadership might be missing. And so, for example, if you're really struggling with collaboration, kind of creative brainstorming from a team point of view, or even garnering feedback up from lower level teams, staff, maybe customer feedback. I could very much see where the Host being able to bring people together to build psychological safety could be really valuable.

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Whereas, you know, frankly, if you come in and people hate being at work, and on Sunday night, every night, they're like, I gotta go to work tomorrow, and there's no spark and there's no energy, and there's no hope and there's no future, and there's, you know, you talked about agitating to the future, then I could see why the Energizer is really important.

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And the Disruptor, you know, if we take it a step further, on the Disruptor side, if a business is not changing, is not embracing change, is not leaning into uncertainty, is not continually trying to find competitive advantages and increase, you know, products or experiment in different things. Why that would hold you back? And then, if there's no coaching, it's like your turnover is going to be crazy and you're not going to get stuff out of people. So, like, I could see the different aspects of the business already where this could be applied. Is it really that simple?

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Colin Hunter: I mean, fundamentally, yeah, I mean, it's for me, the system that's missing is what we call impact conversations, which is confidence, conviction, connection, which goes to your point about being grumpy one day. So Brene Brown is one of my favorite authors because of the vulnerability. So what's wrong with you walking in one day and going, you know, I've had the night from hell. The kids were up. I've had an argument. My soccer team lost on the weekend. You know, where our run is over, where, woe is me.

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So there's a piece where sometimes it's okay to be vulnerable and come in. But when we talk about confidence, conviction, connection, if every day I'm coming in with a lack of confidence, where physicality and vocality is low, I'm grumpy, I'm miserable, I'm biting people's heads off, then you're gonna have a problem. But if I walked in every day that way, there'd be, I could train people to be confident every day, but there's a degree of arrogance when other people are walking in and they're not feeling great, you've got to be able to do connection before content.

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So you've got to be able to, in this way, show some conviction, which is a second C, with values, yeah, identity, with a degree of consistency of how you operate. But the most important one is the third one, which is connection, which is, and I've got a good friend who runs conferences, Chad Littlefield, and he talks about, you know, connection before content. And he's so true. How can I lead unless I understand what's going on in the other people's minds? How can they be led unless they understand what's going through my mind?

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So connection, being able to be curious about what's going on in people's lives, sharing it, not just for the sake of it, but to use it. We use it in sales. So why wouldn't we use it in leadership? We want to understand what's going on in somebody's mind so we can sell them something. Yeah, leadership is not a popularity contest. It is about you building connection, to actually allow other people to feel like they are being led, that they have followership as a leader.

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So that's what the three C's are. So if you have confidence alone, you've got arrogance. If you've got conviction alone, you're you know what we talk about is a cause without a rebel, yeah, putting it around there. So you've got an identity, a purpose. But the biggest thing is, if you're just doing connection for the sake of it, you're a lovely person, but you're not getting anywhere, because the blend of those three, the systems, the other systems, are simple.

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The conversations, as we talked about in our pre-conversation, are the difficult bits, because that's where it gets messy. In the middle, yeah, with people who you think might go one way and they're easy that day. Other days you think it's easy. Yeah. And then you get there, and you go, Oh my God, this conversation, you must have had a few guests, so you thought this was going to be amazing, yeah. And then you get there, it's hard work.

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Mark Drager: I love all of my children equally.

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Colin Hunter: So for me, the system is that easy, but the one that makes it different, this is where Liane Davey in her book The Good Fight leaders need to have conflicts and conversations that almost could be described as being a professional irritant. Yep, in there. How do we agitate? How do we get conversations? And therefore, yeah, some mornings you can turn up grumpy, but other mornings, you've got to be right back on the game and say, yep, apologies for that, but we're back in here now? Yeah, it's the conversations are the most difficult.

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Mark Drager: A big challenge many leaders face is finding and developing the next generation of leaders. And I've gone through the research, I know older generations complained about baby boomers when they entered the workforce. And then people complained about Gen X. As an early millennial, I heard for years about how entitled and terrible Millennials are. And now we have Gen Z in the workforce, and that in itself brings its own challenge.

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Some are ambitious and ready to lead, while others want to be told exactly what to do, step by step, so they’re not responsible for the work or the outcome. How can we effectively recruit, mentor, and develop these younger team members into the leaders our organizations will need tomorrow?

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Colin Hunter: Yeah, that's great for me. I have two daughters who are in that generation you just talked about, and the eldest one is probably the best coach I've ever had, yeah, in terms of giving feedback on our conversations directly. So we've got to be careful that we don't put down that generation for just not doing things that we've always done as a boomer in my time. Yeah?

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So for me, there's a bit that we focus on their strengths. They're probably one of the most connected with technology. They're probably one of the most connected generations we've ever had. That probably was one of the most informed, as long as it's not fake news, yeah, in there. So we've got to think about that.

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But I think it goes back to one of the biggest problems for organizations now is firstly how they recruit people into the organization, and then how they induct. And there's some work they've been doing with the University recently, and they talked about even if you get the recruitment rights, but it's a bit like trying to square peg, round hole, trying to put people into an organization that's run by boomers or run by all the folk who just don't get what these people are about. You've got to change the culture, and you've got to change the way you operate.

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To do that now goes back to experimentation, goes into those things. But I want to come back to the recruitment. If you are selling somebody a dud, yep, in terms of a role, and you are selling them to get them in the door because they're intellectually bright, then for me, it's wrong. I go back to the three principles that Lencioni puts in his book about an ideal team player you should recruit against humble, hungry, smart.

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Humility is a key piece for me in the ability to admit you're wrong, the ability to make mistakes, the ability to speak up, ability to have growth mindset. In there hunger is the ability to be a team player. That's one of the biggest areas where the younger generations will struggle. But again, you can teach them. You can create playgrounds for them to show and to learn. And a lot of them, if they've done team sports, will have learned that already, but actually getting into that point where you are teaching about that's great.

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So that hunger for people, but the key bit at the end is the people smarts. And if you think about COVID, and you think about a lot of their social development, having some playgrounds to develop their social capability, my daughters will still not order in a restaurant. They'll ask me to order age of 21, and 20 now unless I create a playground where they have to do that, then they're not going to do it.

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And unless they're getting feedback about how they're doing developing that. So those early playgrounds for me, and you can do it through assessment centers for recruitment. You can run assessment centers that show people exactly the different challenges, and the different cultures you want, and explain it to them, yep, through that assessment process to get them in. But once you're in there, how do you create playgrounds from day one that show the culture that you want?

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Mark Drager: You've mentioned playgrounds a few times now. What does that mean?

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Colin Hunter: Yeah, if you think about the best way we learn is through play. Yeah? So I'm looking around the back of your office there, and I'm looking at some awards. I'm looking at the other pieces in there. We talked about music. I'm looking about the almost the maple leaf. And I'm thinking about the Maple Leafs, and thinking about sports. For me, the playgrounds, the way we train people needs to be fun. We need a safe place to land. People need to be able to stretch. They need to be able to sail the ship out of the harbor, go face some rough seas, learn together, and just have that bit where they can fail and somebody just knows that they're going to pick them up and work with them.

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So if you think about how we learned in the playground, most of my learning when I was a kid was in the playground, how I interact with other people, how I built relationships, how I played sports, how I played team. So for me, a playground is, for example, in a sales context. When was the last time that as a sales organization, you created role-plays with actors? We have our own professional actors in where you create scenarios where they have got 20 different ways of having a sales conversation, and the actors play 20 different characters, so they get agile in there.

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So it's a safe space. Everybody just critiques. Everybody gets involved in the conversation. It's we have a remote control as a group, so we can rewind, we can fast forward, we can mind tap the person that's having a go in that role play. But there's a playground. So when it's a bit like sports Tiger Woods in the rough, he tries 20 different positions. Why wouldn't we create a playground for salespeople so that when they face those moments in those sales conversations, they can go, Oh, I've faced this before. Hold on a second. Here we go.

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But creating that safe space is non-judgmental, there's no failure. There's only experimentation. Is a way of getting people to think differently. So you could do it in sales hotels. We had actors down a corridor in a lottery hotel with them acting as guests, and people had to adapt to what they were given as they walked along. So spontaneity session, they had to deal with it. Everybody critiqued. Had a go at it. Those are the playgrounds that you start to create to get people to do it.

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Mark Drager: You've just reminded me of something that I didn't even realize was a playground, but it was a formative experience for me. My good friend Evan Carmichael used to run these kinds of thought leadership work boot camps, let's say, but a big part of what we did at one point was like we'd have to go downtown with a deck of cards and walk up to random people and ask them if they would like to see a magic trick, knowing that we have no experience with magic, and the whole goal was to try and see how long we can carry this magic trick on, knowing that we have no outcome.

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We have no out. Like, there's gonna be a point where the person's looking at you and going, like, what is happening? And then we had to do this a few times. We had to like, we got into circle in front of a crowd of people, and someone put on some loud music, and then we had to rap, even though I'm incredibly white and can't rap and do not like singing in public, and found the entire experience like, so cringy, so uncomfortable, like, so beyond my comfort zone, knowing, though, at the same time, like none of it really matters, but I can tell you, having lived through this terribly uncomfortable playground, let's call it or experience one, build camaraderie.

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To jumping on camera and stepping on stage, it's nothing compared to going up to random people and asking if they want to see a magic trick, and then seeing the hope and excitement slowly fade in their eyes. They realize that this is all just one incredible hoax.

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Colin Hunter: The joking aside. The improv vehicle has been around for years, but putting people into improv yes and yes and yes. And doing that's an experimentation. And I think this is, if you look at all the big comedians, they practice their material again and again. They create playgrounds with smaller events. And they know what works with the audience, but they have to have a go at it.

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So you've got to create some playgrounds, whether it's with cyclists, the quality of the bed, the type of bed they have, you know, the type of wheel they have, the type of materials they use in their suits. The playground can be taken as wild, as far as you want. But the bottom line is, if you're talking about younger generations, you know music, my youngest daughter, socially, very nervous, will get up in front of an audience in 400 and play the guitar and write our own and sing our own songs.

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So we give people different playgrounds to bring out different things from them. That's what we should be doing. So I love your example. Yeah, I would have freaked as well. I'm going to take one that's personal to me. When was the last time you truly took care of yourself, physically, and mentally? When was the last time you put your own oxygen mask on yourself before you tried to fit it on everybody else around you? That's the burnout and the resilience that's happening in the business at the moment, and people are just trying to be superhuman and get through it. So from my own experience, that's the most important question, how much are you being properly selfish about your own mental and physical well-being?

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Mark Drager: So I've been speaking with Colin Hunter, who is the author of the book, Be More Wrong: How Failure Makes You an Outstanding Leader. He's also the CEO and founder of Potential Squared. One final question I do have for you, and it's not my typical question I end the podcast with, but, I'm curious if there was one question every leader who's listening to this right now should be asking themselves, what question would that be?

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Colin Hunter: I'm going to take one that's personal to me. When was the last time you truly took care of yourself, physically, and mentally? When was the last time you put your own oxygen mask on yourself before you tried to fit it on everybody else around you? That's the burnout and the resilience that's happening in the business at the moment, and people are just trying to be superhuman and get through it. So from my own experience, that's the most important question, how much are you being properly selfish about your own mental and physical well-being?