Guild's Innovative Approach to Incubate the Future of Work

 

🎧 Subscribe on your favourite platform iTunes | Spotify | Google | TuneIn

Companies today face mounting pressure to develop talent and skills for the future while also supporting employees’ career agility and mobility. My recent guests Terrence Cummings, Chief Opportunity Officer, and Kaley Klemp, Executive Coach in Residence from Guild offered insights into how their "career opportunity platform" is pioneering new approaches that develop talent and unlock potential.

Guild partners with large enterprises to provide upskilling and education benefits to employees. But their mission goes beyond offering courses - they aim to cultivate career opportunity and mobility to close the wealth gap.

Terrence shared how Guild has evolved to build on their learning platform to now focus more holistically on driving economic opportunity. This encompasses everything from skills development to internal talent mobility programs.

A core philosophy at Guild is "conscious leadership" - making intentional choices in how you show up as a leader. Kaley explained how this framework helps leaders have more self-awareness to lead from a place of curiosity, responsibility and candor. As Executive Coach, she provides an outside perspective to see blindspots.

Kaley also emphasized how discomfort enables growth and that great innovations can occur during difficult debates. Her role involves pausing conversations to reset context when teams get stuck in unproductive cycles.

Some other key conscious leadership principles Guild applies:

  • Operating in your "zone of genius" - aligning talents with value

  • Taking 100% responsibility (no more, no less) to empower others

  • Clean agreements at end of meetings to prevent ambiguity

Terrence also emphasized "candor" - saying what's on your mind to bring consciousness into the conversation. This enables healthier debate.

Cultivating a conscious leadership culture doesn't happen overnight. It requires repetition and practice. But even small improvements ultimately add up to transform teams. Guild provides a great model for how other companies can evolve their talent practices to unlock potential.

Episode Highlights

  • Guild's Conscious Leadership framework for application both at work and home

  • Techniques to identify and harness your zone of genius

  • Strategies to assist employees in developing skills beneficial for their career and the company


Recommended Resources

Hire for the right person in every role

From sourcing to structured interviewing and onboarding, Greenhouse gives you the tools to make better, fairer and more confident hiring decisions.

 
 

🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Chris Rainey 0:00

Hey, Terrance & Kaley. Welcome to the show. How are you both? Nice to see you.

Terrence 0:04

I'm incredible excited to be here. excited to talk to you.

Chris Rainey 0:07

Today I’ve got two guests and one host. So take it easy on me. All right, be nice double team gave everyone a little bit more of a background and your journey to where we are today. And also kind of an overview of your role. So I'll start with you first, Terrence.

Terrence 0:24

So I'll start with the role. I'm the chief Opportunity Officer at Guild and the purpose of my team is to eliminate the wealth gap. When you think about that, and break it down, it's driving economic mobility, both for internal guild employees as well as the employees of our employer partners that we work with. And so career acceleration, thinking about how do we drive both career mobility, and we'd like to talk about agility, as well. That's, that's my role.

Chris Rainey 0:47

You've definitely said that more than once. I can tell that you've got that nailed down.

Terrence 0:52

Right. It's my second time. So glad to work that

Chris Rainey 0:56

about you, Kaylee.

Kaley 0:58

I am guild's executive coach in residence. And the way we think about coaching at Guild is a little bit like elite athletes. So you can think about my role as being like the head coach. And so in practice, that means I join executive meetings, that means I polled people one on one. That means that some of the context about how some of these tools are getting implemented throughout guilds, that's what I'm up to,

Chris Rainey 1:21

is a big like a lot of weight on your shoulders being the coach of a company that offers that as a service to clients in many ways as well of like this is it added pressure. Because of that?

Kaley 1:33

I think it's more like validation. Okay, we can get this to work really well inside guild. And we've been our own pilot test case and have a lot more conviction that it can work in organisations all over

Chris Rainey 1:46

Yeah, you kind of have to practice what you preach. Absolutely, as well. For those that aren't aware of Guild parents give them a kind of an overview for people listening.

Terrence 1:55

We are a career opportunity platform. We work with Fortune, think about large companies, fortune 1000, fortune 500 companies, and we help them to drive their talent strategy internally and for their employees to drive career mobility. Amazing, simplest way to think about it.

Chris Rainey 2:09

Yeah, I feel like the company has evolved a lot over the years, though, right? Since when I first came across the business, I think it's important to me, we have,

Terrence 2:17

we have I always think about companies like people. And so when you think about a human, human start off, we're born, we're toddlers, we're kind of learning how to walk, you become a teenager, and you're learning and evolving over time, but all towards your real self. And guilds done the same thing. From the get go. We were trying to drive career mobility, but doing that with education and learning as the centre of it is where we started. And now we're using that as a way to say how do we build upon that platform in that capability to now start to get toward our true selves. And so I think we're, we're in the late teenage, you know, early 20s, right, which is a like a hot time to live. Yeah, I love where we are as a company.

Chris Rainey 2:58

That's about say, you said hot time to live. I was like, that's when you start misbehaving a little bit more. But I'm only joking. I know something we that you you're super passionate about. We spoke about this last time? And is the power of conscious leadership and the framework you have around that. Could you share more, I think that's a good place for us to kick off.

Kaley 3:15

Absolutely. So conscious leadership is really the architecture are the scaffolding that we use for coaching at Guild, you can think about conscious leadership as a series of choices. And the easiest way to think about it is the idea of a line where when you're operating above the line, your choices are things like curiosity, responsibility, candour, and when you're operating below the line, then your choices are things like defensiveness, or staying in drama, or blame, or withholding or gossiping. And by really being aware of how we're making those choices, and we can dive into each of the eight a little bit later, if you want to, it helps create a common vocabulary across skills, a common orientation across skills, and gives people a way to engage with coaching and with each other with share vocabulary, shared understanding and shared intention.

Chris Rainey 4:06

Don't add anything to that Terrence.

Terrence 4:08

I love the idea of consciousness, in general. And when you think about coaching, you've made it explicit in the framework that that you use and that that we're using it Guild and conscious leadership. But even in general, a coach is there to help you to be conscious about, we'll talk about context and content, I'm sure at some point during this helped you to think about your context and where you are operating as a human being. So I love that word as the centre of how we think about it. And Kaylee helps us as a team to be conscious of how we're behaving toward each other, whether we're sticking to what we've said that we want to do and holding ourselves accountable, accountable, etc. So I just think that word is super powerful.

Chris Rainey 4:44

That was something that when I first called coach, Chester Elton, shout out to you, if you're listening. He helped me become more conscious of some of the things that I was doing. I didn't even realise I was like, Whoa, like kind of held that mirror to me. And I was like, Oh, it's hot and it's hard to look in our eyes. Sometimes, as well, when the offeree, he did sort of the free 60 with my team. And I even asked him to include my wife in that which was kind of a bit of a, he was like, you know, these are the most important people, my lives, including my wife in the process. And after having that feedback, I was a lot more conscious of the areas I needed to improve. I think that's so

Kaley 5:18

powerful, even the way that you're describing it. By definition, we can't see our own blind spots. And so this notion of being curious and enhancing self awareness requires some of that outside input, whether that's through a 360, whether that's in the moment in the room through a coach, but I love this learner's mindset that you're describing around, I want to know what I'm not seeing in myself,

Chris Rainey 5:41

a lot of people like to avoid it, because it's, you know, sometimes tough to see it right and hear it. But I see now my mindset shift to is it's a gift. And I'm lucky that I have the opportunity to get back that feedback.

Kaley 5:54

And I think what you're describing is the relationship with discomfort. It takes discomfort to grow. Yeah. And vulnerabilities often uncomfortable. And yeah, there's a way that if I'm willing to lean in, there's so much good stuff on the other side.

Terrence 6:09

Sometimes it can be a privilege to be able to think about getting better. Yes, exactly. And in many times, I think that people don't realise that the default space that we want our employees to be in is one where you're trying to grow, it's consistent improvement, like that's what you want to drive. I love that even from my teams. And what's important to realise is that oftentimes, the context in which your employees are operating is one in which thinking about being better, is hard. You might be thinking about paying rent, you might think about someone sick at home, you might write and so how do you then help to, at least, at a minimum, help your individual employees to be conscious about what their context is, so that you can get to the point we can think about being better. But I just love what you said there, Chris, because that is an awesome place. I remember for myself when I got to the point where improvement was my main goal. And that's powerful. Like that's so awesome that now that's what I can think about. Now my coach can come and punch me in the face emotionally, sometimes I can get better, right? Which is not their intention, but that's the way

Chris Rainey 7:15

out here, again, the relationship we went through and discomfort. Shane and I, we have a little we used to have a sign, it's not there anymore. But I used to say seek discomfort. Because we realise that is within those moments of discomfort came our best breakthroughs, our biggest innovations, personally, professionally, business, it doesn't feel like that at a time, obviously. But once you start to recognise it now we kind of feel it was make a joke that when we have our biggest arguments as founders, and heated debates that we laugh out and say Tommy's gonna make so many good is gonna come out of this. And it does, because it's through that challenge in each other, holding each other accountable. And seeing things in each other that you sometimes can't see in yourself, is really where the magic kind of happens. Absolutely love this topic. Can you break it down a little bit more? You mentioned also that the framework, the place that I think

Kaley 8:09

is worth starting is the distinction between content and context. And so when I think about content, it's all the decisions that you might be making as a business leader, as an organisation. So things that I think about would be, what's our go to market motion? Or are we going to hire this person? Or how are we thinking about our organisational design? These are content questions, and they really matter. Those are decisions that are essential for the future of the business. What we're focused on is context. How are you making those decisions? How are you engaging in those conversations? So as you're deciding, do we want to hire this person? Are you engaging from a place of curiosity, where you're seeking to learn you're seeking to understand, or are you engaging in that conversation from a place of defensiveness, I already know what we need. There's nothing that you have to add to this conversation. And you can really start to feel the decision itself, while really important, is actually in my experience. And so it's less important than the context. And I think that turns you're also talking about as an individual, that the question of how am I showing up in the world, that feedback loop is really useful and understanding what's all of the history, the beliefs, the understanding the environment, all of those different pieces and how they inform how I show up all of that context, really, really matters.

Chris Rainey 9:34

How do we practice that and bring that into our day to day decision making?

Kaley 9:38

Some of it is even just stopping to ask the question. And I think that, especially in the moments where something gets stuck, or when something starts to recycle. So I think about recycling conversations as we've had the same conversation four times, right where you're like, didn't we already have a conversation about whether we were going to launch in this product or that I'd like to why didn't we already have that conversation? And when you start to recognise, oh, we're in the third, fourth, fifth, a 100th iteration of the same conversation. That's a moment to pause and go, what context are we bringing to this conversation? And that does invite a person to take a step back, and to reflect on what are all the different pieces that we're bringing. This can be history from a prior organisation. I've tried this once before, and here's what happened. And so I have a really entrenched perspective on how it's gonna go. This is also a place where, as an executive coach and residents, I get to pause the conversation. So how does this work in real life as folks are ready to engage in a debate and debate is great. Yeah. I just want to make sure that before they jump in, how are they going to do that debate? Are they present? Are they grounded? Are they listening? Are they curious? Or is this a sparring match? Because in a sparring match, like all right, verbal tennis head is fun for a little while, but we're probably not going to get to a different outcome than we would have arguing with ourselves in the mirror.

Terrence 11:02

That's one of the places that I found Kaylee's presence to be most powerful. And there are many. Kaylee has stroke your ego for a second, there are many. But that's one that I found to be most powerful are the times where we're in the middle of a conversation as an executive team. And Kaley will say, Let's pause, okay, take a breath. Because there's something that she observes that's happening in the room. And if you stop and be conscious for a moment, then you can change your tone. You can see what's good and someone's argument, you can ask that question with curiosity versus defensiveness. There's so much that happens there. And having that that human that has the skill set to be able to observe and stop is really important. So I love that in context, for me, it's also just such an important element of being able to operate that, that it really fits well inside of my, my general like being Yeah,

Kaley 11:49

is it David Foster Wallace, who talks about the fish? Right, where like, I always got the story. Not quite right. But there's essentially there's two little fish and they're swimming along. And they're arguing about whether green seaweed or purple seaweed is more interesting. And then a big fish comes up and says, Hey, little guys, How's the water? And the two little fish kind of look at each other baffled? What's water? And the reason that that story matters to me is I love it. I think that people often have that same experience with context, what what's context, and yet recognising it's absolutely everything surrounding what we're doing nearly all the time.

Chris Rainey 12:26

So I love the analogies because you know, it's hard to see it when you're in it, literally, to the water analogy. And I think that's also where coaching is so valuable. And we was having a conversation on Monday with the with Marshall Goldsmith and, and the 100 coaches group, we do a call every Monday 700 Plus coaches on there. And the question for Marshall for us to sort of work on was, why do we keep do stop doing things, even though that a good for us? And it was like what, okay, so we broke into groups. And a lot of it kind of goes back to a lot of what you have, what you said is, sometimes you can't see it, that you stopped doing it. And it takes someone to say, Hey,

Kaley 13:10

I think there's something really powerful also in getting underneath why we're doing that thing that's in our worst interest. And so Terrance, I love what you're talking about. Sometimes that's context, sometimes I think it doesn't apply to me. But sometimes there's actually a bit of a competition in my own mind's eye, that it feels really good in the moment, even though it doesn't serve me in the long run. Or it helps me feel really important, but it actually undermines my team. And I think there's something interesting, we call these unconscious commitments. Then anytime you're doing something interesting, and you say you want something different than what you're actually getting to get underneath, like, how is it serving you to do this thing? Like how is it serving you not to sleep not to exercise not to sleep well, or there's something in there we go, Hmm, well, I get a lot more done. Or I get to brag about how hard I'm working or people admire my stamina, like, there's something in there. Maybe it's just an ego snack, but if you can get into Ha, there's something in here that is working, it helps unlock the possibility of something different.

Chris Rainey 14:16

I love that way. I love what you said there about how we make excuses. I hear a lot of other founders I speak to that say, Oh, I do all of that for my wife and my kids. But I'm like, but you're not around to spend time with them. Right? Why or I'm working really hard so I don't have time to work out. But then you're off of two months sick and you can't work so like and I'm also a culprit of that and for me it ended in anxiety and panic attacks etc. And I was kind of in this revolving door of doing all these bad things even though I know that I shouldn't be doing them but I was justifying them for I don't know how you describe.

Terrence 14:52

I'm going to pass the ball to you for a second Kaylee to talk about zone of genius. A second because I believe that that that apply eyes, which is one of the eight choices. One quick book recommendation that I have for folks is your future self. It's worth reading on this topic. And it's about negotiating with your future self and understanding how your present self and your future self relate to each other. Now, you can become closer to your future self, so you treat it well. But talk about zone of genius cailli, and how that relates to this conversation.

Kaley 15:23

The idea of zone of genius, I think, works best if we understand all four zones for how you can operate. And I learned this model from Gay Hendricks. So I want to give credit where credit is due. The idea is that there are four places we can operate. One is in our zone of incompetence, which is where I'm not good at it, and I don't like it. And if you're listening to this podcast, I'd encourage you just to think about your own life. What do you persist in doing that you don't like and aren't good at? And why might you be holding on to that? That's an interesting unconscious commitment question. Similarly, there's the zone of competence where you can do it, but someone else can do it better. It's often really energy draining again, you can, it's just, it's energetically very expensive, and someone else can do it better. Same idea. If you're looking around your life and finding those things, what's the unconscious commitment there? And what might context be where you're believing you have to, or it must be a struggle, or you have to suffer? Those are really powerful things to start to unpack. Where many people get stuck, is what we call the zone of excellence. And this is where you are really good at it. But it's energetically expensive. It's draining for you. These are the things where you're often getting a lot of accolades for it. Oh, my gosh, Terrance, you're so amazing at doing this thing, and you go, I hear you, maybe once upon a time, it was fun, or it was enlivening. But now, it's just it's kind of a grind. And so people will get stuck there because of the external reinforcement. Again, what an interesting, unconscious commitment that I'm putting someone else's perception of me, or someone else's need from me ahead of what I love, where I give my highest value, what we're aspiring for is what we call the zone of genius. This is where you are uniquely gifted. You love what you're doing. And it's of service in the world. This is where it is energy giving, that when you do this thing you finish. And yeah, you might be tired, but it's the good kind of tired, and you're fired up to go do it again, tomorrow. I want to offer the caveat that sometimes when I teach don't have genius, people hear it and they walk away. And they think, Oh, my goodness, I should spend 100% of my time in my zone of genius. I don't find that realistic. But what I think is really compelling is to start to wonder, how can you spend incrementally more time there? How would you increase the time you spend in your zone of genius by 2%? Or 7%? And what beliefs might you have to challenge? What unconscious commitments might you have to explore? What would you have to believe about the people around you, and teamwork and complementarity? Because I think the zone of genius is a really powerful exploration for a single individual. But when you know everyone on your team zone of genius, you might think about this, as a co founder, you might think about this as an executive team, you might think about this, even within your own functional working team. Once you know what people love and are good at you can lean on them in ways that actually brings out the best in everyone.

Chris Rainey 18:35

I love this. And I can share a personal story. So Shana, and when we first founded the company, we were both doing a bit of everything he was we both selling, we're both doing marketing, we're both doing operations, both just sharing the load. And for years, we first maybe year, yeah, two years, we did that we went to a we was invited to a private sort of leadership retreat with leaders from some of the world's leading global companies. And one of the activities was to sit down and write down on a piece of paper, all the things that give you energy, and all the things that take away your energy. And Shane and I are sitting next to each other we did ours, I looked at Shane Shane looked at mine, all of the things that drain him on the things that I loved, and all the things I hated, he loved. And I was like, why have we been doing this this way for so long? And he looked at me and he was like, I just thought that because we're founders that I have to sell as well. And I just thought as as, as a founder, I also have to contribute to finance and operations.

Terrence 19:33

The idea that I am supposed to, or I have to Yes, yeah, often gets in the way of a lot. I have this this philosophy, it's gonna be overly simplistic, but I have this philosophy that everything in life is a choice. Obviously, it's overly simplistic. However, I believe that it's a healthy way to think about life and it gets to the the consciousness point that we brought up before. Part of it comes from my upbringing. I had a father that was In jail, a lot of my life I saw people, especially males in my life that just made these choices didn't make a lot of sense. There's one, one quick story I'll tell is, I was about 10 years old, and I was over at my grandmother's house. And an uncle was a bus driver, pulled the bus outside the house, came in to the house, rolled up in illicit substance, I don't know, we could say on this podcast, and then said, Oh, the man's always holding me back. And I remember, as a 10 year old I went, I think you're supposed to be like I didn't in my head, I said, I think you're supposed to be driving the bus right now. So maybe you're holding yourself back. And that has stuck with me, because I think about choices that we make. And we often say I'm supposed to or I have to, but it's it's a choice. Some choices are really, really hard. And some choices, the your environment is a headwind to you making that choice, but it's still a choice you make. I think that's it's a powerful concept that I like to hold.

Chris Rainey 20:54

I love that. And I love the story as well, because that's something that's personal, that you're gonna read, you're gonna remember what's next. Within the framework,

Kaley 21:02

I want to build on one of the things that you're talking about right now. Because this notion of a choice, that's how we think about consciousness, that's how we think about conscious leadership is, what are the choices that we're making? And I hear your story, Chris, I love it about choosing to shift the way that you see the world. And part of what I think that makes available is seeing the help that is there, that if I've got glasses on that say, you know, I'm at the effect of nothing can help me the fault is over there. And I'm thinking about terraces uncle, I can't see the opportunity that's there. And it prohibits responsibility. So one of the choices is I commit to taking 100% responsibility, no more, no less. And it's almost I think it's easy to look at less than 100% responsibility, which is what we've been talking about, kind of those glasses of victimhood those glasses of blame, which again, isn't to say that there aren't headwinds that are real for people in life. It's, am I seen only that? I think what also gets really interesting, though, that's worth talking about is more than 100% responsibility. When people start taking 150% responsibility, and making everything more my my responsibility. This is like rescuing, jumping in for, you know, making sure everything is fine. Make sure nobody's uncomfortable. And as I started to hero to rescue to jump in, I, I unintentionally, but systematically disempower the people around me. And as you're thinking about cultures, in organisations, and especially this role as an HR leader, there can be a lot of hero, oh, there's an issue in that department. Let me jump in and solve for, and I don't actually teach people how to engage in healthy conversation, or there's a an employee that isn't performing well, let me just jump in for and I'll create the plan for design for and all of a sudden, I haven't actually empowered a manager, or had that employee reflect on perhaps their zone of genius, or the things that skills they might be missing. And so I think translating these into real application, and as I sort of think about executive teams, even recognising were in a conversation, or in a meeting, we slip into blaming each other, or we slip into rescuing each other. And they call that timeout and say, Alright, what is what does 100% responsibility look like right now?

Terrence 23:29

Yeah, but we can all relate to that. Yeah, think about the the deck that you decided to, to finish instead of someone on your team. Think about when you jump into the Excel spreadsheet, to fix something as opposed to teaching someone or using that as a teaching moment. Or maybe it's not a teaching moment, maybe it's time for someone to move on. But instead you jump in and take 150% responsibility, and someone that's taking that 50% responsibility. We've seen that movie before 100 times where you get to the point maybe if you're in that seat, or you say, I guess Terrence loves to do that, like Terrence loves working on these PowerPoint decks, so I don't need to. And and then as the leader, you might be like, Well, why aren't they pulling their load? Well, maybe that's because you jump into the deck every time when it's due. And so there, it has really practical implications. And as leaders, it's important for us to keep in mind,

Kaley 24:21

I think that this brings us back to where we started this notion of discomfort, and how much growth and how much learning is possible in discomfort. And yet I'll speak for myself I find witnessing other people's discomfort uncomfortable for me. And so that's often the temptation when like, a person over there was really struggling. Let me just make it better for them. Where there's that sense of like, ah, people, there's conflict right now. That's uncomfortable. Like let me just jump in and translate for Sue though over make it better for and yet, if I do that, I actually cheat people out of that learning out of what's possible. I love that word resiliency, that you were mentioning just a second ago that if you don't engage, you can't grow.

Terrence 25:09

Also, when when folks are thinking about what they want to do with their careers, or even activities, that are like a specific tasks, right, that are energising, we were talking about energy before, often, people are told to follow the thing, find the thing you love, which I think that there's value in that. I also would say, find the thing that when it's painful, you like will lean in to it. Because if there are people when when it's that painful, they go, Ooh, you know, you realise that that's not the thing I should do. And sometimes things are painful, like Yes, like that, I get adrenaline off of that pain. An example of what didn't work out for me is I went rock climbing exactly one time. So I'm out. I'm up on the face of the rock. And my ankle, was in this like little divot, right felt like it was broken. My hand was a spider was biting it. And I yelled down at the person that I was with who is a inexperienced rock climber. And I said, I explained, the situation is like, I know I need to get there. My ankle feels like it's broken. I got a spider that's eating me. I said, Great. Push off your broken ankle, and leap for this. And that was a moment when I said nope. Like this is that is not the thing I want to do. But if you take that analogy and put it into the workplace, or oftentimes, that's what you feel, yeah, it's the time where some of my ankle feels like it's the proverbial ankle feels like it's broken, and you go, when that feels good. And I want to push off at that keep doing that thing. Like that's the thing that you should do with your life.

Chris Rainey 26:31

And I think once you recognise that it's becomes a superpower consciousness of time as well, I know we've already kind of gone through a few of the choices. What are some of the other things,

Kaley 26:42

I have one choice that I want to make sure that we get to just because I think it's so universally applicable, which is the idea of clean agreements. And this one can feel really intuitive. And I think that's part of its power, is at the end of a conversation, just having clarity around who is going to do what, why when, at what level of fidelity. And by asking those questions again, and again. And again, at the end of a meeting, it transforms things, in contrast to again, like run your last meeting through your mind's eye. Very often people will do this. We're like, Hey, we're two minutes over. Alright, we'll see you next week. Terrence, you're going to do that thing that we talked about, right? Okay. And Chris, like, ASAP, you'll get that you'll get you'll get that thing done? Yes. It's like, hey, you'll build that deck right away, you'll prep for that meeting. And people have not at all similar understandings of what we just agreed to. And so really getting clear. I'm going to do this, what are you going to do? Okay, when we say as soon as possible, do we mean in an hour? Do we mean by the end of August? Like what do we actually mean? And it's, it's, it's a small and yet extremely powerful choice.

Chris Rainey 27:56

I love that. I don't want to leave this conversation by by not asking the question, How can everyone listening and other leaders incorporate conscious leadership principles into their work?

Terrence 28:05

Um, I'll start I'm going to bring up the one of the principles because I think it's also universal. That is the way that I think that conscious leadership can most apply and you can bring it to your work and that's candour. So around candour, this is not the difference between lying and telling the truth. It is saying what is on your mind. And something very practical, that Kaley raises with our team, is if you've thought about a thing three times and you have not say it, said it, say the thing, if that's the way that I would say to bring conscious leadership, then you have to be conscious about what's happening in my mind. How am I or am I not manifesting that into the context of what is happening here? am I sharing my context today? Kalea we'll start our meetings with this is a point of candour that would come up is to say what's context that you're bringing in to this conversation today? And that context can be Oh, man, my kid this morning. Getting them out of the door was so hard, right? Or it could be I got a fantastic email this morning. And so I'm coming in. I'm energetic, but having the candour to share that context can be really helpful the conversation so candour is another choice that I think is a really practical way to bring it in.

Kaley 29:23

I love that so much, Terrance. Thank you, Chris answering your question super directly. I would say, if you have a team that wants to practice conscious leadership, you're in the right place, listen to this podcast, bring these things forward. A book that supports this work is the 15 commitments of conscious leadership. You'll hear all of these choices, we condense them to eighths, we collapse some of those 15 into eight just to make it easier to remember. But if you just run through what we talked about today, to implement conscious leadership on your team one start with context, the example that Terrence just gave How are you coming into this meeting? So how are you having the conversation? changes everything? If you want to get more specific about that context get curious about, am I curious or defensive? Am I being candid? Or am I withholding? And at the end of our conversation? Do we have a clean agreement about our next steps? Or are we living in the land of ish where things get fuzzy and we're drama happens?

Chris Rainey 30:24

Yeah, love it super practical as well. And like, very quick things to do. Right. But it's about repetition and getting as part of your daily, you know, it's gonna take a while to get into it, I'm sure. But listen, I would like to talk to you about forever about this super fascinating, and the HR leaders that listen to this show is so important for them, working directly with line managers throughout the whole organisation who this information is now more than ever needed. If ever, there's a time when they could need to, they can need to serve this advice and guidance and help it now is the time so I really appreciate you both coming on and sharing and for everyone listening and we're gonna put a link in the description as well to more resources, so you can check out more about Guild and what they're doing. But last thing, where can people connect with you both if they want to reach out directly to you?

Terrence 31:08

LinkedIn is a great place. You can find me on LinkedIn, Terrence Cummings, I work at Guild. If you have all the information, you could find me there. Feel free to message. LinkedIn is also

Kaley 31:17

a great place if you want to learn more about conscious leadership. Kaley clamp.com is a great place to get started.

Chris Rainey 31:22

Amazing. All those links will be below as always, everyone, so make your life very easy apart from that, thanks for coming on the show. And I look forward to seeing you again soon. Thanks. Thank you

HR Leaders Newsletter

Sign up below and well send our weekly newsletter packed with actionable insights, podcasts, clips and compelling content directly to your inbox.


More from the HR Leaders Podcast

Chris RaineyComment