In a recent interview granted to his old University, Avondale University College, the author of A Thousand Little Lightbulbs and a keynote speaker, Simon Banks uncovers how leaders of organisations can obtain leadership management that will help their organisations grow faster.

Read through to hear from the horse's mouth. You won't regret what you did.

Question 1

Alright, welcome, Mr. Simon Banks. We really appreciate your time to spend a bit, have a bit of a chat with us about some leadership management issues.

Yeah, thank you, I'm glad to be here.

Question 2

Let's just get the ball rolling. I've just been really interested in your take as to how you've seen leadership change over your leadership journey?

Yeah, I really like all the questions you set out as well. So, there's probably three or four key things.

I think one, is the idea that you have to know everything, I think there's often this idea that you're the leader, you're the highest paid in the company. You need to know everything, but that's impossible because things move so quickly.

So, I've seen really good leaders say, “look I don't know, but let's find out.”

So that's a shift from pretending you know everything or sort of trying to bluff your way through.

It’s key to remember that leadership's around developing others, not just developing yourself. You can often go on these leadership development programs and  it can be very inward focusing but really it's around developing the people around you and your team.

And I've heard a quote, which is you're not a leader until you've developed another leader who's developed another leader.

Leading a company is about creating those future generations of leaders. So very much that human element, I think, getting the best out of everyone, which leads to that.

So. it's more than just being, you know, making the tough decisions and because you've got great organisations or these living entities full of people and you can have the best technology and have the best platforms, the best systems, but all problems and successes always come back to people.

The stories I've heard from the people I work with is, when a leader can be vulnerable and actually be honest and not put on this big, you know, tough man mask that makes a huge difference.

Question 3

Yeah, fantastic, that's really good, appreciate that. So, how in your role, in your business and your leadership, how and where do you find inspiration?

Oh, this is one of my favourite questions. And one of the things I do so much of with all the people I work with. You have to be an inspiration seeker.

Inspiration will not come after you, it will not come to you. You have to go after it with a sledgehammer.

I think that's a Jack London quote, the author, yeah. Seek inspiration with a sledgehammer.

And look, if you sit on your backside every day and which most of us do or just do the same thing day in and day out and don't put in any time to seek inspiration, you won't find it.

Think of it like exercise. People say, "Oh yeah, he/she’s really fit, he's so lucky". It's not luck. He just makes the effort or she makes the effort, I should say, to be fit.

So it's like that with inspiration. I'd like to call myself an experienced seeker.  I like to search out and try and do new things constantly. Possibly to my detriment, sometimes around trying to focus. But I really like to always seek and do new things.

It's important to spend time out of your comfort zone and continually challenge yourself. And I'm not saying panic zone here, like throwing yourself off the deep end, but also we always find when we step out of our comfort zone we're capable of much more than we thought.

So not only does it change your mindset, but also you get more done as well. And keep on constantly try new things and open your eyes.

That's a big thing because inspiration is everywhere. If you open your eyes and look for it, most of us spend our time in a little world like this and there's this amazing world going on around us that we can so easily ignore because we're just so focused or sucked into this little vortex of emails, calls or social media.

Question 4

Leading on from that, then how do you encourage innovative ideas?

Yeah, this is again, one of my key things that I like to talk about and one of the things I spoke about at the CPA roadshow last year.

And my talk was around look at the world with traveller's eyes.

Imagine when we go and travel, from the moment you step off in say a new country and that might seem a long way away now that we're speaking over Zoom and can’t travel, but the moment you step off in that new country, new location, the moment you get out of the airport, your sensors are on overload.

I mean, the air smells different, the air feels different. You're hearing different sounds, dialects. You look at all the different patterns on the sidewalks. You're taking lots of photos of windows and doors for some reason.

There's all this inspiration. We see things because we have traveller's eyes.

Next

So my number one thing is to open your eyes.

And this other one I'm really keen on is this idea of creative confidence because it’s my strongly held belief  we all have  creativity, we all have this superpower, which is our creative curious and imaginative mind.

As adults, we're really good at going, "Creativity is not for me that's for kids or other people, or those sort of lofty types. I'll just be the serious, down the middle type of person".

We get really good at working out one part of our brain and not working out the other.

We've all got these ideas but often it comes down to, I don't have the creative confidence to share those ideas to try something which might not work, but what works the first time you try it?

Think of when you're writing an assignment, if you write it the first time you don't go, "it's perfect".

You do a reread, don't you? You might do multiple rereads. So be open to trying new things but you need that creative confidence to be able to work in that space.

IDEO which is a human-centred Design Firm and they run the D school out of Stanford. They've got a book called Creative Confidence. And once you develop Creative Confidence, you see the lights go off in people.

“Oh, I can try new things. I can do new things for experiment. I can say something which might be a half-baked idea, and I'm not going to have the fear of laughter”,

But look, Uber was a half-baked idea, Airbnb was a half-baked idea. No idea is ever born fully formed. As much as we would like to, you don't go, “All right, tomorrow I'm going to launch a fully formed Airbnb”.

It doesn't happen like that. You iterate and you try new things and keep building big on that.

If we are to keep these ideas going, we just need to get rid of the "No"s and the "But"s in our organisations.

If you listen out in a meeting, think of the amount of times you hear the "No"s and the "But"s