In this special episode, I’ve invited one of my team members to join me. You’re about to hear from Theshel Govender. Theshel is a Senior Learning Architect on our team at Curious Lion and the recent author of a post on our blog that went viral in our corner of the world.
We started a project this year in which everybody on the Learning Architect team started to write articles and publish them on our blog.
Our goal is for the world and our clients to hear from our team and for us to expand our own understanding of our expertise. Theshel has stepped up as a leader of this project.
The article that you’ll hear came, at least for me, out of the blue. I didn’t even know she was writing it. I hadn’t seen an early outline for it; I didn’t know anything about it.
And I will never forget this – I was at a brewery with my wife and son. I got a notification on my phone from Slack, saying that an article had gone up on our website. Whenever I see that, I’m immediately drawn to reading them.
So, I quickly asked my wife, who said it was okay, and I just started reading this article while sipping a beer. My jaw just started to drop as I was reading.
I don’t want to give too much away, but a big theme of the piece is loyalty. It’s an incredibly vulnerable piece in which Theshel shares a difficult period for her creatively and personally that she overcame, and that she feels like she’s overcome by working at Curious Lion with the incredible team we have.
It made me think about my style of leadership, which I can best describe as inclusive leadership. I’ve realized from reading Theshel’s article that inclusive leadership is what inspires loyalty, and loyalty creates massive leverage.
I can’t begin to describe how incredibly proud I am of this team that feels committed to a shared vision and is working towards a purpose that we all want to see manifest in the world. That leverage that we create together allows us to move the world in the sense of serving our communities.
In this article you’ll hear how we’ve engineered that kind of loyalty. I’ll be the first to admit there wasn’t always a lot of intent behind everything we’ve done, but I certainly could not have predicted that it would end up like this.
I want to leave all of you with the idea that this is possible. Theshel does a great job of doing that and breaking down exactly how she’s seen our business and culture built so that it can be a place where she feels an incredible amount of pride and loyalty and can do her best work.
That’s ultimately my goal – to create a workplace in which everyone feels like they can bring their best selves to do their best work.
This article got picked up by a couple of other writers who included it in their newsletters on various blogs. It started to get a lot of traction and actually provoked quite a debate as well. Not everyone agrees with it.
But this is certainly how we want to build our company, and it’s how we want to grow sustainably. And it’s really the kind of place that I want to be working.
I’ll hand over the microphone to Theshel, who’s going to read her amazing article. Please sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode with Theshel Govender.
Full Episode
Guest Links
Show Notes
- Promotions, loyalty, and success. (00:06:09-00:08:38)
- Defining employee loyalty. (00:08:39-00:09:20)
- Shared vision: A North Star (00:09:21-00:11:14)
- Seeing the light. (00:11:15-00:12:22)
- Actions speak louder than words. (00:12:23-00:17:24)
- Safe harbor. (00:17:25-00:19:28)
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