Breakthrough Leadership – Achieving Success, and Driving Results with Gordon Tredgold

Let’s welcome today’s guest, Mr Gordon Tredgold. Gordon shares, people are not afraid of hard work. They are afraid of failure. As leaders, it is our job to inspire people by showing them how they can be successful. Gordon will offer nuggets on today’s podcast on how to inspire the leader within. 

Gordon has worked with top Fortune 100 companies around the world. He’s listed as a top 30 leadership expert speaker and trainer, and, according to global gurus, Inc magazine, one of the top 100 leadership and management experts and speakers in the world. He’s ranked number two on the top 15 must-read leadership blogs. Gordon was just recently considered the number 19 top social media marketer influencer by CEO world magazine. He is the contributing author on Inc, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, as well as a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management.

Well, let’s meet Gordon Tredgold. Tell our listeners a little bit about who Gordon is;  your background, and how you became such a huge success. Wow!  You have coached and worked with some big companies around the globe!

So I’m from Leeds in the North of England, and if anybody’s watched Game of Thrones, that’s the area I grew up in. King Robert, they’re all from that area, from Yorkshire descent. So that was where I came from, very north. My family was all coal miners and my dad was the first to not work down in the coal mines. 

I loved sports. Rugby was my number one passion. Playing sports taught me great lessons on how to build teams and get the best out of people.

 I also was good at mathematics and problem-solving. I went to University, studied Mathematics, and took that competitiveness and problem-solving into my professional career. 

So when I started working, I had a career progression lined up for me. You do this for a year, then this, then based on this… but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to take the fast track. So I leveraged the skills I had, which was problem-solving and team-building, getting the best out of people, and I accepted all of the difficult projects.  If people said, you know, avoid that, it’s probably going to fail, I put my hand up and volunteered for it. Why? The first reason is, I’m a big football fan. I follow the New York Jets.  Now, if they have a bad season, it doesn’t matter because everybody expected that. If you turn them around, you’re a hero. So it was a no brainer for me.  I got in there, I turned a couple of difficult, failing projects into performing projects, and then just built a reputation from that. I just kept getting offered bigger and bigger projects. So I was leading hundreds of million dollar projects with departments of thousands of people. 

I worked for a company where I helped them save $350 million. Every time it came to my review, they kept telling me, “we love the results. We think your leadership sucks”.  I’d ask them, “how does that work? You know, how can I be successful without leadership?” And they said, “we don’t know, but your leadership sucks”. So that got me wanting, you know, two things. One, I wanted to share the leadership approach. I studied with other people to learn how to do this. Because as I said, being a mathematician, I’m really good at breaking things down into a step-by-step repeatable process. So I wanted to learn this. I wanted  to become a top leadership expert.  So I took on that challenge.

That propelled me to where I am now, I am still leading. I’m currently running a big program for Fujitsu, and I also coach and mentor people, train people in leadership. I got invited to go to Dubai today to teach 15 people in company leadership. Unfortunately, they’re still on the “no travel zone” for Europe. So we’ll have to push that back maybe to September. But that’s kind of how I got into it. You know, leveraging the talents I had, being bold and unafraid of failure.

I’m not afraid of failure. I remember working with a guy called Nick Boothman, who was a speaking coach. He said to me, “You can’t come out and tell people you’ve delivered this and you’ve delivered that, because they won’t be able to connect with you.”  And I said, “Well, I haven’t always done that. You know, I’ve had my share of failures.” And he said, “Well, talk about that. because people will connect with you a lot better than if you tell them:  Hey, I’m Tom Brady, I’ve won seven Super Bowls. They can’t really relate to you. 

My last book that I wrote in 2015, Fast : 4 Principles Every Business Needs to Achieve Success and Drive Result was about understanding failure, and the four causes of failure. When you mitigate failure, what you need to do to stop you from failing actually accelerates the speed at which you succeed. That’s better focus, more accountability, more simplicity and transparency. Where are you performing? You fix those four things and you’ll put yourself on a fast path to success. That’s the stuff that I teach and share with clients.

Nice. So what is your philosophy to create engaged and empowered teams when you’re working with individuals or companies or groups of people?

If you’d asked me this question two or three years ago, I would have probably given you a different answer and it wouldn’t have been wrong. But I’m a mathematician. So I do have that tendency to analyze. I’m always trying to peel back the layers of the onion to understand. 

I wrote an article about six weeks ago, called “Seeds of Leadership”, which is about simplify, empower, excitement, and deliver. The excitement to deliver is a consequence of the simplification and empowerment. Quite often, if you’ve got skilled people, just simplifying it so they understand what they need to do, empowers them.  I used to tell this story about when I decided to run my first marathon at 52, and my two brothers and my two best friends said to me I was too fat and too old.

I said, but I’ve got a plan. I’m going to run 15 minutes a day for the first week and then I’ll run 20 minutes a day the second week, then I’ll run 25 and then I’ll run 30 minutes. They said to me, “so you’re just going to run five minutes more every week?”  And I said, “yeah, but in 26 weeks, I’ll be up to four and a half hours, which is enough to run a marathon”. And they said, “we’ll do it with you”. So that simplification of how to do it empowered them to feel that they could run a marathon.  They knew they couldn’t do it today, but they could see how step-by-step, within six months, we’re going to be running a marathon! So that empowered them, and once empowered, they thought “I can do this. Oh wow!” 

I’ve just done a program for Fujitsu, where we did a network services migration. We had to migrate 75 sites. It was about a one and a half, two month period. Now the technology, I have no clue about, none whatsoever. I don’t know anything about it.  So I said to Tim, “I want you to just forget what we need to do. Think about one side and just tell me step-by-step, what we’re going to need to do to be able to do this”. He replied, “it’s quite complicated”. 

But I got them to explain it to me simply. I said, “right, we’ve got to do that 75 times. We’ve got the best part of six weeks. If we do three a day for 20, five days a week, for five weeks, we’re good to go”. And they said, “oh yeah, that makes sense”. So I was actually able, even without having the technical understanding, to break it down and get them to simplify it so they could see how they could do it. Then now they could repeat that, because one thing that is really interesting is that the big successes aren’t actually big successes. They are an accumulation of small successes. So identify the small success, break it down, show people how to do it. Then it’s just a matter of repeating that.  As you repeat it, you might find a way of doing it faster or better that allows you to accelerate, and boom!  You’re on your way. 

So that’s the approach that I take. I’ve been recognized as a global influencer in leadership.  I worked with one client who now has been recognized as the number nine digital marketer in the world.  I actually sat down with him and went through the process of how I do it. These were the steps that you could do. This is the kind of content. This is what you need to be connected with.  And off he went.  I’ve been able to teach people things like content generation, generally from articles I’ve written over the last five, six years.

 

I don’t know how many you’ve written. How many have you written? 

1500.  

 

Wow.

Sounds like a lot. But it’s just one a day for 15 minutes. Yes. It’s persistence and consistency. You know, there’s no way I could write 1500 full-length articles, but let’s look at what an article is. There are  three components to an article; there’s the medium~ It could be a video. It could be audio, it could be a blog. Make it unique with different media.  And there are two other components to every single piece of an article.  And if you look at it, the way I look at it, you have the concept and the context, and people get wound up trying to come up with new concepts.  

Good luck with that!  It ain’t gonna happen. You know, you might come up with one more, but what is easy to do is the context. You get the idea and then you get the example. A great example of that is when you watch movies, there are maybe only six or seven movie plots. One of which is, I mean, boy loses girl, but you can do that in the 15th century, in space, on the wall. Then they’re mixed race. Then they’re different ages, right? It’s different, but it’s this exact same story. But by using a different example, you can tell that same story many times. So you identify the existing concepts, and then just find new examples of it. So a concept in leadership is: it’s not about position.  It’s about action. 

So if I watch Tom Brady, his move to a new franchise, the Super Bowl, I can talk about, you know, the benefits of bringing a winning leader into a dysfunctional culture, how that can transform that team into an incredible team.

Look. We can simplify things and empower people. Then they become excited. I’ve coached people to write a book in 40 days. Somebody’s worked on a book for two years, and I said, “look, how big is your book?”  “I don’t know”. “This is 40,000 words. This is 60,000. This is 20,000.” She wanted to do 40,000 words. Okay. So that’s a thousand words a day for four days. I have a degree in mathematics, but let me just recheck 40 times one. You know what the book is, you want to write.

 She was writing about eight areas of life in which you have to win and to be successful.  So I said, “how many chapters are in your book”?  “I don’t know”.  I said 10 chapters, one for an introduction, one for each of the eight areas, and then one for the conclusion. If you’ve got 10 chapters, that’s 40,000 words. That’s almost a thousand words each. So now you’ve got your framework, you know where you’re going to write every day. You already know all this stuff inside you. She said, “Stop, stop!  I’ve got to go home and write the book now”.  After 90-minutes of a booked two hour coaching session, she called it quits. Forty days later, she sent me the draft manuscript that she sent to the publishers.

 

So awesome. And it’s so cool how you simplify things. It does get people to look at it differently, as small do-able tasks.

She asked, what about editing? Not your job;  you’re the author. What about the cover? Not your job; you’re the author. What about this? Not your job; you’re the author. Right? Just get your content down. Then when you land the publisher, they’ll take care of all that. Know what your job is.  Your job is not to be the editor. You can go and do that someday. You can go and be an editor in the future, so don’t worry about the editing before you’ve written the content that’s inside. So, you know, it’s just about simplifying to empower people, and when they’re empowered, they become excited. And when they’re excited, they deliver.  It is as simple as that. Absolutely.

 

Thank you for sharing all of that. Now you have a couple of books out. One of those books is Fast and you did reference that earlier. What inspired you to write that book and what is one of the big nuggets that you can give our listeners today? 

Okay. So my first book was called Leadership: It’s a Marathon, not a Sprint.  And I was coaching them for an interview to help them land a job. And, again, a simple process. Don’t tell me what you do. Tell me who you are. And you know, we agreed that he was a commercially- minded AT&T exec who delivers the return, the promise with someone, an investment. So he knew who he was. I asked him, what are your three strengths? He said, I don’t know;  what are yours? I said, well, actually, that’s a great question. I don’t know. I would have to say honesty, hard work, and determination.

Those are just qualities that everybody has;  what is it that differentiates me? I know I went back and thought, do I have a process that I follow when I’m turning around these failing projects and underperforming departments?  Can I extract a document and then teach it to other people?  So I thought, okay, what do I do? Very simple.  When something’s failing, I find the cause of failure and I fix it. Okay. That sounds repeatable. As long as you know what the cause of failure is. I thought, okay, are there common causes of failure? So I looked at the examples that I’d worked on before, and there were four recurring themes. It was a lack of focus. People didn’t know what success looks like. Like the young writer, she wanted to write a book, but she did not know how many words her book should be.

How do you know when you’re finished? How do you know when you’re halfway through? You can’t do that. You’ve got to be clear about the goal, communicate and be accountable. 

Do we know who’s involved? Have we communicated to them what we expect? You got an agreement from them that they’re going to do it. And if you do that with focus, that will help increase your effectiveness because you’ve now got the right people doing the right thing and that’s going to move you forward. 

The next two reasons we fail is one, a lack of simplicity. We over-complicate things. We do it, in a crazy way. When we complicate it, when we lose understanding of how we’re going to be successful, that’s when we become demotivated and stop.

Then transparency;  and transparency is about knowing what’s involved. So when we want to run a marathon, running a marathon is not about one in 26 miles. It’s about training for six months. So you need to know what is the full scope.  Are we clear about the timing involved, so that we’re setting ourselves up to be successful? If we’re focused on the right thing, we’ve got the right people involved and we know what’s expected, we will understand how we’re going to be successful. We know what’s involved, and we’re going to put ourselves on the path to success.

The second reason for failure is accountability. You cannot make people accountable, because accountability is something that we accept. It’s about ownership. I can be responsible and say, this is your job, but I can’t make you succeed on that job. But what I can do is, I can help facilitate that. There’s a simple way to get people to accept accountability. Ask the question, “do you have everything you need in order to be successful?”  And when they say yes, they’re subconsciously accepting accountability. They just told you that they have everything they need to be successful. 

Now a lot of people ask me, what happens if they say no? Well, give them what they need, but the thing they need to be successful, they won’t be successful. So why would they accept accountability?

If we ask them that question, it forces them to think it through.  Oh, well I need this, I’ve got that. And when they’ve thought it through, and see that they have everything they need, boom! They’ve accepted ownership. They believe they’ve got everything they need to be successful. So they’re going to feel empowered, a little bit excited, and they will deliver. So ask, have you everything you need to be successful? That’s powerful.

 

That is very powerful. No one’s ever asked me that before. So yeah, I can definitely see it not only empowers them, but like you said, it’s a process. They’re actually processing that question.

Let’s imagine I give you a job. And I say,  “do you have everything you need to be successful?” And you say, “yeah”.  Two days later it’s not done, and I’m asking you, “so tell me what happened because you said you had everything you needed?  So what happened?” 

It’s a lot easier to have a management conversation. Throughout my career, I’ve managed thousands of people, and my last full-time job, I literally had a thousand people report to me. Throughout my career, I have fired three people. I’ve had a lot of people come to me and say, “you know what, this is not working out.  I can’t do this. Would it be okay if I left? Or could you find me an easier job?” Absolutely!  I want you to be successful. 

But you know, that comes from my sports background. I love transparency because I want you to be able to see what the performance should be. So that if you’ve agreed, you’ve got everything you need. We know where you’ll be 25, 50, 75% of the time.

At every point, all I need to do is keep asking. “Do you have everything you need to do this job? Do you need anything from me?”  If you keep saying, “no, I’m good. I’m good”, and then it’s a disaster, then I don’t have to be aggressive or assertive in a conversation or discussion. You know why this failed? I don’t need to point it out to you. Right? You know, it’s like in football at the end of the season, when the team’s 0 in 16 and somebody knocks on the manager, or the head coach. He knows the next conversation is going to be a battle. Absolutely. It might be, you know what? We had a terrible team. We’ll fix it in the draft next year. You had the best roster in football.  What do you think we need to do? That’s a much easier discussion. 

Of course, sports are different, because only one team can win the Superbowl, but in business every team can be successful. And in my experience, when I give people the tools and empower them to be successful, they take it with both hands. Nobody wants to come to work and go home feeling like they did a poor job or didn’t achieve anything.

 

Absolutely. So where is the best place for our listeners to grab your books?

They can get them on Amazon or on any of my websites. 

 

All right. And your website, what’s your website address? 

I’m the only Gordon Tredgold in the world. So people can find me @gordontredgold.com or they can Google ‘Gordon Tredgold’.  They’ll find me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and they’ll find my website.

 

So who did you have to pay to become the only Gordon Tredgold in the world?

So my son, Dan, is a professional musician.  There are 50 Dan Tredgolds. I was looking for a job and somebody said to me, you know, when you apply for a job, they’ll Google you to find out who you are. This was about 10 years ago. And I thought, whoa. So I Googled myself and it was just me. 

 

There you go. So Gordon, is there a book that you really enjoy outside of the ones you’ve written,obviously, that have had an influence on you?

Yeah. Some books that I would recommend;  my favorite book is called The Heart of a Leader by Ken Blanchard, a leadership and business leader.  When you read Ken Blanchard, you don’t think, wow, this guy’s a genius. You say, wow, I’m a genius because I actually understand this and can use that content and instruction.  Also, Good to Great by Jim Collins is an excellent book.

Then lastly, I would say, and this is a terrible book which you should read at your own peril, it’s called Leadership and Self-deception by Arbinger Institute.  I think of it as a Harbinger of doom. If the truth be told, I can fix the opening chapter, but it basically says you are the common denominator in every success you’ve ever had. And you’re also the common denominator in every failure and every bad relationship you’ve had. If you’re going to take praise for the success, then we need to look at your contributions to the failures. It really is a hard look at how we think and how we put people in boxes. It’s a very tough read, and I can assure you once you’ve read it, you will be phoning people to apologize.

 

That’s pretty powerful. It is good stuff. Absolutely good stuff. Now you’re still working with businesses and individuals. So if someone wants to learn more about bringing you into their company or having you as an individual mentor/coach, they can check that out on your website. Is that correct?

Well,  I’m getting my website updated, and it’ll be done in about four weeks, which again, we’re trying to keep simple.  But people can just reach out to me.  I do a lot of one-to-one coaching which I like.  The one-to-one coaching is my standard coaching package of five sessions. We use the first three sessions to get our heads around the problem. Invariably, the last two are follow-up sessions to see how things are going.  I help people simplify things. We narrow it down, and we make a big jump quite quickly.  I’m not tying people into 15 weeks, 30 weeks, one year programs. I don’t do that. Let’s fix it. Let’s empower you, and off you go.

 

Oh, nice. So tell us a little bit about some of the progressive volunteer work you do in Africa.

Sure.  I went with a group called Wolf Brilliant Africa, and I’ve been working and mentoring with them now for seven years. Basically their philosophy is there are a billion problems in Africa. There are a billion people in Africa. Maybe if we try and fix one problem at a time, we could have an impact. So that’s what they do. They go out, they teach people to fish to empower the people to have some control over their own destiny. They teach them skills so that they might create a career.

They work with women entrepreneurs, helping them understand how to develop their own businesses so that they become self-sufficient. They teach kids in rural areas. They just had their seven year anniversary, and we’re just working on a Go Fund Me campaign. We’ve impacted around 15,000 people in seven years, but still have an immense amount of work to do. Our goal is to help over a hundred thousand people in the next seven years. So we’re running a campaign. We are going to try and do seven times as much as what we’ve done in Ghana, but also reach out to the next seven countries, and empower other people to do that. 

 

Tell me a little bit about Raising Passionate Leaders for the Betterment of Society.

I’m running leadership training at the moment. I do a six week course every Thursday;  I’m just in the middle of one at the moment, but we’ll be starting it again in July. I will probably look at putting it as a web-based option to bring the price down and make it more accessible to more people. My philosophy on leadership, again, is simplicity.  

There’s a lot of training around authenticity, value-based leadership, but a lot of that is about how to make money. What I want to do is try and help good people who have that right leadership spirit, one of servant leadership, stewardship, putting people first.  I want to give them the delivery skills. When you can do that, then we can end up with some great leaders. So that’s the passion;  it’s about helping to create that next generation of  kind-hearted, centered leaders who deliver amazing results.

 

That is so awesome. Gordon, thank you so much. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you for taking time out of your day. I think you’re six hours ahead of us?

Yeah, it’s nine o’clock for me now. So time to get that glass of wine. 

 

Nice. So let’s end this with one more nugget that our audience can really embrace for their professional life, their business life, their leadership skills.

So things you can do today that will improve your leadership skills almost immediately:  Number one, smile more. When you smile at people, your body releases endorphins which help reduce stress. It also makes us approachable. Second is to listen more. When we listen to people, we show them respect. When we show them respect, it helps to build trust. We also can learn more when we listen.  My grandma always said ‘two ears, one mouth, use them in that ratio’. The third thing we can do is we can speak more;  and I don’t mean talk more about our spouse to people, but share the goals of the company, what we’re trying to do and what’s in it for them. People will have more clarity about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Lastly, praise more, whether that’s saying thank you, good job, well done;  praising effort, praising performance. People crave praise. So I smile more, listen more, praise more. If you do that, you will help engage your teams, build trust, and get more out of them. 

 

Amazing Gordon. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you for sharing. I just appreciate you and what you brought to the interview today. So thank you. 

You’re welcome. My pleasure.

Important Links:

Website: https://gordontredgold.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GordonTredgold

Facebook: https://business.facebook.com/GTredgold/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtredgold/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordontredgold/

Gordon’s Books:

Leadership: It’s a Marathon Not a Sprint – Everything You Need to Know about Sustainable Achievements

FAST: 4 Principles Every Business Needs to Achieve Success and Drive Results