The Art of Leadership - Jimmy Burroughes on Leadership training, culture and performance
New managers, senior executives, and HR leaders seeking practical methods to build trust, improve team performance, and navigate hybrid workplace culture.
What the conversation covers
Jimmy joins host Jens Heitland to discuss why traditional leadership development often falls short, drawing on his background as a military officer and corporate executive. He points out that many organisations promote technical specialists into management without training, then send them on isolated courses expecting them to solve problems alone. Jimmy advocates bringing teams and leaders into the same room to build trust and redesign their ways of working together.
The conversation covers how company culture drives commercial results. Jimmy argues that focusing on people, purpose, and potential yields better financial outcomes than fixating purely on profit and productivity metrics. He explains that engaged, supported employees innovate and solve problems naturally, while neglected staff slip into sabotage mode, dragging down retention and output.
Jimmy also outlines practical approaches to navigating hybrid work and driving team performance. Rather than issuing mandates, leaders need to hold adult conversations balancing personal preferences with organisational responsibilities. Moving teams from merely surviving to industry disruptors requires psychological safety, structured curiosity, and an environment where people can make mistakes without fear of failure.
“Your job as a new leader is to make decisions, it's not to have the answers.”
Key takeaways
- Run workshops with leaders and their teams together, removing pressure from managers to have all the answers.
- Focus on people, purpose, and potential rather than pushing purely for profit, productivity, and performance.
- Assess team culture using data points like staff turnover, first-year retention, and leadership 360 feedback.
- Deliver feedback using positive framing: highlight one thing loved and one thing that would make it better.
- Use the PEARL model (Planning, Experimentation, Assessment, Reflection, Learning) to capture lessons learned through reflection and pre-flection.
- Establish the four stages of curiosity (certainty, caution, curious, careless) to run controlled experiments that test ideas.
- Structure one-to-one meetings around performance, personal development, career aspirations, and two-way feedback.
Where this shows up in your business
The ideas in this conversation come from the Simplify to Amplify method. To see where friction is costing your team time, try the free Leadership Friction Finder, or browse all of Jimmy's guest appearances.
Summary written by JBL High Performance from the episode audio. The episode belongs to Human Innovation with Jens Heitland and Jens Heitland.