Restaurant franchises can be powerful environments for leadership development, especially for young people. When managed with intentionality, these seemingly entry-level jobs can provide significant opportunities for personal growth, skill development, and career advancement.

Melissa Nuttall, along with her partner, is the franchisee of a quick service restaurant in New Zealand. In this conversation with Pia and Dan, she lays out how good customer service and continuous training create positive work cycles that benefit both employees and customers.

Three reasons to listen

• Achieve broader business goals while reducing cognitive load on staff
• Develop young team members into capable leaders through progressive responsibility
• Create safe spaces for growth regardless of employees’ long-term career plans

Episode highlights

• [00:08:38] Helping the next generation of leaders
• [00:14:21] Turning a culture around
• [00:18:23] Creating a stable launchpad for new careers
• [00:24:38] Leading with kindness and humility
• [00:27:58] Be mindful of your leadership shadow
• [00:29:20] Mel's media recommendation
• [00:30:11] Takeaways from Pia and Dan

Links

• Connect with Melissa via LinkedIn
• Track and improve your team performance with Squadify
• Leave us a voice note

While many teams focus on building trust to improve performance, it's actually clarity that needs to be addressed first.

Research shows that teams need clear roles, goals and processes before they can effectively build trust and collaborate. This represents a significant shift from traditional thinking about team development, and the data shows that improving clarity drives up trust results, whilst working directly on trust doesn't impact clarity scores.

In this episode, Squadify’s Chief Data Officer, Juliet Owen re-joins Dan and Pia to discuss the role clarity plays in driving team performance.

This episode will help you

• Build team trust by first establishing clarity around roles, goals and processes rather than focusing directly on trust-building exercises
• Create effective one-page team documents that capture why the team exists, their collective goals, and non-negotiable behaviours
• Drive better team performance by shifting from individual KPIs to collective team goals that encourage collaboration rather than competition

Episode highlights

• [00:09:34] How teams are coping with change today
• [00:15:30] What we mean by trust
• [00:20:03] The trust gap
• [00:26:29] Case studies on building trust
• [00:33:12] What can you do?
• [00:34:59] Pia and Juliet's media recommendations
• [00:37:24] Takeaways from Pia and Dan

Links

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, by Patrick Lencioni
• You Can’t Ask That – Pia’s mdia recommendation
• The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
• Connect with Juliet via LinkedIn
• Track and improve your team performance with Squadify
• Leave us a voice note

Humans are crucial to AI adoption. While AI technology continues to advance, its effective implementation in business depends on people working with it rather than being replaced by it.

Inclusive AI means finding the right balance between technological advancement and human insight, rather than seeing AI as a simple push-button solution to complex knowledge work.

Susi O’Neill is a consultant, author, and speaker on frontier technology. She helps organisations implement AI effectively, analyses AI trends, and distills insights in her newsletter.

Three reasons to listen

• To move past the hype and see how humans will continue to be essential in an AI-enhanced workplace
• To start implementing an effective approach to AI adoption in your organisation
• To develop a more balanced perspective on technological change than the one propagated by Silicon Valley

Episode highlights

• [00:05:19] The nebulous nature of AI
• [00:11:17] Change is the constant
• [00:16:06] The falacy of the competetive advantage
• [00:18:16] Inclusive AI
• [00:26:18] How do we use AI responsibly?
• [00:29:05] Squadify's AI governance
• [00:33:06] Take your first step into AI
• [00:37:41] Suzi's media recommendations
• [00:40:32] Takeaways from Dan and Pia

Links

• Track and improve your team performance with Squadify
• Leave us a voice note
• Connect with Suzi via LinkedIn
• Rethinking the Hype Cycle – Suzi’s newsletter
• Women Leaders in Tech Outpace Men Counterparts in Generative AI Adoption
• Channel 4 Corporate AI Principles
• Supremacy, by Parmy Olson
• Threads (1984)
• Offal