Episode 158: Dominic Ashley-Timms Resources

https://humanisethenumbers.online/episode-158-dominic-ashley-timms-author-speaker-and-ceo/

https://vimeo.com/1163964472?fl=ip&fe=ec

1. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic talks about the role of a manager and how stopping and thinking can build the engagement of your team and give you time back in your working week.

2. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO, as he talks about the 'Frankenstein Manager' and the trap of being chiefly a problem solver.  This leads to a workforce that cannot think for itself, has no development or enthusiasm, and managers that are overloaded and burnt out.  Dominic explains how stopping and thinking can change this.

3. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic explains the four elements of the STAR manager programme and the importance of enabling, empowering, and delegating, and why these need to be done in the right order.

https://humanisethenumbers.online/episode-158-dominic-ashley-timms-author-speaker-and-ceo/

1. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic talks about how most businesses still treat their people like cogs in a machine, rarely stopping to acknowledge that those humans have skills, talents, and a genuine desire to contribute to something meaningful.

He puts it simply: ‘a company doesn't really exist without the people.’  He believes it's the willing contribution of people working together that creates extraordinary results, and that it's how we manage, engage, and enable those people that is the only metric that really matters.

2. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  When he is talking to an audience, Dominic often asks them: ‘Put your hand up if you have a to-do list. Now keep your hand up if you've ever completed a task that wasn't on the list, just so you could write it down and cross it off for the dopamine hit.’

Most people keep their hands up.

He uses this example to emphasise the point that most managers measure their value by the number of tasks they complete each day. But that's not management, that's task completion.

The real work of a manager is finding those opportunities to engage with the team, acknowledge their progress, and help them grow.

The shift from task counter to people developer is deceptively simple to describe, but, in reality, it takes effort, hard work, and intention.

3. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic shares how, when you first become a manager, no one sits down with you and says:  'Here's how to adapt your communication style to get the very best out of the people around you.'  Instead, you're thrown in at the deep end. You read a few books, pick up advice from courses, bolt bits and bobs onto your persona, and over time, you become what Dominic calls a ‘Frankenstein Manager’.

There's no overriding philosophy or approach, just a series of habits formed over time and, in most cases, a pre-existing concept of a manager as a problem solver.

But in his opinion, this is the model that is costing managers everything.  When you step into every problem brought to you, you disengage your team, become a micromanager, and take on the burden of responsibility and work for the team, which often leads to manager burnout.  Instead, you need to look for those coaching moments that help build trust in your team.

4. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic talks about that moment when a team member comes to you with a problem.  What do you normally do?

You probably send them away with an instruction on how to solve the problem, a quick fix, a short conversation, and the team member goes away.

But what have you actually done? You've sent them away with an instruction to carry out, but there's no room for appreciative feedback, no sense of ownership, no development, and, critically, no real engagement.

Dominic draws a sharp distinction:  when someone implements your idea, they do it as a gopher.  When they implement their own idea, they do it with pride, zeal, and genuine buy-in.  The quality of the outcome is on a completely different plane.

The manager's role isn't simply to supply answers but to ask the question that helps someone find their own.

5. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  What if your primary job as a manager wasn't to solve problems, but to stimulate thinking?  Dominic calls this ‘operational coaching’ - not a formal coaching session, not a scheduled one-to-one, but a way of engaging with people moment to moment throughout the day.

The result is remarkable.  Within just two weeks of managers adopting this approach, teams that used to bring every problem to the manager start arriving with options they've already worked through themselves.

This means that the team member has broken their dependency on you, the manager, and, as a consequence, their confidence and engagement build.  Managers report winning back 20% to 40% of their time, not by working faster, but by enabling their people to step up.

Dominic puts it simply:  'The job of a line manager is to enable the skills and talents of the people in the team.'  That's it.  Period.

6. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic believes that there is a lot of talk about curiosity in management, but curiosity can be self-serving.  A manager asking diagnostic questions is still gathering information to fix the problem themselves.  That's not coaching, that's research.

He describes something different:  purposeful inquiry, which is learning to construct a question that's most helpful to the thinking of the other person for where they are right now.

That shift from 'asking to gather' to 'asking to enable' is subtle but changes the whole dynamic of your relationship.

This is when habits get broken down, which really helps managers develop situational awareness to tune into what's happening around them and into the conversations they are having with team members in a completely different way.

7. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic admits that, in business, we talk a lot about empowerment and delegation, but giving someone authority to act isn't the blessing we think it is if their confidence to take up a task hasn't first been built up. 

When you delegate too early, and the work comes back to you, there's rework, and the person feels deflated.

Dominic outlines three stages every manager needs to understand:  enable first, then empower, then delegate.  Enabling means finding micro-moments to have people take action themselves, giving them feedback, and building their confidence one small interaction at a time.  Over time, the stature of your team members changes.

Before simply stepping in to solve the problem for the person, STOP and THINK and ask yourself the question:  could this person take this from me confidently?  The gap between where they are and that answer is where you focus on their development journey.

8. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic describes the STAR model as a full behavioural change program.

It starts with STOP.  This, Dominic acknowledges, is the hardest part, because when someone comes to you with a problem, every instinct says, just solve it.

But the STAR approach asks you to pause long enough to ask:  what does this person actually need from me right now?

Then THINK:  Is this a coachable moment? What question would be most helpful to their thinking?

Then ASK:  not diagnostically, but purposefully.

And finally, RESULT:  get a commitment, agree on a follow-up, and actually do it. Because if you don't follow up after helping someone identify an action, what does that say?

Dominic states that managers who begin applying even the first steps, just learning to STOP and THINK, immediately become more mindful and more present.  Behavioural change starts within days.

9. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Dominic shares the story of the UK government calling him and asking him a question he'd never been asked before:  'Could operational coaching improve UK productivity?’

He said yes, and they invited him to prove it.

The London School of Economics ran what became the world's largest randomised control trial of management-related behaviours, across 62 organisations, 14 sectors, and 42 separate data measures. The results were so strong that the government thought they were too good to be true and sent LSE back to recut the data four different ways.

Each time, the same answer came back. Managers who adopted the operational coaching style spent 70% more time coaching their teams in the flow of work, and every manager generated a 74-times return on the cost of the programme. The research is now in the top 5% of all academic papers ever published.

Good management isn't a soft skill; it's the highest-ROI investment a business can make.

10. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Dominic Ashley-Timms, author, speaker, and CEO.  Managers sit at the top of everything good or bad in a business.

But things have changed, and now what is expected of a manager is greater than ever before.  Post-COVID expectations have shifted; we have new generations entering the workforce, hybrid working has changed the texture of relationships, and, of course, AI is reshaping entire roles.

And all of that pressure is landing squarely on the shoulders of line managers, who, in many cases, were never properly equipped for the job in the first place.  At the end of this podcast, Dominic asks a crucial question:  how much talent are you leaving on the table?

Not because your people aren't capable, but because the management style you inherited may never have been designed to find out. The STAR model, the operational coaching approach, and the book The Answer Is a Question exist to change that.

https://humanisethenumbers.online/episode-158-dominic-ashley-timms-author-speaker-and-ceo/

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Here is a soundbite of the interview with Dominic