Ep075: Enterprise Artistry: The future belongs to the artists, with Mykel Dixon

Today I’m chatting with Mykel Dixon. This episode is made possible by Safety on Tap Connected the world’s first professional growth accelerator for health and safety professionals.
If you are invested in your own development and improvement, this is right for you. For the price of about 3 coffee’s a week, you can accelerate your development and your effectiveness with access to an amazing learning community, educational content like you’ve never been taught before, and you get 1:1 online coaching with me – your personal coach to help you accelerate your growth. This combination of things would usually be out of reach of most health and safety professionals, which is the very reason why we developed it – for you. If you want to know more, hop into your browser now and type safetyontap.com/connected. Once you are there you can find out a bit more, and join our waiting list to join. That’s safetyontap.com/connected

Mykel Dixon, as you will hear, probably defies description. When Creativity is the strongest economic currency, Experience the new cost of entry and Human the only meaningful strategy, he reckons all of us must rethink our approach to Leadership. In such a radically transforming world, conventional sources of insight hold diminishing value. To find our authentic edge, we must look to and be willing to learn from those who are already fluent in qualitative thinking, deep empathy and relentless reinvention.
The Artists.

Mykel will be not just speaking, but performing at the 2018 Safetyscape convention, part of the new events offering from the Safety Institute of Australia on from the 22nd to 24th of May in Melbourne. The inaugural #SAFETYSCAPE Convention will enable an array of organisations to assemble as the largest gathering of Health & Safety Industry professionals across a program of events, workshops, forums and the Safety Institute of Australia’s own two day National Health & Safety Conference: In Practice along with the Workplace Health & Safety Show. But don’t forget, as I’ve been saying for a while – most of your learning and in turn performance will come from social and experiential learning – so whilst the knowledge you will gain will be great, it’s even better to meet new peers and strengthen relationships with your network, share stories and reflections from your own experience.
Visit safetyscape.com.au to find out more and get your ticket.

Here’s my chat with Mykel:

I love how authentic Mykel is, how he brings himself, the honest, tired, but amazing guy that he is.

Check out Mykel on YouTube, or on his website

mykeldixon.com

Here’s my three takeaways from that chat with Mykel Dixon:

Takeaway #1: Artistry, and the creation that comes with it, is a gateway to all the amazing things that we want and need as health and safety professionals, as leaders, as business people, and most of all as humans. We know we need more connection, engagement, trust, empathy, care – artistry can help us genuinely effect positive change. You don’t need to paint a masterpiece, or write a song, or produce a feature-length film in the running for the Academy Awards. Artistry, as Mykel encourages us to embrace, can be far simpler, far more accessible for every single one of us. We talked about the little examples to give you an idea of how you can get started – there is no reason not to, is there?
Takeaway #2: Release it. Send it out. This is a critical extension of the first takeaway. I encourage you to get started with little things. But there will be things you won’t want to release, this is when you know you are on the right track. Create a video, or include pictures on your reports, or ask the biggest, boldest question you’ve ever asked of your senior managers. Go back and listen to my early podcast episodes, do you think I like them? No way, but I got started, and 70 something episodes later, I’m improving. Whatever it is for you, you need to release it into the world, without delay.
Takeaway #3: You will fail. Fail a lot. Fail so it hurts. Because that is how you will get better. When you start something, especially if it is scary, you will fail. Mykel talked about how his success comes simply from having stuffed up more times than most people. The thing is, most of us are already failing every day, when our efforts fall on deaf ears, when implementation of controls is poor, when we can’t get through to that leader. Mykel takes a learning approach to failing – getting better each time. The difference between our everyday failure, and the failure that may come through the artistry Mykel speaks of, is I think we’ve normalised the everyday failure without much learning, it becomes default: “it’s just part of the job that I will loose more than I win in health and safety”. That’s a shit attitude, and worse if we do it unconsciously. If we were brave and unleashed more artistry, we would be consciously uncomfortable, we’d be afraid, we’d have more skin in the game. That’s a good sign, because it doesn’t matter whether it works or not, you will learn something either way, and get ever closer to a more human, engaging and effective approach to health and safety leadership, and your own personal leadership.

Until next time, what’s the one thing you’ll do to take positive, effective or rewarding action, to grow yourself, and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Seeya!