In this episode of The extra-Ordinary Leader, I’m joined by Sophie Bowen, Head of Learning & Development at COOK Trading Ltd, a business widely recognised for its award-winning culture, human-centred leadership and long-term commercial success.

Sophie has spent 15 years inside COOK, embedding learning and development into the fabric of the business rather than treating it as a bolt-on or a ‘nice to have’. Together, we explore what extra-Ordinary leadership really looks like when growth, culture and profit are genuinely aligned.

We talk candidly about why learning fails when it sits on the sidelines, how values become meaningless when they’re written about people instead of with them, and why the most powerful leadership development often happens without classrooms, PowerPoint or big budgets.

This conversation is for leaders who want to build organisations where people don’t just perform, but thrive.

You’ll hear us explore leadership through context, reflection, constraint, culture and courage – and why the work always starts with the leader themselves.

Inside This Episode

• What extra-Ordinary leadership really means in complex, multi-site organisations
• Why leaders must create conditions for growth, not control outcomes
• The danger of treating learning and development as a KPI or add-on
• How COOK embeds learning directly into business strategy and culture
• Why values fail when they’re written top-down instead of co-created
• The power of constraint: why small budgets often drive better leadership development
• Why reflection matters more than content in leadership growth
• How Gen Z is reshaping productivity, motivation and expectations of leadership
• Why learning doesn’t need classrooms to be effective
• The leadership lesson hidden in a cricket ball

Guest:
Sophie Bowen – Head of Learning & Development, COOK Trading Ltd
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-bowen?originalSubdomain=uk

Referenced concepts & resources:
COOK Trading Ltd: https://www.cookfood.net
Ikigai (Japanese concept of purpose): https://positivepsychology.com/ikigai/

My book:
The extra-Ordinary Leader
https://www.dollywaddell.com/store/p/the-extra-ordinary-leader

If this episode resonates and you’re rethinking how leadership, learning and culture show up in your organisation, do reach out. I’d love to continue the conversation.

If you want a high-performing team, you cannot ignore the language you use.

In this episode of Dolly in My Pocket, I unpack Tactic 8 from my book extra-Ordinary Leaders and explore the link between language and performance. Do our words shape our behaviour, or does our behaviour shape our words? More importantly: is the language you use helping your team move, or quietly creating friction?

I look at:
→ Why familiar phrases like “meeting” and “we just need to communicate better” aren’t specific enough for modern leadership
→ How precise language transforms focus, pace and clarity
→ Simple shifts you can make today to improve one-to-ones, collaboration and decision-making
→ Why high-performing teams need a shared vocabulary for behaviour
→ Tools that help create that shared language: Insights, DISC, Myers-Briggs, Giant and more

Think of language as WD-40 for your leadership. When you design it deliberately, every part of your organisation moves more smoothly.

If this episode resonates and you want deeper, practical tactics to use with your team, you can find extra-Ordinary Leaders here:
https://www.dollywaddell.com/store/p/the-extra-ordinary-leader

And if you’d like support applying these ideas inside your organisation, you can get in touch with me via dollywaddell.com.

Listen, share, and let me know which language shifts you’re taking into your week.

In this episode of The extra-Ordinary Leader, I sit down with my first-ever returning guest, Roderic Yapp, former Royal Marine Commando and founder of Leadership Capital. Rod brings a razor-sharp perspective to leadership in complex, fast-moving environments, and this conversation expands how we think about context, decision-making, and performance.

We explore why context is the overlooked foundation of leadership, how to tell whether your world is simple, complicated or complex, and why you may need to develop an unexpected capability: a small measure of strategic callousness.

We also unpack the practical tools leaders can use to stay effective - from drawing systems on paper to understanding the Cynefin framework, experimenting for growth, and knowing when to empower…and when to take control.

If you lead people, lead change, or lead yourself, this is one to keep coming back to.

• Why context shapes everything — and why most leaders miss it
• The multi-tool metaphor: choosing the right behaviour for the moment
• How the wrong leadership style destroys performance
• The Cynefin framework in clear, practical language
• Why experiments beat long-range plans in fast growth
• Three-year horizons and twelve sprints: a smarter way to plan
• Drawing your systems to reveal bottlenecks fast
• Where empathy helps — and where it holds leaders back
• Boundaries, accountability and the realities of performance
• The simplest tool for cutting overwhelm: write it down
• What to bin, what to put in: reflective habits for high-performing leaders

Rod Yapp:
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rodericyapp
Leadership Capital: https://leadershipcapital.com/

If you’d like to deepen your own leadership journey, my book The extra-Ordinary Leader is available here: https://www.dollywaddell.com/store/p/the-extra-ordinary-leader