David Deane-Spread is Founder of Metattude, a leadership and business turnaround consultancy focused on behavioral transformation. With more than 25 years of experience coaching CEOs and executives, he has worked across Australia and Europe in both public and private companies. Trained in leadership within the Australian Defence Force and law enforcement agencies, David brings a disciplined, systems-based approach to business transformation. Through Metattude, he helps organizations prevent failure by aligning leadership behavior, culture, and strategic execution.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [0:41] Why business turnaround always starts with leader behavior shifts
- [1:27] How culture is created by attitudes, behaviors, and conversations
- [3:30] See why employees mimic leaders when interacting with customers
- [5:49] Uncover the workshop secrets for building alignment and new habits
- [7:13] Master difficult conversations with David Deane-Spread’s proven coaching process
- [8:45] Recognize payroll as investment, not overhead, to spark growth
- [16:54] Get actionable turnaround advice rooted in mindset and strategic thinking
In this episode…
Business turnarounds are rarely about strategy alone; they are about leadership behavior and organizational culture. Many companies attempt to fix performance issues through systems or restructuring, without addressing the attitudes and conversations driving results. How can leaders shift their thinking and behavior to prevent failure and create sustainable growth?
According to David Deane-Spread, successful turnarounds begin with understanding that culture is the sum of attitudes, behaviors, and conversations inside a business. He explains that leaders must first diagnose root causes, align around new behavioral standards, and develop the courage to have necessary conversations. By mastering the four controllables — thoughts, feelings, words, and actions — leaders can shift outcomes and prevent costly strategic mistakes.
On this episode of Top Business Leaders Show, John Corcoran welcomes David Deane-Spread, Founder of Metattude, for a conversation about preventing business failure through leadership behavior. David shares his ABC framework of attitudes, behaviors, and conversations, explains why culture drives customer experience, and breaks down the Intel case study to show how fear-based decisions can destroy value. He also outlines practical steps for aligning teams and driving growth.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- David Deane-Spread on LinkedIn
- Metattude
- Australian Defence Force
- Intel
- Nvidia
- Rio Tinto
- Perplexity
Quotable Moments
- “Every problem in a business exists because the right conversation didn’t happen at the right time.”
- “Culture is simply the sum of everyone’s attitudes, behaviors, and conversations.”
- “Leaders don’t get copied for what they say — they get copied for what they do.”
- “Payroll isn’t an overhead; it’s your greatest investment.”
- “What got you into the mess is not what will get you out of it.”/li>
Action Steps
- Diagnose behavioral root causes: Assess leadership attitudes, habits, and conversations before changing systems or strategy.
- Master difficult conversations: Practice the observe–listen–ask approach to resolve conflict and prevent recurring problems.
- Invest in your people: Treat payroll as an investment by committing to training and leadership development.
- Focus on the four controllables: Align your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions with your long-term strategy.
- Replace fear-based decisions with strategic thinking: Evaluate risks holistically before making major operational shifts.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 Media, we feature top founders, executives, and business leaders from all over the world.
John Corcoran: 00:20
All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And we’ve got another great guest here today.
I’m with David Deane-Spread. He is the founder of Metattude, and he has an amazing background, 25 years of various coaching. He was also trained to lead in the Australian Defence Force, in law enforcement, and in other agencies. And he’s been coaching a variety of different businesses, CEOs for 25 plus years. He also served as CEO and managing director of public and private companies in Australia and in Europe.
And we’re going to be talking to him today about preventing business failure and also his formula for business turnaround. So let’s talk. Let’s start there David. So you say that it starts with behavior. If you want to turn a business around, you have to look at the behavior of the leaders inside the company or key personnel and start right there.
So let’s take me through that. Where do you start? If you have a company that comes to you and they need a turnaround.
David Deane-Spread: 01:27
Thanks, John. And thanks very much for having me here. The way I start is looking at the business and getting an understanding of what the culture is like and where are the the root causes of whatever their issues and challenges are. And it always boils down to behavior. And that behavior includes how they use systems or don’t use systems, how they treat one another, how they treat their, their resources, and ultimately how they treat their customers.
It’s a behavioral thing. And when we realize that all of us in the business are creating the culture of the business, which is a sum of the all the people’s attitudes inside the business, we realized that we’re in a position now to to really influence that and help that to change, because leadership and interaction and teamwork and all of that is is conducted by three things your attitudes, your behaviors, and the conversations that you have. The ABC basically operates a business.
John Corcoran: 02:39
When you come into a company, how do you uncover what the attitudes are, what the culture is, what the behaviors have been? Do you have to really get under the hood? Do you just ask probing questions?
David Deane-Spread: 02:52
We do. We actually have a particular diagnostic array of tools which we customize for that particular business. So there’s no we don’t have a cookie-cutter type operation. We are tailoring everything to that particular business because they’re all unique, just like us. We’re all unique.
We may have some similarities with one another, but we’re actually unique. Same with business.
John Corcoran: 03:22
What about the behaviors like you mentioned? Like how they treat the customers? How do you figure out how that shows up?
David Deane-Spread: 03:30
Okay. So if it’s a very customer contact-centric type organization, we’ll even interview customers. However, the one thing that we do know is that the way the leaders treat the people is the way the people treat the customers. That’s just the way human behavior works. We don’t do as leaders say we do as leaders do we copy them?
John Corcoran: 04:03
You. Another thing you’ve said is that every business sits in its own demographic. Can you explain what you mean by that?
David Deane-Spread: 04:10
Yeah. So every business has its own shape, size, and its own type of customer base and its own size of customer base. So if you’re looking, say, at a giant global mining company like, say, Rio Tinto, which has many, many, many thousands, I don’t even know what their, their, their client, their headcount is, but they’re very, very different to a company that’s, you know, not even attempt to their size but yet has probably got, you know, 250 to maybe a thousand people in it. They’re very different. It’s a very different demographic, both in terms of the customer and the shape of the company itself.
And so it’s there. And so we have tiers. So there are second, third, second or third-tier companies. And they sit in that space. And the people that work for those companies are people who, who probably have already worked for Rio Tinto and don’t like working inside a large bureaucracy, that they then move to these smaller companies.
They’ve got expertise, and they’re very valuable employees, but they have chosen to work in tighter, smaller, friendlier tiers. Turns out to be demographic. Demographics and their clients and customers are of a similar nature.
John Corcoran: 05:36
How do you get let’s say you got a turnaround situation with the business. How do you gain alignment? How do you get everyone aligned in a new direction?
David Deane-Spread: 05:49
Yeah, that’s a really good point and a very powerful point. And we do that through a range of one-on-one coaching, which is where the biggest bang for your buck is. And then. But we get everyone on the same page early in the piece by diagnosing where they’re at, and then creating a workshop for the leaders to bring the leaders together, to make an agreement about how we need to be and how we’re going to behave from this moment on. And then we learn the new habits and the new ways of having those necessary and sometimes difficult conversations, which have been avoided for many, many years.
And so every look, every single problem that exists inside a business is caused because the right leader did not have the right conversation with the right person at the right time, in the right way. And the problem persists. And it’s only when it gets to a breaking point or beyond that, you know the right intervention finally takes place.
John Corcoran: 07:00
How do you get leaders that have failed to have the right conversation at the right time with the right person? How do you get them to start having those conversations?
David Deane-Spread: 07:13
We coach them one-on-one and we give them scenarios to work through. We get them to practice. They practice on me and we get to the point. And very quickly they can see that there’s a process of having that conversation. And it’s basically observing, listening, asking, very rarely telling.
So the more we can actually and I run them through an exercise and I actually do it and demonstrate it and then get them to do it. And they then become very confident and competent in having these difficult and necessary conversations. And it can be about letting someone go. It can be talking about a person who’s very high value, but they’re prima donnas and very high maintenance, you know, those sort of people. And we actually talk to them because the other side of the coin is that difficult.
People don’t actually mean to be difficult. There’s always a reason, and we need to discover what that reason is. And often it’s something from the past that they’re bringing with them. You know, they’ve been treated badly by a boss in the past. And so they’re here in this place now, and they expect bosses to be the same.
It’s an automatic belief thing. It’s a habit.
John Corcoran: 08:31
Talk to me about companies that coach their team and that don’t coach their team. So there are, you know, some companies that, you know, say, well, we don’t have time to coach our people. What do you say to that?
David Deane-Spread: 08:45
Yeah. Well, I mean, if the leader is complaining that they don’t have time to, to coach their people. They’re too busy doing work that they can’t delegate to their team because the team’s already full up. Then clearly, clearly, they’re not right-sized and then they come back. Oh no.
But we’ve got budgetary constraints and you know, and so. Okay. So what you’re telling me is that somewhere in the system, maybe stemming from the CFO, we’ve got the, the idea of doing more with less, you know, and that is the great disease out there at the moment. Do more with less. And now with tech and AI and everything we can do even more with even less.
And so the payroll is regarded by many leaders as being an overhead. It’s actually your biggest investment. And you’ve got to treat payroll like an investment. In other words, you’ve got to look after it. Yes.
It doesn’t have to be superfluous, it has to be high value. It’s worth every dollar that you’re spending on it, and you need to invest in your payroll. In other words, invest in your people and train them. I mean, I worked, I mean, recently I worked with a company that’s been around for 30 years. They are already the best provider in their space.
But the owners who started the business from scratch 30 years ago had never spent $1 on training their people over 30 years. And they were wondering why they’ve reached a certain point where, you know, they’re feeling that they’re stagnating and their numbers are showing that they’re stagnating, and they’ve got two young sons coming into the business. And the truth of the matter is they need to grow the size of the business because there’s going to be feeding three families, not just one family. And so We and and and then they said, yeah, but we just can’t get the people to, to see that idea of growth. And they’re very comfortable in their position.
You know they’re very comfortable. We do look after them. Yes. And they do. And they looked after them so much.
They’ve got them now contained. And these people have now got the habit of just doing what we are doing now. And we just repeat that. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat and we’ll be fine. And when you start talking about change now we don’t like change.
No no no we don’t like change. So okay. So that means we’ve got to develop the staff and we’re doing that. And we’re now watching the numbers increase. We’re now watching that business break out of its mold into becoming more open minded, more willing to do things differently and to do things better.
And at the same time, they can see suddenly that they’ve got a better future ahead of them.
John Corcoran: 11:50
You know, sometimes you have leaders who feel that they don’t have control or they can only control so much. And you say that leaders, as a leader, can only control three things: your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own actions. Talk to me a little bit about that idea.
David Deane-Spread: 12:08
Yeah. Four things actually that you can only control. Your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own words and your own actions. Right. And how you deploy those and those meanings, you give those thoughts that you need to be.
Absolutely consistent with what the situation is and where you want to go. And I’ll give you a really good example. That’s public knowledge. So I’m going to use Intel. You know the chip manufacturer Intel and Intel in here are they’re Intel inside.
[Continue to Page 2]
John Corcoran: 12:44
Yeah. Yeah.
David Deane-Spread: 12:45
Well you don’t see that anymore. They’re there in the space of three and a half years. The CEO, who had built the business over 30 years came back into the business to rescue it. And in the space of three and a half years, he cost the business $150 billion.
And it was taken off the index because it had diminished to an insignificant size. And there were a series of events that I’ve gone into very deeply to actually prove really that it’s thoughts, feelings, words and actions. And combined with your fears or your courage, your useless habits or your better practice or your ignorance or your constant learning, they’re all the causes and remedies of everything. And in every single step that Intel took, you could see that the leaders and the board failed to use their thoughts, feelings, words and actions in, in a, in a in a way that was courageous, better practice and and based on learning. Indeed, they used the old playbook that got the business there in the first place, and they went down the wrong path, and they invested heavily in manufacturing instead of design.
Nvidia went down the design path and until then said, no, we’re going down the manufacturing path because we know we, we, we, you know, and they were getting all their small chips from, from Taiwan. And the CEO of Intel publicly said, we don’t put all your eggs in one in the Taiwanese basket. It’s very geopolitically wrong and strategically wrong. And, you know, whilst they are correct in that they actually depended on those chips from Taiwan, and they depended on the relationship they had with the chip manufacturer, and they were getting a 60% discount. Because of that relationship.
And then the CEO came back in and he blew the relationship up by saying it. Don’t invest in Taiwan. And yet they were dependent on it. And so the Taiwanese heard that because it was a public announcement. In fact, he they were present when he said it.
It was at a conference. They turned around and they said, okay, if that’s how you feel, full price for your chips. So they went from being $13,000, 13,800 or something to $23,000 per chip. And of course that impacted massively on Intel. And then they then the next step was that.
So that was not reading it right. You know that was not a smart thought. They should have realized what they were. What they said was correct. It is geopolitically a risk.
But the relationship right now is more important than that risk. Do they risk they actually didn’t understand that the risk of the relationship was bigger than the risk of the politics? And to this day, Taiwan still hasn’t been attacked. So, you know, come on. And yet the chip prices through the roof.
So there’s a really good example. And there’s a whole litany of those errors that both the CEO and the board agreed to. And consequently, $150,150 billion went down the drain. And that CEO was told, resign or be fired. But it was all too late.
It was too late.
John Corcoran: 16:39
Yeah, yeah. This has been great, David. So any final thoughts for anyone who’s watching this, who’s thinking, you know, we need to turn our business around. What are some things that you advise you would give them?
David Deane-Spread: 16:54
Well, the first thing they need to do is to have a look at what the current situation is and then apply the correct meaning to that situation. Do not act out of fear. In other words, if you can see that there’s a problem, be very, very mindful of what other problems might occur if we fix this problem. So be strategic about it and do not run with the first thought that hits your head. So you’ve got to think about the fact that fear, habits and ignorance applied in our thoughts, feelings, words, and actions are the causes of all the problems that we’ve got.
And what got you into this mess is not going to get you out of it. So you have to change the way you think, and we can help there. Change the way you feel. Because we’re often our feelings often come first because of a belief that we’re not aware of, and we can’t act out of fear. So the CEO was told by his staff.
We can only do $500 million revenue. That’s all we can create. And he said, no, it has to be $1 billion. And then he doubled down on it and said $2 billion. And then within six months had to bring it back to $500 million.
And then when they couldn’t do that, they had to bring it back even worse. And they lost all their credibility. And that was that, out of fear of perception. We have to face whatever the reality is and come up with a different way of thinking. So that’s the number one thing they’ve got to do.
And the board has to do that as well as the C-suite.
John Corcoran: 18:44
And David, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you and attitude?
David Deane-Spread: 18:48
Well, I’m the only David Deane-Spread on the planet, so Google me. And you can check me out on perplexity. You can go to LinkedIn, and you can go to my website metattude.com.
John Corcoran: 19:04
Deane-Spread is an apostrophe. Sorry. Dash Spread s p r e a d. Yes.
David Deane-Spread: 19:14
It’s d e a n e hyphen spread.
John Corcoran: 19:19
Excellent, excellent. David, thank you so much.
David Deane-Spread: 19:23
My pleasure man. My pleasure.
Outro: 19:25
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