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hello and welcome to truth life and work the award winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture we are brought to you by the hopes hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals my name is lia and believe it or not i'm still a charged occupational psychologist until they strike you off my name is a i'm a business owner until i go bankrupt again again if you if you've less you already know but anyway we're here to help me simplify the signs of work kind of this august we've been practicing what we preach and actually taking some time off your charge yeah but we're not leaving you hanging obviously every tuesday were still sharing something a little bit more relaxed usually recorded on the terrace of the glass wine not take though because it's raining to it's raining first i moved but to be fair first rainy day since june since june so you our friends in the uk particularly in manchester or yeah i'm sorry about alex yeah but we're still bringing you something a little light hearted albeit on this this raining what they call it rainy day play day yeah well used to call it indoors school there's school it school wet play but that's that's something we don't to start a work not a term we really wanna be using you see it out loud yeah moving on the mask but you do want something a bit more serious it's not too serious it's not too serious but check out thursday and this thursday you'll actually hear from a guest who's all about bringing joy back into the workplace this week that's joel za he's an improv comedian comedian and author who's also worked with microsoft mcdonald's american express and wells fargo very fancy and also just a really genuinely nice guy very very happy but today it is tuesday so we've got part one of our chat with the brilliant guys at ne journey that's john white and nick court now their podcast helps tech professionals grow their careers and they've got nearly three hundred and fifty episodes of insights in everything from management careers and over overcoming obstacles to just have to be professional nerd yeah it's an awesome podcast that we've had the real privilege of being on in the past and more recently and that's the episode we're gonna be sharing with you today so after this very short break you'll hear part one of our conversation with nick and john on the nerd journey podcast don't go anywhere you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot yeah and when they started data was housed across multiple systems south maria hubspot completely unified their website their email marketing and that fan experience in just one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better welcome to the nerd journey podcast our goal is to help you the technology professional accelerate your career progression increase your job satisfaction and be more effective in your existing role we wanna bring listeners like you the career advice we wish we've been given earlier in our careers i'm john white at v journey on twitter sharing c host duties within court at network nerd underscore we're two former it operations guys who have moved on to pre sales roles with technology vendors we have our opinions well we also like to highlight the journeys of others and see what we can learn from them we'd also like to ask for your feedback to make us a conversation not a one way broadcast email us at nerd journey podcast at gmail dot com or dms at nerd journey on twitter so come join us on our nerd journey let's take a trip episode three hundred forty what happens when you're expected to lead a large team as a people manager how exactly are you gonna succeed in doing that according to business psychologist lia elliott one way to produce team cohesion might just be to focus on task cohesion leanne and her husband a a business owner are the c host of the truth lies and work podcast both leanne and a have been former guests on our show but we've never had them on together until today here's way you can expect to learn from part one of our discussion this week with leanne and a we'll talk about the uncertainties in the world and how those have impacted business owners entrepreneurs and especially people managers you'll hear about the industry trend of layoffs how and why this might be leading to flatter organizations and larger teams for people managers to lead but despite all these challenges despite the environmental situation we talk through some practical ways that people managers can still succeed address the problems deliver the results and manage to support positive change and positive relationships with the members of their team let's get you to part one of our discussion with a and lia elliott allen lia and elliott welcome back to the nerd thank you so much for having is it such joy to be back really is we we so weird with being together but yeah we both individually loved our experience in there jenny that's right we had you on individually because i think scheduling wise it just didn't quite work out to have you together i do wanna say that each of those interviews went amazingly well and i think that we got just tons and tons of positive feedback on on each one of them we're really happy to have you back jointly this time well thank you so much for fact way we we we we love conversation video the yeah they're awesome we wanted a discussion i guess centered in job uncertainty and maybe economic uncertain times so it's it's just a a theme that we're revisiting in this cyclical world right a few years back it was all about boom times and you know should you leave your job after one year for a better job and you know advising people on that and and right now it's advising people in times of uncertain so we definitely wanted to have you on because you know we knew that you have you know fairly unique takes on that and we also want to shine the light on the elephant from from different parts of the room to get the entire picture you know so to speak k you know we're fairly us centric so we don't we don't necessarily see like the a worldwide view of economic uncertainty and job uncertainties can you give us a a little bit of a different perspective do you think in the uk especially that uncertainty is the perfect word for each feature there is a lot of uncertainty and with that a lot of businesses are some are making the but i think generally speaking comparison to the us there's more of a pause and that pause means a lack of growth the lack of investment sales are slowing down revenues slowing down people are fearful because they can see that in the business and a phrase that i've been hearing a lot recently from uk business owners and i don't know if this is maybe a lag from the pandemic or with the general uncertainty we're seeing in the world in terms of geopolitics and climate sharing and jin and everything else now business owners aren't in the uk student growth they're pursuing lifestyle business so a business that is big enough to provide the lifestyle that they want and provide the the purpose of meaning in their work that they want but rapid hyper growth is no longer the number one priority yeah and i mean i don't know whether it's say the similar stats saying in the us but in the uk i think it's something like ninety six percent of the people are employed by small businesses and when they say small business is two hundred and fifty people or below so they're they're responsible small businesses are responsible for the majority of people the vast majority of people getting them getting employed and my personal political views aside i think almost universally is accepted this government in the uk the labor government which i think is your according to your democrats they're not really doing the things that they need to do to stabilize business and stabilize sort of commerce in the uk and it's meaning that a lot of people at the said there are big businesses who are frightened as in light i might lose my job and a new ceo come in but the smaller businesses would say fifty sixteen employees are frightened going if i don't get this right i'm gonna lose everything and everyone's gonna lose their job so i think you're right uncertainty is unfortunately it looks like it's gonna be here to stay for a little bit does the focus on lifestyle that you spoke to lia in from the top of those small businesses do you think they're also being extremely mindful about their employees lifestyle too or is it more centric toward the top from the business owners i've i've spoke to and and heard of through colleagues they are mindful their employees mindful in that let's not pursue growth necessarily during a time uncertainty and take that risk that a said could derail entire business rather that let's just sit with what we've got focus on quality focus on efficiencies and automations rather than necessarily pursue growth at this time i think the other main issue for uk businesses i said with the labor government coming in we've seen a lot of new and employment laws coming in that on paper sound great but in execution actually bring a lot of risk for businesses so for example rights to flexible working on day one the national living wage basically more rights for employees which is great but what that means is when an organization doesn't feel a equipped to and embed those new laws very effectively they aren't sure how and aren't given the guidance from the government in terms of how to do that they hesitate so they won't make any new hires under these new rules or they'll change how they're employing people in in certain ways may engaging more contractors than full time employees so i think yes they're mindful i'm not sure they're putting them maybe front and center of every business decision they're making i honestly think that is is being driven at the moment by a lot of uncertainty a lot of ambiguity and if i'm being honest a bit fair and does that fear crush the entrepreneurial spirit a for those people who are really love being entrepreneurs and starting up new businesses for example or maybe they they already have a business and they're the the top person at that small business yeah and they founded it kinda back to your story in episodes two hundred thirty five and thirty six i'd love to get your take on that i think true entrepreneurs they live for challenges and when things are going well that's when they normally mess it up so they'll get year five years six year seven and they've had plateau in revenue but still doing very well and they will just crash the business if they're left to their own devices so i think entrepreneurs react well to challenges in the first of three to four years their business so this is just another challenge where i think the problem might lie is back in the uk there was something called ir thirty five which was in and revenue thirty five was a statue which allowed you to employ contractors to do basically your job rather or do jobs rather than employing them permanently because when you employed them permanently you had to make sure you give pension staff here to pay sort of a national insurance i know these are uk centric terms but i'm sure it's very very similar across in the in the us and so a lot of people would to go into this ir thirty five so they go i'll have a contractor because it's so much simple i can just end their contract and then i think that a lot of people over the last ten years have moved to like no no it's safe we were gonna have where we'll have proper employees who are properly employed because you know it's a bit more flexible and is it's proper way of doing it and i fear we're gonna go back to that way because as leanne anne says and the anne to a much much more to the to the actual legislation than i can but it just feels an entrepreneur like it's a risk to employ another person because oh my goodness of got i think about all these other things that the lady rug governor brought in and also other the labor gonna say that i can't i can't fire anyone are they gonna say that if i fire someone have to give them six months like in lithuania in a lot of europe if you fire someone in spain if you fire someone you have to give them six months salary that's just a huge risk in terms of employing people and that could genuinely bring a young business down so i think i would like to think that entrepreneurs are sort of glass half full they're like okay this another challenge will work our way around it but i can see having a big impact on the decision of whether how quickly to scale with with employee b but what are your thoughts yeah i i agree and i think it's it's remembering that i mean globally and in the uk as well it has been relentless for business owners since twenty sixteen you know i had the referendum then we had the pandemic we've gone through five prime ministers in as many years we've just had a recent complete government change it has been so much disruption and so much change that i honestly think entrepreneurs business leaders are exhausted they're burning out and with that like you say an entrepreneur wants to keep fighting they want to keep going but it's how they invest to energy another thing that that we've seen from business owners in the uk is is choosing this lifestyle business and with the extra time they're freeing up through this improved quality of process and automation is actually spending more time on on side hustle on passion projects they're actually looking at what they've enjoyed most about building their business and setting up another stream of their business it focuses purely on that whether that be talent management acquisition training and development but yes certain aspects that they gain energy from so during this period where the business may be fairly stable they're finding other ways to fill that entrepreneurial need and that that meaningful work that they're currently lacking in a business that isn't in a growth stage which is hard for an entrepreneur so i think we're seeing people diversify a little bit what they're doing with their business but much more an individual level than an organizational one is it similar in the uk to the us where a lot of these laws apply basically at the verge where you're transitioning from small to medium sized business or maybe from very small business to small business so we have some things where it's like oh yeah here's this amount of protection that you get but that's for businesses above twenty five people or is it does it kind of apply across the board i'm not an expert in employment law but my understanding is it doesn't matter how smaller or larger organization is your first employee these employment laws apply and that's why for small businesses it's such a a drastic shift and such high risk that as our said businesses are just choosing not not to really focus on growth and until they figured out exactly how this all all applies and how it's gonna work out i think that maybe there's this danger of basically growing your organization to a certain size and then there's like a chilling effect potentially at least in the us to to grow beyond a certain size which kind of feeds into this idea of like well maybe i'll start a new business with these these things that i've learned and i'll just have maybe five very small businesses each kind of having this like diversified source of income i'm rather than take on the additional risk of of growing beyond a certain size i can understand you know different laws in different local and you know i'm sure in the states it's like you know this state has this lawn this state has this other law so i'm sure it's very very you know you get these like micro climates right of of innovation and and business friendliness versus employee like protection maybe this leads to venue shopping right like i'm gonna start a business in this area but not this area i'll hire people from here and have them travel in or something like that this is not gonna fly with my wife and c but there's something around the countries which allow businesses to employ and fire fairly easily in a in a you know in a a short period of time because you can then just sort of like build something without worrying that you're got you've got to pay someone six months worth of salary if you do fire them whereas there are some places where i don't know what it's like in the us but where you can just go right let's try them out let's try them out for six weeks and it's they're no good fine on your on your bike and that does allow an entrepreneur to go okay i feel a bit free and a bit safer about recruiting people but as i said that's not gonna fly with the with the culture experts because that's probably not the way you do it i think it's a balance and i think my understanding is in terms of uk law there is a window that be three months or six months or you could have probation periods where the full kind of rights of employees weren't fully applied until you passed that said probation period that is what has now been scrapped so you have the same rights as an employee's been there six years on the first day that you've been in work so the fact is that i could turn up to work and go off on my first day off six for six months and and still get you know the pay that the company complete promises to pay in the statutory pain things like that there's a trust issue we actually had somebody on on the show a wonderful up and becoming psychologist and she was pointing out that there's a trust crisis at the minute because we've had so much push and pull and power swings over the last few years sometimes the employees have the the power and they can move on as you were saying know after a year and a job for a higher salary and then we saw all the layoffs and then ends up fair from employees so people people stay longer and i think that with the change in laws geopolitics there's so much conflict in every sense of the words society and in our workplaces people are just lacking trust trust in their businesses like trust in their leaders lacking trust in their colleagues we're seeing massive increases in what we call workplace and civility in a minute which isn't bullying or harassment it's it's a level deal from that but equally problematic where it's in fighting it's gossip it's withholding information from a colleague that's on the rise because this is issue with trust so i think having these laws come in a great on paper but as always zwift seems to be the uk government what's great on paper and it comes from the right place the execution is never thought through is never thought through well how does actually this same law reply as you were saying in john to a business that has ten employees are expected to meet and worked with the same expectations and laws and the gala as a business with ten thousand employees the impact of going through a tri is very different for an organization of ten thousand with the internal resources to manage that than a small business only ten people so these blanket laws are necessarily helping businesses i don't think they're always helping employees in the way that they're intended to yeah the the idea is in the right place the execution they haven't quite got right hey millennials i have got a really great podcast recommendation for you if you have not listened to no straight path hosted but actually men's baba day then i think you're really gonna like it it is of course brought to you by the spot podcast network and this one is right up your street if you like to hear the real stories behind those shiny resumes and that ends endlessly positive social media posts and fancy job titles because actually human utilizes success from the perspective of a millennial or something i've not been for a very long time but i've never been a millennial never been a millennial love i love it because it is packed with actual conversations and it brings diverse and important voices to the world like in the episode with phil ag we love phil love phil a fellow millennial who's worked at some of the top companies in tech and then just happened to start the number one marketing podcast in the uk so if you like honest conversations about careers inspiration and achieving success then you have to listen to no straight path wherever you get your podcasts oh it ashley also has the best name to be said in the x factor voice ash man barbara thunder workplace civility at scale and the trust crisis at scale to me translates to oh i'm seeing all these layoffs from large companies and flattening name of management layers and things like that i think this naturally leads us into that topic why do you think so many of these organizations at least the ones we hear about in articles and on linkedin and from people we know are choosing to flatten out some of the management layers and increase those manager to individual contributor ratios because that's it's part of the byproduct of some of these layoffs seems like i think there's a few reasons all of these things that are cyclical i think it's going back in in very again to have less hierarchy there's a belief that that kind of more i guess more startup structure is better for innovation and and collaboration which is lacking in our workplaces right now i'm not i don't think it's because of the structure of the organization but it's lacking another big one is that it's been very publicized over the last eighteen months or so the the issue we have with not training our managers sufficiently is when the eighty two percent of managers accidental and they didn't necessarily en en managing people is part their role but that was just the next step up so they took took it i read a stat yesterday and it's only only forty four percent of managers ever had any form of training so more than half of our managers aren't equipped with the skills they need to lead our people and there the people the managers have a single biggest impact on employee performance motivation engagement outcomes productivity so for an organization who is hearing these things and i'm looking at their business of where to make cuts there's an element of wool if our managers are inefficient we could train them or we could just let them go because they have the highest salaries too so actually from a bottom line perspective that makes sense i can't imagine that it's a thought through seriously considered approach because for me if you have great managers they're the people that drive a success your business i think when we talked last time calling you a managers where culture keeps a lovely phrase that you came up with nick and they really are i think it's naive to think that removing a manager is gonna solve all these problems it's not because people still want and need people to to look to in an organization when there's is a there's a distance in a a sense of removal from senior leadership but but i i think there may be the reasons why they're the higher paid there's a it seems that it's verb right now to flatten out our organizations to be more agile it seems to be back in in fashion as well an element that it's been very publicized managers have the single biggest impact if we're not willing to invest in great managers let's just remove them but you gotta remember though that if you're looking at a like a p and l or you know a financial statement then if you were to attribute the revenue then it's very difficult to attribute revenue directly to a manager but it's it's easy to attribute to an or someone on the production line or whatever or sales or something like that so the temptation for a brutal cfo to sit there and go well let's just caught the meat trim the fat i think is that is the term near because it's difficult looking at spreadsheet to see the impact of what a manager does and particularly if you are if that's what you live in if you live in spreadsheets and you're making the decisions based on numbers it's a no brainer to get rid of these people what i think exactly what he i'm saying what they don't understand is that the ic produces ten thousand a hundred thousand dollars a week in terms of revenue because they've got an amazing manager did the cfo doesn't always see that and i'm i'm not i'm not sort of necessarily picking on cfo here but anyone who's make a decision on spreadsheets it's it's name it's been natural to come back conclusion i think and oh by the way if you're one of those managers who hasn't been trained and you stay you get more people too on top of perhaps the inexperienced and lack of training we're gonna ask you to maybe double the number of employees that you're managing yeah i've been hearing ratios of managers managing fifteen even teams of twenty people and i tried to do thirty minute one on once with every single employee on my team and then if you are you know count the additional like you know upstream meetings that you have and lateral meetings that you have with twenty people there's just no way that you have that level of attention right no because i'm i'm sure also that these managers aren't giving more time to manage with the bigger team they still have to do everything the answer and do in terms of their administration or their their job in general they just now have more people to manage so we're not freeing up more time what's problematic about that and it comes under a fundamental misunderstanding of of relationships within the workplace teams in the workplace is it daniel priest that's like the magic number is twelve yes you're thirteenth higher thirteenth powers of a small business you're your small business your thirteenth powers is when you're gonna start to see people problems potentially because is at that point as a as a group of of size people start to break off into smaller teams so a clicks will start to form it becomes a number that is just too difficult to manage as you said on in a very cohesive time efficient way so for an organization who's now expecting middle managers senior managers to manage teams at fifteen to twenty is hugely problematic particularly if they're not trained we're setting up our managers yet again for failure it seems like it's a much larger more impactful failure if he didn't do well or you were shown the door after being put in that situation but you still wanted to be a manager someday day it seems like it'd be much more difficult to get back to that somewhere yeah we're very good at internal our failures and not very good at internal our achievements and our success is that's why you know we get it we hear up to eighty percent of people will report the of impostor syndrome that's what imp syndrome stems from an inability to internalize our achievements so for a manager it particularly a manager who wants to be a great manager you know the intention is there to have gone through that that experience and that potential failure is gonna be it's it's what we call workplace trauma that we've taught about as well before trauma with a lower t and that is devastating to somebody's career their self they're are their belief that they can do their job well it's detrimental it's psychological harm we are causing potentially to these managers by not giving them the tools and the resource and the support that they need it it highly responsible for organizations to take this approach even in that type of environment where it's challenging is there a way that the managers who are in those seats who really care about doing good job who are willing to dig in and do it can be effective absolutely i think my first advice would be we want to focus on the relationships right because that's where all the goods stuff comes from and we've got great relationships with our our people when you're dealing with it team at this size fifteen to twenty people that's really hard to manage effectively particularly if you're a new manager or an experienced manager my advice to any imagine in that situation is to focus on task cohesion which is much more transactional and much easier to get right so what's the workflow who's doing what who just want what order would has does that contribute to the overall outcomes we're trying to deliver in and how does a role feed into my role and what do i do to make a job easier if we can build in the systems and the processes that mean that task cohesion is really strong then that means that over time we're gonna build team cohesion as a byproduct of that because you'll know anecdotally if you were with a colleague that you don't know particularly well but oh my gosh they make your job so much easier you love them you wanna have a conversation with them over a coffee you wanna get to know a bit more wanna learn more about what they do and and who they are and where they're from because it it breeds what the opposite of instability is not surprising his workplace civility is that respect is that mutual appreciation that can be much more easily achieved by striving for task cohesion and then once you've got that right then you can start to nurture the the team cohesion that people need and i guess from a a relationship perspective in terms of of helping your team operate in an environment that feels functional it's really understanding everything we talked about before when we've had to previous conversation in terms of this team chart what does great look like towards what behavior accept or which aren't but more so than that it's taking the time to check it doesn't need to be a formal thirty minute one to one it could be a five minute phone call on it choose the saying how you doing anything making your job harder stay what can i you to make your job easier as a manager what's really bugging you because if you just had those little check ins which seemed much less time intensive you'll start to see the themes coming across and the issues that are bugging people across the team and that can be a really effective ways kind of kind of troubleshooting and putting out those little fires in a much more time effective way than you need to send you this more formal formal one to one's reviews of course that might be an obligation you have within the organization but if you don't add i'd focus more on just that genuine checking in genuine care of actually what can i do to make your job easier to do and there's the pareto isn't there of the eighty twenty where eighty percent of your problems that come from twenty percent of your team and then you go one step further into the eighty twenty the eighty twenty and then like i think it's like sixty four percent of your problems come from four percent of your team or something like that please correct me if this is if if you disagree with this but i think a lot of managers got got twenty people i need to go and spend an hour with every single all of those twenty people this week and that's twenty hours and then i've got another ten hours of meetings what am i gonna give it work done when actual fact if you were to sort of prioritize and go on actually really the problem the fires are here so that's why he's been an hour but like the answer is just a five minute quick email or a slack or something of just going how are you going on with that thing or you know i heard that x happened are you okay that sort of stuff i don't know it feels like that's a bit more manageable to me for managing twenty people and just going i'm gonna have to do an hour for each one of the week what are your thoughts absolutely the only thing i'd to say is is make it a phone call and i know that can be can be a bit difficult especially especially for melanie millennials in and jen z were much more used to messaging in slacks and that type of thing but it it provides another task that i'm i now have to add to my list might just sent me a message i'm gonna have to apply it and i'm fine financially but it's that distraction that i'm gonna have to have to go back to you well actually there's a massive problem i don't know how to approach it and i'm gonna over think about it for the next three hours and and that's gonna distract me for what i'm doing pick up the phone i don't might not always feel the most comfortable thing to do but honestly once you get into the habit of it and once your employees get into the habit of that that more vocal check ins it's much more time efficient and and less emotional load potentially you touch on upon a couple things there one is the the thing that you just mentioned which is you know make those connections actually count and just because you're going through the motions of a connection tasks doesn't mean that you're you're making quality connections so strive for the quality connections over checking off the tasks and then the first one earlier point was the myth of the peanut butter spreading of your your time right across everybody like i'm gonna give everybody an equal amount of time because that's fair but it's probably not fair in the application right like there's people who need way more time and people who need way less time so to give everybody equal time doesn't serve everybody yeah and a really good clue as well is if you have a member of your team that you really don't wanna have that conversation with because they that they feel a bit they're a bit more challenging they feel a bit more challenging that is an absolute sign that there's a difficult conversation need to be had that you you should have had already so i think if you're looking at who who needs time and and intention today think about the people that really don't wanna wanna pick up the phone too because it's probably something there that that yeah needs to the needs pick conversation i think that if you have work somewhere that has had a trend of layoffs as we see and you kinda get this una unanswered call from your boss you get that principal office feeling you know and it it's just an instant it just happens it's not that you want to think the worst thing but it's something unexpected you might have some trauma that's still there little ptsd d or whatever we wanna call it but when the manager says hey this is a good news call or i just need to check in on this one thing and they get right to it i think that helps if you get ptsd or anxiety when a manager books are calling with you and your manager not talking to not are because if that's what's triggering then you're like that items haven't spoken to this person for six months last time it was a bit of a warning that's not a great manager is it because a great manager someone who who does call you every week and says how's it going i heard that this happened did it work out alright yeah hundred percent you know what i'm i'm reflecting now i i was made redundant back in twenty fifteen still one of the hardest things to go through and i had a great at my manager would speak probably if not every day every other day whether it just be for it honestly sometimes just for a quick chat sometimes for a check sometimes they need a quick answer i answer the first like hi john everything alright went not really we need to have conversation i was like oh and that for me was the complete opposite i always just used to having those really positive conversation my manager so that yeah i don't know just reflecting on on my own experience i think as absolutely right that you want that relationship where that's a lust thing on your mind that could be what's about to happen of course and the current climate is on everybody's mind but i think that reassurance that it's yeah the relationship is is the the primary reason always that phone call i saw in linkedin i'm not sure is this we call or last week a really lovely post from a manager who worked didn't tech organization had had stayed in the organization had seen layoffs and very honestly said how devastating it was how sad it was this was the support he's gonna provide for the people who were leaving the organization that he was reaching out to various contacts and putting together various listed of roles available to the people that staged we do have this survivor guilt this is what i'm feeling is what my virus guilt currently looks like let's look after each other during this time and for me that was such a wonderful way to kind of go kind of a ground i wanna go this is really hard this is what i'm feeling this is what i'm gonna try and do to help what else do we need what else can we do and i think it's matches like that that you're never gonna be afraid to get a phone call from because even if it is the worst they've done everything they can to protect you in in the lead up to that moment and also just a real quick one with that and i know there's something you wanna go into but with that phone call you didn't go yeah good good you know do you have some time on friday i want you know we just wanna do a little bit of a chat might bring hr it was a no there's bad news this is the bad news and because the relationship was there i'm guessing then the bad news was devastating but at the same time you're like well i know you didn't i mean i don't know why i wasn't there yeah exactly it was devastating but it was he will now help me figure out how i move on from this in the immediate future where i have to lay off my entire team before i'm also laid off myself and what work potentially looks like in in the near future so i i think two sides to the coin based on everything we talked about absolutely yes you wanna have a great relationship with your managers so that you don't immediately think those things but i think that each person has their own level of trauma and ptsd that they're suffering from based on the environment regardless of whether you have a great manager or not that they probably have to fight those are the two kind of sides of the scale i think obviously if you have both well then you're really gonna have the anxiety about it i think this might be one of those cultural shifts because thirty years ago telephone is exactly how people communicated so getting a phone call was not like really a a traumatic thing whereas today you know even if my family members phoned me instead of text me i get the spike in in adrenaline and cortisol like oh no what's happened so maybe for a manager who's trying to establish that rhythm maybe there could be some kind of intermediate step where they text or message ahead of time you know even if it's just a a few minutes saying hey noticed you had this spot in your schedule open do you have time for an informal chat just trying to to meet up and checking on how things are going so it's just that preparation and then paving the way and then once that's the established rhythm of oh yes this manager checks in with me for five minutes by phone then doing it out of the blue becomes less of a a trauma you know potential like triggering event definitely definitely and i think absolute clarity is key so even saying just one i wonder if you got half an nav but informal still is a bit of ambiguity there i think if it is simple is growing everything's is good nothing's is wrong just gonna give you a call at this time to check in or what i did hear another man i did do during the early stage of covid dutch i thought was really really positive and proactive basically say i'm gonna i'm gonna call you at two o'clock every tuesday just check no agenda nothing you know on the cars just to just to see how you're doing in and to check in another really nice organic way of doing it is when you have we're tea meetings anyway or resume is allow the first five ten minutes just be like hey how's it going how is it how is your sister how do did they get on with this or how's that project going in oh that client's been in right pig i wouldn't they and just having an actual conversation allowing that time into that five ten at the beginning of the meeting it just establishes that this is part of our team culture this is part of our way of work in our way of operating having these more informal conversations for then you say john during that transition period it feels more comfortable a lot less scary and we'll just yeah very quickly become more natural and then why why shouldn't you be the manager who just does things differently why shouldn't you just be the person who goes will you go and work on on derek team over there you know he's gonna call you just so you know guys he's gonna call you just out of the blue don't worry it's just him checking in on you why shouldn't you be that manager because let's be honest you're gonna be there's gonna be stories about you in the organization you're gonna be known as the phone call manager as the boomer manager perhaps unique nickname because you pick up the phone and you talk to someone you no know i think you're right as long as you're aware that you are potentially triggering someone if they have been through that i'm sorry bad news phone call but at the same time it's the anne said it only takes two or three phone calls and it all to be good news and you going okay right nothing's wrong just wanna check on you yeah and it can't be performing it has to be with some intention it's not enough to hunch just to ring something and go i was no alright because we go yeah fine well these at least brits do yeah fine yeah fine you need a bit but a bit more of an intentional pressure a bit more of in a coaching question so i like i noticed his email come quinn from bob and it seemed it seemed a little bit direct as what's going on is everything alright you're okay how did you take that it's almost digging in a little bit more in finding a specific thing to talk about every good manager does anyway in terms of giving any type of feedback it be very specific and rooted in context it's the same for these casual phone calls if you got something rooted in context it's gonna help that conversation flow it's gonna start to breed that word of the mer psychological safety that people will actually feel that they're able to authentically open up so it can't just be yeah i'm gonna call you every tuesday for ten seconds and and make sure you're still alive it needs to be i'm gonna fur you we're gonna have a conversation because i'm genuinely interested in how you're doing what's going on in your work world and and if appropriate beyond them here's what i just heard in my head when when you and a were talking lia in what i heard you both kinda say was managers should be really good at interviewing people not just in job interviews but just in general to start and continue good conversations that's a really nice way to frame it yeah maybe that's a skill that the potential manager could highlight that they've gotten good at you know what i mean like and if you are someone who has become quite skilled in this area maybe that's something that you talk up during your interview if you wanna be a people manager yeah potentially but also there are a lot of managers out there and i don't know it's the same in the us in the uk you get on a train used to do it back twenty years ago you get on train and there'd always be someone sitting at sitting at a train table they open their laptop they get their mouse out they get their phone out and they go yeah i can't really talk them on the train and they've made the phone call and the point of that was just them going look how important i am now they weren't a manager it because they wanted to lead people who won't manage it because they cared about people who weren't manager it because they wanted to do interviewed people manager because they wanted to tell everyone they got promotion at work and they were important and i think that leslie anne pointed out was a lot of people who fallen into that and what is what was the status and forty four percent and people never got training was it yeah yeah and so they just think that's what being a manager is because what they've seen the the loud mouths who have been managers before and they're really important people who run ra with papers in the hand and they don't know that actually being a manager is almost the opposite is being quiet not loud yeah that's a lovely about being quiet not loud i think into interviewing questions or interviewing skills yes and i understand the perfect kind of crossover skill you've you've got that nick where i just nudge it slightly is it's less interviewing and more coaching questions oh okay so i think it's things like being genuinely in or asking questions that help somebody leads somebody to the next point of their thought process or the next thing that's that's troubling them for anyone out there who wants to be imagine is a manager and hasn't been trained with this already look at skills that are very embedded in coaching things like listening skills do with listening skills course that's can help you loads i mean if you can if you got the resources go on a coaching course it will be such a transformative experience for you in terms of your emotional intelligence yourself awareness how to engage with other people how to interact with other people without gender without judgment that's what i'd say is to highlight dia skill your curiosity your ability to encourage your ability to listen them i would snap up anyone even would had no experience at all i snap up anyone with their skills and so much so i'm afraid we'll have to cut it right there this time if you're one of those managers out there who isn't getting trained you can find that training elsewhere whether it's going to a seminar reading a book listening to some podcasts or as leanne suggested taking some coaching courses to make you more effective at asking questions communicating with your team building those relationships and driving the results you need to as a people leader i liked a encouragement to all of us that it's okay for a manager to do things a little bit differently to have that cork ness that's stylist imprint in the way you lead your team that produces a positive impact of course if you're looking for more on those topics of uncertainty i have a couple of links for you first check out our lay resources page at nerd dash journey dot com slash lay resources on that page you can find the most impactful conversations we've had on the topic of layoffs with experts like lia elliott for example and many technologists who have shared their stories of layoffs and the steps they took to get that next role hopefully you can find something there that's an encouragement and the help to you we also have our career uncertainty action guide which has the five pillars of career resilience and some ai prompts that can help you work through overwhelm financial planning and navigating a lay have you subscribed to the truth flies and work podcast podcasts yet if you haven't now's a good time to do that because part two of our discussion with allen lia elliott happens next week where we'll flip the script and talk about what it's like to be an individual contributor on a large team how can you stand out farewell listeners tune in next time as the journey continues i'm john white at b dream for macquarie patent network nerd underscore signing off how do you that was john white and nick cor from nerd journey podcast for part two of this conversation yes there is more and more than three hundred more episodes go and find nerd journey wherever you get your yeah thank you so much guys they are such good interviews and i tell you what is really cool on they are both intervene from remotely and there's two interviews which we've done this once or twice before and is really really difficult and they're just they just know who's gonna say what and i suppose i after three and forty odd episode you do you do know that but they are really professional really nice guys if you if you are invited on their podcast which i hope you are then yeah it's gonna be really nice time this it is a long record it was about an hour and a half two hours isn't it it was about two hours yet and but i enjoyed that because it allowed for full conversation they edit them such a brilliant way that yeah just just so much god i'm particularly in these times layoffs tech under pressure navigating navigating career changes and transitions is really tough they've got so many episodes and gas and experts and resources do go and check out their podcast also their website where they keep all the good stuff like the resources and and things like that i'll leave links to both of those in the share and thank you so much again to john and nick we love you guys and love coming on your show and love nerd jenny so join us thursday where joel z shows us how to have more fun at work without losing productivity i really pushed back on this with joel because i'm like no i don't believe you and he's like shut up pal it's true i've worked i've worked with a american express who do the hell you work with and i was like yeah i'll just why mate why my neck thank you care everyone here that beef for cheers on tuesday

picture this for a moment you're at the kettle making a coffee when day from accounts walks up and says so how how's your love life going or maybe kendra the you intern somebody blur out you're not like you've lost weight you got any health issues sounds really awkward right well according to new research these uncomfortable small talk moments aren't just cringe worthy they're actually making your employees ill our guest today john michael was studying fun workplace conversations when his research students stumbled across something surprising in the data a large percentage of participant mentioned uncomfortable small talk even though nobody had even asked them about it my colleagues and i were doing some research on coworker socializing and we were trying to figure out the different ways in which people socialize at work outside of work in between tasks things like that and i had the undergraduate assistant at the time and she was looking at the data that we had collected and came across a number of people talking about instances of uncomfortable small talk that were just coming up and it wasn't it wasn't once or twice it was like fifty to eighty instances john has done extensive research john small talk and he's discovered that awkward small talk doesn't just make people feel uncomfortable actually leads to emotional exhaustion the precursor to burnout out and before you think this is just an introvert problem it's not today we're diving into the hidden science of workplace chatter why bad small talk can literally drain your team's energy and the surprising difference between small talk that builds connection and small talk that destroys it this is gonna change how do you think about every casual conversation at work from now on hello and welcome to truth lies and work the award winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture we are brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals my name is leanne i'm a chartered occupational psychologist my name is ali business owner and we are here to help you simplify the science of war so today we are asking when does friendly workplace chat become a well being killer we think small talk is harmless right just the way we build a rapport with colleagues but what if we've been getting it completely wrong our is john michael who's the associate professor at lo university of maryland he studies something most of us take for granted those casual conversations that happened between meetings at a machine or in the left his research reveals as a dark side to work workplace small talk that's hiding and plain sight and if you're a leader thinking well i'll just bum small talk then hold on john's research also shows that the right kind of casual conversation actually boosts performance and reduces turnover and the trick is knowing the difference so after this very quick break we're gonna meet john properly and discover what small talk really is why it can be exhausting and whether you need to be an extra to survive it don't go anyway you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot yeah and when they started data was housed across multiple systems sound familiar hubspot completely unified their website their email marketing and their fan experience in just one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new setups ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how buck can help you grow better so i am john michael i am an associate professor and the bush scholar at lo university maryland in the united states i conduct research in the areas of fun at work coworker or socializing and social interactions and employee retention and performance my colleagues and i were doing some research on coworker or socializing and we are trying to figure out the different ways in which people socialize at work outside of work in between tasks things like that and i have had a grad an undergraduate assistant at the time there's no phd student studying elsewhere and she was looking at the data that we had collected and came across a number of people talking about these instances of uncomfortable small talk that were just coming up and it wasn't you know it wasn't once or twice it was like fifty to eighty instances of people mentioning this and they weren't being asked about about uncomfortable conversations at all they were being asked about like what are the types of things you talk about where do you talk about it who you talk about it with you know and it really geared toward more fun conversations and and playful conversations things that got people excited to be at work and kind of improve the experience of work and what she really found was that you know a lot of people were getting engaged in these conversations that made them feel a little uneasy and uncomfortable we think small talk is the the way that we get to know people the way we start to build that rapport with our with our colleagues and it seems like such a small thing things so what's the big question behind small talk so i think if small talk has often been assumed to be this kind of very basic and you know easy going conversation between people at work conversations about the weather or or sports or common interest but actually people engage in different levels of small talk so there is small talk that is just kind of common thought and then there's small talk to go much deeper so you oftentimes people especially as they build relationships we'll start talking about relationships that they're in or they'll talk about challenges that they're having or they'll talk about you know whether they wanna stay at the organization for at long period time or if they have plans to move on right so they'll they'll they're still not getting into real deep conversation but they're going into more personal avenues of of conversation and this is where these uncomfortable instances a small talk come up right so this is where people might try to engage you in a conversation about how your romantic relationships are going or how is your health and have you experienced any health challenges what types of family issues are you having are you experiencing a lot work life balance issues who are you in conflict with in the organization why are you in conflict with them you know so those types of of conversations come up in just passing in kind of short instances of of of of small talk throughout the day but they oftentimes can kind of en on people's personal selves and become uncomfortable so is it a case then that it's this small talk that is uncomfortable typically falls out side of the realm of work although i know you give a few examples there actually within work is it what what's the driver there is it that it's inappropriate conversation is that they don't have this base of a relationship with this person is it perceived for somebody being noisy because again it feels like i this is just how we start to build authentic relationships isn't it that's right and so there's kinda different category so in some instances there's things where people just don't feel comfortable so if you and i are talking about our favorite sports team and the third person doesn't know anything about sports or is not interest in sports they may feel uncomfortable just because they're not part of the conversation so they feel kind of like an out cast or not really os sides but not part of the ina invert right there's those forms of of of uncomfortable conversation there's also things that bleeding to your personal interest or your personal lives that people just aren't comfortable talking about with their coworkers and so and those are some of the examples they gave before so you know asking about romantic chip to asking about personal issues that people just don't feel comfortable talking about then there's other instances of small talk where people don't feel comfortable talking about them at work but they they're okay if they're in a social setting so say coworkers go out together afterwards for happy hour they're fine talking about it outside of the con finds of work almost like i i don't feel comfortable talking about it in this professional space because i'm supposed to be a professional and supposed to be task focused but i'm okay once we leave kind of the con finds of the professional world so there's these different grouping that we're finding of of small talk it's not it's not kind of that all conversations that are personal are always uncomfortable but you know some topics are kind of always out of off pays some some topics are okay as long as you're not in the of the workplace and some some conversations are always okay so it it really just kinda depend it's not there's no one size fits all everybody doesn't experience the uncomfortable ability the same and and for the same reasons but you know if you're talking about the weather or you know the the the company picnic that just happened people are a problem everybody's probably okay with that but when you start getting into things that people won't care about or they don't feel comfortable bringing into work or it exposes some sort of limitation or some sort of area that they're not confident or we're capable in that might make them feel uncomfortable well led to believe that people you're were introverted typically in these social situations would would find it draining in terms of energy have is there anything chance to say that introverts might want to engage in small talk glass or they find it more uncomfortable or is it more about as you said the context no so the so there's not a lot out there in the organizational literature we are starting to look at that now so we're looking at a number of boundary conditions or moderators currently we're actually conducting the research right now things like intra version ex version neuro so people who just get stressed easily they may not want to talk about personal issues because it may either expose a weakness of theirs or it may just make them feel like they're under time pressure we're also looking at other personal traits like social anxiety some people are just get anxious in social situations so it's not just that they're an introvert but they're actually like anxious talking to other people especially about something that is not task related something that's not work related and then another another personalized looking is the need to belong so some people have a a great need to belong and they may be much more willing to engage in small talk even if it becomes personal because they've got this great need to connect right so we're starting to look at that now but that has really been under examined in the literature thus far and in terms of that that could what i i'm really interesting about the paper that you shared with me was that how you'd found a link between this awkward small talk and emotional exhaustion so can you maybe stop helping i'll listened and understand what emotional exhaustion is in this context yeah so emotional exhaustion is kind of the precursor to burnout so burnout is when you become so tact so stressed and your body because you haven't cope emotionally or or physically your body kinda giving out so we've all experienced burnout if we've studied for too long if we worked for too long and we start to feel sick or we start to get a headache or we start to get really exhausted right that's kind of the the burnout emotional exhaustion is where we start to feel emotionally run down sometimes when people are highly emotionally exhausted they may burst into tears for no explanation or they may get they may lash out you know with anger for no explanation because they're just so emotionally tapped so that's kinda like the the first sign of burnout so it's it's an important indicator of well being if people are experiencing a lot of emotional exhaustion their well being is lower so they're they're not experiencing a lot of potential life satisfaction flourishing thriving in the workplace and that's an important indicator because that's going to explain how much people are able to bring to the job are they able to bring their their full selves to work and are they able to you know bill able to to focus their full energy in the task that they're supposed to focus on so what we found using social exclusion theory is that engaging in these forms of uncomfortable small talk makes people feel lonely or you know os sized or you know or or isolated so they start to feel like well i'm not part of the in group i i i feel like i'm kind of on an island here if you will and that starts to re so that reduces the number of resources that they're getting or the the amount of resources they're getting from their their social support network right and then when they start to feel stressed they can't rely on those other people to help bring that stress down right so that one way that people often cope is through their social support i'm stressed i'm gonna take a break and i'm gonna go talk to lia about something fun or we'll we'll go for a walk and get some exercise together and just have a conversation about life right so that that's something i might do if i start to feel like i'm excluded or i start to feel like i'm lonely or os sized at all right then i don't have those people to go to i don't have that network to draw on in order to protect me against the stress that i'm experiencing which makes me more likely to experience emotional exhaustion so that was that finding that that that you know we identified in that first study was just that people do experience more emotional exhaustion when they experience more uncomfortable forms of small talk at work clear i can imagine this business leaders and aaron his listening going well how do i approach this then because if i if i've got the awkward small talk that's gonna mean that people are emotionally exhausted and then feel isolated how do i know what small talk is is good for building relationships in which isn't do i just ban small talk we just talk about work where does it leave them yeah i think it's important to create an environment where people feel included right so an environment of includes the miserable belonging where people feel like they're part of something that they aisle all identify with so they they have this kind of we spirit and they feel like they're they're kind of altogether and then you know just i think having a reminder that you know keep the small talk professional right so make sure that it's okay to go you know to to talk about things that are not task related but don't talk about things that made make people you know may kind of bro into people's personal lives or may may be uncomfortable to talk about because it could expose a weakness or it could bring up something that you know that that is hurtful to the person so for example if somebody's experiencing financial debt where if somebody is going through a divorce if you bring up topics like that it's gonna not only push the person away but it's also going to start to make them feel like they're not part of the group that people if you know they're willing to talk about that with me they clearly don't care about how i feel about the situation right so i if if if i were a leader and i was looking at this it it would be like first we need to create an environment of belonging this where we all feel like we're we're a team or we're a we're a a a set of people who who have a similar identity to the workplace and then keep it fun but professional right so make it light hearted but not overly personal or not overly sensitive right so so kinda keep it can you know talk about the weather talk about sports talk about things that are going on the company to talk about vacation plans and in similar you know you know find common interest talk about games that people like to play there's many things that that you could engage people in conversation about that aren't gonna get into personal issues such as health you know like if you say like oh you know this person has lost a lot of weight or gained a lot of weight when you start asking about health questions that's gonna make them feel uncomfortable one because they're getting into a personal thing that they all wanna talk about but it's also going to expose weakness like could this person be a liability to the company so if you engage people in conversation like that it's going to push them away because they're gonna go to in into a protective mode where they feel like they need to you know either not answer or give a you know give kind of a very careful answer in order to protect their own image at the company so it's really about making sure that conversations are fun but not overly en encroaching on people's personal space we know from the organizational psychology literature that it's really important that you hire for fit and you hire people who fit the values and personality of the company and and who really will will that'll only get along with what the company is trying to accomplish but with the people within the company you know the people make the place and that's very true and then once you have created that it's important that you you create this sense of belonging it's not belonging this kinda goes a step further than psychological safety psychological safety is as you know is is all about being able to speak freely being able to make mistakes without the threat of punishment or being made fun of belonging is is that is you know a sense of psychological safety but also knowing that people have your back and that people are looking out for your best interest and that we're all in it together and that people see me as an important valued contributor to the organization so that's really what organizations want to focus on so a lot of you know my research and a lot of research in this area focuses on how do you build strong interpersonal connections at work right so how do you build not necessarily friendships but trusting caring nurturing relationships where people can be honest with each other where people can be fair to one another where people are you know showing carrying concern to one another in a way to try to build stronger social exchange relationships with with their colleagues that's really what we're looking to do in organizations if you wanna create a sense of belonging right and that will fulfill their need for relationship and their need for belonging this which are two of the central human needs that that people look for you mentioned it was one of your was it your phd student who first start to look at the data and notice this he's passing when he started to dive into and research it more was there a result that really surprised you and i think the first surprise was just so it might my student was emily thinks she was an undergrad student time now working on her phd i in in biotechnology but she stumbled on it and i i just was shocked at because we were asking like what do you talk about your coworker what do you talk about with your coworkers for funds you know what what do you do to you know make the work environment more fun and engaging and know what are some things that you know come up in conversation that's when we kinda stumble on this i was mostly surprised just how often it happens not not so much by what people were thrown off by it made sense to me right it makes it makes sense that people don't wanna talk about overly personal issues or non task related issues especially if the organization highly competitive or if the organization's is highly structured right you don't wanna kinda get off task because you'd be seen as you know slack off or or not doing your job so it's not that wasn't so surprising to me but just the fact that it was coming up like people are feeling free to just bring up whatever they felt in group others at work now if you look at another thing that we're starting to look at is like if you look at friendship groups once you and i are close friends what i can ask you or what you're willing to share with me is much broader right you you will once we're friends even if we're we're coworker or friends right so not just coworkers but actual friends and we're talking especially outside of work you may talk to me about your relationship you may talk to me about you know your you know your financial issues or the fact that you're looking for a new job at another company right but you're and until we're friends you're not going to have that same level of bond with me or trust with me where you feel that you can bring those up in a way that it's not going to potentially hurt your professional image right so people are most people are savvy enough to think that i need to protect my professional image because i need this job at least now until i choose not to have this job right and they could feel that if i harm my professional image i may be a threat of losing my job and that's really what's going on when people when we were reading that because the data was all qualitative that we started with and you know people just talked about you know like we were talking about the weather you know and and sports or whatever some people that the i just didn't feel i don't feel interested in sports i i wasn't into that conversation but i would have been happy to talk about movies some people talk like that other people said i was surprised that this person started asking me questions about my love life or you know or are my kids like what what what are my kids names how old are they like there's like sometimes people don't mind saying like my kid won a big tournament this weekend and in soccer but they don't wanna get into really specific information about their kids and so things like that came up so it was kind of a vast array of of of issues that came up through the data but it was it was interesting that until people really build that trust they don't really wanna get into many personal issues they wanna keep it much more surface level and i think especially that's important to that that's important to build within the culture right they every but because it's really when when i come into the company i'm gonna be guarded and i'm gonna be careful when i say so i'm really looking to i'm i'm building my socialization by looking at the people around me what kinds of things are they talking about are they joking around a are they goof awful a lot because that they're goof off a lot and they're the the boss is rewarding them for that that may signal to me that that's what i should be doing you know if they're joking around and poking fun at each other and the boss is part of it that tells me something right but if people are more guarded or more careful that also signals to me how should i behave in the organization right so organizational culture is all about if i don't have an idea of what i'm supposed to do the culture will kinda signal to me how i should be behaving right and so it's really important i think mostly that the people already in the organization are careful or are behaving in a way that is in line with what the organization wants maybe the organization wants deeper conversations more personal relationships you know and if if that's the case and the organization operates like that then that's what that's the kind of people they'd wanna hire they'd probably wanna be upfront about that and that's the kind of culture they'd wanna build but if they if they really wanna focus on being more professional they may wanna create a culture where it's obvious that when i'm at work i'm supposed to be working a little bit of funds okay but work is work and when i'm outside of work i can let my hair down a bit so it's really important that the the stage set for the new employees so that they know how to act i wouldn't put too much onus on the new employees to to try to determine themselves how i should act in this it's really the organization's responsibility to signal that to the employees so they know how to how to engage with their coworkers and with the organization so now you know more about small talk the ninety nine percent of people in the world thanks to john after this really short break we're gonna get a little bit more practical and ask how we can build a culture that encourages small talk and just the right amount of fun we're also gonna find out what happens when employers try to force fun in the workplace hint not good things see in a second hey millennials i have got a really great podcast recommendation for you if you have not listened to no straight path hosted by ashley men baba then i think you're really gonna like it it is of course brought to you by the hopes spot podcast network and this one is right up your street if you like to hear the real stories behind those shiny resumes and there's end endless positive social media posts and fancy job titles because actually human success from the perspective of a millennial or something i've not been for a very long time but i've never been a millennial never been a millennial love i love it because it is packed with actual conversations and it brings diverse and important voices to the world like in the episode with phil ag we love phil love phil a fellow millennial he's worked at some of the top companies in tech and then just happened to start the number one marketing podcast in the uk so if you like honest conversations about careers inspiration and achieving success then you have to listen to no straight path wherever you get your podcasts oh it ashley also has the best name to be said in the extract voice ash barbara ton welcome back let's rejoin lia sheen john navigate the tricky path of trying to make work fun without excluding anyone how can organizations can of use the insights of this research and and everything else that we know about ko to build a fun culture that is also effective not excluding anyone the things we can do to support that yeah there there are but fun is like small talk it's kinda got similar similar similar so a lot of my research has been in the area of fun at work and the issue with fun is that there's kinda two areas so there's kind of this very managed or or or you know can fun that's imposed on people so we've got a fun culture here and we're gonna have fun fridays and fun fridays are gonna play games and you're gonna we're gonna go to happy hour we're gonna do all these things right versus more organic forms of fun which is where socializing tends to fall right so you and i go out for a walk or go for lunch or joke around in our cubicle because we're more friendly with each other and that's okay the boss has given us autonomy in this fun culture to allow us to do that that tends to be more effective and more enjoyable for people more fun for people than the more managed fund where we say we're gonna have this celebration this day in this way right when people feel over prescribed and less autonomous even if you're trying to build a sense of belonging this they're gonna feel like it's being forced upon them as opposed to something they're choosing to do and that's really something that that organizations need to be careful with something that we've my colleague michael two's and i have focused on in over the years is this idea of manager support for fun so managers need to be supportive of fund and they do that in various ways one way is they provide resources and time and permission to have fun right they also model the behavior that they want so what level of fun am i expecting how am i wanting people about fun and a supportive manager would also try to get information from people within the organization with the employees what types of fund do you wanna have what would you find fund versus not that's what a supportive manager would do otherwise you're forcing things that you may find fun but others don't right and then they become overly cynical to it and then they start to try to avoid those days or they try to avoid those activities at all costs people are often you know misconception by the fact that your fund tends to happen in between tasks so in between the boundaries of work it's not it tends to not en approach on your task now sometimes the manager might come in and say land it's time out fun put down your work that you're focused on and let's go out offline and that's just gonna frustrate you because you're in the middle of getting something accomplished but if you and i choose to have fun we had choose to goof off or joke around or have a conversation we likely would do that before a meeting after a meeting you know after we've completed a big task right maybe a friday afternoon after a big project has just been completed you know a bunch of people got for happier and dinner right so people will choose to do it they tend to do it you know in between task or outside of task you don't find because that's always been one of the the the things that we've heard from from people and organizations is isn't this going to just reduce productivity and it it really doesn't we have found in our research that productivity you know fund kent really positively the productivity know does relate to performance but it if it's if it's fun all the time clearly task can't get accomplished but if if people are having fun in between work or in between stressful situations to manage the emotional labor that they're experiencing yeah that's a great way to have fun because much of fun is about distressing it's about building relationship it's about building up those resources that you can use when you become stressed right so a lot of the emotional literature talks about building up resources so that when you become stressed or burned out you can lean on those resources to help d stress right so they become ways to overcome stressful situations and so it's important to kind of build those up over time in one way that you you find that people do this in the organizations by having fun with each other joking around with each other goof off together right socializing it's just really important that it doesn't go too far one thing that the humor literature has found for example is that humor can go too far and like small talk can make people feel uncomfortable or can it can almost become a form of bullying so even with humor it's important that there's some ground rules that people follow are there certain ground rules that you'd recommend when it comes mister humor or it staying kinda of with small talk is you know keep it clean keep it you know keep it in non offensive non personal i mean i i think a lot of times is like if it becomes overly personal and you're not really close with the person that's when it becomes an issue right if you're making fun of the person you because of a trait they have of course it's we know it's a problem if you're making fun of a situation or the way the boss lashed out at somebody or you know said something in a meeting it's probably not gonna cause too much issue right so but if it becomes overly personal and it's pointed at the person the the jokes pointed at the person at a a person about some trait they have that's gonna be an issue so it's really about kinda keeping it non personal hearted you know enjoyable for all that are around or if you're gonna be engaging in humor that includes aspects of gossip you might wanna take it outside of work like do that when you're on at lunch or when you're on at happy hour probably not a great idea that will get around eventually but it that does happen so the more professional of the less personal whether it'd be small talk or humor can be the better that tends to be better for for all parties and i'm i'm surprised that this is also where this these levels of emotional intelligence and self awareness in imagine this is so important to almost kind of constantly that environment and pick up the keys when it's it's gone a bit too far or it's not it's disrupting work because you're right if if somebody came in and said yeah it goes time timed to our phone and i was i was in a state of flow be furious there is it as much on the manager needs to be very very aware mindful of of the environment yeah the the i mean the managers need to be they they need to be aware of what's going on in their organization and a highly supportive manager is going to do this right so a highly supportive manager is going to ensure that they're in touch with what the needs of their employees are what the desire of their employees are and where the you know where employees might be experiencing stress or or or you know need additional assistance so it's that that's a that's an important aspect of leadership that that you know the leader need be mindful of if if you look at a lot of the leadership literature especially as it compares like cast to relational behaviors most of that literature finds that from the employee's perspective what they're looking for is the relational manager the supportive manager the develop developmental manager right it's the manager's boss who's looking for those real task indications so not that the employees don't care about task accomplishment or task guidance but what they're looking for is is the manager supporting me looking out for my welfare looking out for opportunities for me helping me develop that's really what employees are looking for so managers need to be mindful of that and they need to ensure that they're providing signals to employees or they're creating an environment where people feel supported and they feel like they've got autonomy to focus on work so say no to the fun experience or to engage in fund when they're feeling a bit stressed and not feel like they're they're under any pressure to stand on task so it's it that's an important thing for managers do and i think more and more managers are learning the importance of being supportive but not all are you know many just kinda crack the weapon and expect you to to d on all the time so clearly there's a balance here between building connection and going too far but here's when it gets really quite interesting john's current research is looking at the dark side of workplace fun because here's the thing we've been told that fun at work is always good right google slides ping pong tables free food everywhere but what happens when fun becomes a bit forced what happens when employers try too hard to manufacture the joy john's got some great insights about why copying google's playbook might be the worst thing you can do for your company culture it turns out that when fun becomes mandatory it backfire spectacularly and actually this connects directly back to our small to problem because when organizations try to force connection whether that's through mandatory phone or pushing people into personal conversations before they're ready they create the exact opposite of what they're trying to achieve so here's john again explaining why authentic connection beats artificial fun every single time right now we are in the process of doing some work where we're looking at the relationship between fun and more destructive behaviors if you not all destructive but more counterproductive type behavior so physical and psychological withdrawal individual bb behavior so like making fun of people gossip about people talking poorly about people burnout out so like the actual experience of burnout not just emotional exhaustion so we're in the process of of looking at that right now and the way we're looking at that is like what are some of the ways in which fund could potentially deplete your resources so we know that it it adds to your resources right we know that it helps you build relationships feel less stress but how can it add to your stress and some of the ways it likely does that are through creating time pressures or you know creating work like imbalances right like because worrying we had fun today i've gotta stay lay at work and get my test and so i can't get home to my family or to my other responsibilities so we're starting to look at that right now our prior research i there wasn't that many surprise surprises we've seen so far a lot of it has been focused on coworker or socializing and manager support as they relate to things like job performance and employee turnover and and a lot of fun operates through this idea of relational attachment where fun promotes relationships and those relationships make us more likely to stay we've we've done a number of studies looking at turnover at three months six months a year and eighteen months and and we found that fund help to increase employee retention and even performance both task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors especially helping behaviors so and it happens a lot through that relationship building and how committed are you towards your fellow coworkers what kinds of relationships are you developing so that's really where fun happens but the unanswered question from our research has been these kind of more destructive or or counterproductive type behavior so that's the area we're going to now and i don't know yet i don't know what the data will will show a their employee employer sorry business owner's his leaders chasing the wrong thing is it right to chase fun or should we actually be chasing that authentic connection where then those those more organic pockets of fun more just happen it's fund the wrong focus hey it's i think it's really more don't force fun don't don't say we are going to create a fun environment right it's more like we're gonna create an environment where people like you said can bring their true selves in where people can build connection where people can goof off a bet but where we're getting real work done i mean if you think about kind of the the the most common example would be google i don't think the the the founders of google were set out to create a fun workplace but they just thought if we weren't really innovative creative people we need to create a space where they can be innovative and creative and we wanna get the best and brightest so we need to create a differentiated environment where people are gonna wanna come and oh by the way with all of these benefits it actually forces people stay at work longer so they're actually getting more out of their employees than than otherwise they otherwise would have so but i don't think they ever intended to create a fun environment per s and i think the the the the problem was is that after google became the the poster company for this you know for these positive working bars everybody tried to create google but they only tried to do it by ink one or two things so let's have free food and then free food didn't really change anything because that was just one little piece of what google was doing right and it that wasn't if the people weren't work out because of free food or because they have a slide or because they had bean bank traders it was kind of this whole concept right this whole entire culture that was built and so i organizations need to be much more thoughtful of what are we trained to create i would really start at are we trying to be a more cooperative or competitive environment in finance competitiveness is good right competitiveness helps financial institutions do what they do but in more high tech or more innovative research research and design it may be more cooperation how do we come together and collaborate and work as teammates and that would those two environments would have very different cultures right and then it's really an idea of regardless of what type of environment we've created how do we go about making people feel like day belong in that environment they fit in that environment and we want them there we value their contributions right so so organizations i i think they need to stop just taking these off the shelf solutions and saying fun seems to work let's do fun and think about what are we trying to create here if we wanna create an environment where you know where we want people to connect and we want people to distress and maybe funds the right thing may you know maybe is for some environments it could be the organized fund activities you know if through like as a team building activity maybe through other companies it's more just like giving people autonomy to socialize and goof off together it's interesting because we michael tu and i originally identified this this kind of area by thinking about google but we were working with a large restaurant training in the united states who was experiencing high levels of turnover and we had been working with them trying to find ways to reduce turnover and when we started ins executing some fun by activities and they were small like up upsell drink competitions or who could roll silverware the fastest after a shift and bosses would walk around as spot bonuses for who could do that they'd make it a competition make it kind of fun they would have you know you know theme days where people would would you know they they would provide different uniforms and people would come in with those uniforms and make it more fun so they did these little tiny tiny experiments around fun and it just worked you know retention went up in a an industry where you know turnover like sixty seventy percent and we were able to help them bring it down fairly significantly right so they brought turnover down by a a significant amount it wasn't a small number it was like over ten percent in some stores over twenty percent so like they it fun worked now in that environment you've got a lot of young people you've got probably a lot of people in high school college you've got you know people who are not making this their full time career right because this was a fast casual restaurant so maybe in that environment fun is the right approach but if i were working with bank to an executive banking i i certainly would not you know suggest that they do you know all the you while the wacky think like like zappos did like having parades around the office and decorating your cubicle goals in wild ways and letting people wear whatever they wanted to work and talk to customers however they wanted i wouldn't suggest that right for a shoe company that's great for a financial institution maybe just giving people more down maybe giving people you know couple fridays off a month we're letting people you know you know starting sports teams that people can play that are company you know sponsored so there there's different ways to do it and i think the the problem you find is that companies will find something that works and they'll just kinda assume that it works the same for all organizations and it just doesn't you have to think about your people your strategy what you're trying to accomplish how you're trying to accomplish with what kind of money do you have to spend on it what your managers are going to how they're gonna react and how they're gonna support it so there it there there needs to be a lot of thought unfortunately and put into this if it's going to work effectively given that a lot of our research is focused on this connection or this you know this belonging idea this idea of socializing start there i mean it's easy to allow people to to to engage in chi chat or conversations or go out for lunch together bring pizza in for your people so people love free food you bring a few pizzas in or whatever whatever your favorite food and you you let people con you know congregate together and share food they love it they they find it to be fun they they they'll be highly engaged in and they'll engage in conversation is non work related often especially if they're altogether you can do little things like that to start it it doesn't have to be this big plan that's really expensive it can be pretty small and really it's those organic types of fun that people care most about anyway and that's where the socializing comes in or the small talk or the the sharing you know bearing pine together it really what it comes down to even the most competitive environments could do that that was john michael and you now know a lot about small talk just to recap here are the top three lessons for leaders lesson number one create psychological safety first belonging second don't jump straight into personal conversations your team needs to feel safe before they'll open up and that does mean keeping small talk professional until genuine relationships develop gradually lesson than two support organic fund but don't manufacture it stop trying to be google with sort of mandatory fund fridays and those in house chefs instead give your people autonomy to connect naturally provide time space and permission for genuine socializing to happen lesson three watch for the warning signs if your team is experiencing uncomfortable small talk regularly it's a red flag for exhaustion and potential burnout so train your managers to recognize when casual conversation is actually isolating people rather than connecting them if you wanna find out more about john michael and his work then go to john w michael that spelled m i c h e l dot wordpress dot com links from the show notes it's also it's from on linkedin that is all for today we are back on tuesday with another summer session of the podcast that's the episodes where we sit on our terrace drink wine and chat about the more fun aspects of work and we'd love you to join us this is straight and work we'll see you next week

hello and welcome to treat lies and work the award podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture we are brought to you by the hopes hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals my name is leanne i'm a charge occupational psychologist my name is a i'm a business owner and together we usually help you some further sites of work but as it's summer we're doing things a little bit differently yeah if you listen to the last few episodes you'll know that we tend to do them on our terrace with perhaps an adult beverage and much more relaxed and we try not to talk about stuff which makes you think too hard so just a bit more silly i mean we're never really the most serious podcast are we no but if you're listening to this lying on a sun lounge and the glorious bulgarian sunshine then one high look us they're very near yeah we're in bulgaria but also yeah i'm i'm one hand do you really wanna be listening to a podcast on your holidays on the other hand i'm sure you've actually specifically tuned in because you know that this is the podcast you do wanna listen to yes when you're on your holidays and those of you who are astute enough to realize perhaps old enough to realize that the thin dream was slightly different today because this is the it is thirty years ago aol choose something called dial up internet kids won't know this but you'd be like mom get off the phone on the internet that used to we used to happen and that was what used to hear whenever you dialed up so it went away this week so they closed it down and so there's no more dialogue up in the us i'm not sure it's dumps it was it may still be in the uk when other places but not not in the us i don't know but i will miss that don wait welcome to aol and i remember email the internet we had was aol so we thought as it's making us feel a little bit old yep we'll run with it so i came across a sub called ask old people and some of the questions are brilliant so i've picked some at random a gonna an alain i can announce answer them after his very short break we'll he in second you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot yeah and when they started data was housed across multiple systems sound familiar hubspot completely unified their website their email marketing and that experience in just one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better okay so if you are maybe our age we're in our forties yeah leanne forty and forty seven yeah forty seven and we don't think we don't feel particularly old no equally we're very aware to our gen z workforce colleagues we're really freaking ancient with dinosaurs i think as well because of the age we are we do remember but probably more than than younger millennials i'm still classes of millennial but more so than than younger millennials i remember what life was like pre computers pre internet mh and because that i do feel a bit old yeah exactly i went to you i've graduated school in nineteen ninety three which is before most before most in fact before any jen ed was born yeah yeah a long time before so yeah so we have so we thought we'd just go through and was it a subreddit you found so reddit called ask old people that met some brilliant ones on there i've tried to pick the ones that are somewhat work related or just interesting maybe more yeah reflections on life and some are just a bit silly so i've got nineteen ally i've numbered them one to nineteen do you wanna pick a number yep we will choose number eleven number eleven you know you're not allowed in bingo to say the say legs eleven and you know that that kind of thing anymore that's what these did bingo alright anyway sorry carry number eleven what something a young person can do to instantly earn your respect oh i know exactly what it is if they ask an interesting question and show up and listen to it listen to the answer i think the there's so many the problem the problem with young people leave players is a but i think that a lot of people because they've grown up i've got access to all of the information they don't really value information and i think there's a huge difference between information as stuff that chat gb boutique can give you in wisdom which is someone who has actually yeah who's actually lived it and usually messed it up so yeah that's that's mine what have you got one i was everything is similar like curiosity genuine curiosity and yeah ask yeah exactly that asking questions and actually wanting to to hear the answer and i think that as well particularly as you get older you want to still feel relevant so particularly to a younger person ask your question they genuinely want the answer to and do you know what people in general i respect people who are curious and also i think if you if you are genuinely asking don't do this don't pretend to be curious because we'll feel see through that we're twice your age sonny we we've will safely through that but if someone does ask a question and they're genuinely curious then one that makes us feel good that we are still relevant but two it also shows that they're interested in learning about the i about the wisdom behind me about how things have evolved because like we say with chat gp now i feel like you almost get diet coke information from chat gp and you don't really get the whole like okay well this is the answer but this is why the answer is the answer and i think that someone who asks that a lot of people say that the future is like history just repeats itself or whatever and so that's why a lot of historians are very good business people because they've understood that there's really only like six motivating of factors in the world or six things that can happen but anyway i'm i'm doing an old person waffle you given me those is carry on no i think i think i think that's a nice a nice summary curiosity essentially absolutely so do we pick another number yeah six generations in the workplace i've deleted the the actual question you've deleted today i did there was another little of things out i think it was something like what do you wish younger generations knew about older generations in the workplace oh that's kind someone to the last one but i maybe this is just one i was like obvious things but i wish that wish that people knew that it was really freaking difficult to get information and data back in the day there used to be a couple like there'll be whole departments whose whose idea what those whose job was just to put together a spreadsheets and put together reports of people and and often you wouldn't have a clue what's going on you know dashboards there's there's only a rather new thing in dashboards so i kinda wish them people knew that it was really pretty hard to make a decision back in the day and a lot of it had to be on gut instinct and also probably a lots of lots of meetings but that's a bit of a wish wishy washy answer so if you got better one i think it'd be for any young person who's feeling a bit overwhelmed or unsure is i promise you the vast majority of us have no freaking idea what we're doing yes no idea what we're doing we might have a slightly better idea than you do because you got twenty years more experience but we really we really don't don't have that much more of an idea and also what i really i think that i was i was i did fall into the trap of in my earlier career particularly as a woman perhaps when i was a kind of starting my career which would have been in the in the northeast is i had this idea that or people take me seriously when i'm older they just not take me seriously now and i'm young and i think that is one i can promise you people do not take more seriously when you're older they still find ways to to not take you seriously so they don't want to but i think it can feed into your sense of as a confidence in your ability and in what you can bring so i think it would be to know that as a young person you have so much value to bring to all workplace situations and ignore all the noise around gen at young millennials and slack off and blah blah blah we all have a lot more in common than than you think yeah and the and the reason why was older people look like we might have got got it together is because we've had twenty years more time to make the same mistakes you're about to yeah and so it's not a question it was knowing more it's a question it was having tried a lot of other things and they're not worked out yeah do you wanna pick a number then i go with number thirteen i'm looking what's something that happened much more quickly in old age than you were prepared for but becoming irrelevant yeah i didn't i doubt not sure at what point it seemed to happen overnight that i went from being like fairly cool thing on the pulse to know what's going on to nav is entire generation he just thinks i'm cringe like when did that happen sorry you asking me yeah you i think you're still cool but then i'm old so yeah my mine is switching cost mine is when you know when you're doing a task or you're doing something and then someone comes along and it says oh can you just grab me that thing and you go and you find it on your hard drive you find it wherever and then you go off and you give it back to them and you get back and you go hanging it how was i doing and i find it's so especially if you doing something which is relatively complex where you have to hold lots of things in your head like class examples when we put in together our thursday episodes when i'm doing that episode i have to hold all of the all of everything the interview said in my head so that we i know that when we interrupt them back in the studio it all fits in together it's boring boring boring but that is something where if i get interrupted then i just lose it and i have to go back till like almost a square one and just to go okay i'll read through the interview again switching cost maybe it's just me but it's massively massively is a big problem for me yeah no i think it is i think just your general energy levels if you get older and i'm not sure whether it's because you've got more aspects of life that require your energy whether it be in terms of your finances or things that going on with family or yeah a general life admin takes up more room than i expected it to when i was young i'm probably realize how little life admin i had mh in my early twenties so i think yeah we're just generally speaking our attention is more split across different areas to find that focus time and work and also i think as well there's much there's a lot more distractions work wise than they used to be like when i started work i didn't have a mobile phone for work i only had a computer in the office so if for example i was thinking a work problem through at home as she tend to there was no other real distractions it was like your phone was going off or you just had that deep literal space away from work to think something through whereas now as well you got slack pinging every five minutes and emails pinging all the time and yeah there's lots of things to steal your attention away yeah and i think the they call it asynchronous communication is it mh i can't remember what what what does that mean is that is that the one where it's slack yeah yeah so asynchronous communication it's like both both the quest blessing and a curse because it means great you could in theory just ignore everyone for for eight hours at the end the end of the day go and answer your messages but then you're gonna probably find someone who's who sent you sixteen messages going wear the hell are and then they're gonna call you and then went to call you if they're millennial or gen out but then they're going to come find you so yeah it's yeah it kind of was a simpler time it was it was speaking of which there was a question it was similar actually let me find it when we're on the subject yes number in nineteen were people more relaxed before the two thousands their follow was i've heard before that people used to be more relaxed back in the days before the two thousands is that true i'm not sure people were more relaxed necessarily but i think they had clearer boundaries of what was work time and what was relaxation time think about my dad you know my dad had fairly kind of high high pressure job that would require him to be on call and things like that i was electrical engineer high voltage subs stations were his were his world so you know if there was a weather event then he would be on call and have to go in to make sure that you know manchester still had electricity but that was rare and it was literally like what what you call it like an active god isn't it like a freak weather event whereas when we were on holiday he didn't have a mobile phone he didn't have a laptop but there was no way of anyone from the office contacting him unless they wanted to actually phone the hotel he was staying in or send something via a mail which people just wouldn't no he wouldn't be so for him i think he he had a very high stress job but had very clear times where would be work isn't even accessible to me right now i can't even check that email if i wanted to so i think maybe people maybe had a bit more balance a bit more the rest and recovery time is more effective perhaps yeah so during those times that people probably were a bit more relaxed yes and also to a certain extent you you were you were limited by capacity because my dad used to bring home paperwork and he had like you know and a nineteen eighties old school briefcase we've meant that you are literally limited to the amount of stuff you can bring home whereas if you are at home then you you and you're working you likely have got everything on dropbox onedrive whatever it's gonna be you got access to everything so in theory sources can you do this thing for me you can't go well i've not bought it home with me because it's gonna be in the cloud and you'd be able to access it so it was almost like a capacity thing and i think there was there was a double thing because i think my dad was very stressed and i remember him working saturdays and and the dining room table and late into the evening probably same as azure dad so maybe maybe they weren't quite as relaxed it was maybe the problem might be that it took longer to do anything because you were doing things in trip remember my dad having these like these what you call them carbon like copy things yeah yeah so young kids if you're wondering what cc stands for an email it stands for carbon copy and they used a carbon copy someone lindsay just usually used to literally write a memo on on a one piece of paper would go through a carbon copy into two others and then one would go to the person and then once someone else was to go look to a the secretary or admin the assistant and then one would go into the file or something so anyway blast from passed sorry what was the question again people more relaxed quality thousands i think probably overall i think yes i think overall yes but in certain periods of time yeah and and i think the we all thought that the internet and mobile my phone's everything was gonna make was gonna be the answer we all awful thought ai was gonna be the answer because then he be like well life's going so much easier i've got somewhat defer all my tasks to that wouldn't it be so much easier if i could just quickly check something up on on on the company drive you know what were our sales figures for last quarter type it into you know into your database and brings you up you didn't have to go down to the records department and go and speak to marjorie it was generally by ninety year old woman who would being charge of the records you have to go and do that so you think always can make things easier by fact no it's it's kinda done the opposite because there's there's the expectation that it's simple to look up a document so therefore why wouldn't you say to someone i'll just favor well i know it's sat but just look up that documents sent it to me yeah absolutely and also the things that are lost in that interaction actual having to walk take a break away from what you're doing really great for for a refocus and those micro opportunities to rest and recover having a conversation with marjorie relationships that one of the best ways that we can we can build our our sense of connection and well being belonging so there's all those little moments that used to be part of everyday working life that now completely taken away because it's all it's all just behind the computer screen yeah and also you wanted the coffee or a sandwich you went to the coffee shop or the sandwich shop you didn't get on uber i get it delivered to your desk so you like you said you had that micro break all this convenience is basically just given us more opportunity to work yes yes absolutely so talking of works we have one more before the break yeah what have you got there ali lee what do you need to choose a number number let's go for number two number two what plan b did you choose after thirty that ended up better than your original plan i think we might both have the same answer here mh what yours podcast me too podcast yeah and i even trace it back to the original travel podcast to a certain extent because although we weren't doing that for commercial reasons that sow the seed to do one hundred and twenty hundred and sixty episodes and that that sow the seed for this one which made this one a lot more straightforward to to get set up and get started so yeah the podcast i think we went for well you tell story when we first decided one did podcast what was it gonna be it was a marketing stream it was a way for us to promote the consultancy we do through our consultancy oblong and then we got picked up by hopes hubspot podcast network really early on maybe seven eight episodes in yeah and what an amazing opportunity because it we were on the accelerator program we give access to all these resources and opportunities and funding so it then became something that was wasn't even a plan b it was just something we did a marketing play then actually became plan eight because this is a really great way to to build something cool and and make a living from it as well so so yeah i guess it was a plan because with with a sideways life our first podcast it wasn't that we ever started that with a view to monetize it because we started it's a way to just record what we were doing traveling and living abroad but i think there was a part of both as a thought well a brand it could be something at some point and still could be and still could be yeah podcast well i've got another one actually which is kinda weird because when i first started my second business and my first business i letter rubbish didn't know what i was doing second business i started was this give me some beer business i talked about two or three weeks ago where we delivered alcohol to twenty four hours basically is uber but for alcohol and this was two thousand and two and i got it completely wrong and i went bankrupt and i got two houses repo so my plan a was to turn that business into i wanted one of one giving me some beer in every single town in the uk university town of the uk was gonna franchise it was gonna be huge that went the wrong way and then my house got repo and then i learned about repo recession and then i started a company that help people who are getting repo and we basically bought the house and rented it back to them and that's what really gave us our wealth i suppose and so that was my plan b which turned out to be i think and that was funny enough that was around thirty thirty one i think that happened so yeah yeah yeah what is it cliche saying but life's what happens when you're busy making other plans mh anyway you you're something about a breakout we need me to put in our ads so our lovely people hubspot continue to pay for a life yet so we'll see you in just a few seconds you know the trail hey millennials i have got a really great podcast recommendation for you if you have not listened to no straight path hosted by ashley men baba then i think you're really gonna like it is of course brought to you by the hopes spot podcast network and this one is right up your street if you like to hear the real stories behind those shiny resumes and that end endless positive social media posts and fancy job titles because actually human success obsessed from the perspective of a millennial something i've not been for a very long time but i've never been a millennial never been a millennial love i love it because it is packed with actual conversations and it brings diverse and important voices to the world like in the episode with phil ag we love phil love phil a fellow millennial who's worked at some of the top companies in tech and then just happened to start the number one marketing podcast in the uk so if you like honest conversations about careers inspiration and achieving success then you have to listen to no straight path wherever you get your podcasts oh it ashley has the best name to be said in the extract voice ash man barbara dun okay welcome back if if you've joined us now at this to what an odd person you are why would you join a podcast halfway through but just to case you've forgotten we've got a link list of questions that from a reddit sub called ask old people isn't ask all people yeah and we're assuming the role of old people although probably we are comparing as far as the young kids are yeah young to sam older many of this yes we're skip toilet okay so we're i'll choose a number then so how about i go for number fifteen number fifteen oh no you just gate did fifteen i think no haven't okay was fifteen oh interesting similar to what we were talking about before the break actually do people who go through extreme trauma and loss actually become stronger or more successful or is that just something people say to come through us oh what are your thoughts from psychological obviously trauma is is a very broad term extreme trauma can look like a lot of things and so i will be without too much on that thing to now is we all have a window of tolerance in terms of the type of the extent of the trauma and stress that we can we can manage and that looks different for everybody so for example out of the story pull the break about how i'm going bankrupt that's that's a significant trauma that could have completely derailed some people mh and took a very different trajectory for the next ten years for you it was very traumatic and stressful but you are able to use it in a way that created opportunity so then it comes down to your individual level of tolerance the actual nature of the trauma and loss in terms of do you become stronger or more successful i mean yeah because resilience is literally defined as is kind your ability to bounce back and if you've been through a trauma or a loss and you've been able to bounce back reflecting on that and the hope it gives you an optimism it gives you going into future that's all part of what we call psychological capital as is our self efficacy our ability to or our belief in our abilities all those things can help has become stronger and more successful as a blanket to term i think it's problematic isn't nick because it can be little the impact in of the trauma somebody is going through so i think i think yes that to an extent people will say that to comfort you but also yay it can be absolutely true depending on the nature of the trauma how you respond to it significantly within that the support network you have around you help you respond to that and how you can actually reflect on it in a very very detailed way as we actually talked about when we talked about are when we got kicked out bosnia episode mh we went through a very structured process of reflection and reflective learning and thinking is really effective in terms of helping us build our resilience because we start to connect the dots of how we were able to bounce back but and yeah i don't know what do you think i think there's there's two parts this i think we all have adversity we all have challenges throughout our life and i think there's kind of like the stacking thing where if you get if you've had a really tough year and then you lose your job that is that could be like you said that thing that pushed you over whereas if you've had an right year and you lose your job might be like well this is devastating but of i'll bounce back so there's that the second part of it is i think is where you are in your life and i think that you know the older you get the more you realize you've got less time to recover and this is the one thing which i think i'd love people under the age of thirty to understand i'm sure they do i'm not being patronizing but would like everyone to understand this is that the in the majority of case you've got decades decades and decades to recover so if you make a mistake and it is a big one it doesn't matter whereas if you're on your seventies and you better you know let's say you you you you invest in something entire life savings and it goes you haven't got those decades to recover so i think that part of it is that yes people are saying it to to to try and make you feel better of course they are of course they are i one hundred percent believe that every bad thing that happened has got a good thing behind it it's just you might not see that for a year or even two years or even five years you might not see it but i think there's that but then i'm hopeless optimistic and thirdly i think it's down to your stage of life yeah i agree with all that and one thing i would i would add is that positive mindset is something you can train yourself in mh is something that you can practice as much as you'd practice something like mindfulness or physical health going for a run it is a muscle that you can strengthen and that's not to that's not to bury the trauma or a bury the immersed and and cover it with toxic positivity that's ultimately gonna crumble it's understanding that any type of traumatic life event whether it be in in work or outside of work requires processing and if you're processing that in an effective way and reflecting it in a way that you can consolidate the lessons and and what you want to take forward with you then you be more likely to be resilient and more likely to overcome future challenges so yeah if you're interested in anything like that i'd recommend doctor audrey tang series of books which i recommend all the time it's the leader's guy to mindfulness the leader's guide resilience and leader's guide to well being doesn't have to have to be in a leadership position to to make the merits of of these books lots of great cell coaching exercise in it that was all about this type of positive psychology and and how to how to build up our psychological capital so check those out yeah just a quick side if you wondering do what all people did back in the day then they did what i did which i bought from secondhand hand i bought some tapes in a big presentation box that came in a big like a four that's letter for you your americans a four like parcel with tapes that you pulled out you put in you listened to and i listen to toby tony robbins i listened to jim rowan i listened to all these kind of things and you go now it feels really quite cheesy to say that anybody was a bit easier at the time but that's what i was saying that was building up so if i was into sports i went to play tennis then i would practice every night tennis and then i'd become probably quite good at tennis but better rather than the rest whereas so not better than the rest better than the average i'm in whereas my practice every night was listening to these tapes so that i built my resilience which is why when something bad happened i'm like that's okay yeah we're working out so i'm not saying that's necessarily you going listen to jim ronan or anyone like that and in fact do be careful who you choose to listen to because a lot of people out there are a load of rubbish but you know work on building resilience okay kelly are you picking a number or am i you go for at those okay have we had number eight yet no if you could ban one question from ever being asked what would it be oh i think i know the to this how are you am i i think i know the answer to this question i have an answer for this question mike i would i would want anyone who asks the question how do i do this the quickest way or what's the shortcut too really boils my back not that's a say you imagine if that went to throw a viral a hashtag ball bag i really hate that because it's like that's just lazy like if there was a shortcut everybody would know and they take it and there wouldn't be a shortcut anymore that will be the long way but stop asking for shortcuts there's rarely a shortcut the only time where success becomes it comes before work is in the dictionary is the cheesy old thing used to say but it's actually kinda of true so i'm sorry to break it to you but that guy on tiktok who says well i'll send you eight that you just an eight thousand pound course and i'll show you how to how to do you know triple your money in crypto no no there's no shortcut because if he knew out a shit triple his money in crypto he would do it day after day and would never ask you for money what do you think love i think that's a good one i i think for me it's any question that is leading in a way that is trying to prove the other person wrong will make them silly or stupid give us an example anything that comes out the mouth of someone like tate do you know what i mean all that breed of influence i'm gonna do a new metric on the on podcast is gonna be called t t tea time to take the average type to take att t t i haven't brought up the tape for ages no you haven't actually no i knew who you're talking about what you're gonna say the sooner and ass yeah just that just that breathe that and what and what i hate as well as now we're seeing it in terms of like like the whole trump jd vance with si in the oval office that was just an ugly ugly situation that asking questions they don't want the answer to they're asking questions to make him look bad or prove him wrong or and i i see that type of behavior breeding in certain circles and including it the monastery and i aren't the on social which i think is unfair to men to be honest because i'm majority men i know aren't like that but i just think any question that is loaded leading or includes the word because oh this is our this is our thing lee thank you for that she just she's just chipped that up i just gonna get my head on it anyone who says to you ask your a question and then use the word because they don't give a shit to what you say so example hey began have you ever been to be bulgaria because what i'm about to say something about how you entered bulgaria yes so or something really negative about bulgaria and now they're gonna make me sound now i have to disagree with you so you're looking for conflict yes not got time people looks conflict no there's nothing fit in the world you don't need to be looking for it if you wanna to be fair i don't think it's an nefarious thing but if you if you're from the uk you and you watch sas kitchen then i do like james martin the the the host of it in the chef is you you know it's a decent fella but once you hear this i'm sorry to ruin inside the kitchen for forever every question he asks he always puts it because and whenever he puts because is either talk about himself or talk about something he wants the guest to know he knows about them so yeah sorry for ruining sad the kitchen for you there but you'll hear it with piers morgan you'll hear it with you know a lot of the the people out there there's sort of shock jokes howard it's stern etcetera not about you about them another one for you all what's a bit of we're talk on a similar similar theme what's a behavior that you used to tolerate but will no longer entertain regards of how many decades you've known a person i think it's bitch about people i used to be a salty little bugger i used to i used to love nothing because i was really insecure as a as a as a kid and then also as a as as a young adult or even old adult and you have to i think you have to be insecure to be an entrepreneur and i hate the word entrepreneur but that's what we're calling it these day because otherwise if you're satisfied with yourself and your life then you don't wanna actually grow so i used be quite secure so i used to love it when other people come and go hate hear what happened and down there god they got so much trouble they messed it up so bad like surely they can't done that they're really intelligent meaning i was asking about those was question surely can't they really tell me because i'm sure i've heard them beating the tell no no no they totally messed up now someone starts talking me like that about someone or a group of people not interested mh what i you have you got one i think in a workplace setting any form of shocking cheating what do you mean by shot advantage so for example right and this this is how things stay with you and i must have been twenty five or six when this happened so you're talking fifteen years ago and it's still me off so i was a job coach which meant i helped people who were unemployed more than likely for a long period of time weekend gain work and there was a rule within the team because there were occasions where a customer would change job coach whatever reason whether it be a capacity issue or one of us would change location or whatever else so there was a there was an there's always an element of risk in terms of if you were helping somebody find a job then they get moved to another coach that coach would them be with him when they got said jobs that wouldn't go against your targets yeah so the general rule in the team which was reinforced supposedly by our manager was it if you've put a note on the system specific about a job that you support this person with regardless of when they get that job even if they're with another coach that going your figures your performance figures so for example it was like customer interviewed for admin position at royal mail expects to hear november twenty twelve you old man and this is what i basically had so then when i'd been moved on to another the contract but still had us the same target just in a different area so i i did like to check up on my customers and see how they're getting on particularly ones that would done really well we're getting really close so i logged on system found this person and the new their new job coach had claimed their job with royal mail for the admin position that they heard of at that time cool man not cool not cool so i phoned my manager i was like can you explain this please this doesn't seem fair oh it doesn't massively and it doesn't matter you're on target this month anyway it doesn't matter no it does matter because if we're all allowed to break that rule isn't with upheld it's no longer a rule so we're all gonna be shocking each other i just annoyed me and you know what you you know who that person was yep cc see no the coach oh like okay yeah i know you mean yeah i'm not gonna use that one but at the time i was like okay i'll try and let it go but i'd never really quite trust this person but i tried to hit on and ultimately throughout my entire career with that company she was always the one that was taking opportunities away from me for my team taking a glory for herself not acknowledging the successes that we had making my life difficult always and now it's like if somebody behaves like that i'm not working with you anymore because we if we have a conversation and you know it's that okay and i understand let's address that of course fine but this no i've not got the time because it's not gonna end well no now and in sales there is that horrible thing in sales you tend to most organizations tend to move towards everyone's in it for themselves and it's because of that and it's such a shame where it was one company i used to sell tele sales stuff for and it was actually a really cool company because there was one girl in there sorry ak look at me this is why old because i said girl and she was a woman one woman there i can't remember brand name began with him and she used to always hit do a target very solidly very quietly do a target by thursday and then then friday i think said this before enough pub friday she'd ring up keep ringing up selling and then give it to the people who were short their target and then they did on monday they worked and they i mean to be fair maybe she was maybe she was just like she i don't know there's no angle there no she was just a lovely person yeah lovely person yeah and i've worked in in more sales based environments where people weren't like that at all yeah so yet to the point where our person who used to like direct the calls when they'd come in and if there was a a like a queue or waiting time the bin that role would have been a new role created and i was asked by this person who sort obviously couldn't got the job whether i was gonna apply for it and i said no i'm back to university in september there's no point and he was like yeah but you could get it for nine months and it's like almost twice the salary i was like yeah i'm not gonna take the opportunity away from somebody who really wants it so when then that person would would if i was a bit behind on my target would send me the really good calls oh amazing but you fact you make sure stacked isn't it right so if you are under the age of thirty you're listening karma is real got can't i can't show you the science behind it but it is real and it will bite you or it will kiss you on the ass whichever the two is is worst lee i feel like we're we're on about thirty five minutes now so we've probably got room for about ten more to tomorrow i've got some i've got some quick ones to go through what were all people saying when you were kid about how things were back in their day one thing i remember so clearly was my na saying to me like you don't understand back in my day we had to go to the bathroom outside what yeah my dad said i think my dad said he remembers in his lifetime when they got an indoor toilet my dad was born in nineteen forty six so it's not like old old yeah yeah that's this kinda kinda weird isn't it and then just the and that's what makes me feel old now that you say my grandparents were saying that it was definitely a thinking in the fifties and sixties when both of our parents we're alive yeah and now we're talking about how ai is potentially gonna replace knowledge workers it's like how we gone from only just getting indoor toilets to compute is taking over our jobs in what sixty is no and that makes me feel odd yeah i think also the i think this it's a typical parent or grandparent they're all back in my there we usually the doors unlocked and and you know all that kind of stuff but then in the same in the same way they'd also talk quite dis discouraging about disposing about certain certain groups of the population demographics mh and and so yeah i was kinda like weird but nostalgia always nostalgia is not the same as it used to be that's why i leave than that what's the oldest email address you have in terms of number of years oh so my oldest email address is a hotmail email address yeah and i probably started it in about two thousand and eight i think i can well i'm pretty sure had an email address back when i was on there's something at aol in the uk well there wasn't in the uk but also something called comp serve i think any of the people in my age will remember miller that it came free on the front of a a cd or a disc free on the front of a computer my computer shopper magazine and i'm pretty sure at a comp serve email address which would i would have been around about fifteen so that would be nineteen ninety two nice oh no that you still have now oh it's that now oh no oh i'll ask just less input less interesting gmail i've about it for about twenty years and honestly i think there's about a quarter of million emails in there yeah yeah no my very first email was an aol well email of course so that's that's that's that a misleading question lia anne i'm sorry i think i think it's just it's funny that it blows young people's minds that we have email addresses that like fifteen seventeen twenty years old and the other i thought it's quite funny if someone's got an email address they obviously set up in in college like roger just sixty nine kinda thing and they're still using it today is like yeah anyway what things did old people in your day used to do at work that made you cringe i remember when i was first started out the networking circuit back in about sort of what would be about nineteen ninety nine and i remember distinctly meeting people and particularly they were there were a very tight there was there were men of a certain age and they used to grab my hand shake really hard squeeze really hard and then turn it so that their hand was on top of mine and be like hey my name's dave dave i'm dave i'm the sales guy dave what's your name and dave and they're you exactly they i they must have been to some kind of seminar where they if you say your name four times to remember you and then turn your hand over and they'll be like who the hell is this oh my god i've got to submit to them straight away what about you i think general misogyny i'm not saying it doesn't exist now absolutely it does but it was a lot more transparent what i dream work in terms of ours one that would looked out to go and make the tea and yeah talk down to and called sweetheart and that type of thing i know it still exists now but it was it was a lot more and that used to meet me he used to make me cringe even back in like the sort of late eighties early nineties i remember and i remember people used to describe to scrubs i'll drop it off my girl's desk will you at his secretary desk drop it off my girl's desk and if you much swear my mom won't watch mad men and and she's like i can't stand how the misogyny how bad it was back then because she was back in the workforce about the same time and i keep saying to it mom it gets better it all goes up i booked got wrote it for you guys you've got seen mad but it can't goes the other way anyway yeah yeah mad is a great series to watch to see the evolution of work even in those what thirty years that it covers or twenty years it covers yeah and and then you can see at the end just how progressive it is but then also how much we moved on in that cut and have what yes yeah yeah absolutely yeah what was your first experience of using computers my first experience they've got i remember too because to be clear we are old enough to have have lived a good amount of our lives without yes that said i was i must been about seven or eight years old and my dad bought a god i car with a call that basically i wanted a bbc basic or a bbc something computer acorn or something was but he he bought something else from from from tan back in the day and it was a computer that had a you you got a separate tape player and you plugged your tape player into your computer and you could play stuff and i used to program in basic i'd spend like my holidays four days writing hand coding racing game so that on the fifth day i could play it with my keys so that i would be about seven which would be about nineteen eighty four early doctor yeah yeah and i surprising how well i did with the ladies later on in though actually that's not true you did very well you very much yes later in life i did computers i don't remember my first time when we had them at school but like the old ones that were like dos where it's just like yeah black screen green font but the first like the flash memory i have about computers was when i must have been about i don't know maybe i in early high school maybe eleven and my dad sat me down in front of a of the computer his work computers but he he'd got his first laptop and it was like did have a nip in the middle between this between the two letters for your mouse i can't remember but it was a weight thing it was a wait talk true of to characters and he he opening it up and he was like leanne i want to show you something this is called the internet and it's gonna change the world wow and i was like what's up then he was up absolutely where i within probably three or four years everyone's online on msn chat space counts and like but yeah that was my first but it's funny to think that when actually goes on to our next question which is what about your uni life would you would sound weird today though the ability to research information online was still very limited when i went to university in two thousand and three that you'd have to go to the library and you'd have to find the journal and you'd have to photocopy if you want to take it out of said library or you'd borrow the books to write your essay you couldn't just google it google with googling the no couldn't google things so it was it was a lot more a lot more manual and speaking of manual another thing that was weird about life at university i did type up my essays but there wasn't a portal to submit them so had to print it off take it down to the administration office which was like five miles away go to the office get like like a cover sheet that had a sticky bit in the corner where you felt your name and your your student number and then fold it down and stick it so it could be marked anonymously and then we'd we'd have to then go back in on a certain date when we're were told in our lectures that that marking was red we we're going and collect it from same admin office and if you didn't go to a you were screwed because nothing was online i remember that it's where you said you could there was no portal and i was like why hell would be a portal i don't understand why there'd beer a portal because i i remember all of our stuff was either printed out in the last year of my university universities printed out in nineteen ninety eight to be printed out but in the first two years ninety five ninety six it was all handwritten and you put a punch punch two holes in it and you'd use treasury tags to go through the punch holes and you'd hand it in to the to the actual you have to go in into wants a treasury tag treasury tag is like a little piece of rope a minute miniature piece of rope with two like a a tea bar at the end and what used to do was you you punch like you you did to use a whole punch a whole punch is and use take these a four pieces of paper a piece of paper is like a tree there's be a face us a way to keep something there that have got holes in the side of it if you didn't have like a file for it you put these treasury tags to like temporary lever arch file sort of thing brilliant wow we are old we owed couple more quick ones for you this is quite footage because i know you'll have a good answer this question about radio back in the day hi folks hope doing well just had a random thought and want some insight from people who lived in a time before advanced technology rude when you would hear a song on the radio and we liked it but did not know a name of it how did you find out the name oh you couldn't well then you there was a couple of ways so you sometimes what you used to do is you'd tap your tape recorder close to your radio wouldn't you and you try and record a song just after the d dj had said something you said the last what you thought it was the last words and invariably one in three times they come back in and go oh by the way and you be like oh man i'm recording this but then they all seems to do something called back announced and with a lot of the a lot of the songs used to just play them and then back announce what it was but i remember distinctly way i first heard a s on my iphone three and i'm distinctly going this is the future of the world this is what everyone will been waiting for a night just kinda like died a death didn't nip yeah the but when you'd have like you'd have magazines like man smash you what was the n enemy enemy if you're a cool yeah so so then you'd see like the the name of it or it have like the lyrics printed in it or you just go to school and play it to your friend on your walk that you taped off off the radio illegally and ask everything heard of it we listened to the top forty charts on a sunday you used you exactly did that that's how come the pops on a friday but thursday top thursday thursday night top of the pops you exactly what you would do you'd listen for three hours in a and you couldn't skip forward be three hours of playing all of the top forty songs from forty down to one and you couldn't miss it because that one song realized liked you didn't know it was oh you don't go to the bathroom for three hours exactly no so that was it with doctor fox and whose things ago does the confessions are radio two simon and car was saying i'm sure you're shouting that but yeah he was he was originally i think one of the top forty guys yeah i just it was such an activity though wasn't it that was just sunday afternoon sorted do you know i did see something i to the other day someone i was saying what right i've got a great idea what it is it's podcasts but it's just streamed live and someone was that dude that's a radio i sorry of the one that was like is anyone just thought about like having one mobile phone that's dedication for the house everyone can share and if you wanna use to get in touch with anyone bring your family can just phone one dedicate mobile our phone in the house it's like dude that the landline anyone i know anything else before we go i mean there's a slightly deep one that might be nice to to finish on did you worry about finding your passion or was work just work do you have an answer to this i was mindful of wanting to do a job that felt i felt connected with so things like fun because professional services is very much the vibe before odd day wasn't it so things like account see and lawyers i just didn't sounded boring so psychology was something that sorry joe your sister to is each each the right is it of course to me it felt boring so we yeah i've told the story before so i won't tell it again but basically it had an experience when i was in high school with a psychologist and i thought what she did was really cool and then pursued it from there and then after i finished my i didn't really know what avenue psychology wanted to go into so i took a gear out and i remember putting my third day work waking up to my alarm at like half past six and thinking is this it mh is this it is this what adult looks like i go to work to job it don't particularly like don't get paid very much come home and watch shall they i go to bed and do the same again the next day nah not for me so i guess from a fairly early age as was probably twenty one yeah and work needs to be more than just work i think i quite lucky in and i did teacher training for two years trained to be a mass teacher and then i went went i'm part of that you have to go in for a term and teach and teach training in a school and i went in there and i was like i first of all i read and enjoy it secondly i know i think i'm sure i to sit there and drink whiskey till three o'clock in the morning with my house mate then go to bed and then get the train at five o'clock well you could when you could could you could and the third thing was that and this that i was only what maybe he's eighteen at the time nineteen at the time and the head master took me you sat me down and he said after tony he said okay been watching what you've been doing and think you i think you're a good teacher i think you got some really really good opportunities here if you work really hard so you need to graduate work really hard and in about twenty twenty five years time you'll be sitting here as a deputy head earning twenty eight thousand pounds if you if you work really hard and i got on the train that night and worked to be fair almost myself from front of the train and i got on the train and i'm like no i ain't doing that i ain't doing that i ain't working twenty five years ironically me saying people not looking for shortcuts and i'm looking i was for shortcuts and so instead i found that i really enjoyed creating things and that now when i create something things as matter what it is the podcast anything i feel like that's not work so i feel like i don't work because i know what it is that makes me happy which is creating things i think there's a there's may be a myth we need to take care of here is that that yes if you're doing something you're passionate about doesn't necessarily feel like work maybe but for me it still very much felt like work mh like i think back to some of the highest stress jobs i've had and even though i've absolutely loved them it's been really hard and there's not been a shortcut to i've had to hustle and work hard to get to the management position to then get the next thing to then be able to go self employed it's not like over and not you know i was twenty one thought i know i'm gonna start podcast about work it would be rubbish if it pumps so i think there is an element of it you need if you can get both if you can find your passion and have a good work ethic a healthy work ethic then i think that's a nice balance but i think there's very few people who are fortunate to find some they just a hundred percent passionate about never feels like work can get to do it all day in fact that's a really good place to think to leave it and i so if anyone is under the age of thirty and they think i just i hate my job i just want a job that i just cannot wait to get up to in the morning that probably doesn't exist it probably shouldn't exist for you because that's your hobby that's the stuff you do for fun on a friday afternoon on a saturday morning or whatever and then the second imagine if you just loved making cakes he went ryan gonna start cake business and then you suddenly had to make cakes you're gotta stop you're gonna fall out of love with with cakes so i think all that is a bit of a rad about way of saying is that don't chase that idea that work is always easy fun because the fact is that some of the most rewarding work in the world is difficult challenging sometimes you go should i be doing this but ultimately you just cannot not do it yeah we all need a little bit tension that's what makes the the achievement so fulfilling lovely well it looks like your drink has been has been taken off my flies been it's been affected by a fly so we're gonna refresh that beverage and we will see you next week we're back on thursday with another interview but don't worry it's not one of those like real serious ones it's kind of bit of fun so i can't remember it but it's definitely double cool jumped till life no let let everyone be surprised thank fun it's a good one see you soon bye bye

there's a google employee who stopped drinking water during work hours not because she forgot but because she didn't have time to use the bathroom there's a vale historian with a perfect gpa who ate her lunches in elevators while biking between meetings and there's a silicon valley success story who on her thirty four's birthday woke up feeling so empty she packed a bag and left everything behind they are all the same person our guest caroline ne las wore business like a badge of honor until her body and mine simply said enough she's a former google and american express employee you discovered that climbing the corporate ladder at break next speed meant she was climbing the wrong ladder entirely caroline his story started like the american dream colombian immigrant arrives at seventeen get scholarships achieves perfect grades lands jobs at the world most prestigious companies but here's the thing she was literally too good for her own good from a very young age i started receiving accolades and awards for my academic results so i was in high school commencement speaker in college four point o gpa which in the us is like perfect score i started to notice that i would get attention and love through my accomplishments tension love validation self worth through output that's unhealthy of course after a six month mental health article and a journey across italy india kenya and beyond carolina discovered something profound the opposite of burnout isn't happiness it's something much simpler and more radical carolina calls it flourishing but don't worry this isn't another instagram perfect wellness story when carolina talks about flourishing she means waking up on a tuesday morning and simply being okay with being human even if that means feeling sad or angry or even lost and in a world where how are you is answered with busy carolina has a challenging message maybe that badge of honor your wearing is actually killing you hello and welcome to truth lives and work the award winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture brought to you by the hopes podcast network the audio destination for business professionals my name is leanne i'm a charge occupational psychologist my name is allan i'm a business owner and we are here to help you simplify the science of war so today we're asking what happens when busy becomes your entire identity let's find out after this very short break you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by app accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot yeah and when they started data was housed across multiple systems south familiar hubspot completely unified their website their email marketing and that fan experience in just one part this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new setups ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better it's so joins he by a pretty incredible woman i'm not even gonna attempt to talk about her street because i think there's a lot of things we can dive into here but before we start can you just tell us carolina who you are what you do and what you might be famous for i'm carolina lasso i am an author i am a an eternal student and a fellow human being walking this planet earth i major in international business i'm immigrant from columbia and i moved to the us when i was seventeen and i had a pretty big dream of accomplishing a lot of goals i was very determined and then that up going into business because i got a scholarship and then i followed the steps they tell us to follow in order to be happy yet to get to a point and realize oh this ladder i have been climbing this is not my ladder this road i've been driving so fast so quickly with so much determination and energy this is not my road so i had to lately i've been calling it rec recalculate kinda like when you're driving and your gps is rec and you're go in a different direction and i've reinvented myself so now nowadays i call myself a purpose mentor and a human flourishing teacher facilitator and eternal student and that's what i do i love though connecting with people i love walking side by side people from all corners of the world for them to reconnect with our purpose sense of meaning and flourishing karen i wanna start off it's the biggest question after doing so much research the biggest question i've got for you it seemed like you had everything you had the mba you had degrees you had travel experience you you're working at google you worked at am you seem to of just given it all up one day just said no i don't want anymore tell me the story what happened yeah this is actually the story on how i i begin my first book the back of flourishing and it starts on my thirty fourth birthday interestingly enough i had gone out with friends and my feet were hurting from dancing so much the night before i received so many gifts and hugs and just so much love from people and so you would have thought that everything was fine in my life i was married i was living in silicon valley sunny veil specifically the veil of this the valley of the sun right so like it's sunny every single day and the next morning i woke up feeling so much sense of emptiness and lack of clarity about my life it was the sense of like all these things that i have that i've earned that i have worked so hard for are not really leading me to being happy what's going on and so it was disappointment at another level because it was just like i did everything right that feeling of i had checked all the boxes why is it that i don't feel happy why is it that i have so many profound questions about the meaning of life about what to do next my next chapter i had given up a little bit on life because of that disappointment of doing everything supposedly by the book and not getting that happiness back and so that day i left my house i left i just backed up a bag and left and went on to think i just needed to have space quiet space to think that led into taking a six month sa article from google because of mental health my big questions evolved into frustration worry concern eventually anxiety eventually apa empathy eventually depression so i left and got divorced and traveled around the world to find myself a little cli cliche i know the whole eat pray love thing my friends joke about the fact that i am the colombian version of pray love because indeed i went to eat did to our therapy i went to live in an ash in southern india in the state of car i eventually i also went to kenya tanzania singapore colombia and i just wanted to learn i became obsessed about learning from all of these different cultures and and traditions and wisdom from so many different places around the world to understand a why i was not happy and two then what was the recipe the ingredients for happiness and when i got back i i realized that it was not happiness that i was after it was something deeper and i in my book i call thor in spanish there is the word that doesn't have a translation which is and it involves being content being whole being in a state of tranquility being well wholesome and then i realized that that's what i was really looking for something that would be with me the peaks and the valleys of my life not necessarily happiness which has this huge eu euphoria upbeat high energy connotation but something a lot more relatable stable in my life and so i've found for my own benefit for my own life the seven principles that take us to a lead flourishing life i didn't even know i would call it that but eventually that's what became my first book right so caroline has just told us by waking up on a thirty fourth birthday feeling completely empty despite having everything but here's what i wanted to understand was this actually about achievement or was there something deeper going on you were doing everything in your life right you were like you're going to google you're at am max you were silicon valley you were living and like you were saying in in the most amazing place what's the difference between healthy ambitious and healthy goals and just sort of collecting achievements what's the difference between healthy ambition and just being addicted to it is how it reframe the question i was addicted to it for sure because from a very young age i started receiving accolades anna awards for my academic results so i was high school commencement speaker in college four point o gpa which in the us is like perfect score and i loved it and i realized that i started to notice that i would get attention and love through my accomplishments attention love validation self through output and that's a really hard realization to get to but it was the truth it just happens right when when human beings develop we'll all develop certain things and that was mine and so that's unhealthy of course to and it took me it took so much work shadow work all sorts of retreats and therapy and exploration and inquiry to get to that point and realize that i am not my goats i am my self worth my identity my worth my value does not come from anything external but the moment i started to tie my self worth to my accomplishments that's when he got to be not helpful not productive i was too good for my own good is how i came to think about it trying to deal so much and and be the good student and be the good daughter and be the good neighbor and the good citizen up until up to a point that you became negative for my own well being because i would bend over our backwards for everybody i would sign up for all types of products at work i would do so much and that's the thing i was so focused on doing i forgot being and that trip around the world it allowed me to space to be not just do and so it it's a reminder that we're not human doing for human beings and i think that's the difference when you have goals when you have structure when you have clarity about what you want that's wonderful so long as your self worth is not tied to it what's the difference between having a bad week or a bad month and what you felt like how did you know it wasn't just something that oh it it'll pass i thought it would be something that would pass i thought i was going through something tim per and i do wanna name that a lot of the self help books and content out there encourages to like keep on going yeah just wake up next day and stand up and with discipline the right main mindset you'll accomplish anything and so i believed it and i would keep on trying that today it's gonna be better oh we up i'm gonna go do my mindfulness practice i am gonna go to the gym and i wanna gratitude i'm gonna do this and i'll try to do it all and i would still feel so empty and and dissatisfied and i think apa empathy is probably the one that struck me the hardest because i was always very engaged very involved very positive in general in my life and when no matter what i did wouldn't help i realized it was time to ask for help and the other part was that there was shame associated with mental health and so i would go to work wearing my mask my happy smiling i can do it all mask because i thought that opening up to say i'm not okay would completely damage my reputation this was my my own story my head of well you're not cut for this right i was working at google with really in minds and sober determined on hardworking people and so admitting that something was not okay was kind of admitting that i i couldn't do it that i was not cut for it that i was not made for something like that and so i were refused to and i denied it for close to a year and of course it felt like a pressure cooker right and so the more you hide it the stronger it is going to explode one day and so one day i just couldn't take it any longer my boss realized and he knows just how bad it was and that's when i started my my time off so i think deep inside we know it i was listening to a podcast by b brown and doctor brown as we know as a researcher on different types of emotions and shame and she talked about in her book atlas of the heart that it based on her research the average person the average person can only name three emotions happy angry or sad and if you think about or if you've ever seen or anyone listening if you've ever seen the wheel of emotions my goodness that are are so many things so we can feel as human beings that we even have labels for i'm i'm sure there are many others that we can't even name or label or have a word for and so it's really important to have that depth of discernment and understand what going on with us so if someone's listening to this and it's resonating deeply be they're going do you know what i am wearing businesses as a badge can you give them something some practical steps in saying how they climb down from that point in their life it's going yeah i would say step one is recognition noticing noticing and sometimes you don't even notice that's what you're doing and so first notice oh gee i've been doing that for a long time now number two ask yourself what's underneath that why would business make you important would elevate you there's this extra sense of elevation of what to what for what who do you want to impress is it yourself is it your inner child is it your parents and your boss who is behind this what's going on there and once you've uncovered then recognize what may be driving it what was the trigger point for that and using that information then you can uncover to and explore ways to change it from that root cost right because you can try to just change the language and not saying busy ink and say fine i'm doing fine or you know i'm more spacious today or whatever but if it's not authentic and if it doesn't tackle the root cause then it will continue to happen or it'll be superficial or fake but what's underneath that right in my case it was that sense of well i'm busy then that means i'm successful and if i'm successful and if i do a lot of really good things and have productive outcomes and very creative solutions that i'm gonna be accepted i am going to belong i'm gonna be loved that's not what's yours but on the other side right and so i think it becomes real important to get to that cost let's talk about belonging for a second the i knew you were going to go there i saw your eyes i saw your eyes you knew it belonging you traveled a lot of people meet who travel extensively i sense they're just looking for somewhere to belong but often they just all that changes is the view out their window what would you say is someone who feels like they don't really belong does travel help does changing jobs help i could come up with a really good answer for that but what i would wanna say is teach me because i'm still struggling with it after moving so many times i've lost count on the number of cds where i've lived even within one state or one region of the world i i think on average i was moving once a year and so it really uproot you and i've struggled with sense of the belonging and identity being multicultural bilingual being just just having one foot here one foot there so right now i'm living in canada most of the year putting in the winter i could spend my time in colombia and if they're throughout the year i'm also traveling to so many different places and so it really makes me wonder where to like belong and i'll tell you i go back to colombia where i grew up and i don't belong fully anymore and it hurts me i'm like i wanna belong here i want this to be my home but there are just so many cultural aspects that don't resonate with me anymore and yet if i'm in north america if i'm in europe i'm also like ugh no i don't belong here either i don't resonate my joke is that i mean i'm born that i belong in the caribbean like somewhere in between north and south america so i've come to embrace it and just know that i will never feel like i fully belong and how can i make that okay how can i create my own culture how can i create my own home and develop it within me so that it's it comes with me wherever i go now sounds nice not easy and i don't think they've gotten to that point just yet i'm homes sick very frequently anywhere i go i'm busy she's right people do say that all the time it is our default response and she's connecting it to this need to belong to be loved but a i'm thinking about our listeners who genuinely are busy not by choice but by necessity that was exactly what i was thinking when i was talking to carrying it so i pushed back on this let's see what she says what happens if you haven't got the luxury to be able to go out there and follow what brings you joy because you have to bring in money to feed a family or to care for a sick one what we supposed to do now i think joy the word joy also has that sense of euphoria and big smiles i think the type of joy i would wanna connect with and the type of joy i talk about is one that is a lot more grounded on the inner knowing the inner yes it's a little bit of connecting to the inner compass that tells us it's this way the yes is here not necessarily the big laughter and smiles that are not always possible let me come back to that but i do want to address what you're mentioning which is the toxic positive positivity that ignores marginal oppression injustice in the world and that no with just a changing mindset i'm not just going to go and all of a sudden change my circumstances when there is something systemic that prevents me from doing it no matter what i do so i do think there is something there that we do need to address and we do need to change therefore we need more people willing to follow their inner knowing to address those changes to make the change happen and so for everybody it's that discernment of i keep going back through that word right but that ability to connect to our inner wisdom and say what's next for me where is that next step and so i talk about follow your joy from that perspective what gives me inner peace another word i use this enthusiasm from the greek in t in god in ind and i don't talk about religion but i do sense that extra connection to source connection to something bigger that guides you it guides me because it gives me peace it gives me extra sense of curiosity and motivation and so lately i've been talking a lot more about either enthusiasm or curiosity follow your curiosity so if you are a person who has to work three shifts and you do not have the time this base there's so much going on you're going through complex times how can you connect to that which gives you a little bit more inner peace tranquility that sense of curiosity and motivation and i do believe that the bigger change i talk about this a lot when i talk about purpose by the bigger change to work purpose throat towards flourishing happens one step at a time when bread crumb of curiosity at a time picking up the bread breadcrumbs one at a time of curiosity and enthusiasm and sure if there is joy that's wonderful if you can uncover it if it's present that's beautiful but it's more about that grounded level of inner knowing i'm glad you addressed the systemic issues there she's not just saying think positive when someone's working three jobs yeah but i was skeptical because follow your when you're absolutely exhausted i just didn't know whether that was can be feasible now wait until hear what she tells us about next about just how far her business went we'll find out after the break hey millennials i have got a really great podcast recommendation for you if you have not listened to no straight path hosted by ashley men baba then i think you're really like it it is of course brought to you by the host spot podcast network and this one is right up your street if you like to hear the real stories behind those shiny resumes and that end endless positive social media posts and fancy job titles because actually human utilizes success from the perspective of a millennial or something i've got for a very long time but i've never been a millennial never been millennial love i love it because it is packed with actual conversations and it brings diverse and important voices to the world like in the episode with phil ag we love them love phil a fellow millennial he's worked at some of the top companies in tech and land just happened to start the number one marketing podcast in the uk so if you like honest conversations about careers inspiration and achieving success then you have to listen to no straight path wherever you get your podcasts oh it ashley also has the best name to be said in the extract voice ash barbara dun so going back to the young woman young woman who was eating a lunch in the elevator who was not drinking so that she didn't have to go to the toilet what's the story was she telling herself back then so i was mentioning the story i tell my book that sometimes i would have back to back meetings without any breaks throughout my day this was when i was in the corporate world that sometimes i chose not to drink so much water because i wouldn't have enough time to go to the bathroom in between meetings sometimes i remember in the google campus which was so big i had to bike from when building to the next with the pretty yellow google bikes and that wouldn't give you enough time to go to the bathroom room of course it's an exaggeration but yeah like that was part of it and the story that all of that situation stemmed from is i need to meet other people's expectations i cannot let them down there was that big component i thought i was being responsible i thought i was being responsible by attending all meetings going to everything doing at all and then i realized it was not responsible with myself my own health and that responsibility is the ability to respond and i was not really responding properly i was not really having the ability to respond because clearly that was human and and i learned right and i think that's the thing and lately i've really been embracing this idea that our life purpose our supreme life purpose is to uncover kinda like peel the onion and uncover deeper and deeper versions of ourselves that are more authentic that remove all of those ego narrative self identity layers and get to the core of who we truly are and i think that a lot of people ask me do i have a purpose does everybody have a purpose i can't find my purpose i'm like first of all you know find purpose we walk the purpose path it's a path it's a journey and number two yeah every single person has one and at the very highest level it's that to reconnect with who you truly are you'd true essence your inner being your if you allow me to say more divine self for someone who's listening to this and going and you've used all these fluff words that i read everywhere mindfulness purpose all this kind of transcend they're still not convinced is the one message you want to give to them to convince them that purpose is the way i'm not here to convince anybody i am here to provide tools for anyone that resonates with and to make it a little easier for people navigating transitions maybe offering some of the help that i wish i had during that moment and i struggled so much and i am here to remind every single person that we all every single person to deserves to flourish every single person so i don't want anyone up there thinking they don't deserve a flourishing life one with meaning one with peace of mind one with the support system they to deserve one that feels wow everybody just deserves well big b let's talk about this word flourishing you've used it a lot what does flu actually feel like i'm not talking about the instagram fancy like i'm posting beautiful quotes and lovely me happen what does tuesday morning alarm goes off while does flourishing actually feel like for the real pete i would say the shortest version of flourishing is i am well well b be well it means you get a good night's sleep and you're able to wake up and you're able to appreciate the fact that you're alive and you go out and you do your very best in whatever it is you're doing and with the resources at your disposal that's the very basic level right and then of course we want more i want more people i want to envision a world in which every single person believes they deserve flourishing they deserve alive that is driven by motivation and health and equity and they deserve moments of smiles they deserve support when the smiles are not present and the tears are they deserve to feel their all their emotions they deserve to find a path that has meaning in their lives where they can enjoy moments of processing of presence and where the the lows of life can be managed better through tools and a support network and and we decrease suffering everywhere it may sound a little your topic sometimes but i can't stop thinking about so if i've understood this then flourishing doesn't necessarily mean you wake up bounce out of bed every single day and and sing it means that you are doing something working towards something meaningful you're okay with feeling sad and crying some days perhaps feeling angry if i must've yeah i think part of it is fully embracing any and every emotion you feel because we've come accustomed to first not only not know to recognize what emotions were going through as we just talked about but then what do you do with among a lot of people reject what they're going through want to avoid those emotions and of course nobody wants to feel sad or frustrated or confused they're not pleasant but doesn't mean we shouldn't embrace them most importantly i believe that every single emotion comes with wisdom and the emotion is here to say something to us to send us a message right it's gonna like when you put your hand on the stove and it's still hot you you need to have that feedback it's hot take your hand away put it up right because otherwise you're gonna burn and you're gonna have a scarred whatever the emotion is telling you this is not the path the emotion is telling you this is not okay the emotion is telling you that was so fun the emotion is selling you there's hope here whatever it is emotions are giving us feedback data information and so yes flourishing is being okay with what is present not in a passive way but quite the contrary embracing is quite active and it requires that level of presence and z awareness and the ability to say this is part of me today it's temporary and i am going to listen to it now there's another level of flourishing that i talk about in my book which a lot more spiritual and so i talk about it being the recognition of our true essence as human beings and transcending the ego and so it's it's the recognition that i am a limitless un bounded majestic human being and i'm not just talking about myself of course every single person is and when i recognize that true essence and i overcome any obstacles my ego may present ego being the story about myself the identity i create about my own self then i am able to live more fully in the present moment and suffer less i see it as the blue sky which is always there's always present but sometimes it has some clouds that cover the sky so it's about removing the clouds more so than creating a guy that doesn't exist right it's already fair we just need to uncover it right remove what covers it to really connect with our true essence so in a nutshell flourishing level one would be being well flourishing level two would be recognizing our two essence and by doing so so much gets addressed and you just feel better i am well it's so simple but when did we lose sight of that what i appreciate is she's not promising constant happiness she's talking about being okay with a full range of emotions but then how do you actually find balance in practice let's look at the opposite her so if you are high achieve and your self worth is tied to these outcomes then you are probably gonna burn out probably gonna have something happen in your life which it did with you so then the opposite of that is going well i'm content with myself i'm satisfied myself i'm happy with where i am but then there's no tension to make yourself better so where is that middle ground of having goals to make yours to improve yourself but not having them take over your life i think once again we go back to discernment and discernment on why is it that i don't have a lot of goals what's going on have i lost my north star have i lost my motivation i'm like doing something that is too easy for me i love them concept of flow being in a state of flow so based on the book by to at mi chi at me high and in the book he talks about that channel of which is the balance between skills and joy right and so when your skills are too developed for a project or for something you're doing then you can get into boredom because it's too easy for you but when you go into something that one you don't like and two is too difficult too challenging then you go into anxiety overwhelm and so i think what's important is to find this sweet spot on constantly doing things that are interesting challenging for you going to that state of flow you're fully immersed into the activity you lose track of time you lose ego one of my favorite aspects of of flow and you're just one with the activity that is healthy that uses your skills it drives engagement it leads to joy and satisfaction and presence without the over attachment to the outcome you are so immersed with the activity it is as though you and the activity become one you're not checking the clock to see what time of is you're you even forget your hungry oftentimes you're just so embedded immersed involved in what you're doing your skills at are putting to use right whatever it is that you're doing your skills are used engaged your mind is there your heart is there and you become one there is that loss of ego of identity you're not worried about the outcome you're just is so much presence and there's so much joy because of that but this is the opposite to the young colombian woman who was eating her lunch in the elevator who wore like business like the badge of honor that was me and unfortunately i was not the only one we are so frequently wearing busy as the batch of honor often oftentimes they ask you hi how are you and you say busy the answer is i am busy notice that right i am your existence is busy i am busy embassy and it's so concerning because who were not born to just be in the hustle or busy busy every single day there is so much to life about being i had to learn the lesson the hard way and now when i see that and i see so how many people burning out with such high levels of stress not having space and time to eat a proper meal let alone to spend time with loved ones to do the hobbies that make them joyful that make them smile or just do nothing in my book i talked about when i was in italy i learned the concept of dolce out of and it's so beautiful that stay that sweet moment of doing nothing nothing in us right that ability to just be wonder around and wonder about life and how majestic it is to be able to be alive and to have this planet but we don't stop you enough to deal all of that i mean we don't even stop to go on vacation properly let alone those moments in our day to day so it all starts with taking a pause stopping taking a moment to disconnect i wanna ask a bit of a practical question because you've i agree with you by the way ego is the enemy yes and i'm willing to interrupt you there out because i don't think ego is an enemy we don't have anyone i don't think so i i actually use the war transcend when referring to the ego i actually think we should embrace it and love it and i think there are a lot of misconceptions about the eco and i a lot of different definitions right so if you go into psychology itself it means one thing sometimes i call the personality if in in c terms it means someone arrogant right like oh eco centric it comes from that but the more i would call it moment perhaps spiritual or at the the term that i have come to embrace is ego is the identity you create about your life about yourself so we all have a store in our heads of our own life i introduced myself i chose what words to include i chose what events not to include like that's my story it's the narrative i have of my own life that then becomes a little bit of a reputation that i am going to protect at all costs that's the ego it's that narrative and so oh if they perceive me as different then the ego feels attacked and so it is going to react or oh if i don't do this i'm not gonna get i'm i'm not gonna be loved i'm not gonna be long therefore the ego goes out and he does things to protect us and so i don't think we need to offer overcome we need to fight with it we should i've learned wish it embrace it listen to it and sometimes simply a piece it what's going on either what part of you feeling attacked here let's have a conversation what message do you have for me i really like the approach of internal family systems to identify all of those parts of ourselves that sometimes go out and protest or feel attacked or simply need a little bit more love and i think the ego is one of them and that ref framing is wonderful the ego isn't the enemy it's trying to protect us in her case protecting her need to belong it all comes back to that achievement addiction doesn't it using accomplishments to feel loved i'm sure we've all done it okay let's just find out quickly where people can learn more about carolina his work sure if you're will go to my website catalina lasso dot com or linkedin talk to me there if you speak spanish i'm also on instagram as cad lasso and i love your input for people so just name this podcast and let me know that you've listened to it then i'd love to engage in conversation i do answer most of the messages i get all of them and so please do connect and you still got a spanish speaking podcast i do yeah it's called lena m and i talk about purpose primarily and i talked to people who live a purposeful life because i love to present examples real a life example of what that looks like what that feels like and how it's possible for everybody what i liked about this conversation she's not selling a miracle cure a silver bullet she's not saying quit your job and move to bali no she's saying just notice notice when you say i am busy notice when you skip lunch notice when you don't drink water because you might need the toilet and maybe just maybe a quest chin whether that's really being responsible if you're just wearing busy as a badge of honor now look i know some of you listening are thinking oh it must be nice to take a six months article and of course you are right but the recognition part that doesn't actually cost anything yeah exactly even if you can't change everything you can start noticing and that really is the first step right that's it for today remember you do deserve to be well not perfect not optimized just well even on a tuesday morning this is truth thighs and work we will see next week

hello and welcome to truth lies and work what is it we say the award winning podcast where behavioral science made a workplace culture we are brought to you by the hopes hubspot podcast network which is and will always be the audio destination for business professionals my name is leanne anne i'm a charge occupational psychologist but as it's august i'm more just a jelly a jelly yeah my name is a i am a business perform well a business owner but in august i'm doing nothing we are having most of all the stuff so this is that summer edition if you listen last week you'll know that we are a recording it outside b it is a accompanied by an adult beverage mh and see is it's not quite as edited as normal we tend to just record these and and post them both it's supposed to be like you're on holiday so come on guys they all be holiday yeah from come with this on holiday yeah come with us in holiday these are the types of chats we have when we're on holiday yeah let's find out if they're interesting adopt so the idea for today was that we were gonna do what we called what do call remote work rule remote work you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot yeah and when they started data was housed across multiple systems sound familiar hubspot completely unified their website their email marketing and their fan experience in just one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow back so regular mo way milk way may well no i only had two sips goodness it's going well may well no the alan and i are what kids call digital nomads what i'm enjoying at the moment side note is there's a lot of chat on linkedin from jen z and it's like they've just event invented it right it's like cute have they got a name for it not call it digital nomads and or just no mud but it's like it's a groundbreaking thing and and of course it isn't in that world so i'm i'm happy to see it and i celebrate it but yeah it is it is fun to look at people kind of popping around but anyway allan i have been no mad since twenty seventeen and we've traveled to almost fifty countries in that time stayed in over two hundred airbnb and hotels across europe southeast asia australia new zealand so we thought we know quite a lot about remote working we actually have another entire podcast about remote working if you want us into that it's called a side of his life there a different vibe no not as many ethical considerations from either as really so that's the why we're that's where you get canceled yeah would absolutely get canceled and people actually find that and connect two things so we thought we're gonna pick sorry math click there how i'm unprofessional than me we thought he would we made a little bowl mh in a bowl with some little bits of paper in with some places i'm just gonna pick them out and have a little chat about them some we'll have a like say some we'll have almost nothing to say yeah see how it goes so should we start with number one you wanna pick one out okay oh it's like a raffle oh i got new zealand we spent about week new zealand visiting our sister mh which lives in auckland beautiful yeah beautiful park the world i was quirky working quite a lot there i don't think you were as much but when my main client was an australian client and it was cool because it's the first time that was actually a time zone in front of them it's never happened to me before but really it was just kinda of kitchen table vibes we were there a few days practical considerations for new zealand first all it is quite an expensive country even compared to like the us and the uk i think we went out we had like four beers and something to eat and it was about a hundred and fifty quid for four of us or five us and secondly data i saw my backside at the airport because i just come from southeast asia where you're going by forty gigabyte for five pounds and we've got to the airport and vodafone shop we're trying to sell me something stupid like one gigabyte for fifty dollars which is about twenty thirty us dollar us dollars fifty am and i was really angry about that so if you do go to new zealand mh then you'll probably be more wifi hoping that you will be on four g because it is expensive man yes it is and also to know what i'm not sure new zealand as a type of place or where you wanna be working remotely it's so cool there's so much to see we didn't see much pictures on there a week so so yeah expensive approach with caution right okay so next one i'm pulling out is our croatia we know a lot about croatia so we're in croatia for probably on and off about three years was it only yeah maybe maybe two two turn a bit we did the digital no visa to we do it twice we applied for a second time and laugh before it came forward oh yes yes so we did the digital no visa which is essentially if you don't know you get a year to live in croatia and i think it's good tax breaks as well percent tax percent tax you get tax taxed obviously if you are in like you have to be careful if you're american because i believe it's something called w two or something in america where basically wherever you are the american tax jurisdiction will find you and make you pay tax but within in the uk and you're out the uk for a year then in theory you don't pay any tax at all do this as not financial advice no it's not croatia loved it honestly croatia is one of those places where if there was a route to permanent residency for third country nationals which is brits americans canadian is basically anyone who's not bought in the european union because it's fabulous place to be we spent a year in and at we spent then probably about six eight months around split we did a lot traveling whilst we were there it's wonderful absolutely wonderful it is a little bit more expensive than it used to be mh when we first went it was really quite cost effective and then they went into s adopted the euro things got very expensive overnight but equally it's where you are if you're going to down make sure so split very expensive islands very expensive if you're had any more towards or northern croatia much more affordable yeah there's a some famous waterfalls in croatia which cool we went in the winter where it was all frozen and that was kinda cool we also stayed in an amazing sort of like home stay sort of like balm thing where there was where we went down to the kitchen and he was cooking pork and on on the open fire and yeah it was really cool so yeah definitely also our covid summer within croatia we spent three almost three months on branch one of the islands which was just heaven on earth the dal donation coast it only the only rival for me to the dal dimension coast is potentially southeast asia yes i'm talking the best bits like lo yeah the gill it's the most stunning coastline you know in terms of of island hopping it's perfect that wash you i don't know how it's so clean and crystal clear it's it's so much fun i would absolutely recommend croatia traditional nomads would absolutely recommend croatia in terms of holidays just bear in mind that depending where you go might be a bit funny yeah yeah good point so yes i think overall in terms of the internet that was relatively cheap and pretty fast even on the islands is pretty fast and yeah if you if you are going there for a year then you probably get yourself a a decent apartment there we're looking around about sort of seven or eight hundred euro for a one bed two bed somewhere in split probably a bit less if you're going to somewhere like polar generally austria which is a bit which ran to s pennsylvania is probably the one of the cheapest parts with you've also got the coastline which is a beautiful so there you go also a good thing about doing the d visa in croatia is this quite a good digital in my community yes just lots of meetups c working spaces that type of thing so so yeah especially if you may be new tim traveling around central eastern europe croatia is probably a really nice place to stop yeah definitely definitely okay so i'm gonna choose one now so i've pull out cambodia lee what do you know about move love cambodia we spent about month in cambodia did mainly around sam reap awesome place for c working yeah so many great c working dedicated c working space then also just cafes are really well equipped so like every table will have like two power sockets it's really cost effective as you'd imagine the food is incredible the people are so kind and i think there's a theme that we've noticed traveling is that the countries that have experience recent hardship we don't know i'm sure you do cambodia earlier awful awful for time and and genocide and and yeah horrible ward not so long ago in our experience those places of people are very welcoming very hopeful just excited to see people coming in i love cambodia i think that's actually one place we meant to say two weeks end up staying a month yeah and in terms of internet like we said southeast asia dead easy the what you need to do is when you land just go to any kind of kiosk first of all go go and research because there's a great thing i can't remember but i'll put trump put the link in the show notes there's a great website which essentially takes all of the data options and puts them out it's a wiki for for for prep so you just go into any kiosk ask i don't believe you need a passport for that you do weirdly montenegro but not not in most southeast southeast saving countries by yourself twenty gigabyte that's probably gonna be i don't know somewhere around about ten dollars us dollars and that you know it's fast and far we're on in the middle of like sam reap was was was wasn't remote but still you were getting like eighty gigabyte eighty gigabyte down and up sounds really good and it's lovely because it just so affordable so in terms of kind of your activities you can really really jump into that whether it be the tours or the trips but also just kind of a self care moments so i was getting get my nails done for like five dollars or going from massage for like seven dollars it's a lovely place to kind of have a bit of a working hybrid holiday i think yeah absolutely check the months you go in because like most of southeast asia there are rainy months there's also smoky months in some parts of thailand but we'll come onto that but yeah i think it's definitely somewhere where i would love to go back and work mate two next one austria well we can't say much about stream not spend much time here you know what we can say about austria what it's is the one country in a world that we have driven across in every possible direction east to west west up and down side to side diagonal we've spent more time driving across austria than anywhere else i think yeah yeah and austria is a cool places system i mean the austrians will hate me for saying this but if it's fairly similar to germany in a lot of ways i know sense a humor different as christopher watts pointed out so yeah definitely a good place to go we can't really tell you much about it because women's spent too much time there working but this cool only we spent any time working there no i think we spent a long weekend in vienna yep which was cool and then for christmas markets lovely vienna i'm really a christmas market a couple times there but yeah not really work there but as you imagine austria to be fairly expensive good internet great accommodation options yeah absolutely vibe oh and if you are if you are a digital no with a car and you're and you're in southern or southeast europe and you're going across perhaps you go back to the uk it's a really good place austria street is really good place to stop over because there's some beautiful christmas barker like the jan said we we went went back about two or three years ago we helped back and we took about five days to get back and we just did the christmas market tour she's saw he stopped in some of the most famous christmas markets in europe tang again was that what it's called yeah van w a n g e n oh that was of the best smartest too incredible like they have a special name for it but it's essentially mac and cheese yeah so good but yeah loved it what else you saying late india oh god right just can preface this because i'm not gonna speak highly a bit of of my experience in india and i'm gonna preface it by saying i was so excited to go so excited to go and i got there and it was the biggest culture shock ever and it was also the biggest what what can i say which is polite digestive digestive shock as well i was extremely ill in india so a little little hack you i wasn't looking forward to going to india at all in fact the only reason we went is we were in southeast asia and our friends were going to go for a holiday like taught around thing but we were meeting them in goa so i wasn't so keen but i absolutely loved it i absolutely loved it and people often asked me night as an introvert why'd do you like such busy places i think it's because it's an introvert busy places you can be completely anonymous and detached and you're one of many nobody's really that to focused on on you but i loved it but then i also wonder if and i'm not saying this is an an official hack i'm not a medical professional but when we landed i was full of cold chest infection type thing so i went to a pharmacy just to ask if there's anything they could give me he ended up giving me entire course of antibiotics some really powerful anti inflammatory and who who knows what else so he gave me like four different pills and i was fine yeah i was fine so yeah it might be worth right worth looking at we went to new delhi very busy loved it some the best food had my life go i'm not sure i'd recommend going necessarily but i'm glad we went mh glad we went wouldn't go back corolla and corral corolla which is incredible in the south with all kinds of the the waters and stuff which we got boats on which was cool in terms to work it was fine internet i don't remember being too much for a problem again you can afford quite nice accommodation because it is very affordable so then typically they'll come with little working spaces and things like that we did say in a box or hotel that caught fire what before middle of the night but yes so so india yeah maybe maybe i think i obviously food aside is a cool place and it's huge obviously we've only been into three places so so our experience was that yeah it probably is pretty good for no nomadic but are working remotely but you probably don't wanna be going to a to a cafe i would have thought i would have thought you wanna be working somewhere at home yeah it's very very busy as you imagine so yeah we tended to work out the hotels that we were staying here okay so let's get my pot of dreams and pull out the next one which is yeah we spent a lot times that was another place we got a lockdown in in covid we got lockdown in lithuania first and then we went to s with because the because the rates were low and then within two weeks that was shut out and we were there for six months i think in linear but mean it is a very very cool place it's kinda like a cross between croatia and austria yes because it does border austria so you'll find particularly in the north where we were in mara which is very close to the austrian border and instead of saying duh which they say yes is in in croatian and a lot of the other slavic languages they say yeah there's also lot german words there and it's just a really cool place if you like wine oh my goodness for you and also go to mari then go to because that's the capital cute little sit where i say little city is probably massive but it's just really compact and lovely to wander around or be your thoughts i think sa pennsylvania is the immersed underrated country in europe and i'm still not entirely sure why it hasn't caught on i'm not mad about it because i wouldn't want it to be overrun with tourists but it's one of the most beautiful places we've ever been to the people lovely the food is great because it is it's melting pot like italian creation in german food the wine is incredible mar has the oldest grape vibe in the world which is on the outdoors of their wine museum and on the eleventh of november every year they have a wine festival this day is bigger than new year's eve essentially what happens is at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of november the wine matures from mu into wine and they celebrate it is if i guess yeah like it's it's it's it's new year but like nineteen ninety nine new year the whole city basically just has an all day yeah on all the different wines it's like markets store they'll have all the wine represented that that new wines and and the most incredible food it's such a party and it's it's it's an absolute bucket list experience that people don't know about yeah hundred percent in terms of working there there's loads of c working spaces is very very modern and internet fast accommodation we found was relatively decent very very decent very decent and well priced they've got little they've got audi they've got spa they've got into spa we don't know the difference still don't know the difference between those two and yeah it's you just you could be you could be the us you could be in the uk it could be in australia yeah it's it's very good so yeah highly recommend it's such a diverse country as well that you can literally like we were we were sat in mar city center on a cold but sunny day in february mh and then we drove up to the mountains where there's a ski or maybe twenty minutes yeah and it was three foot now it's the diversity experience you can have in such a small place is incredible and as a no i think the beauty of no is when you go to places you wouldn't typically go otherwise yeah and is top of top the left for me in terms of know my destinations we just gone before we go into the next one what we did on our first leg of our of our no is we call it the second city tour so if we were going to croatia we wouldn't got as zag grab we went to we actually went to wreck re book we should have gone to split so went to instead of going into lu louisiana in knew it went to mari the second city and that is a really great hack if you are traveling around because the second cities are often quite a bit more exciting no that's not true i don't mean they're more exciting the second cities they're all real all them they're more real is the word of like a local rather than just a tourist in capital yes absolutely is it your turn of mine united go lovely just excited did you like a kid at christmas oh luxembourg luxembourg left with f three nights we didn't work beautiful public transport is free yeah fun fact completely free tram train boss all totally free other fun factors is that i think the majority of people who live there are brazilian or something or a portuguese a very big melting part pricey man really really expensive but beautiful definitely stay over a what for one i don't go there for a month yeah pass pass through enjoy poland is my next is next choice i'm sorry i chose that before i should have done my hey hang on there you go poland right well we spent a bit of time in poland we were in place called ro which we called raw claw before we got there because it's spelled w r o cla w ro and it is a cool place looked at loved it around the winter it was like minus twelve at night snow on the ground christmas markets fabulous accommodation really cool little city i'd i'd say it's sort of a the city a bit like i'm gonna go with bristol or yeah not quite as big as manchester nowhere it near as big as london but that was very cool very cool we also spent a month in danced on the north coast one thing i think there's a no matter maybe i'm everyone's different but ali and i are very much summer people we enjoy being warm but if you're traveling europe in winter january february march there's not many places to be warm so we went the opposite when we did this trip and we were like well let's go cold as cold as we can snug fires snow beautiful so we had rot in december and dan february i think fabulous absolutely fabulous the atmosphere the history the tours again the food is wonderful the people are so kind very cost fact we're seen a beautiful apartment dance for i think maybe a hundred and fifty two hundred pounds a week yeah yeah it was it was really really experiment i mean for obviously for short term that's quite this really reasonable and also fun fact christmas they tend to not take anything down all the decoration down for christmas until sort of the end of january so if you if you do enjoy christmas and you're in the uk or somewhere where they take everything down the sixth then go to poland because they little bit hey millennials i have got a really great podcast recommendation for you if you have not listened to no straight path hosted by ashley men baba then i think you're really gonna like kit it is of course brought to you by the hopes spot podcast network and next one is right up your street if you like to hear the real stories behind those shiny resumes and that end endless positive social media posts and fancy job titles because actually human utilizes success from the perspective of a millennial or something i've not been for a very long time but i've never been a millennial never been a millennial love i love it because it is packed with actual conversations and it brings diverse and important voices to the world like in the episode with phil ag we love phil love phil a fellow millennial who's worked at some of the top companies in tech and then just happened to start the number one marketing podcast in the uk so if you like honest conversations about careers inspiration and achieving success then you have to listen to no straight path wherever you get your podcasts oh it ashley has the best name to be said in the factor voice ash moses barbara dun okay moly i think is your turn slovakia how long we there for it felt like we were there a month forward months yeah this was death this was on our first or first no trip yeah we went to slovakia we did actually go to kat went to brat on the recommendation of somebody we know from brat and we stayed in the small place called devin because we also travel with dogs when we travel europe so if you are traveling with dogs locks we can tell you about that as well but particularly in some places you wanna be in the city center because actually there's more stuff for dogs in the sea center of some cities and there is on the outskirts slovakia we were told not so much we stayed on the outskirts it's in a place called devon which is right on the danube stunning oh my gosh completely just ignored the slovakia isn't it i think in in favor of of kind of check its former other half i think brat does rival prague yeah i agree and i think again as a non obvious place to go if you're if you're trying to decide between frog or barcelona i would say go to b hundred percent again in terms of the prices i would said half the price of of of prague and if i remember slovakia euro and prague k yes yeah yeah and fun fact slovakia if you it's if you wanna say yes you say an i know i know like you know like the irish i know okay also what's great about it's about hour train ride to vienna that he did wanna include a trip to austria but not with the price tag stay in brat trainer over with vienna easily a day trip brat is like an hour vienna an hour to somewhere else i can't remember exactly where it is but a lot of people live in brat and working vienna working this other place that i can't think where it is not bud of passion a current brew is maybe he he's put a bush you got check on the out yeah okay so the next one floss france we've not spent a lot of time in france and in fact to be really brutally honest with you we weren't massive fans of france for a long time where we until until this year yep ali line was we've never voluntarily been to france because we've been for people's birthdays or or weddings or that type of thing and until this year yeah and so this year we came back from the uk for christmas we came across the channel tunnel and by the way if you do that trip and you got a car just just do the train don't do the boats we tried to save money on the boats it is about twice expensive on the on the tunnel but you just turn up and then you just stay in your car watch your stories on netflix and then give you in france whereas the number of times we've had problems with fe so top tip do do do pay the extra bit although don't pay for flex which is which is the way they say you can upgrade and you can says you give you priority and all this kind of things it's a bit like is a bit like you're bit like ryan air priority and it doesn't really give you much because if you turn up early on a normal ticket they should be on a ticket yeah yeah exactly the other great thing about the the quote shuttle rather than the euro style your stars for passengers like foot passengers is normal train the shuttle as you drive onto the train perfect if you travel with dogs could you stay in the car it's thirty minutes and you're straight through whereas with the ferry is your yeah you're looking at least kind of two to five hours depending on where you're faring to and france so if you have an anxious dog like we do it's a much better option absolutely in terms of france we don't we don't know about internet because we just used our uk sim there so i i i i everything else seems a little more expensive than say neighboring germany so i'm i i don't know the best people to ask about france to honest well let's move on this yeah the best place that we we found was actually kind of the north east of france again christmas time so oh and ko which is in the south east on the border of germany if you like wine ko is the place you wanna go okay albania albania well we were there for about two weeks or we yeah maybe maybe three weeks or four weeks because we went to sam we drove through from greece and we came up to sam first which is spelled k s a m i l with the first time i ever saw a five hundred euro note pretty sure the guy was into i'm sure we say import export but five hundred euros note legit a yes i'm not i can say it because i haven't said who it is if i yeah anyway same was interesting probably a bit more developing it was when we were there but then we went to stay in near the capital didn't we were there for about two weeks three weeks yes we did doris yeah doris yeah that was really nice the thing i'd say about the south because i i i i see the south of albania talked about a lot mh has being like the new riviera or kind of the place to go and i and i i was talking to a friend about this you'd who's also been albania i don't really guess it because there's such there's so much development you can't be looking in any direction without seeing cranes and building sites and the sea is beautiful but you just look behind you and you're looking at construction sites yeah i didn't i didn't really get hype no i think it there's there's there's there's a few people on twitter or on well instagram whatever who will say yes you're looking at beautiful pictures of of albania but it's if you just flipped the camera around if would looked like you're in i don't know spain in the nineteen fifties when they're still building stuff one thing about about working in albania was he found that back then i'm not sure it's different now but back then an awful lot of power cuts and power surges it was an awful place to work remotely pete really was the internet wasn't great like you say the power wasn't great no so don't don't take our word for and say don't go to albania but do your research first find the place i'm sure in in the capital it's different but if you're anywhere outside the capital expect slight issues the other thing is talking issues to you're driving through albania it is the craziest of drivers in europe at we've driven through montenegro and all balkan countries their craziest drivers ever you're literally your around corner and there'll be a car overtaking a car and then another car overtaking that car and they'll all be on your side of the road and one of them will probably be the police so yeah just be a bit careful but it is stunning if you were to drive down towards the greek border that last bit there the last hundred k is just stunning beautiful i would say if you can do a albania do it the holiday great i don't think it's to know my destination i agree okay so we're gonna do a quick fire around because we are currently on twenty seven minutes romania always recommend it would never go back had the best time there really great wouldn't go back couple of things about romania number one if you are able to hire a car in flank is a bud pest boo boo cares arrest sorry and hire a car do that top gear trans trans guardian highway do that it is stunning you're also then and i've go up to brush off and s wearer trans pennsylvania trans pennsylvania those are the most amazing places in terms of working we we use the wifi it was okay it was okay but and it's yeah it's it's challenge everything seems to be a bit of a challenge you gotta go out the supermarkets is a bit of a challenge but if you do know any kind of italian or spanish then it's another romantic language which is strange recent in europe so be a few words you recognize yeah go holiday there gibraltar never lived there got married there visited a lot morrison never never lived there never worked there no comment well to be fair we lived maybe about half an hour from gibraltar in in southern spain for about five years and so we used to drive down to gibraltar into a soup supermarket called morrison because they had the tiger bread they had all the stuff we were missing from home and then drive back so yeah yeah it's it's definitely worth we're worth a go but we've not worked there and it's expensive accommodation at the time we were there very dated accommodation and yeah it's it's not someone we necessary recommend talking somewhere we're not necessarily recommend now this place is another beautiful place for holidays it is known by number of different names it is now known as north macedonia or north macedonia but back in the day it was called the formula yugoslavia republic of north macedonia macedonia catchy we went to now obviously sc the capital very cool very crazy very strange it's it's honestly the statues are still wrapped in plastic because they've just come out there just come off the back of the van it's made to look like it's like a hundred years old and it's about eight years old mh also there's a big bridge that takes your across into the the old town the turkish quarter that is it's just weird as you go from the new town to the old town and it is almost completely dry if you like kebabs as in dryers in the alcohol if you like kebabs oh my god you're gonna love it but don't expect to beer there good place for dogs actually and we found a really good like doggy day care in scorpio that peanut went to that was really good we also spent some time in like awkward gorgeous yeah highly recommend like awkward recommend macedonia to be honest i really enjoyed it i thought it was a cool quirky little place don't remember having any issues in terms of working don't don't remember much better either way which poor was fine yeah exactly okay so i would pull out and myanmar oh my this is the four this was if you know him if you're a bit old you might know is be myanmar one of the most incredible experiences of our life there and now you can't go what do you can but it's a bit tasty i don't think you can actually it's under kind of military rule at the moment is isn't after a coup yeah yeah i almost don't wanna talk about because it's really little point because it it's it's so sad that that we can't go anymore but genuinely one of them are most stunning people places and it's heartbreaking wants what's happening there so yeah hopefully that'll will get figured out because one of the most for the most incredible place webinar been and if you go to if it does open up again try and get to nap it's not spelled the same way as the italian way but try to get to nap because it is a beautiful beach resort and it's just people anyway maybe italy talking nap italy we've done a fair bit in the north yep fabulous is a place about an hour from venice is now gonna be our regular stop every year we were there for a week or ten days last this year stunning gorgeous you don't you know italy the food are great there's lowest to do there's lowest to see we've done luca we did peas don't go to sicily in august is the only advice i give you back own that enjoy yeah quick thing about is as you go oh well what because it's hot well yes but if you get a place with air condition which our very first place was and we hired a place for a month lasted four days then went and rented somewhere else because the landlord was weird for a start but also there was no installation on it and know air conditioning genuinely our we used the meat when i were in our kitchen and it was thirty seven degrees in the kitchen so no absolutely can't work there but also the other thing is there's so festivals on that the church bells go continuously and continuously so for august so going in august is beautiful if you're sitting there out there with your lovely you lovely ape roll and you're lucky at the church bells listening the church but if you're trying to be on a zoom call with someone no don't get sicily italy is a good place for no consider because it's one of the few places that you can get long term residency as a third country national without too much hard work and taxes to do it so if you're looking to extend your your normal venture into the into years and italy is a really good option for that to do take a look just a quick point on that you have to apply when you're outside of italy where as opposed to most of the other digital nomads as where you're gonna you can arrive and then apply for it no mad no no nomadic but you can't do that okay so the next one i'll pull out is greece can't really talk to too much about greece you've probably spent a few days in greece but yeah through our holiday we won't yeah so greece don't i'd really don't it we should talk about it because we've not worked there we've only just relaxed there yeah but it is another place it does do i did she'll know my visa resort so again if going to extend greece is another one to look at absolutely so there my replacement there is spain spain you beautiful beautiful beautiful pitch we would live in spain if we could heartbeat yeah don't yeah the only reason we don't is that they're currently tax worldwide wealth which means that it's not it's not feasible for us right now perhaps that will change but yeah and and income taxes is like in handle a series fifty percent then also if you want to be a self employed you have to pay two hundred and fifty euros a month each before you make any money which is why most people go to spain and don't tell anyone they're working in spain just be careful because they're getting onto that but there is a no med visa in turns of internet when we were there it was relatively pricey 4g was a bit pricey but i think it's come down quite a bit since then yeah and when we went back actually went to the north of spain a couple of years could you remember via they had lightning fast internet in our airbnb so yeah think internet's got low lows better now it's fabulous go get the dmv i have a wonderful time don't fall and love too hard because i promise you you can't afford it yes absolutely this honestly we could do an entire while choosing we could do an entire episode quick yeah we have an entire episode of so we're gonna do a quick quick one word fire round yes okay indonesia lu paradise long right don't go bali got a long that's all we need to say it is the most amazing place belgium never at actually worked there it's always been our stopping over i think we've been a holiday there and we've stopped over there but don't only grab work there every we no great chips great chips yeah fries if you're not from the uk yes great fries great waffles if you're into that kind of thing and great mussels oh my goodness aren't peanut g and gotta go go to belgium for the for the seafood and for the wine and for the fries and good beach cheers if you got a dog get on oh peanut loved it sweden we did come the day served didn't work there really enjoyed it we went to m yeah yeah and that was it was cool it was really really cool really really cool again quite expensive as you'd expect for the year for the ba bow tick countries but what the balkan baltic supposed to be a speed right now sorry indonesia gilead islands yes that's all go great for working yes internet pretty quick beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful place gl go there go to a tiki bar we didn't interview on our podcast from the tiki bar from the guy they're really cool x actor on d as well ireland love island it's it's honestly i'm one of those like annoying americans that like i have irish heritage therefore i feel at home an island went to go away dublin of course and county mayo yeah the west coast of ireland is just an absolute must go spend a lifetime there don't yeah don't go a dublin go somewhere else got the carry go go to the local bar and get a proper guinness and it and we were there and there was a guinness there was fiddle like violin it was brilliant okay oh sorry you got one more no go next wanna pull out stein it's a cheat us keeping this because running in there for either one night or even just one day cool little place to do there's not a lot to do i think you could probably walk it from just from the from end to end in about three hours the actual old town itself is tiny but cool definitely go next what i've got here is lit lithuania now we know a lot about lithuania because we spent four five months lockdown our first lockdown lockdown from what i remember internet was very fast we stayed just outside vi in the city but in a beautiful like townhouse the neighbors were amazing neighbors kept bringing his food in fact when we left they sent us a whatsapp watches v up there but send as a whatsapp message with the what they've made which was like a time to say goodbye and it got like tears and stuff and they were like we miss shooting as up not let lithuania definitely definitely go bit more expensive than some of the neighboring baltic countries but still worth it yeah it's just it's really cool we couldn't we got so lucky with our lockdown it's in the best place i remember people at time saying you're gonna come back to the uk it's like why g four ten it's in a country the really low covid way we were right back on onto a lake so we could walk the dogs we were ten drive into the city center which was only locked for six weeks where where am i going and actually couldn't because the borders eventually closed loved it also the there's a what's it called a spit oh yes that's like a really thin bit of land that we went to that's kind of separated by the scene then a lagoon mh and is actually connected with russia yes incredible the best smoked fish ever had in my life san dune like i've never seen before it's like i have a movie huge fan of lithuania love it definitely go lithuania okay speed around ireland you just said ireland or do i write it down twice la la l a o s and quite sure to say it beautiful place a very french yes it was colonized by french really good place we're only there for maybe three or four days it and we don't think we worked there did we did we a week we went to a coworker working oh dang that was that yeah that was now brilliant food we went too wang bank brilliant food and we went up a mountain to watch the sunrise sunset at the top of a monastery pool yeah temple yes stone food great they have a they've it's it's it's a if you're imagine an asian food but with like french influence they have like these sort of like roast sausage things that are just incredible it's like two of the best cuisine in the world mixed together and it does not disappoint incredible night markets as well yes we actually went to there's a little island in the middle of the me kong mh that runs sri wang bank that is only there during the summer periods it gets flooded in the winter and every year the locals rebuild it and it's a they'll cucumber form so you have to go and get a boat over it and they have beers and cucumber salad and that's it but it'll be the best coldest big you've ever had the best cucumber salad you ever had and we just sat there for hours isn't were you're just watching watching the sunset so yeah fabulous beautiful anyway thailand we haven't got time we haven't got time yes yeah god way we went to thailand was just incredible the islands the and the only thing is that some of the islands when we went back in seventeen eighteen the internet wasn't brilliant i'm sure that's changed now i'm thinking of that one where we literally had our place on the sand and that was brilliant but if you go to colon to that's kinda like the digital no island and then from there your fig up find people and travel with them yes absolutely brilliant if you've never been south before and your additional know my talent is a place to stop yeah maybe avoid chang mai just because chang mai is in the north and it's very ex patty the kids love it oh i don't know why because you just what you what you see old ben walking coming around the corner with like two young girls in their hand and it's just weird chia mai when the places where people will stay as no mad for months like they'll do the visa hot where you can get like a three month vegan and then i'll leave for a week and then come back and get another three months yeah to chang mai rest and amazing okay i've got netherlands unfortunately but i don't think we can tell you much about that we've stayed a few times very nice beautiful lots of bikes we didn't partake in any of the activities well i didn't when i went to any the activities that are there you know the one i'm talking about but otherwise we lovely place very similar to belgium was talking great chris market yes fabulous christmas ba chris's market in europe yes australia loved it we did sydney we did melbourne a slightly different experience for me because i was there with my client from australia so i very much loved it and they helped us around seeing things and in getting the immersed out of it yeah i think every know with has go to australia don't they yeah of course you do of course you do next one malta now we only went the holiday so unfortunately you i can't tell you about that but our internet was pretty decent there it's a really cool place it's kinda kinda got a weird sort of like italian drug spanish vibe and it's definitely worth going really good just don't go and get the rabbit which is the local delicacy i we like rabbit but it was just a bit disappointing if you're not keen on no but wanna look at x expat but don't have any language multi andrew gibraltar that we both talked about really good options for that so do take a look particularly if you're in the gaming industry if you're in the gaming industry you'll already know about malta and gibraltar anyway montenegro grow love it if we didn't live in bosnia we live montenegro yep great internet although you do need it as i said before you do do need a passport to go and get your sim card in montenegro for some very strange reason crazy crazy drivers c is beautiful but you probably don't wanna go to c and stay there because it'll expensive in off season but yes montenegro grow absolutely stunning just be careful for the drivers got talking of rabbit hungary there's my joke we've only ever a done to past yeah yeah i really liked it you weren't a king where you i thought it was okay i thought it was okay i think we just caught the back of several eastern european countries and so it was getting i hate to say in a little sammy but it's just it's a very cool place and if you like the likes of prague and brat i would imagine you'd love b rest bud pass sorry don't get it else yeah i really liked it and again i mean we i'm a big fan of christmas in christmas market so you might not be surprised that we've been to a lot of them if you're looking at like an alternative christmas market tour and you don't wanna do too much of germany the obvious ones bud past christmas market is incorporated the entire city is basically one big christmas market and because it's cold and crisp and yeah it's very very cool i believe you get black current wine there i think is the maid is a predominant wine and cool ash so next we'll pulled out is portugal we only spent a little bit of times time let me be about monte to portugal pack week was only a week yeah week in lisbon list is cool place it's where all the nomads hang out yeah i don't think we need sent about that because if you're ever thinking of working remotely then you'll have already thought of portugal check yeah do you know what there are many additional no hotspots that are hugely overrated overhead i would never recommend them bali there are others like prague they're are totally worth the hype prague is awesome cool go they they split up the the location into like prague one two three four five six seven eight etcetera prague four was very cool we stayed there for a month and we went to prague six for a month as well so basically the tip is to go slightly outside because the the trains or the tram taking the center out so quick and so cheap so i definitely look at prague and if you do try with a dog prague it's probably the most dog friendly place ever been to so all public transport dogs can go on there's no need for muzzle or any that nonsense restaurants well let them in we had a really nice restaurant for my birthday took the dog with us pubs and cafes at absolutely fine so yeah if you if you travel the dog prague is a must and of course there is a hundred million c working space in yes there are next one comes up is bulgaria now we have to cook talk quietly because we were in bulgaria bulgaria right now bulgaria is a cool place it's definitely one i would rather be on holiday in than necessarily working in but then we are in rural bulgaria right now south of if you've heard of a place called has we're probably about an hour from the greek border so yeah i mean it's cool definitely come and have a look at bulgaria it's like we said the other week they are not their head when they say when they mean no as they go that what do i mean yeah so what you'd go yes and not your head and they actually mean no not the head and there's also lots of stalks yes cool things doing bulgaria go to the black sea very very different coastline go to a place called p huge amounts of history beautiful beautiful place we haven't been severe but heard with things sorry i was distracted yes absolutely so i'm just looking now and what we're gonna do is cheat i think leanne we're gonna take out the rest of them and just pick out the ones we wanna talk about because you still got about four in there five in there six okay so i'm gonna start off we got some you here we were there for a couple of days it's beautiful place really cool latvia f went on holiday back in the day to latvia for you yeah it didn't work for me the didn't work me of those places but both lovely places switzerland we stayed with our friends in switzerland just a little bit of a cheat because we didn't actually pay for anything because andrew and funny is his missus were wouldn't let us pay for anything but it was it's a beautiful beautiful place but it's not somewhere you go if your budget conscious what you got i've got denmark we only went in on holiday there but absolutely loved it indonesia bali i think we've said that's a hard no no malaysia we said in k for a couple of days again i don't think we were working today were but obviously we're in k so the internet is incredible there's loads of places to work it's all good serbia spent a month in be grade i love be grade yes be grade is one of my most favorite cities in europe it's dirty it's big it's gritty it's noisy it's everything you want a capital city to be great shopping beautiful parts gru parts dive bars fancy restaurants so much diversity absolutely loved it only place in europe we did get a little bit of beef with somebody local logo tax driver asked to get out once they realized we were british but then we did bomb the ever a loving shit out of them so as nato so you did so if you're british or american there's a small chance you'll experience a little bit of hostility but that was the only bit that we did and the vast when everyone else was completely lovely to and if anyone's under thirty that it's not even on their mind i don't think no and also it's really really big on tech like the the europe's silicon valley is kind of like in in serbia yeah so lots to know much actually even weren't working i've got germany written down in which we've never i actually you it's another transit country us we've only ever stopped over on the way to somewhere but it just germany it's gonna be efficient and amazing and everything's gonna work and it's also gonna be delightful weird and it's huge yes always takes us like for two days to drag across germany it easy there's a lot of germany a lot of germany my last one is vietnam got mixed feelings about it wasn't our favorite place to go no we stayed in hanoi that was really busy so we went down to we were there over chinese new they were so that was busy and then we went down to the middle one which is called way hue that was cool yeah like that and then my favorite part and they went to h you in the capital very smart if you'd it's like bangkok it's just a really progressive what it doesn't have what we didn't find there was the grit of say the chinatown in bangkok where you felt like you could have been coming in nineteen eighteen would be the same we found mine hanoi yes found annoying but for the obvious reasons so that's out lia if you got any anymore i've got one more bi h west and he the governor that's our home that's why we should be right at home i i don't think we need to say anything more other than it's the place of all fifty countries we traveled to where we'd actually wanna spend the majority of our time people are great it's a very diverse country in terms of its people and it's it's landscapes and it's everything really internet is decent very affordable a growing number of backpack there i'd say well the necessarily nomads don't not come across many nomads so there's not really a community there as there would be in some like be grade yeah but it's a very beautiful country and there's a place in terms of if you are no it's a great hideout from s if you you're get close on your s days because it's non you and non s very cost effective you'll be finding easily places to stay for probably like ten euros night mh you'll probably get entire apartments for twenty euros as a night yeah it's it's heaven we live in moscow or just outside hurts the governor is our favorite sarajevo is a very cool city lots of history there's a film festival there this week it's getting more and more in terms of our events and stuff like that but it's a great place to including your hopping because you'll get from croatia to montenegro grow to bosnia to mac to serbia probably within a week if you wanted to go that fast yeah and so and if if you're cut more of if you're more on the intrepid side of remote work digital no mad traveling back backing then go to bosnian now before or battery technically hurts the governing a one we prefer but go to her to go boss hope it's going now because give it ten years i reckon it'll be part of the eu you and it'll you it'll just be like oh yeah yeah we've been there whereas now it's cool really cool there's oil train trails wine trails keep mentioning wine talk to which i think i've run out of my wine so should we should we wrap things up my love we should so from all of those for somebody who is maybe new to no or on the first no nomadic experience we'll look at what are maybe our top three places we would recommend to nomads yep i'm gonna go straight in with prague or that would be mind due to this it's the perfect starting point it's gonna be very friendly introduction to central eastern europe as slows there in terms of community so you'll meet other nomads it's a great city i think it's nice it's a nice starter yeah okay well in that case then i'll come in with so where did you just say you just said prague prague i was just gonna say thailand because if you prague if you like some city vibes and european weather thailand if you just wanna sit on a beach somewhere you just can't go wrong in thailand i don't think well you can you can go to that place like i wanna say pay papa papa tire oh yes yeah there there are certain places which are built for people who've got other tourist intents in intention yes so that's that's our h chan was our favorite chan yes it's in our opinion it we like we'd prefer over other islands which are a bit more developed yes number two i i would say i would say italy mh and it's not necessary because it's my favorite place i think there's lots to explore i think it's more that if you are no and you catch the book and want to live abroad yeah it's one of the few places where you can get a long term visa fairly easily so it's probably good to know if that's even an option for you early on and you could probably spend easily six weeks in italy have a fabulous time well weirdly my i couldn't decide between s and croatia which is basically that's the route from italy i would probably say go for s even though i don't think they have a no visa right now but this i'm seeing them promote a lot more on google news and all this kind of stuff so i'm i suspect they will soon out of the two croatia or s you can't go wrong i think if you're a bit more official first time perhaps got to croatia if you've done don't no nomadic before maybe try or just go into a month in mara in s pennsylvania and see if you love it and stay if you don't then go to a in croatia i would then staying on kind of the city vibe i would say be grade i think it's a city that you would yeah it's an experience you won't to forget particularly if you are a bit younger it's very known for its kind of nightlife and party scene i think be grade will be one of the coolest life experiences you'd have a hundred percent and my last one is quite obviously spain if you can go go just slightly anne said don't fall too hard because she's not she's not the best place to live full time and if there's only one thing you take away from this entire round of a conversation please the love of report we stay together do not to go to bali sorry bali see you next week bye mate

i recently was told about an employee who was asked by their boss to check emails every single day whilst they were on annual leave and the justification apparently it wasn't fair to expect their colleague to decide what was urgent so they did every day of their two week holiday day they check their inbox and here's where it gets even worse one day they didn't check for twenty four hours only twenty four hours and a colleague sent multiple angry emails about not getting a reply even though they acknowledge that that person was on holiday so if you're listening to this and thinking that sounds familiar or at least it's not as bad as my workplace then trust me this episode is very much for you i am a clinical psychologist so that is my training and now i specialize in mental health at work i came to that work really because of a lot of experiences in my own clinic people coming to me with stories about work worked as a huge anchor in life and it can really support us or can you join us that was doctor elaine smith doctor lane worked with hundreds of people trapped in exactly these toxic work cultures but she's also discovered something very powerful the problem isn't just bad bosses or unrealistic expectations is that we've accidentally trained our own brains to be addicted to checking and she knows exactly how to break that addiction doctor elena has crack the code on how to actually disconnect properly not just the surface level leave your laptop at home advice but the deep psychological shifts they'll let you genuinely rest and come back stronger and with your summer holidays just around the corner her timing could not be more perfect because the science is really clear proper rest doesn't just make you feel better it makes you dramatically more productive when you do return to work hello and welcome to truth lies and work the award winning podcast where behavioral science meets to workplace culture we are brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professional knows my name is lia i'm a chart occupational psychologist my name is a i am a business owner today we're going to discover why your brain is literally wide to check emails on holiday i know how annoying also gonna look at the exact words to use in your out of office message the ones actually work and doctor elaine strategy for dealing with colleagues who expect you to be available twenty four oh we're also gonna hear from a listener whose workplace culture was so toxic around holidays is gonna make you question everything about modern work expectations so we're gonna join doctor elena after very short break you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident it's angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot yeah and when they started data to was housed across multiple systems sound familiar hubspot completely unified their website their email marketing and their fan experience in just one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new setups ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better i am a clinical psychologist so that is my tri and now i specialize in mental health at work and i'm particularly interested in leadership and the impact that leaders can have on mental health both their own but also of their team and the little changes they can make to make a a massive impact if think work as a huge anchor in our life and it can really support us or it can really drain us it's such a big aspect of our our lives isn't it i mean it's i mean i guess now at the time of year but we don't want it to be as big and i suspect of lives we're looking to take those holidays looking to that rest in and recovery time but with that does come a bit of anxiety from people around that has that effectively or how to manage their expectations of their where plays and their family and what that looks like if we just start at the beginning because even as a self employed person and my own boss can take time off and i want to but i still find it really hard to switch off why is that well i think because we're always on you know i think obviously technology out as well as i'm an advocate for it i think there's lots of great things about it it definitely helps me to do my job for sure i'm definitely not anti technology but the same time it means i mean we can book a holiday we can order a shop and we can do our work all from this machine in our hands so no wonder it's hard to switch off not only for work but also just in life switch off from friends to switch off from media so yeah we're we're always on and that you know there's some statistics i don't know exactly but how many notifications for example beginning day how that's training us really so i think gets no wonder find it really hard to switch up i often say to people it's not like the olden days where you got from work and you didn't hear anything about work until the next day and i must say what i was thinking about doing this today thinking i do appreciate grown up in that age where i can remember that even though i was quite young at the time and i have that as a as a sort of baseline whereas people going up younger generation today don't have that they did not live through a time where actually you could properly switch off and so yeah i think that's really important i guess my question is we want to be engaged in our work if we find meaningful fulfilling work that's really good for us i cause you really good for our well being on mental health but where does that engagement in work tip into unhealthy he was a boundary between being attached or work in a healthy way and in an unhealthy way i like this question i think it's about obviously we want to fulfill a role and that if we even think a bit more black and white like watching on your contract what do you have to do for your work and i guess a lot of people will always do a little bit more than that some people might do a little bit less than that but i guess it becomes so you've got your responsibility you're meeting and all your goals you're doing what you're meant to do to get paid for but it becomes unhealthy when it becomes more like a comp to to keep working or that need to keep doing more and more and more and the guilt that comes with not working you know so i think it's really about balance and it and it becomes unhealthy when it leaks over into other parts of our life like say family time for example or not doing hobbies as much or whatever so there's less balance when know there's something wrong what's driving that what what why am i failing actually detach from work we know that obviously we're we're primed for it right so we have phone everywhere so it's not like you have to charge like open up the laptop and wait for the emails to come in you just have your phone it's about anxiety obviously it's driven by anxiety but also if we think about what happens when you do check okay so every behavior there's a reason behind it as we know how are you rewarded by checking right so what happens is you you feel the anxiety you check and then we speed in short term relief because often were thinking what f what f if you know as that you know as somebody replied to that or it's a worry because it's usually driven by there's something that happened or often it as maybe not always so when we check we get short term relief and obviously that's a word for us doesn't last very long hence it's short term wait some time and then anxiety builds again and then we check so i think it's partly habit but definitely that reward we get because we want to feel really we wanna get rid of that feeling but by checking all the time we're actually just be in that anxiety what's a better habit to form and deal with that anxiety than the checking pay is and well say or talk about if you're if you're on holiday i do recommend for for some people just getting rid of the apps or the notifications for that time or disable them or whatever right because temptation is difficult okay so i think that's part of it the other part of it is so that's a practical way in terms of our psychology in our mental health it's about noticing here we go here we go anxiety i feel you again i feel this again but what we know about anxiety is that if we look at on a curve it has to peak somewhere and once it peaks of course then it will reduce but we have to stay with it so in a a way we have to like ride the urge and find something else to do wow that inside it's gonna might be gonna walk it might be listening to music just talking to some disconnect him with somebody probably doing something off the phone ideally and in that time while that anxiety is peaking and then it will reduce it can't people knock up and up it will reduce so i think it's about doing that you can say it's a a distraction technique but that's okay short term to let us because we're trying to retrain ourselves and form a new habit i like that so if if somebody's got a a holiday coming up in a couple of weeks time would you recommend start setting those boundaries now so as you say maybe remove those apps from your home you can only check on your laptop not doing it and non working hours will that help them when we are on on holiday to detach absolutely it's about practice it's a bit about confidence as well you know the building that confidence that you you don't need to check all the time and it's trying something new and ideally it's good to try that something new before there's enough to think about going on holiday which is part of that as well there's enough physical practical preparation without sort of adding in so need to do a little bit of work before the holiday and just to yeah to prepare give yourself the best chance there's so much time effort and money spent on a holiday yet a lot of people say don't even know if it's worth it which i think a real shame you know it's a dreadful shame we've come to that so i really want to help people to try and really embrace the holiday we mentioned that we can practice the not checking during what after work hours before we go on holidays you said they're deciding what emails you would look for and potentially open is there anything else that we can do to to prepare for a holiday so we are yeah setting ourselves up for success yeah definitely so there's a couple of things there's doing a handover like if there's somebody else that's gonna be taking care of your work or i mean i not it's sort of rare that there's somebody actually doing your job perhaps when you're away but somebody who's taken care of any emergencies or something like having a a chat with them you know it's a bit of passing in the baton isn't that because when you're away you'll pass the back to them and vice versa so when there way you'll do the same okay so it's it should be shared in that way but definitely about having a chat with them and just making it clear if there's anything a b or c you want them to look out for to be very clear and this is all about clarity as well setting that boundary and then i also talk about setting a really good out of office email and because that is your own personal boundary plan if you like and it also really helps to set expectations so it's been really clear in your if epstein don't be out with block of emails but you know something people will say they're on the beach you can inject personality at it's a very personal choice but one that really works for you see an i'm away from the state until this state for example and making it clear that on your return i think this is the really important part on your return buying yourself a little bit of time you could even say i'm likely to have lots of emails on his term but i do hope to get back to you within two business days three businesses days whatever it is you know and being really realistic about that because that really helps us to be like okay i've told people exactly what they can expect from me and i need to stick to that it's actually well in mind gets quite unprofessional to say i won't be i won't be looking at or replying to emails on the leave and then actually sort of breaking in that you've already stated what you're going to do and what you're not going to do and then you kind of break your own rule so i think it's really important that we set it very clearly and we stick to it how does that impact the person receiving that is it gonna negatively impact their view of them how much they trust them whether they wanna work with them can it have that much an impact i don't mind about to having maybe that much of an impact but i guess i maybe it's on my psychologist i gone oh you said your drunk look i wonder if i wonder what was driving you to look at your emails i know maybe not everybody's gonna think like that and but i would certainly be wondering oh but you said this now the person actually getting a reply might be happy okay this is another part of it because they're one on but the important thing here is when we set the boundary what we do is we're actually training other people but not to expect to reply this is like opera condition and action so even if we reply to somebody one in ten times on a sunday night bills but oh but my elaine replied that some night before so i'll i'll give it a go again you know so we are we're we're training other people their behavior by how we behave and if we just if we stop and they're getting never getting a reward from emailing us at those times or have an expectations of us they all stop that behavior that's how that's how we work it's just that it's not it's not instant but it's it is important to remember we we do have that ability and what can we do to to help ourselves stick to those boundaries again i mean especially if you're a leader it can feel really really difficult a business owner especially i see it in who you know wanna check in and make sure things okay how do they set of hard boundary and and stick to it i think people do genuinely trying to tricky but what they need to remember is why they're doing that because if they don't get proper we think about if we don't get proper rest what's going happen if we have that chronic stress all the time it often leads the mental health or even physical health problems so we must take we must be and even read about rest read about rest and productivity okay because think that's quite a motivating factor so that can help to stick to the boundaries and and sometimes if people find it really hard to do it just for themselves so though i would always advocate that's the most important part first i'll say look and this has worked when i've worked with leaders before say you're not just doing it for your actually do it for your family as well you know and when they can see that sometimes for people i hope whether that's been a little bit of a light bulb moment to go okay because it's not just affecting you as an individual leader affect him whoever you might be with or whoever else is in your life and and that can often help people to shift and then when they do change the behavior they reap the pair national rewards as well which hopefully it means that it's actually easier to continue to do that for themselves as well and have that self compassion like you deserve to have a arrest we deserve to have a break you know it's not know position means that they need to keep on working there's there's actually no benefit to that rest with so many benefits but sometimes it helps to look at like the science about the depends on the person sometimes it helps the bank well who else has benefited them from me sticking to those boundaries so doctor elena is just laid out how to set boundaries needs to be really clear about what you will and won't do and stick to it and also don't break your own rules but i have to ask you out what if people are thinking this all sounds great in theory but my boss is never gonna accept this i totally understand that fear and at the risk of being a typical psychologist it really will depend it's gonna depend on your organization it's culture and the behaviors of the leaders around you and that's important elaine mentioned that leaders who model this behavior actually give other people the permission to do the same so look for that almost like someone has to go first and hopefully that's your leader and it's so important because there's science behind rest and recovery it turns out there's actual research on what proper rest does for your brain and your performance when you come back and we're about to hear some statistics that might change how you think about your holiday forever so after this very short break we're gonna rejoin leanne and doctor lane and discover exactly why rest makes you more productive we're gonna hear that shocking story from a listener about the toxic workplace plus doctor elaine will give us her strategy for the inevitable return to work inbox chaos don't go anywhere hey millennials i have got a really great podcast recommendation for you if you have not listened to no straight path hosted by ashley men baba then i think you're really gonna like it it is of course brought to you by the holds spot podcast network and this one is right up your street if you like to hear the real stories behind those shiny resumes and that end endless positive social media posts and fancy job titles because actually human utilizes success from the perspective of a millennial or something i've not for a very long time but i've never been a never been a millennial love i love it because it is packed with actual conversations and it brings diverse and important voices to the world like in the episode with phil ag we love it love phil a fellow millennial who's worked at some of top companies in tech and land just happened to start the number one marketing podcast in the uk so if you like honest conversations about careers inspiration and achieving success then you have to listen to no straight path wherever you get your podcasts oh it ashley also has the best name to be said in the extract voice ash barbara dun it's injured what you said there in terms of sometimes people understanding the impact pattern and understanding the why can be really powerful so what do we know about rest and recovery and what does that mean for our future productivity performance well rest obviously there's are different types of breath but obviously rest means a new behavior is like a a change of behavior is also that's saying that there's changes as good as a rest right so even in that way i think you're doing something different rejuvenate us right having a change of pace and a change of routine in itself but what we do know is that rest boosts productivity obviously it helps soothe their nervous system it has always sort of mental health and physical health benefits the way i kind of would overall describe rest or being in a different if you're born on holiday so that been in a different environment is that it gives us different perspective unlike we can spend so long in our own little bubble and and we just see life from a very similar lens each day but i think going in holiday or having a break is almost like zooming out of that and people find like they're are more creative so rest also leads to creativity people have ideas sometimes people think about what we're doing with my life you know in a positive way so i think yeah there are so many benefits of of rest and when we're when we're truly rested we can then come back and be our peak performance which is also what we want because companies spend a lot of money on annual leave you know it's a very costly business and we're and we know and in the uk in particular anyway people get generally get quite generous holiday you was just costing a lot of money so we want people it's when when you know we want people to feel fully rested because the organization benefits as well as the individual what i think is you know it's hard to argue i wanna go back to what you're saying about about rest because i think there's a bit of a myth that rest means lying on a beach rest means sleeping in late i know there's plenty of people that that i have in my life that was say i i can't i can't just sit still i can't that's just not that's just not me what does rest look like really physical rest and emotional rest of even spiritual rest and there's all these different types of rest and it's about what fills us up really so you could say going in a hobby you know it's rest it's it's rest from our usual stress or our usual life i guess it's like disconnect and from that part and reconnect them with what tells us at and a lot of people i work with are definitely not the sun that all day they're they're busy doing people and they get really restless and they get easily bored so it it needs to be things that appeal to us but not but things that we want to do versus things we feel obligated to do as well i think that's an important distinction because sometimes what can happen is people can be off and say oh i'm going to completely do a deep clean of the house or something which for some people actually is quite rest in soothing but for others it isn't and this is an important point as well it's very individual what we find rest and yeah so it's it's not always lying about and it's not and it's not always been still for a lot of people it's actually the opposite of that but it we feel relaxed i think that's the most important point we feel relaxed and we feel like we're being energized by what we're doing and it often that's not the same as what we're doing every day and what we're doing at work i love to cook that's my resting in recovery activity so i start to get restless this when i'm in a hotel for too long and i can't cook i know a loves coding and i don't get it because it feels like work because he's sat in front of a community it was not up to us side but i guess when it yeah when it feels that that person feels obliged to do something or or this is the other one and need to be productive and often that's fed by people who might experience traits of perfection on as well or because as you mentioned this about societal society's views on rest which is often that's lazy or the word lazy accompanies it and then people feel like i have to do something productive but if we reed educate people about what actual means i think they would use rest time different this actually came from a a listen to the show who who really wanted this this message go ahead to get this type of advice so they were saying would love to know where the deal colleagues who expect that you will check emails whilst and leave took examples come to mind the first time i went on annual leave at my last place i was basically told to check my emails daily the justification was that it wasn't reasonable to expect my secretary who also had access to my inbox to decide whether something was urgent and i need to be passed on or could wait another time on leave there was a day when i didn't check my emails in those twenty four hours a colleague sent multiple slightly piss emails about not me not replying even though they acknowledged hours on holiday i mean it's it's shocking example isn't and it it's shocking examples but i mean in this in this type of culture when we we're seeing these types of behaviors from colleagues what what can you do is an individual to train set that boundary tricky i will just say listening to that i mean that's obviously deep organizational cultural problems there and and and those individuals are probably just doing what they could to try and manage the enormous stress but that also doesn't make it okay but that's probably how we can understand it and but yet i guess in those situations there i'm must say it's i'm not saying it's easy but sometimes if we just stick to the facts and just state to people like know your boundaries know when you're gonna stop replying know when you're gonna have your whole leave and that you're not telling them i won't be you know have it on your out of office explicitly in bold of you must i will not be checking my emails if we're clear with people they actually do prefer that and and there's a saying as well that people who you know who don't respond well to boundaries often need them the most right so it's a tough it's a tough sell sometimes because so you're gonna set boundaries in your mind we could probably expect some people won't like it initially but that's actually all alright you know it's part of the process and that's part of the reason we need to set them with these people really really need them and then one time in the future they might be actually to be grateful for it so it's about just rip sticking into that like not trying to get emotional with these colleagues and being very matter of fact as much as we can be and not getting sort of drawn in because that's a lot of their stuff isn't it that's a lot of their fears and their anxiety that belongs to them but we can get quickly get drawn in into the emotion of that and wanting to be lights and wanted to be helpful in all of that doesn't really help anybody so we just have to kinda stick to it and be very very strict and what's easier said than done but it's very possible and just be clear you know what bernie brown says clear kind unclear is un kind and i think that's another way of thinking about all of this we just tell people what we're going to do and what we're not going to do and stick to it that's say i would almost summarize that you know that's the best we can do for people and obviously help train them as well that even if they send us a hundred emails on a sunday night for a hundred weeks we're not gonna respond what tuesday somebody thinking here i'd like to set a hard boundary lane but i i'm am i can fired for him and but certainly hope somebody prefer for i can i can understand what you're saying about this fear what's going to happen if i do this or if do that i would turn it around slightly and say leader is not just by title so whether you're leader or not there's there's there's someday above you you can lead in this behavior you can be the one set the tone because of what i guarantee is that once you set that boundary others will follow when they see it especially if you are in a leadership role there's definitely there's definitely something about being able to set the boundary and thank you know there's other people who are gonna go thank you that's so glad they did that because i want to do that now i'm a bit i can do that when i go on the holiday or just in general to say i'm not not replying in the evenings or at weekends so actually i think you you set the toe eagle you make a decision you do make a decision and you make a decision to commit to this as well and remember that you're not in anything wrong you're you're entitled to your time outside of work and it's only because of how societies has changed that this has become a problem never really used to be a problem we've kind of created that so we need to fix it and to be made to feel pressure in any way that you have to do something when you don't want to do well what would we say to children about that you know we'd say what you have to say no so we can think about it in that way as well and and sometimes you mean you could say that that can cross a line into bullying and harassment as well you know what i mean what like where those boundaries are but that that that can be how it can leave the person that your listener for example just to felt terrible you know receiving that when we're not doing anything wrong they're actually you know trying just to have annual leave and being met with this sort boiling and kind of rage of wherever it was discontent from the organization rather than there's got anything wrong you want it's just absolutely toxic i we do need to fix that we do need to do something about that and as you say it i guess you know it's that understanding that this will be uncomfortable when you probably will get some back in if you you know most people wanna do a great job and be there for the colleagues and support them in the best way that they can but as you say once once those boundaries start to be reinforced through your own behavior it's gonna have an impact on on the other person's behavior isn't it that one of keys start to happen if they see it yeah so i'm not getting any reward from constantly contacting no matter what they say if they ramp up the language which kind of what your listeners when saying like you know ramping up the language the emotional pool not fair on secretary that kind of thing and they no matter what they say or do you're not replying people will stop that behavior will become extinct that's what happens it's a fact but we must set to it and remember that fat if you if you if you reply one and five or ten or twenty times that's a very strongly enforce for people so it's not just about the volume it's about not doing at all you know and we have a personal responsibility in that as well so sometimes i would say well if you do keep replying they're going be emailing them the okay they shouldn't be emailing yet if our respects use but we have we need to pick personal responsibility as well and i was thinking about this to you about as a clinical psychologist part of our training there's obviously a lot about boundaries because of the therapeutic relationship it's really important we have very strict boundaries so i think that's partly where i come at this from as well and but what that means is it's completely non negotiable for us like there's there's no negotiation with that so for example client emails me a weekend or whatever i will never reply and never apply and that's to keep very strict healthy therapeutic boundaries i think that is extremely important don't get me wrong and and i think this is helpful too i know people for some people in life there's that flexible work and they might do emails at night one or two hours at night because they have to do the school run or something we want a world where it's individual and it's flexible what i would say for that is you can schedule your emails don't get them sent at eleven pm right need to schedule them for working and time now that i think that's okay and i know a lot of people with family or catering commitments do that but make sure your output is in work in ours that's what i would say so you can manage that to best suit you and to train other people yeah i think this is tipping into into bullying harassment type behaviors and setting these boundaries is the only it's the only way to survive this environment i think ultimately in know long term it's it's it's not it's eaten unless they go through a court change themselves it's not gonna get any bastard book boundaries sounds like survival at this point unfortunately in a way it's got to that point but yeah for longevity for protect own health you we think of stress hormones and the damage they can do yeah we need boundaries to put a line under work and to and fill up her life with with stuff that's not work which is really important as well so that we kinda i mean i know work can be varying levels of importance to people but a lot of people are work with work is a lot of their life you know it spells up a lot of their identity a lot of third reason for being but that becomes bigger the less the less other stuff we have in our life so the less time we spend with family and friends with less time to do bobbi you know we can almost inflate work to a bigger sense of importance by having less in our life so that's another thing i think it's probably another episode but i think that's important in as well i know we've already teased this story but honestly it's kinda kinda shocking isn't it shocking so shocking and doctor lo just called that behavior exactly what it is absolutely toxic and honestly hearing that listener story about being sent angry emails whilst you're on holiday it's hard not to get work doc about that for them it really really is and as we just heard boundaries are survival at this point so this isn't about being polite or professional anymore this is about protecting your mental health from genuinely harmful workplace culture exactly and the psychology she explained chest kiss even if you reply just once in ten times you're actually reinforcing that behavior that is conditioning in action you are literally training people to harass you but here's the important thing even if you do set those boundaries even if you survive the pushback there's still that moment of truth when you come back from holiday that inbox that anxiety how do you actually prepare for that without ruining the last few days of your break i think we've all been there so this is where doctor alain gets really practical i mean for people listening who were like okay i've got some good tips here some good things that i can do before i go whilst i'm on holiday there is the inevitable read reentry that going back into work that day one that inbox how do you how do you prepare for that on sunday night monday monday morning how do you prepare for that and how do you deal with with what you're walking into get there ideally what i would reckon would you actually prepare for that before you even go on holiday because you block out the time for looking at your emails when you get back so also depends what your rule is but wherever possible you don't have some things we can be overly optimistic and think after a holiday i'll sort that after the holiday i'll sort that after holiday and you've got your being you come back and you think i really wish pre holiday me had done that task right so what we don't mind to do is overload all that stuff at once when we get back because it's not gonna you're not gonna notice win from that can feel like there's a precaution to fill up the diary so block out at least what depends at least that morning that you get back to us to prioritize and that's what you're gonna do it you're just going to prioritize your your emails and you're gonna look at them and you're gonna see you could maybe grade them or and see what really needs attention a lot of them as we know probably you know sort of email to everybody or your cc then or it's not even that important alright so the number is not that important it's more of what you have to engage with so try not to get en gross in the number of emails you have try to work out how many you actually need to reply to it's probably quite a small percent at ji probably five or ten percent and then yes so block out the time remember what you said in your out of office about how long you were gonna take to reply and resist the urge for all to be immediate or feel like or feel like everybody knows that you're back everybody in the whole company knows that you're back and they're all waiting for your reply because they're not you know there there might be one or two but they're not all things back today back today that's probably more an our mind and just have that goes you know you're probably not gonna reach inbox you but what you're gonna do is you're gonna just manage it have a bit of perspective as well like if it all becomes a lot and you become feel bit overwhelmed or anxious to think these are only emails like really well we need to zoom out sometimes and check ourselves and go these are only emails if someone was really urgent and be passed to somebody else and that's probably been dealt with and you'll probably goes through an email like that and see it's actually been resolved and you do see that thanks see that's actually what happens if something becomes urgent that's what should happen anyway so yes it's about taking the time and not feeling that you're in this massive rush because you've already set yourself up before your holiday you've got this at least this spill morning and you've already told people it might take two or three business days whatever you state so i think the preparation comes comes quite time before you go back i i think it's so important isn't it you know suddenly that i'll will always saying and and i have now absorbed it as well alright he's also say how can i be as kind as possible to future out so and i kinda think they're saying like how can i be as kind of possible future and i should probably the dishwasher before i go to bed the in future i love that in the morning is it come into a cli kitchen no exactly that yeah and i think we do have a pen say if someone's a couple of weeks ahead like your return to work you know you can become a bla air or like just call if it's a boring task for one you don't like you'll leave it but no i do think it's about definitely doing of what's the reality where come back what could do now that is gonna make my life a little bit easier our more pleasant in the future if somebody is listening and going i just need the one thing what's the one thing alone is there just one thing they could do just remember that people actually prefer clarity we are being kind to people by telling them what we're going to do what we're not going to do we're kind of be un kind by being big even though that can feel better in the moment i might look at my emails i might be delayed reply well just just let's just be clear with each other and then actually makes life easier and and thank you not it's you know boundaries are healthy you know just think boundaries are healthy we need them we try and set them for for children all the time because we say that but we don't do their quiet ourselves with adults as much so that's why i would we just be really clear una clear about what you're going to do and usually it works out absolutely fine that was the amazing doctor elaine smith clinical psychologist and expert in workplace mental health and also lives about three miles from where my grandma used to live in edinburgh so these are the three key key takeaways that i can see first of all your brain is literally wired to be anxious when you stop checking so it's not a character floor it's learned behavior number two is that clear boundaries aren't rude they're actually kinder than being vague and of course number three proper rest doesn't make you lazy it makes you dramatically more productive when you return and let's not forget that doctor elena advice is grounded in proper psychology and we like that we talked about opera conditioning which explains why applying just wants reinforces bad behavior we also talked about anxiety curves it shows us why we need to ride the wave rather than constantly checking our emails for a moment of relief and of course those practical strategies like blocking out return time and writing crystal clear out of office messages you've got everything you need to get boundary setting right now so if you've got a holiday coming up and you're already feeling anxious about switching off or maybe you're dealing with colleagues who expect you to be available twenty four seven doctor lanes just give you permission to set those boundaries and the psychological tools to actually stick to them and please remember you are not being difficult when you refuse to check emails on holiday you're modeling healthy behavior that others desperately need to see and honestly future you will thank present you for being brave enough to truly disconnect i'm pretty sure your family will thank you for that as well and of course as mentioned doctor lane holiday heads space masterclass class this is the one that takes you do the five practical steps for maximum holiday rest you can find out much more about that at doctor elaine smith dot com we'll put a link in the show notes i want if you listen this far then you're gonna get a twenty percent discount just use the code to truth lies work twenty again that's gonna be in the show notes please it's not particularly expensive as it it's not even at full price is only thirty nine british pounds so what fifty dollars at the market less than that and you'll get twenty percent off so go and head over to doctor elaine website we will leave all the links and that promo code in the show notes so off you go different book that time off and actually enjoy it this is treat lives and work and we will see you next week when we're on our holiday

hello and welcome to truth lies and work summer sessions episode one my name is leanne i'm a charter occupational psychologist but i'm also just a girl sat next to a report asking her listeners to stick with her and listen to a business podcast while they're on holiday it's a tough ask that's difficult to follow that one my name is alan i'm a business owner and also sitting by a pool in on our terrace you probably hear a bit win maybe some dogs barking the back ground perhaps the occasional stock because we're in bulgaria mh for a couple of months are over summer and fun fact for bulgaria couple of things first of all stalks lots of stalks they nest on top of lamp posts maybe two stalks are massive fell like the size for cat probably bigger and three bulgarian when they say no they not their head so we went in and asked for something in a suit supermarket do you have this and they said no but not at their head very confusing anyway this is truth clients of work where we simplify the science of work and basically relax over summer i believe yeah i'm not sure we're doing much simplifying the science of work over the next few weeks but what we will be doing is bring you into our smaller day the the idea is it's august or pretty much i think this episode will go out couple of days before before august starts and we fancy a little break tube equally we wanna bring you with us on our holidays so we're gonna talk to you about things aren't typical truth lies work but are very allan leanne so particularly listen to why this we can work episodes the vibe and conversation that it will feel familiar but just slightly different topics whilst as keeping it loosely work related but fun work related you like kc leanne mh here's one from hubspot about sandler training and how they got their sales cycle in half using in hubspot ai tools in half that sounds a bit far fetched stuff the numbers are actually pretty solid they used breeze which is hubspot ai tools suite to personalize every customer interaction and as a result their qualified leads quadrupled their click through rates jump by twenty five percent and people spend three times longer on their landing pages i think i'd worry that using ai would kind remove the human touch fair point but not in this case in fact using breeze they actually enhanced it so if this sounds like something you want for your organization not yu the listener go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow if you've listened to our previous podcast you might know me from podcasts such as the sideways life we have a podcast called sideways life which is all about our travels we have a whole backstory story about that and you've probably recognizes a lot more like that because we're sitting with a gin tonic yes we are son is out unfortunately i left my sunglasses inside i and i then going in because i'm might lose connection but so and anne already she's you know one separate energy is just getting larry but yeah so so if you're expecting professional broadcasting and expecting something incredible from these episodes probably not the episode for you time lower your expectations around we're back in said demo we'll we're back with all the normal stuff which is we're also be back in our studio in roster so we'll have all the equipment there yes and we should also say as well our thursday episodes will remain largely the same guest interviews but topics are a bit more relevant so for example on thursday we have doctor elaine coming up who's is talking all about the best ways to switch off during your holiday and actually enjoy it but today we are talking about i think the official episode title is that for files we had some ideas with the assistance of of an ai platform tel generates my ideas to what talk about and we put it to our our lovely followers on linkedin and this was by far the most voted episode people wanna learn how we've completely messed up our lives and we are here to deliver absolutely so what we've decided to do is split is into three sort of like major cups i'm not sure if we're gonna with we can say that and i need to beep it i have to beep it it's the disaster files we're calling it you know what we mean so the first one is business disasters second one is korea disasters and the third one is just general disasters really real faster life disasters just roughly speaking so prepare to cringe so leigh what do you wanna kick off with your first now in yours it's actually i believe it's you've got two career and one personal and i've got one business that much of a mess up i've got one business disaster i've got two i to be fair i've got two business and what i'm one personal because my career is nothing really have no jobs since two thousand and two so can't talk about that so do you wanna start off with your first career disaster oh yes the time i got emotions how could i forget that was a tough day so cool set the scene so before you tell us what happened set the scene what what was your job what was your position how well was it going so i'm gonna take you back to early twenty twelve january in fact right at the start of twenty twelve a year the allen and i was due to get married which was stress you say due to get married barry we did catch get married no we did but i mean in january we routine to get married in in the september so a fairly high stress year or all i got promoted into a management role my first management role you in the company i with also supporting my proper management role i've been a mad before i've only had one member of staff and it a set up a brand new welfare to work contract called the family support program which was c funded by the d and the ess support fund very exciting there was me there was one coach on board basically the program is to help people who were from multi generation work with his family so work christmas you work yes so they were unemployed their parents were unemployed molecular of their grandparents had been unemployed for a significant part of their working in life i should have known it wasn't going well when on my first day we sat down in a meeting with the md the director of the contract fun fact the md the director the contract were married no pressure there and the one coach who was also starting to work one to one with the customers who had been a peer of mine for a number of years of years and has also applied for the management job that i had subsequently got so you got this person's job we applied for the same job i got it they didn't they didn't that's done a great start no like it's not a great start so we was sat this meeting talking about what the program looked like all the things we need do to set it up was just basically everything and after that first morning session the md came up to me and said the leanne anne can i have a word she sat me down on the stairs and said you don't have to do this oh that's harsh that's like what you mean she's like well you know if this is a bit of a stretch for you i understand your maybe your main motivation was to me back to manchester i've been put on a contract over in yorkshire previous and had a very commute should understand there's no pressure you're more than welcome be a coach on this contract will find somebody else to manage it i don't want you to feel that there's any pressure or not our job for you here and being the naive twenty seven year old that i was i was like i'll be fine i've got this i'll be absolutely fine so we went through the initial setup of a contract in the northwest which is manchester and cha east it went okay started to get some people onto program it was voluntary which made it difficult so typically welfare to work contracts and mandated by job centers this was voluntary and in delivered also in partnership with the local authority so it's slow getting people into program but we were started to get there they also had this contract over in yorkshire and hadn't filled that position for a manager in yorkshire so maybe about a month in we're starting to make some make some waves in the northwest and i was asked to pick up the contract in yorkshire as well so i thought to it's going well things are getting and i got the call from the same md that told me i didn't need to do this so i thought that's a nice phone call a bit of faith a bit of trust here so i also then took on yorkshire and it was probably over the next three months that the wheels really start to fall off if you're not from the uk manchester and yorkshire aren't that close and we had all of yorkshire so we're short talking in yorkshire west yorkshire east yorkshire largest county i think in england so base pretty much coast coast at the north of england a big area just may no fixed premises or community based had to bring in all the coaches built a team from ground up and that's probably the only thing that i can still say confidently that i did write because of all the members of staff that i hired in those initial four to five months every single one of them except one remained on a contract for its entirety which is three and a half nice so that i did well but understandably massive area complete startup up two contracts very complex brand new i was out of my depth if i'm being honest i wasn't provided the support i probably should have been by the organization at this point to the point where we meant to deliver courses they weren't being developed in head office as i promised they were just and i to pick up that as well and developed the course of myself equally did them well because those courses also stayed in place for the entirety contract so when my strengths were recruitment pathway development training and development all that type of thing smashed it but in terms of building a contract from startup or the logistics office structure we needed systems processes i struggled and it was just it was just me so we get to about july august i know it's not going well and i'm starting to feel that i'm losing control of where things are up to but i feel like it's ticking by we then go on holiday day to get married we got married in gibraltar so we had three weeks annual leave wedding in the honeymoon and i came back after three weeks and the entire contract was broken because i hadn't set up enough systems and processes that it could function without me being there and a new roller coming in way blah blah from the prime contractor which meant we didn't have a right paperwork in place and anyway don't wanna make any excuses i was out my depth and i went into a meeting maybe on my third day back with said day and my director i was told that i wasn't doing enough good enough job i being d demoted and i have three options i could either become a coach on the contractor in manchester to basically become a peer of the people i had been i'd recruited into the business and have been managing up that rough i could go back to the contract i used to work on in yorkshire as a occurred long commute promotion back to the role i was in previously or a third option was i could be a tutor so i could actually deliver the courses that i developed to the customers so i went home i spoke to a obviously and a couple of trusted colleagues and decided that i'd be tutor because the other two options seemed like stepping back this at least like a bit of a sidestep and something new can i ask you at this point then how much of this was ego led as and you didn't want to look i even take a step back it was a bit of ego but to be honest it was more from a view of career development because at this point you and i started talking about moving to spain mh and i kinda thought well i'm not i'm not gonna find a job coach role gibraltar because when employment doesn't exist also but i might find a training and development role gibraltar so it it's more that that aspect of it and to be fair when i had been a coach running the training sessions had been my favorite part of it so i went back in the next day it said i wanna be a tutor that's what i'll do and the md was not expecting that she didn't like that she thought i was go back to being in coach so we took a break and my director called john who was also the mds husband said to me i think you can do this i just think it was too much for you to take on the entire north region i think if you just have manchester with a team you've got in place the premises you put in place i think in three months you'll smash it so he really campaigned for me to the d to give me this opportunity she was knocking keen and it was made very clear to me that if i didn't completely turn around a contract by christmas and this would have been late september than then i was basically at the job so again challenge accepted at this point allan i'd already made the decision that we were gonna move to spain in the spring so it's kinda like well make the most of it deal with what happens and at that point as well john became much more of a hands on mental mentor and time coach and i got my self together in terms of being more organized understanding exactly where all of our customers are at where our coaches are at much more hands on to the point polly micro management within that first six weeks to understand exactly what was going on and just found our groove found the joy in what we were doing we had a lovely wave of of inflow of customers coming on which also made everything easy to hit our targets and by christmas we were smashing it and the md came to manchester to visit me and asked me to stay on is managed fabulous is that the same contract that you ended up running from spain yes yes so this would have been at christmas and made the decision and plan to move to spain in may so i handed in my notice in april contract still doing really well explained john we were moving abroad he was very sweet gave me a hug wish me well and then the next morning i got a phone call he said to me but when we left an a meeting i don't talk to anyone yet i obviously wanna talk through could katrina and understand how we handle this transition the next morning out a phone from john and he was like just to understand are you leaving your job because you have another job to go to in gibraltar or you're leaving your job because you think you can't do it from while being abroad and was like the second one he like well i'm not so sure about that i said i think you can probably do the majority of this job remotely so go and have a think about how much of a job you think you could do what system structure potentially other the members of staff and you'd put in place on the grand of manchester and talked to about and see if it's even something he'd want you to consider because we would expect you to come back a week a month to the uk we had those conversations and it worked out really well we flew to spain in may and for the next two years i worked as a remote manager going back to uk a week a month in fact it went kind better than that because after a year i got promoted into the national manager role where i had manchester i regained yorkshire which is why i got demoted from and also picked up cornwall so let's just say that someone's listening to this and they go oh god that i feel like that's happened to me or i'm at the situation where things aren't great at work maybe not been demoted but they just haven't got the promotion that they wanted is there any advice you give them i made the mistake that every first manager the vast majority of first matches make i felt i need to do all of my own i felt need to have all the answers and i felt that asking for help would be a sign of weakness and signal to my competence and the exact opposite is true the minute i asked for help went to my team asked for their help went to my manager asked for his help different colleagues across the business when it all turned around i was stuck in this complete frozen threat state of overwhelm that i didn't i didn't do anything effectively so i think if you're feeling that or if you've just been d demoted or you can feel that coming think about who around you you can ask for support and ask for help and in if if it's possible to reduce your focus air down to the absolute must be done have to be done suddenly lee when you look back on this what thirteen years ago fourteen years ago do you still see it as a career disaster yes i probably do i probably do i because i can't show cody too much it was it was such a hard hard experience and that was also the year that i start to have really bad panic text so my mental health took a real toll as well and it took me a long time to rebuild my credibility with the rest of the organization my team not so much my direct mind is not so much my md not so much but gossip in organization's happens so it took me a good probably twelve months to rebuild any form of credibility if i'm being honest there are some leaders and emerges in that organization that never truly stormy me is a competent no matter how successful ess s was and it was by far and most successful contracts the organization has ever seen i think we finished with from start up we finished with maybe more than three thousand customers have gone through the program forty plus members of staff and yeah we always wanna the top performing but booked that but that one that one slip stayed with me i'm with my reputation with certain people throughout the business it was one of the hardest things i've ever been through in my career it was really really hard because there's an element of you have to internalize that failure to an extent that you can learn from and growth from it and that's a process we have to go through but that little sting failure is still there and always will be i also think that's where maybe i i've since developed a lot of empathy for people who find themselves as accidental merges or new numerators without the training where i can connect with them in ways that perhaps other practitioners and trainers and coaches can't so it's definitely given me the unique perspective but if i was being honest and i could go back and have it not happen and to know that be a hard choice okay we're gonna take a very short break after this i believe anne got a question for me hey you yeah at you if you're enjoying truth lies work was another podcast on the spot network that i think you're gonna really really like you joined me yeah was it is this the mistakes that made me booker yes it is i've been binge binging this as well recently au man ism interviews these amazing business owners about their biggest business mistakes and honestly it is fascinating how often these massive errors lead to the biggest breakthroughs throughs i just love how real emma man is i'm hugely helpful in her advice in her latest episode she's thirty four weeks pregnant and breaks out exactly how she system her agency so it runs smoothly while she's on maternity and of course other a psychologist i really appreciate how emma is normalizing failure is just a simple part of the business journey you can listen to mistakes that made meet wherever you get your but enough about me in my career as us there's another one coming down a which one of your mess ups do you wanna start with first let's start with a big one so it was two thousand and two i'd been working for about well basically i've started working a pub then i moved up to manager then they had my own pub but then i got fired for my own pub because someone was stealing and i couldn't tell them who so they were like okay well you're stealing so and i wasn't by the way but they so i got fired from that so i had a couple of really weird jobs sales jobs folk tele sales jobs that kind of thing and then had enough of working in the office and said right i'm gonna start gonna stop my own business two thousand and two it was basically if you've heard of uber saw anything similar it was basically that in two thousand and two so you'd ring me up up two o'clock in the morning and i would bring you some beer and that was it and it was aimed for students a couple of issues that started that business first of all the peak times as in light just when the pub shot back there you couldn't buy alcohol twenty four hours i know for all those kids who are oh my god if you born two thousand and two how old would you be now it'd be twenty three wouldn't so yeah those kids so anyone who's over the age of forty will know in the uk well know you can never used to be able to buy alcohol so this solved the problem basic i'd sell it over the phone to people would ring up and i get the drivers out but there was lots of peak demand around about eleven till one and then around about sort of two thirty till four in the morning but i paid the drivers rather than paying per delivery i paid them in hourly rate which meant that i didn't it didn't make a lot of money and the second issue was i didn't really look forward as look i wasn't really careful about what was gonna happen in future i heard that the licensing law was gonna change didn't think it was gonna affect me and of course it did it decimated that at a high where i was like think we had sort of twenty staff and we were doing twenty thirty grand a week which back into you know two thousand and two two thousand and three was you know decent but no that didn't work at all so essentially what happened was i was every week i was trying to make payroll and i just ring the bank and they'd have to give me a temporary overdraft for three days and then i'd pull i withdraw the money to pay all the staff and then the revenue from those three days or at least i think it was actually when the credit cards went through and when that money hit the account it allowed me then to get back into the back into the black it see this is why this this is why i don't know this is why i went bankrupt i don't know the difference between red and black when get back into the black and it was really tough time i ended up moving out the house i lived in i lived in the warehouse i built a little room in the back and i did everything to try and keep that business alive but was not to be so when the license all came in went from twenty grand a week to about two grand a week had to find ninety nine percent of my staff and too fair at two grand a week were kind of almost profitable but by that stage i got a hundred and three grams worth of debt mainly to hsbc banks sorry if you worked there and you and you were around in two thousand and three two thousand and four and so eventually i was like right well i'm gonna have to declare bankruptcy so i did so i'm bankrupt in two thousand and five for a hundred and three thousand pounds oof oof indeed before we dwell on the bankruptcy i i wanna ask you because about the because this is so like we say alice a business owner alice is is and i know you hate this word entrepreneur in ways that there are many entrepreneurs because not only did you have this idea that you saw yes it's the early north every student wants to keep drinking he after eleven o'clock and they don't say wanna go out club in but then you also had to find very creative of ways of working around the existing laws around selling alcohol so tell us a little bit about that okay so without boring you about the legal regulations back then but essentially there was something called off sales and on sales on sales were on premises sales that was in bars and clubs off premises sales was you bought you sold alcohol to basically drink at home or drink off the premises so that's basically what it was so we definitely came onto the off license rules which meant that you're only allowed to sell alcohol during what the couple committed hours which is ten am to ten pm it sounds archaic now and the kids these days you know if you're like what you mean you can't go in at three o'clock in the morning and buy a bottle of white claw or whatever it's called but no you couldn't after to ten pm you weren't allowed to buy any an alcohol unless you went to a pub and then even then at eleven o'clock would shop so this was the this was the hole that i thought we could fill now the now just just to be fair there was a company out there called i can't remember what a calls now first emergency or something and they were trading but they were doing it wholesale because whole we're being in the uk and the sam border but we're in the uk you were able to sell a wholesale without without a license which by basically wholesale is twenty four ka arc so what they were doing was students were can i four cans along and they going no you have to buy twenty four on the like i don't wanna i buy twenty four go well that's the other idea where we can sell it to you so there was that we found a slightly weird way around this i found a law that basically said that if you're you're allowed to set aside orders four customers during committed hours and you're allowed to give it to them after permitted hours as long as you then take the money during committed hours now that's this bear with me what that basically means if leanne if i if said to me i want four ka lag tonight at two am then i'm allowed to permitted hours going to my shop take four ka lag put a sticky note and they're saying fully am and then at two am go and take her those look take at that lag i'm not allowed to take any money from her at that point but then if i went in knocked a door at ten o one the next morning and said can you pay with those lag that's perfectly okay so i was like well obviously that's not a good great business plan but you know when you when you go into a hotel and they take a swipe of your card well i did that about the same time which hotel to swipe a card was like tell me how this works so oh it's called a pre i've you know i forgotten the term but it's called like a reserve kind of thing pre something is called and what they would do is essentially reserve the money on your card and then they would complete that purchase that transaction when you left i was like oh so that means i can go in basically take a swipe of the ant card when i deliver the a call at two am and then at ten am i could then complete that sale knowing the money's reserved me for twenty four hours and i could do and i did that for like two years boy well one of my best friends and her business partner in her current business he was at his job was to come in and essentially we had one of those old fashioned machines where you with numbers on it where you typed the credit card number in and you typed the expiry date and you tap the amount you press enter and he just he just basically went through and did completion for all of the transactions the night before will be hundreds you're taking four or five hours to do that but that's the way we got around it so like wow we found a way this is cool but then we got a visit from the licensing officer first one and the license officer said can you just show me where this person ordered this alcohol so go back to lia example what i was doing was taking the four ka at two am taking a swipe of her card to reserve the ten pounds whatever i was taking off and then the next morning at ten o one i was typing a card in again in completing that transaction the problem was the licensing officer was licensing officer was clever and he seems basically the police the person charge with licensing and said when did you act when did actually ordered that that stumped me a little bit i'll be honest because leanne hadn't ordered that you've rung me up at two am as guy you bring it to me so i was like so then i wrote a bit of software back in if you remember lotus notes no i can't with a database one was in lotus but i wrote bit of software that essentially generated every possible combination of order for every possible customer we had a record of and we had like maybe a hundred like files and each one of those had an order like they had basically everything anyone could order from every customer so the landlord order of four ka in a bottle cad she would have an independent order for four ka and an independent order for bottle cad that been auto generated during committed hours that i could then prove she's pre ordered it of course we'd never showed them the files but that's we could do it that satisfy the us the officer for a little while but then about six months later it all went wrong so what happened when it went wrong so license the officer i went you by solicit by this stage we're working my solicit you just loved you he was finest gigs that you had it really did i think he did wells and stuff like that boring stuff and then this was this was really bit fun fun fact was also in the commonwealth games as a as a speed walking like finalist got bronze or something but anyway he he eventually wrote rang me up he went look he's we need to get a court they wanna see us again so went front of the mag rates and he walked into me in the man straight courtney and went bob who was the last officers bob is furious with you hey you said i think it's the end of the end of the road so i and was i go in front of the mag and they basically said look no i'm res sending your license taking away from you you're not it's you you're you're operating otherwise in accordance with the with the license so i got taken away i was like oh what do i do now well i did find out remember this the wholesale thing where it as long as you sell as long as you sell twenty four cans of lag or beer or whatever as long as you sell twenty four cans like you don't need license well i looked at that and that and the laws said it could include lag beer and perry now perry is a pair wine and if that was the uk remembers lo lamborghini lamborghini was the cheapest petrol horrible stuff you could possibly buy really girls just wanna have fun oh it was horrible but you could buy a liter for genuinely about back and that will class wholesale well if you bought you could if you bought six pack for about five pounds that'll be six liters and that meant then your minimum order just became something like eight cans of lag or four cans remember exactly where we worked it out but it basically it became four cans lag so we still sold individually as if was an off license but every single customer had to buy this lo lamborghini to make it up to wholesale so that we weren't breaking the law and then we also said but don't worry if you buy it as long as you keep keep it intact and give it back us when you order again we'll give you a refund against it but of course when he ordered it again they got another case of i'm breeding so so and most people's students to the drink anyway dish but that we did sell that literally it cost possibly even less than even below cost so but yeah that lasted until the license law changed and then that was it i went bankrupt so a a fun ride i i'm not gonna lie it was a lot of fun but it was also very very stressful and i'm now very gray and i think a lot of that came from those like five years of of running that and also obviously i i lost my my house i got that repo and i also bought an investment house in managed manchester to the that they got repo as well and i couldn't get a bank couldn't get a mortgage for seven years you know so but still like you say it was a lot of fun so take me back here at this point what twenty seven twenty eight yeah that's right bankrupt for a hundred and three thousand pounds mh and you do what what what happens next you look for a job do you move back with your mom and dad what happened so at that point i got a job selling off planned stuff now off plan properties i thought it was legit turns out it wasn't in fact funnily enough the the person behind that has now been the serious fraud office that have just finished an investigation and i believe that guy looking at somewhere between eight to ten years in the big house in the in prison so yeah interesting interesting times but yes i did that and then and then because i had my house repo i was like i know all of about repo recession repositioning i'd looked into it so the you know the kid member was seventeen it was doing all my all my credit card i think he'd been to university at that point and i said you actually start in a business where we go and buy repo houses and he was like sure so we did so he's that the company we bought quite a number of houses so around about forty houses in about eighteen months of people are getting repo and that built our wealth so we built and basically that's the wealth that i suppose to to this day we have so it'll all it it all worked out right in the end it did work out or at the end i wanna ask you though about the immediate aftermath of being bankrupt because that is it's something then there shouldn't there shouldn't be shame attached to it but there is definitely a stigma attached to it it's certainly in the uk not in the entrepreneur entrepreneurial community because i hear people say like you're not a real entrepreneur unless you've been bankrupt at least once but certainly amongst the general kind of population bankruptcy is a bit of a is it yeah it's it's got a stigma how did you how is your mental health in that immediate well i think i suppose immediately like if we're talking literally me i went to court and i i don't i've never been to court before had i had been court in court for the magic but my i assume there's be different courts i assumed to be like the bill you know where they'd be like someone in a wig and i'd be stood in a box and basically like it wasn't out and so they they have a big ga and then be like i declare you bankrupt now take him down kind of thing and actually i sat a room i filled that's reforms and then an hour later she came back and went there they go at your bankrupt and it was such an anti climax that i went to i went to a local pub and i think i just spent the afternoon in there with the little money i had just having a few beers and fully very sorry myself but truth was this was what two thousand and seven so two thousand and five i'll be twenty eight and something special about being in your twenties because you are so resilient and so i was like rather than going well my you know my my life's over i was like okay what can we do now what's next and so went and got that got that job selling dodgy stuff which i didn't know at the time and then start the business about a a year later with eighteen months later so the same question you asked me with that in mind do you still see as a business value no hundred percent not had i not had that failure early on if i had it now that be difficult to recover from both financially and mentally that would be tough one to cut to because imagine if you'd spent like thirty years buildings something or twenty years buildings something me and then it went pop so no that's a tough one to come back from is that also why you're a big fan of the gen z younger millennial generation here out there with a side hustle is in trying to build something for themselves yeah exactly i think if you're gonna get it wrong get it wrong in your twenties because if fact you should be getting wrong in your twenties i think there's an old yi expression that something like if you're not making mistakes you're not making enough decisions and i would say in your twenties if you'd if you're not if you're don't on the brink of bankruptcy at least once every year or if you're not doing something you really really regret you not done something you really regret then you've not made it enough decision so i think you should go out there try everything at childbirth and morris and i've done neither advice taken i can't believe the time it's going by are clearly talking about trauma suits as well i i know we had another one each i wonder if maybe me talk about this another another time i guess a teaser for you headline would be i quit my job with nothing else to go to on the first of february twenty twenty and my teaser is that i once got in the same year i once got an investigation from the in inland revenue and also the vat squad this is the the this is when there were two separate things the vat squad turned up with eight people in a black van at my warehouse and ripped everything apart so that's gonna come up in a future episode but let's just talk and let's just finish things off with a a bit of a fun one although it's not front fun and i don't think they we're gonna talk about our personal we're gonna talk about the time that you know that moment three am or even no probably more like eleven am eleven pm you're just lying a bed you you've about to go to sleep and your brain just pro goes you remember that time that you did this you go oh god no oh i hate it lee what does your brain say at eleven pm and it's prodding you telling you to something silly joe that time you found the pool in thailand at you best mate wedding oh i cannot not believe that you are making me share this i didn't tell anyone for so long i just wanted to tell everyone because it was the funniest thing i've ever seen but at the time now my stomach is going i'm so come on i'll get and everyone with like a plaster so set the scene tell us what happened and tell us why it was even more mo than it actually sounds my best friend at was getting married love his life kenny in thailand coast movie we got invited to the wedding were actually the only friends invited which was a huge honor because there was family it was was family no it wasn't a alone no there was there was family there and family friends but there was no like personal friends so we were the the only two invited which was a huge honor alan and i being because at that point we were living in spain were like still fit let's us make a month of it and we traveled around thailand first and then met up and c me with allen and kenny and the fam for wedding beautiful beautiful day it rained but i mean in terms of like the ceremony beautiful day they had thai monks chanting in the ceremony and actually the rain added to it in an thai buddhist culture water is very lucky so actually they were very excited that it was raining that day and and it was a yeah beautiful beautiful ceremony beautiful meal an incredible privileged to share that very intimate moment with such just margaret people the evening comes the rain clouds partridge and the the party started in the pool area beautiful pool it's a a complex called tango looks and c google it it's stunning go there on your next holiday incredible in fact alec like if you're listening he's there now tied to the gang so we're on the we're on the pool area this must been a but i know exactly what time it was it's about quarter to midnight and we were we were chatting and a few drinks have been consumed but anyone who knows me knows i'm i'm i'm from the northwest my parents are scar and my blood line is irish i'm am a girl that can handle her drink she can so i'd had a few drinks of course but i was by no means drunk and certainly not drunk enough for this event to happen that was coming without being absolutely mortified the pool area was stunning it's one of those infinity pools you know the walmart it kind of like it has no edge only with this one it did have an edge and it was like a little two foot wide gutter that that kind of went around the area of the pool and then there is a decking of the the pool area so we had been told i'll be careful of the the edge of the pool be careful edge of pool so i'd had been stood chatting to alex mom and his niece and just chatting about various things as an asked was very cool and very fun and very bubbly and then we hear announcement that the fireworks they're about to start at midnight how wonderful if everyone could make their way to the beach i'm in then just chatter chatter with alex norman nice i turn around and the worst thing is i said something like linda you so cool at this point my will probably tell me to stop drink and then the next thing i remember is being in the pool gutter not even the pool not even the pool if it was the pool i would've been able to style it out or been like hey come on everybody in the pool gus i don't even know how i got in it i don't know because you that like the the you could bang your head easily is two foot wide you could bang your head take cart wheeled into it there was no other explanation for it because to the point where when i i went full under into like my head was under as well it wasn't much like my my legs philip my entire head went under the water i pop up and i'm then facing with my back to the bar area where i just fallen from looking over the full pool to the hotel and halved it so i'm sideways right so that the pool is like i'm looking at it so i have to turn in the gutter to be able to then fish myself out but because my hips are fairly fairly wide as any you know good luck and shape woman's ears i couldn't actually turn the full way i did love so i couldn't actually like fit my hips because it was only like it was it was honestly it must have been like a foot and a half like thirty forty cents because it wasn't much so i couldn't actually like turn all the way so i had to like lift myself up out enough i to get take my out the water to turn around and then lower myself back down to then see the entire freaking wedding party looking be going you are right and at this point bless alex alex niece is like fishing my handbag out of the pool and and somebody saying grab a towel all and and somebody fishes me out i can't even remember who it was and i'm trying to like how funny out house leave me because i'm not drunk off for this to be no a thing or funny you haven't like oh gosh and then at that point it was like one minute to the fireworks because i like oh my god everyone just go to the beach distraction thank god a distraction let's go let's go with this tower i'm gonna and then one fireworks goes off and then they fail all the fire all the fireworks fail so i had one rocket and that was it and then of course everyone turns batch to me and goes what happened so i was like and then and then steph access who actually used to work with at at pinnacle the company we've just been talking about with alec came up to me i'm blessed she's she's she's a lovely lovely girl but she was laughing just like what the oh yeah i how did she do that oh my god how is it even possible and i was i don't know she's like why is your hair wet i was like i don't no so i was like i'm gonna take this opportunity to go in back to the the hotel room and change because i'm still dripping head to toe yeah so i went back to our beautiful little and has like little courtyard and i sat i think i got out of my dress now sat dressing gown just on the on in the lounge area just thinking i can't go back out there this is the worst thing it's ever happened to me can i just just so at this point i wasn't there i didn't see leanne undo it i was at the bar and the anne was walking towards the fireworks and i was just finishing my beer at the bar and someone said was falling in the pool and i went oh my god that's embarrassing isn't it i hadn't realized he was my wife so just in case you thought that i was doing nothing i was wasn't there when you fell in and you went back on your own i believe because yeah you didn't want me to no i insisted on that i insist on that so i'm sat there i probably at this point about twenty past midnight at my best friend's wedding thinking i want to leave immediately can i book a flight out of here and at that point alec comes to the door the group my best friend comes to the door and he's likely just sits down to me he's like you okay hon i'm like no a like and i'm not okay i'm not okay that is the worst thing that could have happened and you can see him kind of halfway between like genuine can concern empathy and just laughing yeah you can see the pain drug in his face but he keeps it together you let am in situations like this in this situation you got two options either you go to bed embarrassed and ruin my wedding day nope you put another dress you dry your hair you get out there and you have a great night i was like well not much a choice alec like is it you're like no so go and get dressed you did i did and went back out and it's that point you know everyone's very kind at that point because i realized i think that i'm mortified it's not nice as funny as i thought it was so almost like what you okay to being a market to show yourself and at that point i sit down next to kenny mom yeah denise the other the other groom and she is from preston and the most wonderful northern soul or the earth woman you'll ever meet and i i sat down and she goes no i love he went yeah yeah so you fell the pool yeah embarrassing that love yeah it is and then she went over and just took my hand went you okay i like yeah she's like do you wanna drink was like yeah and then the rest was history until the next morning when i bump to alex cousin who who'd gone to bed already because she had a small child with her and said you alright right heard fat the pool last night at that point i was like i that i can't i can't talk about like completely tricky she say oh my god i didn't realize it was a so yeah so i didn't tell anyone for a while i believe that alec and kenny did pull up the cctv and the subsequent honeymoon at the same as all and laughed very hard it let me falling into it i think the resort team were very pleased that i didn't launch any kind of health and safety violation given the ease of which i could fall into the poor and i didn't talk about it again until alice fourteenth which boy would have been in year later when your sister came up to and was like i've just i've been told alec and he said you found the pool wet think i was like what so it gets it gets rolled out as a story amongst the friendship group from time time but i think before i told my closest girlfriend it was probably a good three years later yeah couldn't couldn't yeah mortified so thank you for letting me relive that i will spend the next day to eighteen you months was trying to push that back down yeah yeah absolutely no problem you like looking at i'm now and she's like wiping her eyes and i know there's like halfway between looks so seen or just laughing or perhaps crying or perhaps a combination in all three burst so that is the most embarrassing moment of my life and up that fail there is no lessons to be learnt from it out there are no oh shiny takeaways of resilience to take from it was a worst embarrassing amount of my life and i will never go over it on my deathbed i'm sure the last thing i will think about is you remember the time you found the pool and if i out leave you then i will tell it i know you will i know you have okay so just really quickly because we've only got a couple of minutes left but i will tell you my story and my story is so so so simple remember tesco yes in the supermarket so there's a soup supermarket chain in the uk court tesco basically think walmart that's essentially the same thing although i'm not sure the tesco would re or tesco cohen in the original woman who started it would be please me with that and with that comparison so i walk tesco as i go up to the meat counter and i'm like okay lia told to go get some ham so i went to get some ham so i went across to the meat counter and i saw there was like some in the uk they have this processed ham that's horrible something looks like a teddy bear they literally processed it to make a look like a teddy bears face it's like la so that's like the worst ham and then there's medium ham which is just supposed to look like fake ham bit sweaty ham sweaty ham which which is processed but they put little bits of white in it to make it look like it's proper ham but it's not that's the wafer thin ham and then they have the good ham the like like the pepper yeah what is it called like pepper crust crust and it's just it's a proper piece of pig eggs crust it's really really nice so i was so i took down from ham she said that she pointed to to the to the the sn ham them the wafer for the wafer thin ham said no no not that one i kinda have the good hand at the front and it just so happened that the that this cabinet was quite kind of wide so when i point at the front it was a bit was near as me standing face the cabinet but furthest for this woman to actually reach across and get so she's trying to reach across and she can barely reach to get this with her tongs she can barely reach to get this ham and she picked the first bit it fell off and we both chuckle and picked up the second bit and she and she only pulled a little bit off and and i was like oh my god your i'm not long enough to reach that arm and she just stopped let me directly in the eye and just stared at me i'm like why the hell is she what what's wrong with her what have i said it's not like and i looked across another her other arm was kind of i don't know whether it was cut off at the elbow amputated at the elbow amputated at the elbow that's her other arm and i'm like oh my god that's why she's staring at me and i just thought there is nothing you can do to make this situation worse and then my brain went hold my beer because without thinking about it i just pointed at her stomp arm and i went i didn't mean that one ad she oh she was mortified i was mortified i'm mortified slightly still she's heard this five times now she's still speechless she she walked away i walked away suffice to say there was no ham sandwich that right night we had tune instead and that's the moment not the moment of leg is your arm not long enough because that's bad enough but just me just saying i didn't mean that one and pointing at this poor woman's amputated arm that's the worst thing if you you i mean you guys know out by now you know he's a he's a kind intelligent gentle soul who tries to do everything he can to make people's lives better he's also a complete do i am hundred percent and i just it breaks my heart because i know that horn you it's still haunt you and it's it's yeah it's it's it's just one of those situations where it it was a complete unintended accident that you tried to make better and failed and ultimately it made worse so we didn't shop in that tesco again no we didn't and you know what this like you say you need to forgive yourself i think sometimes and this is that this is the jerry spring as jerry's final thought you forgive yourself sometimes and so often when i do think about that and i cringe so hard that sometimes i literally like sort of like curl up like a prawn then i just go come on now it's not that bad this shouldn't fall in a pool so on that bombshell we shall leave it for today no thank you for joining us thank you for if you come this far we will have another episode like this at some point and then i'm gonna go and lia i'm just gonna come and have a little conversation with you i'm gonna go cry in the bathroom if you wanna share my humiliation come out to linkedin say hi connect so do you know what lia i heard you your paul story and i'm equally embarrassed for you if you have an embarrassing story to share a career fail of business fail that maybe you something found or maybe it was just freaking awful share sharing is caring and i think the overall messages we all mess up for it's how we respond to it in how we move forward and we we boot forward in the best ways we could then look at us now it's sat next to a pool in in bulgaria retailing our worst moments to people ian internet who we've never met there is a worse moment than all of that and that is that my gin finished your gin is warm needs to go to replace that so we will see you guys next week bye bye

there's a car factory in derby england where workers deliberately stopped production multiple times every single day and the managers love it there's a very senior exec stripe who's has produced a manual outlining exactly how to work with her and there's an aircraft with the scores pretty low and innovation yet employees are happy engaged and fully committed to the mission so why do these counter intuitive ideas work well our guest today is going to explain this and more he's interviewed some other world's most successful leaders and that factory story is just one of many stories he hasn't covered which could make you rethink your own workplace culture i'm andrew palmer i'm the bart bee columnist for the economist which means absolutely nothing to anyone who doesn't subscribe so what that means is i write on management and the workplace and i also host a podcast for us called boss class oh and by the way fun fact andrew's also the guy who came up with a comparison between liz truss time in office and an iceberg lettuce but more importantly he's discovered that the best managers aren't the loudest voices in the room andrew has interviewed leaders from netflix linkedin shopify stripe google you name a company and he has probably covered it and he has some strong opinions of his own he argues that middle managers often seen his bureaucratic dead weight are actually the most crucial people in any organization and he's found that some of our most celebrated genius jerks like steve jobs and elon musk might not be as bad as we once thought and in a world where ai threatens to replace human managers with dashboards and algorithms andrew warns were about to lose the most important thing leaders do actually talking to their people hello and welcome to truth lies and work the award winning podcast by behavioral science meets workplace culture brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals my name is leanne and i'm a chartered occupational psychologist my name is a i'm a business owner and we are here to help you simplify the science of work and after this really short break will discover why great management is like poetry and pros why multiple interruptions a day creates the world's best culture and andrew surprising defense of people others might call jokes see you in a sec you like case leanne mh here's one from hubspot about sandler training and how they got their sales cycle in half using ai tools in half that sounds a bit far fetched go the numbers are actually pretty solid they used breeze which is hubspot ai tools suite to personalize every customer interaction and as a result a qualified leads quadrupled their click through rates jump by twenty five percent and people spent three times longer on their landing pages i think i'd worry that using ai would kind remove the human touch fair point but not in this case in fact using breeze they actually enhanced it so if this sounds like something you want for your organization julian the listener go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow i'm andrew palmer i'm the bart b columnist for the economist which means absolutely nothing to anyone who doesn't scribes so what that means is i write on management and the workplace and i also host a podcast for us called boss class and we've just finished the second season so that is i think what i'm most famous for there's one other thing i should mention do you remember liz trust and the lettuce so that was based on a leader the i wrote in the economist so what happened i wrote the the lettuce line and then the daily star to their ever lost credit got hold of that and turned it into the famous webcam with the lettuce decaying and liz truss premier ship also decaying in a kind of battle for the ages so that's that's my real claim effect i feel like with the amount you've written recorded on management we have to ask you the question early on what do you think a great manager is so i'm gonna borrow a line which reid hoffman who founded linkedin gave to me in response to that exact question and he himself borrowed it from a a stanford professor of his and the definition they both gave was that great management is a combination of poetry and prose and the poetry is the ability to motivate and to inspire to kind of reach the human if you like to elevate people and the pros is the kind practical technicalities of management so how do you organize the processes the structures the rhythms of the workplace so that stuff gets gets done effectively as you want and so there is something in that combination i think which adds up to a great manager let's stick with read for a second because he's obviously quite a famous sort of start guy is there a difference between someone who's perhaps a sort of like a manager for ibm or someone like read who've started a you know a big a big startup up and actually then gone on to to lead i think that's right scale of company has to make a difference to how you how you manage and how you think about about your role will probably come on to this this conversation again a bit later but one of the more most recent interviews we did was with someone called il who's earth thin who is the c founder and the boss of a big mobile games company called super cell and they were founded on a principle of kind of radical autonomy a very decentralized way of thinking about things use have pushed decision making down as the company has got bigger and bigger and as the gains have sort of started to gather in audiences of in a tens of millions the types of thing the company has to do have have changed the types of management structures have changed so scale does bring a need from all process more structure and middle managers often a kind of in a cursed word but actually deserving a lot of respect within organizations and beyond it become much more necessary and much more important so definitely there's there's there's a difference on your show i think i think even to be a lot of what people would call good managers do you find there any kind of behaviors or traits or commonalities that show up from those people who are perceived as great managers yeah so i i interview people but have never been managed them so there's always a little sort of trigger and little little sort of alarm bell in my head you know how great are they really but they're certainly successful and i do think that there are some common behaviors for people who sort of climb climb the ladder and think a lot about management so thoughtful is a kind of is a filter in itself right someone who actually has a theory so i would say the ability to sort of articulate clearly and repeatedly what it is that is important to them and their company matters so one behavior is like these people can say what the mission of the company as or what it is they're trying to achieve like instantly there is absolutely no doubt in their mind what the values and the priorities of their organizations are they are able to say it without appearing board and that sounds that sounds flip but i think it's actually quite important as a skill especially if you're leading a big organization you've basically got to say the same thing over and over again for years on end i mean it's that incredibly dull if you think about it but they managed to do it without you know as though they believe it so they're passionate about it the whole time slightly less flip and on this point about them thinking about things there's a high degree of self awareness across most of the people that i talk to so they they have a sense of how they come across to people so you know in talking about this with emma w who's the boss of gs k for big drugs company know she's completely aware that her interactions with people elsewhere in the organization had the potential to kind of either turn a day into a triumph for a disaster for those people and that she had to show up in a certain way all of the time so was was very aware of that and similarly people like claire who's hugh johnson who's an american manager chief operating officer of stripe which the payments firm until recently has a manual which it's called working with claire where she writes down what it is like to work with and for her so it basically is an expression of her her working preferences how does she like to receive information does she take decisions quickly how much data does she like to have that kind of thing she sends checks it with people around her know is this a fair representation and then uses that with all of her direct reports and it's not a kind of like this is the way it must be it's just a a sort of it's an expectation setting device it's also a way of holding up a mirror to herself and it's any it's like an interesting way of thinking about like do i work efficiently is this the best way for me to take decisions am i providing psychological safety people think about it in different ways but they definitely think about it and that i think is probably the common thread there were some quite surprising ideas here yeah but what andrew just brilliantly is not only summarize the idea well but he also really thinks through the implications of it talking to thinking about things andrew told us about interviewing danny can who wrote thinking fast and slow and it is a masterclass class in decision making which we'll get into right after this short break hey you yay at you if you're enjoying truth lies work was another podcast on a hubspot network that i think you're gonna really really like you joined me yeah was that is this the mistakes that made be podcast yes it is i've been binging this as well recently eu man ism interviews these amazing business owners about their biggest business mistakes and honestly it is fascinating how often these massive errors lead to the biggest breakthroughs throughs i just love how real emma man is and hugely help full in her advice in her latest episode she's thirty four weeks pregnant and breaks out exactly how she is assist her agency so it runs smoothly while she's on maternity and of course as a psychologist i really appreciate how emma is normalizing failure as just a simple part of the business journey you can listen to mistakes that made meet wherever you get your welcome back let's rejoin the interview where i'll ask andrew about managing great teams falling in love with the solution and why steve jobs might not have been the jerk boss that he's known as but let's start with what daniel can taught andrew about thinking fast and slow i mean his thesis is that humans are really bad at making decisions that's not quite that's a little that's a little unfair actually but but lots of the decisions within organizations are subject to cognitive bias human flaws and decision making so the more algorithm that you can get in the way that you set up decisions around hiring or whatever it might be the better that was relatively well known to me and is in his book and you know he explained it beautifully but the thing that stuck from the conversation was actually at the end he he both acknowledged that he was subject to all these same flaws despite being the single person on the planet who thought most about it but also recognized that those flaws could occasionally be useful and his example there was startup founders so you know an unreasonable degree of optimism and a lack of realism we're absolutely critical to the biggest companies being set up and changing the world so what what i liked about that apart from the point itself was that this was someone who you know was towards the end of his life his sadly passed away subsequently had thought about this for decades but had the kind of humility and curiosity to kind of think about things differently recognize recognized where his theories didn't didn't work he was super interested in what ai would mean both both very very worried about it but also you know very curious about what it would mean for humanity so there was something about an expert with humility which is just endlessly appealing so that was a conversation that stuck with you is there anything else that like there any other conversations you've had which you've just like blown your away or you gone like oh that's such a great point never thought of it this way so so i think probably one that sticks in the mind is a recent one with liz reid who's the head of search at google who was talking about how that company thinks about innovation and in particular talking through their process for for developing ai so we we all now see these ai overview when we do a google search sort of at the top of the screen so that was a super interesting conversation just in terms of how they how they think about things the one line that stuck was this line which was you know fall in love with the problem not the solution which was advised that she had been given as a young product her engineer and now sort of resides to her teams and is meant to kind of encourage a problem solving mindset within the company which allows for people to sort of pivot change direction recognize when something has not worked and you might park it and and and and change course i just think it's a really nice little app to to latch latch onto two whether you're trying to innovate or just trying to trying to solve a different kind of problem in entirely you know the first answer the one that occurs to you may not be the right one so again sort of have the open minded to change course if it turns out that you're wrong i mean i think it's not like it's not fall in love with any problem it's fall in love with the problem as opposed to the solution so you know it's important that you define a problem that matters so lots of user research you know common sense will tell you like is there is there an issue with how this product is working or is there a need that isn't isn't met but once once you identify the problem approach that with an open mind rather than okay and this is the way we're gonna solve it because you will often have like meeting one someone with a you know a large salary and a loud voice will say this is the way i think we should solve it and potentially that's the end of the end of the discussion so ways to sort of avoid that problem are important and i just like that phrase as a way of thinking about it you say loud voice which immediately when some when someone thinks of a boss they tend to think loud booming voice some of the people who have had that say volume wise but the loudest his voices have been the likes of jobs have been the likes of musk but by all accounts they're not amazing managers not great leaders so does that mean that we can say if you're loud you're not a great leader of your quiet you are a great leader it's not simple as it totally isn't so but by by loud i really mean the one that kind of silence has debate before it's before it's happened yeah i think that this steve jobs is is a sort of problem because he sort of gets wielded as this you know ace card in any kind of story or debate and he was both are kind of one of a kind genius and apparently a bit of a jerk and so you know neither of those things are particularly helpful in a normal workplace you know most people are not going to invent the iphone they're kind of their range of achievement is gonna be slightly less less high and most workplaces could i i mean we maybe we should talk about because i think actually you can get you can zero tolerance of jerks is not good but you that's definitely not code for you should behave badly so jobs got away with it because of what he done and i'm not sure that's a useful lesson for anyone you just said zero tolerance is not the way that sounds odd to me i would've thought you don't want any horrible people or jerks and your come in your organization k so i'm gonna like i don't wanna be the person who's sort of arguing publicly for you know horrible people but i think there are a couple of couple of issues one is the definition of a jerk right it's subjective so one person's jerk might be another person's kind of of grit the oyster truth to power kind of person so i you know most of my columns are about trolling my colleagues so i won't i won't actually mention anyone but there are people here who i can think who are kind of exceptionally useful in in the workplace because they're willing to say things in a way which is kind of you know if not confrontational at least provocative some people might regard that as jerk like behavior actually it's i think it's extremely useful so the subject is a problem who who gets to define who's a jerk and the second is like the jerk ness if that's the word may be coming from from a from a particular place it may be that that person is just not in a integrate in in the right job and needs to be somewhere else it maybe be that person is absolutely brilliant but shouldn't be managing people or should be you know locked in a in a home office and not allowed to come into the in into into work so i think there's probably a lot of color square peg round holes which leads to jerky behavior and you can solve that with with lateral moves people are people are can be good in different positions from the one that they're in and that and goodness doesn't just mean competence it can also mean behavior so for the record not a big fan of jerks don't think horrible people is where you know you should put all your hiring effort but zero tolerance for jerks strikes me as a bit like you know it's a bit salem it's a bit like you know that's a jerk let's get rid of him or her and it's often not that simple so on this palmer jerk is continuum that we've just invented at what point do we go we're not accepting this behavior where does someone go from they're maybe in the different in the wrong role or perhaps they're just to under stress too absolutely this person is just we don't want them anymore well there's are certain types of behavior which just plainly unacceptable immediately and that's you know that then they're gone but there's a gray area which is you know difficult to work with really spiky gets involved in arguments s people feeling bruised where you might rather than okay i'm sorry we're gonna have to park company you might think about it in a slightly more intentional way you know what is going on do you even realize you're being a jerk i mean some people are kind of unintentionally you know unpleasant to people they just don't realize how they're coming across so i just you know zero tolerance i don't think i just don't like ever i don't think as a phrase it just seems thought and plainly there are some types of behavior where that's where that's appropriate but lots of jerky behavior is is a bit more ambiguous i think at least giving someone a chance telling them you know you're behaving in a way which is upsetting are you aware of it and seeing if they change that's a that's a reasonable first step you've spent to so many different organizations you've been exposed to so many different types of culture and they're all very different i'd imagine but what are the commonalities what does a great culture have to have so there are certain types of behavior which kind of distinguish all bad cultures you know the toxic the toxic culture so you know a kind of institutional civility or worse is just is just bad for everyone no one no one really enjoys being harassed bullied or shouted at i mean that's so so that's that's one commonality but i think more interestingly the sort of good culture it's very hard to define one good culture because people are different and strategies are different and cultures will therefore be different so that the example i like to give is there's a organization in the states which is called culture x which basically trolls through the reviews that employees leave on glass or and other sites and it basically looks at unstructured data to the comments and then pulls it together and what you will see there is in the aerospace industry two firms which are rated above the industry average for their culture by their employees one is spacex and the other is lockheed martin now they they score highly on totally different things so spacex scores super high as you might expect for you know innovation perks because you get to see rockets taking off and a sense of being at the cutting edge scores terribly on work life balance right i mean basically they're all just sleeping in in the office the entire time and then lockheed martin has a very different profile where it doesn't score highly on innovation at all scores really well on work life balance and some of those more classic you know working from herbs sort of employee satisfaction measures so but both do well so i think what i'm trying to say at incredible length is that different cultures can be good for different different people so it's not i think it's very hard to define one good culture the common thread though is among managers who have created a good culture or in companies where it exists is again thoughtful so i think this is just just the thing that always always comes out from these interviews is that they know exactly what their culture wants to look like and they vary systematically embedded it so they there are tons of levers that you can pull to to make a culture live and it's not painting abstract nouns on the wall of the cafeteria and hoping that you know if someone reads the word integrity they're going to be honest it's much more systematic than that so you know that all of their hiring all of their promotion yes the re repeating of the mission statement all of their performance management and more sometimes some of their organizational structure is designed to reinforce the values that they regard as most important to their companies what is it you've learned about teams from the people interviewed yeah those those examples are the shopify if i'm was was was really just like everyone hates meetings how the hell can we sort this out for people so that was a a kind of less teens more kind of like everyone in this spiral of despair about about meetings but broadly you know that the number one characteristic of a well functioning team is psychological safety and so that's the google famously this project aristotle research on on the components of a of a successful team and that was that was the most important one so you know that can be embedded in many different ways but an a nice way of working out if you are the boss whether you've got a problem or not and this is the advice of amy edmonds who literally wrote the book on this is you know ask yourself when was the last time that you heard dissent so if you're the boss that's the question you should be asking yourself and if you can't remember you've definitely got a problem and if actually it's it's a struggle then you've probably got a problem too so that's that's one that's one example one component psychological safety role clarity really really matters so you know this is what i do this is what the other person on the team team does etcetera etcetera so being clear about that without having kind of like you know turf wars is important and that the the netflix example is sort of interesting one there that's more of a sort of entire company as a team sort of problem that they were trying to solve for but what they did especially when they're were a young company was they would get every single employee this is sort of relatively small in at at that point and you know make sure that they understood everything about the p and l and take real time to explain the way in which the job that they did fed through into the bottom line so you know you're customer service and you solve the problem that is basically you know and that person retains that is pure profit you know etcetera etcetera so just taking the time to explain how each role ladder up into the organization's mission and financials was something that they were very hot on and it does make sense because you can often feel completely disconnected to you know the the health of the company and not quite understand why it is what you're doing so if you can articulate that for people that's really good and then autonomy is the other thing so people people generally like autonomy they're like not being micro managed and you know again to come back to super cell which was the mobile games company you know their founding principle is that games teams kind of have the whip hand in quite unusual way so you know these small teams can spend months even years developing a title and it is in their gift at any point to say we're can it it's not good enough so you could you can literally spend years of company money and if you feel like the quality is not good enough then you can say no there's a there's a point when the game is out there in the world and it's not a your gift anymore and it's not that there are no management structures at all but there is a very very unusual degree of decent and autonomy at super cell to the extent that one of one of the teams that was working there has decided to move out of the main office is in a separate office in helsinki and and the ceo doesn't have a key so cannot get in and that's a sort of like just slightly bizarre but but very vivid example of what autonomy looks like to them at the start of the episode we teased you with a story about a factory where the production line was intentionally shut down multiple times a day that factory is in fact the toyota factory in darby england yeah so one of the visits that we did for the second season a post class was to the be car plant which toyota runs in darby and toyota is famous around the world for lean management and the principles that it has around continuous improvement and so on but if you go into the plant you see this come alive just just immediately in a way which is unmistakable it's it's sort of visible and audible it's the it's the way people talk quite you have people sort of with japanese snatch of japanese in kind of derby accents it's just a kind of strange auditory experience but when you're when you're in the assembly plant that their their principal at toyota is is this idea that everyone is empowered to come up with ideas for how to improve the car making process this is kai zen continuous improvement and every factory employee is expected to come up with two a month and so you're getting up to you know twenty thousand something like something like that in a in a month they have these famous and on cords which is by each workspace as the body of the car is moving through the assembly plant there's a cord that hangs down a bit like a close clothes line and you can pull that cord at any point and that is a signal sometimes it's a signal of something very trivial but that can also be a signal of something is wrong and we need to change change it and what happens is that gives your supervisor this supervisor has something like two minutes to get down there and sorted it out and if they if they can't then the whole line stops but that's fine because what they want to do is encourage people to identify and surface problems and the guy was talking to said that like when new people come onto the line their first and natural reaction if you think about this right here's this cord if you pull this cord you potentially get to stop the entire factory and you're signaling to your boss that i've got a problem and i can't solve it so that is quite cultural right i mean it's sort like you could imagine especially young people coming into the workplace wanting to impress their bosses like and i'm really gonna pull that cord so there's spend quite a lot of time socializing people to understand that it's it's important so the first shift they get everyone round the new person is there and is encouraged to pull the cord and everyone does this you know football on cr so kind of thing and they pull the cord and a big cheer and but everything is geared towards that and i'm gonna give you a little test here so there's in in this plant there are there are how many people are there two thousand people who who work there and i want you to guess how many times this cord is being pulled in a day i would guess somewhere between five and seven so six i said twenty and the real answer is fourteen thousand what yeah so it's just completely completely off the scale i mean like you just would would have no idea now as i say some of those pulls are you know you're you're kind of you know there's a slot you need a break for whatever reason or something like that but even if you strip those away there's this very very high volume turnover of kind of you know observations or this is a thing we ought to think about that then translates into a smaller number of suggestions for improvements that then goes through a process at at the company in general of kinda like do we do this do we not some of those some of those improvements upon are specific some of them get rolled out around the world and that numb that number is just like mind blowing to me it's like i i had i so out on on the guests and you know clearly they're very used to that they know that people are kind of being in low low single digits as a sort of first approximation so that was that was one very clear example of a lived culture so just to get these numbers right two thousand people there fourteen thousand times a day that's an average of everyone cup pulling it seven times a day that is right now i am going to like i will check this afterwards so you you'll hear from me again if i've got that but that's my that's my memory i think the important the important thing is the difference between you know you're at five zero six i was at twenty the real number is ludicrous higher and as i say that number does include things which would be kind of you know i i need to i need to take a break or whatever it is right sort of so so can can you fill in for a minute the important thing is that that if this is some sort of extremely kind of well functioning feedback machine that is also operating within the assembly plant and the two go together andrew's podcast is packed with examples just like this so there's a medical tech firm called str which is based in ka and that's in michigan and it it's a weird place because you have the divisions are named after body parts so you know you can you can start off in knee but if you're lucky you might get promoted to pancreas or something like that it's all very it's a weird it's a weird top place but the reason that it's interesting is that they have again a very clear sense of what culture they want they want basically performance driven low eco ego kind of underdog that's what they they just want this sort of hunger so it's very it's it's quite it's not a particularly c place i don't think but it's it's it's driven by achievement and this is the point on levers that they the guy i spoke to there as the the ceo called kevin lob who sort of can articulate this for himself but then has it driven through the entire company so one one sort of example which i hadn't come across before was just structural so when their divisions grow for certain size they split them in two and so at that point you're back to you're no longer number what number one in your market and you've got to grow again so they they're very very keen on organizational constantly sort of requiring you to think about growth and being you know the top dog in a market is not helpful for that all all of their hiring all their performance management is is based around that quite hard edged way of thinking about things so you know if you're if you if you're in sales and you you're ninety nine point nine percent of your budget you missed your budget that's it so it's that that kind of but as as i was talking to him you know and he went through absolutely everything in the company it was clear that they had just lined up all of these things in a way that that transmitted the same the same message and that was that was super effective so novo nord which is the company that makes and oz in copenhagen has a process called facilitation and facilitation is they don't like this word but it's basically is a cultural audit and what that is is basically sort of experienced employees some of them full time some of them not have the job of sort of going round departments divisions around the world and around the company they spend time with those units they interview the bosses and the people within them and the goal is to try and work out whether the values of the company are genuinely being lived and then all of those cultural auditors come back and report into senior leadership so there is some kind of independent monitoring of whether the culture exists when the ceo is not there which is a good good definition of culture and that's their that's their way of kind of ensuring that that actually things are working as they should you just mentioned it was very danish so do you think that culture is perhaps affected by where you are like if the japanese or danish or american yeah completely so i don't think culture necessarily has to be prison so toyota which is a very sort of you know you'd sort of associate japanese society with a kind of hierarchical way of behaving that hierarchy definitely exists it it definitely came off the company as when i was there but they just managed to make that coexist with a culture of feedback and what they like to call the inverted inverted pyramid so you know manager's job is to support the workers rather than give them instructions so i don't think culture has to be a prison but it definitely has an impact so actually that novo are interesting on this because you know the bosses there spend a lot time with the scientists they want to have back and forth they want to understand what's going on and they're quite into it's dutch soc called geared hof has these measures of defining national culture and one of them is to do with your willingness to challenge basically sort of hierarchy levels of hierarchy and people from different national can find it become more or less comfortable to be expected to go in and sort of talk and challenge the big cheese at a company so culture definitely definitely has some kind of impact there but there are ways around it again you know being being thoughtful about these things definitely helps ai we cannot have any conversation about the future of management without talking about ai here's andrew's take on it you mentioned earlier that daniel was both simultaneously terrified and in and fascinated by ai i wanna hear what you think about ai and what is it a good thing is it bad thing houses is gonna change culture teams management but i find it really hard to to answer how i you know the sort of ranges a possible outcomes are so big and the tech is moving so fast so i'm not sure i could give you a really sensible answer i could tell you the things that i worry about which is that you know the incentives are strongly to look for for for efficiencies and cost savings and particularly in that middle management layer that we spoke about earlier so you could you know you could well imagine and we are seeing it in some of the tech giants ready and some of the language that's coming out of you know duo amazon k and others that they're there's a sort of layer of what is being labeled as bureaucratic fat that can be slim down quite radically if you've got ai doing certain things i'm i'm i would be really worried about that partly because it sort of just reinforces an existing problem which is that you know managers already often have to do you know they're another job as well as manage so they're they're kind of already so you're by slim them you're not solving that that problem but also some of the some of the kind of behaviors which are bad are likely i think to be reinforced so i don't you know ai summaries of meetings are in theory sort good in practice if that's gonna be used for performance management as a way of kind of like what's the level of engagement you know what percentage of time did you spend talking during this meeting and that's somehow gonna feed into a dashboard we're gonna have even more people talking for no good purpose in meetings in order to appear on a dashboard so there's all those sort of unintended consequences from quantification which sort of just just just worry me i mean you definitely want to know if people are you know unhappy dissatisfied with their work not engaged and i don't think that you know six monthly surveys are the answer but that you know one to one meetings is the most effective way to get at how people is are talking and it's as opposed to you know occasional occasional surveys or always on pan that sort of trying to work out your emotional data at any time so i think there is quite a kind of well defined and effective way of working out what your team is feeling but it does require you to meet them so and you know another another problem with ai is that you you don't that incentive to stay at your desk and not to talk to your team is gonna go up if if you can just look at a dashboard and it's gonna tell you while you know team engagement is is okay it's like in a range fine i'll just i'll just sit here and not go out and i'll cut i'll come back to toyota because they they use this phrase which was really new to me and and striking which is they talked about the right to digitize and they're very very keen on something the japanese is gen cheek ga which is basically sort of the idea of management by walking around you go you go to the place and if you sit your desk and the data comes to you the incentives to go out talk to workers talk to employees see what's actually happening is muted and i could see ai doing that like in in a massive way yeah why why would i ever talk to anyone is there anything that you've come across in the in this in this two seasons you've done that's you've actually played in your own work yeah so i i i have i was managing in the first season and not in the second and i tried i don't know i mean i think people probably who i was managing found the whole thing laughable that i was dispensing advice on how to be a good manager what do i use i mean i think they're kind of just just little little sort of heuristic actually which are just useful so you know if you're in a meeting emma w has this d dia framework you know are we here to make a decision is it an input into a decision or is it for awareness and so you know whatever framework you use just understanding you know okay this is what the meeting is for and articulating that is really useful and and almost anyone can do that even if you're not running the meeting you can sort of ask the question upfront i had an excruciating experience at rod being trained on how to present and it was like massively uncomfortable but quite useful and you know i'm not gonna challenge for awards but i definitely there were a couple of tips there that were quite quite useful in terms of presenting one thing which i haven't done very well in this conversation is slowing down so you know pauses are really really important another is like when you carry yourself this is like an acting tip i don't know if you've ever acted out i never i never never did so you're supposed to imagine that there's a golden thread that runs from the top of your head the very top of your head and stretches up for infinity but is holding you up and weirdly once you sort of visualize that your your posture does sort of change you start to see there you go you know you start you start to hold yourself very differently but not unnatural so there are certain certain things like that and then the jaw is vital absolutely vital apparently so all of your kind of emotion comes through vowel sounds and it's really important to have an open mouth in order to develop for the vowel sounds to come across and to be rich and so there's a lot of sort of self p that goes on before presentations by people who've gone through these these courses where they're sort of you know mass their jaws and slapping themselves in the face in order to to be able to kind of articulate properly so anyway that was that was that was quite useful certainly diverting that was andrew palmer from the economist to the bart b column and host of boss class podcast three key takeaways i think number one great management is both poetry prose you need to inspire and organize middle managers aren't be bureaucratic fan they're the crucial connecting tissue in every single organization and thoughtful beats loudness every single time and andrew's insights are backed by research from google's project aristotle and psychological safety to danny can work on cognitive bias plus there's concrete examples like toyota's fourteen arrows and daily interruptions and claire hughes johnson's working manual show you exactly how to put this into practice so if you're struggling with difficult team members or wondering how to build a real culture or maybe just worried about ai replacing human management andrew's just given you a framework for thinking differently the best managers aren't the ones with the loudest voices they're the ones that think most carefully about their impact you can find andrew's boss class podcast wherever you get your podcast and you can read his weekly bart column at the economist we're gonna put links in the shout notes this is truth thighs and work we'll see you next week

coming up this week in work is imp syndrome really a confidence problem or a workplace one new research suggests its inclusion not insecurity that's holding people back and the six strategies you need to to find great people so is this smart hiring or just old school thinking and in the workplace surgery our job boards the only way to find great talent we are joined by recruitment experts the curve group to help one listener quit with noise and find great people this is truth lies and work the award winning podcast behavioral science meets workplace culture brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals my name is leanne i'm a charge occupational psychologist my name is a i'm a business owner and together we help organizations but amazing workplace we're gonna get to all of that right after this very quick word from my sponsors you like coastal leanne mh here's one from hubspot about sandler training and how they got their sales cycle in half using hubspot ai tools in half that sounds a bit far fetched stuff the numbers are actually pretty solid they used breeze which is hubspot ai tools suite to personalize every customer interaction and as a result their qualified leads quadrupled their click through rates jump by twenty five percent and people spent three times longer on their landing pages i think i'd brewery that using ai would kind remove the human touch fair point but not in this case in fact using breeze they actually enhanced it so if this sounds like something you want for your organization not yu the listener go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow welcome back this might be the last of the formal this week's in work not ever but just for july because in august didn't something me a little while we're trying something bit different now we love yeah well we figured you guys are all on holiday so we might wanna have a little holiday too or or at least do create content that feels a bit more holiday vibe and let's be honest you're not gonna wanna listen to a work podcast when you're sat the beach nor would we encourage you to so when said we're gonna bring you some bit lighter content that that you'll hopefully to enjoy when you're dipping your toes in the mediterranean absolutely or whichever see is your preference we don't these are available so we've got interviews with people about making work fun on tuesdays it's probably me anne in the garden with all the lapel mics not gonna lie probably at glass of wine i simply if this but you'll fine now if there's like more than one glass of wine because it could be even worse than it normally is anyway right now it's tuesday right now it is july and right now it is leanne favorite time of the i think i say your name on lia lia favorite okay well what have you seen this week i have a new word i do you know what you always announced as it was a brand new thing like you've you've never come up the new word every you have new word give us a new word not every but i seem to have been coming across food than recently yeah yeah yeah well better than numbers was my new word let's see what this one's like my new word is in intruder paradox right so i've got a guess up now so in true paradox the paradox is something which appears to be something is actually in something else is that what a paradox is mh yeah so in true zones it's we've main someone is in ent but they're not really protruding i i think might have gone down there called sa ikea love help us out it's you know what i'm not i'm not surprised it's one that i must admit i probably read a couple of times before i kind of understood it i should say well this i came across this through matt meade who was actually on the show last week yes i think so yeah just last week who posted this research article on linkedin i thought is kinda cool so basically in intruder paradox is being put forward it's an alternative term for imp syndrome so it's it's not the act of being put forward it is it is an alternative to impostor syndrome it's is being suggested it's been taped yes tables yeah i like that it's been taped yes hello like that got i feel like we're real corporate i know yeah tables yes yes that circle back to this definition suck idiot so impostor syndrome basically syndrome it says that the self doubt comes from within yeah the in intruder paradox is arguing that actually might be your environment that's making you feel like an outsider see now i wouldn't it's not me it's you but i wouldn't go with with that i'd go imp is internal x pasta syndrome is what i'd call it x pasta syndrome because now this is a difference routine mark is and psychologist market has make it up psychology psychologists have genuinely yeah but yours is more catchy you probably remember that way achievable bullshit yeah marketing and all that sums up marketing i'm gonna change rate by x by to catchy but bullshit there you go right so you could buy out more idea on catch bullshit dot com so yeah anyway sorry matt you were talking in intruder paradox yep so yeah matt match share this paper and basically suggests that workplace structures norms behaviors is the environment that we're in can often trigger feelings of being an intruder especially people who are perhaps from underrepresented or marginalized groups so women people of color we do hear a lot about past syndrome i'm probably a bit too much psychology psychologist interesting enough i've call it impostor phenomenon i'm not sure why i got called syndrome because it's not a syndrome is it what a syndrome what's a phenomenon was syndrome but i think it's syndrome is when it suggest there's something wrong oh so it's kinda like or different i guess so much something you might have contracted or been born with do you know what carrie i'm totally hijacking your bit here right i'm gonna shut up i usually do so when anyway pass syndrome that thing that you're not you're not good enough it's framed a person she was now like i'm just lacking the confidence so i'm not able to internalize my achievement that's on me so what these researchers were saying is what if the real problem isn't your mindset but actually the environment around you so what they did to understand this is they sample women forty women working in train working or training in medicine in canada so very successful women typically male dominated our environments many of these women were also from underrepresented backgrounds and they talked about what its like to try and succeed in a male dominated profession so what they found is that some women said they did feel like impostor but not because they lacked confidence instead they've been treated as if they didn't belong so ignored pastor over criticized and fairly turned regular monday right ladies auto told they weren't right for certain roles so one woman also said this the quote is not impossible syndrome it's you don't want me in the field so research you came up with a new term the intruder paradox to describe this just signs on the difference it's not that they're meant that they feel like they're impossible they're made to feel like intruders exactly exactly so it's what what the research an on do was describe some work workplace scenarios where one might feel in intruder paradox so if they say it subtle things like not not being invited to key meetings being told to tone it down getting less credit than others or being discouraged from going for leadership roles and over time that's having the impact chips away confidence so even if you believe in yourself these kind of cues yeah we internalize them in a in a way that the impacts are confidence of what psychologists call self efficacy the belief that we can do our jobs well so yeah i think that's the that's the kind of the summary of the research that instead of blaming the individuals to feel like impossible perhaps we need to consider the environment and actually work were but certain environments by making people feel like they're intruders so i guess a is this useful is it a word that we don't need is it actually describing what these women are experiencing i mean most of the words you come up with the words we don't need and you do you do admit to that that some of them are just like forest bathing and stuff which is basically just going out and and not be from behind your desk i think i think it would be difficult reframe because boston has been around what's the seventies so i mean were difficult reframe but i think it does more accurately show what people are going through and also just you saying that made me go oh oh yeah yeah no i can see it i don't think i don't think i've done that maybe i have in the past but i can definitely see how now it's not a product it's not the problem of these women is the problem of the organizational culture is yeah yeah and i think that's where and matt was a bit conflicted on this is well his original post which i'll leave a link to in the s if you wanna to have a a read of his take on it he was kind of the same like it i'm not sure if it's a new term that we need i'm not sure if was actually describing what it's describing is actually just talk about something that's that's more rooted in diversity and inclusion or rather ex exclusion is it really yeah impostor syndrome necessarily equally there's a lot of beef around impostor phenomenon that it is primarily found in women it is roost research off in the seventies where women didn't have particularly great rights in the workplace and we're very publicly and on a family undermined in in in work so there's some kind of tension around that as a term as well and also kind of how widely it's used and people will what kind of self diagnosis is having imp syndrome and actually when you look at it the kind of really debilitating aspect of imp syndrome it is much smaller in terms of percent of the population so i think it's a it was problematic to begin with i think this may be making it more complicated and potentially problematic i think what there's actually no doubt about is there are behaviors and systems in our workplaces that is making women and people from marginalized life backgrounds and potentially anybody who finds himself on on the wrong side of somebody more powerful these are environments that are impacting our ability to progress to develop our careers to perform really well and to feel confident and about what we do so i think it's interesting i just don't know if it's quite i don't know if it's the same thing you know i don't know i'm not sure i like them matt i have more questions from this than it questions answered yes so i saw on twitter or t or x or whatever we're calling these days this post i'm only gonna say the the person posting it that their name is first name is michael who's essentially six strategies about how to find great candidates how to interview great candidates this person has interviewed over four thousand candidates so they but you think they know what they're doing my concern with this was maybe it was a little bit too generalist realistic but i thought let's put it to you lee so i will give you each one of these six and then we'll go through one by one and you can tell me what your thoughts are but the first one is checking out whether they've got five essential qualities secondly is these assessment strategy g thirdly is the a player philosophy fourth is the interview process fifth is reference checks and sickly six is that a word sixth is documented you should be it's a great word is document everything now the ones that jumped out of mailing or number one this a player philosophy now what he says is a players make up just ten percent of all candidates but one a player can outperform ten b players wash your thoughts what's an player well he's saying basically an a player is someone who is going to go the extra mile who's going to be just so dedicated he's gonna shift your business so we're talking about in terms of open ai they just lost her i think it's something ai or was it was it wins there's one company who just lost their entire a player c suite all the people who are geniuses they've gone to google so today now talk about something else oh go now you talk about intelligence before you were talking about engagement which happens on the job not before you apply for it fair enough fair enough that i think maybe this isn't michael's problem this is me i think translating it but essentially what we're saying is that here we are would you if you were given ten candidates and you you could tell straight away from from interviewing them one of them was just incredible they were what what michael ko by and then you had six which were b players michael reckon one a player is worth ten b players watch your thoughts what's an a player i don't don't mean to be be like annoying but it's like well how do i instantly know they're an a player i shouldn't instantly know i should have a very thought out methodical recruitment process that will give me data back to tell me who is the most qualified person for that role well that has teamed me up nicely for the second point which is the process see it's almost like we we practiced this we haven't clearly we yeah you could tell we haven't so the number the second thing is said was have a great interview process now what way does this is two on one behavioral interviewers one lead interviewer at one listener and he says to got check impressions then they do it each interview two hours to deep dive approach two hours learning the life story of the candidate and van what makes them tick and then finally and sorry not and finally and this two hours is a stress test if they can't handle two hours of questions they probably can't handle the job what are your thoughts what's the job i don't know because this is just general like if you want to get great people this is my problem this is my problem and engine and awe respect i love michael and i love i love the majority of his ideas what frustrate me about this a little bit is it's like it's all very like buzz and i can see how it's gone violence like yeah all i need to do now is input to hour interviews and be like wharf and it's like for what though what are you trying to assess what job are you recruiting for i do i want somebody who's really good at answering questions doing my compliance maybe actually because i probably get asked a lot of questions but you could do there's gonna be jobs where it's like that's not what skill that you're assessing there by by putting somebody many in room and asking them constant questions for two hours hugely problematic as well in terms of anyone with any form of disability or health condition also when he was neuro diverse very problematic contention lawful for recruitment prices if you're not careful the other thing as well in terms of that they say the whole life story the person so they can figure out who they are there's loads of great psychologists who wouldn't do that because actually who you are is quite subjective in what you wanna share in the context of an interview is not therapy that's why people use psycho because they're designed to extract clues about our personality are ways of thinking that we can get and can then look at objectively so again i'm not sure this sounds highly problematic out the third thing and what do you think like this is third one is he tell every candidate upfront you're doing five hours of reference checks because then bad candidates will drop out because they like oh my god then probably gonna check up on me and great candidates would want the job even more because they know other businesses are sloppy where references but your thoughts on that well i mean maybe i mean yeah it's gonna have somebody lead is making up their references i probably let themselves out there i don't know where why needs be five hours i think but i think what michael's point is that they they're not just gonna go oh great i'll i'll i'll ring up this one person go yeah did greg just greg exists yeah did he work for yeah cool thank you very much apparently he's gonna go to every single reference and interview interesting graphic maybe for two hours as well i don't know alright mel love what else do you see this week quick quick because the dog looked look like is about to bark what i've seen this week the fear of being ordered back into the office is apparently affecting uk employee well being that's according to the guardian this week i don't even say anymore that makes sense fair enough okay so time for news so what else have they said about this new poll from hayes surveyed are three thousand six hundred uk workers and employers and nearly four in intense so their well is taking a hit just from hearing about companies tightening office rules quite a lot better isn't it yeah sorry i've distracted talking to a little doctor yes absolutely so hay three thousand six hundred one in four what was the what was the stats again morning in four in ten said that their well being is taking hit just from hearing about other organization's tightening between office policies okay you know how you destroyed it my last new segment yeah i'm possibly gonna be canceled for saying this but going come on guys go no same what it would just no right it's not affecting you remember our lips have give a shit before we talked about the ben diagram stuff you care about stuff you control a bit in the middle is what you need to worry about all all the companies are bringing people back to work so while get on your own work works just shut up and just get on with yeah yeah sorry no i i it's not quite that easy with it it's it's what's called participatory back with participatory anxiety oh i think our got anxiety you get anxiety about saying yeah is that irony i think so yeah there you go this each don't what i i get it because it's not just like it's big names isn't it it's big organizations that made a big song and dance like just post pandemic about how they're gonna stay remote first and on a hybrid and and we're seeing so many so many people being callbacks back to the office i actually i think it's it's a significant i think is a significant worry for somebody who have caring responsibility somebody who has a long commute given how much transport costs have gone up massively over last two years i think it could actually have a a real impact on somebody's life and finances as it's getting more popular is it inevitable at some point everyone's gonna get an rt monday yeah but i suppose that's worrying about you know layoffs and of course you're gonna worry about those but until it happens to you maybe i'm just living in a topic word world maybe i'm just a little bit privileged but i'm like why worry about something because ninety percent ninety percent of the things we worry about never even happened so if if just the sound the thought of all the people going back to work me i i'd look at it and go i'm not screw you up on the that's because you know or never impact you like you'll never it's completely relevant maybe although to be fair lose it have to go and get a job then perhaps i'll be crying my eyes out you employ at this point absolutely not people would i i do not ever if i come to ask you for a job yeah you listener do not employ me i'm terrible you're not you're you're phenomenal you just like to work not to walk to the bay of your own drum love don't you exactly and and that means having your coffee once an hour yes anyway actually maybe to your point this wasn't autistic that was gonna i was gonna share with you not from his article about rc mandates more generally and i think this actually from nick blu who posted about this so he quoted some data from a sw survey in december last year so december twenty four they people were asked would what would they do if their employer required five day return to office forty four percent reported they would comply mh and two years ago so when they did it in twenty twenty three fifty three percent reported that they would have comp complained so it's gone down so it seems though resistance is is growing potentially and which causes a bit of a pickle because if we've got fewer hybrid jobs and more people who will going to leave their job because it's not hybrid we might have a bit of a critical mass problem in the labor market at some point but equally i wonder just sometimes whether you hear all these audio mandates like the ones they cor article with the hsbc barclays santa the majority of organization the uk small businesses and majority of small businesses tend to have a hybrid policy do they not do you know one small business who doesn't have high but at this point no no mad do i some if else right maybe it's all nonsense but i think it is it's worth might reminding i think as a as a business owner if you're ever thinking about adjusting your policy whether it's remote hybrid or what that split is it's being aware that there may well be people in your organization who are anxious about that change before you said anything so either being very clear that you're not gonna change it it's gonna help with this these levels of anxiety or if you are gonna change it be very clear about what that means what the lead time is and ideally have some kind of consultation period in that as well clearly i didn't think this is very interesting if you did i will leave a link in the show i'm introducing a new segment by way i'm sorry but maybe it's just bit a tip that because you shot down mine was daniels yours fine but look forward to your letters i'm got a new segment i've just thought with new segment i'm gonna call it stories didn't have time for right and so in today's stories we don't have time for how about the boss of a multi billion dollar software company who went to a cold play oh my god my whole linkedin has been full of that today cold play gig if you've not heard basically boss to c gig was filling up his the the woman who's having an affair with which ironically is the head of hr that's the worst thing stuck on the big screen and cold play were like and chris martin is it a quick cold thing it was like oh they're either embarrassed because they obviously just went oh my god shit and just dived dived out the camera i said oh either is their shy having an affair turns out they were having an affair so if you wanna find out just search for coal affair and then look for not that one but the other one just go on to linkedin then there'll be every second post i did see a funny one day i i'm trying to find it's so i i can share it with you i am i am enjoying linkedin that moment it's getting quite quite salty and i'm here for it rough day for andy byron imagine waking up the whole world realizing you like cold play brilliant absolutely from brad mum brad well done well played my friend well played okay so after this very short break we'll get back with the hot take from incredible woman you wanna love her this week and also talking an incredible woman my wife and c host is also incredible and she's gonna be here with the world famous week i sergio or i put your questions to her we will see you in just a second hey you yay at you if you're enjoying truth lies work was another podcast on the hubspot network that i think you're gonna really really like you joined me yeah do was that this is this the mistakes that made me booker yes it is i've been binging this as well recently emo man ism interviews these amazing business owners about their biggest business mistakes and honestly it is fascinating how often these massive errors lead to the biggest breakthroughs through i just love how real emma man is i'm hugely helpful in her advice in her latest episode she's thirty four weeks pregnant and breaks down exactly how she is assist ty her agency so it runs smoothly while she's on maternity and of course as a psychologist i really appreciate how emma is normalizing failure is just a simple part of the business journey you can listen to mistakes that made me wherever you get your podcasts how welcome back it is time for our hot take where we bring in a guest to challenge the way we think about work and today is about something that nobody likes to talk about but everyone ends up we're dealing with people leaving our hot take day comes from becky sims she is the founder of reflect digital and ceo of the human first collective she has spent nearly two decades leading teams building agencies and helping businesses grow through digital strategy and behavioral insight and her view is simple we need to stop treating resignation like betrayal and start being honest about the fact that most people will move on eventually so here's becky sims and check out what you're talking about with aspiration digital really cool initiative i'm becky sims i and the founder of the human best collective is a group of agencies that put humans first in the way we work and the work we do we also have an initiative called aspiration digital which is where we inspire the next generation of digital leaders so we run events for six form students across the country which and we have a podcast called behind the future which is where myself and a c student interview people that work in sector to find out what they do and how they got into it and if that wasn't enough i also sit on the government's digital skills council as an external adviser help address the uk's evolving digital needs and to create a workforce that can grow with the digital economy then my hot take is that businesses is and employees just need to get over the secrecy around the fact that people will leave their job at some point to it's it's this thing it's a taboo isn't it to talk about it and you end up one day someone comes in and they just had you their notice and the people still like to do that quite formally don't they we end up especially if you're in person you get the printed letter and you're like whoa where did this come from and it's a shame like actually what what we do in our business and that i just encourage more businesses should do is is we talk to the team about being open about it so actually when i do it onboarding intro with anyone new that joins our business i always mentioned this i say now you could be with our business for the next five to ten years or you might be here for a year or two and that doesn't matter like one of our big things is that one we want you to make sure that you leave stronger and better than than when you arrived and make sure that we've had an impact on your career but two we wanna help you ti to be having a fantastic career and to do that we wanna talk about your career plans we wanna know what you want where you want to be and they will come a point where maybe that isn't with us and let's talk about that because we've got incredible networks we can help you set you up for that we can help make sure that you can find the right next step all the while also we can business plan around that as well so so whether that is that they want to go and work here hopefully it's not in a competitive business normally is that they wanna do something different and maybe we haven't got the space for them to do in our business but but sometimes they might go onto to a competitor and that that's equally fine because i think there was there was used to feel that there's this difference the employer has all the control but i really tried to say even like in people's probation period this is your chance to decide if you like working as much as it is our chance to decide whether we think you're right for the role and working in this this environment so it's the same when you talk about people's career prospects they'll come a point where maybe they aren't right in the role they're doing and then the aim is that you try and move them into the role that right but sometimes again it might be that they've kind of the out be the business is outgrown them or they've outgrown the business but it's all the while it's this kind of taboo do thing that we need to talk about behind banks closed doors and not to the person that really needs to hear it you can't do anything about it and you can't help the person and the same as well we really encourage side hustle people to be entrepreneurial so we recently lost one of my probably the most important employees we've had along the journey he was my side kick for a huge amount of time a fantastic guy si van but he was running a side hustle which we knew about which we supported him in and he thought on to do great things with that and i could not be prouder of him but actually we managed to have a really wonderful exit where it was at the right time for both of us we knew what was happening we talked about it as adult and and it's been perfect we've been able to get the right person in to fill his shoes it'll never be another si band but we've got a new person doing their thing and putting in their stamp on the business and it's brilliant it also means that if you end things well that you never know what happens next people go and work other places where they might refer business back to you but we've also had some boomerang people that have left gone and done some different grown and learned some new skills and then come back to us because we've got had at that point had the right role for them again in a small business you don't always have the opportunities to have the opening that they might want so they leave they go do something else and then when the time is right they come back i just think we need to get over the secrecy behind it and help each other from a business point of view and an employee point you to to have the best relationship while we're together and to help make sure that we can have the best relationship afterwards and that we're helping each other to grow and also when you welcome the conversation so that it's never this surprise if i'm going but you've got a chance to talk to each other and to look at is there another route so we've had people before that i want to said that i'm not sure this rolls why i want anymore and i'm thinking of this and we've gone you could do that here like we could build a pathway to get you into that role like we might we probably can't flick a switch overnight but we can make it happen actually one of our really long term employees she joined us she don't enjoy us as a summer summer intern and then a year placement student she then was working in our seo team for very long time but really enjoyed the client side of it so we built a pathway that meant that she moved into the client servicing team she's now one of our account directors and she's absolutely thriving but if we'd not created a space where we could have that conversation she probably would have left as an seo manager to go and find that pathway elsewhere when actually we didn't want to leave she's brilliant and she didn't really wanna leave either but it kind of forces those open conversations to go well we can help make this happen and we try and make it just easy through the career development plan i think the seat proceed behind it and those kind of and you know what when someone starting to interview i've got dentist appointment or you're suddenly going to the dentist a lot so like just talk about it and let's help you because also we might be able to make that introduction that is just what you need to find that next role in that company that might be better suited for what you want to do next i think there's gonna be a number of cfo listening and gonna go oh we're gonna be angry about this idea because they're thinking i'm investing all this money in rep recruiting training onboarding developing all of these these amazing talent and we're actively having a conversation with them saying well if you wanna go go what would you say to those people but i suppose that you were also actively helping keep them in the business longer because if they openly are telling you and feel psychologically safe to tell you what they want and what maybe they're not getting you can fix it i again the problem with the mindset where it's not okay to talk about it is that the person just sits there thinking well i just have to do the job you've told me i need to do and i can't there's no wiggle room and then it's well i don't really wanna do this anymore i wanna do that so i'll just go find that and they'll hear when i've found that and i'm going and here's my notice whereas actually if you've created the safe space to go you know what i've really been thinking about this and i've been having conversations with other people i really wanted develop more into this role providing that's a role in your business it's then in your power to help save that person and make sure that you can get them in that role when the time's right and people are pretty reasonable even if you can't make it happen overnight but you can start say well why don't if we have one day a week where we were helping you to do that and then suddenly actually from cfo point of view this is brilliant we're keeping people longer because we're stopping them having to leave the company because they want something but but we didn't know about before so yeah we we love feedback and again when someone new starts we talk about that so openly to say there is nothing you can't say to us about feedback we wanna hear it and and we don't let it be anonymous you don't let it be enormous no you can't do anything with anonymous feedback i don't know who you said it i don't understand the context like because people all put like a couple of sentences and you're like but that's really annoying because i i i don't know enough about that i can't do anything with that now so we don't let it be anonymous it has to be but then we've created a safe space where people can say things openly enough with their name against it and they know we're not gonna sack them tomorrow because they said something we didn't like or we didn't wanna hear it's like of course we're not we we need to hear this and we need to hear it openly so yeah no anonymous feedback so i'm just talk about aspiration digital right so from what i understand is taking younger people and getting them into industry so this sounds cool for someone who's maybe under the age of twenty five you bring them and they don't know where they're going what does it do you do the same thing if someone's maybe in their fifties and they're come into your business and you still say yeah you can leave if you want is it a generational thing talk me through it we're aspiration very focused on helping school age kind of as they're at that leaving age so sick form helping them to see what the roles in the digital space look like because absolutely young people they are more well versed in digital and tech probably than you and i they're quicker they're better they're faster they know all about it but they so often do not know the jobs that sit behind it and that there's these real jobs and careers and things they can get paid to do that are exciting and fun and brilliant and they don't know they exist and the currently the curriculum does not make space to tell them about these jobs so they're leaving school unless they've had parents or friends of parents that are in these roles or they have been super curious and found it they don't know so so that's what we do with the aspiration digital on the kind of career changes side of things i'm really prove that as well so i am to my other things i do there's a an organization called be the british interactive media association which is like the fa is to the to the football football world for the digital world i helped share their attract part of the of the organization where we're helping attract people into the sector partly at the young age which really aligns with aspiration digital but also looking at career changes because digital joy is amazing especially for people that might want more flexible working once they've had children being able to go and work in a career where it's not so tied to a desk having to be in an office all the time but actually things like our i'll work from anywhere policy we were chatting about earlier and those kind of things that a lot of digital businesses offer and the flexibility to work different hours etcetera is really attractive to people that might be wanting to find the right career to suit their lifestyle once they've got hidden and and all the responsibility and things that come with that and actually there's a little form which you might wanna put in the short show notes that people can can fill in so we are looking for speakers and people to get on stages to come and inspire students so we're at the moment on events are in newcastle and in kent but we are currently in talks with lots of different venues across the country so they're over the next year we kind of i wanna get across the whole of the uk i i don't see why students just in our back garden and should benefit from this we want everybody to to have the chance so there'll be opportunities to get on stages we'll be looking for sponsors so we run this as not for profit we aim for to find venues that give us the space for free so any universities out there listening you tend to be a good spot for us we've also got the peloton podcast behind the future so we're looking for guests to join us on that so there's lots of different ways but on that form we've kind of got a you can tell us what you wanna do and how you can help us so anyone that's interested and you don't have to be a pure digital business you just need to have something about what you do that's digital that that you could inspire young people to show them how digital works in the world of work and how they might be able to to aspire to do something like that so that was becky sims don't forget aspiration digital a link in the show notes to find out more about that but before we talk about that lee counterintuitive is this is she mad she genius what's what's your psychological take on what she just said she's a genius well there we go that was becky sims and lia so thank becky keep people told genius the anderson doesn't never called me a genius go i have definitely called you oh no i i like it i like it i like it look if we've got organizations that have authentic psychological safety which we go on about all the time and business owners has gone about all the time that will include people feeling being feeling comfortable but being open honest about what they want for their career what that path looks like and the reality is particularly if you're a smaller business you might just simply not have the roles available within your organization to offer that career pathway it might be that somebody wants to you know works for an agency and wants to go in house for a little while it might be they want a complete career pivot i i don't think it's it's a worst thing to ask people in and expect them to be honest because if nothing else it gives you an idea of succession planning and we've worked with clients at the worst thing about people leaving is their completely blind blindsided and have no no backup plan so the could be really smart way of actually helping your person and by doing that they're gonna give you a hundred and twenty percent whilst they are in your organization and give you a really clear view of this succession plan that you're gonna get any need tell in place absolutely are there maybe seven ways to leave your lover but actually is only one proper way to leave your employer late she did say now i don't know how you to react to this but becky did say that she doesn't allow an feedback if you do surveys you have put your name to it if you give some feedback you have to put your name to it now i pushed on that and i said that that's not the way normal people do it and she she said first of all i'm not normal unacceptable she didn't but i've added that but secondly she said look there's no wrong there's nobody's wrong it doesn't matter if you say this is all terrible because i want to hear it and i wanna hear your your name why i don't know how which way this is gonna go late what are your thoughts on that i mean again i think because because of what she's doing and i i'm and i i follow some of becky although approaches in in terms of how she leads her business as well but when you combine combine that with the fact that she's openly asking when people are gonna leave and she's not punishing for it i know she has a she has lots of interest employees are wrote there i think i've got four weeks a year where they can work from anywhere in the world four day work week four day work we joint trust is so embedded in this organization it's culture then i i i i can't i can't say otherwise other than i'm sure it probably works without you know actually speaking to employees and getting their view on it but yeah i think it's it's trusted at that level isn't that radical honesty if people aren't being placed at how experiencing true authentic psychological safety then i'm sure people will be happy to provide for you feedback without it being and minimized i would imagine that becky organization one in a million for being able to do that i wouldn't recommend it to other businesses but clearly becky does not need my recommendation she's smashing it i think that's probably an important thing saying it doesn't work for every business because as becky said in that conversation this like it's it's so important to understand that you can't just go out there and implement this go right we're doing feedback but it's non anonymous una anonymous it's not anonymous you can't go and do that you can't go and do the stuff that becky is doing right now because becky started before we work week in two thousand seventeen i think it was so even before the pandemic so she's been doing all this so she's got everything in place so every time she adds something new it's just building on a foundation of amazing culture it's not going all will sticks some pizzas down in the in the in the break room and hopefully they'll stop complaining about overtime yeah and that trust is compounded is now it's not just in one examples over and over again over time so yeah i mean i think i think it's a wonderful thing and becky create a culture that is is authentically experiencing psychological safety so if you're know a learn more about becky then definitely gonna follow on link in and if you care about the future of work then should and you should and if you don't then what you're listening to us for you weirdo if you'd care about the future work then definitely go and check out the way she's doing at aspiration digital it is a phenomenal organization that i believe is not for profit don't quote me that i know it's not a commercial thing and and she's going around the country's gonna a new newcastle she's totally going to manchester to possibly talking to one of our friends in man i think encouraged one i think you can get this one we're talking about and you always do this on air don't you she always drops something like that i need to just can't handle it back to becky so go and check out exploration digital going and also if you think you can help with that cause then click the link in the insurance which is a form you can fill it out and say what you can do and she'll i i she's such a lovely woman she'll be like yeah great come come and get involved so if you care about the kids once somebody said think of the children if you care about the kids then go and check out what she's doing now it's time to move on to a favorite time of the week it's a world famous weekly workplace surgery and but we're doing a bit different this week just a little bit we've got friends previous guests and also lovely lovely people who we're gonna help us with our with our questions this yeah we do we do because from time to time we do get some questions in from this which are much more hr based employer employee relations based i'm an occupational psychologist i'm not an expert in hr employment law that world is not mine i'm adjacent i'm not in it so i would never try to give you advice on on these things but i will find someone who can and that's what i have joined regular listeners will remember this organization we have some friends today joining us from the curve group if you don't know of them we you haven't heard of them or haven't listened to the episode with jeanette rum who's the ceo who talked wonderful things about reduced working a reduced working week yeah yeah then the curve group is an outsourced hr and recruitment solution provider and they provide loads of different solutions across the entire employee life cycle so you're talking like right from recruitment right through to maybe how some deep might need to leave the organization and watch too once they have so we have three questions this week with a more hr focused and that we'll be answering alongside our friends from the curve group so question number one what do you do when two employees are in a complete deadlock after a serious complaint we've had a situation where one employee reported another for inappropriate behavior including comments with racist undertone and unwanted physical contact the accused was shocked and wanted to apologize but the person who made the complaint that said they never want to see or speak to this person again they're not in the same team but they are in the same department a total separation isn't possible how do you move forward when one person wants to make amend and the other one just wants them gone this one definitely requires to hr in legal expertise something which we wouldn't necessarily always say that we've got the answer i would never say but the wouldn't say she got the answers here is catherine cog who is head of internal hr and legal at the curve group and here are thoughts this is a difficult situation and unfortunately there's probably no quick fix solution if you're happy that you've dealt with the grievance in the correct manner so whether it's formal or informal or you followed the right process i would then have a conversation with the employee who raised the agreements to explain to them what's being done and also that you're unable to separate them completely due to the department they work in wonder if you've offered mediation as an option so this can be run internally if you've got trained individuals within your workplace or you can use external support such as aca asos and it's an opportunity for both sides to explain how a feeling about the incident and agree to solutions moving forward and it's supported by an impartial party to help facilitate that conversation unfortunately you can't force an employee into taking part so if the employee who raised the grievance doesn't wish to take part then all you need to be seen to be doing is ensuring you've taken a reasonable step to separate the employee and resolve any issues that was catherine cog leigh lia elliott what are your thoughts yeah solid adviser catherine i think mediation is really a really smart idea and it might feel overly formal to go through something like this taken a small organization it can feel a bit serious on it but actually i think it it's it's often the only way that you're gonna really kind of get some kind of solution and on how to move forward if you've got a third party media this conversation between these two people as catherine said you can't force people to end inter mediation so if if this member of staff doesn't want to there's there's not much you can you can do about that yeah it's it's a real it's a really tricky one i think the only thing that i would also recommend that you do is maybe have a little think about how you're currently dealing with behaviors like this in the workplace in real time rather than wants a a complaint is made classic definition of culture worse behaviors tolerated are there other behaviors like this like i say these undertone that are happening more regularly than you might see or you might want to be happening i'm sure you don't want them to happen and that is to find your culture because when people feel safe in in these types of behaviors that's when they actually start to action them towards the people so i would have a think about that and go back to our episode we did with any doyle doctor any doyle the harassment doctor some fantastic advice now i'll leave a link to the insurance okay great so question number two is there actually a good recruitment tool for small businesses or are we stuck with job boards interesting interesting i run a small business team of seven we're trying to hire a couple of roles so far job boards haven't brought in much mostly under qualified or irrelevant applications not from monster dot com that's gone bust i'm wondering it's better just to reach out to candidate candidates directly are there any tools that actually helps small businesses find good people not just wait for to apply i of course have my opinions on this as some do also manage recruitment but in terms of the actual tools not my area of expertise i wasn't sure so i passed on your question to an expert please welcome liam reed he was head of recruitment operations at the curve group so yeah i think before jumping into the tools or heads headphones the first question what i tend to ask yourself is are you using the right platform to attract the right kind of talent so taking a step back is always a good start job boards can be hit on this especially for small businesses so if you are seeing a lot of under qualified or relevant applications it might not be about volume it might be about targets the right profile head ends a great option but let's be honest it is really time consuming finding a decent profile on linkedin one thing but then comes a hard part actually engaging them getting them interested and then selling the opportunity as mentioned there are tools out there that can help but it really just depend on the type of role for example if it's a senior a hire linkedin tends to be to go to but if you're looking for more an ops role or a junior role platforms lie indeed and total job cv library might give you better traction and i think this tends to get over locks but have you really tapped into that referral market your own network your team even friends or family of the business sometimes you candidate that a close by understand your culture and right for the business really just to recap before you start looking at platforms or tools get a really clear on the role who you're targeting what good looks like once that's dialed in you you got a much more effective approaching and go to market referrals well if you listen to nick hub sweaty start up interview about twenty episodes ago he was talking about he says that's how he gets most of his great people military referrals although i had read a couple books that sometimes you have to be careful with how you get referrals but and obviously knows what he's talking about yeah i've had huge success with referrals yeah particularly once you've kind of nailed down the roles that you need in your organization and how they will fit in together and your culture cult and know you behave is evolving and it can be really effective i got to the point i in the last eighteen months of of my job before i went self employed i think referrals was like ninety percent of our our field vacancies came from referrals there is a might danger of course because if you're asking people to refer friends or family typically it can be people like them you could then have some imbalance in terms of depending what your organization look like of course in terms of demographics or indeed experience groups think can start to creep in style with innovation all that but in my experience referrals have also worked out i really really well so i really like that that advice from liam and i think the only other thing i'd i i'd kind of add is having something a bit more proactive in place in terms of ongoing recruitment so i think they're they quiet hiring or something now in other word we just used to call it ongoing recruitment when we'd have talent pools of people who we thought were really cool and when we had a vacancy we'd pick up with them and see where they were at so you can actually be proactive in your recruitment whilst you're you're not in suit actively looking for vacancies can work out pretty well for a small business yeah i needs to be managed but also it could be worth looking at but i think liam right that referrals could be a really good starting place absolutely thank you liam liam reed from curve okay so question number three how does bank hardly leave work if you do compressed hours all this a great question and what i like about this is that i think if i'd asked you that you'd gone oh oh so my wife's returning from maternity leave and working compressed hours basically five days over four we understand how that affects her regularly but what about bank holidays now what we're talking about bank holidays just in case you never heard of it bank holidays are a uk thing used to usually a monday and you get like six holiday public holidays what we're talking about you my memorial day across the pond she's entitled to the usual eight days of bank holiday but now she'll be warm won't be working mondays and a lot of bank holidays fall on mondays does she just lose them i am so pleased we're to answering this i don't think i even understand the question yeah okay so once again we're gonna go over to catherine cog the head of internal hr and legal at the curve group because let's be honest we've got no idea this very much depends on what is contained in the contract of employment so specifically around bank holidays public holidays so i'd recommend speaking to hr department i'm a fair way to calculate holidays is to convert the full time entitlement including bank holidays into hours and then anytime needed to cover bank holidays is deducted from this this would then leave you with a proportion of bank holiday entitlement to use as when but one definitely need to speak to hr department about i understand what katherine said i still have we're never clue to do it it sounds to me like you need a spreadsheet and but a chat gp thrown in there or possibly just kathleen from the curved group i don't know but catherine from coke is the best option era she has a good point go to catherine or someone like catherine to get to go and get that advice don't use the things i talked about with spreadsheets and and chat gb that's not gonna work leigh what would work do you know what it never even crossed my mind attachment when we were talking dig you out on the show and she said about how they convert days into hours and i said well that makes lois more sense mh because that i gives you much more flexibility so yeah but it's clever hr people like that isn't it that figure out figure out the processes to implant the things that that yeah that we know psychologically and from the research is really positive for the employee experience so yeah thank you so much to catherine and liam and everyone at the curve group helped who helped to to put that together sam special shout out to thank you very much yeah if you enjoyed that let us know and we'll we'll include some more hr based questions in the future if you have a hr based questions send it in and we'll get it answered by a member of the team at the curve group as always i'll leave links to to the curve group in the share notes should you wanna get in touch and ask about working out that holiday allowance ar i still can't quite wrap head around i feel like i should say other hr agencies are available i'm not sponsored not not sponsored but i think that this this hopefully this will become a rare relatively semi regular thing because there there's lots of questions that come in they're just you know certainly i'm not qualified too and i i think you say they're better to defer to an hr specialist okay so that is all for now join us next tuesday in fact welch joining on thursday for an interview you know happens on thursday we got a great interview this oh my god i'm so looking forward to thursday's interview we i was a bit stars truck because essentially i'm not giving anything away i don't think here but there's a number one spot on the management podcast the uk and it kind of alternator the last six weeks between this person and us so yes welcome steven bart let us know he's not we got a great guy for you next week we are gonna be doing something differently as i mentioned in september in august lee yeah as of from next next tuesday we're gonna be taking a little bit of a a bit of leave as well which means that our tuesday are gonna be a bit lighter to a bit more chat so with that if you got a question you've always wanted to ask anna and maybe it's about living abroad maybe it's about working abroad maybe it's about working with your partner and how you make all that work without killing each other how to travel with dogs while working any questions that would we'd be for answering to how to do a pod on the road as you possibly on the road if you want some inside of podcasting secrets we we are we are not gate gatekeepers we will tell you everything we know open book yeah and then probably some of the little funny things in there as well we had some people reach out to recently who have got books being launched and stuff that we're very excited about so we might start some kind of some book club names yeah that's great yeah to know we still it's still in development but we'll we'll be here next tuesday in some form and what i can promise is that next tuesday will also still be in development it'll be it flows it'll be it'll be liquid we'll see how it goes lucy lucy so do the things you know subscribe like tell all your friends post about us on linkedin go on see go and check out anna linkedin she is killing it at the moment some of these posts comes out with i'll be honest some of the posts she did like twelve months ago to i was like oh that's nice these ones everyone that comes out i read and i quite often comment which is not like you don't often comment actually but what you will say to me is you're looking at me and you know what i like about your linkedin i'll actually know my name else you don't wanna like about your linkedin and i actually you wanna read your shit like thanks very much on the brew dog thing that we spoke about on the podcast and post about that and it kicked off yes we're getting sued by brew something more on that next week we'll see soon bye bye we are joined by hr and h am i we're joined by hr and recruitment specialist the curved group who will be doing something we're gonna get into all of that right after this very very quick break from my sponsors gonna get into all of that just we're gonna get into all of that right after this very quick word from my sponsors so here's becky sims from reflect digital and also check out aspirational so his becky sims to reflect digital and also aspiration digital work so here's so here's becky sims and check out what she's talking about with it so here's becky sims and check out what she's talking about with aspiration digital really cool finished stuff

one of the most powerful leadership philosophies in the world comes from a disney movie yes a disney movie and not just any disney movie frozen two frozen two is a great movie and our guest today is tim lu he credits a song from frozen with helping and lead fourteen hundred people through a global pandemic tim's entire leadership philosophy around the idea that everybody leads regardless of your title corner office or even perceive power i'm tim lu the ceo and chair of one of the largest law firms in the united states baker donaldson have really developed a passion around leadership and this philosophy that everybody leads in the context of everyone has influence and everyone has impact and can have influence an impact on others tim's approach flies in the face of traditional leadership thinking especially in the legal industry he talks openly about seeing a therapist he admits when he doesn't have the answers and he literally passes ceremonial baton ons to junior staff members to show he trust them to lead and in a world where leaders are told me more masculine this so called soft approach might seem to be a bit of a mistake but tim has turned baker donaldson around consistently delivering record financial years massively increasing employee engagement scores and now they boast a much lower employee turnover than industry averages so if you've been told your leadership style isn't bras enough or you've struggled with impostor syndrome in a senior role this episode is right up your street hello and welcome to treat lies and work the award winning podcast where behavioral science workplace culture brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals my name is leanne i'm a charge occupational psychologist my name is a i'm a business owner and we are here to help you simplify the science of whack as we said today we're gonna discover how tin uses a disney song as his leadership mantra why he believed acting like winds churchill is the key to business success and we'll here his biggest mistake that taught leadership with a daily practice not just a destination we'll join lia and tim after his very short break you like k leanne mh here's one from hubspot about sandler training and how they got their sales cycle in half using hubspot ai tools in half that sounds a bit far fetched go the numbers are actually pretty solid they used breeze which is hubspot ai tools suite to personalize every customer interaction and as a result their qualified leads quadrupled their click through rates jump by twenty five percent and people spent three times longer on their landing pages i think i'd worry that using ai would kind remove the human touch fair point but not in this case in fact using breeze they actually enhanced it if this sounds like something you want for your organization not you the listener go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow tim lu the ceo and chair of one of the largest law firms in the united states baker donaldson i've been in the role about six years and i've been practicing law about thirty five years and this philosophy that everybody leads in the context of everyone has influence and everyone has impact and can have influence an impact on others regardless of title or corner office or power that you perceive you have you can be a leader and that means we and then we need all get better at it every day so that's really what i i try to live out in leading my firm i noticed that as you say you you you run a huge firm but you've still call yourself a student of leadership why do you think so many ceos do perhaps stop learning when either they get that top top job or start to enter senior leadership i think that a lot of individuals when they get to that point that they're finally leading the big team that they wanted to lead or lead the organization or even lead the big committee at a nonprofit they think they've arrived and and and it's their they they've they know they have all the answers and that people should just follow them because now they're in that senior role and and i've just learned i'm not the the smartest guy around i work with a really like fourteen hundred really talented individuals and i wanna try to learn something from them every day and i wanna learn from other great leaders like i listen to podcast reading books and particularly you know i'm in the legal profession the legal industry and i read some things about the legal industry and legal industry leaders but i find most value in trying to get diverse views different views different types of industries and then take how can i take one or two ideas that i learned and and and apply it in what we're trying to accomplish here so i just think being curious it's just part of my nature because i don't think i know a whole and i'm just trying to get better and i think a lot of leaders do feel that pressure that they're meant mentor to have all all the answers i mean can you tell us about may be a moment where you've realized i i don't know what i'm doing here but this is how gonna approach it i think bland that's a great question because i kind of view that in that vein and know people have different views about this of sort of that impasse or syndrome that the people are gonna find out that i don't know what i'm i'm talking about and i've struggled with that too and i think it's just because you're particularly when you're not in the leadership role you're always striving for something you're continuing to have that ambition you or you find yourself in a leadership spot and then you look around i think people are looking to me and that was it really became pointed to me when the pandemic the global pandemic happened because i've been in my role about six months and and there wasn't a playbook right on on what to do next now ultimately the legal profession a lot of professional services firms did fine during the pandemic but i really had to ask myself you know why they're gonna realize i don't know what i'm doing because billy a lot of people don't know what they're doing with the pandemic but you know i wasn't prepared for this and i really landed this is kind of a little silly thing but it's a little mantra that i repeated in my head at the time the pandemic happened you know there was a the the frozen movie that was such a worldwide success there was a a a second frozen movie and one of the songs in there was one of the characters seeing about taking the next right step i think in the story arc she was struggling and didn't know what to do but you said i'm just gonna take the next right step and do the next right thing and our coo and i have the firm really landed on that as a way to say yeah we have our doubts and others may have doubts but we're gonna do the next right thing and really then talk about the why behind it and and it was interesting when unpack the story of that song it was really written by some folks who had really struggled with some depression and that's really you know something that helped them you know you wake up and you don't wanna get out of bed well the next right step is to get out of bed and the next right step maybe to make the coffee and then the next right step is to move on so that's really what i've tried to do when i getting those times of self doubt you know i need to have that confidence that my colleagues have put me in this role to do the best i can to help serve them the best i can and and certainly i'm i'm gonna learn i'm gonna i don't know anything i need to ask questions i need to get experts surrounding me that do know it but just to take that next right step so helped me i think as she said there's there's pressure to always have the answers when you're the one in charge i mean having that having that honesty that i don't what to you on get engage the experts that will help me and i'll take that next right step have you found in your experience that humility helps people trust you more or less in order to help lead effectively i think some people have said you know it was like herding cats or whatever i don't know if that's true but i really have to build those authentic relationships i i need to spend that time you know it was like all like breaking bread and sharing things or churchill called dinner table diplomacy getting around the table sharing things learning about each other what drives them what what are their ambitions because of very high functioning professionals around and so if i build those relationships and they trust me and i'm authentic about no challenges i'm going through or questions i want their feedback that that may make a decision that they don't agree with but that at least they understand where i'm coming from and they understand the why behind it and i found that that helps now it doesn't always mean that people don't leave for whatever reason but i just have found that's so invaluable and but it's not only even at that high stakeholder level like the shareholders the the owners of the firm but even walking the halls and talking to our business services and staff professionals and just listening to them and understanding them and then then they get to know me and know my heart and know what we're trying to accomplish and we're really kinda help them thrive in their career ambitions i think that's just it helps organizations you know perform even better so tim talking about churchill dinner table diplomacy idea and this is really really good because it's so actionable you're literally just having meals with people but with intention now what tim's describing really is a difference between transactional and relational leadership so he's genuinely investing in understanding what drives his team and he does this at every level not just with like the fancy shareholders but when he's walking the halls or talking to reception stuff now that's how you build a culture where everyone feels like they can lead and notice as well tim's vulnerability he shared that he sees a therapist that creates psychological safety for others to show up authentically too so if you're thinking my leadership style might be a little bit too soft tim is about to show us the business case how is that influenced the organization's you've worked in having that approach to leadership which is quite unique in the industry that you're in well you know like i said it's it's interesting you know we've been able to have several years of record years financially but more importantly on like engagement surveys with our colleagues and building market presence but that all comes back to to to my view to our people and really pouring into them speaking into them as i said that they are a leader in their area of expertise if they're receptionist if their legal support coordinator or paralegal or or the the lawyer has the biggest book of business in our firm they've they they've if if they're a leader and if they step up and get better as a leader then we're all gonna move forward together and and you you know it's a challenging complex world you know it you see it and certainly across all geographies and all industries a mental health and wellness is something that people are struggling with more today than they did say five or six years ago and it hit the legal industry even more so in addition to giving the skill building and the tools to help in the day to day professional advancement and professional development we are really focused on we call it baker well because everything has baker since our firms donaldson and baker well we have baker fit things like that but we've really be intentional about des the fact that many of us need you know mental health wellness counseling tools tips and and that that goes to your point leanne of of showing up as your best self i mean i'm very vocal i talked to a therapist every six weeks or so and that kinda try to help des stigma digitize it to i need to say space to be able to process some things right and so as we encourage our colleagues with that with coaching with access to therapy and just a safe space to talk i think it helps them then better perform and it helps the organization do better so it i'm convinced if you really focus on the people and caring for them then they're gonna show up their best and care about the organization they're gonna have bigger purpose in what they're doing and then the organization can thrive tim's built this amazing culture but here's the thing not everyone's gonna buy into it immediately and that is really important for leaders to understand when you're changing culture especially in traditional industries like law you're going to get resistance people are going to test about your serious about these values and i think what we're about to hear is really really important because tim had to prove that emotional intelligence and relationship building actually drives business results it's not just about being a nice guy it's not about being a nice guy does this falls dichotomy that you're either a results driven leader war off or a people focused leader and tim showing is that they're the same thing and research backs up as well so commercial intelligence isn't just good for leaders it's really good for teams leaders to are self aware emotionally regulated and able to connect with others don't just perform better themselves their teams do too in fact emotional intelligence has been found a key predictor of team performance job satisfaction and organizational commitment so when tim leads with empathy it's not distraction from results it's how you actually achieve them coming up after this very short break we're gonna hear how tim deals with the skeptics how to handle biggie goes at work and his take on mark zuckerberg leadership style hey you yeah you if you're enjoying truth work was another podcast on the spot network that i think you're gonna really really like you joined me yeah was that is this the mistakes that made me booker yes it is i've been binging this as well recently a man ism interviews these amazing business owners about their biggest business mistakes and honestly it is fascinating how often these massive errors lead to the biggest breakthroughs i just love how real emma man is and hugely helpful in her advice in her latest episode she's thirty four weeks pregnant and breaks on exactly how she is assist her agency so it runs smoothly whilst she's on maternity and of course as a psychologist i really appreciate how emma man is normalizing failure as just a simple part of the business journey you can listen to mistakes that made me wherever you get your podcast podcasts right let's rejoin the interview and here how tim handles the skeptics we see a lot online on the media you're about very different styles of leadership very c styles of leadership very masculine styles of leadership to you know pull up a matter in mark zuckerberg berg i call from more masculine and energy do you ever get any pushback from from people that maybe this is a little bit too soft or weak or i guess probably more early on when i first started in the role that because i i i haven't like i mean that's just been who i am and of course to some extent the board selected me as a next ceo knowing that that was kinda how i am but i did have people saying and like i said we had really plateau in several instances but for many people were plateau financially so they were like had their eyes on it so we're gonna be able to turn this ship around or turn it to the right direction and so when i was as you said some of the soft skills or or things that say well that's not important how we're gonna drive more revenue and drive more profit i i i did have to explain why i thought this was important and why emotional intelligence was important in not just in the leader of the firm but leading teams engaging the teams and in better serving clients i think it it's it's you know relationships internally are important but the relationships externally with our customers and clients are are equally important and those are they database soft skills but they're skills that help differentiates you in serving as a trusted advisor to your clients so definitely got some pushback i'd listened to it i explained why my philosophy was and that you know if they didn't wanna participate in some of the you know training that we did or some of the opportunities where we had you know town halls about the mental health and wellness they'd that was their choice not to participate i think over time that they've seen how it really does work in and glove in you know helping the firm thrive and have their financial performance i think people sort of have a little bit more buy in but there's still some folks that could care less and they just think that's just tim talking about whatever but they go on their way i mean and they're and they're still i mean they're they're productive person in the firm they're not d anything they're not you know trying to stop what we're doing but that's fine they can decide to you know take advantage of opportunities or not but but yeah you're exactly right a lot of people that's just the different mindset i think with that a different mindset there are some leaders that are a little bit addicted to being the most powerful person the room is smartest person in a room equally there's gonna be times where you will be the smartest room person in in the room tim you will be person that needs to to give direction or offer that to people who are looking for direction i mean in those moments how do you how do you exert that power in a way that motivates people rather than then perhaps causes fear or what are the more negative consequences i don't want it to come across like this is some nirvana and everything's perfect and is everyone just growing in the same direction all the time i mean that that they're are very difficult decisions that we have to make certainly in the pandemic we did and and anytime you have people involved you know and it may be individuals that will probably thrive in other organizations and you have to make those hard decisions and go ahead and and do that i mean you can do it with grace and compassion and we really try to do that but i think the biggest part of it for our colleagues is to know the why and to hear that it was really thought through what the decision was we think we're making this decision in the best interest of the organization as a whole and ensuring our longer term success and while for some individuals or for some who don't think it's the right decision try to understand why we're doing it and and and and again to understand the thought process i'm very much involved wanna have our board engaged on those really tough decisions so that they can help you know under explain it and and and and unpack that for people but that's that gets back again too i don't think it can't be this type of commanding control and just do a decision and if there's fallout outlet let it happen i've gotta listen and and and and and i'm very open and if some decisions we've made you know i have a even young attorneys or even some professional business services staff reach out and say i really don't agree with this kinda i can i talk to you about it and i listen to them and i kinda explain more what we're doing and and most often they say said well i understand i don't necessarily agree with it so you definitely because i've got to lead this organization and it can't be what one of the fourteen hundred individuals best impact you know how that helps them the best it's gotta be for the good of the organization but just being accessible and talking through it i think is also important and there are hard decisions and people disagree with it and you know in some instances they may decide to leave because i don't think this is the right place for them and and i gotta you know just i know early on i would really fret over everyone who left and think it wasn't an indictment of me but over time i realized that just people thrive in different situations different circumstances i love what we're doing here and may not be for everybody so but it is it's something that i think leaders have to be really intentional about talking about the why behind some of those hard decisions how do you humble a leader who maybe is a little bit more you go driven than than fits within in the culture of the organization that you're building it's another great question and it and it is it's a it's i think it's hard work it takes time and intentional i do love that again that churchill model of breaking bread and sharing things around like the the diplomacy around the dinner table now i'm not sitting there saying i'm smoking cigars and drinking brandy like he did in all hours of the night although that was great you know for him so i really do try to build those relationships particularly with some of the individuals who may be the the have the sharpest elbows so to speak and and then at times that may lead to they've taken some actions that are kind of against our values against our culture and it's me then following up hopefully having built a relationship to say hey this is not acceptable in what we're trying to do we'd love to get you some coaching some counseling to really help through this and in some instances they take that up and they they learn from it and they get you know they figure out some of the reasons why maybe they lash out at people and and things like that some instances they do it or they just refused to do it and we just have to you know again with grace try to counsel them out and when you know you're kinda turning around the finances of an organization and one of your top producers is that type of person it it's hard to make that decision but it does you gotta search true to your values and so we've done that and then ultimately it's net positive and others see that you know you don't just cocktail to the person with the biggest ego but it's a balance it's definitely a balance and it's gotta be handled with tact and and with authenticity i think now sometimes with ego driven leaders you just have to encourage them out of the business and it's kind of reassuring to hear that it's not all cupcakes and rainbows yeah talking of real life a common fear i think phil is this if i empower others what if they make mistakes what if they off in the wrong direction and tim's about to give us this brilliant concept called jump balls which is essentially how do you give people leadership opportunities that won't sink the ship if they get them wrong so basically what tim saying is it's risk managed empowerment to creating these safe to fail experiments where people can practice leadership skills and the evidence on that is actually really clear experience alone isn't enough without structure and feedback most learning from real world challenges is patchy and a bit unpredictable will actually drive the leadership development is deliberate practice so repeated focused effort in a safe environment with immediate feedback that's what actually turns experience into expertise tim's got this amazing story about lit passing baton ons to people in front of the whole leadership team it's such a visual way to show trust and accountability and physical symbols do actually matter more than we realize for behavior change so when you make empowerment tangible in this way like tim is it shifts how people see themselves and their role you mentioned that you believe that everybody can lead and that this leadership period required at every level of an organization how would you make space for other people to lead without either losing going off track the direction or or what you're trying to achieve how do you allow that to happen without derail the the main direction of an organization i learned from a really great leader who talked about this idea of jump balls which i guess is like in basketball you know that used to do jump balls but that if you're trying to build those next generations of leaders to look for those projects look for opportunities that you know probably you're not gonna derail the organization if they dropped the ball but gives them an opportunity to step up and show their leadership so we've been trying to be intentional about that around baker donaldson in the last few years because we've been very focused on succession planning for all of us for leaders for key client attorneys so that the the you know the client knows they've got people the next generation coming along and so that's one way we've done it is to just look for some projects some areas that they can try to lead and and not something that if it goes off the rails it's gonna really you know sink the ship of like that jim collins idea of you know shoot bullets before cannonball balls give some jump balls give some opportunities and if it's a bullet hole you're gonna be able to fix it if it's a cannon hole then you can you might be some trouble and then some of it is just as as individuals step up and they do show that they're executing well it's then expanding that in that that responsibility expanding their territory of where you're giving them visibility and and helping them to lead and then if it does get off track a little bit you sometimes have to pull that back do some coaching do some counseling i've had that happen before and but i think again all all this really comes back to intentional i think and really intentional and i'm trying to i talk a lot about pathways i want all of our colleagues to see that they have a pathway to achieve their career ambitions it's gonna be different for different people and for some it's to really continue to elevate up you know in like in our par from an associate to a shareholder to an equity shareholder owner but even business services and staff it may be that bigger promotion that bigger responsibility and so we're really trying to be intentional about giving people opportunities like that is says something small that a ceo can do that really sends a big message that shared the leadership is a reality in this organization i think just being willing to have somebody else even step up and have the microphone so to speak right we have several individuals we have a chief growth officer who's helping us grow and i could very much just be you know micro manage that and every time we have a new you know lawyer or that's or a group that's gonna join the firm that i would be right out in front of that but i will i i encourage mark to do that and and to be out in front and that just shows you know tim's trust trust me trust mark and marks out there a few years ago even with our leadership group i wanted to continue to push this idea of shared leadership and empowerment and we actually i had a little you know baton baton like the running baton baton runners you know you're passing the baton i i did little runners up that i did little baton up that said something like i'm passing you the baton and had my name on it and in front of the whole leadership group i called some of our business services leaders up to just kind of let them see the visual that i was i i trusted them i was giving them the baton to lead now they had responsibility and they had accountability to lead well and there's times you then have to step in and say you know you're not really you're not doing this the best way you could be doing it but that was just a visual to say i trust them and do that and i think that i think you know when we do town hall meetings virtually i try to get other voices to speak into it so it's not just hearing from tim so there's i think there's it's it's again it's how you show up and how you're empowering others to do that and and and there's a part of confidence in that right because if you come from the space of i want everyone to think i'm the you know i'm the big leader i know it all i'm leaning all then you don't really feel like you wanna have someone else take the man to talk but but i that's just my style i just i think we've got so many smart people around here and they need to to shine and thrive to help us get better you mentioned that there's there has been some trial and error and i think that's just the way it is when we're portraying something new what's the biggest mistake that that you've made as a leader it was interesting after it was a couple really hard years as i said like we had about six months before the pandemic where we were trying to turn some things around already so we were already in the trenches really having to make some hard decisions and then the pandemic came and we came through that and then you know that lasted for whatever eighteen months and but we'd had two or three record years in a row and and then i i think some extent you're kinda like okay we can take a pause and everyone sees that what we're talking about is really working and so then i think i jumped the gun and just gotta little complacent and just started taking some actions without getting the full buy in and then people are like whoa whoa whoa what do you doing are you trying to pull something over on us when it was just one of those like well personally i mean i'll be honest what i was feeling like well look we've shown we're making all the success you know trust me on this but that was just a wrong attitude to have because we just say it's a constant daily intentional actions of and and intentional relationships are built day in the day after day right now yeah there's some grace about some things because of the success but i just tried to i tried to move a little too fast on some things that needed some more buy in and support and so that was good lesson to learn just as a reminder that i gotta show up every day and figuring out how am i gonna make a a big impact today and not just assume i can do it by coast so that was that was a that was a challenging time but i had to reflect and and grow from it and learn how to get better in in leading and what do you think your team learned from seeing you go through that process from that miss step to how you handled it to them putting things back on track you know i think i think to some extent they felt a little the same way i think they were exhausted because there'd been a couple really you know busy years and that a lot of this is all around change management and of course everyone's re to change they like things kinda status quo and i think maybe even in the legal profession it's even worse about like they don't want change and i think to some extent they were like first they were like well no we've been successful we gotta accelerate change even faster but then i think i was help helped us all kinda of realize that it it's just a continuing evolution and we had to continue to build by and so i think when they saw that and and and heard my heart as i was thinking about it and i really realized that some of our colleagues who were kind of getting in and getting a little bit aggravated about some things that they were right and and then so we just had to kinda learn and lived through that and and look we all struggle with still to this day and and it's just a matter of being that it's that it goes back to that open transparency and being able to share in safe spaces with you know some of the other executives when things get off the rails in their in their area of focus something you you're leading there an organization more than a thousand people people will still treat you no matter how example is a leader you are as this ceo the big boss how do you react to that and how do you stay grounded whenever everybody's trick treating you on you know you're in the on this pedestal yeah it is it and that's an interesting thing and i know the leaders listening will realize is one of the things that was an odd thing to me was i would say something early on i'd say something and then people would say well tim said this and so then it like became a life of its own when i was just in chi chat you know like the i mean and i'm like no i'm just tim i'm not you know i'm not saying this as a mandate it's just a an observation so i have to be really you know cautious about that and particularly about somebody may have a complaint or a criticism of an issue that's in another one of our executives lanes they're swim lanes it's not really mine and i would say oh well you know that that is kind you know maybe like i don't really understand that either when i was just trying to process it and then it became well tim didn't agree with what you know jennifer said and i had to be really had to learn do hard not you know hard knocks about that to some extent with the high powered professionals i work with they don't ever let you get up on a pedestal is there a person or certain people in the organization that will maybe be the ones that will come to go i'm not sure this landed well or you made this comment in our people we're running it are there people that kind of feel that safety to to give you that type of feedback absolutely and that is so critical and it's vital because like i said i could get in like an echo chamber or i could i i definitely have blind spots and and we do our executive team i think is very open we're very safe to share i with each other when something doesn't land something doesn't come across as we thought and then i do have some of those high powered professionals who i really trust their voice and their and their feedback i mean i i i trust all of our colleagues but there's some that just know me and they're just gonna say hey tim you know that message is a little flat it didn't go into enough details about why the decision was made and so then i'll put together a follow up i mean i did that happened just last week where we i had to make a decision about something and talked about the why but then people were skeptical about what was a hiding so like i said nobody's gonna let me you know get too behind my horse and and that we weren't hiding anything but i just had to then do a follow up email about some more details about it so yeah that's so vital and again it goes back to what we talked about earlier i have to be intentional about building those authentic relationships so and and being open to feedback and criticism to help me then listen to that when they bring it to me and then act on it so i know there'll be people out there and maybe you've had them in your life that maybe have mistaken this leadership approach as a weakness as a soft touch how do you find that balance of leading with humility but also with authority it really is an intersection of both right it's humility but with authority and it's making the tough decisions and i think that just comes from people seeing that you are making those tough decisions decisions that they don't necessarily agree with and then seeing that you're you're authenticity behind it the why behind it as i was talking about earlier and and you do have to make those decisions and and be very vocal about it and stand in front of it i mean one of the things i think about i kind of a little acronym i think to myself every day around the word courage and the o is out front i need to be out front i need to own this i need to recognize that there may be you know twenty percent or fifteen percent or whatever that don't agree with the decision but i'm doing it based on all the information all the feedback and then acting you know and and moving forward i will say it's been through trial and error a lot of the feedback i got in my first several years and i still get is about being more decisive and that people trust you so go ahead and do it because sometimes i wanna get maybe i go too far on the spectrum of getting too much insight and from other people and getting ideas so i really have to work hard at it it's a muscle that you really have to have to work on because maybe i do come across at times like i'm not making enough of the harder decisions and being vocal about it so i it's just a lifelong journey of working at it and trying so we've covered the philosophy we've heard about the practical tools what really separates good leaders from great ones it sounds cheesy but leadership start with self leadership and what tim about to share is really honest about what it takes day to day to show up as your best self for fourteen hundred people there's this great quote by jim ro there are only two pains in the world the pain of discipline or the pain of regret and which one you reckon tim favors you mentioned discipline a couple of times and i think people use that word mind talking about leadership what does discipline in leadership mean to you it really starts with me with tim and really trying to show up for my colleagues i'm just i'm i'm really honored to be in the role that i have and with this firm and the people and and even like i said we're on the road a lot we've been doing these road trips and so it really starts i call like my my daily disciplines of tim you know that i gotta get up and i i wanna walk or run i typically run but then we were in our louisiana offices this week humidity of a hundred percent and temperatures in the nineties so i i did more walking than running outside but it starts with just at some movement being outside i get i get energy from being outside i love that i tried to do a little reading every morning i tried to do a little journal every morning and then i try to eat healthy and particularly when i'm on the road like trying to like it just little silly things for some people but for tim i like i gotta say i have no desserts and and no bread and try to just live by that or else i would just you know could have challenges and then it really starts the night before trying to get to bed early not staying up and having you know that extra second or third glass of wine or whatever it's really those are things that help me show up better for our colleagues and i know some people say sounds pretty boring you're going to bed at eight thirty or whatever but then it helps me show up and i'm getting up at four thirty and ready to go and and do that so and and and just do that so that that's that's sort of the personal discipline and then i've just in a real believer of you know there's there's all kinds of different ways that you can keep up with to do lists and things like that but i've gotten really addicted to this microsoft to do and you know i may think of something while i'm walking that i gotta get done and just being very disciplined of you know trying to work through that list and trying to prioritize it too that's another challenge i have of doing what are the most important things i can do and then trying to delegate to others and i guess the last thing i do as far as it's the context of the organization and i read this from somebody else too like every night i tried it back and say what were three wins today you know i had things maybe go wrong that i wanna learn about what what were three wins and then i think about what are gonna be three wins tomorrow and it really helps me to try to prioritize like for the tomorrow like one of them is to show up and be fully engaged in my discussion with you leanne i mean that's something and so that then is a priority for me today and so i don't know that's really helped me just stay disciplined and focused i wanna ask you about your book which is coming up very very soon everybody leads what can we expect from it is there anything in there that we haven't touched on our conversation that people can afford do i'm really excited you know it's a layer of love and i'm just glad to get some of this launched out in the world it's really just a lot of really try to build around practical ways that individuals can better lead themselves first and then as their influence grows how can they better lead others and throughout it all there's sort of this under current of how can we keep building resilience because it is hard leadership is hard and so i it's just been fun to put together it's a lot of lessons i've learned from leading here at the firm it's things i've read from other you know great leaders great authors and then how we applied it in our own special way and and even learning from some of our colleagues so hopefully it would be helpful for someone if you're really looking for a how to guide if there's all that like you said there's all this research out there about how to do things but we try i try just make it this is what we did this is what worked this so what didn't work and maybe it'll work for you and i know our listeners will want to learn loads more about you as the best place for them to go yeah i'm at baker donaldson dot com b a k e r d o n e l s o n and then i've got a website around everybody leads the nonprofit part of it everybody leads dot org i'm on linkedin and instagram and all that so i'd love to love to meet you and interact and you got podcasts it's called everybody leads or i guess i'm not creative everything's everybody leads but it's really built around talking to executives from companies and and executive directors from nonprofit about their leadership journey and i'm just i'd like to do because i just to learn from them so that was the amazing tim lu from baker donaldson three key takeaways here i reckon leadership isn't about having all the answers is about taking the next right step secondly authentic relationships drive real business results this isn't fluff and thirdly everyone can lead regardless of your job and tim's i ideas are immediately actionable jump balls for developing leaders three wins for daily focused dinner a table diplomacy relationships you can start using them tomorrow you could start using them today yeah tim shows us that leading with humility isn't a weakness he made really tough decisions about high performers who didn't fit the culture but he did it with grace and actual authenticity so of you are a new manager looking to be a great leader or maybe an experienced leader who wants to change things up tim's just given you the permission to lead differently and the business results speak themselves you can of course find tim's book everybody leads wherever you get your books and connect with him on linkedin or go to everybody leads dot org this is truth lesson and work we will see you next week