Jen Brown: Hello to our listeners and viewers. I'm Jen Brown, a leadership coach and consultant with Journey of Grace Coaching and a former U.S. diplomat where I had the pleasure of serving with my good friend and colleague, Hugo Rodriguez. Hugo, over to you.
Hugo Rodriguez: Thank you, Jen. As Jen said, my name is Hugo Rodriguez, also a former diplomat, currently a professor of practice in leadership and a leadership coach. And today we are so happy to bring you a guest. Jen, tell everybody who is joining us today on the report.
Jen Brown: We have a wonderful new friend and colleague, John Walsh, who is joining us from across the pond. He is the co-founder of Breakthrough Change Management, where he has spent over 27 years helping leaders and teams and organizations improve their confidence, improve their teamwork and their leadership. His work has taken him across many different industries from nuclear defense to manufacturing and construction. He has worked with over 180 organizations. He's an author, and we're going to talk about that coming up here soon. He is also the host of a podcast where I had the pleasure of getting to meet John. And that was Let's Talk About Confidence. So today
Hugo Rodriguez: Yes.
Jen Brown: we're talking about confidence with John. John, thank you for joining us.
John Walsh: Thank you so much, that's such a lovely introduction. Shucks, I think is where I think I was getting slightly embarrassed.
Hugo Rodriguez: yeah.
John Walsh: So it's great to
Jen Brown: So
John Walsh: see you again, Jen. was great conversation last time and look forward to this time.
Jen Brown: Exactly. We had such a wonderful conversation about the role of confidence in leadership and in organizations. And let's start with the basics because your foundation is that confidence is not actually something we have to be born with. So how did you come up with your definition of confidence and how does that
Hugo Rodriguez: Exactly.
Jen Brown: show up in leadership?
John Walsh: I think I was watching people, Jen, particularly over the last couple of years, it's probably always been there. But I just noticed that more more clients were asking us to work with their people and building their confidence to do certain elements of the job. And it was like, you know, sometimes when you see something so clearly, you think, wow, that's what we've been doing over the years, basically equipping people with knowledge or skills to make them feel more confident. But suddenly you realize that, wow, that... That should be our starting place. Instead of building our competence, we should go, let's start with confidence, then build the competence, then we can move into leadership, then we can move into the team. So it started like that. So the definition was simple. was, you're not born with it. Nobody's born confident. We learn that it's like any skill, like any muscle, we've got to use it. And the more we use it, the more confident we become.
Jen Brown: Interesting. That is that's a disruptive thought, if you will, in the sense that organizations start with competence, right? They start with the technical, we need to get the job done. So
John Walsh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: You can't do that.
Jen Brown: I'm curious, how do you shift that mindset with leaders and the organizations who are bringing you in, knowing they want to see like a tangible outcome from trainings and the work with you?
John Walsh: I think it's reverse engineering. I think if we went out and said to people, hey, we're gonna come and do some confidence training. I there was three particular clients specifically asked for that, which made me think, wow, something's going on in the world. This is over since 24, 25. And that's what probably, right, the books, et cetera, et cetera. But the... If we went out and said to the clients, listen, there was one recently, a manufacturing client, global one, that's building a factory just down the road from where you are. And they wanted the folks to understand the difference between working in a permanent organization where you've got a full-time job and folks you know and everybody works for the same company, to working on a project where you've got contractors and kind of nobody works for you. How you transition between, I'm used to this and now I've got to manage that. So if we'd said, we'll go do it about confidence, we probably wouldn't have got the gig. But because we said, okay, give us your problem. And then we reverse engineer and go, right, so what's the mindset from a confidence angle? people, what do they need to help them to get to that where they feel confident in that environment? Does that make sense? reverse engineering supposed to go saying,
Jen Brown: Completely.
John Walsh: hey, we're going to sell you some confidence here? I can see the guy in the Wild West
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
Jen Brown: completely, completely understand that.
John Walsh: in the wagon, giving you some steak oils or whatever. Here comes the confidence. Take that twice a day and you're going to be confident. Didn't work, it?
Jen Brown: No, it doesn't work that way at all.
Hugo Rodriguez: Can I ask a quick question? Can I jump in? So I I this fascinates
John Walsh: Sorry about that.
Hugo Rodriguez: me. And as you started talking about it, I I mentally reviewed in my head, you know, some of the biggest hurdles that new leaders have is that confidence, right? Whether that's kind like
John Walsh: Yeah
Hugo Rodriguez: the self-confidence, the leadership confidence. And I know I can speak to many of my coaching clients. The first thing they say is, you know, I have imposter syndrome. I, you know, I shouldn't be
John Walsh: Yeah!
Hugo Rodriguez: in this room with these other leaders, right? You know, that's a that is a huge hurdle to get over early in your career. So I'm really curious, how do you go about helping new leaders, especially, start to build the confidence that they are not imposters to the room and that, you know, it th they they deserve to be there and they can have the skills to be effective as leaders.
John Walsh: Yeah, I think it's for us the simple way that we start off doing it is get them to review their past evidence. Hugo, that's the place to go where you go. Look at what you have done. You know, there's a fantastic leader I'm working with at the moment. Very, very good, very competent, I'd say mid-40s. Been doing it a few years. He's moving into a slightly different stream of work that he's not worked in before. But he's also... really accomplish rock climber and you go, I know this seems a bit of a leap, when he does his rock climbing he's leaping, but you look at it and you go, you go like, think about what you can achieve there, think about what you do there, you know, and he talks about the planning, the preparation, the working together with his colleague, know, his fellow climber, the prep they put into it, and it was like trying to get him to see that. and the past successes
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: he's had at work. Because we've all got bits of our life we'll be super confident, but there'll be other bits where you try something new and you're never going to be as confident as you are about something that you do daily, you've clocked up the others in. So the evidence is the first place you go. That was a really long way of saying evidence. Sorry.
Jen Brown: I I love that because evidence is one of my buzzwords and it's one of the practices I've been
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
Jen Brown: s using lately, right? Keeping that evidence list. It's easy to spiral, but I'm also curious because you really are hitting on the transferable skills, rock climbing to stepping up in a leadership role. They both take a leap. They both take consistent practice and showing up. And and I'm curious when you talk about.
Hugo Rodriguez: I'm hoping to make people put a trying purple
John Walsh: Yeah. Absolutely.
Jen Brown: new leaders and and really getting them to look at that evidence list. I'm wondering in this role in of evolving technology, right? How
Hugo Rodriguez: people.
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: does confidence show up? Because certainly a younger generation may have some more confidence in technology, but maybe not in the people skills. And people of I'll I'll say our generation,
Hugo Rodriguez: I thought again we're
Jen Brown: maybe have a bit more in the people skill area and not as much in in some of the technology. So I'm wondering, how do you bridge the confidence between generations, if you will, with technology?
Hugo Rodriguez: on the biggest mind. Okay, just keep that. Okay, I think that
John Walsh: It's a massive challenge, Jen, you've hit on it because I think there's a tendency for some, it's Jen or Evelyn, or is it, that's a good sort of point. There's a bit I'm always careful of, you we put people in buckets and go like, there we go, it's the youngsters or whatever. But there's a, I think when you're more technically minded, it could be that, that you tend to lean into the technical parts, proving your confidence, you're getting your confidence from that. So if we took age and we said youngsters or olders or whatever, it's with AI coming along, I can see folks maybe disappearing into the technical because they haven't clicked at what's gonna make the difference is the behavioural. Can I share something with you? This is fascinating. And you may find this happens in the States, but what we're finding in the UK at the moment. So any government contract, and this is over the last, let's say, it's really over the last four years, maybe five. we've seen it accelerate. say we're going to do a big defense program and we're going to do a infrastructure program or whatever. It be a power station, it could be new ships, new boats, whatever. If the government's funding it through contractors, they add, so part of the procurement process is we've got to put the procurement document out, but they'll attach points in the procurement. process to behaviours. So they're running behavioural assessments as well as checking it for price, checking it for technical competence, etc. And the points vary between what we've seen as 15 % to 45 % on behaviours. And what they'll do is they'll get the people in and they'll do a technical review of them to make sure they're competent and their solution works. But they'll also run an assessment centre. So What we're getting this conclusion is that as we move towards technology and the levelling up, in the past we could have said, a wonderful company seen in the US that had a unique way of doing it. I won't name the company, but they did a unique process for managing project management offices. They were amazing at it. Everybody's got that now. It's mature and the technology's there. But what our government is looking and saying, That's not what solves it. Competence rarely solves these things. It is the behaviours of the team in particular. They'll look for things like collaboration, obviously. They'll look for the ability to work on uncertainty. That thing we spoke about of have you got an organisation where nobody works for you? So how do you manage the leadership in that which is going to flex, you know, depending on the context.
Hugo Rodriguez: This is fascinating.
Jen Brown: So I I I love that you just said
Hugo Rodriguez: This is fascinating.
Jen Brown: that title. I know so
John Walsh: yeah, that's the title of the book, sorry.
Hugo Rodriguez: How do you
Jen Brown: so Hugo, may I just jump in for a moment because John just said when no one works for you. And John, that's the title of your book that's coming out, right? So
John Walsh: Yeah. And it came about from these conversations, Jen. The title of the book was quite snappy. It was a complex project leaders programs book or something. It was like a dreadful title. And the two of us, colleague and I, Simon, who wrote it, we suddenly went, nobody works for you. That's what it's actually about. So it's really funny. Yeah.
Jen Brown: But that that is so true. And we were talking before we started recording. Hugo and I come from an organization, long-standing organization, and you build these long-standing relationships. But
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: when you work for an organization where it's contractors and temporary projects, and you have people coming together. I don't know about you, but the four stages of forming a group, right? When you are like storming and trying to figure out how you come together.
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay.
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: Talk to us. How do you build confidence quickly in an organization like that?
John Walsh: I was just going to say, so back to these contracts, and it must be happening in the States as well. So they're assessing the behaviours of the people, that's like speaking our language, isn't it? It's like going, most folks are going to be technically competent. They wouldn't put themselves up for the job if they couldn't do it, and jobs like this. So all that's there. The pricing is going to be about the same, but when it comes to the behaviour, so. And the last one, we kind of get a request about once a month, once every two months to support a team that's going to be going through an assessment. And we've written assessments to ourselves as well in the past. But the most recent one we worked on, we sat to perfect our process a bit. Often what we get faced with, Jen, is they tell us, we say, we've got these 20 people that we're gonna put in this project. And we said to this client, because we're in early stages in selecting the team, we said, let us help you do a behavioral assessment on the folks, rather than just taking the people that you've got available on the bench. And they were like, fantastic idea. So to answer your question, how do you build confidence in it, we actually select the team based on The behaviors, so we've got a thing in the UK, it probably came from America, it's called SQEP, suitably qualified, experienced personnel. So whenever you go on a nuclear job, that's where it came from. For me anyway, might be, so that's where I first heard of it. We've got to prove that the people are suitably qualified and experienced personnel. So we do a SQEP on them technically, but we don't do a SQEP on behaviors. And that's what we said to the client we're doing. Look, we're squapping them for behaviors so that when you go to the ultimate client that's gonna be buying your services, you're saying, technically they're competent and behaviorally they're competent. And that's been a massive difference in the confidence of the teams. So choosing the right, when we get that luxury, choosing the right behavioral. And you know what we could argue and say, well, that's what we do in interviews, isn't it? But I don't think we just ask them questions in interviews, don't we? We don't tend to. actually put them through a bit where we can see them under pressure, rarely.
Hugo Rodriguez: So could I ask John when you're doing when when a when a contract is let and they are gonna do the behavioral assessment, do they look at the team working together? Is that where the behavior or are they looking at individuals?
John Walsh: Both. They start off with the team. They tend to structure it over a day, two days, half day, whatever they do. But they'll do, number one, they want to see the team together. Number two, they want to see the individuals. What they're trying to do, if you think about it, what they're trying to do is authenticity. know, imagine us three walk up to pitch for a job on something. We've met a couple of times online. Before we pitched for it, we probably had flyover and we'd... have a bite to eat and we'd find a bit more about each other, we'd talk a bit more about processes. We wouldn't just walk up at the contract shake. And we saw this one, this is a true, true thing, right? We'd prepared the team and we told them they were going to get to know the suppliers. It was one of them before. This was pre the assessments and they've done a lot of work with us. They in a good place. They turn up and they do a good job. But one of the other teams from another contractor were introducing each other in the hallway. in plain sight of the client. You know, it's like, Hugo, I'm Joe. you're Hugo. nice to meet you. I've heard all about you. And you're going like, how are you guys collaborative? How are you? So what they're looking for is authenticity in both the team and the individuals. And you can't fake it because part of what we're saying to them is we're not preparing you for an assessment to pass an assessment because you won't pass it. What we're preparing you for is to work together as a collaborative team when you win it. That's the difference in it, you know, that's
Hugo Rodriguez: man, I love this.
John Walsh: great fun. It's great. love the...
Jen Brown: I know. Isn't this totally amazing? And it gets back to a conversation we had about stakeholders and knowing who's all on your team and how you communicate.
John Walsh: Yeah, it's just, it's a, and I like from the contractors point of view and from the government, you it indicates taxpayers dollars. So they've made sure the people they choose are technically competent. And I think if I look back, without being too controversial, some of the projects we've done, particularly in the UK, if we'd been applying that, me say 10 years ago, as rigorously as they're applying it now, we might have got slightly better outcomes.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah. We started the conversation talking about kind
John Walsh: You know what I
Hugo Rodriguez: of how AI is going to change a lot of what we do. And I can't help but think, you know, this is the new playground or battleground, maybe, for competence in the future, right? Like your technical skills will be driven by super intelligence. But
John Walsh: Yes.
Hugo Rodriguez: Your interpersonal skills, your behaviors, that's what's going to make the difference in you know one team being successful versus another team being successful. How authentic are they? How well do they work together, right? Their ability to be humble and curious and you know supportive, all of those things that really separate great teams from, you know, average teams. And once once the technical aspects kind of everybody gets to a certain technical level, the thing that really pays off is how does the team interact as humans, right? And so I I I you've
John Walsh: especially when the pressure comes
Hugo Rodriguez: opened my mind.
John Walsh: I think that's probably going to be the differentiator. We've spotted it already and we think that's going to be differentiator when AI really plugs into a lot of the technical spaces. As long as there's an old joke about, it's not particularly funny but I'll go for it, but a guy gets sent up to space, it's him and a monkey, and the monkey opens the envelope and it says press this button, press that button, press this button, press that button. and the guy opens his envelope and says, feed the monkey. it's that, told you it wasn't funny. And it's the part I think that our job is gonna be to feed AI with
Jen Brown: Yes. Yes.
John Walsh: the things we need it to point to and do. It's gonna do a lot of the work, but it's gonna be that then factor on our behaviors. We gotta be able to under pressure pull together as a team and deliver. A lot of the things that you do anyway, Hugo, in the leadership space that you talk about, and Jen with
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: the coaching, et cetera, it's just nothing new. I think it's just gonna become more pronounced.
Jen Brown: It is really like having that competence to lead technology and
John Walsh: Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Brown: still needing the people skills, right? Because now you are leading people who are leading technology.
John Walsh: got it, you got it. And it's
Jen Brown: Yeah.
John Walsh: what happens when, I mean a lot of preparation we do for them, this one particular team I think we spent about nine days preparing them to work together, not to pass an assessment to work together, and a lot of the time we started to ramp up the pressure on them, like real life. What happens when you get late information, what happens when you get disruptive stuff coming, what happens when some Part of it lets you down when money runs out and you keep
Jen Brown: Yeah.
John Walsh: fighting all that in and you can see these guys and girls pulling together really well because they were selected for behavioural
Jen Brown: That sounds yeah.
John Walsh: SQEPs, suitably qualified experience. They were selected for that. that for me is back to your original question, Jen. I think what I'm with, so we do a workshop called the first time manager. and it's for technical people that have been promoted to be a manager of technical people. And because the audience is naturally younger, you know, they're in their late 20s, early 30s, we're finding that it's just the cusp of the behavioral part. You can see they're not as used to picking up a phone and talking to people, or they're
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: more reliant on texts, or... emails, know, they're more reliant
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: on that. And the last six years particularly with us working more hybrid from home, there's less chance to just go and have a water cooler moment with Hugo about this thing I'm worried about. And mean, if you're going to have talking about a design element that we could probably solve in about five minutes having a coffee, whereas it'll take three
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay.
John Walsh: days with constant emails going back and forward.
Jen Brown: And the potential for misinterpretation of how those emails are crafted, right? And and the whole communication
John Walsh: Good luck.
Jen Brown: variable. So adding challenges. I'm curious when you lead teams through these exercises, right? The team building, what have you seen to be like the greatest aha in terms of a team coming together with
Hugo Rodriguez: Right.
Jen Brown: confidence?
John Walsh: It was the fact that the leader is not necessarily the person that needs to tell them what to do, that was massive.
Jen Brown: Woo, you speak into my heart. I love that.
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay now.
Jen Brown: The leader doesn't
John Walsh: he suddenly went.
Jen Brown: have to be the person to tell them what to do.
John Walsh: it was like putting an accelerant on a fire. Because every exercise after that, they were going like, wow, smashing it, smashing it, smashing it. So much so that after we done, I mean, really did put them through, it was like military training. They went through nine different exercises, all different shapes and sizes with all the things thrown at them. And they crushed every single one. That's what they took from it, Jen, that they then had a really solid process for. And what I love is, my fingers are crossed, I hope they win it, because I'd love to continue working with them live. But if they don't, they've already said that we're going to take things away that we're going to use elsewhere. So yes, it's been great, a really very, very enjoyable piece of work.
Hugo Rodriguez: Fascinating. Fascinating. I would love to dig in more to some of these exercises because for
John Walsh: Yeah, yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: for what I do at the university level sounds a lot like this. And the aha moment for a lot of my leadership students is I don't have to be the decision maker, even though I have the title, you know, I can I
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: can delegate decision making w and then be the the the person that Empowers and finds the resources and opens the doors for my team to run with their decisions. But getting our guys to learn a level of comfort and a level of confidence with sharing that quote unquote power, right? Like you know, when you are given the title, you think you're given the power. I'm a leader, so now
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: I am the one who decides. Right. I'm the one who has to come up with the big ideas. And we know that's not true. And you you leave so much energy on the table if you don't empower your team to be the driver of all of that. But it's counterintuitive. You know, our young leaders, they think leadership looks like General Patton on the battlefield making the big decisions and and leading from the front. But we
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: know with our experience, that rarely works. And it's it's really about setting setting some ambitious goals out on the horizon, but then let it letting the team figure out how we're gonna get there and and
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: telling us what what do they need to help them get there. And then that's where we kick in with being the connector to other parts of the organization.
John Walsh: I think that's hard at the beginning Hugo, think back to all
Hugo Rodriguez: You
John Walsh: of us when we first got our first management role probably in our mid-twenties or something like that and you've been a subject matter expert you know this thing really really well. For me it was a bit banking, a bit commercial finance and banking and all of a sudden you're running a team that you could do it quicker yourself, you could do it to a better quality standard but you realise that instead of you responsible for your outputs, which say we make a number up and we say I'm responsible for five outputs a week and I've suddenly got a team of 10 that's responsible for 50, I can't do 50. So, but then I don't know if this happened to you because I was a manager and the first management position was in the 80s and there was a lot of framework and scaffolding to support me, so good training, lots of courses, lots of good support to teach you how to be a leader. So you you kind of knew quite quickly that you couldn't do it all and you couldn't be an expert. And I think that's been dismantled over, you we had a financial crisis in the 07, 08, we? And budgets went from there, working from home took a bit of it away. I think we've stopped investing as much as we, you know, it's the casual investment, not the big programme, that still happens, but it's the casual investment, the little, you know, like let's have. some material on this particular issue that we're all going to face, the smaller interactions
Hugo Rodriguez: Right.
John Walsh: they seem to have gone.
Hugo Rodriguez: That's right. That's right. couldn't agree more. I think that that I also, my first managerial roles were in the eighties, and there was a lot of really good sort of that soft skills training, right? but it
John Walsh: Yeah
Hugo Rodriguez: has all but disappeared. And now we rely on each other. And unfortunately, I think you when you go through like COVID, as you were mentioning earlier, and the and more and more of our work is transmitted via screens and via emails and text messages, we've really, we really have to work hard to train the interpersonal skills. Great leadership. It can be done mediated through Zoom, but you can't lay that foundation of trust. You can't start with Zoom. You really have to be able to start connecting with people. And I think that's only done face to face and building trust that then you can leverage via these mediated communications platforms. But You know, we we have to get back to good training, good foundational trust building, good listening skills. yeah. Totally agree.
Jen Brown: Well,
John Walsh: I think
Jen Brown: if I if I can add in there, I mean, I I agree.
John Walsh: so. Well that's the... Yeah, please.
Jen Brown: I think the in-person is so critical, yet let's be real. When so many of our teams are spread out, we may not have that opportunity to directly meet. And so what does building confidence and connection look like across a screen? And it's it's that intentional coffee over the screen. It is different than the water cooler, right? Let's be real.
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: And and I think that's why we see a lot of companies who are focusing on what do retreats look like, what do conferences look like. Maybe we don't need to work in the same space, but how do we still create that environment for connection? And and
John Walsh: Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Brown: I I can say when I started a a position during COVID and I was meeting a lot of my colleagues via Zoom.
Hugo Rodriguez: That's the end.
Jen Brown: It was harder and it really took more of an intentional let's sit down and just do a connection call, right? This isn't a a work related thing. I equate it to that leadership by walking around where I'm just trying to get to know you and build relationship. I I'm curious, what have you seen in terms of confidence with teams who are mostly virtual?
John Walsh: You've nailed it with one particular guy and it was a French guy. This will be funny in a minute. He was a French guy who decided to have afternoon tea at three o'clock. The most British of things, afternoon tea on the screen during COVID. And his team was the most, as they were in COVID, the most productive. And when they came out of COVID, when they met in the office, never having met before, it was like that because he'd done what you just mentioned, he'd done the desk callers at three o'clock. to see certain and all we're gonna do is talk about how we're getting, you what you've been up to, Jen what you've been doing.
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay.
John Walsh: I'm finding it hard to get groceries because blah, blah, blah. You it was that connection where we got to, and you know, he invited me along to as many as I wanted to go to. And it was just great to see people making good, strong, but very, very, very intentional. And for a Frenchman embracing afternoon tea, I was like, this is magnificent. What does it say, man? Magnificent. I can't even speak English. I'm trying
Hugo Rodriguez: Magnifique, magnifique.
John Walsh: to say thank you. Thank you, Hugo.
Jen Brown: No, that's
Hugo Rodriguez: Ha ha.
Jen Brown: that is amazing when you talk about
John Walsh: Just think.
Jen Brown: it like that leader, very high emotional intelligence to know that's
John Walsh: Yeah
Jen Brown: the way to get to your team, right? Like adapting there across cultures. I love that.
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm. And confidence. And confidence, right? Like that is Yeah. That that's key.
Jen Brown: And confidence to do it. Yeah.
John Walsh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You remember that first day, so we've gone through 2020, 2021, we get a call to, we can get, it was a construction site, so the construction workers had to turn up. The guys doing the planning, the commercials, the yada yada, they could work from home, but all of a sudden, there was a fairness equation come into it that said, look, we're asking these guys to be here, we really need to be able to interact with them. everyone was given a call to come back to site. And the confidence would be, now imagine, I've never met my team and I walk into an office and it's like, your confidence is a bit lower because you're walking into a bunch of strangers. Whereas they walked in and it was like, you it was like you'd all been on a vacation and you were all meeting up after, you know, two years of knowing each other. was like, hey, you doing? my God, you're so much taller than you look
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: on screen.
Jen Brown: Right, right. How often
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
Jen Brown: do we hear something like that? Yeah. It's true. Right.
John Walsh: Yeah, you're small, you're tall, you're whatever, it's because I'm sitting down. So yeah, that was, that really, he really built confidence in that and he continued to be a good operating team as time went on. We'd done this other thing during COVID, it was quite, it was, can we take this workshop and put it online and make it as interactive? And the simple answer to all our questions from earlier about face to face or Zoom was, Face to Face was better because we got more richness in the communication. But with things like Zoom where you could do the rooms, you were getting people to work on real problems together in small groups and continuing to change the groups so they all got to know each other. They got to know how the different perspectives were. And that was, I'd say, pretty much as near as we could get. It was pretty good. those guys particularly, was leaning back into our finance. It was to do with teaching people anti-money laundering techniques for banks and they could hit the desk running pretty confident to do the road. It was a one week long course which is unheard of these days. Five days and by the time they'd done it they could take people through the three different levels of KYC. Know your customer and... Anti-Money London. So it's really,
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: that was pretty good. Again, I think there's elements of it. It's just being inventive about it. Intentionally you're working, and that's so true. Really good.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah. That's right. Two things jump up for me in this conversation. The first one is something that Jen and I talk about all the time, which is that as a leader, you have to you're under tremendous time pressure and your inbox is constantly refilling with new messages you have to answer and your to-do list never gets any shorter. But the real value as a leader is Is closing all of that down and being present with your team. As you were saying, John, you know, in that tea, it's not about what are we working on? It's about how are you doing? How are you getting your groceries in? You know, all of those sort of personal details, which you know, you want to be authentic about it. This isn't just making, you know, making it up, but it is so important to to build human contact and to build that relationship. And Fundamental. And the second point is you it it's a great luxury to be able to do it in person these days. Because as Jen was saying, so much of our world now comes through this kind of multi-screen. and and what you were saying, John, made me think, you know, we need to be teaching leaders how to be good in this medium. Because so much of their job as we head into the future. Is going to be like this, right? As much as you know, there was a backlash about remote work at base, it just makes sense that some percentage of your work going forward is going to be regional, it's going to be connected, it's going to be at a distance. And so, how do we teach young leaders to have that virtual tea? Right. And be present with their teams and build that connection. When you're on the screen, it kind of feels like you're you're against you're working against time, you're working against technology. Let's get this done so we can get back to real life. No, let's pause and realize this is real life. This is exactly how we need to lead in heading into the future. Technology is this we're not going back, right? This is it.
John Walsh: It's amazing, I mean we can do this. Technology,
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: we get to speak across thousands of miles and have great conversations. All these things, they're so good at what they can give us. I think there's a bit before that Hugo that is we've got to help leaders to value the human connection part because the way you phrased it was absolutely spot on. Inboxes are busy, tasks are backing up and being pressurized to get stuff done. And the thing that probably takes the backseat is the human connection. know, because if you said to
Jen Brown: Yeah. Yeah.
John Walsh: them, look, just spend 15 minutes having an afternoon, virtual afternoon tea or, you know, a pint at the end of the day or whatever it is you do. That is getting them to value that. I found that's probably the hardest part. It's not getting them to do it. It's getting them to
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: value it so they prioritize it.
Jen Brown: Yeah. And when I think
Hugo Rodriguez: Yes.
Jen Brown: the leaders value that first and show that, right, then that ripples to the team. Compl. Yeah, it is. It really is.
John Walsh: Game changer, it's a game changer. Being curious about your people, mean one of the jobs I'm working on, we've been around the war room, we've been taking this week's issues and working on them and it's been great. From a behavior point of view, we've been monitoring, I think it was about seven ideas that we all agreed were the ones that we would get, putting the job first over your organization, the things you would expect. What I noticed though is the pressure came on, I could see some of the leaders starting to go, like, we'll just park that for a minute because we want to get on with this particular task, you know, building a, let's say, you know, putting the roof on the building. That's what we've got to, because that's the big thing. And the hardest part, this is the valiant part, the hardest conversation I've been having with them is, and it's quite a big statement this, but we we say it in the book as well when I stand behind every issue on a project and every issue. There's a behavior as well. Say for example, the roof that we were getting isn't available and the teams waiting to, the steel fixers are there to erect it, but the roof panels haven't arrived. Somewhere along the line, and we used an example, I'll you the example we used, it was to do with brackets holding up cable trays. So you're in a data center, get thousands of cables, you gotta put brackets, put cable trays and pull the cables through. And the person that was in charge of buying the electrical packages, the brackets came through so sporadically that you'd have a full team waiting to do a big long run. And they'd have, maybe they needed 200 brackets, they'd have 50, but they'd all be different places. It wasn't like, so you were wasting efficiency on it. And the team started to look at, what's our process? We must have got the process wrong. Is it the suppliers wrong? And I'd say, well, let's go speak to the guy that done it. And when I spoke to him quietly one to one, I said, what was the story, how come the brackets, was, brackets are a bit boring, aren't they? They're just brackets. And so what I found really interesting was the Transformers. We were getting them shipped from Mexico and it was amazing working with them. And you go, there's human nature, there's a behaviour, isn't it? That's boring,
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: I don't wanna work on it. And it's easy, it's only a bracket. I can whistle them up in minutes. And it turns out you can't. because our supply chain for them in the UK wasn't as advanced. So
Jen Brown: But
Hugo Rodriguez: Fascinating.
John Walsh: it's behind it, and it's a bold statement to say behind everything is a behaviour. Whether it's good or bad, there's always the element of the technical part and the behavioural part. And that guy, he hadn't done anything wrong, he? You can't blame him for it. I've got to say, we kind of put the onus on the management who should have been sent to him. Do you do realise those brackets are, you know, there's a cost somewhere around a hundred grand of if we... take too long to do this. Running
Jen Brown: That's right.
John Walsh: a corridor shouldn't, it should be, the team should be in there for like, putting the brackets up probably about two days, three days maybe. Not
Hugo Rodriguez: Right.
John Walsh: sporadic.
Jen Brown: Yep. But I think that's that's
Hugo Rodriguez: And that's that's b that's a behavior thing too, right? Like the the leadership team wasn't thinking through
John Walsh: Yeah! Yeah!
Jen Brown: Yeah. Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: it that way, wasn't communicating that way, that because for whatever reason they made assumptions and yeah, that is it's behavior all the way down.
John Walsh: I was just thinking again about intentionality. Imagine
Jen Brown: Yes.
John Walsh: they'd had an afternoon tea or whatever and you're talking to the brackets guy and you say, now you're getting on with those brackets, you know we need them in the next, you know they're going to be coming up in February next year or something and the guy's going, yeah I know. And you can see from his answer, you think he doesn't get it, does he? So that, but because we didn't do that, know, no one knew that this guy was getting excited about Transformers versus, and I get it, you know. I don't know, but your brackets didn't look particularly exciting, does it?
Jen Brown: No, but that's the that's the piece of leadership is communicating the value that each person contributes to the team.
John Walsh: Yes, absolutely.
Jen Brown: And when you have that relationship and they know their place and how that impacts the rest, right? Then every person has a critical part of the function. Otherwise,
John Walsh: You got it. You got
Jen Brown: you would automate it somehow and and not have the person be there. So yeah, I I'm with you. I I am curious how you have seen how you have worked with teams, organizations. who've gone through a type of failure and rebuilding confidence, maybe when they've gone through something pretty dramatic.
John Walsh: We've seen it, we kind of get involved with projects either at the very beginning or somewhere in the middle. And the middle part's normally where it's been going backwards, so it's not been getting the traction it should have. And then normally it's under a bit of pressure, a bit of heat, you know, from budget, from time, from stakeholders or whatever. So totally different, you're right. From the beginning, you're building the behaviors up. From that point, you're trying to establish. what behaviors are being rewarded, what's being tolerated. And so the difference there about building confidence is saying, let's have, so bottom line, we use a process called BARPIT, catchy, I know. It stands for baseline, analyze the data you get in your baseline, it's behavioral baseline, analyze the data you get in it, and review it with the team. You gotta do it, that's the first part of it, BAR. Second part. when you've reviewed it with the team and we agree that that's the kind of issues, make a plan. The I is implement the plan and the T is track the implementation of that plan and the changes is affecting. So the starting point Jen is to baseline again so that people go right, this is where we are and making sure there's no blame attached to the baseline.
Jen Brown: No blame attached to the baseline.
John Walsh: Do it.
Jen Brown: That's a pretty hard thing to achieve there, right? Because I think the natural tendency is to push it off onto somebody else.
John Walsh: tell you how we do it. We invented a questionnaire years ago called the high performance team questionnaire. It's just the vehicle to do it and it measures three things. Foundations of a team, have we all got roles, responsibilities, do we know the organisation, do we know who does what, do we know the processes, are those processes any good, have we got enough people, have we got enough skills, are we competent, have we built an accountability. So there's foundations then build on top of that. We then start to look at the behaviours. And then we do a thing called the team sentiment. How do people feel about being part of this team? You can imagine the team sentiment is the bit when you're failing, where everybody's going, it's dreadful, or under the cosh.
Jen Brown: Exactly.
John Walsh: So we got the questionnaire and we say to the client, we need to ask everyone that's got a voice in it, let's go out and ask them. Don't just ask the leaders, ask 250 people, ask 50 people, whoever's the right audience, ask them. And then when you're playing back the data, It's not us as clever consultants saying, look at this, this is what we've spotted. We're saying, your people are telling you this across the foundations, the behaviors and the team sentiment. And that's what the power, that's where the no blame came from Jen, because all of a sudden we're
Jen Brown: Yes.
John Walsh: going, it's not your stakeholders telling you that, it's not your client telling you that, it's your
Jen Brown: Yeah, Right.
John Walsh: people telling you that. And that's who's
Jen Brown: Right. Right.
John Walsh: going to deliver the job for you. it was. I'd love to say that we've been pretty organic in our growth through Breakthrough. I'd love to say that, yeah, we thought about that long and hard and came up with that, we'll go do it. It was a reverse fit. We went like, we need to measure these things. So we started measuring it. then
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: over the year, I think when we set the count of 98, I think we discovered the question in 2007. And then we started to apply it and then we refined it, made it better and understood it. So it's... We're trying to solve this very problem of, let's baseline it, but it's all about, well, that was your fault. If you'd given us more clarity,
Jen Brown: That's right.
John Walsh: we'd always say, no, the folks in your team are telling you this, and we'd be stupid if we didn't listen to them, wouldn't we?
Jen Brown: That's the power of analyzing a full organizational health, right? Because you can develop
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: a training, you can develop any type of program, but if you're doing that for the wrong issue, the wrong problem to solve, then
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: that's a temporary band-aid. Yeah. Yeah.
John Walsh: You got it, you got it. And this, we also made it simple as well, Jen, because what I was conscious of was the fact that you don't wanna be saying, yeah, it's gonna cost you $250,000, $2.5 million for us to tell you where you are. What we came up with is a question that everybody can fill in in seven minutes, flat. We can analyze
Jen Brown: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: it super fast. And you're talking a couple of thousand dollars and suddenly you've got a picture of where your team is. But more importantly, you've got a plan. So, and I think often
Jen Brown: That's it.
John Walsh: that's missing. see a lot of, I know from my past working with other pretty, you know, the major consultancies where we would maybe be supporting something in the project. And they would often tell you what the problem was, but they might not tell you how to solve it. we're thinking, we've
Jen Brown: That's right. That's right. I love it.
John Walsh: got the problem and we've got a plan to fix it, you know. But there's
Jen Brown: That's it.
John Walsh: an added dimension to that, Jen, where what happens is, so confidence-wise, We get a boost pretty quickly, because if we see our organisation charts a bit out of shape, or our processes, everybody's, we've got the process, but nobody uses it because it's too complicated, or it doesn't give us anything. So we can fix them quickly. Normally you fix them within six months, pretty straightforward. But your behaviours, they're always lagging. So we've done work, the leaders are changing their behaviours. And what happens, we get all the teams we've worked on, I gave some of the numbers, so typically the first team would score. So out of 100, we scored about 60%, that's the first score. Some are higher, some are lower. After we've done, six months, we've fixed foundations and a few of the behaviors. Not fixed, we've taken their data and we've implemented the plan. We get to about 72, so we've moved up 12 points. What we discovered was, at 80%, we see high performance. I thought we'd need to get to 100, but that was 2008, 2009, I was going like, whoa, wait a minute, we're getting results here at 80%. So Ergo high performance for us started at 80%. So to get them from 72 to 80, that's the hardest part and only 26 % of the teams managed to get above the 80 because the behaviors part is painful. You can't see it shining through. If I say roles and responsibilities, I can give new roles and responsibilities tomorrow. You work with my team to get them. Everybody understands them. We then... see an uplift in the next month or two because people are more joined up. But if I talk about say let's be collaborative, let's put, you know, if I think of delivery focus as one of the big ones, so what is it we're trying to produce, let's think about that. I can reinforce it, we can talk about it, we can have meetings about it, you know, but it won't feed through as quickly as one of the foundation fixes. And you can see the leaders kind of go, this is hard work now. from giving up. I'm
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: going for a new initiative. I've tried high performance teams. I'm gonna try for collaborative teams. Then when you go like, stick with it, stick with it. We call it the boring
Jen Brown: That is
John Walsh: middle bit. It's the bit before you're in it. I may mentioned it last time I'm learning piano and it's fantastic. I'm three months in and it's like my brain hasn't caught by my hands yet.
Jen Brown: Right, exactly. And that's the hard work, right? But you do have to stick with it. It's the consistency piece.
John Walsh: It's fun.
Jen Brown: John, we are so thrilled that you joined us today for this conversation. This this topic
John Walsh: Thank you so much. Brilliant.
Jen Brown: is so, so powerful for for both of us. And I would just love to ask, how can our listeners, viewers find you? And put another plug out there for this book. I'm super I I really want to find it. Yeah.
John Walsh: Thank you. The book is called Nobody Works For You. It's on Amazon right now. So it's easy to find my name, John Walsh, but you'll find a middle initial in there is helpful in finding it, John Walsh. Because I never realized, I mean, I know there's the famous John Walsh in America, America's most wanted, but I never realized there's
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: so many people that had written books called John Walsh.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: So I had to resurrect my middle name from a Christian, which is way too embarrassing to share with you. Okay,
Hugo Rodriguez: Ha ha
John Walsh: well, it's my mum and dad were devout Catholics and they prayed to St. Mary of something, so I had to get a Mary in my name. So my middle name.
Hugo Rodriguez: Hmm.
Jen Brown: I love it. Well of course we will include your links in here too so that we
Hugo Rodriguez: Excellent. Excellent.
John Walsh: Which we can understand.
Jen Brown: don't confuse anyone.
Hugo Rodriguez: That's ver that is very humble. I appreciate that you were willing to share that.
Jen Brown: That's right. Thank you.
John Walsh: As a youngster you keep it hidden but now you're this age you go I don't care who knows and it's a nice
Hugo Rodriguez: That's right.
Jen Brown: Right. That's right. That's right.
John Walsh: nod to my wonderful parents.
Jen Brown: That's right. that sounds like evolving confidence, John.
Hugo Rodriguez: At all. Yeah.
John Walsh: Much earlier I wouldn't have been happy with that.
Jen Brown: Ha ha ha.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: But now I feel confident to share it with the world.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: So that
Jen Brown: That's right.
John Walsh: books out there we've done This is our sixth book, which is, I'm amazed at because it's like finding your voice and they're all on Amazon. I should really put them on Barnes and Noble as well, but I haven't got round to that yet. But
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: well, I need to.
Jen Brown: Well, it sounds like you're just a tad busy and and doing the other work here. So well, we
John Walsh: It's green.
Jen Brown: love it. And thank you, thank you so much for joining us. It
John Walsh: No, it's a pleasure, thank you both. I really appreciate
Jen Brown: Yes.
John Walsh: it, it's creative.
Hugo Rodriguez: John, this has been such a great, great conversation. I am wow, you've expanded my thinking so much. I look forward to following up with you on a lot of these issues because a lot of the stuff is stuff I hadn't
John Walsh: Definitely.
Hugo Rodriguez: heard of before. And it's a great perspective to look at leadership through. So thank you.
John Walsh: No, it's an absolute pleasure and thank you, it's so good to have a chance to speak with like-minded folks about it because we don't often get that do we? We're normally client facing or student facing
Jen Brown: Right. Right.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah. Right.
John Walsh: and the students are wanting one thing from his clients, wanting another, whereas to speak to fellow professionals that just get it and it buzzes us and it's the same, I'm buzzed a second, it's like a great way to start a Monday.
Jen Brown: That's right. That's right. And for our listeners
Hugo Rodriguez: Great. Great.
Jen Brown: and viewers, please give us a like. Tell us what resonated with you and where are you struggling to build confidence in your leadership with your teams? How can we help support you during your journey? Thanks again so much for joining.
Hugo Rodriguez: Thank you, Jen. As Jen said, my name is Hugo Rodriguez, also a former diplomat, currently a professor of practice in leadership and a leadership coach. And today we are so happy to bring you a guest. Jen, tell everybody who is joining us today on the report.
Jen Brown: We have a wonderful new friend and colleague, John Walsh, who is joining us from across the pond. He is the co-founder of Breakthrough Change Management, where he has spent over 27 years helping leaders and teams and organizations improve their confidence, improve their teamwork and their leadership. His work has taken him across many different industries from nuclear defense to manufacturing and construction. He has worked with over 180 organizations. He's an author, and we're going to talk about that coming up here soon. He is also the host of a podcast where I had the pleasure of getting to meet John. And that was Let's Talk About Confidence. So today
Hugo Rodriguez: Yes.
Jen Brown: we're talking about confidence with John. John, thank you for joining us.
John Walsh: Thank you so much, that's such a lovely introduction. Shucks, I think is where I think I was getting slightly embarrassed.
Hugo Rodriguez: yeah.
John Walsh: So it's great to
Jen Brown: So
John Walsh: see you again, Jen. was great conversation last time and look forward to this time.
Jen Brown: Exactly. We had such a wonderful conversation about the role of confidence in leadership and in organizations. And let's start with the basics because your foundation is that confidence is not actually something we have to be born with. So how did you come up with your definition of confidence and how does that
Hugo Rodriguez: Exactly.
Jen Brown: show up in leadership?
John Walsh: I think I was watching people, Jen, particularly over the last couple of years, it's probably always been there. But I just noticed that more more clients were asking us to work with their people and building their confidence to do certain elements of the job. And it was like, you know, sometimes when you see something so clearly, you think, wow, that's what we've been doing over the years, basically equipping people with knowledge or skills to make them feel more confident. But suddenly you realize that, wow, that... That should be our starting place. Instead of building our competence, we should go, let's start with confidence, then build the competence, then we can move into leadership, then we can move into the team. So it started like that. So the definition was simple. was, you're not born with it. Nobody's born confident. We learn that it's like any skill, like any muscle, we've got to use it. And the more we use it, the more confident we become.
Jen Brown: Interesting. That is that's a disruptive thought, if you will, in the sense that organizations start with competence, right? They start with the technical, we need to get the job done. So
John Walsh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: You can't do that.
Jen Brown: I'm curious, how do you shift that mindset with leaders and the organizations who are bringing you in, knowing they want to see like a tangible outcome from trainings and the work with you?
John Walsh: I think it's reverse engineering. I think if we went out and said to people, hey, we're gonna come and do some confidence training. I there was three particular clients specifically asked for that, which made me think, wow, something's going on in the world. This is over since 24, 25. And that's what probably, right, the books, et cetera, et cetera. But the... If we went out and said to the clients, listen, there was one recently, a manufacturing client, global one, that's building a factory just down the road from where you are. And they wanted the folks to understand the difference between working in a permanent organization where you've got a full-time job and folks you know and everybody works for the same company, to working on a project where you've got contractors and kind of nobody works for you. How you transition between, I'm used to this and now I've got to manage that. So if we'd said, we'll go do it about confidence, we probably wouldn't have got the gig. But because we said, okay, give us your problem. And then we reverse engineer and go, right, so what's the mindset from a confidence angle? people, what do they need to help them to get to that where they feel confident in that environment? Does that make sense? reverse engineering supposed to go saying,
Jen Brown: Completely.
John Walsh: hey, we're going to sell you some confidence here? I can see the guy in the Wild West
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
Jen Brown: completely, completely understand that.
John Walsh: in the wagon, giving you some steak oils or whatever. Here comes the confidence. Take that twice a day and you're going to be confident. Didn't work, it?
Jen Brown: No, it doesn't work that way at all.
Hugo Rodriguez: Can I ask a quick question? Can I jump in? So I I this fascinates
John Walsh: Sorry about that.
Hugo Rodriguez: me. And as you started talking about it, I I mentally reviewed in my head, you know, some of the biggest hurdles that new leaders have is that confidence, right? Whether that's kind like
John Walsh: Yeah
Hugo Rodriguez: the self-confidence, the leadership confidence. And I know I can speak to many of my coaching clients. The first thing they say is, you know, I have imposter syndrome. I, you know, I shouldn't be
John Walsh: Yeah!
Hugo Rodriguez: in this room with these other leaders, right? You know, that's a that is a huge hurdle to get over early in your career. So I'm really curious, how do you go about helping new leaders, especially, start to build the confidence that they are not imposters to the room and that, you know, it th they they deserve to be there and they can have the skills to be effective as leaders.
John Walsh: Yeah, I think it's for us the simple way that we start off doing it is get them to review their past evidence. Hugo, that's the place to go where you go. Look at what you have done. You know, there's a fantastic leader I'm working with at the moment. Very, very good, very competent, I'd say mid-40s. Been doing it a few years. He's moving into a slightly different stream of work that he's not worked in before. But he's also... really accomplish rock climber and you go, I know this seems a bit of a leap, when he does his rock climbing he's leaping, but you look at it and you go, you go like, think about what you can achieve there, think about what you do there, you know, and he talks about the planning, the preparation, the working together with his colleague, know, his fellow climber, the prep they put into it, and it was like trying to get him to see that. and the past successes
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: he's had at work. Because we've all got bits of our life we'll be super confident, but there'll be other bits where you try something new and you're never going to be as confident as you are about something that you do daily, you've clocked up the others in. So the evidence is the first place you go. That was a really long way of saying evidence. Sorry.
Jen Brown: I I love that because evidence is one of my buzzwords and it's one of the practices I've been
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
Jen Brown: s using lately, right? Keeping that evidence list. It's easy to spiral, but I'm also curious because you really are hitting on the transferable skills, rock climbing to stepping up in a leadership role. They both take a leap. They both take consistent practice and showing up. And and I'm curious when you talk about.
Hugo Rodriguez: I'm hoping to make people put a trying purple
John Walsh: Yeah. Absolutely.
Jen Brown: new leaders and and really getting them to look at that evidence list. I'm wondering in this role in of evolving technology, right? How
Hugo Rodriguez: people.
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: does confidence show up? Because certainly a younger generation may have some more confidence in technology, but maybe not in the people skills. And people of I'll I'll say our generation,
Hugo Rodriguez: I thought again we're
Jen Brown: maybe have a bit more in the people skill area and not as much in in some of the technology. So I'm wondering, how do you bridge the confidence between generations, if you will, with technology?
Hugo Rodriguez: on the biggest mind. Okay, just keep that. Okay, I think that
John Walsh: It's a massive challenge, Jen, you've hit on it because I think there's a tendency for some, it's Jen or Evelyn, or is it, that's a good sort of point. There's a bit I'm always careful of, you we put people in buckets and go like, there we go, it's the youngsters or whatever. But there's a, I think when you're more technically minded, it could be that, that you tend to lean into the technical parts, proving your confidence, you're getting your confidence from that. So if we took age and we said youngsters or olders or whatever, it's with AI coming along, I can see folks maybe disappearing into the technical because they haven't clicked at what's gonna make the difference is the behavioural. Can I share something with you? This is fascinating. And you may find this happens in the States, but what we're finding in the UK at the moment. So any government contract, and this is over the last, let's say, it's really over the last four years, maybe five. we've seen it accelerate. say we're going to do a big defense program and we're going to do a infrastructure program or whatever. It be a power station, it could be new ships, new boats, whatever. If the government's funding it through contractors, they add, so part of the procurement process is we've got to put the procurement document out, but they'll attach points in the procurement. process to behaviours. So they're running behavioural assessments as well as checking it for price, checking it for technical competence, etc. And the points vary between what we've seen as 15 % to 45 % on behaviours. And what they'll do is they'll get the people in and they'll do a technical review of them to make sure they're competent and their solution works. But they'll also run an assessment centre. So What we're getting this conclusion is that as we move towards technology and the levelling up, in the past we could have said, a wonderful company seen in the US that had a unique way of doing it. I won't name the company, but they did a unique process for managing project management offices. They were amazing at it. Everybody's got that now. It's mature and the technology's there. But what our government is looking and saying, That's not what solves it. Competence rarely solves these things. It is the behaviours of the team in particular. They'll look for things like collaboration, obviously. They'll look for the ability to work on uncertainty. That thing we spoke about of have you got an organisation where nobody works for you? So how do you manage the leadership in that which is going to flex, you know, depending on the context.
Hugo Rodriguez: This is fascinating.
Jen Brown: So I I I love that you just said
Hugo Rodriguez: This is fascinating.
Jen Brown: that title. I know so
John Walsh: yeah, that's the title of the book, sorry.
Hugo Rodriguez: How do you
Jen Brown: so Hugo, may I just jump in for a moment because John just said when no one works for you. And John, that's the title of your book that's coming out, right? So
John Walsh: Yeah. And it came about from these conversations, Jen. The title of the book was quite snappy. It was a complex project leaders programs book or something. It was like a dreadful title. And the two of us, colleague and I, Simon, who wrote it, we suddenly went, nobody works for you. That's what it's actually about. So it's really funny. Yeah.
Jen Brown: But that that is so true. And we were talking before we started recording. Hugo and I come from an organization, long-standing organization, and you build these long-standing relationships. But
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: when you work for an organization where it's contractors and temporary projects, and you have people coming together. I don't know about you, but the four stages of forming a group, right? When you are like storming and trying to figure out how you come together.
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay.
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: Talk to us. How do you build confidence quickly in an organization like that?
John Walsh: I was just going to say, so back to these contracts, and it must be happening in the States as well. So they're assessing the behaviours of the people, that's like speaking our language, isn't it? It's like going, most folks are going to be technically competent. They wouldn't put themselves up for the job if they couldn't do it, and jobs like this. So all that's there. The pricing is going to be about the same, but when it comes to the behaviour, so. And the last one, we kind of get a request about once a month, once every two months to support a team that's going to be going through an assessment. And we've written assessments to ourselves as well in the past. But the most recent one we worked on, we sat to perfect our process a bit. Often what we get faced with, Jen, is they tell us, we say, we've got these 20 people that we're gonna put in this project. And we said to this client, because we're in early stages in selecting the team, we said, let us help you do a behavioral assessment on the folks, rather than just taking the people that you've got available on the bench. And they were like, fantastic idea. So to answer your question, how do you build confidence in it, we actually select the team based on The behaviors, so we've got a thing in the UK, it probably came from America, it's called SQEP, suitably qualified, experienced personnel. So whenever you go on a nuclear job, that's where it came from. For me anyway, might be, so that's where I first heard of it. We've got to prove that the people are suitably qualified and experienced personnel. So we do a SQEP on them technically, but we don't do a SQEP on behaviors. And that's what we said to the client we're doing. Look, we're squapping them for behaviors so that when you go to the ultimate client that's gonna be buying your services, you're saying, technically they're competent and behaviorally they're competent. And that's been a massive difference in the confidence of the teams. So choosing the right, when we get that luxury, choosing the right behavioral. And you know what we could argue and say, well, that's what we do in interviews, isn't it? But I don't think we just ask them questions in interviews, don't we? We don't tend to. actually put them through a bit where we can see them under pressure, rarely.
Hugo Rodriguez: So could I ask John when you're doing when when a when a contract is let and they are gonna do the behavioral assessment, do they look at the team working together? Is that where the behavior or are they looking at individuals?
John Walsh: Both. They start off with the team. They tend to structure it over a day, two days, half day, whatever they do. But they'll do, number one, they want to see the team together. Number two, they want to see the individuals. What they're trying to do, if you think about it, what they're trying to do is authenticity. know, imagine us three walk up to pitch for a job on something. We've met a couple of times online. Before we pitched for it, we probably had flyover and we'd... have a bite to eat and we'd find a bit more about each other, we'd talk a bit more about processes. We wouldn't just walk up at the contract shake. And we saw this one, this is a true, true thing, right? We'd prepared the team and we told them they were going to get to know the suppliers. It was one of them before. This was pre the assessments and they've done a lot of work with us. They in a good place. They turn up and they do a good job. But one of the other teams from another contractor were introducing each other in the hallway. in plain sight of the client. You know, it's like, Hugo, I'm Joe. you're Hugo. nice to meet you. I've heard all about you. And you're going like, how are you guys collaborative? How are you? So what they're looking for is authenticity in both the team and the individuals. And you can't fake it because part of what we're saying to them is we're not preparing you for an assessment to pass an assessment because you won't pass it. What we're preparing you for is to work together as a collaborative team when you win it. That's the difference in it, you know, that's
Hugo Rodriguez: man, I love this.
John Walsh: great fun. It's great. love the...
Jen Brown: I know. Isn't this totally amazing? And it gets back to a conversation we had about stakeholders and knowing who's all on your team and how you communicate.
John Walsh: Yeah, it's just, it's a, and I like from the contractors point of view and from the government, you it indicates taxpayers dollars. So they've made sure the people they choose are technically competent. And I think if I look back, without being too controversial, some of the projects we've done, particularly in the UK, if we'd been applying that, me say 10 years ago, as rigorously as they're applying it now, we might have got slightly better outcomes.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah. We started the conversation talking about kind
John Walsh: You know what I
Hugo Rodriguez: of how AI is going to change a lot of what we do. And I can't help but think, you know, this is the new playground or battleground, maybe, for competence in the future, right? Like your technical skills will be driven by super intelligence. But
John Walsh: Yes.
Hugo Rodriguez: Your interpersonal skills, your behaviors, that's what's going to make the difference in you know one team being successful versus another team being successful. How authentic are they? How well do they work together, right? Their ability to be humble and curious and you know supportive, all of those things that really separate great teams from, you know, average teams. And once once the technical aspects kind of everybody gets to a certain technical level, the thing that really pays off is how does the team interact as humans, right? And so I I I you've
John Walsh: especially when the pressure comes
Hugo Rodriguez: opened my mind.
John Walsh: I think that's probably going to be the differentiator. We've spotted it already and we think that's going to be differentiator when AI really plugs into a lot of the technical spaces. As long as there's an old joke about, it's not particularly funny but I'll go for it, but a guy gets sent up to space, it's him and a monkey, and the monkey opens the envelope and it says press this button, press that button, press this button, press that button. and the guy opens his envelope and says, feed the monkey. it's that, told you it wasn't funny. And it's the part I think that our job is gonna be to feed AI with
Jen Brown: Yes. Yes.
John Walsh: the things we need it to point to and do. It's gonna do a lot of the work, but it's gonna be that then factor on our behaviors. We gotta be able to under pressure pull together as a team and deliver. A lot of the things that you do anyway, Hugo, in the leadership space that you talk about, and Jen with
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: the coaching, et cetera, it's just nothing new. I think it's just gonna become more pronounced.
Jen Brown: It is really like having that competence to lead technology and
John Walsh: Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Brown: still needing the people skills, right? Because now you are leading people who are leading technology.
John Walsh: got it, you got it. And it's
Jen Brown: Yeah.
John Walsh: what happens when, I mean a lot of preparation we do for them, this one particular team I think we spent about nine days preparing them to work together, not to pass an assessment to work together, and a lot of the time we started to ramp up the pressure on them, like real life. What happens when you get late information, what happens when you get disruptive stuff coming, what happens when some Part of it lets you down when money runs out and you keep
Jen Brown: Yeah.
John Walsh: fighting all that in and you can see these guys and girls pulling together really well because they were selected for behavioural
Jen Brown: That sounds yeah.
John Walsh: SQEPs, suitably qualified experience. They were selected for that. that for me is back to your original question, Jen. I think what I'm with, so we do a workshop called the first time manager. and it's for technical people that have been promoted to be a manager of technical people. And because the audience is naturally younger, you know, they're in their late 20s, early 30s, we're finding that it's just the cusp of the behavioral part. You can see they're not as used to picking up a phone and talking to people, or they're
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: more reliant on texts, or... emails, know, they're more reliant
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: on that. And the last six years particularly with us working more hybrid from home, there's less chance to just go and have a water cooler moment with Hugo about this thing I'm worried about. And mean, if you're going to have talking about a design element that we could probably solve in about five minutes having a coffee, whereas it'll take three
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay.
John Walsh: days with constant emails going back and forward.
Jen Brown: And the potential for misinterpretation of how those emails are crafted, right? And and the whole communication
John Walsh: Good luck.
Jen Brown: variable. So adding challenges. I'm curious when you lead teams through these exercises, right? The team building, what have you seen to be like the greatest aha in terms of a team coming together with
Hugo Rodriguez: Right.
Jen Brown: confidence?
John Walsh: It was the fact that the leader is not necessarily the person that needs to tell them what to do, that was massive.
Jen Brown: Woo, you speak into my heart. I love that.
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay now.
Jen Brown: The leader doesn't
John Walsh: he suddenly went.
Jen Brown: have to be the person to tell them what to do.
John Walsh: it was like putting an accelerant on a fire. Because every exercise after that, they were going like, wow, smashing it, smashing it, smashing it. So much so that after we done, I mean, really did put them through, it was like military training. They went through nine different exercises, all different shapes and sizes with all the things thrown at them. And they crushed every single one. That's what they took from it, Jen, that they then had a really solid process for. And what I love is, my fingers are crossed, I hope they win it, because I'd love to continue working with them live. But if they don't, they've already said that we're going to take things away that we're going to use elsewhere. So yes, it's been great, a really very, very enjoyable piece of work.
Hugo Rodriguez: Fascinating. Fascinating. I would love to dig in more to some of these exercises because for
John Walsh: Yeah, yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: for what I do at the university level sounds a lot like this. And the aha moment for a lot of my leadership students is I don't have to be the decision maker, even though I have the title, you know, I can I
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: can delegate decision making w and then be the the the person that Empowers and finds the resources and opens the doors for my team to run with their decisions. But getting our guys to learn a level of comfort and a level of confidence with sharing that quote unquote power, right? Like you know, when you are given the title, you think you're given the power. I'm a leader, so now
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: I am the one who decides. Right. I'm the one who has to come up with the big ideas. And we know that's not true. And you you leave so much energy on the table if you don't empower your team to be the driver of all of that. But it's counterintuitive. You know, our young leaders, they think leadership looks like General Patton on the battlefield making the big decisions and and leading from the front. But we
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: know with our experience, that rarely works. And it's it's really about setting setting some ambitious goals out on the horizon, but then let it letting the team figure out how we're gonna get there and and
John Walsh: Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: telling us what what do they need to help them get there. And then that's where we kick in with being the connector to other parts of the organization.
John Walsh: I think that's hard at the beginning Hugo, think back to all
Hugo Rodriguez: You
John Walsh: of us when we first got our first management role probably in our mid-twenties or something like that and you've been a subject matter expert you know this thing really really well. For me it was a bit banking, a bit commercial finance and banking and all of a sudden you're running a team that you could do it quicker yourself, you could do it to a better quality standard but you realise that instead of you responsible for your outputs, which say we make a number up and we say I'm responsible for five outputs a week and I've suddenly got a team of 10 that's responsible for 50, I can't do 50. So, but then I don't know if this happened to you because I was a manager and the first management position was in the 80s and there was a lot of framework and scaffolding to support me, so good training, lots of courses, lots of good support to teach you how to be a leader. So you you kind of knew quite quickly that you couldn't do it all and you couldn't be an expert. And I think that's been dismantled over, you we had a financial crisis in the 07, 08, we? And budgets went from there, working from home took a bit of it away. I think we've stopped investing as much as we, you know, it's the casual investment, not the big programme, that still happens, but it's the casual investment, the little, you know, like let's have. some material on this particular issue that we're all going to face, the smaller interactions
Hugo Rodriguez: Right.
John Walsh: they seem to have gone.
Hugo Rodriguez: That's right. That's right. couldn't agree more. I think that that I also, my first managerial roles were in the eighties, and there was a lot of really good sort of that soft skills training, right? but it
John Walsh: Yeah
Hugo Rodriguez: has all but disappeared. And now we rely on each other. And unfortunately, I think you when you go through like COVID, as you were mentioning earlier, and the and more and more of our work is transmitted via screens and via emails and text messages, we've really, we really have to work hard to train the interpersonal skills. Great leadership. It can be done mediated through Zoom, but you can't lay that foundation of trust. You can't start with Zoom. You really have to be able to start connecting with people. And I think that's only done face to face and building trust that then you can leverage via these mediated communications platforms. But You know, we we have to get back to good training, good foundational trust building, good listening skills. yeah. Totally agree.
Jen Brown: Well,
John Walsh: I think
Jen Brown: if I if I can add in there, I mean, I I agree.
John Walsh: so. Well that's the... Yeah, please.
Jen Brown: I think the in-person is so critical, yet let's be real. When so many of our teams are spread out, we may not have that opportunity to directly meet. And so what does building confidence and connection look like across a screen? And it's it's that intentional coffee over the screen. It is different than the water cooler, right? Let's be real.
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: And and I think that's why we see a lot of companies who are focusing on what do retreats look like, what do conferences look like. Maybe we don't need to work in the same space, but how do we still create that environment for connection? And and
John Walsh: Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Brown: I I can say when I started a a position during COVID and I was meeting a lot of my colleagues via Zoom.
Hugo Rodriguez: That's the end.
Jen Brown: It was harder and it really took more of an intentional let's sit down and just do a connection call, right? This isn't a a work related thing. I equate it to that leadership by walking around where I'm just trying to get to know you and build relationship. I I'm curious, what have you seen in terms of confidence with teams who are mostly virtual?
John Walsh: You've nailed it with one particular guy and it was a French guy. This will be funny in a minute. He was a French guy who decided to have afternoon tea at three o'clock. The most British of things, afternoon tea on the screen during COVID. And his team was the most, as they were in COVID, the most productive. And when they came out of COVID, when they met in the office, never having met before, it was like that because he'd done what you just mentioned, he'd done the desk callers at three o'clock. to see certain and all we're gonna do is talk about how we're getting, you what you've been up to, Jen what you've been doing.
Hugo Rodriguez: Okay.
John Walsh: I'm finding it hard to get groceries because blah, blah, blah. You it was that connection where we got to, and you know, he invited me along to as many as I wanted to go to. And it was just great to see people making good, strong, but very, very, very intentional. And for a Frenchman embracing afternoon tea, I was like, this is magnificent. What does it say, man? Magnificent. I can't even speak English. I'm trying
Hugo Rodriguez: Magnifique, magnifique.
John Walsh: to say thank you. Thank you, Hugo.
Jen Brown: No, that's
Hugo Rodriguez: Ha ha.
Jen Brown: that is amazing when you talk about
John Walsh: Just think.
Jen Brown: it like that leader, very high emotional intelligence to know that's
John Walsh: Yeah
Jen Brown: the way to get to your team, right? Like adapting there across cultures. I love that.
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm. And confidence. And confidence, right? Like that is Yeah. That that's key.
Jen Brown: And confidence to do it. Yeah.
John Walsh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You remember that first day, so we've gone through 2020, 2021, we get a call to, we can get, it was a construction site, so the construction workers had to turn up. The guys doing the planning, the commercials, the yada yada, they could work from home, but all of a sudden, there was a fairness equation come into it that said, look, we're asking these guys to be here, we really need to be able to interact with them. everyone was given a call to come back to site. And the confidence would be, now imagine, I've never met my team and I walk into an office and it's like, your confidence is a bit lower because you're walking into a bunch of strangers. Whereas they walked in and it was like, you it was like you'd all been on a vacation and you were all meeting up after, you know, two years of knowing each other. was like, hey, you doing? my God, you're so much taller than you look
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: on screen.
Jen Brown: Right, right. How often
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
Jen Brown: do we hear something like that? Yeah. It's true. Right.
John Walsh: Yeah, you're small, you're tall, you're whatever, it's because I'm sitting down. So yeah, that was, that really, he really built confidence in that and he continued to be a good operating team as time went on. We'd done this other thing during COVID, it was quite, it was, can we take this workshop and put it online and make it as interactive? And the simple answer to all our questions from earlier about face to face or Zoom was, Face to Face was better because we got more richness in the communication. But with things like Zoom where you could do the rooms, you were getting people to work on real problems together in small groups and continuing to change the groups so they all got to know each other. They got to know how the different perspectives were. And that was, I'd say, pretty much as near as we could get. It was pretty good. those guys particularly, was leaning back into our finance. It was to do with teaching people anti-money laundering techniques for banks and they could hit the desk running pretty confident to do the road. It was a one week long course which is unheard of these days. Five days and by the time they'd done it they could take people through the three different levels of KYC. Know your customer and... Anti-Money London. So it's really,
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: that was pretty good. Again, I think there's elements of it. It's just being inventive about it. Intentionally you're working, and that's so true. Really good.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah. That's right. Two things jump up for me in this conversation. The first one is something that Jen and I talk about all the time, which is that as a leader, you have to you're under tremendous time pressure and your inbox is constantly refilling with new messages you have to answer and your to-do list never gets any shorter. But the real value as a leader is Is closing all of that down and being present with your team. As you were saying, John, you know, in that tea, it's not about what are we working on? It's about how are you doing? How are you getting your groceries in? You know, all of those sort of personal details, which you know, you want to be authentic about it. This isn't just making, you know, making it up, but it is so important to to build human contact and to build that relationship. And Fundamental. And the second point is you it it's a great luxury to be able to do it in person these days. Because as Jen was saying, so much of our world now comes through this kind of multi-screen. and and what you were saying, John, made me think, you know, we need to be teaching leaders how to be good in this medium. Because so much of their job as we head into the future. Is going to be like this, right? As much as you know, there was a backlash about remote work at base, it just makes sense that some percentage of your work going forward is going to be regional, it's going to be connected, it's going to be at a distance. And so, how do we teach young leaders to have that virtual tea? Right. And be present with their teams and build that connection. When you're on the screen, it kind of feels like you're you're against you're working against time, you're working against technology. Let's get this done so we can get back to real life. No, let's pause and realize this is real life. This is exactly how we need to lead in heading into the future. Technology is this we're not going back, right? This is it.
John Walsh: It's amazing, I mean we can do this. Technology,
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: we get to speak across thousands of miles and have great conversations. All these things, they're so good at what they can give us. I think there's a bit before that Hugo that is we've got to help leaders to value the human connection part because the way you phrased it was absolutely spot on. Inboxes are busy, tasks are backing up and being pressurized to get stuff done. And the thing that probably takes the backseat is the human connection. know, because if you said to
Jen Brown: Yeah. Yeah.
John Walsh: them, look, just spend 15 minutes having an afternoon, virtual afternoon tea or, you know, a pint at the end of the day or whatever it is you do. That is getting them to value that. I found that's probably the hardest part. It's not getting them to do it. It's getting them to
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: value it so they prioritize it.
Jen Brown: Yeah. And when I think
Hugo Rodriguez: Yes.
Jen Brown: the leaders value that first and show that, right, then that ripples to the team. Compl. Yeah, it is. It really is.
John Walsh: Game changer, it's a game changer. Being curious about your people, mean one of the jobs I'm working on, we've been around the war room, we've been taking this week's issues and working on them and it's been great. From a behavior point of view, we've been monitoring, I think it was about seven ideas that we all agreed were the ones that we would get, putting the job first over your organization, the things you would expect. What I noticed though is the pressure came on, I could see some of the leaders starting to go, like, we'll just park that for a minute because we want to get on with this particular task, you know, building a, let's say, you know, putting the roof on the building. That's what we've got to, because that's the big thing. And the hardest part, this is the valiant part, the hardest conversation I've been having with them is, and it's quite a big statement this, but we we say it in the book as well when I stand behind every issue on a project and every issue. There's a behavior as well. Say for example, the roof that we were getting isn't available and the teams waiting to, the steel fixers are there to erect it, but the roof panels haven't arrived. Somewhere along the line, and we used an example, I'll you the example we used, it was to do with brackets holding up cable trays. So you're in a data center, get thousands of cables, you gotta put brackets, put cable trays and pull the cables through. And the person that was in charge of buying the electrical packages, the brackets came through so sporadically that you'd have a full team waiting to do a big long run. And they'd have, maybe they needed 200 brackets, they'd have 50, but they'd all be different places. It wasn't like, so you were wasting efficiency on it. And the team started to look at, what's our process? We must have got the process wrong. Is it the suppliers wrong? And I'd say, well, let's go speak to the guy that done it. And when I spoke to him quietly one to one, I said, what was the story, how come the brackets, was, brackets are a bit boring, aren't they? They're just brackets. And so what I found really interesting was the Transformers. We were getting them shipped from Mexico and it was amazing working with them. And you go, there's human nature, there's a behaviour, isn't it? That's boring,
Hugo Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: I don't wanna work on it. And it's easy, it's only a bracket. I can whistle them up in minutes. And it turns out you can't. because our supply chain for them in the UK wasn't as advanced. So
Jen Brown: But
Hugo Rodriguez: Fascinating.
John Walsh: it's behind it, and it's a bold statement to say behind everything is a behaviour. Whether it's good or bad, there's always the element of the technical part and the behavioural part. And that guy, he hadn't done anything wrong, he? You can't blame him for it. I've got to say, we kind of put the onus on the management who should have been sent to him. Do you do realise those brackets are, you know, there's a cost somewhere around a hundred grand of if we... take too long to do this. Running
Jen Brown: That's right.
John Walsh: a corridor shouldn't, it should be, the team should be in there for like, putting the brackets up probably about two days, three days maybe. Not
Hugo Rodriguez: Right.
John Walsh: sporadic.
Jen Brown: Yep. But I think that's that's
Hugo Rodriguez: And that's that's b that's a behavior thing too, right? Like the the leadership team wasn't thinking through
John Walsh: Yeah! Yeah!
Jen Brown: Yeah. Yeah.
Hugo Rodriguez: it that way, wasn't communicating that way, that because for whatever reason they made assumptions and yeah, that is it's behavior all the way down.
John Walsh: I was just thinking again about intentionality. Imagine
Jen Brown: Yes.
John Walsh: they'd had an afternoon tea or whatever and you're talking to the brackets guy and you say, now you're getting on with those brackets, you know we need them in the next, you know they're going to be coming up in February next year or something and the guy's going, yeah I know. And you can see from his answer, you think he doesn't get it, does he? So that, but because we didn't do that, know, no one knew that this guy was getting excited about Transformers versus, and I get it, you know. I don't know, but your brackets didn't look particularly exciting, does it?
Jen Brown: No, but that's the that's the piece of leadership is communicating the value that each person contributes to the team.
John Walsh: Yes, absolutely.
Jen Brown: And when you have that relationship and they know their place and how that impacts the rest, right? Then every person has a critical part of the function. Otherwise,
John Walsh: You got it. You got
Jen Brown: you would automate it somehow and and not have the person be there. So yeah, I I'm with you. I I am curious how you have seen how you have worked with teams, organizations. who've gone through a type of failure and rebuilding confidence, maybe when they've gone through something pretty dramatic.
John Walsh: We've seen it, we kind of get involved with projects either at the very beginning or somewhere in the middle. And the middle part's normally where it's been going backwards, so it's not been getting the traction it should have. And then normally it's under a bit of pressure, a bit of heat, you know, from budget, from time, from stakeholders or whatever. So totally different, you're right. From the beginning, you're building the behaviors up. From that point, you're trying to establish. what behaviors are being rewarded, what's being tolerated. And so the difference there about building confidence is saying, let's have, so bottom line, we use a process called BARPIT, catchy, I know. It stands for baseline, analyze the data you get in your baseline, it's behavioral baseline, analyze the data you get in it, and review it with the team. You gotta do it, that's the first part of it, BAR. Second part. when you've reviewed it with the team and we agree that that's the kind of issues, make a plan. The I is implement the plan and the T is track the implementation of that plan and the changes is affecting. So the starting point Jen is to baseline again so that people go right, this is where we are and making sure there's no blame attached to the baseline.
Jen Brown: No blame attached to the baseline.
John Walsh: Do it.
Jen Brown: That's a pretty hard thing to achieve there, right? Because I think the natural tendency is to push it off onto somebody else.
John Walsh: tell you how we do it. We invented a questionnaire years ago called the high performance team questionnaire. It's just the vehicle to do it and it measures three things. Foundations of a team, have we all got roles, responsibilities, do we know the organisation, do we know who does what, do we know the processes, are those processes any good, have we got enough people, have we got enough skills, are we competent, have we built an accountability. So there's foundations then build on top of that. We then start to look at the behaviours. And then we do a thing called the team sentiment. How do people feel about being part of this team? You can imagine the team sentiment is the bit when you're failing, where everybody's going, it's dreadful, or under the cosh.
Jen Brown: Exactly.
John Walsh: So we got the questionnaire and we say to the client, we need to ask everyone that's got a voice in it, let's go out and ask them. Don't just ask the leaders, ask 250 people, ask 50 people, whoever's the right audience, ask them. And then when you're playing back the data, It's not us as clever consultants saying, look at this, this is what we've spotted. We're saying, your people are telling you this across the foundations, the behaviors and the team sentiment. And that's what the power, that's where the no blame came from Jen, because all of a sudden we're
Jen Brown: Yes.
John Walsh: going, it's not your stakeholders telling you that, it's not your client telling you that, it's your
Jen Brown: Yeah, Right.
John Walsh: people telling you that. And that's who's
Jen Brown: Right. Right.
John Walsh: going to deliver the job for you. it was. I'd love to say that we've been pretty organic in our growth through Breakthrough. I'd love to say that, yeah, we thought about that long and hard and came up with that, we'll go do it. It was a reverse fit. We went like, we need to measure these things. So we started measuring it. then
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: over the year, I think when we set the count of 98, I think we discovered the question in 2007. And then we started to apply it and then we refined it, made it better and understood it. So it's... We're trying to solve this very problem of, let's baseline it, but it's all about, well, that was your fault. If you'd given us more clarity,
Jen Brown: That's right.
John Walsh: we'd always say, no, the folks in your team are telling you this, and we'd be stupid if we didn't listen to them, wouldn't we?
Jen Brown: That's the power of analyzing a full organizational health, right? Because you can develop
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: a training, you can develop any type of program, but if you're doing that for the wrong issue, the wrong problem to solve, then
John Walsh: Yeah.
Jen Brown: that's a temporary band-aid. Yeah. Yeah.
John Walsh: You got it, you got it. And this, we also made it simple as well, Jen, because what I was conscious of was the fact that you don't wanna be saying, yeah, it's gonna cost you $250,000, $2.5 million for us to tell you where you are. What we came up with is a question that everybody can fill in in seven minutes, flat. We can analyze
Jen Brown: Mm-hmm.
John Walsh: it super fast. And you're talking a couple of thousand dollars and suddenly you've got a picture of where your team is. But more importantly, you've got a plan. So, and I think often
Jen Brown: That's it.
John Walsh: that's missing. see a lot of, I know from my past working with other pretty, you know, the major consultancies where we would maybe be supporting something in the project. And they would often tell you what the problem was, but they might not tell you how to solve it. we're thinking, we've
Jen Brown: That's right. That's right. I love it.
John Walsh: got the problem and we've got a plan to fix it, you know. But there's
Jen Brown: That's it.
John Walsh: an added dimension to that, Jen, where what happens is, so confidence-wise, We get a boost pretty quickly, because if we see our organisation charts a bit out of shape, or our processes, everybody's, we've got the process, but nobody uses it because it's too complicated, or it doesn't give us anything. So we can fix them quickly. Normally you fix them within six months, pretty straightforward. But your behaviours, they're always lagging. So we've done work, the leaders are changing their behaviours. And what happens, we get all the teams we've worked on, I gave some of the numbers, so typically the first team would score. So out of 100, we scored about 60%, that's the first score. Some are higher, some are lower. After we've done, six months, we've fixed foundations and a few of the behaviors. Not fixed, we've taken their data and we've implemented the plan. We get to about 72, so we've moved up 12 points. What we discovered was, at 80%, we see high performance. I thought we'd need to get to 100, but that was 2008, 2009, I was going like, whoa, wait a minute, we're getting results here at 80%. So Ergo high performance for us started at 80%. So to get them from 72 to 80, that's the hardest part and only 26 % of the teams managed to get above the 80 because the behaviors part is painful. You can't see it shining through. If I say roles and responsibilities, I can give new roles and responsibilities tomorrow. You work with my team to get them. Everybody understands them. We then... see an uplift in the next month or two because people are more joined up. But if I talk about say let's be collaborative, let's put, you know, if I think of delivery focus as one of the big ones, so what is it we're trying to produce, let's think about that. I can reinforce it, we can talk about it, we can have meetings about it, you know, but it won't feed through as quickly as one of the foundation fixes. And you can see the leaders kind of go, this is hard work now. from giving up. I'm
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: going for a new initiative. I've tried high performance teams. I'm gonna try for collaborative teams. Then when you go like, stick with it, stick with it. We call it the boring
Jen Brown: That is
John Walsh: middle bit. It's the bit before you're in it. I may mentioned it last time I'm learning piano and it's fantastic. I'm three months in and it's like my brain hasn't caught by my hands yet.
Jen Brown: Right, exactly. And that's the hard work, right? But you do have to stick with it. It's the consistency piece.
John Walsh: It's fun.
Jen Brown: John, we are so thrilled that you joined us today for this conversation. This this topic
John Walsh: Thank you so much. Brilliant.
Jen Brown: is so, so powerful for for both of us. And I would just love to ask, how can our listeners, viewers find you? And put another plug out there for this book. I'm super I I really want to find it. Yeah.
John Walsh: Thank you. The book is called Nobody Works For You. It's on Amazon right now. So it's easy to find my name, John Walsh, but you'll find a middle initial in there is helpful in finding it, John Walsh. Because I never realized, I mean, I know there's the famous John Walsh in America, America's most wanted, but I never realized there's
Jen Brown: Right.
John Walsh: so many people that had written books called John Walsh.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: So I had to resurrect my middle name from a Christian, which is way too embarrassing to share with you. Okay,
Hugo Rodriguez: Ha ha
John Walsh: well, it's my mum and dad were devout Catholics and they prayed to St. Mary of something, so I had to get a Mary in my name. So my middle name.
Hugo Rodriguez: Hmm.
Jen Brown: I love it. Well of course we will include your links in here too so that we
Hugo Rodriguez: Excellent. Excellent.
John Walsh: Which we can understand.
Jen Brown: don't confuse anyone.
Hugo Rodriguez: That's ver that is very humble. I appreciate that you were willing to share that.
Jen Brown: That's right. Thank you.
John Walsh: As a youngster you keep it hidden but now you're this age you go I don't care who knows and it's a nice
Hugo Rodriguez: That's right.
Jen Brown: Right. That's right. That's right.
John Walsh: nod to my wonderful parents.
Jen Brown: That's right. that sounds like evolving confidence, John.
Hugo Rodriguez: At all. Yeah.
John Walsh: Much earlier I wouldn't have been happy with that.
Jen Brown: Ha ha ha.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: But now I feel confident to share it with the world.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: So that
Jen Brown: That's right.
John Walsh: books out there we've done This is our sixth book, which is, I'm amazed at because it's like finding your voice and they're all on Amazon. I should really put them on Barnes and Noble as well, but I haven't got round to that yet. But
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah.
John Walsh: well, I need to.
Jen Brown: Well, it sounds like you're just a tad busy and and doing the other work here. So well, we
John Walsh: It's green.
Jen Brown: love it. And thank you, thank you so much for joining us. It
John Walsh: No, it's a pleasure, thank you both. I really appreciate
Jen Brown: Yes.
John Walsh: it, it's creative.
Hugo Rodriguez: John, this has been such a great, great conversation. I am wow, you've expanded my thinking so much. I look forward to following up with you on a lot of these issues because a lot of the stuff is stuff I hadn't
John Walsh: Definitely.
Hugo Rodriguez: heard of before. And it's a great perspective to look at leadership through. So thank you.
John Walsh: No, it's an absolute pleasure and thank you, it's so good to have a chance to speak with like-minded folks about it because we don't often get that do we? We're normally client facing or student facing
Jen Brown: Right. Right.
Hugo Rodriguez: Yeah. Right.
John Walsh: and the students are wanting one thing from his clients, wanting another, whereas to speak to fellow professionals that just get it and it buzzes us and it's the same, I'm buzzed a second, it's like a great way to start a Monday.
Jen Brown: That's right. That's right. And for our listeners
Hugo Rodriguez: Great. Great.
Jen Brown: and viewers, please give us a like. Tell us what resonated with you and where are you struggling to build confidence in your leadership with your teams? How can we help support you during your journey? Thanks again so much for joining.
