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Uncharted territory is brought to you by MoneyPenny.
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When you connect with people in a room like that, it's the most incredible feeling.
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Basic processes and systems don't currently work, but we're being promised unicorns and rainbows and magic wands.
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And what we end up with is a very lonely, very fragmented workforce.
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Nobody turns up wanting to do a bad job.
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People want, they want to do well.
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Today's guest is someone who's been rewriting the rules of work, especially for those juggling careers, kits, and everything in between.
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Christine Armstrong is a workplace expert, author of the best-selling book, The Mother of All Jobs, that I have a copy of here.
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Super popular.
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And you're a fierce advocate of making work actually work, which it doesn't do for everyone.
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Christine has advised Global Leaders, co-founded a trailblazing consultancy, and she somehow still finds time to offer wisdom on her weekly blog seen by thousands.
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She's here to share some of that wisdom with us today.
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Christine, I'm delighted to welcome you to Uncharted Territory.
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Thank you for joining us.
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Thanks for having me.
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I'm excited.
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Great.
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You began your career in a high-pressure sort of global PR communications before becoming a researcher, an author, a workplace expert.
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What was the moment or series of moments that pushed you to rethink your career?
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It was serendipity.
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And it's one of those things that I find fascinating is how poor we are at spotting our own talents or interests.
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So I did a politics degree, I went into communications, I was okay at communications, was fine.
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And then one day I'm head of communications, director of communications at an ad agency, and my then boss has a row with the person who's the head of planning for Europe, and they shout at each other, and the head of planning throws all of her papers in the air and says, I'm going back to my old job and walks out.
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And my boss sort of looks around because he's got all these projects ongoing and says, You could you just like do this job for a bit until we find somebody who actually knows how to do it?
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And I was like, sure, why not?
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At which point I discover that I am incredibly nosy.
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I mean, I just love nothing more than asking people questions, working through the data, trying to work out the curious am I am curious.
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Okay.
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My mother says I'm nosy.
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Um, and and we were doing these great, this great work at the time.
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It's a global project.
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So we we were doing ethnographies, we're filming people's houses and going literally going through people's cupboards and their finances and asking these great questions about their relationship with money and phones and cars, and then I would go and present that to our clients, and so I'd go off around the world and share the insights from it.
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And I started off being very bad at presenting, and then I realized that there's nothing more painful than presenting incredibly badly, and so I got better at presenting.
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So two bits to my career, the research and then the presenting kind of emerged almost by accident.
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So, what are the moments where you've learned something and that's just changed everything, other than be you are, you need to do this job a little bit?
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So I think it is at after that period, I started to write for Management Today magazine, and then they started to invite me to speak at events.
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And I did this, I was asked to speak about bullying, and I wasn't an expert in bullying, and so I was like, okay, I had an interest in it because of various workplaces.
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So I emailed 25 people that I knew and said, tell me your experiences of bullying.
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And I just got up on stage and I went, I've done a bit of background reading on the you know technical side of the power out of it, but I want to just tell you these stories, and I just remember the feeling of the response in the room.
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I couldn't get to the back of the room.
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Everybody wanted to talk to me.
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I went to the toilet.
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There were people like trying to hold my hand and tell me those stories.
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And I was like, there's a real power of words, and when you connect with people in a room like that, it's the most incredible feeling.
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It's such a joy, and it's so fascinating what you then hear back.
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So you became a storyteller.
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Yeah, maybe.
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Yeah.
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Other people's stories.
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What were some of the questions that people uh were asking you there, uh making your way out of the room?
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Well, the best question came before.
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I sent this email out saying, Tell me my your experience of being bullied, uh bul bullying.
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And some who I know really well emailed back and said, Do you want to know the time when I was bullied or when I was the bully?
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And I was like, Oh, this is gold.
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This is gold.
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And so that was a real light bulb moment, that awareness and that ability to confront both and talk about the dynamics.
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She worked for somebody very famous in the media, still in the UK, and she replicated the behavior that she saw, and you know, she had regrets about that.
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Um, so that was one of the things.
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In the room, people want to tell you their stories.
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They want to tell you what happened to them and they want to be recognized.
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They want to say, I hear, I feel seen, you know, somebody's seen something that happened to me.
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And how widespread is bullying in the workplace?
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I'm still not an expert at bullying.
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I think it's much wider spread than we think.
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And I think, but it's a very nuanced thing, isn't it?
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Because if you confront a bully, and I've confronted quite a lot in my time and I've been in organizations dealing with bullying, usually they will say something like, I'm just being direct, I want the work to be great.
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I just want a higher standard.
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And what people misunderstand when they are in power is the the power imbalance.
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They don't understand how powerful they are.
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They think they're speaking to somebody who's broadly equal, but it doesn't feel like that when you work for somebody.
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And that's the thing they most often understand.
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One of the things I talk about a lot is how in organizations we see power above us, we look up for power because those people decide our pay, our bonus, whether we stay in this organization, whether we get promoted.
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And we're very bad at looking down and understanding how people who are junior to us or newer than us feel.
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And so, really, bullying is often a misunderstanding of that power imburns.
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It's a bit of a role model you also look up to, right?
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So if you're trying to replicate that person, that that's um that's a challenging sort of dynamic if if that's the case.
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Yeah, we're always looking up, we study the people above us.
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If I interview someone and I say, tell me about your boss or your boss's boss, they'll say, Right, okay.
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They drive this car, they're friends with this, they like this, they like information like this, this is how they were.
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So, okay, let's do the same thing for somebody two levels junior to you.
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They're like, Yeah, I think he goes to the sandwich shop on the corner.
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Like, and it's not because they're not nice people, it's because our brains are wired for survival in these complex organizations.
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So when we're senior, what we have to remember is people study us.
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If we come in in a bad mood because our cat, you know, brought in a mouse and it's running around our kitchen and we've had a terrible morning, like they will think that's them, unless we say.
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So we have to be aware of what that weather system or that feeling that we bring with us when we So is that about taking the veneer off and just be a little bit more open, a little bit more a little more human, maybe.
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Totally.
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I think it is about being human and honest, but also just calculating what sounds to you like a statement, an equal statement, may sound quite challenging to somebody else.
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And then so just you know, filtering a little bit, being a bit aware of that.
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Yeah, that's good advice.
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Um so when I was uh reading up on you and thinking about our conversation today, you've done a lot of work and um you sort of very early on were very flexible around how you wanted to work, having kids, you wrote your book about it.
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What's some of the uh myths that still need to be debunked in uh in that space?
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Oh, sadly, so many.
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Uh the world doesn't seem to have changed enough.
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I think the key problem that we have is that we've got an economy that's based on a model of working that doesn't really exist.
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It's the breadwinner model, technically, we kind of still think that in any household we've got one person out earning money and one person, I know, sociologists would say a one and a half job, you know, maybe working locally or flexibly or whatever.
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Um, and in reality, for most people, uh, you know, particularly if you're living in another centre, but just generally, you know, two adults in a household, if there are two, they both need to work to pay the bills.
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And we haven't compensated for that.
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And we still have a lot of leaders who want to work in what I call the Tiger Who Came for Tea era.
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You know, there's kind of like daddy's at the office with his keys in the car, and Murray's at home with animals and children.
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And and the reality is that there are a lot of very stressed-out people who are trying so hard to make everything work.
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At the same time as for a lot of people, their working day has expanded exponentially because of laptops and phones and international work and calls.
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You know, I have three kids.
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They, you know, in any given week, you know, how many activities, how many things are you also expected to?
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School wants you to come in on Thursday, and you know, you're like, I'm in Ireland on Thursday.
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I don't know, I don't know what to tell you.
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Uh so you know, it's all it just all of this complexity.
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So the big thing I think that needs to be said again and again and again is if you're struggling with this, it's not your fault.
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The system is not set up for you.
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And I think the other big thing which needs to be said to a lot of leaders who grew up in the Bridewriter model and for whom it worked for them, there's great data.
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American chief executive, I think something 75 odd percent of them have a stay-at-home partner who's running the household.
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You know, the question I often mentally ask, if not actually ask, is, you know, when did you last, you know, pick up the pick up food on the way home from work?
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When did you last clean the bathroom?
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And most of them don't.
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And sometimes people invite me into their organizations and somebody who say, you know, I'm head of finance, but nobody understands that I have a big job, but I still have to feed my kids and I still have to let my dogs out, and I still have to do these things, and you know, because that I don't have somebody else doing it.
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So if we started again, if we had a blank piece of paper, how would you design society to sort of fit around work, families, activities, just life, really?
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Great question.
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So I would go to the Microsoft data, so they look at the telemetry of interruptions, and they say we get interrupted at work on average 275 times a day.
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So that's every two to three minutes.
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But that's just on Microsoft products.
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That's just your Outlook, your Teams, okay?
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That isn't your WhatsApp.
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That isn't the doorbell ring with the delivery.
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It's not somebody popping in asking you if they can have a quick word.
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Yeah.
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And so we've created a world of continuous distraction and interruption.
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And rather than I think in an ideal world, having a shorter working day where we truly focus on task and get stuff done, we've created a world of constant, constant interruption.
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And there's some data from consultants who's saying that some people who are hired for expertise, an actuary, you know, uh somebody who's a developer in programs, sometimes they spend 70% of their time doing meetings and emails and messages and not doing the thing they believe.
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They don't want to give them time to do their job.
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It's crazy.
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So what I would do is step back and say, how do we hold back these interruptions?
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What do we need to do so people can come in, do a great job, focus, get the satisfaction of saying, I know what I need to do, I've done this job, and now I'm gonna go home feeling boom, I've done it.
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But life still goes on, you still have school, you said activities, maybe there are two parents working, international travel, lots of different stuff.
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What are we gonna do about all that?
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Imagine that you could go into work and do six hours totally focused.
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How much could you get done if that all that interruptions were managed?
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And we were able to agree amongst us.
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And some organizations have done this.
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I've read read, you know, uh interview.
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It's hard to do at scale where you just say, come in, do your job, and then let's try to stop.
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Because I think what we've done is we are the boiled frocks.
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You know, I don't know how old you are, but I remember email being stalled on my computer at work.
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You know, we never had a plan, we never meant to do this to ourselves.
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Um, you know, so we can structure our days and actually do some proper, deep thinking work, get that report done, get the analysis done, sort out that customer problem, whatever it is, get the job done and then move on.
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And I think if we could do that, then we would allow the space for other things around it.
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So that that sounds like a tangible shift that could be done.
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What are some of the other shifts that is either happening or should be happening that people are ignoring right now?
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So I think one of the shifts that people are ignoring it, I've become slightly obsessed with, so don't let me go on too long.
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I'll stop you.
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Don't worry.
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Go off.
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It's fine.
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Let's hear it.
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I'm really obsessed by what AI is doing to us at work and at home and how it's changing how we think and operate.
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So the one level I call it the AI paradox.
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So I'll go into an organization and I'll ask them what's going on, and they'll say, oh my God, we're gonna have these agents and it's gonna be amazing, and it's AI and it's incredible, and we're gonna resolve all of these problems that have been going on for ages, and we're gonna launch rockets to the moon.
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It's amazing.
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And I say, That's really great.
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How is your technology now?
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And they say, Well, I've got to be honest, the printer doesn't work, and tech stack doesn't talk to each other.
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So we might have gold in them when we're shooting for the moment.
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Yeah, and it's like this really grinding contradiction where the most basic processes and systems don't currently work, but we're being promised unicorns and rainbows and magic wands, you know.
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And so I think that there's this disconnect here.
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So that's one of the disconnects.
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The other disconnect, I think, is because of that magic and unicor unicorns promise, lots of organizations go, okay, okay.
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We've got to do AI, okay, we've got to stay ahead, we've got to do AI.
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So we'll do what's the difficult things that AI goes.
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We have to use AI for hiring people.
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You're like, is that a good idea?
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No, probably not.
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And so we're putting in these processes that actually are driving a bigger trend that I see, which is the disconnect between ourselves as the as in as an employee's team, as a workers, and also our customers.
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And so where we might have sat in a group, got to know each other, been in a team for years, got to know each other, agreed where we were going, pulled in the same direction, suddenly we're doing hot desking.
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So we don't sit with people that we might not even be in the office.
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We might, some of us are at home, some of us are.
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We're hot desking.
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We'll do all of our stuff on Teams because some people aren't here.
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So everything's on Zoom or Teams, so we're not meeting in person.
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We're gonna have an agile team, so every three months you're going to change teams.
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Uh, and and and all of our humanity, all of our desire for tribalism, for friendship, for connection, for understanding is being pulled away at the very time we're going, AI is going to solve everything.
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And what we end up with is a very lonely, very fragmented workforce.
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And you know, I work with organizers.
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Sometimes I go in, I feel like if you can ditch this, if you imagine like a tug of war where two people are pulling in opposite direction, but it's like eight people are pulling in opposite directions on eight ropes and and and nothing's moving, you know, because they're all exerting, they're all sweating and grunting and pulling so hard, and they're tired and their kids are not getting what they were.
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Am I not getting what I'm doing?
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Yeah, and their partner's pissed off with them because they're never home, and all of this stress, and yet they're not actually connected and going, guys, we're we're trying to go over there.
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If we all pulled in that direction, actually, maybe we wouldn't have to work quite this hard, and we would get their foster.
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But that sounds more alignment, sort of.
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Yeah, but I think it's the lack of connection.
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Is if you're not in the same place having those conversations, misunderstandings are easier, people are more threatening, people are more insecure, AI's coming for your job, so then they start holding information, hiding.
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I won't tell them what the boss said because then I'm gonna get on and they're gonna not be able to do that.
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They're not sharing, yeah, they're not generous and they don't trust each other because they haven't spent that time together.
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It sounds terrible, it sounds horrible working environment.
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It does, and I, you know, and I don't want to overplay it, there's lots of places not like that, but I think where it tilts in that direction, and it's all very logical.
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You've got people going, well, we've only got some people in three days or four days, so if we're hot desk, it's an efficient use of the space, and and it does all make sense from a system, but does it make sense in terms of people feeling connected, clear, getting work done, working together?
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I think in a lot of organizations it's not doing that.
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So, do you think we're not measuring?
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I'm saying generally we um uh we're not measuring output, we're sort of looking at the efficiency of hot desking or maybe not paying for big enough facilities, or we don't talk enough to each other.
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How do we shift that to think maybe more about the outcome and the the output really, like and people's happiness along the way?
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I mean, happy people typically do great work.
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Surprise, right?
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Yeah, I think it's taking the time.
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I think we get into this sort of pathologically busy state where it feels like you're rat raised, and so it's the default to say I don't have time to sit down and agree with the strategy.
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I don't have time for this.
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Like I know everybody should know what the strategy is.
00:16:02.960 --> 00:16:04.320
It's something you hear a lot from leaders.
00:16:04.399 --> 00:16:04.960
Everybody should know.
00:16:05.039 --> 00:16:07.440
If I asked anybody, they would they would they would tell us.
00:16:07.759 --> 00:16:08.559
Yeah, I told them.
00:16:08.639 --> 00:16:11.519
And then if you ask people, they give you 12 different answers, you know.
00:16:11.840 --> 00:16:17.360
So I think it's taking the time to be really clear and then taking the time to have conversations.
00:16:17.679 --> 00:16:23.360
One of the things I do when I'm in the room with people, which they hate and they really they try to leave, but then it changes rooms.
00:16:23.600 --> 00:16:31.200
I just say, listen, we're just gonna try and experiment, we're gonna talk, and one of you is gonna talk for three minutes, and the other person's just gonna listen without interrupting.
00:16:31.440 --> 00:16:33.120
So it's like an active listening exercise?
00:16:33.360 --> 00:16:34.960
Just for three minutes, and then we're gonna swap.
00:16:35.120 --> 00:16:37.919
And firstly, everybody fidgets, like, I don't want to have to do this.
00:16:38.080 --> 00:16:48.799
Then they do it, and at the end, there are people crying, there are people hugging each other, there are people saying, I've worked with this person for 15 years and I've never had a conversation like I've just had.
00:16:48.879 --> 00:16:50.159
I've never had a connection.
00:16:50.559 --> 00:17:04.079
And and and somebody last week I was running a session out at the NHS, and a guy came up to me and he had handwritten a note on his little piece of paper, and he showed it to me, and it said, I feel like this is going to completely change my relationship with my wife for the better.
00:17:04.319 --> 00:17:06.640
And I said, Did the exercise do you enduring?
00:17:06.880 --> 00:17:08.000
Yeah, it wasn't for his wife, that was.
00:17:09.200 --> 00:17:10.480
And I said, Do you want to share that with your room?
00:17:10.640 --> 00:17:11.759
He said, Absolutely not.
00:17:13.519 --> 00:17:15.440
But it's like just that revelation.
00:17:15.599 --> 00:17:18.000
We don't let somebody finish a sentence.
00:17:18.400 --> 00:17:19.359
I completely agree.
00:17:19.440 --> 00:17:25.599
And I think there's something about just listening, thinking, not thinking about what you're going to respond to.
00:17:25.920 --> 00:17:28.000
I I I mean, I'm sure we all had it.
00:17:28.079 --> 00:17:35.200
Sometimes you talk to somebody and you see the lips even moving, and the other person, they're formulating their response, and therefore they're not really getting it.
00:17:35.359 --> 00:17:37.359
So, how do we slow down society more?
00:17:37.519 --> 00:17:43.119
What should leadership look like to facilitate those sort of um good organizational structures?
00:17:43.440 --> 00:17:44.960
There are really simple things that you can do.
00:17:45.039 --> 00:17:52.079
One of the things I say, and I took this from Nancy Klein, who, you know, the the the exercise I discovered is a sort of sort of uh very rough version of what she does.
00:17:52.160 --> 00:17:58.319
But I just say one a really basic thing, don't start meetings until everybody's said something, whether it's online or in person.
00:17:58.480 --> 00:17:59.519
People say, Well, how do you do that?
00:17:59.680 --> 00:18:00.240
Don't start them.
00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:02.559
Don't start them until everybody's spoken, said something.
00:18:02.720 --> 00:18:05.279
And sometimes I speak at events, you know, it's 2,000 people.
00:18:05.359 --> 00:18:06.400
I say, Well, that's impossible.
00:18:06.559 --> 00:18:08.240
And I say, No, it's time to say something to your neighbour.
00:18:08.319 --> 00:18:09.039
How are you feeling today?
00:18:09.200 --> 00:18:09.519
Say hi.
00:18:09.839 --> 00:18:10.960
I I often get them to hum.
00:18:11.119 --> 00:18:14.240
I'm gonna say, I'm gonna put some quotes up, and you're gonna tell me whether you recognize me.
00:18:16.160 --> 00:18:19.519
And then it's like you kind of feedback and they're not spoken, but they know it's a conversation.
00:18:19.920 --> 00:18:20.400
They feel heard.
00:18:20.559 --> 00:18:21.119
They feel heard.
00:18:21.200 --> 00:18:25.839
That from the right, that's from the very first moment, we've got a two-way communication.
00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:30.480
Not me coming onto a team school, going, There's 25 of you, these are the three things that are the priority this week.
00:18:30.640 --> 00:18:34.559
And everybody else is feeding the cat, reading their WhatsApp, dead behind the eyes.
00:18:34.720 --> 00:18:42.000
Just make time for people to make it a conversation, small change uh that can really unlock a different energy.
00:19:23.240 --> 00:19:28.279
So um lots of people are sort of worried about how you set it up.
00:19:28.360 --> 00:19:32.920
You sort of talk about the output, or we talked about the output rather than the effort.
00:19:33.160 --> 00:19:36.840
Remote working is hard, notifications are toxic.
00:19:37.160 --> 00:19:45.800
Um I think a lot of time, and you talk about it in your book and and elsewhere, when people sort of finding new ways of working, remote working is okay.
00:19:45.960 --> 00:19:48.600
Uh, of course, getting people together is important too.
00:19:48.840 --> 00:19:58.440
I get the feeling that that level of flexibility, for many people, they're worried about giving flexibility to their teams because how am I gonna be sure you oppress and that you actually do your work?
00:19:58.600 --> 00:20:01.320
I mean, maybe you'll do better because you get deep thinking time.
00:20:01.480 --> 00:20:07.800
Um, what's your advice to sort of how how do you make that adjustment and get comfortable with people working remotely?
00:20:08.120 --> 00:20:13.000
There's some great data from 2016 where they uh asked people, what do you do when you're in the office?
00:20:13.160 --> 00:20:13.320
Okay.
00:20:13.880 --> 00:20:17.800
And um, this is self-reported, so this isn't even like a time emotion study.
00:20:18.039 --> 00:20:26.600
And um, and then they broke down the answers and they discovered that people spent, on average, half an hour a day um looking for another job while they were at work.
00:20:26.759 --> 00:20:30.759
They spent about an hour, I think it was, in uh doing social media and kind of connecting.
00:20:31.080 --> 00:20:33.880
And eventually it's like, how much time did the edges been working when they're in the office?
00:20:34.039 --> 00:20:35.800
It was a little bit over three hours, you know.
00:20:36.039 --> 00:20:46.440
So we we idealized the office as a place of work, but those of us old enough to work full-time in office can assure you that there were plenty of people who didn't do a lot of work when they were full-time in the office.
00:20:46.680 --> 00:20:49.880
So we we're creating kind of a false correlation.
00:20:50.039 --> 00:20:55.480
Offices are places for focus work and homes are not, or third spaces, whatever.
00:20:55.880 --> 00:21:01.560
I think we have to just look at the data and say people work best, no surprise, where they feel happiest.
00:21:01.640 --> 00:21:05.160
And Professor Chowdhury, who's at Harvard, has a very good book out on this.
00:21:05.240 --> 00:21:11.160
And, you know, he says the most talented people in the world, the people that we need to change businesses, they want to work from where they want to work.
00:21:11.240 --> 00:21:14.360
So we need to let them because that's how we're gonna get the most talented people.
00:21:14.600 --> 00:21:27.640
So I think you have to decide whether you want control because it feels good and it looks good, and it's the way that worked for you because maybe you grew up in a breadwinner model, or whether you think actually talent's gonna be hard to find, hard to keep, hard to motivate.
00:21:27.720 --> 00:21:33.720
And so having some thought about how you organize it in a way that works for their lives could could pay out for you.
00:21:33.960 --> 00:21:35.880
And then let's put the complexity of AI.
00:21:35.960 --> 00:21:44.920
We talked about it briefly earlier, because now you can churn out content, you can probably portray your work to be very different to what you actually put into it.
00:21:45.080 --> 00:21:50.519
I think there's lots of great applications of of AI, but uh maybe we're also heading, that's my fear.
00:21:50.840 --> 00:21:54.519
I'd love to get your view on it, that life could become very vanilla, right?
00:21:54.600 --> 00:21:59.240
If you're just recycling old learnings, whatever good AI is at the moment, at least.
00:21:59.400 --> 00:22:01.560
How do we how do we avoid that happening?
00:22:01.720 --> 00:22:08.600
We all sort of just become um human robots in a world that is predetermined already from what's happened before.
00:22:08.840 --> 00:22:13.560
Jimmy Carr, the comedian, has a brilliant line on this, and he says that AI is a brilliant cover band.
00:22:13.720 --> 00:22:15.480
It's a good cover band, but it's still a cover band.
00:22:15.640 --> 00:22:16.519
It's not the original.
00:22:16.600 --> 00:22:17.640
It can cover something.
00:22:17.880 --> 00:22:18.039
Right.
00:22:18.200 --> 00:22:30.840
Um, and it's a great line, and I think it's really helpful because when I interview people, I was interviewing somebody last week at a recruitment firm, and she said, I cannot tell you how many reports I get, and I'm a page into them, and I realize, oh, this has been written by AI.
00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:40.600
It's full of wordiness, it looks important, it's beautifully laid out, but there's no substance to it, and it drives me crazy because the person who wrote the report is a person who's supposed to care about this subject and they can't be bothered.
00:22:41.160 --> 00:22:45.080
Even think about it to write me a proper report and just really cross about it.
00:22:45.240 --> 00:22:50.200
So I think with AI, we have to separate the hype from the reality.
00:22:50.360 --> 00:22:51.640
We have to be so granular.
00:22:51.720 --> 00:22:53.720
Where does there are moments when it's so useful?
00:22:53.800 --> 00:22:54.279
Let's be honest.
00:22:54.600 --> 00:22:55.720
No, you can't remember a few.
00:22:56.039 --> 00:23:01.640
Maybe to summarize that long report just to get the to summarize the report and then send back your comments.
00:23:02.600 --> 00:23:04.039
You've got to break out of those loops.
00:23:04.120 --> 00:23:04.759
And it is useful.
00:23:04.840 --> 00:23:07.000
I make loads of typos because I type really fast.
00:23:07.080 --> 00:23:08.840
I'd put stuff into it and it's great.
00:23:08.920 --> 00:23:10.039
It's like a liberation.
00:23:10.120 --> 00:23:13.000
I, you know, record things and then it gives me a great little sound.
00:23:13.160 --> 00:23:17.080
There's loads of brilliant things that it can do with process, and I don't want to belittle any of that.
00:23:17.240 --> 00:23:19.400
But we have to know where the line is.
00:23:19.560 --> 00:23:27.880
Where do we need to bring ourselves fully to things to make it but not a cover band, to be original, to break out of it, to really think deeply.
00:23:28.039 --> 00:23:33.320
And I think if it gives us, if it removes some of the clutter and allows us to think about stuff, it's great.
00:23:33.560 --> 00:23:37.960
When it stops us thinking, when it makes us lazy, then we have a problem.
00:23:38.120 --> 00:23:41.640
And I think for a lot of people, that's that's is what's happening.
00:23:41.800 --> 00:23:52.039
The other thing I would say related to that, some um researchers I spoke to a while ago, I need to go back to them in Holland um university, and they were doing some work on the emerging patterns and saying actually AR makes people talk to each other less.
00:23:52.120 --> 00:23:58.039
So it's actually adding to this asimization issue because if you mention something I don't understand it, I would look like an idiot in front of you.
00:23:58.120 --> 00:24:00.840
I just quietly going to my what was that thing he meant?
00:24:01.080 --> 00:24:01.480
Oh, okay.
00:24:01.560 --> 00:24:15.080
And instead of saying, Oh, I I don't know that, maybe you could tell me, and then it would give you a gauge of what I do and don't know, and you would explain the nuance maybe of why you referenced that particular thing, and we would understand each other a little bit better, rather than me going off secretly into my phone and yeah.
00:24:15.400 --> 00:24:15.880
It's fine.
00:24:16.120 --> 00:24:22.920
What's great for technology, maybe lower complexity right now, and what's great people, and what are we all adding to it and holding it to account to some extent?
00:24:23.160 --> 00:24:27.400
Yeah, I'm working the line, like hiring maybe is not a great thing to go through it.
00:24:27.560 --> 00:24:29.560
Maybe you want to scan some CBs, maybe that was fine.
00:24:29.640 --> 00:24:33.240
But as soon as you get into interviewing, like what are you doing to the relationship of that person?
00:24:33.400 --> 00:24:34.200
It then comes to you.
00:24:34.279 --> 00:24:40.120
So where is it like maybe uh reducing people's discretionary effort, reducing their commitment?
00:24:40.440 --> 00:24:45.400
Where might it really help if your expenses can be processed in 20 minutes rather than three weeks?
00:24:45.480 --> 00:24:47.160
That's probably helping your relationship really.
00:24:48.680 --> 00:24:49.000
Yeah.
00:24:49.240 --> 00:24:54.120
So, you know, figuring out, you know, where it's really adding some value to the system.
00:24:54.440 --> 00:24:55.960
So let's shift gears a little bit.
00:24:56.039 --> 00:25:07.000
And um, your book, you talk about career balance, having children, um, the sort of society probably set up for uh not having working mothers in the same way.
00:25:07.160 --> 00:25:12.360
Like, talk to me about um how you would like to set society up if we started again.
00:25:13.160 --> 00:25:14.039
Great question.
00:25:14.360 --> 00:25:28.360
I think you have to start with the potential of the hundred-year life, and you have to say that the most important thing that we can do for any generation is to help them really find their talents and interests and really bring that out.
00:25:28.519 --> 00:25:31.240
And I think that sort of starts in our education system.
00:25:31.320 --> 00:25:36.759
It's less of the sausage factory, it's much more like what are you really energized by?
00:25:36.920 --> 00:25:37.880
What gifts do you have?
00:25:38.039 --> 00:25:40.519
And the thing I started with is hard to spot your own gifts.
00:25:40.680 --> 00:25:43.160
We need other people to help us and to grow them.
00:25:43.320 --> 00:26:02.200
So I think we need to be much more open-minded in that first phase of education, but then to create a system that builds education throughout our lives so that when you have those pivots, we talked about my pivots, I'm sure you've heard pivots, you can go back and learn something new, study something in an easy way, um, that's not debilitating.
00:26:02.279 --> 00:26:06.039
And you can have children and go back to things and you know, have phases.
00:26:06.200 --> 00:26:10.039
Um, Zoe Williams, who's a writer at The Guardian, said it beautifully when I interviewed her once.
00:26:10.120 --> 00:26:11.880
She said, you know, there's a season for everything.
00:26:12.039 --> 00:26:19.640
But what we try to do is to say there's one season for education, then there's a season for getting ahead in your career, and you've got to combine that with having a baby.
00:26:19.880 --> 00:26:27.400
I interviewed a lawyer not long ago and she said, you know, I realize that the year my youngest child leaves home will be the year I'm eligible for retirement.
00:26:27.480 --> 00:26:28.680
I mean, how crazy.
00:26:28.840 --> 00:26:29.640
How crazy.
00:26:29.800 --> 00:26:33.640
Even though she's healthy, she's not even 60, but she's got, you know, a great pension.
00:26:33.720 --> 00:26:37.800
She could work, she could have taken 10 years out and done another 10 years of work and it would have worked by itself.
00:26:37.960 --> 00:26:38.360
I think it's really.
00:26:38.840 --> 00:26:40.360
But there's another version of her, right?
00:26:40.440 --> 00:26:45.720
That's um the seasons of different people at different to individual circumstances.
00:26:45.960 --> 00:26:46.360
Of course.
00:26:46.519 --> 00:26:49.400
And she has so much more to give the world, you know.
00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:51.960
Um, and yet we try to cram it all in.
00:26:52.039 --> 00:26:55.560
So I think it's seeing our careers as longer, like it's blending education.
00:26:55.720 --> 00:27:09.160
I think it's telling all of us that we don't have to be in such a hurry to do everything right now, that there are moments of growth, as books are very fashionable for a few years, wintering, and then there are periods where you consolidate, where you need to be a little bit more at home, and that that's okay.
00:27:09.240 --> 00:27:10.200
We can we can do that.
00:27:10.279 --> 00:27:11.800
We have to allow people to do that.
00:27:11.960 --> 00:27:14.920
Um, so that's that would be my utopia of the future.
00:27:15.080 --> 00:27:24.200
So let's take it down, be a little bit more pragmatic that you're working with so many amazing organizations of people, and I'm sure you've seen lots of examples of people doing this, right?
00:27:24.440 --> 00:27:26.759
To better or lesser extent, maybe.
00:27:26.840 --> 00:27:33.080
Um, can you give us a couple of examples of where this is working and some tangible stuff that people can go and try out?
00:27:33.480 --> 00:27:41.160
So, one of the examples, and I'm gonna sound like I'm kissing your ass now, and I don't mean to, was actually hearing a presentation from somebody in your team about what's going on at Money Power.
00:27:41.720 --> 00:27:54.920
Which no, generally, no, but you should take that because actually that people first orientation and hearing people from genuinely in your team about what that gives them and how they value how you value people and how that makes them feel is really energizing.
00:27:55.000 --> 00:28:01.080
And one of the things that I would say is that it's not as usual as you might imagine.
00:28:01.320 --> 00:28:08.360
And the bigger organizations are what you find, and I often work for big organizations, is that there are teams where this works.
00:28:08.519 --> 00:28:18.680
There's a great boss or a great leader of a team who sees their people, who works with them, who is great at creating opportunities, spotting talents, allowing people to work in a way that works for them.
00:28:18.840 --> 00:28:24.920
But if I talk about that, I will have, you know, a thousand people in other teams going, are we talking about the same organization?
00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:26.440
Because it doesn't work like that here.
00:28:26.680 --> 00:28:32.120
So actually, what I find is when you get into big organizations, it's very difficult to say this organization is great at it.
00:28:32.200 --> 00:28:35.560
It may, they may strive to be, and there will be bits of brilliance.
00:28:35.720 --> 00:28:40.759
But the reality is this comes down to leaders and leaders role-playing what they see above.
00:28:40.920 --> 00:28:46.120
So where it works, it's small, medium, growing-sized firms, it can work really well.
00:28:46.200 --> 00:28:49.400
When you get to really big firms that everyone knows, it's very hard to do it at scale.
00:28:49.640 --> 00:28:52.680
So we talked a little bit about defaulting back to old ways.
00:28:52.759 --> 00:28:56.440
Um, then new generations of people coming on stream all the time.
00:28:56.600 --> 00:29:01.400
They will have to learn to work either in the old system or in those large organizations.
00:29:01.560 --> 00:29:03.560
They there's AI as we talked about.
00:29:03.720 --> 00:29:10.920
What are some of the themes that you're seeing coming through now from some of those the expectations of newer people coming into the workforce?
00:29:11.240 --> 00:29:18.279
The thing that I see at the moment is Gen Z, uh Gen X and Boomers uh being very cross with the new generation coming in.
00:29:18.519 --> 00:29:28.039
They call me in they're so cross, and they say they're entitled and they're lazy and they go on about their mental health and they're fragile and they're snowflakes, and oh, they're terrible, terrible.
00:29:28.120 --> 00:29:29.080
What do I do with them?
00:29:29.160 --> 00:29:35.240
They want to go home on time and they don't want to work at the weekend, and uh sounds like they have good lives.
00:29:35.400 --> 00:29:37.800
Well, that is another interpretation, isn't it?
00:29:37.960 --> 00:29:50.519
I um somebody told me it's too of a managing partner uh in a law firm, you know, very successful firm, and they get that 20, you know, uh graduates that they've hired, bringers said, which one of you, you know, which ones of you are shooting to be partner?
00:29:50.759 --> 00:29:52.279
And none of them put their hands up.
00:29:52.360 --> 00:29:57.960
And this guy's like, not only do they not want to do it, but they're not even intelligent enough to tell me that they want to do it.
00:29:58.200 --> 00:30:00.200
What's wrong with these kids, you know?
00:30:00.519 --> 00:30:06.600
So um I think what we have to do is to step back and say, uh, what how are we raising this generation?
00:30:06.759 --> 00:30:07.480
What have they seen?
00:30:07.640 --> 00:30:09.160
What are their experiences?
00:30:09.480 --> 00:30:17.960
And they're watching all of us, of course, and they're going, Well, you've told us since the day we were born that mental and our mental and physical well-being was the most important thing in the world.
00:30:18.039 --> 00:30:24.279
I don't know about you, my mother not really that interested, you know, in my big feelings or what I wanted for dinner, you know, as another world.
00:30:24.440 --> 00:30:36.120
This generation expects to be heard at school, um, at university or college if they go, and then they turn up in the workplace and they're very surprised that people are not more interested in their well-being because we've told them it's really important.
00:30:36.360 --> 00:30:40.680
Um, combined with that, they've watched us be overwhelmed with technology and they kind of think we're idiots.
00:30:40.840 --> 00:30:45.400
They often don't think they're ever going to own a home because if they go to college, they come out with such debts.
00:30:45.560 --> 00:30:51.080
Uh, they certainly don't think they're going to retire with the kind of pension that people that we see are going to retire on.
00:30:51.160 --> 00:30:53.800
They're probably not going to have the same quality of life their parents.
00:30:53.880 --> 00:30:59.080
So there's a perfectly rational bit of them saying, well, why would I work until midnight and all we can?
00:30:59.400 --> 00:31:02.600
Because I'm not getting the win that previous generations got.
00:31:02.759 --> 00:31:04.039
And so we have to think differently.
00:31:04.200 --> 00:31:06.920
They want to do a good job, but they want to do it on their terms.
00:31:07.080 --> 00:31:08.680
They want to be energized by work.
00:31:08.759 --> 00:31:12.680
They've worked very hard, probably at school and college, to get it if they're in a professional job.
00:31:12.759 --> 00:31:14.360
Even if they're not, they probably work very hard.
00:31:14.519 --> 00:31:16.840
And nobody turns up wanting to do a bad job.
00:31:17.000 --> 00:31:17.480
Nobody.
00:31:17.560 --> 00:31:20.200
It it people want, they want to do well.
00:31:20.360 --> 00:31:27.080
And so we have to take that time to connect, to understand what energizes them, what motivates them, what does doing a good job look like?
00:31:27.160 --> 00:31:32.680
And and just think, and maybe as you say, we learn something from the fact that they want to live a good life at the same time.
00:31:32.840 --> 00:31:34.279
Maybe, maybe that's okay.
00:31:34.920 --> 00:31:40.279
So it's about setting boundaries um between work and and and life, really.
00:31:40.440 --> 00:31:42.120
Well, non-work life, should I say?
00:31:42.360 --> 00:31:43.640
I think it is about setting boundaries.
00:31:43.720 --> 00:31:46.680
It's also about verbalizing things that we think are really obvious.
00:31:46.840 --> 00:31:58.600
I heard a great story recently from Ireland, and there was a guy who didn't go to college, he did his exams and went and worked at an accountancy, and his boss emailed him in there very long saying we've got a client meeting on Thursday, so you know we need to be in the office.
00:31:58.680 --> 00:32:01.240
And he said, Oh no, I I'm not in the office on Thursdays.
00:32:01.480 --> 00:32:03.560
And the boss was like, Oh, yeah, but it's a client meeting.
00:32:03.720 --> 00:32:04.840
He's like, No, I don't come into.
00:32:05.080 --> 00:32:05.960
And this email goes back.
00:32:06.039 --> 00:32:07.160
You can imagine what the boss is saying.
00:32:07.320 --> 00:32:08.440
The boss is going crazy, right?
00:32:08.600 --> 00:32:15.160
And then this guy tells his mum, who's like, You more like seriously, you don't understand the difference between a client meeting and an internal meeting.
00:32:15.320 --> 00:32:18.600
Of course, you're going to the office on Thursday, email bag and say you misunderstood.
00:32:18.759 --> 00:32:21.640
But because he's not in it, he's not understanding what's happening, right?
00:32:21.720 --> 00:32:22.600
He's missed something.
00:32:22.680 --> 00:32:32.759
So sometimes we have to verbalize things, not emotionally or dramatically, say, you know, when we come into the office, we turn up at this time, we've already had our breakfast, and we sit down and we're ready to go.
00:32:32.920 --> 00:32:37.400
We don't turn up at 10 past carrying our breakfast in our coat because you did that at college.
00:32:37.560 --> 00:32:46.759
And if you don't see it every day and we don't have the same kind of hierarchical structure where somebody would shout at you, but we can say that really politely, you know, and just to be a bit more clear sometimes.
00:32:47.000 --> 00:32:52.519
And you talk in the book about being sane and maintaining, yeah, I guess, in insanity.
00:32:53.000 --> 00:32:58.920
Um, I'm just thinking that that person might afford that's completely insane and there on a first day.
00:32:59.000 --> 00:33:07.960
Like, how how do you how do we get sort of a common, common ground, I guess an updated common ground of what's acceptable and what's not, so we don't all go insane by misunderstanding.
00:33:08.360 --> 00:33:09.400
You kind of have the conversations.
00:33:09.640 --> 00:33:10.920
You've got to you've got to sit down.
00:33:11.080 --> 00:33:15.800
I mean, I often do this exercise where I say to people, look, I've given you an imaginary magic wand as a team.
00:33:15.960 --> 00:33:17.240
How do you want this team to run?
00:33:17.320 --> 00:33:18.600
Like, you can do anything you want.
00:33:18.680 --> 00:33:21.160
You know, you can have Taylor Swift on your reception singing to you.
00:33:21.240 --> 00:33:21.560
I don't mind.
00:33:21.640 --> 00:33:23.160
Like, you have on that, just go at it.
00:33:23.320 --> 00:33:24.920
And they write these long great lists.
00:33:25.000 --> 00:33:28.279
And then I say, Okay, now go through it and take anything you could do right away.
00:33:28.440 --> 00:33:36.039
And they look at this list and they go, Oh, we're gonna take a lunch break, and we're only gonna do three team schools a day, and we're gonna get together as a team once a week and agree.
00:33:36.120 --> 00:33:39.640
I mean, there's nothing on here that you need anyone's permission to do.
00:33:39.720 --> 00:33:40.840
You could just do this.
00:33:40.920 --> 00:33:42.360
And the puppies might have to wait.
00:33:42.440 --> 00:33:43.640
They always want puppies, that's fine.
00:33:43.720 --> 00:33:44.840
Uh, you I love puppies.
00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:45.560
I mean, who doesn't?
00:33:45.640 --> 00:33:48.120
Yeah, there are companies that'll bring puppies to your office.
00:33:48.200 --> 00:33:49.000
You can still have the puppies.
00:33:49.160 --> 00:33:50.360
And you can do puppy yoga.
00:33:50.600 --> 00:33:51.240
Yeah, well, there you go.
00:33:51.480 --> 00:33:51.800
What do you think?
00:33:52.519 --> 00:33:53.000
I'm up for it.
00:33:53.080 --> 00:33:53.880
I'll do yoga, right?
00:33:53.960 --> 00:33:55.000
I'm into dogs, fine.
00:33:55.080 --> 00:34:00.440
So, um, yeah, so I think there's just a lot where we just don't have the conversation to say what does good look like.
00:34:00.519 --> 00:34:01.800
Why don't we try and work that way?
00:34:01.960 --> 00:34:07.560
So, other than yoga, how do you said personally boundaries between work and non-work life?
00:34:08.039 --> 00:34:11.079
I'd say I am pretty good at boundaries.
00:34:11.159 --> 00:34:15.559
I actually work a very intense but often relatively short day.
00:34:15.639 --> 00:34:17.400
So I am one of those morning people.
00:34:17.559 --> 00:34:21.159
If I've got a busy day, I'm like from eight in the morning, I'll just like in it, you know.
00:34:21.239 --> 00:34:24.920
If I'm working at like preparing a talk or doing interviews, I'm like da-da-da-da-da-da.
00:34:25.079 --> 00:34:32.440
By 2-3, like my concentration is drifting, and I'll take the dog for a walk, chill out, um, and maybe go back online later and just like resolve some stuff.
00:34:32.519 --> 00:34:36.599
But I'm pretty boundaried, I don't take too many needs today, but because I control my own time.
00:34:36.679 --> 00:34:40.599
I have a team, but you know, we kind of all know how we work and they're all remote.
00:34:40.759 --> 00:34:43.880
Um, so it's much easier for me than in a big organization.
00:34:43.960 --> 00:34:50.440
So I can work more to my kind of biological rhythm, and and I'm pretty good at getting a lot done.
00:34:50.760 --> 00:34:53.559
So, what if there were three things we talked about a lot?
00:34:53.720 --> 00:35:04.039
Um, and there's lots of good things in that, but top three things that people maybe should try um to get more structured, get more productive, be happier, really.
00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:08.760
I would say do stuff out of work that gives you joy.
00:35:08.920 --> 00:35:10.440
We talked before we started about bridge.
00:35:10.519 --> 00:35:12.039
Like, I play bridge, I love it.
00:35:12.200 --> 00:35:14.280
Um, I do loads of things outside of work.
00:35:14.360 --> 00:35:15.559
I've just written a panto.
00:35:15.960 --> 00:35:17.559
Uh here in the village panto.
00:35:17.880 --> 00:35:18.680
You are not getting tickets.
00:35:18.840 --> 00:35:20.360
I'm never telling anyone when it is.
00:35:20.519 --> 00:35:21.559
Um, I play bridge.
00:35:21.800 --> 00:35:22.840
You told me where you live.
00:35:23.000 --> 00:35:24.440
So I'm kidding.
00:35:24.680 --> 00:35:29.159
I go to the gym, I walk my dog, and I have friends that I walk, dogs that you know, like we all like Chad.
00:35:29.320 --> 00:35:33.960
So I have lots of structured things around work, which give me a reason to get out and connect.
00:35:34.039 --> 00:35:36.119
And I also learn a lot from those people.
00:35:36.200 --> 00:35:37.320
So it gives me a lot of information.
00:35:37.480 --> 00:35:41.960
So I'd say connect, have um, have your have your have reasons to leave work.
00:35:42.200 --> 00:35:49.960
I would say uh have your fixed, turned off all your notifications time if you possibly can, if you can navigate that with your team.
00:35:50.119 --> 00:35:55.800
Don't just do it because it freaks people out, but try and have a conversation about when you want focus time and how you get on with that.
00:35:55.880 --> 00:36:02.680
Um, and I would say um try listening to people and not saying anything and just letting them talk and see what they say.
00:36:04.360 --> 00:36:06.200
Should we do a quick fire round of questions?
00:36:06.680 --> 00:36:07.000
All right.
00:36:07.079 --> 00:36:10.280
Um, best piece of leadership advice you ever received.
00:36:10.680 --> 00:36:12.440
So it's a slightly it's a bit of a story.
00:36:12.519 --> 00:36:14.280
So Benjamin Zander, do you know him?
00:36:14.440 --> 00:36:18.840
He was the conductor of the Boston Philomonic, he used to do amazing talks and uh with a grand piano.
00:36:19.480 --> 00:36:28.200
And the group best piece of advice he is whenever goes anything goes wrong, instead of blaming everyone else and doing that, she did it wrong, he did it wrong, she was late, that team's rubbish.
00:36:28.360 --> 00:36:31.079
You breathe it into yourself and you go, What did I do wrong?
00:36:31.880 --> 00:36:34.119
And it's awful because it feels so painful.
00:36:34.200 --> 00:36:35.720
It's like they didn't deliver their report.
00:36:35.800 --> 00:36:36.920
That's oh, it's my fault.
00:36:37.159 --> 00:36:38.440
And it's a what didn't I do?
00:36:38.599 --> 00:36:40.280
Okay, did I not tell them it was important?
00:36:40.599 --> 00:36:42.039
But they're not the right person to ask.
00:36:42.119 --> 00:36:43.720
Did they not have the skills or the tools?
00:36:43.880 --> 00:36:45.480
What did I, what could I do differently?
00:36:45.639 --> 00:36:50.920
And it feels awful at first, but then it feels empowering because then you can fix it because it's you.
00:36:51.559 --> 00:36:53.240
That's truly great advice.
00:36:53.400 --> 00:36:57.079
Um the biggest red flag in a company culture.
00:36:59.559 --> 00:37:05.639
So there's something about being on the outside of organizations where you see a lot about how they behave.
00:37:05.720 --> 00:37:30.360
And I love 99% of my clients, and they call you up and they book you, and you turn up and you do, and sometimes just one you get, and they need three setup calls, and then they don't like this, and then they want to change the contract, and then you're like, mm-hmm, I don't know what's going on, but there's something about respecting time happening here, and it is always a flag, and it is always a good indicator of how they operate as a business.
00:37:30.680 --> 00:37:31.400
Interesting.
00:37:31.720 --> 00:37:37.079
You have such foresight into workplace trends and going-ons and whatnot.
00:37:37.159 --> 00:37:40.280
What's the next trend that we haven't even thought about yet?
00:37:41.079 --> 00:37:47.960
I think it's gonna be the it's gonna be the other side of the AI hype.
00:37:48.280 --> 00:37:55.639
It's gonna be the bit where we figure out what really works and what doesn't, and we all calm down and say, it's really good, it's practical.
00:37:55.800 --> 00:38:04.840
Same as Excel is practical, but it has limits, and we just need to just take all of the guff and the hype and the hysterics out of this and make it less complicated.
00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:07.400
I think that's the bit that's gonna be fun.
00:38:08.039 --> 00:38:08.760
Sounds it.
00:38:08.920 --> 00:38:14.119
So obviously, everybody should go and buy the motherwall jobs and how to stay sane.
00:38:14.280 --> 00:38:17.400
Um any other book that you would recommend?
00:38:17.880 --> 00:38:21.720
4,000 weeks by Oliver Bertman, if you want to make the most of your life is great.
00:38:21.800 --> 00:38:25.159
And then there's one, Julia De Gange wrote this amazing book.
00:38:25.400 --> 00:38:25.960
What's it called?
00:38:26.039 --> 00:38:27.800
It's gonna be I'll have to give it to you afterwards.
00:38:27.880 --> 00:38:31.240
It's about neuroscience and how our brains process problem solving.
00:38:31.320 --> 00:38:34.840
And it I recommend it to everyone, and it's really life-changing.
00:38:34.920 --> 00:38:36.280
And the name of it's gone out my head off since.
00:38:36.519 --> 00:38:37.880
You'll tell me, we'll put it in the show notes.
00:38:38.360 --> 00:38:41.480
Um and last, the proudest moment.
00:38:42.599 --> 00:38:46.119
When my book came out, I always invited to somebody else's book launch.
00:38:46.200 --> 00:38:51.079
And I my family's read the Times newspaper since I was bored, so it's like my paper of record.
00:38:51.240 --> 00:38:56.039
And I saw this curly head of hair across the room, and I thought, that's Eleanor Mills from the Sunday Times.
00:38:56.119 --> 00:38:58.039
And I went over and introduced, she said, What do you do?
00:38:58.119 --> 00:38:59.079
I said, Well, I just wrote a book.
00:38:59.240 --> 00:39:01.720
She said, Have it on my desk at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.
00:39:01.960 --> 00:39:02.760
I was so excited.
00:39:02.840 --> 00:39:05.240
I called my publisher, they said, Oh no, we already sent her a copy or say.
00:39:05.320 --> 00:39:05.800
No, no, send it.
00:39:07.079 --> 00:39:15.480
And um, and she put it on the front page of the uh Sunday Times magazine with a picture of me and my kids, and it was the best read piece that year with the longest dwell time.
00:39:15.720 --> 00:39:19.320
It had thousands and thousands of comments, and it was uh it was called Big Little Lies.
00:39:19.480 --> 00:39:21.320
It was about the lies we tell about when parenting.
00:39:21.480 --> 00:39:25.880
It was just one of those moments where it was like something that you thought just Christine.
00:39:25.960 --> 00:39:27.159
This has been amazing.
00:39:27.320 --> 00:39:29.639
Such foresight, such interesting insight.
00:39:29.720 --> 00:39:30.280
Thank you so much.
00:39:30.519 --> 00:39:30.760
Thanks.
00:39:30.840 --> 00:39:32.200
It's been lovely to be here.
00:39:32.760 --> 00:39:37.480
Thank you for listening to Uncharted Territory, which was brought to you by Money Penny.
00:00:00.239 --> 00:00:03.520
Uncharted territory is brought to you by MoneyPenny.
00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:08.080
When you connect with people in a room like that, it's the most incredible feeling.
00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:14.880
Basic processes and systems don't currently work, but we're being promised unicorns and rainbows and magic wands.
00:00:14.960 --> 00:00:18.800
And what we end up with is a very lonely, very fragmented workforce.
00:00:18.960 --> 00:00:21.039
Nobody turns up wanting to do a bad job.
00:00:21.199 --> 00:00:23.199
People want, they want to do well.
00:00:34.479 --> 00:00:43.679
Today's guest is someone who's been rewriting the rules of work, especially for those juggling careers, kits, and everything in between.
00:00:44.079 --> 00:00:52.799
Christine Armstrong is a workplace expert, author of the best-selling book, The Mother of All Jobs, that I have a copy of here.
00:00:54.240 --> 00:00:55.119
Super popular.
00:00:55.280 --> 00:01:00.479
And you're a fierce advocate of making work actually work, which it doesn't do for everyone.
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Christine has advised Global Leaders, co-founded a trailblazing consultancy, and she somehow still finds time to offer wisdom on her weekly blog seen by thousands.
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She's here to share some of that wisdom with us today.
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Christine, I'm delighted to welcome you to Uncharted Territory.
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Thank you for joining us.
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Thanks for having me.
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I'm excited.
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Great.
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You began your career in a high-pressure sort of global PR communications before becoming a researcher, an author, a workplace expert.
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What was the moment or series of moments that pushed you to rethink your career?
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It was serendipity.
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And it's one of those things that I find fascinating is how poor we are at spotting our own talents or interests.
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So I did a politics degree, I went into communications, I was okay at communications, was fine.
00:01:49.280 --> 00:02:04.959
And then one day I'm head of communications, director of communications at an ad agency, and my then boss has a row with the person who's the head of planning for Europe, and they shout at each other, and the head of planning throws all of her papers in the air and says, I'm going back to my old job and walks out.
00:02:05.040 --> 00:02:13.919
And my boss sort of looks around because he's got all these projects ongoing and says, You could you just like do this job for a bit until we find somebody who actually knows how to do it?
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And I was like, sure, why not?
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At which point I discover that I am incredibly nosy.
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I mean, I just love nothing more than asking people questions, working through the data, trying to work out the curious am I am curious.
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Okay.
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My mother says I'm nosy.
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Um, and and we were doing these great, this great work at the time.
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It's a global project.
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So we we were doing ethnographies, we're filming people's houses and going literally going through people's cupboards and their finances and asking these great questions about their relationship with money and phones and cars, and then I would go and present that to our clients, and so I'd go off around the world and share the insights from it.
00:02:48.560 --> 00:02:57.120
And I started off being very bad at presenting, and then I realized that there's nothing more painful than presenting incredibly badly, and so I got better at presenting.
00:02:57.199 --> 00:03:02.639
So two bits to my career, the research and then the presenting kind of emerged almost by accident.
00:03:02.879 --> 00:03:10.479
So, what are the moments where you've learned something and that's just changed everything, other than be you are, you need to do this job a little bit?
00:03:10.879 --> 00:03:19.759
So I think it is at after that period, I started to write for Management Today magazine, and then they started to invite me to speak at events.
00:03:19.919 --> 00:03:29.120
And I did this, I was asked to speak about bullying, and I wasn't an expert in bullying, and so I was like, okay, I had an interest in it because of various workplaces.
00:03:29.360 --> 00:03:33.439
So I emailed 25 people that I knew and said, tell me your experiences of bullying.
00:03:33.520 --> 00:03:43.199
And I just got up on stage and I went, I've done a bit of background reading on the you know technical side of the power out of it, but I want to just tell you these stories, and I just remember the feeling of the response in the room.
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I couldn't get to the back of the room.
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Everybody wanted to talk to me.
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I went to the toilet.
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There were people like trying to hold my hand and tell me those stories.
00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:57.360
And I was like, there's a real power of words, and when you connect with people in a room like that, it's the most incredible feeling.
00:03:57.439 --> 00:04:00.960
It's such a joy, and it's so fascinating what you then hear back.
00:04:01.280 --> 00:04:02.400
So you became a storyteller.
00:04:02.639 --> 00:04:03.280
Yeah, maybe.
00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:03.520
Yeah.
00:04:03.759 --> 00:04:04.479
Other people's stories.
00:04:04.719 --> 00:04:09.280
What were some of the questions that people uh were asking you there, uh making your way out of the room?
00:04:09.599 --> 00:04:10.960
Well, the best question came before.
00:04:11.039 --> 00:04:15.439
I sent this email out saying, Tell me my your experience of being bullied, uh bul bullying.
00:04:15.680 --> 00:04:21.040
And some who I know really well emailed back and said, Do you want to know the time when I was bullied or when I was the bully?
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And I was like, Oh, this is gold.
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This is gold.
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And so that was a real light bulb moment, that awareness and that ability to confront both and talk about the dynamics.
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She worked for somebody very famous in the media, still in the UK, and she replicated the behavior that she saw, and you know, she had regrets about that.
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Um, so that was one of the things.
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In the room, people want to tell you their stories.
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They want to tell you what happened to them and they want to be recognized.
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They want to say, I hear, I feel seen, you know, somebody's seen something that happened to me.
00:04:48.879 --> 00:04:50.959
And how widespread is bullying in the workplace?
00:04:51.279 --> 00:04:52.800
I'm still not an expert at bullying.
00:04:52.879 --> 00:04:54.800
I think it's much wider spread than we think.
00:04:54.879 --> 00:04:57.439
And I think, but it's a very nuanced thing, isn't it?
00:04:57.519 --> 00:05:08.240
Because if you confront a bully, and I've confronted quite a lot in my time and I've been in organizations dealing with bullying, usually they will say something like, I'm just being direct, I want the work to be great.
00:05:08.399 --> 00:05:09.839
I just want a higher standard.
00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:16.319
And what people misunderstand when they are in power is the the power imbalance.
00:05:16.480 --> 00:05:18.000
They don't understand how powerful they are.
00:05:18.160 --> 00:05:22.879
They think they're speaking to somebody who's broadly equal, but it doesn't feel like that when you work for somebody.
00:05:23.040 --> 00:05:24.879
And that's the thing they most often understand.
00:05:25.040 --> 00:05:36.560
One of the things I talk about a lot is how in organizations we see power above us, we look up for power because those people decide our pay, our bonus, whether we stay in this organization, whether we get promoted.
00:05:36.639 --> 00:05:43.040
And we're very bad at looking down and understanding how people who are junior to us or newer than us feel.
00:05:43.199 --> 00:05:47.920
And so, really, bullying is often a misunderstanding of that power imburns.
00:05:48.399 --> 00:05:50.560
It's a bit of a role model you also look up to, right?
00:05:50.639 --> 00:05:56.399
So if you're trying to replicate that person, that that's um that's a challenging sort of dynamic if if that's the case.
00:05:56.800 --> 00:06:00.000
Yeah, we're always looking up, we study the people above us.
00:06:00.079 --> 00:06:04.639
If I interview someone and I say, tell me about your boss or your boss's boss, they'll say, Right, okay.
00:06:04.720 --> 00:06:08.720
They drive this car, they're friends with this, they like this, they like information like this, this is how they were.
00:06:08.959 --> 00:06:11.839
So, okay, let's do the same thing for somebody two levels junior to you.
00:06:11.920 --> 00:06:15.040
They're like, Yeah, I think he goes to the sandwich shop on the corner.
00:06:15.120 --> 00:06:22.160
Like, and it's not because they're not nice people, it's because our brains are wired for survival in these complex organizations.
00:06:22.240 --> 00:06:25.600
So when we're senior, what we have to remember is people study us.
00:06:25.759 --> 00:06:34.879
If we come in in a bad mood because our cat, you know, brought in a mouse and it's running around our kitchen and we've had a terrible morning, like they will think that's them, unless we say.
00:06:35.040 --> 00:06:46.000
So we have to be aware of what that weather system or that feeling that we bring with us when we So is that about taking the veneer off and just be a little bit more open, a little bit more a little more human, maybe.
00:06:46.319 --> 00:06:46.639
Totally.
00:06:46.800 --> 00:06:57.519
I think it is about being human and honest, but also just calculating what sounds to you like a statement, an equal statement, may sound quite challenging to somebody else.
00:06:57.680 --> 00:07:00.879
And then so just you know, filtering a little bit, being a bit aware of that.
00:07:01.120 --> 00:07:02.560
Yeah, that's good advice.
00:07:02.800 --> 00:07:16.000
Um so when I was uh reading up on you and thinking about our conversation today, you've done a lot of work and um you sort of very early on were very flexible around how you wanted to work, having kids, you wrote your book about it.
00:07:16.240 --> 00:07:20.079
What's some of the uh myths that still need to be debunked in uh in that space?
00:07:20.319 --> 00:07:21.519
Oh, sadly, so many.
00:07:21.600 --> 00:07:23.360
Uh the world doesn't seem to have changed enough.
00:07:23.519 --> 00:07:29.360
I think the key problem that we have is that we've got an economy that's based on a model of working that doesn't really exist.
00:07:29.519 --> 00:07:41.279
It's the breadwinner model, technically, we kind of still think that in any household we've got one person out earning money and one person, I know, sociologists would say a one and a half job, you know, maybe working locally or flexibly or whatever.
00:07:41.439 --> 00:07:51.040
Um, and in reality, for most people, uh, you know, particularly if you're living in another centre, but just generally, you know, two adults in a household, if there are two, they both need to work to pay the bills.
00:07:51.120 --> 00:07:53.439
And we haven't compensated for that.
00:07:53.600 --> 00:07:59.120
And we still have a lot of leaders who want to work in what I call the Tiger Who Came for Tea era.
00:07:59.199 --> 00:08:04.480
You know, there's kind of like daddy's at the office with his keys in the car, and Murray's at home with animals and children.
00:08:04.639 --> 00:08:14.800
And and the reality is that there are a lot of very stressed-out people who are trying so hard to make everything work.
00:08:14.959 --> 00:08:22.720
At the same time as for a lot of people, their working day has expanded exponentially because of laptops and phones and international work and calls.
00:08:22.959 --> 00:08:23.920
You know, I have three kids.
00:08:24.079 --> 00:08:29.439
They, you know, in any given week, you know, how many activities, how many things are you also expected to?
00:08:29.680 --> 00:08:34.879
School wants you to come in on Thursday, and you know, you're like, I'm in Ireland on Thursday.
00:08:34.960 --> 00:08:36.320
I don't know, I don't know what to tell you.
00:08:36.480 --> 00:08:38.639
Uh so you know, it's all it just all of this complexity.
00:08:38.799 --> 00:08:44.960
So the big thing I think that needs to be said again and again and again is if you're struggling with this, it's not your fault.
00:08:45.039 --> 00:08:46.639
The system is not set up for you.
00:08:46.799 --> 00:08:53.360
And I think the other big thing which needs to be said to a lot of leaders who grew up in the Bridewriter model and for whom it worked for them, there's great data.
00:08:53.759 --> 00:08:59.919
American chief executive, I think something 75 odd percent of them have a stay-at-home partner who's running the household.
00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:07.759
You know, the question I often mentally ask, if not actually ask, is, you know, when did you last, you know, pick up the pick up food on the way home from work?
00:09:07.919 --> 00:09:09.360
When did you last clean the bathroom?
00:09:09.440 --> 00:09:10.159
And most of them don't.
00:09:10.240 --> 00:09:24.080
And sometimes people invite me into their organizations and somebody who say, you know, I'm head of finance, but nobody understands that I have a big job, but I still have to feed my kids and I still have to let my dogs out, and I still have to do these things, and you know, because that I don't have somebody else doing it.
00:09:24.399 --> 00:09:33.120
So if we started again, if we had a blank piece of paper, how would you design society to sort of fit around work, families, activities, just life, really?
00:09:33.519 --> 00:09:34.080
Great question.
00:09:34.320 --> 00:09:43.039
So I would go to the Microsoft data, so they look at the telemetry of interruptions, and they say we get interrupted at work on average 275 times a day.
00:09:43.120 --> 00:09:44.799
So that's every two to three minutes.
00:09:44.960 --> 00:09:46.639
But that's just on Microsoft products.
00:09:46.879 --> 00:09:48.799
That's just your Outlook, your Teams, okay?
00:09:48.879 --> 00:09:49.919
That isn't your WhatsApp.
00:09:50.080 --> 00:09:51.759
That isn't the doorbell ring with the delivery.
00:09:51.840 --> 00:09:54.399
It's not somebody popping in asking you if they can have a quick word.
00:09:54.480 --> 00:09:54.639
Yeah.
00:09:54.879 --> 00:09:59.600
And so we've created a world of continuous distraction and interruption.
00:09:59.759 --> 00:10:09.840
And rather than I think in an ideal world, having a shorter working day where we truly focus on task and get stuff done, we've created a world of constant, constant interruption.
00:10:09.919 --> 00:10:23.600
And there's some data from consultants who's saying that some people who are hired for expertise, an actuary, you know, uh somebody who's a developer in programs, sometimes they spend 70% of their time doing meetings and emails and messages and not doing the thing they believe.
00:10:23.840 --> 00:10:25.120
They don't want to give them time to do their job.
00:10:25.440 --> 00:10:25.919
It's crazy.
00:10:26.080 --> 00:10:29.519
So what I would do is step back and say, how do we hold back these interruptions?
00:10:29.600 --> 00:10:39.600
What do we need to do so people can come in, do a great job, focus, get the satisfaction of saying, I know what I need to do, I've done this job, and now I'm gonna go home feeling boom, I've done it.
00:10:39.919 --> 00:10:49.440
But life still goes on, you still have school, you said activities, maybe there are two parents working, international travel, lots of different stuff.
00:10:49.759 --> 00:10:51.039
What are we gonna do about all that?
00:10:51.360 --> 00:10:55.200
Imagine that you could go into work and do six hours totally focused.
00:10:55.279 --> 00:10:58.000
How much could you get done if that all that interruptions were managed?
00:10:58.080 --> 00:11:00.559
And we were able to agree amongst us.
00:11:00.639 --> 00:11:01.919
And some organizations have done this.
00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:03.519
I've read read, you know, uh interview.
00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:09.360
It's hard to do at scale where you just say, come in, do your job, and then let's try to stop.
00:11:09.519 --> 00:11:11.840
Because I think what we've done is we are the boiled frocks.
00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:15.600
You know, I don't know how old you are, but I remember email being stalled on my computer at work.
00:11:15.679 --> 00:11:18.399
You know, we never had a plan, we never meant to do this to ourselves.
00:11:19.440 --> 00:11:31.840
Um, you know, so we can structure our days and actually do some proper, deep thinking work, get that report done, get the analysis done, sort out that customer problem, whatever it is, get the job done and then move on.
00:11:31.919 --> 00:11:36.320
And I think if we could do that, then we would allow the space for other things around it.
00:11:36.559 --> 00:11:39.279
So that that sounds like a tangible shift that could be done.
00:11:39.360 --> 00:11:43.919
What are some of the other shifts that is either happening or should be happening that people are ignoring right now?
00:11:44.240 --> 00:11:49.200
So I think one of the shifts that people are ignoring it, I've become slightly obsessed with, so don't let me go on too long.
00:11:49.840 --> 00:11:50.320
I'll stop you.
00:11:50.399 --> 00:11:50.720
Don't worry.
00:11:50.879 --> 00:11:51.120
Go off.
00:11:51.600 --> 00:11:51.919
It's fine.
00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:52.639
Let's hear it.
00:11:53.600 --> 00:12:01.600
I'm really obsessed by what AI is doing to us at work and at home and how it's changing how we think and operate.
00:12:01.759 --> 00:12:04.320
So the one level I call it the AI paradox.
00:12:04.399 --> 00:12:19.120
So I'll go into an organization and I'll ask them what's going on, and they'll say, oh my God, we're gonna have these agents and it's gonna be amazing, and it's AI and it's incredible, and we're gonna resolve all of these problems that have been going on for ages, and we're gonna launch rockets to the moon.
00:12:19.200 --> 00:12:19.919
It's amazing.
00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:21.360
And I say, That's really great.
00:12:21.519 --> 00:12:22.960
How is your technology now?
00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:29.120
And they say, Well, I've got to be honest, the printer doesn't work, and tech stack doesn't talk to each other.
00:12:29.360 --> 00:12:31.200
So we might have gold in them when we're shooting for the moment.
00:12:31.519 --> 00:12:41.759
Yeah, and it's like this really grinding contradiction where the most basic processes and systems don't currently work, but we're being promised unicorns and rainbows and magic wands, you know.
00:12:41.840 --> 00:12:43.919
And so I think that there's this disconnect here.
00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:45.440
So that's one of the disconnects.
00:12:45.679 --> 00:12:52.480
The other disconnect, I think, is because of that magic and unicor unicorns promise, lots of organizations go, okay, okay.
00:12:53.840 --> 00:12:56.000
We've got to do AI, okay, we've got to stay ahead, we've got to do AI.
00:12:56.080 --> 00:12:58.879
So we'll do what's the difficult things that AI goes.
00:12:59.039 --> 00:13:00.720
We have to use AI for hiring people.
00:13:00.879 --> 00:13:02.159
You're like, is that a good idea?
00:13:02.320 --> 00:13:03.039
No, probably not.
00:13:03.440 --> 00:13:17.039
And so we're putting in these processes that actually are driving a bigger trend that I see, which is the disconnect between ourselves as the as in as an employee's team, as a workers, and also our customers.
00:13:17.120 --> 00:13:27.360
And so where we might have sat in a group, got to know each other, been in a team for years, got to know each other, agreed where we were going, pulled in the same direction, suddenly we're doing hot desking.
00:13:27.440 --> 00:13:29.600
So we don't sit with people that we might not even be in the office.
00:13:29.840 --> 00:13:31.039
We might, some of us are at home, some of us are.
00:13:31.360 --> 00:13:32.080
We're hot desking.
00:13:32.159 --> 00:13:34.399
We'll do all of our stuff on Teams because some people aren't here.
00:13:34.480 --> 00:13:37.039
So everything's on Zoom or Teams, so we're not meeting in person.
00:13:37.200 --> 00:13:40.399
We're gonna have an agile team, so every three months you're going to change teams.
00:13:40.480 --> 00:13:51.039
Uh, and and and all of our humanity, all of our desire for tribalism, for friendship, for connection, for understanding is being pulled away at the very time we're going, AI is going to solve everything.
00:13:51.120 --> 00:13:54.639
And what we end up with is a very lonely, very fragmented workforce.
00:13:54.799 --> 00:13:56.320
And you know, I work with organizers.
00:13:56.480 --> 00:14:16.000
Sometimes I go in, I feel like if you can ditch this, if you imagine like a tug of war where two people are pulling in opposite direction, but it's like eight people are pulling in opposite directions on eight ropes and and and nothing's moving, you know, because they're all exerting, they're all sweating and grunting and pulling so hard, and they're tired and their kids are not getting what they were.
00:14:16.399 --> 00:14:17.279
Am I not getting what I'm doing?
00:14:17.519 --> 00:14:24.879
Yeah, and their partner's pissed off with them because they're never home, and all of this stress, and yet they're not actually connected and going, guys, we're we're trying to go over there.
00:14:24.960 --> 00:14:30.159
If we all pulled in that direction, actually, maybe we wouldn't have to work quite this hard, and we would get their foster.
00:14:30.480 --> 00:14:32.240
But that sounds more alignment, sort of.
00:14:32.559 --> 00:14:34.320
Yeah, but I think it's the lack of connection.
00:14:34.559 --> 00:14:46.159
Is if you're not in the same place having those conversations, misunderstandings are easier, people are more threatening, people are more insecure, AI's coming for your job, so then they start holding information, hiding.
00:14:46.320 --> 00:14:50.480
I won't tell them what the boss said because then I'm gonna get on and they're gonna not be able to do that.
00:14:50.639 --> 00:14:55.279
They're not sharing, yeah, they're not generous and they don't trust each other because they haven't spent that time together.
00:14:55.519 --> 00:14:57.519
It sounds terrible, it sounds horrible working environment.
00:14:58.080 --> 00:15:05.759
It does, and I, you know, and I don't want to overplay it, there's lots of places not like that, but I think where it tilts in that direction, and it's all very logical.
00:15:05.840 --> 00:15:20.879
You've got people going, well, we've only got some people in three days or four days, so if we're hot desk, it's an efficient use of the space, and and it does all make sense from a system, but does it make sense in terms of people feeling connected, clear, getting work done, working together?
00:15:21.039 --> 00:15:23.279
I think in a lot of organizations it's not doing that.
00:15:23.519 --> 00:15:25.759
So, do you think we're not measuring?
00:15:25.840 --> 00:15:38.159
I'm saying generally we um uh we're not measuring output, we're sort of looking at the efficiency of hot desking or maybe not paying for big enough facilities, or we don't talk enough to each other.
00:15:38.399 --> 00:15:45.440
How do we shift that to think maybe more about the outcome and the the output really, like and people's happiness along the way?
00:15:45.519 --> 00:15:47.519
I mean, happy people typically do great work.
00:15:47.840 --> 00:15:48.399
Surprise, right?
00:15:48.480 --> 00:15:50.159
Yeah, I think it's taking the time.
00:15:50.240 --> 00:15:59.679
I think we get into this sort of pathologically busy state where it feels like you're rat raised, and so it's the default to say I don't have time to sit down and agree with the strategy.
00:15:59.759 --> 00:16:00.639
I don't have time for this.
00:16:00.799 --> 00:16:02.879
Like I know everybody should know what the strategy is.
00:16:02.960 --> 00:16:04.320
It's something you hear a lot from leaders.
00:16:04.399 --> 00:16:04.960
Everybody should know.
00:16:05.039 --> 00:16:07.440
If I asked anybody, they would they would they would tell us.
00:16:07.759 --> 00:16:08.559
Yeah, I told them.
00:16:08.639 --> 00:16:11.519
And then if you ask people, they give you 12 different answers, you know.
00:16:11.840 --> 00:16:17.360
So I think it's taking the time to be really clear and then taking the time to have conversations.
00:16:17.679 --> 00:16:23.360
One of the things I do when I'm in the room with people, which they hate and they really they try to leave, but then it changes rooms.
00:16:23.600 --> 00:16:31.200
I just say, listen, we're just gonna try and experiment, we're gonna talk, and one of you is gonna talk for three minutes, and the other person's just gonna listen without interrupting.
00:16:31.440 --> 00:16:33.120
So it's like an active listening exercise?
00:16:33.360 --> 00:16:34.960
Just for three minutes, and then we're gonna swap.
00:16:35.120 --> 00:16:37.919
And firstly, everybody fidgets, like, I don't want to have to do this.
00:16:38.080 --> 00:16:48.799
Then they do it, and at the end, there are people crying, there are people hugging each other, there are people saying, I've worked with this person for 15 years and I've never had a conversation like I've just had.
00:16:48.879 --> 00:16:50.159
I've never had a connection.
00:16:50.559 --> 00:17:04.079
And and and somebody last week I was running a session out at the NHS, and a guy came up to me and he had handwritten a note on his little piece of paper, and he showed it to me, and it said, I feel like this is going to completely change my relationship with my wife for the better.
00:17:04.319 --> 00:17:06.640
And I said, Did the exercise do you enduring?
00:17:06.880 --> 00:17:08.000
Yeah, it wasn't for his wife, that was.
00:17:09.200 --> 00:17:10.480
And I said, Do you want to share that with your room?
00:17:10.640 --> 00:17:11.759
He said, Absolutely not.
00:17:13.519 --> 00:17:15.440
But it's like just that revelation.
00:17:15.599 --> 00:17:18.000
We don't let somebody finish a sentence.
00:17:18.400 --> 00:17:19.359
I completely agree.
00:17:19.440 --> 00:17:25.599
And I think there's something about just listening, thinking, not thinking about what you're going to respond to.
00:17:25.920 --> 00:17:28.000
I I I mean, I'm sure we all had it.
00:17:28.079 --> 00:17:35.200
Sometimes you talk to somebody and you see the lips even moving, and the other person, they're formulating their response, and therefore they're not really getting it.
00:17:35.359 --> 00:17:37.359
So, how do we slow down society more?
00:17:37.519 --> 00:17:43.119
What should leadership look like to facilitate those sort of um good organizational structures?
00:17:43.440 --> 00:17:44.960
There are really simple things that you can do.
00:17:45.039 --> 00:17:52.079
One of the things I say, and I took this from Nancy Klein, who, you know, the the the exercise I discovered is a sort of sort of uh very rough version of what she does.
00:17:52.160 --> 00:17:58.319
But I just say one a really basic thing, don't start meetings until everybody's said something, whether it's online or in person.
00:17:58.480 --> 00:17:59.519
People say, Well, how do you do that?
00:17:59.680 --> 00:18:00.240
Don't start them.
00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:02.559
Don't start them until everybody's spoken, said something.
00:18:02.720 --> 00:18:05.279
And sometimes I speak at events, you know, it's 2,000 people.
00:18:05.359 --> 00:18:06.400
I say, Well, that's impossible.
00:18:06.559 --> 00:18:08.240
And I say, No, it's time to say something to your neighbour.
00:18:08.319 --> 00:18:09.039
How are you feeling today?
00:18:09.200 --> 00:18:09.519
Say hi.
00:18:09.839 --> 00:18:10.960
I I often get them to hum.
00:18:11.119 --> 00:18:14.240
I'm gonna say, I'm gonna put some quotes up, and you're gonna tell me whether you recognize me.
00:18:16.160 --> 00:18:19.519
And then it's like you kind of feedback and they're not spoken, but they know it's a conversation.
00:18:19.920 --> 00:18:20.400
They feel heard.
00:18:20.559 --> 00:18:21.119
They feel heard.
00:18:21.200 --> 00:18:25.839
That from the right, that's from the very first moment, we've got a two-way communication.
00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:30.480
Not me coming onto a team school, going, There's 25 of you, these are the three things that are the priority this week.
00:18:30.640 --> 00:18:34.559
And everybody else is feeding the cat, reading their WhatsApp, dead behind the eyes.
00:18:34.720 --> 00:18:42.000
Just make time for people to make it a conversation, small change uh that can really unlock a different energy.
00:19:23.240 --> 00:19:28.279
So um lots of people are sort of worried about how you set it up.
00:19:28.360 --> 00:19:32.920
You sort of talk about the output, or we talked about the output rather than the effort.
00:19:33.160 --> 00:19:36.840
Remote working is hard, notifications are toxic.
00:19:37.160 --> 00:19:45.800
Um I think a lot of time, and you talk about it in your book and and elsewhere, when people sort of finding new ways of working, remote working is okay.
00:19:45.960 --> 00:19:48.600
Uh, of course, getting people together is important too.
00:19:48.840 --> 00:19:58.440
I get the feeling that that level of flexibility, for many people, they're worried about giving flexibility to their teams because how am I gonna be sure you oppress and that you actually do your work?
00:19:58.600 --> 00:20:01.320
I mean, maybe you'll do better because you get deep thinking time.
00:20:01.480 --> 00:20:07.800
Um, what's your advice to sort of how how do you make that adjustment and get comfortable with people working remotely?
00:20:08.120 --> 00:20:13.000
There's some great data from 2016 where they uh asked people, what do you do when you're in the office?
00:20:13.160 --> 00:20:13.320
Okay.
00:20:13.880 --> 00:20:17.800
And um, this is self-reported, so this isn't even like a time emotion study.
00:20:18.039 --> 00:20:26.600
And um, and then they broke down the answers and they discovered that people spent, on average, half an hour a day um looking for another job while they were at work.
00:20:26.759 --> 00:20:30.759
They spent about an hour, I think it was, in uh doing social media and kind of connecting.
00:20:31.080 --> 00:20:33.880
And eventually it's like, how much time did the edges been working when they're in the office?
00:20:34.039 --> 00:20:35.800
It was a little bit over three hours, you know.
00:20:36.039 --> 00:20:46.440
So we we idealized the office as a place of work, but those of us old enough to work full-time in office can assure you that there were plenty of people who didn't do a lot of work when they were full-time in the office.
00:20:46.680 --> 00:20:49.880
So we we're creating kind of a false correlation.
00:20:50.039 --> 00:20:55.480
Offices are places for focus work and homes are not, or third spaces, whatever.
00:20:55.880 --> 00:21:01.560
I think we have to just look at the data and say people work best, no surprise, where they feel happiest.
00:21:01.640 --> 00:21:05.160
And Professor Chowdhury, who's at Harvard, has a very good book out on this.
00:21:05.240 --> 00:21:11.160
And, you know, he says the most talented people in the world, the people that we need to change businesses, they want to work from where they want to work.
00:21:11.240 --> 00:21:14.360
So we need to let them because that's how we're gonna get the most talented people.
00:21:14.600 --> 00:21:27.640
So I think you have to decide whether you want control because it feels good and it looks good, and it's the way that worked for you because maybe you grew up in a breadwinner model, or whether you think actually talent's gonna be hard to find, hard to keep, hard to motivate.
00:21:27.720 --> 00:21:33.720
And so having some thought about how you organize it in a way that works for their lives could could pay out for you.
00:21:33.960 --> 00:21:35.880
And then let's put the complexity of AI.
00:21:35.960 --> 00:21:44.920
We talked about it briefly earlier, because now you can churn out content, you can probably portray your work to be very different to what you actually put into it.
00:21:45.080 --> 00:21:50.519
I think there's lots of great applications of of AI, but uh maybe we're also heading, that's my fear.
00:21:50.840 --> 00:21:54.519
I'd love to get your view on it, that life could become very vanilla, right?
00:21:54.600 --> 00:21:59.240
If you're just recycling old learnings, whatever good AI is at the moment, at least.
00:21:59.400 --> 00:22:01.560
How do we how do we avoid that happening?
00:22:01.720 --> 00:22:08.600
We all sort of just become um human robots in a world that is predetermined already from what's happened before.
00:22:08.840 --> 00:22:13.560
Jimmy Carr, the comedian, has a brilliant line on this, and he says that AI is a brilliant cover band.
00:22:13.720 --> 00:22:15.480
It's a good cover band, but it's still a cover band.
00:22:15.640 --> 00:22:16.519
It's not the original.
00:22:16.600 --> 00:22:17.640
It can cover something.
00:22:17.880 --> 00:22:18.039
Right.
00:22:18.200 --> 00:22:30.840
Um, and it's a great line, and I think it's really helpful because when I interview people, I was interviewing somebody last week at a recruitment firm, and she said, I cannot tell you how many reports I get, and I'm a page into them, and I realize, oh, this has been written by AI.
00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:40.600
It's full of wordiness, it looks important, it's beautifully laid out, but there's no substance to it, and it drives me crazy because the person who wrote the report is a person who's supposed to care about this subject and they can't be bothered.
00:22:41.160 --> 00:22:45.080
Even think about it to write me a proper report and just really cross about it.
00:22:45.240 --> 00:22:50.200
So I think with AI, we have to separate the hype from the reality.
00:22:50.360 --> 00:22:51.640
We have to be so granular.
00:22:51.720 --> 00:22:53.720
Where does there are moments when it's so useful?
00:22:53.800 --> 00:22:54.279
Let's be honest.
00:22:54.600 --> 00:22:55.720
No, you can't remember a few.
00:22:56.039 --> 00:23:01.640
Maybe to summarize that long report just to get the to summarize the report and then send back your comments.
00:23:02.600 --> 00:23:04.039
You've got to break out of those loops.
00:23:04.120 --> 00:23:04.759
And it is useful.
00:23:04.840 --> 00:23:07.000
I make loads of typos because I type really fast.
00:23:07.080 --> 00:23:08.840
I'd put stuff into it and it's great.
00:23:08.920 --> 00:23:10.039
It's like a liberation.
00:23:10.120 --> 00:23:13.000
I, you know, record things and then it gives me a great little sound.
00:23:13.160 --> 00:23:17.080
There's loads of brilliant things that it can do with process, and I don't want to belittle any of that.
00:23:17.240 --> 00:23:19.400
But we have to know where the line is.
00:23:19.560 --> 00:23:27.880
Where do we need to bring ourselves fully to things to make it but not a cover band, to be original, to break out of it, to really think deeply.
00:23:28.039 --> 00:23:33.320
And I think if it gives us, if it removes some of the clutter and allows us to think about stuff, it's great.
00:23:33.560 --> 00:23:37.960
When it stops us thinking, when it makes us lazy, then we have a problem.
00:23:38.120 --> 00:23:41.640
And I think for a lot of people, that's that's is what's happening.
00:23:41.800 --> 00:23:52.039
The other thing I would say related to that, some um researchers I spoke to a while ago, I need to go back to them in Holland um university, and they were doing some work on the emerging patterns and saying actually AR makes people talk to each other less.
00:23:52.120 --> 00:23:58.039
So it's actually adding to this asimization issue because if you mention something I don't understand it, I would look like an idiot in front of you.
00:23:58.120 --> 00:24:00.840
I just quietly going to my what was that thing he meant?
00:24:01.080 --> 00:24:01.480
Oh, okay.
00:24:01.560 --> 00:24:15.080
And instead of saying, Oh, I I don't know that, maybe you could tell me, and then it would give you a gauge of what I do and don't know, and you would explain the nuance maybe of why you referenced that particular thing, and we would understand each other a little bit better, rather than me going off secretly into my phone and yeah.
00:24:15.400 --> 00:24:15.880
It's fine.
00:24:16.120 --> 00:24:22.920
What's great for technology, maybe lower complexity right now, and what's great people, and what are we all adding to it and holding it to account to some extent?
00:24:23.160 --> 00:24:27.400
Yeah, I'm working the line, like hiring maybe is not a great thing to go through it.
00:24:27.560 --> 00:24:29.560
Maybe you want to scan some CBs, maybe that was fine.
00:24:29.640 --> 00:24:33.240
But as soon as you get into interviewing, like what are you doing to the relationship of that person?
00:24:33.400 --> 00:24:34.200
It then comes to you.
00:24:34.279 --> 00:24:40.120
So where is it like maybe uh reducing people's discretionary effort, reducing their commitment?
00:24:40.440 --> 00:24:45.400
Where might it really help if your expenses can be processed in 20 minutes rather than three weeks?
00:24:45.480 --> 00:24:47.160
That's probably helping your relationship really.
00:24:48.680 --> 00:24:49.000
Yeah.
00:24:49.240 --> 00:24:54.120
So, you know, figuring out, you know, where it's really adding some value to the system.
00:24:54.440 --> 00:24:55.960
So let's shift gears a little bit.
00:24:56.039 --> 00:25:07.000
And um, your book, you talk about career balance, having children, um, the sort of society probably set up for uh not having working mothers in the same way.
00:25:07.160 --> 00:25:12.360
Like, talk to me about um how you would like to set society up if we started again.
00:25:13.160 --> 00:25:14.039
Great question.
00:25:14.360 --> 00:25:28.360
I think you have to start with the potential of the hundred-year life, and you have to say that the most important thing that we can do for any generation is to help them really find their talents and interests and really bring that out.
00:25:28.519 --> 00:25:31.240
And I think that sort of starts in our education system.
00:25:31.320 --> 00:25:36.759
It's less of the sausage factory, it's much more like what are you really energized by?
00:25:36.920 --> 00:25:37.880
What gifts do you have?
00:25:38.039 --> 00:25:40.519
And the thing I started with is hard to spot your own gifts.
00:25:40.680 --> 00:25:43.160
We need other people to help us and to grow them.
00:25:43.320 --> 00:26:02.200
So I think we need to be much more open-minded in that first phase of education, but then to create a system that builds education throughout our lives so that when you have those pivots, we talked about my pivots, I'm sure you've heard pivots, you can go back and learn something new, study something in an easy way, um, that's not debilitating.
00:26:02.279 --> 00:26:06.039
And you can have children and go back to things and you know, have phases.
00:26:06.200 --> 00:26:10.039
Um, Zoe Williams, who's a writer at The Guardian, said it beautifully when I interviewed her once.
00:26:10.120 --> 00:26:11.880
She said, you know, there's a season for everything.
00:26:12.039 --> 00:26:19.640
But what we try to do is to say there's one season for education, then there's a season for getting ahead in your career, and you've got to combine that with having a baby.
00:26:19.880 --> 00:26:27.400
I interviewed a lawyer not long ago and she said, you know, I realize that the year my youngest child leaves home will be the year I'm eligible for retirement.
00:26:27.480 --> 00:26:28.680
I mean, how crazy.
00:26:28.840 --> 00:26:29.640
How crazy.
00:26:29.800 --> 00:26:33.640
Even though she's healthy, she's not even 60, but she's got, you know, a great pension.
00:26:33.720 --> 00:26:37.800
She could work, she could have taken 10 years out and done another 10 years of work and it would have worked by itself.
00:26:37.960 --> 00:26:38.360
I think it's really.
00:26:38.840 --> 00:26:40.360
But there's another version of her, right?
00:26:40.440 --> 00:26:45.720
That's um the seasons of different people at different to individual circumstances.
00:26:45.960 --> 00:26:46.360
Of course.
00:26:46.519 --> 00:26:49.400
And she has so much more to give the world, you know.
00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:51.960
Um, and yet we try to cram it all in.
00:26:52.039 --> 00:26:55.560
So I think it's seeing our careers as longer, like it's blending education.
00:26:55.720 --> 00:27:09.160
I think it's telling all of us that we don't have to be in such a hurry to do everything right now, that there are moments of growth, as books are very fashionable for a few years, wintering, and then there are periods where you consolidate, where you need to be a little bit more at home, and that that's okay.
00:27:09.240 --> 00:27:10.200
We can we can do that.
00:27:10.279 --> 00:27:11.800
We have to allow people to do that.
00:27:11.960 --> 00:27:14.920
Um, so that's that would be my utopia of the future.
00:27:15.080 --> 00:27:24.200
So let's take it down, be a little bit more pragmatic that you're working with so many amazing organizations of people, and I'm sure you've seen lots of examples of people doing this, right?
00:27:24.440 --> 00:27:26.759
To better or lesser extent, maybe.
00:27:26.840 --> 00:27:33.080
Um, can you give us a couple of examples of where this is working and some tangible stuff that people can go and try out?
00:27:33.480 --> 00:27:41.160
So, one of the examples, and I'm gonna sound like I'm kissing your ass now, and I don't mean to, was actually hearing a presentation from somebody in your team about what's going on at Money Power.
00:27:41.720 --> 00:27:54.920
Which no, generally, no, but you should take that because actually that people first orientation and hearing people from genuinely in your team about what that gives them and how they value how you value people and how that makes them feel is really energizing.
00:27:55.000 --> 00:28:01.080
And one of the things that I would say is that it's not as usual as you might imagine.
00:28:01.320 --> 00:28:08.360
And the bigger organizations are what you find, and I often work for big organizations, is that there are teams where this works.
00:28:08.519 --> 00:28:18.680
There's a great boss or a great leader of a team who sees their people, who works with them, who is great at creating opportunities, spotting talents, allowing people to work in a way that works for them.
00:28:18.840 --> 00:28:24.920
But if I talk about that, I will have, you know, a thousand people in other teams going, are we talking about the same organization?
00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:26.440
Because it doesn't work like that here.
00:28:26.680 --> 00:28:32.120
So actually, what I find is when you get into big organizations, it's very difficult to say this organization is great at it.
00:28:32.200 --> 00:28:35.560
It may, they may strive to be, and there will be bits of brilliance.
00:28:35.720 --> 00:28:40.759
But the reality is this comes down to leaders and leaders role-playing what they see above.
00:28:40.920 --> 00:28:46.120
So where it works, it's small, medium, growing-sized firms, it can work really well.
00:28:46.200 --> 00:28:49.400
When you get to really big firms that everyone knows, it's very hard to do it at scale.
00:28:49.640 --> 00:28:52.680
So we talked a little bit about defaulting back to old ways.
00:28:52.759 --> 00:28:56.440
Um, then new generations of people coming on stream all the time.
00:28:56.600 --> 00:29:01.400
They will have to learn to work either in the old system or in those large organizations.
00:29:01.560 --> 00:29:03.560
They there's AI as we talked about.
00:29:03.720 --> 00:29:10.920
What are some of the themes that you're seeing coming through now from some of those the expectations of newer people coming into the workforce?
00:29:11.240 --> 00:29:18.279
The thing that I see at the moment is Gen Z, uh Gen X and Boomers uh being very cross with the new generation coming in.
00:29:18.519 --> 00:29:28.039
They call me in they're so cross, and they say they're entitled and they're lazy and they go on about their mental health and they're fragile and they're snowflakes, and oh, they're terrible, terrible.
00:29:28.120 --> 00:29:29.080
What do I do with them?
00:29:29.160 --> 00:29:35.240
They want to go home on time and they don't want to work at the weekend, and uh sounds like they have good lives.
00:29:35.400 --> 00:29:37.800
Well, that is another interpretation, isn't it?
00:29:37.960 --> 00:29:50.519
I um somebody told me it's too of a managing partner uh in a law firm, you know, very successful firm, and they get that 20, you know, uh graduates that they've hired, bringers said, which one of you, you know, which ones of you are shooting to be partner?
00:29:50.759 --> 00:29:52.279
And none of them put their hands up.
00:29:52.360 --> 00:29:57.960
And this guy's like, not only do they not want to do it, but they're not even intelligent enough to tell me that they want to do it.
00:29:58.200 --> 00:30:00.200
What's wrong with these kids, you know?
00:30:00.519 --> 00:30:06.600
So um I think what we have to do is to step back and say, uh, what how are we raising this generation?
00:30:06.759 --> 00:30:07.480
What have they seen?
00:30:07.640 --> 00:30:09.160
What are their experiences?
00:30:09.480 --> 00:30:17.960
And they're watching all of us, of course, and they're going, Well, you've told us since the day we were born that mental and our mental and physical well-being was the most important thing in the world.
00:30:18.039 --> 00:30:24.279
I don't know about you, my mother not really that interested, you know, in my big feelings or what I wanted for dinner, you know, as another world.
00:30:24.440 --> 00:30:36.120
This generation expects to be heard at school, um, at university or college if they go, and then they turn up in the workplace and they're very surprised that people are not more interested in their well-being because we've told them it's really important.
00:30:36.360 --> 00:30:40.680
Um, combined with that, they've watched us be overwhelmed with technology and they kind of think we're idiots.
00:30:40.840 --> 00:30:45.400
They often don't think they're ever going to own a home because if they go to college, they come out with such debts.
00:30:45.560 --> 00:30:51.080
Uh, they certainly don't think they're going to retire with the kind of pension that people that we see are going to retire on.
00:30:51.160 --> 00:30:53.800
They're probably not going to have the same quality of life their parents.
00:30:53.880 --> 00:30:59.080
So there's a perfectly rational bit of them saying, well, why would I work until midnight and all we can?
00:30:59.400 --> 00:31:02.600
Because I'm not getting the win that previous generations got.
00:31:02.759 --> 00:31:04.039
And so we have to think differently.
00:31:04.200 --> 00:31:06.920
They want to do a good job, but they want to do it on their terms.
00:31:07.080 --> 00:31:08.680
They want to be energized by work.
00:31:08.759 --> 00:31:12.680
They've worked very hard, probably at school and college, to get it if they're in a professional job.
00:31:12.759 --> 00:31:14.360
Even if they're not, they probably work very hard.
00:31:14.519 --> 00:31:16.840
And nobody turns up wanting to do a bad job.
00:31:17.000 --> 00:31:17.480
Nobody.
00:31:17.560 --> 00:31:20.200
It it people want, they want to do well.
00:31:20.360 --> 00:31:27.080
And so we have to take that time to connect, to understand what energizes them, what motivates them, what does doing a good job look like?
00:31:27.160 --> 00:31:32.680
And and just think, and maybe as you say, we learn something from the fact that they want to live a good life at the same time.
00:31:32.840 --> 00:31:34.279
Maybe, maybe that's okay.
00:31:34.920 --> 00:31:40.279
So it's about setting boundaries um between work and and and life, really.
00:31:40.440 --> 00:31:42.120
Well, non-work life, should I say?
00:31:42.360 --> 00:31:43.640
I think it is about setting boundaries.
00:31:43.720 --> 00:31:46.680
It's also about verbalizing things that we think are really obvious.
00:31:46.840 --> 00:31:58.600
I heard a great story recently from Ireland, and there was a guy who didn't go to college, he did his exams and went and worked at an accountancy, and his boss emailed him in there very long saying we've got a client meeting on Thursday, so you know we need to be in the office.
00:31:58.680 --> 00:32:01.240
And he said, Oh no, I I'm not in the office on Thursdays.
00:32:01.480 --> 00:32:03.560
And the boss was like, Oh, yeah, but it's a client meeting.
00:32:03.720 --> 00:32:04.840
He's like, No, I don't come into.
00:32:05.080 --> 00:32:05.960
And this email goes back.
00:32:06.039 --> 00:32:07.160
You can imagine what the boss is saying.
00:32:07.320 --> 00:32:08.440
The boss is going crazy, right?
00:32:08.600 --> 00:32:15.160
And then this guy tells his mum, who's like, You more like seriously, you don't understand the difference between a client meeting and an internal meeting.
00:32:15.320 --> 00:32:18.600
Of course, you're going to the office on Thursday, email bag and say you misunderstood.
00:32:18.759 --> 00:32:21.640
But because he's not in it, he's not understanding what's happening, right?
00:32:21.720 --> 00:32:22.600
He's missed something.
00:32:22.680 --> 00:32:32.759
So sometimes we have to verbalize things, not emotionally or dramatically, say, you know, when we come into the office, we turn up at this time, we've already had our breakfast, and we sit down and we're ready to go.
00:32:32.920 --> 00:32:37.400
We don't turn up at 10 past carrying our breakfast in our coat because you did that at college.
00:32:37.560 --> 00:32:46.759
And if you don't see it every day and we don't have the same kind of hierarchical structure where somebody would shout at you, but we can say that really politely, you know, and just to be a bit more clear sometimes.
00:32:47.000 --> 00:32:52.519
And you talk in the book about being sane and maintaining, yeah, I guess, in insanity.
00:32:53.000 --> 00:32:58.920
Um, I'm just thinking that that person might afford that's completely insane and there on a first day.
00:32:59.000 --> 00:33:07.960
Like, how how do you how do we get sort of a common, common ground, I guess an updated common ground of what's acceptable and what's not, so we don't all go insane by misunderstanding.
00:33:08.360 --> 00:33:09.400
You kind of have the conversations.
00:33:09.640 --> 00:33:10.920
You've got to you've got to sit down.
00:33:11.080 --> 00:33:15.800
I mean, I often do this exercise where I say to people, look, I've given you an imaginary magic wand as a team.
00:33:15.960 --> 00:33:17.240
How do you want this team to run?
00:33:17.320 --> 00:33:18.600
Like, you can do anything you want.
00:33:18.680 --> 00:33:21.160
You know, you can have Taylor Swift on your reception singing to you.
00:33:21.240 --> 00:33:21.560
I don't mind.
00:33:21.640 --> 00:33:23.160
Like, you have on that, just go at it.
00:33:23.320 --> 00:33:24.920
And they write these long great lists.
00:33:25.000 --> 00:33:28.279
And then I say, Okay, now go through it and take anything you could do right away.
00:33:28.440 --> 00:33:36.039
And they look at this list and they go, Oh, we're gonna take a lunch break, and we're only gonna do three team schools a day, and we're gonna get together as a team once a week and agree.
00:33:36.120 --> 00:33:39.640
I mean, there's nothing on here that you need anyone's permission to do.
00:33:39.720 --> 00:33:40.840
You could just do this.
00:33:40.920 --> 00:33:42.360
And the puppies might have to wait.
00:33:42.440 --> 00:33:43.640
They always want puppies, that's fine.
00:33:43.720 --> 00:33:44.840
Uh, you I love puppies.
00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:45.560
I mean, who doesn't?
00:33:45.640 --> 00:33:48.120
Yeah, there are companies that'll bring puppies to your office.
00:33:48.200 --> 00:33:49.000
You can still have the puppies.
00:33:49.160 --> 00:33:50.360
And you can do puppy yoga.
00:33:50.600 --> 00:33:51.240
Yeah, well, there you go.
00:33:51.480 --> 00:33:51.800
What do you think?
00:33:52.519 --> 00:33:53.000
I'm up for it.
00:33:53.080 --> 00:33:53.880
I'll do yoga, right?
00:33:53.960 --> 00:33:55.000
I'm into dogs, fine.
00:33:55.080 --> 00:34:00.440
So, um, yeah, so I think there's just a lot where we just don't have the conversation to say what does good look like.
00:34:00.519 --> 00:34:01.800
Why don't we try and work that way?
00:34:01.960 --> 00:34:07.560
So, other than yoga, how do you said personally boundaries between work and non-work life?
00:34:08.039 --> 00:34:11.079
I'd say I am pretty good at boundaries.
00:34:11.159 --> 00:34:15.559
I actually work a very intense but often relatively short day.
00:34:15.639 --> 00:34:17.400
So I am one of those morning people.
00:34:17.559 --> 00:34:21.159
If I've got a busy day, I'm like from eight in the morning, I'll just like in it, you know.
00:34:21.239 --> 00:34:24.920
If I'm working at like preparing a talk or doing interviews, I'm like da-da-da-da-da-da.
00:34:25.079 --> 00:34:32.440
By 2-3, like my concentration is drifting, and I'll take the dog for a walk, chill out, um, and maybe go back online later and just like resolve some stuff.
00:34:32.519 --> 00:34:36.599
But I'm pretty boundaried, I don't take too many needs today, but because I control my own time.
00:34:36.679 --> 00:34:40.599
I have a team, but you know, we kind of all know how we work and they're all remote.
00:34:40.759 --> 00:34:43.880
Um, so it's much easier for me than in a big organization.
00:34:43.960 --> 00:34:50.440
So I can work more to my kind of biological rhythm, and and I'm pretty good at getting a lot done.
00:34:50.760 --> 00:34:53.559
So, what if there were three things we talked about a lot?
00:34:53.720 --> 00:35:04.039
Um, and there's lots of good things in that, but top three things that people maybe should try um to get more structured, get more productive, be happier, really.
00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:08.760
I would say do stuff out of work that gives you joy.
00:35:08.920 --> 00:35:10.440
We talked before we started about bridge.
00:35:10.519 --> 00:35:12.039
Like, I play bridge, I love it.
00:35:12.200 --> 00:35:14.280
Um, I do loads of things outside of work.
00:35:14.360 --> 00:35:15.559
I've just written a panto.
00:35:15.960 --> 00:35:17.559
Uh here in the village panto.
00:35:17.880 --> 00:35:18.680
You are not getting tickets.
00:35:18.840 --> 00:35:20.360
I'm never telling anyone when it is.
00:35:20.519 --> 00:35:21.559
Um, I play bridge.
00:35:21.800 --> 00:35:22.840
You told me where you live.
00:35:23.000 --> 00:35:24.440
So I'm kidding.
00:35:24.680 --> 00:35:29.159
I go to the gym, I walk my dog, and I have friends that I walk, dogs that you know, like we all like Chad.
00:35:29.320 --> 00:35:33.960
So I have lots of structured things around work, which give me a reason to get out and connect.
00:35:34.039 --> 00:35:36.119
And I also learn a lot from those people.
00:35:36.200 --> 00:35:37.320
So it gives me a lot of information.
00:35:37.480 --> 00:35:41.960
So I'd say connect, have um, have your have your have reasons to leave work.
00:35:42.200 --> 00:35:49.960
I would say uh have your fixed, turned off all your notifications time if you possibly can, if you can navigate that with your team.
00:35:50.119 --> 00:35:55.800
Don't just do it because it freaks people out, but try and have a conversation about when you want focus time and how you get on with that.
00:35:55.880 --> 00:36:02.680
Um, and I would say um try listening to people and not saying anything and just letting them talk and see what they say.
00:36:04.360 --> 00:36:06.200
Should we do a quick fire round of questions?
00:36:06.680 --> 00:36:07.000
All right.
00:36:07.079 --> 00:36:10.280
Um, best piece of leadership advice you ever received.
00:36:10.680 --> 00:36:12.440
So it's a slightly it's a bit of a story.
00:36:12.519 --> 00:36:14.280
So Benjamin Zander, do you know him?
00:36:14.440 --> 00:36:18.840
He was the conductor of the Boston Philomonic, he used to do amazing talks and uh with a grand piano.
00:36:19.480 --> 00:36:28.200
And the group best piece of advice he is whenever goes anything goes wrong, instead of blaming everyone else and doing that, she did it wrong, he did it wrong, she was late, that team's rubbish.
00:36:28.360 --> 00:36:31.079
You breathe it into yourself and you go, What did I do wrong?
00:36:31.880 --> 00:36:34.119
And it's awful because it feels so painful.
00:36:34.200 --> 00:36:35.720
It's like they didn't deliver their report.
00:36:35.800 --> 00:36:36.920
That's oh, it's my fault.
00:36:37.159 --> 00:36:38.440
And it's a what didn't I do?
00:36:38.599 --> 00:36:40.280
Okay, did I not tell them it was important?
00:36:40.599 --> 00:36:42.039
But they're not the right person to ask.
00:36:42.119 --> 00:36:43.720
Did they not have the skills or the tools?
00:36:43.880 --> 00:36:45.480
What did I, what could I do differently?
00:36:45.639 --> 00:36:50.920
And it feels awful at first, but then it feels empowering because then you can fix it because it's you.
00:36:51.559 --> 00:36:53.240
That's truly great advice.
00:36:53.400 --> 00:36:57.079
Um the biggest red flag in a company culture.
00:36:59.559 --> 00:37:05.639
So there's something about being on the outside of organizations where you see a lot about how they behave.
00:37:05.720 --> 00:37:30.360
And I love 99% of my clients, and they call you up and they book you, and you turn up and you do, and sometimes just one you get, and they need three setup calls, and then they don't like this, and then they want to change the contract, and then you're like, mm-hmm, I don't know what's going on, but there's something about respecting time happening here, and it is always a flag, and it is always a good indicator of how they operate as a business.
00:37:30.680 --> 00:37:31.400
Interesting.
00:37:31.720 --> 00:37:37.079
You have such foresight into workplace trends and going-ons and whatnot.
00:37:37.159 --> 00:37:40.280
What's the next trend that we haven't even thought about yet?
00:37:41.079 --> 00:37:47.960
I think it's gonna be the it's gonna be the other side of the AI hype.
00:37:48.280 --> 00:37:55.639
It's gonna be the bit where we figure out what really works and what doesn't, and we all calm down and say, it's really good, it's practical.
00:37:55.800 --> 00:38:04.840
Same as Excel is practical, but it has limits, and we just need to just take all of the guff and the hype and the hysterics out of this and make it less complicated.
00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:07.400
I think that's the bit that's gonna be fun.
00:38:08.039 --> 00:38:08.760
Sounds it.
00:38:08.920 --> 00:38:14.119
So obviously, everybody should go and buy the motherwall jobs and how to stay sane.
00:38:14.280 --> 00:38:17.400
Um any other book that you would recommend?
00:38:17.880 --> 00:38:21.720
4,000 weeks by Oliver Bertman, if you want to make the most of your life is great.
00:38:21.800 --> 00:38:25.159
And then there's one, Julia De Gange wrote this amazing book.
00:38:25.400 --> 00:38:25.960
What's it called?
00:38:26.039 --> 00:38:27.800
It's gonna be I'll have to give it to you afterwards.
00:38:27.880 --> 00:38:31.240
It's about neuroscience and how our brains process problem solving.
00:38:31.320 --> 00:38:34.840
And it I recommend it to everyone, and it's really life-changing.
00:38:34.920 --> 00:38:36.280
And the name of it's gone out my head off since.
00:38:36.519 --> 00:38:37.880
You'll tell me, we'll put it in the show notes.
00:38:38.360 --> 00:38:41.480
Um and last, the proudest moment.
00:38:42.599 --> 00:38:46.119
When my book came out, I always invited to somebody else's book launch.
00:38:46.200 --> 00:38:51.079
And I my family's read the Times newspaper since I was bored, so it's like my paper of record.
00:38:51.240 --> 00:38:56.039
And I saw this curly head of hair across the room, and I thought, that's Eleanor Mills from the Sunday Times.
00:38:56.119 --> 00:38:58.039
And I went over and introduced, she said, What do you do?
00:38:58.119 --> 00:38:59.079
I said, Well, I just wrote a book.
00:38:59.240 --> 00:39:01.720
She said, Have it on my desk at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.
00:39:01.960 --> 00:39:02.760
I was so excited.
00:39:02.840 --> 00:39:05.240
I called my publisher, they said, Oh no, we already sent her a copy or say.
00:39:05.320 --> 00:39:05.800
No, no, send it.
00:39:07.079 --> 00:39:15.480
And um, and she put it on the front page of the uh Sunday Times magazine with a picture of me and my kids, and it was the best read piece that year with the longest dwell time.
00:39:15.720 --> 00:39:19.320
It had thousands and thousands of comments, and it was uh it was called Big Little Lies.
00:39:19.480 --> 00:39:21.320
It was about the lies we tell about when parenting.
00:39:21.480 --> 00:39:25.880
It was just one of those moments where it was like something that you thought just Christine.
00:39:25.960 --> 00:39:27.159
This has been amazing.
00:39:27.320 --> 00:39:29.639
Such foresight, such interesting insight.
00:39:29.720 --> 00:39:30.280
Thank you so much.
00:39:30.519 --> 00:39:30.760
Thanks.
00:39:30.840 --> 00:39:32.200
It's been lovely to be here.
00:39:32.760 --> 00:39:37.480
Thank you for listening to Uncharted Territory, which was brought to you by Money Penny.
