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Creating Thriving Workplaces: How Phil Burgess and Felix Koch Are Redefining Success Through Connection
85 Plays1 year ago
Testament to their belief that relationships are the source of results, Phil Burgess and Felix Koch have worked together for more than a decade.
As joint Managing Directors of marketing services agency, C Space, their people-centric leadership approach to culture transformation led to various awards including ‘Best Place to Work’, ‘Best Agency’ and ‘Learning Team of the Year’ at the Learning Performance Institute’s Global Learning Awards.
They were jointly listed on Management Today’s ‘Agents of Change’ Power List for men championing gender equity in business and in 2022, Felix was listed on the InsideOut LeaderBoard which celebrates senior-leader role models who are working to smash the stigma of mental ill-health in workplaces.
As Chief People Officer and European CEO of C Space, they commissioned an award-winning mental health and connection programme which had a phenomenal impact on participant wellbeing and their sense of connection.
This inspired them to leave their corporate careers to set up WITHIN where they now work with leaders to drive results by creating cultures of connection where people can thrive. Their award-winning, group-based approach strengthens relationships, significantly improving wellbeing and delivering sustained impact over time.
The topics we covered:
- How people feel connection and disconnection in the workplace.
- Where employee disconnection might show up in the bottom line.
- What positive impact working on connection could bring.
- How people’s best efforts often miss the mark.
- And what you can do that will really make a difference.
If you want to hear more from Phil and Felix sign up to their free workshop:
Unlearning 3 leadership habits that prevent connection. https://calendly.com/within-business/within-workshop-unlearn-3-habits-that-prevent-connection?month=2023-10
Or connect with them on LinkedIn:
Felix: www.linkedin.com/in/relationships-are-the-source-of-results/
Phil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipburgess/
Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com
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Transcript
Introduction to the Visible Leader Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to The Visible Leader, a podcast that challenges conventional leadership and inspires you to create a workplace culture that empowers your team. Join me as I talk to thought leaders and changemakers about practical ways to apply new learning and rethink the status quo. Get ready to become a visible leader in your organization.
Phil and Felix's Journey
00:00:30
Speaker
So welcome Phil and Felix to my podcast. I'm really excited to have this long-awaited conversation with you. I think a good place for us to kick off is tell us a little about yourselves and your business within and we can start from there.
00:00:53
Speaker
Absolutely. So yeah, it's great to be here. So thanks for having us. Well, why don't I start by showing how Felix and I came to be working together. That started about 12 years ago when Felix and the MD of a small consultancy recruited me in to join their team. And at the time, there was about 35 people working for a creative agency in Soho, and I joined to help build up one of their new divisions.
00:01:20
Speaker
And I guess over the last 12 years, we've sort of come as a bit of a package. So we worked together consulting with big blue chip clients. And then our first foray into leadership was when we were catapulted into a joint MD position running our London office at a big time of change for that company. So that was where we sort of learned a lot about each other and how to lead
00:01:46
Speaker
We then went out of separate ways. I went to Boston, spent four years as a chief people officer out there and Felix ran our EMEA and APAC operations over here as CEO. And now we're running a new business together where we're focused on building connected cultures in workplaces we're called within. So yeah, that's us and Felix can probably have some color too.
Co-Leadership Style Benefits
00:02:08
Speaker
Thank you. I guess maybe I can double click a bit on the kind of co-leadership piece because that's not very common for people to be a co-MD and to keep wanting to work together. I guess looking back, it was quite an unorthodox choice for us to be both made MDs. None of us had really
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, known that we wanted to be an MD or had that in mind, but we were asked to do it and I think it worked well because we have very similar values in terms of what we believe in and what good work looks like, what good work ethic might look like, how we want to run a people-centric business, but we're also very different from a skills point of view.
00:02:49
Speaker
personality-wise, Phyllis, ENFP, I'm INTJ, so very complimentary characters who respect each other a lot. And I think we felt we had a really great run together at C-Space and we felt let's kind of recreate some of the magic we had there and do that in a new business. So that's why we launched in February. Great. Yeah, so you can work well together. Yeah, I think so. I think that's established.
00:03:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's a fact.
Workplace Connection Post-Pandemic
00:03:15
Speaker
So I was having a little look at your website and your mission is to radically improve employee mental health by building connection at work. That's your place now. So my first thought was, what do you mean by connection?
00:03:35
Speaker
That's a big question. I think perhaps the way to answer the question about connection is almost to look at its opposite and think about what disconnected workplaces look like. And I think what we saw in our own organization and what probably many organizations and people have experienced themselves over the last few years is a sense of disconnection in the world, lots of polarized opinions, lots of people, this talk of a loneliness epidemic,
00:04:02
Speaker
There's a lot of strife going on in the world and in our workplaces we're also seeing that people are disengaged, there's this talk of quiet quitting, the great resignation and all of the forces that have sort of come upon us as a result of the pandemic and the new ways in which we're working.
00:04:21
Speaker
And I think we found in our own organization, I mean, we really focused on culture. We had a really vibrant office-led culture. We'd won lots of awards for being the best place to work, but we still experienced this sense of disconnection as we emerged from the pandemic. And I guess,
00:04:38
Speaker
how that manifested was in attrition, people not necessarily feeling they could show up as themselves, burnout, high emotions, and this sense of sort of disengagement. And I guess connection, to come back to your original question, is really the reverse of that, a sense of knowing yourself, a sense of having strong relationships with others, a sense of having purpose in your work, and
00:05:06
Speaker
I think that's really what we're trying to do through our new organisation, work with organisations and intentionally help them shape cultures so that people feel more connected to themselves and to the organisations that they're working within.
Impact of Hybrid Work on Connection
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah. So it's a big cultural thing that you can see when you go in if there's a sense of disconnect.
00:05:29
Speaker
I also think that probably hybrid work and some of the kind of future of work challenges that we have been through and that we see everywhere in organizations are contributing to a sense of disconnection. So I think if people spend a lot of time on Zoom, they have very functional meetings, they talk about work, they talk about objectives, they talk about what do we need to do next, and they don't do a lot of
00:05:52
Speaker
intentional bonding or building relationship with their peers. It's quite a problematic approach to work. And I think a lot of stuff gets lost if that's the only thing you do. So the question is, if the hybrid work is here to stay, how can we connect people with each other in those environments and create more connective tissue to have better trust, better productivity, more fulfillment at work, really? Yeah, the trust word is just so important, isn't it? And I
00:06:21
Speaker
knowing what it feels like to run sessions over teams and not do any of that bit at the beginning where you chat about the weekend and you have a bit of a human element to it, just going straight into it. Yeah, there's something that's lost, definitely. I can see that too. So thinking about my hard-faced, I've worked with lovely leaders who are always smiling, but often the thing that it comes down to is the so what,
00:06:52
Speaker
Could it be a bit nicer to work in this environment? Yes. But how is that going to affect my business? How is that going to have an effect to the bottom line? What are your thoughts? I think that there are so many different ways of answering that question.
00:07:10
Speaker
I think if people are feeling more connected to one another, then inherent in that is that they are feeling more safe with one another. If they're feeling safe with one another, then they are able to dissent, have conflicting ideas, be more creative, be more innovative. So on one level, there's increased psychological safety and that leads to more collaboration, better ideas, more innovation.
00:07:36
Speaker
And there's great books. Amy Ebbinson has written huge amounts on psychological safety, which I think speak to some of that. If people are feeling more connected, then they feel that they're included in it and that they belong. And that is likely to lead to increased retention of those people, increased contribution, increased productivity, and the things that Felix spoke to, which have really hard measures.
00:08:02
Speaker
decrease mental health issues in the organisation. I read a Deloitte report the other day that said mental health costs UK businesses £56bn a year in turnover, absenteeism, presenteeism,
00:08:19
Speaker
all of those sorts of things. So I think those are some of the arguments that you can use with a CFO. And I think they resonate with some and they don't resonate with all CEOs. I think that's an excellent experience too. Some people believe the stats and some people don't.
00:08:34
Speaker
I think just last week we had two conversations with two very different types of leaders. One was really interested in reducing sick days. So they looked at their database and said, if I can reduce sick leave by 20%, I can service a $100 million account with all that time that is being wasted otherwise. So if you can come in and help us make a small dent in our sick leave, especially the run around mental health, that would be huge.
00:08:57
Speaker
Someone else, a CEO of a big consultancy says, I don't really mind attrition. I don't have that issue. I don't mind sick leave. I don't have that issue. My issue is, everyone's batteries are low. I need to re-energize my people for complicated times. Is that something that you can help with? I think it really depends on the type of leader, what metric and what kind of diagnostic is really pressing the most for them. Yeah, absolutely.
Identifying and Addressing Workplace Disconnect
00:09:25
Speaker
It's no ever one size fits all, is it?
00:09:27
Speaker
So we've looked at connection, why it's important, this massive link to mental health and how that can really have an impact. How might a leader go about kind of diagnosing that there's a bit of a disconnect? What do you think they could do which would tune into it or what flavor of disconnect there might be?
00:09:51
Speaker
I think there's probably various data points that would start to suggest that there's a problem. So I think in terms of hard HR data, if turnover is increasing, if attrition is increasing, if the themes that are coming out in exit interviews, if they do them are to do with burnout or people not feeling that there's purpose in their work, or that they're struggling, I think
00:10:15
Speaker
Most organizations are doing employee engagement surveys of some description, some probably in more meaningful ways than others, but if that data starts to show that people are not feeling supported at work, that they're struggling, that they don't have the tools and resources to do their jobs well, that's going to be another indicator.
00:10:34
Speaker
But I think more than anything, it's the human conversations that people are having with their teams because the hard data will be indicators. There's also just going to be the conversations between managers and their teams and that sense of what's really going on in the organization. What are people saying? How are people showing up? And sometimes it's what goes unsaid.
00:10:55
Speaker
the sort of visceral feeling you have in team meetings, are people still speaking up and engaged or are they sort of resigned to their fate and just sort of staring at the screen? So I think tuning into some of those kind of things and not just listening through the official measures can also be really helpful in diagnosing some of these things. Yeah, yeah. Now, you know, all these different avenues to get to this information, isn't it? And sometimes you just feel it, can't you? It's trying to
00:11:24
Speaker
connect with what's actually going on. I was also just wondering, obviously you've got stuff that's happened around hybrid working and remote working and the COVID situation.
00:11:38
Speaker
What blockers or things do people in business and people at the leadership level do that promotes disconnect? Because I know in a minute I want to talk to you about how we can pro connection, but what are people doing right now that actually might be promoting disconnect? It might be that they don't intend that. They're not like intentionally wanting to harm people's mental health, but unintended consequences is leading us to the same place.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's great. It's a great question. I think sometimes what we see a lot of in if we do one-to-one conversations is that leaders, of course, have become leaders because they're good at problem solving. They're really, you know, they have exceptional cognitive skills, they're an expert in the field and they have been promoted often because they've been
00:12:24
Speaker
able to sort stuff out and I think what happens in a one-to-one situation with a leader and their team often that maybe the team brings an issue to them and the leader only ever wants to solve the problem. Sometimes the team just doesn't need a solution they just need to be listened to they just need to say I had a rough day at home and it's really tricky but they don't want the leader to say why don't you go for a walk or have you tried leaving at 4pm or what about the nursery one can your wife do that
00:12:50
Speaker
That's often the go-to place for leaders is to go to solutionizing and very often that disconnects between the leader and that conversation because they just needed someone to say, yeah, I can see this is stressful. They didn't need any solution. That's just a very practical one-to-one thing that leaders often do that disconnects them. I think...
00:13:11
Speaker
We talked about over-reliance on Zoom or over-reliance on Zoom called to do functional stuff and to not think about like, where does culture happen in our organization? Whether we are remote or in the office, it doesn't matter. Where are we intentional about being a group of people that share some fate together, share time together? How have you baked things into the week where you connect with each other as humans and not just as accountants or as people who are project managers? I think that's
00:13:36
Speaker
That's, I think, missing in a lot of organizations is intent around creating connections. And then you have a disengaged, dis-infinished work force. Yeah, I mean, I think there are so many things. I think everything from closing down conversations, not role modeling healthy behaviors themselves. That's a big one, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah, like working weekends, sending late night emails.
00:14:05
Speaker
expecting that others might do the same, not taking holidays. Through to, I think, probably some of the things that can also be damaging, and I think we learned this probably from doing it a bit ourselves and then correcting based on listening to feedback, but performative measures around mental health as well.
00:14:26
Speaker
and sticking up something on your website on Mental Health Awareness Week, saying that we've brought in a speaker to teach you all about resilience, and that being the one thing you do all year to support staff rather than see it as a cultural challenge, a leadership challenge, an ongoing systemic issue that needs to be tackled. So I think that's also prevalent, this sort of sense of well-being washing that can be quite damaging. Yeah, yeah.
Perceptions of Workplace Culture
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, the bowl of fruit. Yeah, and partial to a bowl of fruit, we had a bowl of fruit in our office and it went down well, but we weren't under any illusions that the bowl of fruit was going to be the solution to any challenges we had around culture and wellbeing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do you see a difference when you're working with corporate organisations versus smaller SMEs? Do you see the same symptoms and the same
00:15:22
Speaker
It shows up the same as any kind of differences you've noticed. Because the bone of fruits are more corporate, it tends to be, doesn't it? I think it really is.
00:15:32
Speaker
quite a function of how many people are in that business, I think. So I think, you know, below 100, very often you have still quite a, I don't want to say family feel, because work shouldn't be a family and isn't a family, but you have a, people know everyone's names pretty much, the leaders know everyone's names pretty much, and it's more of a community feel often, no matter what kind of business it is. If it goes over 115, that's quite a critical mark.
00:15:55
Speaker
that layer of familiarity gets lost and you have, you know, tribes or kind of smaller groups of people that 30, 35 size teams that have microcultures and then you have multiples of that. So I think there's probably a big difference between those sizes and how much you can still know the people around you or whether you care about the people that are, you know, in your business, in your, in your, in your floor. So I think those are the market differences that we see in our work, I think. I don't know if nobody agree.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of it comes down to the intention of the leadership team as well. So you can have small companies where the cultures might be quite toxic and where the leaders might know everyone's names, but they also might have a culture of super long hours, which might be acceptable to people and that might be part of the culture or might lead to burnout. And then you can have larger organizations which have very structured, intentional ways of building culture and looking after their people.
00:16:52
Speaker
and vice versa. So I think the challenges are different and again the most successful companies are navigating these sorts of challenges except that companies go through different stages and there are going to be different things that they need to dial up and down at different times to shift the culture and to ensure people are set up to be successful.
00:17:13
Speaker
I'm so interested Felix in what you said about the family feel and companies should be family feel like I'm not suggesting they should be family feel but sometimes I am working with people and what part of the culture is they want it to keep retain that family feel and I do sometimes see leaders that are friends with their staff you know in this sort of not just friendly but they're like potentially drinking and friends with the staff
00:17:39
Speaker
I'm just curious about your view on it. I know it might be diverging a bit, but since you said that, it pulled me in. Yeah, I'm a big fan of strong boundaries. I've always been. It's not a development of area of mind to have good boundaries. I've always been good at that. I do believe that drinking culture has a whole issue in itself. I think it is kind of on the out.
00:18:04
Speaker
if the leader is going drinking with just a couple of people regularly and not the other ones, I think that's an issue and that's a problem in terms of how you behave yourself. People, as leaders, people always underestimate how much they are in the spotlight and how many people are watching them and watch whatever they do. So I think that has significance. So you need to, yeah, you're watched all the time. So you kind of can't do that what would look like favoritism or
00:18:28
Speaker
you know, not appropriate behavior. So I think that's important. Well, why are certain elements of the family maybe appealing as a metaphor or something that's important? I think you do want to look after your people, you do want to care for them, you do want them to respect you, all of those things you also want to take place in families. Of course, we loan certain relationship dynamics from the family potentially, but we should be very careful to not
00:18:53
Speaker
then turn that into a patriarchal system where it's like, you know, I'm providing for you. And as a result, you need to kind of do these things. So I think it's it's a fine balance. But boundaries, I would over index on boundaries and making them healthy and not blurring these things. It can it can lead to trouble.
00:19:09
Speaker
And fundamentally, you can't fire your family, but you can. I mean, I guess you can divorce or you could disappear, but you ultimately may need to fire people at work during a downsizing, and they may be people with whom you're close. So I actually just posted something today on a comment someone was talking about the importance of building friendships at work. And I think there's a lot of evidence that says that if you have a best friend at work,
00:19:32
Speaker
and someone you can confide in, then you're much more likely to perform and feel like you belong and stay at a company. And I had commented on this piece that I read that I don't think it's really about trying to have people forge friendships, but it is about helping people form strong relationships. And some of those may turn into friendships. I have lots of work with who I am also friends with, and I think I was friends with them at the time. But as Felix said, there's definitely a line to be drawn because
00:20:02
Speaker
because it's the professional stuff that gets in the way. I think the word boundaries is so important to that, isn't it? And to mental health and, you know, a lot of the symptoms here about long hours and emailing at the wrong times and all of that is like a clarity around boundaries and not feeling that you can be boundaried around when you reply and what time you leave. I definitely encounter that with people, which creates attention
00:20:33
Speaker
and a disconnect. So I got us back to disconnect. I'm just thinking, I really want these conversations that I have with people like you. And it's lovely talking to you and just really getting your insights and your thoughts about all this stuff, which is such an important subject.
Practical Solutions for Workplace Disconnect
00:20:55
Speaker
I want to move us to what steps. Somebody in a leadership role, whether it's a corporate or they're in the top team of an SME, so they've looked at the data, whatever server they run or whatever informal conversations they've had and they sense that there's some sort of disconnect issue and they realize the importance of doing something about it and they do really care about mental health.
00:21:25
Speaker
What can they do? What practical steps could they take?
00:21:30
Speaker
I think I just want to connect to something you said earlier. You said, oh, we often run workshops and we just launch straight into it. I think that's a very, very micro thing. Any leader can do at the beginning of the meeting that would provide a bit more space for us as humans. Something we do a lot in our workshops is just simply state your name at the beginning of a workshop and name a number between 1 and 10, which denotes how you feel right now and give us one sentence why you feel the way you do.
00:21:57
Speaker
And then you just walk through the room takes two minutes, five minutes, depending on how many people and then you will hear something like my name is Peter. I'm a four. My child is of sick today. So they're lying in the room next to me. And I've got a big deliverable and don't know what to do about it. So of course, that happens when you have a bit more safety and a bit more openness. But if you have that information as a leader,
00:22:18
Speaker
You have understood the room. You've read the room. You know the temperature of the room. You know how to run the meeting. You know that you need to be mindful of that person's time and that you can recognize that. I think that's a super simple thing to kind of create a bit more humanity into a meeting. And it's a tiny thing, but it changes if you do it well. And if you lead by example, for example, you should do it first, right? Like you have leaders who then ask other people to do it without going first. When I do that with the teams I work with,
00:22:47
Speaker
I love it when they incorporate me into it, because sometimes I do forget about myself. But what I love even more is when I've worked with them for a while, and then I'll go away, and maybe I'll come back in. But one of the key things that they've held on to is that check-in, that space, their confidence to do it. Because I think until they see it working, they think it's a bit personal. But actually, when you see it working, you realize how it sets the tone for great, great meetings. So yes, lovely.
00:23:14
Speaker
I see a lot of people, they look at the data as you said, they see that there might be a problem or they sense there might be a problem and then they jump into solutions. So people are not collaborating properly, so I'm going to bring in some training to train them to collaborate or people are working too long hours, so we're going to launch a policy about no emails after eight o'clock.
00:23:33
Speaker
I think people sometimes miss that step of like, let's define like, what are some of, get really concrete. So what are some of the negative behaviors that we are seeing? What are some of the positive behaviors that we would like to see? And then what are some of the root causes that are driving those behaviors? So is it about, they're following the example of the CEO who always works at 10 o'clock at night? Or is it that the policy isn't clear? Or is it that they want everyone to stop
00:24:00
Speaker
emailing at seven o'clock? Or is it more that they want to create permission for people to work when they want?
00:24:07
Speaker
But just to be clear that if you get an email from me at seven, I've got no expectation that you might need to reply. And I think if you can get clear on the bad behaviors or the undesired behaviors and the desired ones, you can then start to think about the right solutions before you just jump to the answer. It takes a little bit more time. But I think that reflective process can yield so many insights about how to change. And it can prevent people spending a lot of time and money on things that are not really
00:24:37
Speaker
treating the root cause of the problem. And then they get initiative tiredness don't they? They get weary. Initiative overload and I think that's one of the things that we're seeing right now. I think rightly so many people responded to the challenges of the pandemic and now they're looking at their solutions for employee well-being and they do have fruit in the office and they have a well-being app and they have an online therapy platform and they have three or four different trainers and they're looking at
00:25:05
Speaker
those solutions and they're not quite sure what's working and what's not because they're not necessarily collecting data, they're spending a lot of money and the things that were right maybe two years ago are maybe not right for where the organization is at right now. So again those leaders that I think are taking a pause looking at what they've got, what's not working, what is working and then moving forward I think are also going to find themselves more successful in the in the coming years as they continue to grapple with these challenges.
00:25:33
Speaker
I think there's also an awful lot of tickboxing going on. So employees say, mental health is your responsibility, employer, do something about it. And the employer is like, oh, fast, we need to do something. Let's put something on the website. We have done it, tick the box, next issue. But that's not how health works. And that's also definitely not how a mental health works. So superficial initiatives that are not really an investment in actually changing anything. And sometimes it's better not to do anything rather than to do something and to pretend it solved it.
00:26:02
Speaker
And so talk about increasing your disconnect by getting people doing initiatives that aren't really well thought out or don't really actually deal with the root cause. Anything else that comes to mind about things that you can do?
00:26:23
Speaker
There's something we did well, I think, at C-Space, and we did an awful lot of, which is like a weekly meeting. We called it Friday at 4. It was a weekly meeting that we had every Friday at 4, and it actually was at 4.30, but that was the running gag. And at that meeting, we would get together online or face-to-face for 45 minutes, and we would do welcome any new joiners, say goodbye to anyone who's leaving the business with proper speeches and kind of comedy,
00:26:48
Speaker
skits, share any new business wins that have come in this week that had been signed. And we could celebrate that. And any other kind of shout outs on behavior. So we had a set of behaviors. And then I could say, I want to nominate Phil for Show the Love, because this week he's helped with the accounting team. And they had to work long hours. And he bought them some fruit, whatever. And then people would do other shout outs, appreciating each other. And we did that really religiously every week. And that was a moment to just come together
00:27:17
Speaker
form an identity of this is who we are, this is how we treat our people, and this is what we do. And then everyone would still have a beer and then maybe go back to their desk and do some work, but we would just make that very intentional. So it was a ritual. Some people felt, oh, it's a bit like a cult and it's too intense and I'm introverted, but we just did it anyway. And it worked quite well to keep some cohesiveness and some connection going.
00:27:39
Speaker
You might say that only works in creative agencies. I don't think it does. I think you can find your way of doing that. But if you don't meet once a week or if you don't have a moment to say goodbye and hello to people, like why are you even running a business? Yeah, it's like some of the things you say about doing what you notice is in small, maybe more kind of traditional companies, they'll do that and it will be a company day and they'll do it like once a year. And it's like, yeah, we're going to get everybody together. And you just
00:28:05
Speaker
It's so lovely hearing this other version of it where it's just like feeding the culture and it's a regular connection point. I'm working at how to do it so it's not onerous and like you say that people that maybe they're more introverted and they don't want to have people jump up and down about them, but it's done in a way that works for people. It's a bit like appraisals, people doing appraisal. We're going to do an appraisal of you once a year and actually
00:28:28
Speaker
So often, the check-in, the monthly check-in is going to meet that need so much better. So it's interesting, it might make me think of it. I was just going to say to the point about it not working for everyone, I was speaking to someone the other day and they do half an hour tea and cake.
Innovative Meeting Strategies
00:28:44
Speaker
So it's very low energy in terms, it's not like a big public thing, but it's just a time where you can drop in and the whole organization stops and they can drop in and have tea and cake if they want for half an hour. It's just a moment in their day.
00:28:57
Speaker
Another thing we did was sort of normalize walk and talk. So when people have got video fatigue, it's so nice when someone says, should we just turn our videos off? Why don't we go old school and get outside, walk around for half an hour, either together, or if you're working in different locations, just do it on the phone. Get some exercise, you get some fresh air, you connect.
00:29:15
Speaker
And why not? But it does require someone to do it first, to normalise it, to create permission for others to do it. And I think the more that leaders, managers step up and see that that's their responsibility to do it for others, the better it will be. And the more they will help their own mental health as well. So yeah, it's sort of a win-win. Yeah, I'm doing now that weather's improving, I'm doing coaching and walking as and when I can.
00:29:42
Speaker
Well, the reason I said, can I get to be great? I know they're really into fitness and they're like, I don't really want to sweat during the working day. I'm like, yeah, that is a unintended consequence of getting out there when it's like 25 degrees or whatever it has been.
00:29:58
Speaker
It's so funny, though, because so much of it is about boundaries and what's right for you. Like, I had people who organized intense, collaborative workouts. And I was like, I don't necessarily want to work out in front of my team. If that works for them, great. I had other ways that worked for me. And I think that's another thing that's so important in this topic, accepting that you need a variety of different things available that don't assume the same thing will work for everyone. Yeah.
00:30:24
Speaker
take an experimental approach except you're going to do some things that might not work, keep thinking about how you can change things, keep things fresh. They're always to make a topic that is very heavy actually a bit more accessible and fun as well.
00:30:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think experiments are the way forward. It's a lovely way of keeping it light and keeping everybody engaged with how it is, rather than we are doing this initiative and it's going to, you know, never end. No one wants another initiative, really. No one does, do they? Not really. Not in their hearts.
00:30:58
Speaker
I think the one thing that me and Phil are quite passionate about is this whole notion of the power of groups. Because I think we see a lot of like, you know, when you look at the mental health space, there's a lot of apps. So you download an app and you
00:31:12
Speaker
tell the app whether you're happy or not and you track yourself or you speak to a therapist one-to-one and all that is fine and good and works. But I think what we've found really being quite powerful is this question of how can we activate a group of employees that are part of the same organization for the well-being and the connection of that business because that way we are not
00:31:33
Speaker
taking an individual out and say, hey, Phil, you seem to have an issue. Why don't you sort yourself out with a shrink? And when you're good again, then you're allowed to come back and play with us. But you actually say, we are a group, and we all have mental health. And we can listen to each other. We can hold each other's space. And Phil is part of that group. And he will be able to heal someone or help someone, and vice versa. And then the group realizes, wow, we are effective. We don't need gurus. We just can activate our own powers to do that. And I think that's completely under leveraged.
00:32:01
Speaker
in business is the fact that we have all these powers in us, within us. I think that's worth standing on the soapbox for. The groups, you've got everything that you need already. You don't need always experts. Sometimes you do, but I think for the vast majority of connection issues, the people are there. You need to connect them. You don't need something else to bring into them. Yeah, I love it. I think this sense that we are resourced
00:32:27
Speaker
we can do this and actually we don't need to outsource connection necessarily. But I think setting up and that expertise to just listening to you talking about this and my knowledge about this initiative fatigue and everything can be really valuable. But I think sustaining it, these businesses have got that within them that they can keep doing the check-ins, they can keep doing that group. They don't need to have someone come in to like,
00:32:56
Speaker
do a group conversation with them. I guess my one build on what Felix just shared around connection is perhaps related and is this sense of focusing on prevention rather than cure. So similar to the point around leveraging the power of groups.
Continuous Cultural Investment
00:33:14
Speaker
I think it's really easy to wait until you're in a point of distress before seeking help, either on an individual level or at an organizational level. And I think if organizations can just bake this into their culture, into the way they are every day, investing in the development of their teams, investing in relationships, making space for people to have these conversations, not just at times of turmoil after redundancies or when there's
00:33:41
Speaker
another school shooting in america or whatever it might be that's really important but just make it part of the day to day ensure that people are connected and i think a lot of the issues we see in our organizations will start to be mitigated as people learn to better support themselves and each other. A nice thought to bring us to a close.
00:34:03
Speaker
Thank you so much. It's been great catching up and talking to you about this subject and I've learnt a lot and I look forward to hearing more from you. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks for the thoughtful questions. Thank you, Corinne.
00:34:20
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Visible Leader podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episode, hit the subscribe button. And I'd love to hear what you think, so please leave me a review. If you have any questions or comments, reach out to me. Corinne Hines on LinkedIn.