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021 chief wellbeing officer
68 Plays5 years ago
GUEST / Dr. Steven MacGregor of The Leadership Academy Barcelona
HOST / Matt Morley
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
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Welcome to episode 21 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we take a deep dive into the world of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today.
Introducing Dr. Steven McGregor
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I'm your host, Matt Morley, and today I'm talking to Dr. Steven McGregor, the Scottish founder of the Leadership Academy here in Barcelona.
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Before setting up his business, Stephen was an elite runner and swimmer while his academic career took him from the University of Glasgow all the way to Stamford and Carnegie Mellon. He's an honorary professor of health and wellbeing at the Glasgow School of Art and with the lab has delivered leadership development programmes for the likes of Salesforce, Telefónica, Uber,
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and
Exploring Workplace Performance and Elite Sports
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McKinsey. He's the author of six books, including Chief Wellbeing Officer, which is also the title of his own podcast series. We discuss the connection between performance in the workplace and his experience in elite sports, the concept of marginal gains in creating a change culture within a large corporation, the role of senior executives in leading the way on workplace wellbeing, the potential of social dynamics in creating a positive change process,
00:01:21
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take inspiration from Plato on prioritising rest and recovery, the connection between individual team and societal wellbeing from his perspective, the business case for incidental movement during the workday such as walking meetings, even the potential of conscious breathing as a way to manage stressful situations at work. There's a lot in here and he is a man full of
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incredible insight and seemingly endless array of well-chosen quotes. So if you enjoy this content please hit subscribe for regular updates.
Applying Marginal Gains to Workplace Wellness
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You can find links to Dr Stephen's work and the lab as well as my own contact details in the show notes. Here's my conversation with Dr Stephen McGregor of the Leadership Academy Barcelona.
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Stephen, thanks for joining us. I'm going to jump straight in with a starter for 10. One of the things that I found most interesting about going through both of your books over the last couple of weeks in audio format, it has to be said, is this connection, and you'll see why it's interesting to me, but this connection between performance and sports. Performance in the workplace and
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what you took from your experience in sport and one of the key concepts that keeps coming up in your thoughts, in your thinking is this idea of marginal gains and I think it's so crucial to really understand and appreciate that because it can feel like creating change in an organization is just an insurmountable mountain. So how do you see
00:02:52
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applying the concept of marginal gains to wellness in the workplace.
Implementing Workplace Change Initiatives
00:02:57
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Hi Matt, pleasure to join you today on the podcast. It's an interesting concept. A lot of people who are familiar with the concept in terms of following sport and particularly cycling and track cycling where essentially the term came from
00:03:13
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are kind of a little bit bored with hearing the term but I think in business it's still very much got a lot of potential a lot of road to to run and essentially you know for several years I've been trying to convince people in business of the value of marginal gains. I mean essentially the way that we approach change within the workplace is that we have a huge change initiative
00:03:35
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and we go all out on that project, whatever it may be. And we get everyone involved, but we don't tackle it for a sufficient amount of time. And often, we get these big change initiatives within the workplace. And this doesn't have to be in the context of well-being at all, but it could be anything
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to change an organization. But change takes time. And of course, there's going to be a dip in performance often in the interim before you get that uptick and before you get those benefits. So often, it's about staying the course. And just when things may start to change within the workplace, what happens? They go on to another change initiative. So that's very much the way of thinking and business regarding change, a huge effort on a big, big stretch goal for a period of time and then move on to something else.
00:04:24
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marginal gains is about being more realistic with change and it's recognizing that what you do every day matters more much much more than what you do every now and again and i think we get that cumulative effect
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if we build it into
Engaging Businesses in Change
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our lives. So this could be the impact that we have on an organizational level or just on personal level and we know how fast life goes past and especially working life and if we build it in, we forget about it essentially but we still get that cumulative impact
00:04:59
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And the other factor, and I'm talking about this in a program this week with Telefonica actually, is about the time that it takes us to create a new habit. And essentially it depends often on the complexity of the task. So if you make something small, if you make it simple, that synaptic process in the brain, it snaps into place a lot faster. You actually build that habit in a short amount of time
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And you can then build on the success of that or move on to something else. So it's a much more feasible approach to change when we have busy chaotic lives. So really a lot of potential in that for business, I think.
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When you're working at an organizational level, there's obviously that dichotomy between individual agency and corporate-wide change. How do you think about engaging with a business, whether it's the CEO and it's sort of a one-to-one coaching, or whether it's something like a telefonica, which is a giant beast of an organization? How do you get into people's heads so that it's something that they can take on and empower them to
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to implement change rather than it being something that's just sort of delivered at some sort of somewhat abstract corporate level? Yeah, that's a great question. And it was not easy, right? Every case and every client, I'm learning something new. I think there's a couple of key factors that I've learned over the years. One is to gain some level of executive sponsorship. So you want to really convince some senior people within the organization.
Team Dynamics and Workplace Culture
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because what they will do essentially is a role model and that has a massive impact. Regarding wellbeing, regarding any aspect of a healthier way of working a more positive culture, we can have policies, we can have different functions such as HR that are actually trying to get people to change their behavior and maybe they take them on training programs and that's all very well and good. But then if people see the really senior
00:07:03
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guys and girls within the company and they're not following these policies, then they're not gonna follow them either. Because either that's about thinking about what is the shaping culture within an organization or maybe they aspire to be them in the future, either within that company or somewhere else, they're gonna follow their lead. So I think role modeling, getting some senior buy-in is absolutely critical. And then another factor is just making change
00:07:31
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easy and practical and as you said it's not to make it you know too opaque or too kind of fuzzy and people don't really understand it and you know you know this yourself right if you're trying to you know make something happen and even in client conversations or make a change you have to make that easy to understand.
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And if you're trying to sell, for want of a better word, the whole idea of a more positive workplace, but you keep putting a very fuzzy, abstract, maybe overly academic, and I'm very conscious of that bias that I have myself at times. But I'm an engineer. I have a background in design thinking. Everything's about being practical, pragmatic, usable, accessible, and so that you present the objectives of what you want to do in terms of the context of well-being and a positive working place.
Balancing Individual and Systemic Change
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with something that is coming back to the merger and gain stuff, easy to do, but it's also highly visible, highly measurable, and there's no excuse for not doing it. And then so you present that simplicity and that accessibility, and once people at all levels of an organization start to do that, and we often work with teams, right? We often work with trying to make teams more high performing,
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And that becomes sticky, that change. So then other teams see these rituals that these teams are adopting and they copy them, right? You know, we're social beings and we copy others, especially when we see things that we think are of value.
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uh and and and you know or look good essentially they're appealing and I think everything within the space of well-being and a more positive working environment absolutely is appealing it improves your daily experience of work what doesn't have to be about suffering you know we can really uh improve our daily lived experience
00:09:18
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by making the workplace better. So we copy the simple things, people realize the positive impact that that has on their own daily lived experience and that often takes us further within that overall objective.
00:09:35
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I was going to ask whether you rely more on creating a sense of innate interest and desire and willpower within the individual, whether it's more about creating systems and checks and balances almost from an engineering perspective in terms of making sure that certain things get done each day to increase the health and well-being of the workers in the
00:09:57
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in an organization, but you've thrown a third element into the mix there, which is social, right? So there's this sort of community aspect to it that, in a way, circumnavigates that individual agency around willpower or systems. Or are you effectively working with all three? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, those first two points, I've often reflected on that. And I think that's my background in design. So I'm an engineer.
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But the focus is design and design thinking. So that essentially gives us those two sides. It gives you the rigor and the process orientation and the checks and balances of engineering, but also gives you the creativity and the chaos and the freedom to find new solutions and to be innovative that comes from design.
00:10:43
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And the best processes are a mix of both, right? You have to make sure that you're moving forward and you have those checks and balances, but you can't just be copying and pasting the things that you've done before. You need to have that extra element of newness and novelty. So those two elements have always been in my thinking and in my work. And in that social element, yeah, absolutely. I think the key point here, Matt, is that the whole field of well-being
00:11:10
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it doesn't exist in isolation. So you never just think about, okay, how can I improve my own well-being? You know, that could be the starting point. It's often the starting point for our journeys with clients. But very quickly, that starts to extend outwards into other people, right? We don't live in bubbles. We have to extend a course in the pandemic, right? But, you know, we interact with others, with her families, with teams, with people in her neighborhoods.
00:11:39
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And so well-being, it necessarily includes elements of well-being for these other people. So, you know, even coming back to a quote I remember in the book from an interview that I did, if you're not well at home, you can't be well at work. And if you're not well at work, you can't be well at home.
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you know, fully and to the full potential of being well. And so, you know, individual wellbeing is often the starting point, but that necessarily has to extend into team and organisational wellbeing and societal wellbeing. And we have to think about the values that we are bringing into our daily lives.
Promoting Movement in the Workplace
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And I hope that if more and more people think about how they change their approach to a working life, then that will also improve the world around us.
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The way you've just described it, that really makes it clear how you're able to go and play with the big boys along the lines of Telefónica. I mean, you just can't operate at that scale without the kind of systems approach that you've described. I just wanted to pick up on one thing then.
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Between us, we're almost taking it for granted that there's this direct link between health and well-being and productivity and performance. But it's unconscious that it's not necessarily as obvious to some people if someone isn't especially interested in sport or fitness or physical
00:13:06
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um health and activities uh then you know there's there's clearly a a mental barrier to overcome there perhaps you could just talk to that that idea of because at some point you're taking time away from the office it's not about necessarily just putting in more and more hours at your desk to achieve more and to earn more money sometimes it's it's almost counter-sensical right the idea of having to invest more in yourself
00:13:31
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Perhaps taking time away from you and your computer or you at your desk in order to, for example, go do some exercise at lunchtime, but then to be more productive in the afternoon. Is that sort of the basics of how you try and pitch it to someone who's just not in this space at all?
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And over the years, I've had a lot of skeptics who, of course, have gained a great deal of success by just grinding through and doing a ton of hours and just forgetting about every other part of it. Sooner or later, I think there does come a reckoning for that type of approach. And look, it can come very late in life.
00:14:11
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But burnout is increasing for many people. And the key that I often try and make the argument with and try and convince skeptics is that it's about sustainability. It's about, OK, you want to perform, but if you really want to perform in the long term, then you need to take into account these things. Sooner or later, something is going to give.
00:14:33
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and show the research. There's a lot of research out there. And we're still lacking the big picture on a complex systems level. But there are discrete studies which show along so many different dimensions that when you improve your own health and well-being, this improves energy, your ability to inspire others, quality of ideas, creativity, many, many different things. The business case is absolutely there. It's inarguable in all these different dimensions. So it's just trying to get people to get on the journey
00:15:02
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to making these changes and to convince them that there is this strong business case. I think another key element is to show people, and I'm very conscious of this because of my own background in sport and elite sport, that we can't make it threatening for people, and especially people who have never previously thought about their physical selves.
00:15:23
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that you know and this is the thing you know i was inspired very early with the corporate athlete and i was reflecting on that earlier this week as well and and that metaphor even of the corporate athlete is powerful but isn't for everyone right because you find i think it's an overly male perhaps an overly sport driven metaphor and so for other people in the workplace doesn't quite resonate so you need to be careful with some of these associations and so for me over the years you know the point of departure has been the physical self
00:15:51
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But I've tried to present that in a non-threatening way. And one example, and I say to people every single time when I'm in a program, I say it's better to sit down less half an hour every day
00:16:07
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than to aspire to run a marathon. The quick wins on your health is much more significant of combating a sedentary daily lifestyle than becoming an Ironman or Ironwoman. And this is often the case that we are presented with in corporate life as well. And I always remember a quote from Brendan Foster, the English distance runner, fantastic runner, Olympic athlete. And someone said to him, Brendan,
00:16:34
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How do you feel? You must feel amazing being an Olympian. What does it feel like? And he said, look, I'm just tired. I'm just tired all the time, right? And it's just, you know, we can take things too far. You go back to a quote from Plato and Plato
00:16:49
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I used in a couple of my books in terms of the importance of health, and this isn't just exercise, and he was a champion wrestler. He's also thinking about sleep. But he also said, beware of the balance. Sleeping too much, it leaves you sluggish. If you train too much, you're not going to be
00:17:05
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better mentally, so there is that balance that we need. And just a final point, in the physical domain, in the sports domain, it isn't just the doing or the athletic output, it's the recovery. That's the big key that differentiates the best athletes, right? It's the recovery.
00:17:20
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So even just sleeping more as an executive, research shows it improves executive function. And it also changes that mindset that you talked about. Claude Debussy said, music is the space between the notes. And it's been trying to change that culture and high performers in saying, you've been fantastic so far. If you adopt some of these practices, you're going to take it to another level.
00:17:44
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I'm going to come back to the recovery, the rest of the recovery chapter piece, because I think it's really key and it's a fundamental element and often something that's quite misunderstood. But I wanted to dig into the idea of movement, you call it move as your chapter title, from where I am in creating these physical spaces. For us, that concept is often referred to as active design. So how are we like designing a space to promote movement? What I found fascinating talking to you is that you're coming at it more from the sort of the cultural change
00:18:14
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the organizational change. And for you, you describe it more as incidental movements. So you describe stay use, for example, like how else can people think or sorry, you just described not sitting down all day in your chair and perhaps moving around a bit more. But how can people think about what's on the face of it, a very basic elemental part of their day, but but in
00:18:38
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integrating more movement at work? What are the simple basics that people can do there? That is often the starting point for us, and as I just mentioned, presenting the importance of physical health and remembering that you have a body but doing it in a non-threatening way. Scientists say that our ancestors would move up to 12 miles a day to hunt or to escape danger, but we have this highly sedentary life within the workplace now,
00:19:07
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And so moving at work does have the health benefits. But what we try and show people is that it changes the culture of work and the results of doing work. And it's another example of how we can adopt a lot of these practices about changing the culture of work. And it's not about
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fixing ourselves after the work, right?
Rest and Recovery for Performance
00:19:28
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So we're in work and we're grinding through the day and then we go for a run at night to recover or we go to the gym or we do a class and we just kind of get rid of all that stress. What we try and do is to integrate these elements and as you say incidental movement within normal working day. So examples of that.
00:19:46
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meetings, a stand-up meeting. You have the benefit of burning more calories when you stand compared to sitting, but it also means that meetings are much shorter. And of course, part of that whole agile transformation in the workplace the past several years, stand-ups are a big part of that. A walking meeting. Steve Jobs was a big advocate of a walking meeting. He felt he'd really get to know someone on that walk. He did all of his recruitment on walking meetings. It's just much more enjoyable.
00:20:12
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And even the kind of seems like a simple thing, but rather than being facing each other across a desk, it's quite an adversarial position. When you go for a walk-in meeting, you both have the same view. And it may sound insignificant. I think that really does make a difference in coming towards a shared understanding. So there are different things that you can bring in. And even Stanford research shows also that just walking the biomechanics of walking improves creativity by about 60%. That was some studies that were published a few years ago. So there we have.
00:20:40
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things that we do in work, conversations, meetings, all of these different things which make up our daily working day. And if you integrate movement as part of that, you actually improve the quality of the work. And then, of course, you improve health as well. So you're winning in all factors.
00:21:00
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And also another quote, I love to bring in a quote now and again, but David Kelly from IDEO, he said, when I see someone at their desk all day, it's suspicious how they pretend to work. And we still have that mindset. It's a very first industrial revolution mindset, you know, specialization of work, you're at your workstation and a sign of being productive.
00:21:21
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is that you're at your desk, often with your head down, and you're doing the thing. But nowadays, work is more collaborative. It has to have more energy behind it. And so movement necessarily has to be part of the new way of working. And as we move further in that fourth industrial revolution, desk time shouldn't be about desk time. It's just get more movement, more walking, less sitting, and that's the basis of a much more positive way of working.
00:21:48
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That's sort of almost where I pick it up and say, okay, well then let's look at the floor plan of an office space and how can you create, for example, more collaborative spaces, more deep work spaces, more spaces with standing desks, spaces that are more geared towards sort of sitting down. And that's where the two connect. You can also imagine that you would almost try and encourage senior managers to book those standing meetings, right? To show that it's okay, that it's allowed
00:22:14
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you then get into how you could instigate or foster a culture of accepting that rest and recovery is crucial to sustainable performance in the workplace, right? So clearly there are certain, there must be organizations that you encounter that are still working in that sort of almost, I wanna say macho approach of more is more, more hours, less rest, stay longer. I mean, it's still hugely prevalent in Asia. I know you've done some work in China,
00:22:44
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you must have been exposed to it first hand there when you thinking about rest and recovery in the workplace it might not seem the first place to go look for it but you mentioned sleep performance what are the things you are you working with what are your leave is there when you're encouraging a more holistic approach to how you can be productive during the work day.
00:23:02
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Yeah, no, great question. You know, I think it's giving people options. And as you say, you know, sleep is the is the main means of recovery and something that often makes a big difference to people's lives along so many dimensions in terms of
00:23:18
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well-being but also creativity and thinking ability and executive function tasks essentially which involves creativity but also judgment and a lot of these other higher order levels of thinking that we have increasingly in business but we can't forget about the day and the full day and so essentially we give people options and we focus on
00:23:39
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different pockets of time because we need recovery as human beings along different paths of time, right? So every day we need to sleep. You know, every year or every, you know, few months, right, might be vacation that we really need, really, you know, downtime, really change our view. You know, some people every several years take a second minute or whatever it is, right? So we need recovery and functions of different time.
00:24:08
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and also on the smaller scale. So what do we do inside the working day? Do you take a lunch? Working lunch or a meeting, grabbing a sandwich and chugging through an extra meeting is very common in a lot of organizations. But
00:24:24
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breaks between meetings for example. Microsoft last week came out with a lot of research into virtual meetings and brain imaging when people have these back-to-back meetings and they don't have a break. By the third and the fourth meeting brain imaging scans show that there's a lot of pressure in the brain which causes you know different effects and it absolutely affects your health and well-being and also your performance. So even a five minute break between meetings is something we've been advocating for a while right. So taking breaks
00:24:54
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in a long day with virtual meetings, one of these characteristics of the pandemic and other aspects that you can do, you know, get away from the desk, get outside, you know, the importance of nature as you know very well in your your own work matter, right? Looking out the window, right?
Incorporating Nature and Breathing Techniques
00:25:09
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You know, we're part of nature, so getting those elements in a day and even other things like breathing, you know, so we take people through the importance of breathing that even if you can't escape a meeting, you're in a very challenging situation.
00:25:21
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How can you change your style of breathing, which also changes your heart rate variability and the part of your nervous system and it has so many other deep impacts. So it's trying to show people that we can recover all the way through our day and we don't just have to, again, coming back to a previous point, fix ourselves when we go home at night or when we close the laptop, right?
00:25:44
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There's a little bit there. There's something in there perhaps about, at least from my perspective, of that Buddhist theory of loving yourself in order to share more love with the world. And if you can't give that little bit back to yourself during your day, the reality is, yeah, you're going to be limited in terms of what you can give. And it is that change in mindset.
00:26:05
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And it's really, I think, it's fundamental to where we're at right now. I love what you're doing. One of my favorite pieces from your book was with the idea of if you think your meeting is going to be 60 minutes, then try and halve it and see what happens to your productivity. So I'm going to be conscious of your time.
00:26:23
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I'd really recommend people check out Chief Wellbeing Officer. It's a very excessively written book. It's not academic. Perhaps the sustainable executive performance will be for people who wanted to go a bit deeper. So you've got the books, you've got your own podcast. If people are interested in connecting on a coaching level, what are the sort of services, if you like, that you're offering? How do you put yourself out there?
00:26:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, within the lab, we're doing a lot of programs and we do that with teams. You know, the great thing about the pandemic is that it's allowed us to try and scale up our reach. So, you know, globally, we're doing a lot more even over the years, as you said, you know, I taught in China, also Latin America, a lot over there in different parts of the Middle East.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:27:05
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But, you know, virtual trainings are offering us the chance to reach
00:27:09
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larger audience with bigger numbers. And all of what we do is these workshops that we take people through different programs and that is accompanied sometimes by individual coaching. So all those things to just try and change people's behavior and just have an impact on culture. That's what we love to see and make a difference to people not just for them and actually being a higher performer. If they do that, that's great. But we just want to
00:27:35
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You know, the short life we have, right, Matt? And we just want people to have a happier life as well. And if that relates to passion and them doing a great work, then that's a great reward for me. I'm delighted to do that. They're good vibes. That's for sure. Steven, thanks again for your time. It's been great. Pleasure, Matt. All the best. Bye bye.