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Breaking Down the 'Yes, But...' Excuses for Busyness with Neil Jurd
89 Plays1 year ago
Neil Jurd is a former army officer and RMA Sandhurst instructor. He served in several operational theatres, including the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Yemen. Since leaving the army he has worked in leadership development and coaching for more than a decade, Neil has an MA from Cranfield University, is a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Lancaster University. He was awarded the British Citizen Award in 2020, and appointed OBE in 2021.
He is the author of the 5* rated ‘The Leadership Book’, written to make Leadership easy to understand and easy to apply.
Topics we covered:
- The dark side of being busy
- The ‘yes, but..’ excuses for busyness
- How to create space
- How controlling less can be the key to success
Find out more about Neil
Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neiljurd/
Find his book here: The Leadership Book: A step by step guide to excellent leadership
Watch his Ted Talk: Pause & Allow. How controlling less can be the key to success
Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast & Host
00:00:01
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.
00:00:30
Speaker
I do feel very lucky to be introducing you today, Neil, because someone recommended I speak to you, and they said you were very lovely, very generous with your time, but they were a bit surprised that you took the time out because you're quite a name in the leadership world, and turns out they're right. You are being very generous to give me your time today, and you are one of the UK's top leadership development experts. I think I wrote that.
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm completely believing it. I've read your book and you are good. You have done several other things and I'm going to list a couple of them.
Insights from 'The Leadership Book'
00:01:07
Speaker
I'm not going to get them all, but you were a serving officer in the British Army. You led expeditions around the world. You taught leadership at Sandhurst and when you left the military in 2009, you've worked with many several... How many organizations do you think? Oh, I don't know. I've been over the last 10 or 15 years,
00:01:27
Speaker
don't know, tens, hundreds. It depends what you often just one person in an organisation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you were awarded an OBE in 2021, which is pretty cool.
00:01:41
Speaker
So the reason I'm interested in chatting with you is having been looking at your book, The Leadership Book, which we were just chatting about, which is what I really like is how super practical it
Exploring 'The Dark Side of Busy'
00:01:55
Speaker
is. It's not just theory, it's about doing, which just totally appeals to me and my community. I think that's kind of important. The other thing is your TED Talk. Pause and allow how controlling less can be the key to success. So, Nil Jird, welcome to the show.
00:02:11
Speaker
Thank you, Cohen, and thank you for that lovely, lovely introduction. It's great to be here, really nice to meet you. Yeah, no, really, really lovely to meet you too. There's a good thing about doing this podcast actually, I'm just going to meet such lovely people. So the theme of the show really is looking at some of the conventions around leadership that we accept and it's just normal and even rewarded, but have unintended consequences.
00:02:39
Speaker
So the focus of today is the answer to the question that you often hear if you say to leaders, how are things? And the answer is often very busy. Okay. It's just, you know, so, so standard is like a badge and you had a really nice little phrase. Um, I think it was in your Ted talk saying the dark side of busy. So Neil, what did you mean by the dark side of busy?
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah. In the TED talk, I refer to a meeting at a coffee shop just up there. I live in Kendall and a coffee shop in the next village along from here. Somebody said, how are you, Neil? And I said exactly that. So I said, I said, busy. And he said, good, good.
00:03:32
Speaker
And, and that really struck me. I just thought, gosh, you know, people, I meant busy, kind of hoping for a bit of sympathy. And actually, we, we consider busy as sort of a badge of honor, a sign of success.
Prioritizing Purpose in Leadership
00:03:50
Speaker
And we associate it with
00:03:52
Speaker
know, with kind of how life should be. And increasingly, I've come to believe that that's not the case, that that dark side of busy is the busy way you, you don't really have time for the stuff that matters. You don't you don't have time for your friends for your your core relationships, the people you love, you don't have time to look after yourself, you don't have time to stay fit to feed yourself properly. And it's all because
00:04:21
Speaker
somehow work has taken over. And I just think that's wrong. We're at our most effective as people and therefore as leaders, when we've got the time to look after ourselves, the time to nurture ourselves, the time to think, the time to connect. So really, it's about putting process back in its place. And
00:04:50
Speaker
being more focused on purpose, the things that matter to us that we're trying to achieve. That's kind of the core of the TED Talk, as the TED Talk summarized in a minute or whatever.
Transitioning from Control to Allowance
00:05:04
Speaker
Still worth listening to though, folks. There's more to it. I'm hearing you and I, I mean, it all feels like really sound.
00:05:15
Speaker
And then I'm tuning into my leaders, who I've worked with over the years, and I can feel them say to me, that's all very well. But how? How to get to that place? Because, you know, I had, I was thinking about
00:05:34
Speaker
the types of things they might say to me that would be, but, so yes, but, you know, so like the first one was kind of, yes, but I might want that, but there are stakeholders out there that are making demands on me and I have to satisfy that. So how can I shift into a different way of being if I've got these multiple demands on me? I just wondered how you'd reply to them. Yes, but.
00:06:05
Speaker
is often people saying, tell me how, isn't this? It's like they really want to and they're just, there's just this kind of obstacle. And I think, and again, I actually, I say in the talk, I talk about bravery, about you have to be brave to work in this way. So a lot of organizations, maybe most organizations have evolved a way of working.
00:06:31
Speaker
which is quite relentless and particularly post COVID I think online work can be even more relentless because the natural breaks that we used to have moving from one location to another have gone and we the next meeting just pops up on the screen after after the current one. A lot of its organizational culture
00:06:56
Speaker
But perhaps 90% of the problem is culture. And the fact that in most organizations, it either is better, or we think it's better to be seen to be busy, to be seen to be doing kind of earning our money. And a lot of people in leadership positions have never been taught how to lead, but genuinely that they'll have done a 20 and you'll have come across this, I'm sure that I've done a 20 or 30 year career.
00:07:23
Speaker
and never been taught how to lead. They'll have done management courses that they'll know how to manage absence or they'll know how to run the leave system or to allocate transport or whatever they do. They'll be good at the process, but they've never understood the concept of leading about knowing what you're trying to achieve and connecting with people to get it done. And that's really essential because leadership is about an effect. It's about purpose.
00:07:53
Speaker
And if an organization has that culture, where you are focused on something, and that's what matters, not the process by which you get to it, just the objective, people are measured by what they've achieved, not by how many hours they've put in.
Can Leadership be Taught?
00:08:12
Speaker
And it's the tendency to
00:08:15
Speaker
measure people's performance by quantity rather than quality, which leads, which I think is what traps people in most organisations. So I think this bravery, I think sometimes it's about as a boss. So if you own the environment, it's about saying, look, all I'm interested in here is having a great culture and achieving our objective. How you do it, you've got freedom. I'm not going to be looking over your shoulders.
00:08:45
Speaker
I don't want to be kept in every loop, don't copy me in. But all those things clutter the brain with irrelevance and detail and drag the leader into other people's jobs. If you're not the leader, if other people are above you, well, you've got to address this. You've got to think about what culture would allow you to be most effective. And you've got to be able to discuss that. You should be brave enough. That moral courage, I think, is important in anyone.
00:09:15
Speaker
in a leadership position. And if you believe in what you're trying to achieve, then that is usually enough to make you brave to think, hold on, what I'm doing here matters, so I'm going to speak to them, to my boss, and I'm going to explain why I could do it better if we worked in a different way. If your objective isn't important enough for you to do that, to be brave, well, why are you doing it? Should you not be looking for a job that excites you a bit more?
00:09:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the purpose question is so at the core of this, isn't it? And actually, how often do you work with teams where their clarity of that is non-existent? They actually don't really know. And they don't know why they're together as a team and what their shared goal is.
00:10:09
Speaker
They're all workers. In my book, Corinne, there's a diagram which you may have seen, which is a target with some arrows going straight onto the target and others going in the right direction but missing it. And that's how I see people in lots of teams. You can normally spot the person who's just going completely the wrong way and people normally don't. But you'll get people who are doing the right sort of thing.
00:10:39
Speaker
what they've always done, what they've usually done, but it isn't really focused on the objective. It doesn't differentiate your organization from, from the competition. And a lot of leadership is about making sure that purpose is, well, I used the term clear and compelling. So absolutely clearly expressed and understood and compelling something people want to do, it motivates them, it gets a bit of emotion going in them.
Engagement and Authenticity in Leadership
00:11:08
Speaker
I mean, we're kind of straying off the subject of busy, but there's a part in the book that, or just when I've read about you, which is, can leadership be taught or is it innate? Because I'm interested in your view of this, because I've coached people where they didn't appear to be naturally
00:11:32
Speaker
leaderful. It's like, I know it. I'm okay about that. And thinking about people I've worked with where it didn't really work out, you know, they had a leadership role, but it didn't work out because that is sometimes what happens. They were wanted to be popular. They didn't want to
00:11:56
Speaker
set themselves apart. They didn't want to give feedback unless it was easy to do. It's naturally hard to do that sometimes. Stepping into that role didn't work out for them. When I look at them, I think, is that because it's in you or it's not? Or is it because it's either you want it or you don't? If you wanted it enough, you could learn those things. I think people have different starting points, and some of that will be genetic.
00:12:26
Speaker
And a lot of it will be down to upbringing, you know, the kind of the clutter that gets put in us by family and the key relationships when we're growing up that either exemplify good leadership or I guess if you've come from a family where you are shouted at and told exactly what to do and punished if it's not done,
00:12:54
Speaker
that sets the conditions for the way you're going to interact with people later on in life, unless unless you can break that chain, or if you're never allowed any freedom to make a decision, you know, again, these these things carry through into life. Some people do just get leadership more naturally than than others, because probably because they've been taught
00:13:20
Speaker
inherently from a very young age how to lead they just didn't know they were being taught but they but they have the right role models. However I think anyone can learn to lead or pretty much anyone unless they're very damaged and have got a you know a really really well I think I think very damaged is probably the best way to put it but but anybody else who tries to learn to lead can and probably anyone can improve their leadership and I
00:13:50
Speaker
I think again the whole premise behind my book is leadership is easy and in some ways that's why I've been surprised that the book has such an impact on people because I genuinely think everything I wrote is really obvious and it is. I don't write anything that I don't think people would read and say no that's I have a contrary opinion. I think I'm stating the obvious that people just know
00:14:17
Speaker
about being decent to people and working out where you're going and building a team, you know, it's all, it's all really obvious. But people haven't been taught it. No, they probably never sat down and thought about it. So any leadership training will have a huge impact on people who otherwise are living out deeply embedded learned behaviors that they're being like that manager they had in their
00:14:45
Speaker
first part time job on a Saturday at Tesco's 25 or 30 years ago, that they're, they're models of what good leadership or what being in charge look like, but not necessarily positive leadership models. I found with coaching, coaching leaders, often, you've got to assume that they don't know anything about leadership, like literally nothing, they can't differentiate between management and leadership, which are terms that get
00:15:15
Speaker
mixed up. I love your definitions of those. I think I'd like you to, when you finish, just to define them, because I read them and I was thinking, okay, that is actually slightly different than I've looked at previously. So that would be useful. Yeah. Yeah, no, happily. To coach people in leadership, often, I would start by explaining what leadership is. Because trying to coach the answers out of someone who's never understood the concept of leadership.
00:15:44
Speaker
or doesn't understand the stages of team development or doesn't understand the different levels at which we communicate, probably impossible actually, without sometimes saying, look, here's a bit of theory, just let me explain this concept to you and then we'll coach how it applies to you. And I see answering the question you threw in there, Corinne, I see leadership as being about people and management being about stuff. We manage time, space, resources,
00:16:13
Speaker
process, really, and we lead people. And leadership, I talk about being about increasing our impact in the world. So not doing, not doing a bit more work, actually, leadership, you shouldn't need to work any harder as a leader than as a any other position in the team. It's not about carrying all the stress, it's about increasing your impact by engaging other people. And I differentiate that into emotionally
00:16:42
Speaker
emotional engagement and intellectual engagement, like getting their heart beating a bit faster, but also having a structure that they're pulled into, in pursuit of a clear and compelling purpose. So leadership is about having a bigger impact by connecting with people.
Leaders Within the Team
00:16:58
Speaker
And in I've got a doodle video we made a couple of years ago, where I summarize it as connection and direction, connect with people have a clear direction.
00:17:08
Speaker
sense of direction, not about controlling and directing people, about being very clear what direction you're going in. I think it resonated where you said about your model of leadership might be somebody that you were managed by and it's like being in charge, that phrase. I think I see some people like become leaders and then they become something else, they like turn into this thing and it's like it jars when they describe
00:17:38
Speaker
some of the scenarios and how they've handled it. Because I feel like, hey, if I think I'm chatting with you three months before you turned into this role, you would have probably described instinctively it different, potentially differently than that. But it's like this thing, you know, you've put on this coat and suddenly it's like, I'm in charge, therefore I need to be a certain way. Do you know, it's funny you say that coat. I was working with a team
00:18:08
Speaker
last week and it was a university team but the senior leader there was talking about a boss that she had worked for in another university and this boss had talked about putting on a cloak of leadership almost like a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility and playing the part of a leader at work and separating work from home. Now I
00:18:36
Speaker
I don't agree with that at all. I think that's terribly exhausting to have a difference between who you are and who you're presenting yourself as. It makes it really hard to connect with people. What are they connecting with actually? What's the real you? You can't connect with the illusion of a person.
00:18:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. Coats or cloaks. No, absolutely not. You should be. I think, you know, yeah, I was just thinking, you know, we started talking about this sense that being busy and what that might mean. And I was thinking, you know, we're straying into other areas, but I think this this this other area is another leadership kind of idea that you're two different people in this work life balance as if like, work isn't your life, you know, and
00:19:27
Speaker
It's just like a continuation of you, isn't it? I would find that really hard myself. And I've probably I mean, everything again, everything I've ever written has, has come out of my own learning, which is somewhere along the line, I'll have got it wrong. And I suspect early on, I maybe all the way through, I've strayed into the
00:19:52
Speaker
the temptation to play the part. But as I've got older, I've realised more and more how ridiculous playing the part is. Because then every decision you make has to go through a two stage process of like, there's what would I do? But then, yeah, actually, what would the character that I'm playing? What would lead you? Yeah. I mean, and it's just, it's
00:20:19
Speaker
It is exhausting. I can't think of a better way of putting it to have a two-step process in every decision. And you also lack or miss out on the support of others by being leader you. You don't feel this. I mean, leaders need support of the teams that they're in. And
00:20:40
Speaker
leaders with cloaks don't get that support, that emotion. Yeah, that emotional support, because the vulnerability thing kicks in with this, doesn't it? It's about allowing people to see that real version of you so that they can connect with you. And I actually was looking at something this morning that you put up.
Case Study: Self-Managed Teams at Maiden
00:21:02
Speaker
It's a quote, it's like a one pager in my book, but it's basically leadership is leadership sees themselves
00:21:09
Speaker
as just another member of the team, but one whose function is leading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by that, I mean, you're not more important because you're the leader. It's just the thing you have to be good at, and I expand on this in the text a bit further on, that the thing that you have to be good at if you're in charge is leading. Your responsibility is to be the best you can possibly be at leading that team, but it doesn't make you better than
00:21:39
Speaker
the other people. It's just your role is to, is to own the interpretation of the objective, and then to gather the energy and look after and nurture other people in moving them towards that objective. But that it shouldn't be done from a position of above. It's in a power dynamic. Yeah, yeah, it should be with. And yeah,
00:22:07
Speaker
you've got to be quite confident in your own ability to lead with rather than above. Above gives you a barrier that you can hide behind. And also that the people below you in that barrier you've created can hide behind and you end up with truth and information and ideas not flowing. I mean, it's just it's so obviously not good for a team. There is never any benefit in a
00:22:34
Speaker
the sort of team you'd want, the sort of culture you'd want, there's never any benefit in having a rank divide. You might have different levels of responsibility, but any kind of rank or status divide. I mean, you must have seen this, Corinne, I guess.
00:22:50
Speaker
status gets in the way. Oh, people think that when I get that job title, I'm going to have that authority. And that will bring me authority. And it's, it's interesting how
00:23:06
Speaker
it doesn't work like that necessarily, or you can push something, but it's not really what you would be hoping for. My first conversation I had was with Philippa from Maiden in Bath, where they are... I don't know if you've heard of Maiden? I think I have, but I'm wrecking my brains. Yeah, they are fully self-managed teams. They completely transitioned several years ago, so now they don't have...
00:23:34
Speaker
any of that traditional hierarchy and they work in a particular way that is very different and it's really interesting just understanding how that works. A lot of process, a lot of management within it because there's a lot of ways in which they work in order to make that work successfully. But taking away that hierarchical power, I think it's created
00:23:59
Speaker
creativity and innovation and quality of life, I think, for people that work there. That's the theory brought to life beautifully. I think the quality of life... So why was the quality of life better? What was happening that made it better?
00:24:20
Speaker
I think from the conversations, because it was so mindful what they did and what they are continuing to do, that people were brought in on how it was happening. There were working groups of how are we going to make decisions or how are we going to do this. Just imagining being part of that environment and feeling that you've got a stake
00:24:43
Speaker
in how it works and how we will work and knowing that it's not just hierarchical and i suppose i don't think i'm not saying that that is the answer for every organization and i'm sure that you can create the right type of leadership. In a more hierarchical scenario but what you're saying there about taking away that sort of,
00:25:06
Speaker
dynamic of power so that the leader has got some extra thing control. It'd be interesting to see how that works throughout. I've led various things over the years and I doubt I've ever been the cleverest person. And I don't say this isn't like false modesty, it's just statistically.
00:25:33
Speaker
likely to be a reality. I doubt I've ever been the cleverest person in any team that I've led.
Creativity through Allowance
00:25:42
Speaker
So the idea that every decision has to be made by me, because I think that's the same in any organization. And the bigger what you lead is, the less likely it is the people in charge are going to be the cleverest. But even if they are, it's a total nonsense to clutter up
00:26:00
Speaker
those senior brains with every decision and effectively you're switching off all of the all of the brain power throughout the organization because decisions can only be made by the most senior people and therefore actually only the most senior people ever do any thinking and they're caught up in everything. We've circled back to busy. Yeah well yeah and it does and that's
00:26:28
Speaker
You know, the second part of my TED talk was around the idea of allow, the concept of allowing as a leader rather than controlling. Controlling is rather a negative energy and it seems to, even when I said the words when I was writing the talk, I thought, gosh, control, you can feel it's closing stuff in that word. There's something about the structure of the word, whereas allow is expansive.
00:26:55
Speaker
and I think where you create a culture where you allow people, in fact more than allow, you expect people but you give them the freedom and the space and the support to think and to create and to grow, which it sounds like, what do maiden do? What's their
00:27:18
Speaker
The IT company for healthcare, NHS, so that's as far as I can say, when it's anything to do with IT and software. But because of that background, they were used to working in sprints in our jobs. So they had that kind of place to start. But I think the thing they did was go, well, actually, if it worked so well with those teams, how about it? How would it work across the whole organization? So
00:27:47
Speaker
But yeah, that idea of switching everybody's brains on. Another badge-wearing phrase, which I can just see a couple of leaders, I've worked with in the past, where they say they're control freaks, but they don't say it negatively. No. But while they're controlling, they're slowing things down in all of these
00:28:15
Speaker
And I'm not saying you shouldn't have any control. You have to have some sort of a system of probably boundaries that people know that they can't cross without discussion and check-ins just so you know when you've achieved certain things or that you're on track to deliver. But generally speaking, bosses who control slow things down, make other people nervous, create a culture that's focused
00:28:45
Speaker
as much on pleasing the boss as meeting the objectives and it's actually, it distracts the pure flow of energy towards the objective and it usually comes from that leader's own needs. It's meeting their need for control rather than the objective's need for control. The culture rarely needs it. Very few of us have
00:29:09
Speaker
Well, I think if I asked anyone, do you want to work for a controlling boss? They'd say no. So why do any of us think that being a controlling boss is a good thing? Because none of us want that boss. I suppose insecurity kicks in, doesn't it? That sense of not feeling secure.
Shifting Leadership Responsibilities
00:29:31
Speaker
Now, what are they're unsecure about? Their team's capability? Yeah.
00:29:38
Speaker
I mean, you hear so many times that it's better if I do it myself. When people say I'm delegating more and I've let go of the fact that it will be better if I do it myself, I'm like, or it might be better. How scary would that be? But there's something wrong if them doing it is the answer.
00:30:07
Speaker
their system isn't working. And actually, they've got to step back as soon as they can. Sure, they might be in something they can't step out of it, you know, it could be an absolute emergency. And in this instance, you have to step in and do it and make the decision and control the activity. But as soon as you can, you have to step out and go, gosh, why did I have to step in? How am I not going to step in next time? And I think as you say,
00:30:37
Speaker
It's often because you don't trust the people. And you don't trust the people either because they don't know what they're achieving, or because the culture's wrong, or because they're the wrong people, or because they're not trained. But there'll be something in there. There will be a reason why that system doesn't work. And the effective leader creates a system which works
00:31:01
Speaker
without the lead of being a cog in any process. And that's like a really purist level of thinking. But I, you know, I run a leadership company now as you're probably aware, we run quite a lot of courses. But I, I'm not in the process of those courses. I'm really not. We all flow and
00:31:24
Speaker
There's a lot of allow actually, I trust the people that deliver the courses for me and the people that do the coaching and it works and it's not stressful. Have you had times where you've done allow and it's not worked and you've felt like getting stuck back in again? I don't think so. I'm racking my brain, certainly not lately, no.
00:31:52
Speaker
No, I've taken things over so I ran a large voluntary organisation for a few years and when I took it over it needed more involvement but even then I saw my involvement as being getting the objective right and then getting the people right
00:32:18
Speaker
and then being able to step out as soon as I can, as soon as I could. But it took a couple of years before I could actively not be conscious of what was going on. I did then have a feeling that things could go wrong unless I was given more information than I, weirdly, so more information than I felt comfortable with. But I find it clutters my brain. If I'm given too much
00:32:49
Speaker
routine information, it stops me being able to think, what next? What could we try and where could we be going? The better ideas, the creative ideas, the innovation that keeps something moving forward becomes very, very difficult when you're in every tiny loop. I mean, even though we've strayed around the houses a little bit,
00:33:17
Speaker
I just see this busy executive and that it's not possible to do all of those things that you've talked about if you are, like you say, in every single piece. I think possibly less senior
00:33:34
Speaker
managers, leaders. What I notice, and this is a cultural thing as well, is this classic thing of they're really, really good technically.
Understanding Leadership vs Management
00:33:43
Speaker
So they are then put in the leadership role, given no training or given training eventually. And then they're doing both jobs. So they're like a cog and then they're also
00:34:00
Speaker
adding on that extra job, which is a bit kind of difficult to... How many hours does that take? How much of their time is it? Because they are literally doing both things and I see them
00:34:16
Speaker
drowning and really drowning. Some of them drown because that leadership role probably isn't something they really want actually. But maybe if it was done differently in a different culture, it would be something they could grow to do. But other people are quite technical and they really did love their technical type role and they don't really want the leadership, but there's no other career progression. So it's either lead or tread water.
00:34:46
Speaker
You must see this all the time as well, this double thing. You've got two jobs now that you've got to do in the same amount of time. Of course, you haven't really got two jobs to do. You've just carried your last job with you into your present one. Yeah. You can lead an organization without knowing in detail what the people you lead are doing. There is a way of leading. If you get your team right, you've got your trust, you've got your objective, but the relationships are everything.
00:35:16
Speaker
then you don't need to know everything the finance director is doing. Now, if you've got the wrong finance director, or you have a reason not to trust your finance director, then you need to know everything your finance director is doing clearly. But a lot of that's down to selecting the right people and then making sure that you've got people that you can trust. The leader who gets into that technical
00:35:46
Speaker
that, you know, the next promotion up in their technical sphere, again, has almost never, and I can say that with certainty, because of all the organisations I've worked with, prior to what I've done, these people will have had no meaningful leadership training. So, so they go up a level, but they don't understand the difference in how they can work, and that their job now is to
00:36:14
Speaker
gather and enable others rather than to just be the best and busiest practitioner. So they're very often just working harder. They're getting involved in everything. They don't really know what to do. So they just think that they have to do more. They have to justify. I talk about senior leader guilt quite often, the fact that I've been promoted. I'm kind of now above all my mates, all the people I've worked with for years. I need to justify it. So I better justify it by
00:36:44
Speaker
doing more by showing them that I'm being paid more because I'm doing more. And actually you achieve up so much more when you can step back from that business and have an effect on the whole team and gathering the energy of that team. It's because people don't know, they just haven't been taught it, they haven't read it, they don't know where to go for the information.
00:37:09
Speaker
So they manage like the manager that was there before them and things never change.
Social Dynamics and Team Cohesion
00:37:17
Speaker
You know, you said about they've not actually handed or they've not left behind their old job, so they've just brought that with them and now they're trying to do both. Do you think, again, the cultural expectation is that they will do both? Do you see that or do you think that this is a personal thing where actually
00:37:39
Speaker
their comfort, because I think you're in the book, you've got some leadership profiles. One of them you've described there, isn't it? Is it the comfort? Yeah, I call it comfort working, which is the idea that it's the stuff they know. If the boss is looking at them, well, at least they're busy. Look, I did 10 hours per day, I'm busy. But it's not the 10 hours of useful work out. It's not work that would have taken the company
00:38:09
Speaker
forward. It's just routine and process type work. I don't think any business benefits from that style of work. One leader who is themselves doing 10 hours and working weekends, while their team aren't feeling any extra pressure and very often are living a very good life underneath this boss, it doesn't make any sense actually. No.
00:38:37
Speaker
the boss is off to this, that sort of boss is often doing irrelevant activity that doesn't contribute at the right level. That isn't to say that sometimes you don't get stuck in. Sometimes the best thing you can do is spend a day on the shop floor, just just with people working with people understanding, but you're doing it
00:38:56
Speaker
to take the temperature as a leader not because your actual work should be an essential part of the process because again if it is your team doesn't work. No that's an interesting idea so it's not just an extra pair of hands you're actually got your brain in there. Yeah yeah your brain there and you're also building connections this idea that huge part of leadership is having
00:39:23
Speaker
the strongest possible connections with the people you work with. So while you're there, you chat to them, you get to know them, you get to understand what drives them, what their family situation is. The more people know each other, the less friction you get in a group. That leads really nicely to another question I was super curious about. So I've worked in cultures where there are the dynamic between
00:39:51
Speaker
the directors, the board and other people in the organisation can be different. So we've got one where there's a little bit more of a socialising culture and all of them socialise. It's just part of the way they are. Probably a bit of a drinking culture whether or not that's fading out probably now.
00:40:13
Speaker
I always look at that and I do wonder to myself how easy that is, being that friendly, being that casual. And I would think if I was in that organization, I'd hold back. And I just wondered about that balance between being available and vulnerable and being normal Neil, and then actually feeling like
00:40:37
Speaker
you need to hold back something rather than get completely wasted. Completely wasted, Neil. Yeah, I'd be wary of being completely wasted, Neil. Not just because it hurts the next day. I'm probably too old for that. But I think you can have really good, honest, trusting relationships without it being based on
00:41:04
Speaker
excessive consumption and craziness. So there are plenty of ways of really getting to know people. You can go for tea or coffee with them, you can go for walks with them, you can go out somewhere nice for the day. There's things you could do as a group that aren't hedonistic, that will build a really good team. I'm not saying actually, if your group
00:41:31
Speaker
does like to go for a drink, that's absolutely fine if it suits everybody in the group to do so. It can be quite excluding if not everybody in the group wants to be going for big drinks. If you've got young children at home or a relationship that doesn't support you going off and doing those sorts of things or you don't drink, it can be quite excluding rather than inclusive. But I do think that
00:42:00
Speaker
the closer the relationships are in a team, the better, as long as they're not exclusive strong relation, you know, as long as they're on different strengths of relationships
Importance of Feedback and Disagreement
00:42:14
Speaker
within the team. Well, I was wondering about that. Yeah, you can then you start to get cliques and favouritism and clearly you don't want that you want a flow of openness and honesty and trust between people.
00:42:27
Speaker
And going back to something that I said earlier, I think your purpose and some leadership training again will give you the bravery that even if you get on really well, you can have a difficult conversation. And in fact, because you've worked on your culture, having a difficult conversation isn't difficult. And I think the best teams that I've been part of are ones where we can tell each other something's wrong.
00:42:57
Speaker
actively like, and I'm sure you'll understand this, people who tell me I'm wrong, because it stops me making a mistake. And I like the fact that our relationship is such that someone, you know, my, probably the best two I see, you know, second in command that I've worked with, would often tell me I was wrong, often, and he was always right. And we're really good friends. In fact, we work together now in my current job.
00:43:26
Speaker
I think that's fine. In that instance, we have a very good friendship, but when it's work-related, we can disagree, but disagree is for us.
00:43:38
Speaker
I mean, so I, as I said, worked with Steve, my husband for many years. We did have lively debates about who was wrong. And people used to say to me, God, I don't know how you work with your husband. And I think to myself, God, I don't know how I'd work with somebody that isn't because I can just be so
00:43:57
Speaker
so honest and just don't even have to cover up. You don't even have to sugarcoat it. I was sensitive. I wasn't ripping him down, but we both were totally direct about what was right, what was wrong, what we really stood for, and then we'd give way as soon as we realized we were wrong. It was just such a healthy dynamic, but it could look a bit fiery because sometimes we'd shout each other about. We'd get a bit heated because you really felt strongly, but because it was so much trust, it was fine.
00:44:27
Speaker
As long as you can be wrong, I think that's fine. I think it's an organization where you can't be wrong, where you can't question things. Again, you're not using the whole brain of the organization. The organization starts to thin down to this is what we believe. And if you disagree with what we believe or you question what we believe, you're
Conclusion & Resources
00:44:48
Speaker
wrong. And that kind of group thing is really limited, really damaging. Yeah, absolutely.
00:44:57
Speaker
So, well, I mean, we're coming to the end of our time and it's just been fascinating. I've loved it. It's been a really interesting chat, Corinne. Thank you. Yeah, it's been lovely. Anything that we haven't said that you'd like to share, anything else that you've got coming up that you'd like to tell people about or where can they get your lovely book? Well, the book is, I mean, Amazon, unfortunately, is the easiest place to
00:45:27
Speaker
to buy it. It's also in some branches of water stones, but you can get it online through any of the bookshops. Or the Sandhurst Shop, which is an online, the Sandhurst Trust Shop from the Royal Military Academy. So yeah, you can get the book there. I've also got an online video platform called Leader Connect, which has got quite a lot of free content and
00:45:55
Speaker
interviews that we've recorded with leaders. People might find that interesting. I've got a lot of articles out as well. I think if someone searches me, quite a few of those articles will come up. Perfect. I highly recommend the book.
00:46:13
Speaker
leadership book. Really practical. Lots in there. Like you say, common sense, but just makes sense. Certainly for people that haven't done any leadership training, it'll be really good for them too. Thank you very much for your time, Neil. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
00:46:36
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.