[00:00:00] Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Fulton, the host of the Rebel Diaries podcast. This show will help you learn how to make work better for you, your colleagues and the organization you work for. I believe the modern workplace is broken for too many people with leaders and their teams, drowning in corporate complexity, information overload, and unnecessary levels of stress. 

[00:00:18] Scott: Having spent over 20 years leading disruptive high-performing teams who have won international awards for their impact. I've now dedicated my career to helping coach and train leaders and teams to deliver more value and impact at work whilst reducing the risk of burnout, overload, and wasted effort. 

[00:00:34] Scott: This podcast is dedicated to you and thousands like you who know work can and should be better.

[00:00:39] Scott: You'll get tips and insights from me as well as the amazing guests I invite to be the show, many of them have disrupted their industries and are thought leaders, speakers, and authors who have fascinating stories and advice to share. 

[00:00:50] Scott: Thank you for listening. I'm Scott Fulton and welcome to the Rebel Diaries show. 

[00:00:55] Scott: Hi, and welcome to episode 37. This marks, the end of the season, it's the end of the year. So I thought I would do a bit of a wrap-up. Before we start a fresh with season two. 

[00:01:06] Scott: There won't be a gap, so don't worry. You'll still get your fix every week of insights and tips from me and my great guests. So for this episode, what I've done is I've put together. 10 clips from the 10 most popular episodes from season one, which was in 2022. And if you've been listening from the beginning, some of these will be great reminders. I'm sure. 

[00:01:29] Scott: And if you're a relatively new listener. It'd be a good chance for you to catch up on some key episodes that you may have missed. They are still available of course, for you to go back and listen to. 

[00:01:39] Scott: So without further ado, let's get cracking.

[00:01:42] Scott: The first clip is from the episode with Becky Tipper the Head of Command and Control for Avon and Somerset Police and we are talking about vulnerability in leadership.

[00:01:52] Scott: There's also something for me around vulnerability and being open when you are not having a good day yourself. If you show you're vulnerable and you're not having a good day, that can help them feel comfortable as well. 

[00:02:03] Becky Tipper: Oh, absolutely. That I wear my heart on my sleeve and whilst I have absolutely got that positive outlet and I'll leave my own problems at the door.

[00:02:12] Becky Tipper: I'm definitely someone that. Share how I'm feeling or my life experiences to help other people. I think it's really important. I think leaders go first, and if you can show a little bit of vulnerability as a leader and show that you are human and you understand that, then. You create again, that trust with your team to know that you get it and you don't always know exactly how they're feeling.

[00:02:36] Becky Tipper: You haven't always got the answers, but just knowing that someone can resonate with you and understand that you know what, you've been there as well, it plays a huge part of any team. Ethos and I think the pandemic was a really good example of that. I was asking my team to put on their uniforms and be operational every single day whilst the rest of the world were really being asked to stay at home safe indoors.

[00:02:59] Becky Tipper: And we all were going through that at the same time. So showing my own vulnerability and my own t at that also enabled the team to understand that we were all in it. And lockdown definitely as a team. Thought we were close before, but it brought everybody even closer because we were all going through something at the same time.

[00:03:19] Becky Tipper: And we also, we were having different experiences with it. So for some people they had people at home that were shielding. Some of our own team needed to shield. I myself, lost my mother-in-law in the first lockdown. Very suddenly we're unable to see her. Brief played a huge part of what other people were also going through, so I think being able to share that and also leaning on the team, I'm as much part of the team as the team mean to me.

[00:03:44] Becky Tipper: I've definitely drawn strength and feel the love from them just as much as hopefully I give it to them as well. I think when you generally care about your team, it's really. I keep talking about kindness, but for me, Scott, it's really important and kindness in leadership is key. If you can be somebody that cares about your team, it definitely shaped me as a person.

[00:04:01] Becky Tipper: I had some really kind people when I was growing up during a really tough time, and it helped me get through those times. So I feel incredibly lucky to work with an amazingly kind team. I've said it, but the work family, they really look out for each other. They lend that caring year after really tough incidents.

[00:04:17] Scott: The next clip is from the episode with Joshua Kerievsky. from Industrial Logic and we are discussing the definition of agile and how the dictionary has it wrong

[00:04:28] Scott: I'm relatively active in the agile community and sometimes I go onto LinkedIn and I see arguments still about what agile is it's like even the agile community can't agree what it is.

[00:04:40] Joshua Kerievsky: It's very sad to me that we don't have an agreed upon very simple understanding of the word agile.

[00:04:46] Joshua Kerievsky: It's particularly upsetting because the word has been around for centuries. It exists. It's in the dictionary. You can look it up. I do love and appreciate the Oxford English Dictionary. However, in this particular case, I do the Miriam Webster American Dictionary for the word agile a little bit better, because basically the O E D basically says that, to be agile means being able to move quickly and easily, right?

[00:05:12] Joshua Kerievsky: That's agile. If you can move quickly and easily, you're. There's actually a god forsaken other definition in the o e D that actually is about project management and it makes me ill, it makes me sick to my stomach to see it. I don't understand how they allowed that in there, cuz to me Agile is about some, about being.

[00:05:32] Joshua Kerievsky: It's an adjective, right? It's a, it is an adjective. People forget that. Also they talk about agile as if it were a noun, and it's an adjective. You have an agile doctor, an agile team, an agile athlete. The dictionary definitions to me absolutely clarify what it means. That still doesn't mean it's simple, but they do have the meaning.

[00:05:50] Joshua Kerievsky: So able to move with quick, easy grace, or having a quick resourceful or adaptable character That's what it means. Now, what do those words mean? What does it mean to be adaptable or resourceful? What does it mean to be quick? I now understand. Most people don't get it. They don't understand what it means to be quick.

[00:06:09] Joshua Kerievsky: It's such a simple word quick, but most people associate it with rushing or hurrying, 

[00:06:15] Scott: cutting corners 

[00:06:16] Joshua Kerievsky: and, yeah. Yeah. So they said they, they'll come out and they say "the purpose of agile is not to be quick". and I'll say yeah, it, it actually is, the word quick is in every definition of the word, agile."

[00:06:29] Joshua Kerievsky: It doesn't equal quick because it's not synonymous with quick. You have to be easy, graceful, adaptable, resourceful as well. However, it's a definite part of it. If you're not quick, then you would not say you're agile. So it's a part of it, but what it doesn't say is hurry or rush. Cause when you're hurrying and rushing you, you tend to make mistakes.

[00:06:51] Joshua Kerievsky: Now, we just said, Hey, safe to fail. Mistakes are fine. Those are safe to fail mistakes, right? If you're making mistakes that are costly, then you're rushing or hurrying. So there's a mantra that the famous coach John Wooden, he was a famous basketball coach in the US for a college basketball team. And he would say, "be quick, but don't hurry".

[00:07:13] Joshua Kerievsky: And to me this is a brilliant concept because a lot of the players he would get would be like high school stars who were doing things very quickly very much in a rushing kind of way and maybe succeeding. That wasn't the John Wooden game, John Wooden would say, Nope, we've gotta slow down and we have to be absolutely centered, balanced in order to be consistently championship teams.

[00:07:42] Scott: Now we move on to Joanna Parsons, who is the Head of Internal Communications and Culture at Teamwork. In this clip, we are discussing, setting up your own personal brand in an organization. 

[00:07:54] Joanna Parsons: This is a big part of the bit where you are setting up your own kind of personal brand and your own credibility in the organization. So when I joined the police, for example, I was the only person, the first person in the hundred year history of the police to be head of internal coms. They'd never had a me before.

[00:08:09] Joanna Parsons: They didn't quite know what I was there to do. So I had a lot of William, how come you finish this poster? Or will you tell me what size and should get this notebook printed? They'd call with a very specific tactical thing. I want this on the front page of the in. Pulling into a policing organization in particular, it's quite intimidating sometimes to have that conversation with someone who outranks you in an organization where you expected to jump when someone outranks you and do as you're told.

[00:08:37] Joanna Parsons: But your role to really deliver business value is to then have a conversation with that person to say, let's take a step back from the poster for a second. Let's park the notebook and let's talk. , what are you trying to achieve with this poster? So what are you trying to get people to do, or do you want people to think differently about something?

[00:08:57] Joanna Parsons: Do you want people to feel something? Maybe you want to instill a bit of point. Let's start there. And this was a very different approach, certainly in the police, and one that quickly became really popular because people knew they could come to me. It's not just to execute some stuff and get it off the list, but actually have some very thoughtful conversations.

[00:09:19] Joanna Parsons: And by the end of it, they're not gonna do that poster in the end. And the notebook goes in the bin because they've realized actually when I want to change behavior in somebody, a poster isn't gonna do that. And they conned that realization by themselves. And often the answer is something that I don't even need to do myself because they need to go off and talk to their team or hold a town hall or it's something for them to.

[00:09:42] Joanna Parsons: So I morally advisor role, but that bit, it's definitely a red flag. So we'll call, see you with the perfect solution and tactical identified, help them to take a step back. But you can do that in a helpful and collaborative way. Yeah. 

[00:09:55] Scott: And it's about keeping your mind open to say, oh, their mind's open. Say this might not be the right solution.

[00:10:01] Scott: Let's not think about the, as you said, just think about the problem we're trying to solve first, not jump straight to the solution. And even it gets worse, doesn't it? I've seen in organizations. , you create the solution for a problem that doesn't even exist, and then try and find a problem that meets the need of the solution you create.

[00:10:17] Scott: Saw 

[00:10:18] Joanna Parsons: that in a previous organization I saw that they were like, oh, this other company that's vaguely in our industry that's not the same size as us, but they do this thing and we should definitely do this thing and what you think about this. And I was like that's an interesting idea. But based on the knowledge that I have on our audience and how they respond to things and the channels, they like that's not a great fit here. And they took great umbridge at this. We had a conversation about it and they eventually went, oh yeah, fair enough. But they'd gotten so far down the track of imagining this thing. But again, it's always going back to that, what's it trying to achieve and what's that doing for the business and why is it important? 

[00:10:55] Joanna Parsons: Yeah,

[00:10:55] Scott: Next I'm talking to Zena Everett. She is a speaker and author on what she calls crazy busy and productivity. In this clip she's talking about technology and the impact on our ability to focus

[00:11:08] Zena Everett: We've become totally tech-centric as opposed to task centric. Look at me or people. I like that. Yeah. No, we have, we've, we are, our lives are dictated to, By our inbox. And by Teams interruptions. Of course, it's really hard to do something and the brain can't tell the difference. We've still got a dopamine hit of crossing any old thing off our list.

[00:11:26] Zena Everett: I've got write a proposal to that client that's gonna feed the family for a month first clean my kitchen with a damp cloth. The brain can't tell the difference. Whatever I cross off it. Things awful. Still achieve something. Still achieve something. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, and I think when you are tired and overwhelmed, Also, our brains are there to keep us safe.

[00:11:46] Zena Everett: So if you've got difficult person sending you stupid emails and then saying, oh, thanks, your email, Scott, and I go, oh, right back at you and then you send me a smiley face. All that stuff is just making it hard to think and hard to focus, and we get, we really get ground down and we're not meant to be sat in front of screens all day.

[00:12:04] Zena Everett: So I think it's, I just think, yeah, it's really hard. We've got to be, and my clients that are super successful will know what's, they'll know what's in their inbox roughly, but they're ruthless about, and we shouldn't even use the word ruthless, they're just structured discipline. But it's gotta be ruthless these days about putting in the boundaries and knowing what's really important.

[00:12:25] Zena Everett: So like a basic hackers are, most of our diaries are full. Of meetings, aren't they? In cools? , but we don't actually block out time to do our tasks. That just finish fits in all around the science, the important stuff. Yeah. And I also say to people in, in group, crazy busy masterclass, what's the one thing you really need to get done that would have a massive impact on the, your team, your business, your career?

[00:12:54] Zena Everett: You probably keep moving it from one list to another every quarter, every year you keep shifting it really neatly. There's a system I need to sort out, or there's a client I wanna go after, or whatever it is, book I need to write, whatever. And they say this and I say, realistically, how much time do you spend on it?

[00:13:10] Zena Everett: Think, look at your calendar for the last couple of weeks. And if it's a, the really big thing, Invariably they've spent less than 5% on it. It's really sad, and that's because there's no time left to figure it out because we're just hardwired Now, if we're not busy, then we're not working. Yeah. Have you ever worked billable arrows?

[00:13:30] Zena Everett: Have you ever worked in one of those cultures where you are, you've got a time sheet? I 

[00:13:35] Scott: had a secondment for about six months to a commercial company. It was a joint venture that was working with the public sector company I've worked for. So this big company said, we wanna track every 15 minutes of your time on a spreadsheet.

[00:13:47] Scott: And we were like, what the hell? This is just alien to us. And it didn't last long. Yeah. Luckily we managed to escape 

[00:13:54] Zena Everett: people who I find have been, have come from a billable hours culture, so maybe lawyers, accountants, whatever it is, but they really struggle with thinking . You can't block out thinking time, figuring out time, sitting quietly, working all this out because going for a walk and figuring out for 10 minutes will save me so much time in the long run.

[00:14:13] Zena Everett: And actually then I track my productivity in the afternoon and that's great. Taking a break. That is an anathema to them because they're trained simply not to do that. Time is money. It's all this kind of crazy busy stuff. That time is money, but actually the endless doing is the problem.

[00:14:29] Scott: Next is Allan Kelly, who is a conference keynote speaker and author specializing in the agile space. In this clip he's talking about his alternate model for organizational hierarchy.

[00:14:42] Scott: I think that links into one of the other points we're gonna talk about, which was the authority and who has the actual authority to do the work. And the hierarchy of organizations are still not really compatible. 

[00:14:53] Allan Kelly: So hierarchy's a good thing. Hierarchy tells us where we are and we all need a bit of hierarchy cuz otherwise your adrift in a wide ocean and it helps us understand what we should be doing.

[00:15:06] Allan Kelly: The problem with hierarchy is that it goes from top to bottom. As much as people say we have a flat hierarchy here, and that's an oxymoron if you say to somebody describe the company to me, or, draw me a diagram of the company, they inevitably draw a tree, an upside down tree. And at the top there's a managing director, a C E O, somebody like that.

[00:15:27] Allan Kelly: And then everyone else is like the branches of a tree inverted below there. And we keep seeing it that way. And while that is our view of the company, we are inevitably wedded to this, to elements of command and control. And we're we never wedded to expressions like above and below, we're implying that in art language, The model I've been using for a while, and listeners can try this at home, truly quite simple.

[00:15:56] Allan Kelly: Instead of imagining your organization as an inverted tree, imagine your organization as the solar system At the center is the sun. Every nthe solar system has a relationship with the son. It's bright, it's hot, it's massive gravity in your organiz. That's gonna be your senior leaders, your CEOs, your managing directors, perhaps the C F O, the CTO whoever.

[00:16:22] Allan Kelly: Yeah. Everybody in the organization has a relationship with the person at the center, the ceo, e o. Most people in the organization can name that person. However, on a day-to-day basis, most of what you do has nothing to do with that person. You work within a team, you work within a department, so your teams and departments they're like the planets going around this sun.

[00:16:49] Allan Kelly: If your CEO is the center of your solar system is your sun, your team is a planet going around that and possibly your team works quite closely with the c e o. Perhaps you're physically close to them in the next office, or perhaps you're just in the same building. Perhaps you're doing something which the CEO is interested in, and your team is a Venus or Mercury.

[00:17:11] Allan Kelly: You, you're close in you're heavily affected, the heat really gets to you, et cetera, et cetera. Alternatively, your team might be like Neptune. It's stuck way out. And although the CEO exerts some influence on you, there's a whole load of other stuff going on around you. You follow your path that there's not much heat off the c e o.

[00:17:30] Allan Kelly: You get on, you do your own thing, but the sun's not the only force that there's the things that are happening around you, your own moons. And this is like any team, you're, yes, you're trying to do what the CEO and the senior leadership team say. You are also trying to do what's right for your customers and you're trying to do what your team thinks is right, and that might be cuz your team has got an idea of what the customers will need in future.

[00:17:55] Allan Kelly: Or it may be because your technology is taking you in one direction, your technology saying, rebuild me, move me to iPhone or something. And you've also got the force of competitors. If you are in an environment where you have competitors, that is, no, not everyone is. What your competitors are doing is gonna influence what you are doing..

[00:18:15] Allan Kelly: And really as much as the senior leadership team may say they want you to go in this direction or do that, there's so much else going on that they can't really know what is important for your team. And your team needs to understand those forces, gather information and make their own decisions.

[00:18:35] Scott: Now we've got Gerry McGovern who has been described as one of the five visionaries who had a major impact on the development of the web. In this clip he is talking about intranet and management contempt for employees.

[00:18:47] Gerry McGovern: Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I talked to people recently about, really large internet and the very idea of trying to structure it, they found almost incredible. Like what? I You couldn't do that. It's extraordinary. It's inherently crap. You're just not gonna fix it. And that's the way people think because that's the management contempt for employees.

[00:19:11] Gerry McGovern: Because they don't feel their employees time is what I, they're measured in other ways, but them having a terrible experience, booking a meeting or doing whatever is a no real concern to a lot of managers. 

[00:19:23] Scott: It's just that hidden damage is so frustrating and yeah, it becomes like Stockholm Syndrome, doesn't it?

[00:19:29] Scott: I heard many times when I wrote out the previous internet, oh, I just phoned someone to find out where this page is on the internet and they email me the link. And a senior manager was having that three or four times a day, but it just accepted that was how it was. It's just bonkers. It just, it's quite dysfunctional.

[00:19:45] Gerry McGovern: It's you've created, A new world, but you're living in the old world. Yeah. You So you've built a new house, but you live in the caravan cuz the new house, you can't even find the door of it when you go to it. So you end up living in the caravan cuz at least you know your way around the caravan and you just say all that new house didn't quite, nobody can find the door to get into that house.

[00:20:10] Gerry McGovern: We would never do. One 50th of the things we do in digital, in the physical world, but cause as you say, it seems hidden, we make these crazy decisions and we just accept the terribleness of the decisions that we've made.

[00:20:27] Scott: Mike Jones is the founder of Better Happy and employee engagement and wellbeing consultancy. He had military experience before. Which was fascinating to talk through in this clip he is talking about Covid and engaged workforces.

[00:20:44] Scott: Do you think that's been growing over time or has that been accelerated by Covid? People having a taste of flexibility in the hybrid or working from home thing. Actually, I don't have to travel for two hours every single day. I can choose a company that'll let me not do that. Do you think that's accelerated that 

[00:20:59] Mike Jones: I think Covid has definitely empowered the employee more.

[00:21:03] Mike Jones: The hybrid remote star work on that scale has really opened the world's eyes to the fact that we don't need to keep people as slaves in the office if that. Necessity. So I think that's definitely changed things undoubtedly in regards to do I think Covid s led to the kind of social political change that we've got in regards to how we're looking at work and how it's more about empowering and engaging and meaningful work.

[00:21:27] Mike Jones: I think that's a natural thing that's happening. I think Covid aside, that was always going to happen, I think for a variety of reasons, the internet that were more socially aware. Before Covid, we knew that a lot of millennials care more about the. More about doing the right thing, and I think that's just a natural evolution of being in a capitalist society that's developed where less and less people live in poverty.

[00:21:48] Mike Jones: More and more people live in affluence. I think just Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we have to address our safety and our physiological needs first, don't we? You and I are talking about these now, but if we remove the roofs from our head and so we couldn't feed ourselves, we'd be off this podcast pretty quickly trying to sort that stuff out.

[00:22:03] Mike Jones: I think society as a whole, 60 years ago, people were still just happy with being able to pay the bills and being able to eat three meals a day and try and work towards a decent style of living. I think, recently, last 20, 30, 40 years, that's almost become guaranteed in the uk cuz we've developed our society to such a high standard for most people, not all.

[00:22:23] Mike Jones: So I think that's the natural thing. Okay. My safety's taken care of. I don't have to think about where the next meal's coming from. There's plenty of jobs. I've got a roof over my head. Most people have. Some financial stability with their families. So what do we naturally then start to focus on meaningful causes, developing ourselves, making the world a better place.

[00:22:39] Mike Jones: So I think that's a natural thing that happens as society improves and we remove when we step away from poverty. 

[00:22:45] Scott: So do you think those jobs were, it'd be interesting to see the stats around the kind of employees and jobs that aren't rewarding, are they the one's biggest hit by people leaving saying, I'm not enjoying this, I'm not delivering value.

[00:22:56] Scott: I'm gonna find something more meaningful. 

[00:22:58] Mike Jones: It makes a lot of sense that the businesses with engaged employees are the ones that are leading the way because most businesses need to be innovative. Now, cuz technology means that things change fast. And if you wanna be innovative, you need people that are willing to think about challenges and approach problems with a positive attitude and a collaborative attitude.

[00:23:16] Mike Jones: If you don't have any engaged workforce, you have people turning up to get paid and do what's part of them and nothing more. Your business can't adapt. You're gonna have loads of issues. You can't be innovative. Your customers are probably not gonna be getting the best level of service. Everything you try and do, every time you try and change, you're gonna be met with every one person that resists.

[00:23:34] Mike Jones: That is a collection of roadblocks, isn't it? And that's just gonna slow down the business, being able to grow. So I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the data would show that if you look through it. But companies that have got high levels of engagement, we know from Gallup data, companies in the top quartile of engagement versus the bottom quart.

[00:23:51] Mike Jones: So you take all the companies and you know who's in the top quarter of engagement versus who's in the bottom. 22% higher profits, 65% less employee turnover, 45% less safety instance, 16% increased productivity, 20% lower opposite. These are big numbers. If you have a team of 10, those are big numbers.

[00:24:08] Mike Jones: If you have a team of thousand, you've got 10,000 plus this is millions and millions of pounds in, in lost opportunities and also missed opportunities and sickness and all that stuff cost.

[00:24:18] Scott: Mike Burrows is the founder of a company called Agendashift. In this clip we are talking about agile frameworks and how Mike sees it's more important to focus on outcomes

[00:24:31] Mike Burrows: I think there is a big issue, and I think there is, if there is a fight worth fighting in the, like the framework space, the fight isn't over the detail of the frameworks. The fight is over. Whether you think it's okay to impose these things. or whether it's not, and I'm among those that think it's not.

[00:24:47] Mike Burrows: Yeah. I just find that idea objectionable, that may put me in the minority, but I also suspect that we'll get to a point where we'll get to two like peak framework when people realize that it is only so much that process frameworks can do, process frameworks solve a particular set of problems, and a lot of organizational challenges aren't actually solved by them.

[00:25:08] Mike Burrows: No, and I think it's much more interesting to look at what are the. Root causes for a lot of the real things that organizations struggle with. And for those that aren't solved by the process frameworks, some of those actually you should fix first. And then if there comes a point where the process frameworks are useful, use them to solve the problems that you have and don't create a whole new route to problems by going down the rollout route.

[00:25:31] Mike Burrows: Yeah, so I'm not gonna try and change the frameworks themselves, but I'm gonna try and change our relat. The frameworks. That's the best way of putting it. Cause I think you're shooting potshots at the frameworks doesn't actually get you very far. I see people trying to do it and they always have an answer.

[00:25:45] Mike Burrows: It's, they have, the frameworks do have their cake and eat it. Some of them say you're not allowed to change the framework. Some of them say, don't worry what goes on. The poster isn't touch what people get taught or what gets implemented. do you even argue with that? And I think it's better not to try and I think it's the it's, I have decided what it is.

[00:26:01] Mike Burrows: I object to. And I'm being not only being clear about what I object to, but actually offering a constructive and pragmatic alternative, leading with outcomes, strategy, conversations, helping the innovation come from the inside. I think that's a constructive response to that problem. 

[00:26:18] Scott: Richard Cartlidge was a navigator in the Royal Air Force, flying Chinook helicopters. He now helps senior leadership through his training and coaching programs. In this clip he talks about leaders and the importance of making capacity.

[00:26:33] Richard Cartlidge: As I said earlier, make capacity is for me the fundamental first thing that leaders need to get right. They need to be able to make space, make time to, to think and to do things, and then they can focus on what they wanna do with that capacity. I know that sounds a bit of a tongue twister, but actually I usually talk to you about this, about talking about how busy people are.

[00:26:51] Richard Cartlidge: So if you say to, if you go to a colleague and say, are you busy? They'll say, yeah, I'm busy. How busy are, I'm busy too. There's a bit of a busy off, there's a bit of a busy tourettes that takes place in corporate. And I put out there that you probably work five days a week delivering five days worth of stuff.

[00:27:06] Richard Cartlidge: It might take you five and a half days to do it, but you get to the end of the week, you say, I'm busy, and you'll maintain a status quo. Leaders I think do exactly the same amount of stuff, but they'll do it in three days and you'll go, hang on a minute, your brains spread a bit of a hiccup there and said, that's not right, rich.

[00:27:22] Richard Cartlidge: You can't do that. My trunk card for saying that is that when people get promoted, they're not given an extra day in the. So leaders work out how to do that five days worth of stuff and do it in three days so they can create two days to do the other thing that leaders do. Reading, researching, networking, meeting people, looking after the morale of their people, going to the shop floor and seeing how the business is really doing.

[00:27:42] Richard Cartlidge: Focusing on those things. And where I learned about that, that where that really struck home. So I was on course, I was training to be a qualified helicopter tactic instructor, so I was a mission command. On this salty where there's about 30 or 40 aircraft flying and you had to coordinate them all and pull it all together.

[00:28:01] Richard Cartlidge: It's a massive day and you can imagine there's a lot of pressure there. You're surrounded by a lot of peers and senior officers and they're all looking at you to see how you perform. So I started out that morning, I got the Met Brief, I got my head around what the task was. I spent about half an hour just working out how I was gonna do things.

[00:28:17] Richard Cartlidge: And then you go through this very formulate briefing cycle of how you're going to run the. You brief all the elements and then they crack on and they enter a sort of six hour planning phase. And then after the six hour planning phase, you get airborne and you fly the mission, which is normally three or four hours.

[00:28:32] Richard Cartlidge: And then when you come back, this is a three hour debrief. So these are really quite long days and quite tiring. 

[00:28:37] Richard Cartlidge: So at the start of this day, I did the brief set out what we were going to do with all the different elements. Everyone off a start started planning. 

[00:28:43] Richard Cartlidge: I thought, that was easy, wasn't it?

[00:28:44] Richard Cartlidge: That's what you've gotta do. And then in a nanosecond, I was just flooded with thoughts of what could go. All the contingency things coming in. And what was fantastic to learn in that was if I hadn't made capacity by being effective with the briefing and effective with the organization of the assets, I would've been getting stuck into what they're doing and getting my hands dirty with the things that were familiar to me.

[00:29:06] Richard Cartlidge: Instead of stepping back and saying, okay, what could happen here? What could happen if we only got three jets instead of four jets covering us? What could happen if the weather moves in a bit quicker than we thought it would on the forecast? All these are variable. Another way of talking about making capacity might be how do leaders properly step back metaphorically and physically from their context and say, what's really going on here and what needs my attention right now?

[00:29:30] Richard Cartlidge: Now the op, the opposite of that would be for me as a navigator on Chinooks to go in across to the Chinook tent, join in their planning cycle, and just get stuck into stuff that's really familiar. If I did that, I won't be available or be listening to all the. Elements that might be having problems or just needed to check in with me to see how things were going.

[00:29:48] Richard Cartlidge: And sure enough, over the next six hours, people kept coming to me saying, rich, we've only got three jets instead of four. What do you wanna do? I'd already thought about it. I'd just, okay, what's the go? No-go. We can actually go with two. So three is great, we'll still go. So I was in a position where I commit those decisions quickly, and all the people who were trained to do things really well were allowed to do the things they could do without me interfering.

[00:30:08] Scott: Andrew Lloyd Gordon is a business psychologist, speaker and digital marketing expert. In this final clip he is talking about fixed versus growth mindsets. 

[00:30:19] Scott: So people in this kind of situation where their, maybe, I don't wanna say not have the right mindset, but what kind of advice would you give to people who this is resonating with?

[00:30:30] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: I think if, if you are listening to this sort of podcast, you probably have the mindset of what's called growth mindset. So the growth mindset, if you're familiar with the idea is that there's two basic sort of mindsets with regards to personal development. Caroline Dweck, the psychologist, she came up with this approach.

[00:30:47] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: There's people who have what's called a fixed mindset, and they believe that they're finished, that they can't improve. This is who I am. Take me or leave me. I can't change. The growth mindset is a person who says I'm here where I am today, but I can improve, I can get better, whatever it is.

[00:31:05] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: It could be public speaking, it could. Writing copy for your website. It could be being a manager and you are always looking for improvement. And a growth mindset is you don't want to fail, but if you fail, you make mistakes. You see those as learning lessons, whereas a fixed mindset, they avoid failure because failure challenges their sense of identity.

[00:31:28] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: So I think what I'd suggest is to understand where your mindsets are is how do you feel about failure? For example, do you see errors as learning? Or the worst thing ever. Are you threatened by taking on new challenges? Do you believe you can improve? Now, if you start to identify those barriers, then it's worth saying, okay, do I have a fixed mindset or growth mindset?

[00:31:53] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: And then if you're gonna wanna improve, that sort of fixed mindset is what can I do about, taking on new challenges and trying to find ways to move forward and develop. But say again, it comes back to that awareness. Where do you think you are? Just to clarify, you may have a fixed mindset in certain areas of your life and a growth mindset in others.

[00:32:13] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: So I'll give you a personal example. I don't see myself as much of a cook. look in the fridge and what can I just eat very quickly and just throw together? Whereas my partner will look in the fridge and go, oh, I could make this meal. I could make that meal. So I have a fixed mindset maybe when it comes to the kitchen.

[00:32:30] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: But in terms of learning things and development and understanding psychology and the areas I like, I am always looking to improve. Where she's probably more, she doesn't think she's capable of doing some of that learning, so she's very anxious about her ability to learn new material. So she's got a growth mindset in some areas and a fixed, so I don't wanna suggest that some people are affix in every area of their.

[00:32:52] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: I think that if you can understand how do I feel about taking on new challenges? How do I feel about mistakes? That gives you a clue. Now, it, the next step is then what am I gonna do about it? If I do think I've got a fixed mindset and I don't want to move forward. That's your personal choice.

[00:33:09] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: So I suggest that people probably listen to this podcast and podcasts like it, it's almost like a self-selecting audience. They're probably listening to podcasts because they want to improve that they want to move. , and that's great for those people. It's the people that you probably work with, the colleagues who perhaps do tell you that I can't change.

[00:33:28] Andrew Lloyd Gordon: This is me. So often, it's not you. That's the issue sometimes in, in organizations, it's those people with a fixed mindset of who are your colleagues, and that's a, that's a minefield. Trying to manage those people.

[00:33:39] Scott: So there you have it. I hope you enjoy listen to those clips. I certainly did. And remember. Fondly the conversations I've had with all the guests and there was too many to choose. So I let the audience choose. So the clips that were chosen were based purely on the listening numbers. 

[00:33:57] Scott: Be sure to checkout the full episodes for those ones that took your fancy, the links are in the show notes. 

[00:34:04] Scott: Season two kicks off next week. Speak to you on the next one. 

[00:34:08] Scott: A big, thank you for listening to the Rebel Diaries show your time is precious, so it is appreciated. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to hit that subscribe button in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss the next one. There's a new episode every Monday morning, ideal for your commute to work or early morning walk. 

[00:34:25] Scott: Until next time, take care be a rebel and deliver work with impact.