138 | What Our Research Reveals About Workplace Culture | Sadhbh O'Flaherty & Scott McInnes

Hello there and welcome to the episode of Building Better Cultures podcast. Now, normally you'd be hearing that in Scott McInnes' unmistakable voice, but today you've got me instead, Síle O'Flaherty, and I've taken over the mic. So as Scott would usually say, if you enjoy what you hear, a review, preferably 5 stars, would be hugely appreciated to spread the word. So no further ado, today's guest is someone who doesn't normally sit in the hot seat, but spends most of his time asking the questions. Yes, it is Scott McInnes himself. And the reason I got him here is to talk about some research that he has done earlier on in this year through Inspiring Change. So the research is called Mind the Gap. It's insights from CPOs on what's holding organizational performance back. So in this, Scott talked to CPOs across Ireland and really wanted to get to the heart of the culture challenges that organizations are facing today. So over the coming weeks, Scott will be talking to more guests to explore the themes that we'll talk about today. And— but I get the privilege of turning the table on Scott. So we're going to talk about this research, going to talk about some of the findings, but we don't want to give it all away in the first episode. So I just really want to get to understand the why behind why we did this. So, Scott, welcome to your own podcast.

Welcome to—

How do you feel to be in the hot seat?

Welcome to our own podcast. Thank you very much. It's always, you know, whenever I do podcasts for other people, it's always weird because I'm like, I'm the one that's used to sitting in that chair and asking questions and not having to answer hard questions. But at least it's a topic that I know about because it was me that did the research. So I'd better not screw it up, I guess.

No pressure. So, Scott, let's start right at the beginning. So this report, it didn't just come out of nowhere. So what made you decide to do this piece of research and why now?

You know what, it's a great question to start with because there are a few reasons, and probably one of the first ones is actually what ended up being one of the findings that we'll talk about later, which was connection. Just actually trying to build a bit more connection among HR leaders, particularly in Ireland, where where we spoke to the majority of people and just build stronger relationships with them. I think we're in a place now where it's so hard to get to meet people, to talk to people, to have conversations. And that was a really big driver. The second big driver was to find out what's going on. We can now go to ChatGPT, we can go to Claude, we can go to Gemini, we can go to Google, whatever is your poison, and we can ask it to tell us what What are the big 3 culture challenges in Ireland? And it'll probably tell you. I said this very unkindly on a podcast the other day, from the horse's mouth. So I do apologize to any horses that I spoke to, not being disrespectful. I wanted to hear from the frontline what was going on. I wanted to understand what the challenges were to building amazing cultures in organizations in Ireland today. And I wanted to understand that. It was a one-question survey. It took about 10 or 15 minutes for each call. And the question was, what are the 3 challenges that are getting in the way of you building the culture that you need to have in your organization? And I said, I don't really care about all the Googly stuff. I want to know what's happening in your organization specifically. Now, what I said was that my commitment to them for their honesty and openness was I commit to taking your feedback. I will anonymize that and I'll theme it up. So, in the report, you won't see so-and-so CPO in XYZ company saying, "Our leadership team are the biggest challenge to our culture," because that probably isn't good for anybody's career. So, we took all that feedback, took all that insight, and then rolled it up into these 5 themes, which I guess we'll get onto and talk about in a minute.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I was going to say, like, yeah, you've broken it down into all these interviews that you've taken, and you've broken them down into kind of 5 big themes. And yeah, it'd be great go through each one of those and maybe just give a little bit of understanding of why these pieces are timely and why they're valuable. You know, it's valuable to understand these right now. So I guess we can start with the first one, which is leadership skill and will. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Yeah, and I'm only gonna tell you a little bit because what I don't want to do is I don't want to steal the thunder because, of course, as you mentioned at the top, this is the first of this series. We're gonna be talking to leaders about each of these challenges separately and getting their insights. So I'm gonna just give you today a little bit maybe of a teaser as to what we found. And of course, if you've downloaded the report already, which you will find at inspiringchange.ie/mindthegap, then you'll have read all this already. But we're going to deep dive it in those 5 other episodes. Leadership skill and will. We talk about tone from the top all the time. But we also talk about the fact that leaders don't own culture. Everybody owns culture. So, how do you kind of— they seem, that seems like a bit of a dichotomy because we're saying on one hand they've got to lead it and on the second, on the other hand, everyone kind of owns it. So that's kind of tricky. For me, leaders in organizations are the ones who set the tone. They set the cultural tone at the top of the organization. The CEO sets the cultural tone with the leadership team, and they then set the tone for their divisions. However, one of the things that came up was this idea that those leaders, leaders at that level, often lack the skills and perhaps the mindsets to do that job really, really effectively. Perhaps it's a time thing, perhaps it's a prioritization thing, perhaps they don't think it's their job, perhaps they think it's HR's job, which, by the way, if culture is left to HR, it immediately lacks authority. When a CEO prioritizes something like culture, it immediately gets people's attention. They suddenly say, "Oh, that's obviously an important thing because that's on Billy's or Sarah's agenda. They keep talking about it. Therefore, it's something that I should talk about as well." And the people that we spoke to said that, overarching, that lack of understanding of people, of the people aspects of the business, is a barrier to a high-performing culture. And that was one thing that they pulled out.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would completely agree with that in terms of the leaders being the ones who are driving from the top. You know, as I know you say yourself, they, they cast long shadows. So really, you know, that is very much about them. So having the skill and the will for me is extremely important. So the next one then, the manager factor. I could go into that one a little bit more.

So it's interesting because what we did was we looked at this and leadership which, if you think about that as kind of the more senior leaders in the organization, was one perspective that we just spoke about. The second was this challenge that we called the manager factor. And if we kind of go down the path of the fact that leaders set the tone for culture, then the managers, the people leaders, the supervisors, anybody that manages a team, they're the ones that carry that through organizations. And I think what I've called them in the report is chief sensemakers. So, how do those people make sense of the values, the behaviors, the purpose, the type of culture we want to have in our organization? How do they help that make sense for their teams? So, these people, these managers, great managers, they're multipliers. They are contextualizers. They are translators. They're the ones that are saying to their teams, Or actually not saying to their teams, asking of their teams, what do these values mean to us? What do these behaviors mean to us? What will we put in our charter that we'll hold each other and ourselves to account for? What will we do as a team when somebody doesn't, you know, somebody isn't being held accountable for value, somebody is behaving poorly? We'll talk about accountability later. But when someone's behaving badly, behaving poorly, not living the behaviors, not living the values, what will we do as a team? And to be able to have that conversation with groups of 8 or 10 or 12, however many people are on your team across an organization. You think about some big organizations might have 2 or 3,000 teams. Those conversations happening locally 2 or 3,000 times is really, really powerful. Now, in that same space, the say-do gap is a challenge that if the organization is saying one thing and if managers are saying one thing, but then it's not being done, then that say-do say-do gap starts to undermine credibility and starts to undermine integrity. So, making sure that we bridge that say-do gap is really, really important. We found and we heard from CPOs that a really big challenge when it comes to building strong culture, and particularly around the behavioral aspects of leadership, is a lot of managerial avoidance. People not necessarily being willing to have what we've termed, what we often term the tough conversation, the difficult conversation. And I wonder, and maybe we'll probably get into this in the episode on on Challenge 2, that maybe even branding it as a tough conversation, a difficult conversation, actually already sets the scene for the manager as being, "Oh, this is going to be an absolute nightmare. You know, they're going to go mad. They're going to cry. They're going to shout and scream at me." Whereas actually, if we perhaps called it a development conversation, a support conversation, a conversation that's about you being a better version of you, and perhaps just holding up a mirror to help you see and understand a behavior that you might not even realize you've got, I'm very long in the tooth at doing this stuff. And the one thing that I found over every session, every team I've worked with, every session I've run, every one-to-one I've had, self-awareness is in incredibly short supply. So, people just might not even realize that they're doing this stuff. So, the manager factor, the role of managers is absolutely key.

Yeah. I mean, from my experience as well, managers, they make or break teams as well, and they can create little micro cultures, and, you know, they can protect from maybe not so pleasant cultures in an organization. So the manager has a huge part to play. And, and yeah, trying to, to get people, I suppose, to have that skill and will, which we're saying with leadership. And I know there's intertwining with all of these things, but yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. So on to number 3 of our 5. So skills for today and tomorrow.

And I think that whole idea of strong leadership learning and development being key to culture is so true. And that's not just about people going on courses. And in fact, I think that's a big challenge that often when you sit down for one-to-ones, well, what have you learned this year? Well, I haven't been on any courses. Well, that wasn't the question. The question was, what have you learned this year? So, again, a little bit like the tough conversation needing a rebrand, perhaps learning needs a bit of a rebrand as well. What does that mean in the context of our team and in the context of organization, because learning can be about mentoring, can be about reverse mentoring, can be about sideways moves, can be about going off to do projects for 6 months, can be about, yes, of course, about going on a course or doing an MBA, can be going to a conference and bringing that learning back and upskilling the team, could be about 100 things. So, we've got to think about what learning means in the context of organizations and then critically balancing that learning for people with the operational needs of the business. And one of the things that came up was just that everyone's really busy all the time. I don't know what's happened in the past couple of years, but anybody you speak to is up the walls busy, really busy, super busy. I'm so busy, I can barely turn around. That doesn't allow time for learning. If learning isn't prioritized, it doesn't happen. Now, in talking about prioritization of learning, one of the things that came out of the conversation was this whole idea of people taking responsibility for their own learning, of them not waiting to be kind of spoon-fed. Now you go on this course, now you go on that course, which In fairness to people in organizations, it's a learned behavior that comes from a place of organizations talking about learning pathways. And here's your career progression, and here's your— So, you're being told you'll do this, then you'll do that, then you'll do this, and you do. So, you are just waiting for that to happen. So, perhaps the focus needs to change a little bit, where people start to take responsibility for their own learning, where they're going out and looking for learning opportunities. And again, thinking about learning, the breadth of potential learning as being all these things, the on-the-job learning, the lateral moves, the mentoring, the reverse mentoring, the coaching, the whatever. Thinking about all of that and taking that into account because it's not just about going on courses.

Yeah, exactly. And so much that you learn from your leaders and people around you, from just different things that are going on. And there's so much learning out there now that it's nearly, it's a bit bamboozling that you can get learning from everywhere. So it's trying to make sure you're getting what you need and when you need it in the right moment, you know, so it really stands to you and improves your performance and your development and all those lovely things.

Yeah, definitely. I also think just before we move off this one, actually, one other thing as well, and you touched on a point there, you know, there's learning from our leaders and our bosses and the people around us. Actually, there's not anymore. Because when you think about it, how we work and that, and you know what, and that's, we'll actually come on to that down on number 5 when we talk about disconnection.

It's a massive challenge.

I know we jokingly talk about the water cooler moments and how we're missing those out, but actually, let's broaden that out a little bit. When many of us of a particular vintage were first in our jobs, we would sit next to the HR consultant, the HRBP, the sales guy, the marketing person, the PR director, whatever department we were in. We were just listening and watching and understanding and having lunch with and having a coffee with and walking around the block with and bumping into these people all the time. That's not happening anymore. So, we've got to be much, much, much more intentional about that. And look, the whole idea of the return to office conversation that's going on at the moment all over the place. Should people who are earlier in their careers be required to be in the office more? The answer is maybe yes. Maybe they do. The downside of that is if they're in there 4 days a week and nobody else is in there, then it's a complete waste of their time. So again, back to that intentionality, and we'll talk about that later.

Yeah, that tacit learning, which I know definitely I benefited from in my career. But the next one then, and you've talked about it a few times already, the accountability for values. And this is always one where it's like, who's actually accountable to these? So, talk to me about that one.

Karen Jones from Denison, who you'll get to hear later on in this series, said to me a line one time, which actually came from a book. It was written by a couple of guys in the late '90s in the US where they were talking about schools, culture in schools, and they talked about an organization's culture being dictated by the worst behavior it is willing to accept. So, let's just let that sink in for a moment. That whole idea that your culture is basically determined by whatever you are willing to walk past. So, when we see something happening, what do we do? When we see or hear somebody acting poorly, not living the behaviors, not being reflective of the culture that we want to have in our organization, as leaders in the organization or as team members, what do we do? And that idea of being accountable for values is, yes, about people in organizations feeling accountable for those values. Those values, in any organization, values need to be lived, and then people need to be held accountable for their behavior. So, I need to hold myself accountable for living those values and for living those behaviors. But equally, other people in my team, my boss, leaders, they need to be in a place where they can hold me accountable for the same. It comes back to that point earlier about having, let's call them developmental conversations, performance conversations, where we're actually able to say to somebody, look, "I just didn't think that how you spoke to Saive in that meeting last week was particularly respectful. Can we have just a quick conversation about that?" Or Saive being able to go to Scott and say, "You know, look, the way that you spoke to me in that meeting, can we have a conversation about that? Is that okay?" Now, there's two sides to that. One, the person who's giving the feedback has to feel comfortable giving the feedback. So, we have to create an environment or create a culture in which that's accepted and in which that's expected. And equally, the person receiving the feedback has to go, "You know what? Thank you." I used to do a lot of work in customer service years ago, and we used to talk about feedback being a gift. If nobody in a restaurant ever tells you that your steak is crappy and all they do is they go somewhere else and never tell their friends anything good about your restaurant, you will keep buying the same steak from the same supplier because you don't know any, you're none the wiser. You don't know any different. Same with this. People need to be given feedback in order to help them change. And you know what? Those conversations, holding people to account, they can be massively uncomfortable for the person giving the feedback, for the person receiving the feedback. But ultimately, what's it about? It's about helping that person to be better, not necessarily even just in this role, but in whatever role they go on to work in later in their career as well.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And on the more general view, you know, holding people accountable to those values ultimately strengthens that culture, keeps you more aligned with the strategy and everything that— if you're defining your culture and you're being intentional about what you want in your organization, then it is essential that people are being held accountable to it and that you allow then your people within your organization to also hold other people to account. Like you were saying, they feel empowered to actually do it as well. So, yeah, it's a really interesting one.

There's also a bit here about being a little bit fleet of foot and being a bit curious as well. And I think that— interesting, if people haven't watched Ted Lasso, go and watch Ted Lasso. Genius. Absolute genius. From a work perspective, from a culture perspective, from a how-to-manage-teams perspective. Absolutely brilliant. It's must-watch. There's a line in there that he uses, which is, "Be curious, not judgmental." And for me, it's about asking questions. It's about finding out Finding out what the reason is for people acting the way they are. And if higher up the organization, we keep seeing a challenge around respect, we keep seeing a challenge around teamwork, we talk, we see values all the time, which are, we work better together, but then we reward teams for delivering specific targets that are only targets for their teams. We don't reward people for for cross-functional working. So, the whole idea of having a value, which is we work better together, then siloing an organization such that it's really hard to work with other teams and actually, and I've no real reason to do it. And actually, if I do work with the other team, that's going to impact my number. And actually, I'm going to be held to account for my number. So, the organization is getting in its own way. And back to my point about being curious, sometimes it's about looking at the feedback and listening to the mood music in the organization and saying, I wonder why it is that people aren't— one of our values is working together, and I wonder why it is that people aren't working together.

Duh.

Let's look at how we objectify people and how we KPI them and how we measure their progress and their success. And actually, oh, okay, so we're not really rewarding people for working together. Okay, well, that makes sense. And so that curiosity and just listening to what people are talking about can be indicative of either you have to change your values or you have to change the context, systems, processes, ways of doing things in which those values sit.

Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Love that. So we're onto our final one of the 5. So nearly half of those interviewed spoke about concerns around maintaining connections. So the 5th one that we want to talk about is disconnection. So this one, I think, is something that I hear a lot myself everywhere. So Tell me more about what you heard within the interviews around this element.

So I think just broadly, and you said it there yourself, you're seeing lots about this. I'm seeing lots about this too, on LinkedIn, on socials, in the paper, about growing loneliness, about a growing disconnection. And the thing that kept coming up was since COVID we can use the C word, 5 years ago. So that was 5 years ago. We had 2 years of forced at home. We've now had 3 years of flexi-working. I don't think that people have quite gotten to the nub of how we make that best work yet. I've got a couple of thoughts on that that I might come to in a second as to why I think that. But I think that this shift in how we work, A, is not going anywhere. So, you can hit as many nuclear back-to-office, return-to-office buttons as you like. And maybe that button is a great big giant nuclear button, which is 5 days back in the office. Maybe it's a mediocre, nuclear button, 3 days back in the office up from 2, whatever it might be. But what we have to do is, those moves are having a profound impact on culture. But for me, what we need to do is be way, way more intentional about creating moments of connection or moments for connection. And I think it's really easy in organizations to look and to say, well, 'If I'm an employee, that's the job of my manager and the job of the senior team and the organization to come up with ways that I can have more connection.' Sorry, no. There's 3 legs to this stool. Yes, absolutely. The organization needs to put in place framework and guidelines. And I think Kevin Empy, who will also be on this podcast series, he and I talked about freedom within a framework. Back actually in the early days of COVID There's a podcast episode on that, that we might actually stick in the show notes here. And we talked about, yeah, give people the outline of what OK is, give them the pitch markings, and then just let them go off and play the game. So, yes, there's a role for the organization. There's definitely a role for managers in terms of, well, if we're coming in, so, at Inspiring Change, we go in on a Wednesday. We have our team meeting. We try and get out for lunch every other one. And we try and spend that time with each other. If you driving down from Dundalk, spending 2 hours on a bus to get to work, if you then spent all day sitting in a booth doing Teams calls, then that's an utter waste of your time and an utter waste of our time because it means actually we're not getting the benefit of you being in the office. Now, whose responsibility is that? Well, as the, I guess, manager, I believe, well, it's partly my responsibility because I've got to put in place the structures to help make that those connection points happen, that intentionality. But actually, third leg of the stool, it's also your problem. Because if we're coming in for a team day, a day in, a core day where we're with people in the office, then you shouldn't be arranging Teams calls all day on a Wednesday because that's our team day. And so, there's a responsibility for people in the organization as well to say, well, okay, If it's on a Wednesday, if a client really wants a call on a Wednesday, then of course, we'll do the call on the Wednesday. But actually, if they're like, "Oh yeah, we can do any time in the week," then we actually just don't choose the Wednesday. And then when that happens, then we've got the opportunity to have those moments of connection. I think the other piece to throw in here as well is the number of generations that we have in the workplace now. Different people wanting different things, and connection means different things to different people. Of course, people who are in the twilight of their careers, they've done everything. So, they just maybe want to have different things to those who are coming into their careers who do need those water cooler moments, perhaps those social pieces. I don't know because I'm not 22 anymore, despite my flowing locks. Not. So, I don't know what people want at the younger ages. Do they prioritize purpose and development? Do older people, People in the twilight of their careers and heading into retirement, they put more value on security and structure. What is it people want? And we've got to ask those questions. That's really, really important. This issue is not going away, and it can kill culture, or if it's handled very, very well, what it can do is it can create a cultural strength which acts as an attractor and a retainer of talent, and it becomes a really, really, really important kind of center point of your employer brand.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I think if people know what it is, what it looks like, what it feels like, what they get out of it, and then what they need as well, then, you know, people make very good decisions in terms of where they work, who they work for, how they work. You know, it builds on their motivation within an organization, their feeling of connection to that organization, their caring about the organization, all those different things. So, yeah. It's an interesting one to kind of navigate over the next while because I don't, as you say, I don't think anybody's really hit the nail on the head with it. And I don't think there is a one answer to it. It's a what suits your business.

Absolutely. Yeah, you're absolutely spot on. But I think the word that I mentioned earlier on, the most important word here is intentionality, being really clear and intentional about what you want and what you need in your organization and the role that everyone plays in getting you there. Unless we're having those conversations, the remote working, flexi-working, whatever we're calling it these days, I wish we could actually just call it work because that's what it is. The whole idea that we're not actually putting in place those frameworks, those guidelines is poor. We need to be much more intentional. We need to create the frameworks. We need to create the moments of magic, the moments of connection to allow people to have that stronger sense of connection with their organizations.

Yeah, yeah, brilliant. So moving on a little bit, I'm going to ask you a couple more questions before we wrap up. So I suppose going into this research, you probably had some expectations around what you were going to find. So was there anything that came out of it that might have surprised you? Anything that you didn't expect?

No, and I think that's part of the problem. And when I did a debrief with— we had a group of people in the office to do a debrief on the results, and I said to them, okay, There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is there's nothing new in here, and the bad news is there's nothing new in here. And that's an awful shame because some of these things are things that have been around since time immemorial. They've been around forever, and we just don't seem to be doing anything about them. Or not that we're not— nothing's moving, nothing's changing. These are not issues. These are all issues that you could probably look at and go, yeah, we were suffering these things, same things 5 years ago. Maybe the disconnection one was cloaked because we were all in the office. But certainly, accountability for values, the skills that we need, leader skill and will, the manager, the role of managers, we see it all the time. Managers still feel underskilled, undereducated, that they don't have the capability, the confidence, the tools to do the job really, really well. And that's a challenge. And we're still not, you know, you can bet your bottom dollar, in places where the economy is taking a wee bit of a turn at the moment, What's the first thing to go? First thing to go is going to be learning and development budget. And for me, that's a massive challenge. So I think probably the biggest thing, biggest surprise for me was that there was nothing new in here.

Yeah, yeah. God, that's fascinating, isn't it? Absolutely, absolutely. And I suppose then something that stood out to me definitely was in the report talking about how a culture and all these things, they can either supercharge your culture or it can drag your culture down. So, from what you've seen, how do these 5 themes kind of connect actual business outcomes?

So, I think it's really interesting because they are themes because they all kind of, they all thread, they're like threads, they all kind of interweave into each other. Ultimately, if we don't have a leadership team which is helping an organization point in the right direction, if they're not being really intentional about coming up with the culture that they believe they need to deliver their strategy. Remember, we don't have culture for fun. We don't have culture because it makes it a nice place to be. We have culture because we will, you know, we're dictating what it is we believe the culture needs to be in order to deliver the strategy that we've got to deliver as an organization, to do the number, to break into new markets, to innovate new products, whatever it might be. What's the culture that we need? So, if we don't have that culture, it's just getting in the way of us getting to that strategy quicker, or it's getting in the way of delivering that strategy to its fullest. So, without a focus on culture, without that kind of leadership from the top, without that intentionality, actually, we're all pulling in different directions. And the analogy that I most often use is that idea of a boat race in the Olympics with 8 people in each boat across 10 lanes. The whistle goes and all of those teams just do whatever they want to do. Some are going one way, some are going another way, some are using a shovel in the boat because they haven't got the right equipment. Other people have never been in a boat before, so they haven't got a clue what they're doing. Somebody's shouting stroke, somebody else is shouting go, somebody else is shouting pull, somebody else is shouting whatever, and you end up with a big boat crash. So without that intentionality, we haven't got 10 teams all pulling in the same direction towards strategy, or, you know, in their case, towards that finish line. And then And it basically rolls down from there. So, that's probably for me, if you were thinking about a capstone or a cornerstone for a building, that's the one. Getting that right is really important because that allows everyone else to see, okay, well, that's what we need to do. That's what we're pulling towards. That then aligns your managers and your leaders around what it is we expect them to do. That then aligns your skills. So, what is it we need to give people? Allows you then to say, well, based on this culture, if that's our North Star, here's our values, here's our behaviors, there's real clarity around what they are, and therefore there's no excuse for people not to understand them or to be living them. And I think that's really, really important. And the fifth one then underpins all of that, because if I don't feel connected to my organization, I'm going to leave.

Yeah.

The end. And I'm going to go and look for a job elsewhere. And that's a problem as well, because you could be hemorrhaging really, really good people. Really brilliant talent could just be walking out the door. You're none the wiser as to why that is.

Yeah, yeah. Especially if people don't tell you why they're leaving and they just leave. Oh, okay. So finally, I suppose then, just to kind of wrap it up a little bit. So there's the 5 challenges that we've talked about, and you've spoken about how they kind of overlap and they feed into each other. So I suppose when you're thinking about it in practice for any organizations out there listening to this, like, is there any that you go after first? You know, what do you need to tackle? Do you need to tackle them together? You know, how would you look at these 5 themes in terms of if you were to make a plan of action to try and solve something around this?

I think I probably answered that question in the last question accidentally. Number 1, well, actually these weren't in particular, these weren't in order of importance when we wrote the report particularly. But actually, number one, that leader skill and will, I think, is the most important thing. Agreeing as a senior team, looking at the strategy and saying, if we are an organization that is very long in the tooth, we've been around for ages, we're a shoe manufacturer, we're still using the same machines that we've been using for 150 years in our factory in wherever, but we know there's loads of 'Product coming in from the Far East or from China or from somewhere else is undercutting our prices. We've got to think about a strategy to do things differently. That might mean lots more innovation.' But if we have a culture which isn't innovative, where people are just doing the same thing day in, day out, because they always have done for generations of their families, you know, 'This is what my great uncle did 50 years ago,' then that's a problem. So, that senior team is now looking at the strategy and going, 'Well, okay, we need to be more innovative. We need to think about new products. We need to do design. We need to think about new ways of doing things. We need to ditch all the machines actually and outsource everything to the Middle East, perhaps. How do you then create a culture that allows that to happen? Because your culture otherwise simply stands there, crosses his arms, and says, "Not on my watch." And does that mean that you're going to achieve nothing in your strategy? No, of course not. You're still going to achieve something. But what it does mean is, as I said earlier, you're perhaps not going to get there as quickly. Or you're perhaps not going to be able to deliver as much as you think you could. So having that conversation around what's our culture vision, what do we need our culture to be, thinking about what the values and behaviors beneath that need to be to deliver that culture, and then actually talking about that consistently and constantly down through the organization is really important. So that's where I'd start, at the top, number one.

Well, listen, thank you so much, Scott. Scott, thank you for letting me take over your podcast, first of all. I've really enjoyed this. So, no, it's been great hearing your perspective on the research, and I know you're gonna be meeting with people over the next few weeks, so, and really delving into each one of those themes with a little bit more detail, which will be really, really interesting. And so I suppose just, I hope you found today's conversation as insightful as I did. We'll be unpacking this research, the Mind the Gap research, in more detail, as I've mentioned, with our fantastic guests that are coming up over the coming weeks. So do keep an ear out for those episodes. If you want to have a read of the report yourself, you will find a link in the show notes. I assume we're going to put them in there. And if you want to visit our website, so inspiringchange.ie. So again, as I said at the top of the show, if you've enjoyed our chat, please do leave a review. If you're feeling generous, a 5-star one. Share it with your friends. And that is it from me, Síle O'Flaherty, your guest today. Thank you again for listening, and we'll see you next time on the Building Better Cultures podcast.