16 | Engaging your Front line Staff in Organisations

Welcome to Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. So, hi there, and welcome to this edition of Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on everything internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Contrary to what my friends might think, I am a bit of a geek at heart, and no more so than when I get on an aeroplane. And my wife has said to me more than once, as she throws her eyes to the heavens, you are such a geek, as I climb aboard a plane. And even as we take off, probably for the thousandth time I've been in a plane, and I'm still the one saying, isn't this absolutely amazing that they can get us up here in this cigar tube and fly us 10,000 miles to the other side of the planet? It is phenomenal. And actually, much of the reason for that is obviously the design of the aeroplane and the Engines. So I'm really excited that today I've got Paul Diggins on the podcast, who is the former director of internal communications and community investment at Rolls-Royce. Paul, good morning.

Hi, Scott, how you doing?

I'm well, thanks. I'm well. Listen, why don't we get— I'm sure we'll get some of the aeroplane stuff in a while and you'll tell us some cool stories, but why don't we kick off first of all with you telling us a few minutes about you, your career, and what your career had been in Rolls-Royce and your role in Rolls-Royce.

Yeah, certainly. So I started internal comms about 20 years ago, pre-banking crisis, back at Barclays Bank. It was quite a new thing then. It was, I guess I got in at the ground level and sort of learned from the bottom up, really. Started out on one of our very first publications, very, very quickly got moved into face-to-face engagement activity and did a lot of work with Matt Barrett when he joined Barclays, then moved into my first comms BP roles in most of our wealth management divisions in Barclays. And then since then, my career has taken me through a number of sectors, so insurance with the Prudential, mobile telcos with T-Mobile and EE. After that, a stint back at RBS but in general insurance, and then spinning off a division that was ultimately then named the Direct Line Group, so those of you that are familiar with red phones and Churchill the dog, and then latterly at Rolls-Royce, so moved into Rolls-Royce from Direct Line after 6 years there, spent just under 2 years there as their Director of Internal Comms and Community Investment with a brief to really, you know, engage and unify people across a much clearer and well-articulated purpose, a new vision and strategy, And I guess the interesting part of that was also the community investment part, which was also all of our education outreach activity. So all of our STEM ambassador network that works with schools, but then also all of our employee volunteering.

Okay, interesting. That's about 25 years of a career in a nutshell.

Yes.

So one thing I'm really interested in is your thoughts on what makes a leader a great leader, because from my perspective, I think the roles that you and I fulfill, I guess, when you're in-house and I'm in a consultancy capacity, is helping organizations to realize the power of leader as communicator and how leaders can really be the glue to help connect vision and strategy and purpose to their teams. So I wonder, from your perspective, what makes a leader a great leader?

For me, I guess it's 3 things, 3 words spring to mind. So authenticity, they need to be, you know, they need to be real. I've worked, you know, I've been privileged to work with a number of leaders, you know, internationally over the years. And for me, you know, one of the main things that characterizes the best of those leaders is the ones that are, you know, the person that you see up on stage or doing the set piece thing in front of a broad brush base of employees is no different to the person that you meet in his office or her office when you're having a conversation about what you're going to be doing or the sort of things you want to work on. So authenticity is probably the most important thing. Humility is a really, really important one as well. I guess some of the best leaders I've worked with don't ever profess to know everything or have all the answers. And that, you know, that authenticity and that willingness to accept that other people know better, I think, certainly from an employee perspective, makes them much more accessible because they want to hear from other people and they actually want to get into conversations with people rather than just stand up and broadcast. And then I think that, you know, the absolute last one is, you know, if you've got a slightly flawed leader and they have the first two criteria, so they're authentic and they're humble, they're almost willing to talk about their flaws And again, that's a great way for people to buy into them as human beings and actually realize that they're just like me or you.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And the fact that I think for me, the one, the really top spot one there is humility and leaders being humble. And, you know, it brings to mind that quote. I think it was Branson who said, why is it we insist on hiring people who are cleverer than us and then tell them what to do?

Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, if you hire great people, you've got to set them free and let them, you know, let them challenge you the ways you think.

Yeah, absolutely. I was having a chat with a leader this morning who wants to do a bit of coaching, and I was saying to him exactly that. It's an owner-managed business. And I said, I know from having chatted to lots of you types of guys and girls that owner-managed businesses are really hard to let go. It's really hard to actually hire people to do the stuff that you've been doing yourself for maybe 10+ years, to let go. It can be really tricky.

Yeah, and it's the same for us in our own teams. I find, you know, one of the joys of moving into Rolls-Royce at the start of last year was, you know, 25 new people to work with that knew more about that organization and what to do. They were as keen to learn from me as I was from them, and that surprised a lot of them, I think, because, you know, Rolls-Royce is a very— it's a national treasure, and it's full of engineers, and engineers know the answer to everything. And so actually, you know, people coming in and being a little bit more open to different ways of thinking and challenging the status quo can be a breath of fresh air for an organization.

Yeah, agreed. And I love, again, back to that piece around kind of a leader with flaws. I think you're right, once they have that authenticity, once they have that humility, once they're happy to put their hands up and say mea culpa, You know, I know that you guys all think that I'm up here on the top of the mountain and I have all the answers, but I don't. And I'm not, you know, and I'm not going to have it. I'm going to need your support. And for me, that's so important to have people who are willing to put their hands up and actually say that.

Some of the most powerful things that have worked for me from an engagement perspective in previous organizations is when leaders, based on the feedback they're receiving from their employees, are prepared to go, "Actually, do you know what? I've made the wrong call on this, and it's clear from the feedback that you're all giving me that we need to do something differently, so we'll change it." And, you know, when that happens, it gets you so much goodwill, and it, more importantly for us as communicators, it shows that our audiences are being listened to. And it's incredibly powerful. It's transformational for an organization when stuff like that happens.

Agreed. And why is it that more leaders don't do that? Why is it, do you think, that people in senior roles oftentimes get into that space of, I need to have all the answers and I can't be, you know, I can't show that I was wrong because that shows some sign of weakness.

Why is that?

I don't know.

My experience is, you know, when you're the CEO, it's a pretty lonely gig. You have the weight of the world on your shoulders. You're answerable to either a board or a, you know, a group of shareholders. You have, you know, you have a leadership role yourself. You have a team, you have an executive team that you need to lead. And actually, again, you know, coming back to what makes a great leader, though. Though the best leaders I've worked with are the ones that hold their own teams to account, you know. They're not, they're not distant from their own teams. They work with their exec teams as a team. But, you know, you have conflicting priorities. You have to manage shareholders, you have to manage customers, you have to manage your employees. We spent a lot of time on this at Direct Line when we were taking Direct Line out of, out of RBS. We did, we did a major program that focused on those three areas. And the reason we did that was we wanted our people to tell us what they wanted the company to feel like, because we were building something something new. We wanted to understand from our people what our customers would want, but at the same time, we had to do an exercise to help people understand the responsibilities that come with having shareholders. You know, our aspiration was to take this business out of RBS and float it off, and if, you know, were we to be successful in doing that, which we were, you know, we would be answerable to shareholders, and that would change the way we would have to run the business compared to when it was a division that was sheltered within a bigger bigger organization like RBS. And for the CEO, I think, you know, my absolute key message on this one is it's difficult to manage those three conflicting priorities. But the secret to that is to be consistent across all three of them. And where they tend to tie themselves in knots is where they're almost trying to play three different narratives out for three different groups of people, rather than the one thing coming together as one cohesive narrative that everybody can buy into. And you can talk, you can talk just as openly to your shareholders about what you're doing with your people as you can talk to your customers about what that means for the business in terms of the things that you're doing.

And of course, if you grow that narrative, if you create that narrative with those, with those 3 audiences in mind from, from, from, from year, from day 1, then that gives you something that can lend itself to having that conversation.

That's exactly it. You know, if you've, if you've got a different narrative for the media and customers than you have from your shareholders, then is, you know, maybe the narrative wouldn't necessarily be different in the organization, but if the reality of what the organization experiences is different to that narrative, then that's when you get real engagement challenges on your hands.

And you've got an integrity gap.

Yep, absolutely.

I'm interested in when you said that about Direct Line and the work that you did, or sorry, apologies, in Rolls-Royce, the work you did around purpose and vision and strategy. I'm actually, I'm doing a talk this evening at a networking gig for about 100 people, and that's what I'm going to focus on, purpose. They're all small businesses and really thinking much more about, well, what's the why? That whole Simon Sinek, you know, what's the why piece?

Why do you think— I'm reading that at the moment. I haven't got very far, but I'm reading it.

It's a really good book. And actually, if you run out of steam on the book, his TED Talk is very good as well. So that's worth a look. Why is purpose so important and how do you bring that to life in an organization like Rolls-Royce?

So, I mean, and Rolls-Royce, you know, as an organization when it comes to purpose is quite a unique one. It has, it has, you know, a more than, a greater than 100-year history. Um, it's changed the world on a number of fronts with a number of things it's done. You know, there are iconic aspects of Rolls-Royce that still to this day exist. You know, I was only watching the other day, um, a documentary about the Red Arrows, and they were doing the Battle of Britain flypast, and, you know, I was watching Dunkirk, the film, the other day, and they talk about Rolls-Royce Merlin engines in Spitfires. It's, you know, with an engineering legacy like that, you know, it's— and also because it's born out of, you know, the narrative was born out of two people that came together. We have on the wall in the office in London a quote from— I can't remember if it's Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce, but it's, you know, whatever is nobly done is worthwhile, or something along the lines of that. And, and so for us, the challenge was, how do you set this organization up for the next 100 years when, you know, the pace of evolution in terms of technology and manufacturing and just, you know, electrical— when it's essentially an industrial heritage company, how do you set yourselves up for 100 years of future success when The narrative to that point has essentially been, we've been good at this forever and we'll always be good at it. And that, you know, that comes with its own— it's not as simple as just a purpose and a narrative challenge. That's a cultural challenge as well, which is, you know, you've got 3 generations of the same family working in the same places in Rolls-Royce. You've got an average tenure of 30 to 40 years. You've got attrition that's less than 2%. You know, it's an organization that is, you know, for the people that work there, is an institution. You go to Derby, you've got 25,000 people across a campus that is the size of a small town. And so the challenge is very much about how do you paint a picture of the future that helps people understand that what we do today is still incredibly valid, but what we're going to need to do in the future is going to be radically different from what we do today. You know, it was interesting, we we were talking about the fact that, you know, the average jet engine— to get into the geeky stuff for you, Scott— the lifecycle of an average jet is 30 years.

Wow.

So, you know, the engines that we're building today will still be flying in 30 years' time. But at the same time, we can see a horizon that says in the next 15 to 20 years, the first electrical— electrically powered flight will start to happen. You know, for smaller vehicles, that's going to be in the next 5 to 10 years. So, you know, we already have to be thinking that far far ahead because the, you know, the development cycles and the amount of time it takes to bring these things to market. You know, we're going to need increasingly different skills. We're going to need digital skills where, you know, it's not about putting something together and seeing if it works. We need digital modeling skills that mean we can test and learn without actually having to build anything. We need to— we need futurologists that understand the way things are going so that we're making the bets in the right places for the right things. You know, it's, you know, some of the technology that's in our cutting-edge engines. So the ones that are on the next generation of widebodies that are flying already, it was mind-blowing for me the day that we went in there. I'd only started a couple of weeks before and I got taken around one of the manufacturing plants and we have turbine blades that sit in these engines that run at 4 times their melting point. The material they're made from, they operate for 10, 12 hours at a time when they're in the sky. At 4 times their melting point. And the way the engineer explained it to me was, it's equivalent to having your oven on gas mark 9, putting an ice cube on a baking tray and leaving it in there and it never melting. And so, you know, the amount of foresight that is required in an organization to think about these things and answer these challenges, but at the same time be progressive rather than always draw on what was done the last time. And so rather than incremental gains, the switch for us in purpose was very much about How do you completely start to flip this stuff on its head and do it differently? And so all of our purpose narrative work was about— we latched onto this phrase about pioneering. So we talked about the concept of Rolls-Royce being pioneering the power that matters. We always had a little subtext was, for those of your listeners that aren't fully conversant with our situation, we don't own the car company anymore. It's one of the things that, you know, certainly the first 3 months I was working there, I had to keep telling people I didn't get a company car and all of that. That sort of thing. But, um, we said we sold the car company off because, you know, cars weren't hard to build anymore. We like to build hard stuff. We like, we like to do things that, that people can't actually conceive of. So pioneering the power that matters, which is the purpose we came up with, was all about saying actually we've been a pioneer for 100 years, we've done amazing things, but actually what we want to, what we want to be known for in the future, what we want to be famous for, is power. So it's not necessarily about jet engines, it's not necessarily about the stuff that people would have historically known us for. But what is at its heart is generating power for the ever-changing world. Okay. Sorry, that was a slightly winded answer.

Oh, no, it's great and really interesting. And I think that whole move, because you could argue that, you know, in some ways, you know, when you look back at the history of the organization and that really, really rich manufacturing history that you guys have had, that it could bring with it some sense of complacency and actually act as a barrier to looking forward. You know, "But sure, we're fine. We've always done the stuff we've always done and we've done very well. And we're, you know, we're decades and decades and decades old." So I wonder then, from a leader perspective, what's the role of the leader in bringing that purpose and narrative to life for their teams? Obviously, as you said there, in Derby, there's 25,000 people. The CEO or the director of communications in your case, can't know all those people. So there has to be a really critical role for the people leaders. What is that role and what was that role in Rolls-Royce?

And I think that's a really important point, Scott, which is that, you know, the term leader doesn't only refer to the person that sits at the top of the pyramid in the organization. You know, anybody that has any responsibility for people, I consider a leader. And actually, I consider a big part of my job is helping all of those leaders help their people understand where they fit and how they can make a difference. So, you know, a really big part of that for me is absolutely about local context. You know, if you're the guy that works on the shop floor making the jet engine that's going to fly for the next 30 years, you're probably not that interested in electrical flight. But at the same time, you do need to understand how the world around you is changing so that you can recognize what you might need to do differently to still be a part of that in the future. So a lot of what we did with our purpose work was absolutely about putting those conversations in the heart of our people, in in the hands of our people managers. You know, we did, as with any major campaign, you've got, there's a load of set-piece stuff that gets materials out and about and raises awareness. But actually the richness of the conversation was in those team-level conversations that said, so, you know, let's look at what we've got to do next year. What are the priorities that we have for the next 12 months and how do they align with this strategic narrative? Where do we fit? How do we make a difference? And what part of this strategy is it that we're helping with? And for me, that's the absolute critical part of this, this, you know, how you link from something as high order as purpose through to your corporately articulated vision and then into your strategic narrative, and then how that translates to what you're asking someone to do on a day-to-day basis. So if they're doing everything that's asked of them and the company is performing, they understand that they're making a difference. Equally, if they're doing everything that's asked of them and the company isn't performing, that you can explain to them why the company isn't doing as well as it is, even if they've done everything they've been asked to do. So all of that for me is the most important part of what we do in terms of setting context against, creating the backdrop for everything that we talk about as a comms function in the business.

My old boss, Anth Burrows, who I think you know, he would always talk about linking and labeling, linking and labeling, linking and labeling. We talked about that in every single team meeting in terms of how we were going to support the business and that whole idea, as you say, of creating that that thread through human links and through stories back to the top of the organization for staff is so critical.

But it's also, you know, back to that topic we were talking about earlier, which is the benefit for us is if that narrative is consistent, you know, we are as reliant on what our employees see about their organizations outside the organization as we are inside. You know, I had that thrown into sharp focus in the days when I worked at RBS. You know, I worked in an organization that was a division of RBS, where people never actually talked about working for RBS. They talked about the brands they worked for, so whether they were Direct Line or Churchill, because, you know, the, the, the damage that had been done to that RBS brand, you just didn't want to go into the pub and tell someone that you work for RBS. Um, and, and so actually, you know, we're as reliant on the external narrative of our organizations as our internal narrative to really land the message about how the company's doing and where people fit.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And as you were going on that journey with RBS, I was kind of on a similar journey with AIB and people telling taxi drivers to drop them somewhere else, then they'd walk back to the office because they just didn't want to sit through 35 minutes of effectively abuse.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's great when you're doing things that are transformative for the world, but But at the same time, we have challenges with some of our engines at Rolls-Royce at the moment. And, you know, that's in the public eye. It's not common knowledge in the sense that it's front page news, but it's certainly front page of the business section and certainly in the trade press. And, you know, aviation industry is quite an incestuous business. So actually, you know, there's a lot of people— one of my best friends is the head of engineering at Virgin Atlantic. And, you know, every time we go out for dinner, I get an ear blasting about Rolls-Royce and what's going on with the engines at the moment. You know, that's a consequence of trying to be revolutionary and trying to push the boundaries. So what you need to help people with is the narrative that allows them to explain why and where the challenges are and what we're doing about the challenges and how things will get better in the longer term.

I love that. And for me, that's where narrative really plays such an important role, that you're actually telling people in the organization in English, because I think organizations are really good at speaking corporate, but they're not often very good at speaking English and actually trying to get into the heads of their staff in a more emotional way. But I think being able to arm is the wrong word, but give people something that, as you say, in the pub they can go back with and say, well, listen, we are trying and we're pushing the envelope, and that's why things maybe don't work quite as well as they should.

And for us, I think it's a really valuable tool because it allows, you know, it actually ultimately makes our job easier because you're not then spending, you're not spending all of your time in the organization trying to rebalance the internal narrative because people are asking questions about what they're reading in the media. At Direct Line, we got to the point that when we did our financial reporting processes, we would equip our people managers with a sort of crib sheet of what the headlines are and what the key information was. But working in conjunction with my external comms colleagues, we'd have a go at saying, "And this is what we think the papers are going to write about us in the morning," so that they could understand what they were going to see in the papers the next day based on how we performed in the previous year. Again, it's all just about equipping people with the story so that they can understand how these things play out.

Absolutely. No, I couldn't agree more. So tell me, so all of that's kind of positive, particularly from the Rolls-Royce perspective, in terms of kind of vision, strategy, purpose, the future. I was reading earlier on in the news, and obviously earlier this year, about the organization having to make some fairly, what seemed on paper to be fairly big job cuts. And, you know, when you're going through that as a director of internal comms, I wonder what it is you're thinking about and how you're helping the organization through that time of transition.

So I guess a couple of things. One, again, you need to put all of your leaders at the heart of that conversation. It's, you know, if you try and run a major restructuring, so we were talking about a 10% reduction overall in the business, or just under 10%, 8 to 10%, 4,500 jobs jobs in an organization of just over 50,000, um, you know, primarily in our head office functions. So it was a little bit easier in that, you know, our, if you like, our core frontline was sort of largely out of scope but had massive ramifications in our engineering functions, as an example. And so that was about, you know, a really carefully balanced, um, rollout plan that started, you know, ultimately this whole process started with a stock market announcement and Certainly for me, as somebody that was relatively new in Rolls-Royce, one of the hardest things we had to do was get people to open their minds to the fact that we might have to tell a fairly significant population within the organization ahead of the stock market announcement. And the way that we dealt with that was what, what we, what we had to make our finance people understand was nobody would have the whole picture. They'd only have their bit of it, so they wouldn't actually get the whole picture until we told the stock market, because the nervousness was around us pre-disclosing something internally before we told the markets. Um, and so we worked really, really hard to make sure that the people that actually understood how all the pieces of the jigsaw fitted together was as small a circulation list as possible. But what it allowed us to do was pre-brief of all of our leaders so that they could then, the minute this news broke, which obviously with any type of stock market announcement is generally as people are coming to work, they were on the front foot when people got to work to be able to get them into rooms, talk to them about what it meant for them and their organization. In some cases, that was nothing at all. In other cases, that was, you know, some fairly radical restructuring proposals, and they were only proposals because it was the start of the process. But, you know, sitting down and taking people through those impacts, talking about what the next steps are, you know, it was a gargantuan effort to get to what we called A-Day in terms of aligning maybe 15 different functions and business units, making sure that the core elements of those announcements were aligned. But that everybody had access to everything. So, you know, there was no— transparency was a fundamental principle. Leader-led was another fundamental principle. And, you know, it's— I'm proud to say that, you know, many, many of my HR colleagues said they've done various restructurings in Rolls-Royce over the years. They'd never done an announcement in that way that meant everybody was hearing similar things at the same time. And more importantly, we then made all of that content available to everybody. So, you know, if you were working in finance, you could see what the impacts were in HR. Which was a level of transparency that the organization had never experienced before.

I love that idea. I love that idea of a pre-brief. And, you know, particularly I think we come up in larger organizations, particularly when they're listed, where we are in communications utterly beholden to the people who are in charge of the stock market, to the finance guys, who will say point blank, you cannot say anything at all until 7 o'clock tomorrow morning. And I wonder, how did you get around that? Was it just simply saying, we just won't tell anybody every bit, we'll tell lots of people lots of different bits?

Was that the main— I mean, it was a collaborative process. So we had, you know, the restructuring program had been running for the best part of 3 months. So, you know, from a comms perspective, I was the link into the restructuring program because the activity was all internal. But, you know, there was a working party that was made up of investor relations, of the, you know, the restructuring lead, my colleague that ran external comms, um, you know, the HRDs. And we all— we got everybody on the same page. And, and as you say, the key thing is nobody other than the exec team understood the entirety of the message. Until that message broke. But what everybody, you know, the things that we were doing with the team leaders and the people managers lower down in the organization was talking to them about the specifics of what was going on in their function and obviously warming them up to the fact that it was part of a bigger corporate announcement. But nobody really had ever had all of the pieces of the jigsaw apart from that central team that were collaborating on everything to ensure that everything remained aligned and consistent.

Brilliant. So listeners, there you go. If you take nothing else away from this podcast, then take away that blueprint for people change, because it's brilliant. And from what, Paul, from what you just said there, worked really, really well. So that's super. Give me a quick couple of minutes on your leadership role models, who it is that as leaders you look up to.

Oh, wowzers, there's a question. As I touched on earlier, I've been privileged to work with some of the most amazing ones. The first person that made a massive impact on me was John Varley, who at the time was the Chief Executive of Retail Banking Barclays, not the whole Barclays Group. He was my first experience of, you know, when I first moved into my first comms role, I'd already worked for Barclays for 10 years and I'd sat in a branch and it blew my mind that, you know, with having spent 10 years in branches where you're so far down the food chain, the next day I was sort of sitting in an office with John Varley and he was chatting to me and interested to hear about me and interested to know what that meant. So he made a massive impact on me. And then in fairly short order after that, Matt Barrett, who came in as the group chief exec. And again, somebody that was, you know, job number one for him was just to get out on the road and meet people. And I spent a lot of time on the road with him then. And you realize that, you know, the best leaders understand that the answers are out there in the front line. They're not, you know, they're not in boardrooms and, you know, workshops. They're down there talking to people that are doing the day, the job day in, day out. Other people I would touch on is, you know, I've worked with some great HRDs that just get people but also get change. I think, you know, I might say something controversial here, but HR departments tend to fall into two sorts of things. One, they're either really big and really complex personnel departments that make sure everybody gets paid and understand that there's got to be a performance review process, or you get real transformative HR leaders who understand and, you know, sit at the exec board level and understand that people are the key to unlocking the objectives that the business needs to achieve. And then more recently, I would say Paul Geddes, who was my chief exec at Direct Line, you know, to bring us full circle right back to the start of the podcast, you know, he encapsulated those three things that I look for in every leader. You know, he was prepared to admit he was flawed, he was completely humble, and he was incredibly authentic. He was just a genuinely nice person to be around and great fun to work with.. So for me, that's it in a nutshell.

Okay. And I, you know, what's really nice is that I think when you have people on the podcast, and I think you're maybe the 15th or 16th guest now, that, you know, people often tend to reach for the big names, the Nelson Mandela's and the Richard Branson's and those guys. But I love the fact that all of your role models have come from your own career. I think that's amazing. And I think learning from others is is fundamentally important.

Most definitely.

Yeah. So very last question. I know we're just wrapping up now in a couple of minutes. I know you're heading off to something else. One question I always ask everybody on the podcast is, what's the one piece of leadership advice that you would give to your 20-year-old self?

So it's interesting. That one's changed over the last couple of years. It used to be work hard, play hard, be nice. To the extent I actually bought it for my godchild as a piece of art to go on their bedroom wall because I wanted them to just see it every day as they grew up. I think linking back to this thing, for me, at its core, it doesn't matter what you do in business. Everybody's human. As long as you can have a conversation with them on a human level, you're going to make some progress. The reason that mantra has changed over the last couple of years is one of my daughter's favorite films at the moment is the live-action version of Cinderella. Cinderella's mother, before she ended up living with the wicked stepmom and the ugly sisters, always used to say to her, "Have courage and be kind." Actually, that to some extent encapsulates what we do in our job, really, which is we have to have the courage to say to people why we think the things they want to do are wrong or why the things they're saying aren't the right things to say. But at the same time, we just have to be kind about it because I used to work with a guy that used to say, "Be kind because everybody you meet is fighting a great fight. You just don't know what it is." We're all human beings, and our job is to make those people that might seem the least human of all in a major organization the most human they can be. Again, slightly long-winded answer, but at the end of the day, we're all about people.

I think that idea that you don't really ever truly know what's going on in other people's lives is really, really important. Really important. Yeah. Paul, listen, I know we're coming to the end of our time, so a thousand thank yous for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. I've really enjoyed the conversation and I look forward to hearing a bit more about blades and jet engines and melting ice cubes over a beer sometime.

I was going to say, that's one for a pint of the black stuff. It's a shame we couldn't do this over that actually, but maybe next time.

We'll do it the next time. Listen, thanks a Cheers, Scott. All right, thanks, Paul. Thanks for listening. For more on Inspiring Change, to read our blog, and to listen to other podcasts, please visit inspiringchange.ie.