74 | Redefining Success: Trust, Compassion, and the Future of Work | Mark Edgar

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

You know, a lot of it goes back to rather than providing a lot of control and guidelines and trying to deal with every scenario, is equip your leaders with the skills to kind of manage in this way. Give them the freedom, the autonomy, the kind of guide rails to manage it and let them go. And Yeah, they'll do a great job. Trust them to do it.

Hello there, and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. You'll know, many of you who've listened to many episodes of the podcast, that I do love to have a real mix of guests on, from subject matter experts to in-house leaders to consultants, because I think actually what you get from all of those interviews and all of those discussions is just a really rich mix of experience and knowledge. Knowledge and ideas. And of course, what I always tell guests before we get on the podcast is make sure you have plenty of practical experience. So I'm really pleased that today's guest in fact ticks all of those boxes of in-house leader, consultant, and expert. So before we get to our guest today, the usual thank you to Workvivo, who very kindly sponsor the podcast. If you are looking for a platform, I guess, to help you build better levels of engagement with your staff, if you're thinking about how you're to manage communications as you move to a hybrid world, then the whole Workvivo platform is definitely worth a look. You can find out more about them at workvivo.com. So, on to today's guest. So, I first came across Mark when a former colleague of his and a former boss of mine said, "You should chat to Mark Edgar." And I said, "Okay, I will," because he used to be former global head of HR for RSA, the insurance company based in the UK. He's since moved to Canada and he is talking to me today from his home over there. So really look forward to the chat. Mark, hello there. How are you getting on?

I'm well, Scott, thank you. Good to be here.

Thanks very much. Listen, really keen to get into some of the detailed stuff around human leadership and that type of thing that you're really, really hot on. But before we do that, why don't we just start off as I always do on these podcasts? I will change this one day because it might get a bit formulaic. But until then, you know, let's just, let's just run with this, which is just you just maybe telling the guests, the listeners rather, about your background, where you've come from, and what you're up to today.

Yeah, perfect. Tonight probably is a very practical place to start, isn't it? Rather than starting at the end of the podcast, that would confuse everybody. Agreed. It's a good place to start. So yeah, no, it's so great to be here. And I don't know, it's interesting. I think these days everyone's identity, I think, is so much focused around work. I think it's kind of most important for me in terms of who I am is really dad of two daughters here in Canada, a husband to Sarah. We've been married for 25 years next week, actually. So that's an exciting milestone for us. But also I am a, what I call a recovering CHRO. So, as you mentioned, spent most recently a career supporting HR for the Canadian part of RSA. So it wasn't actually the global part of RSA, the Canadian part of RSA. So I moved here in 2012 2011 and was supporting HR for a Canadian business of the RSA Insurance Company headquartered out of the UK, which was a super interesting time. I was there for 8 and a half years. Prior to that, I was in senior HR roles, again, primarily in the UK. So, I worked for lots of companies that seem to be bought by other companies, which is— I don't know if there's a theme here, but a company called Excel that was bought by DHL. And then Sky and Centrica, obviously companies that are still going strong. But yeah, I've had lots of great experience. I've been very fortunate in the experiences I've had from an HR perspective. But I probably did have a midlife crisis a couple of years ago. I realized when I decided to go independent, probably a bit of a crazy time with the whole pandemic going on, but I built a business that launched on the Wednesday before the wheels fell off the world, on the Friday, called Goat Radio Project. And for those of you who don't know what Goat Radio is all about train wrecks and things going badly wrong. The timing was actually ironically quite appropriate. But my business is really focused on taking all of that experience and helping organizations to think about how they can deal with all the crazy disruption going on in the world. Yeah, having a lot of fun doing that.

Brilliant. The Wednesday before we all shut down for the pandemic, that must have been a surprise.

Yes, it was. I had these amazing plans. I was actually coming back to the UK, so I was going to launch it on the Wednesday, and then we were heading over to the UK, and a taxi was due to come and pick us up at 7 o'clock Canadian time. And I was like, we're getting all these notifications from friends in the UK, and we're like, yeah, perhaps we just shouldn't go. So we sat tight, which was— and I've not left my office since.

Yeah, that makes two of us. Congratulations on your silver wedding anniversary.

Thank you.

Yeah, that'll be a fun evening.

Yes.

So tell me this. A lot of the discussions that we've had, a lot of the stuff that I've read on your LinkedIn and just read about you generally is that you're a big believer in the whole idea and ethos of human leadership. Maybe tell me a little bit about what that is for a start, for those listeners who don't know, and what it means to you and why that's so important.

Yeah, it's a kind of term that I stumbled across, I guess, over a number of years. It's always how I feel I've led people. And at the core of it is really just— and it sounds one of those easy things to say, hard things to do— but just being very people-centric, being very conscious of the fact that at the end of the day, Bob Chapman is a person who's probably done a lot of research around human leadership. His book, Truly Human Leadership, Everybody Matters, he's done work with Simon Sinek. But in the businesses that he's run, it's really this idea that everybody matters. And that was really the philosophy that I've kind of maybe somewhat naively took into my career, based on, as I think about it, based on how I saw my dad, who was a lecturer in a university, and just seeing him going about his life. I think it had this impact on me as a kid, I guess. So as I went through life, I was the annoying kid at school that probably got on with most people pretty well. I was the person who was breaking up fights rather than being in fights and just wanted everyone to kind of get along. And brought that into a career in HR eventually and tried to really ensure that I was taking that level of leadership and approaching everything that I did in this very people-centric way. The idea of treating everybody as they want to be treated rather than how you think you want to be treated. Being very compassionate with people, very respectful with people, and bringing that into the work I did. And it kind of worked well for me, I guess. I kind of was able to progress through my career, but also But it does come with some challenges as well. And certainly something that I feel there's the opportunity to bring more into the way that organizations go about things moving forward.

Yeah, and what— interesting. What made you say somewhat naively brought that thinking into your career and way of doing things?

Because I think many organizations are looking for something still quite different. So, lots of the organizations I've had the privilege to work for have been very obsessed with customers. Had been very obsessed with shareholders. You know, I frankly hadn't worked for many organizations that are obsessed with their people. And so you're kind of bringing in a philosophy and a real set of values that are often counter to what the organization wants. And I kind of held on to that because I felt so strongly about it. But it sometimes means that you are a bit of an exception in an organization. You don't quite fit the corporate blueprint of what somebody's looking for in certain roles. And I think that, yeah, that kind of presented some challenges. And I, you know, I have a bit of an annoying way of going about things sometimes. I can be kind of quietly quite stubborn about things. So I'm sure through the conversation today, we'll end up talking about hybrid work, but we did a big office move, I remember. And this kind of approach I had around thinking about office space meant that I was the first executive to give up his office. And that frustrated everybody, because all the other executives wanted an office. But for me, it was the right thing to do. And then everyone had desks, and I was the first one who didn't have a desk, because it was kind of that role modeling. So I think that's where the naivety part of it, I think, comes from. It's very well-intentioned, but it really can put me in a situation where I wasn't necessarily setting— I was kind of a bit different. And that caused a bit of confusion for people in terms of how they approach things. Certainly at an executive level, I sometimes found.

But isn't it really, really interesting that you perhaps for that reason stuck out like a sore thumb, but stuck out like a sore thumb for the right reasons, which were role modeling what you wanted to see in the rest of the organization, which was no doubt in line with the values of the organization, in line with the culture, whereas perhaps other execs— this happens not just in the places that you worked but in organizations globally where we're saying one thing It's really important that all the execs role model the values and the purpose and that we live for what we want our people to live for. And they don't actually do that. So, in some ways, that form of leadership, that form of human leadership, if it does make you stick out like a sore thumb, then there's bigger questions to ask about the organization, is there?

Yeah, for sure. And I think it's kind of the opportunity to think about that, I think, very much from an individual perspective. What do you want out of your own career, which in somewhat, some ways, probably kind of results in me thinking where I am now, but I think also gives you an opportunity in an HR role, particularly a very senior HR role, to role model things in a different way. And if the HR person isn't being consistent with the values, then who will be? So I think, yeah, and it's fair to say that there's values that I struggle with and things that I'm not, lots and lots of things that I'm not very good at, which are important in business, but there were these ones very much around the people and the human parts of it that were quite very authentic to how I believed in the world. So, yeah, values are an interesting thing and bringing them to life is important. But I think doing that at a very personal level is also a critical step.

And I think the more and more research that comes out and you hear from Branson, it was probably 10 years ago now, that line about don't put your customers first, put your people first and let them look after your customers, which I think is probably an ethos that you and I both share. And for me, that's really, really important. Important, but still organizations and one that I worked in, it was all about customer first, customer first, customer first, almost to the detriment of employees. You know, well, we've got to put the customer first. That means you have to do more hours, do more work at less, you know, with less resources because we're cutting costs because we need to keep the customer happy. When do organizations, do you think, what will it take for them to sit back and realize actually, maybe that employee-first thing is not such a bad idea after all. Maybe that will serve us quite well, given all the research that's out there. What's it going to take to get companies to realize that, do you think?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think something that I would have wrestled with a lot to try and ensure that you're shifting the needle on that to give people that important perspective. Because that is 100% the right approach. You say that the research backs that up. I kind of scratch my head sometimes thinking why people who who are super intelligent and very clever at what they do don't quite make that same connection. I think a lot of that— I try to do this as much as I can. If I put myself in their shoes, and I never had an aspiration to be a CEO or a CFO or whatever it might be, I think they're under a huge amount of pressure from the markets, essentially, to deliver a very satisfying quarterly return. That inevitably drives some very challenging behaviours, I think, and some challenging decisions. I think we're starting to see this. I think some of the changes in terms of ESG requirements will start to put more of an expectation on companies to present a much more holistic view of how they're going about things, and that can only help. I think a lot of it comes from just setting an expectation at a market level.

I think was very interesting. I think, was it last year or the year— I keep forgetting about last year because basically nothing happened last year. Of course. It was probably the year before. But the Business Roundtable, that organization down in the States with the top 300 CEOs in the world that are a member of this club who came out and said, actually, forever we stood for shareholder value and we're now changing it in our Ts&Cs or in our memorandum of understanding that now it's not about stakeholder value anymore, it's about shareholder value. But that's really easy to say and really easy to get a couple of LinkedIn things up on and a bit of social media going. If they don't do it, there's no point in saying it, I guess.

No. Yeah, I think it was 2019 and I think it will take time, but I think just that did get a lot of press at the time, quite rightly. And I think that will start to filter down. There's also just this sense of trying to really understand the benefits at a holistic level of taking a much more broad approach to how the world works and the opportunities to create much more of a win-win-win solution, as Raj Sodhiya talks about, I think is really powerful as well. So I think the opportunities are there. I think we're going to have to keep chipping away at them. I think it's really interesting. I spent a lot of time talking to organizations about how they're going to respond to the pandemic they've been through and the opportunities they have to reimagine work. I think that provided this massive opportunity for people to really think differently about how work was getting done and presented all sorts of opportunity. But even with that, it's a bit like— trying to think of the analogy, but the pendulum was swinging towards it and we were creating this momentum, but we're so exhausted. People are so tired having gone through so much change that It's really hard to bring that momentum into actually thinking about what has to change. 'Cause when you think about how strangely work is constructed and how much of it could be changed, there's a lot of work to be done. And we still have to focus on our customers and we still have to deliver shareholder value. So I think it takes a very, you know, kind of quite courageous, quite well, high-level thinking leader to really realize the benefits of starting with employees. And whilst we know it's the right thing to do, when you put yourself in their shoes and understand all the different pressures they're under, you can then start to understand why it's hard to drive that forward. And that's why, you know, opportunities to talk about this stuff on podcasts and to write about this stuff is really important, just to continue to raise the awareness, I think.

Yeah, and it's a really interesting perspective. And I think that CEOs and CFOs and COOs were in a bit of a maelstrom already pre-last March. And when you take that maelstrom they were in already and apply on top of that the whole pandemic maelstrom as well, then to expect them to change in that moment is, is hard. But I think you're right. You know, for me, there is such an opportunity now to change. There was the analogy I've been using recently was one that I nicked off Kevin Empy from Work Matters, who was on the podcast a few episodes ago. That idea of the Japanese art of kintsugi, where they take a broken piece of pottery and they put it back together with glue that's got platinum in it or gold or silver. And what you end up with is a work of art, which is theoretically more beautiful than it was before it was finished. So the analogy being, from a world of work perspective, the way we worked before that bowl in many ways has been broken. Has been dropped on the floor. And as we come to put it back together again, however we do that, we do have an opportunity, I think, to make work better for people and in turn help to drive shareholder value by driving stakeholder value. So there's definitely something in that.

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But it's a beautiful segue into my next question, which is, of course, around hybrid working, because I still think, you know, and I feel as I've been saying this for ages, But it's been going on for ages and it will keep going on that people still haven't really, they're still struggling with what to do and how to do it and how do I make this work? So, I wonder from your perspective and that whole idea back to the thoughts that we had at the top about human leadership, how does that work in what's likely to be a really, very likely to be a hybrid future of work as we see it at the moment? What do leaders need to bring of that in order to be successful in that world?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think certainly the hybrid work question is high on everybody's mind, isn't it? And something that lots of people are talking about still and considering, so it's important to raise it. I think for me, the human leadership part of it is the key component to making hybrid work successful, and I see it as simply as that. And that, you know, it's probably one of those things that's worth digging into in a bit more detail though, because the, the sense I have is that for a hybrid work scenario to be successful, it's based on a number of principles. And one of those principles would be around kind of trusting people and ensuring that there's an appropriate level of empowerment and there's an adult-to-adult relationship and you're able to effectively collaborate with people and be very thoughtful about the time, and you're able to be very conscious of people's well-being, recognizing that you're not necessarily seeing them, and that can be a difficult thing to, to manage remotely. So these are all characteristics of being very understanding about other people, about being empathetic, about being, as I say, compassionate, and being a great collaborator and communicator, which are all human leadership skills. So I think leaders who were working well in the old world, the kind of building, have probably been able to adopt the hybrid working approaches or remote working approaches really well. The leaders that struggled previously are probably still struggling. So I think there are key characteristics that are going to make hybrid work successful.

And do you think it's amplified that struggle? Do you think where leaders weren't maybe so great when they were face-to-face in an office environment. Has this amplified that problem? Has this really shown them for what they are?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there are lots of examples. I was doing some work with a particular company at the moment. It's involving doing a review of their HR team and doing lots of business leader interviews to get stakeholder feedback. And in this particular organization, the majority of the business leaders are still in the office, and their teams are working remotely. They're not in a position where they feel that they can kind of role model that behavior and, you know, suggest to me that they're struggling to adapt to it. And so, yeah, I think that certainly is probably creating more of a kind of chasm between those two things. But perhaps more concerningly, I think it will result in those leaders who perhaps are uncomfortable leading in the hybrid world will be the proponents for getting people back into the office and back to, you know, the scenario we were just talking about. We'll miss the opportunity of really being able to reimagine work. There's some really interesting research I saw that Bruce Daisley, kind of a fellow podcaster of yours, pulled together around Australian workforces where interestingly, you know, kind of more— the more male-dominated an organization was, the more likely they were to be looking to bring people back into the office. And so there's these, you know, kind of traditional, kind of macho management styles, I'd suggest, which have struggled to adapt to this way of working. I can think about CEOs who would be used to kind of being in the office, opening their door, looking out, and picking the people they want to come in for a quick meeting, and spending the whole day doing stuff like that. So again, put yourself in their shoes. It's a big adjustment for how their day is being managed now. But these are the things we have to work through. And I think for us to get the benefit of hybrid and to maintain the flexibility that we all want as human beings, in our busy lives, then we have to kind of wrestle through some of these scenarios, I think.

I think it was interesting the other day I saw there were a couple of big famous ones. Was it Wells Fargo CEO came out and a couple of the other big US banks came out and said, oh no, we want everyone back in the office. And of course, Tim Cook there a week or two ago, who got a bit of a rocket back up his behind for saying that he wanted everyone back in the office. And 10,000 staff said, well, we don't want to come back in. Thank you very much, Mr. Cook. So it's just really interesting that that whole employee voice piece and maybe maybe verging on employee activism is getting very strong as well. And people are saying, we can work this way, we don't need to come back in. But I thought it was really interesting that it was one of the banking CEOs said, we have a lot of graduates coming in, we have a lot of younger staff, we have a lot of staff who learn on the job. And it was funny, it was only the other day I was chatting to a friend of mine and he said, when I think back to my first job, in sales, it was actually sitting at my desk in a little pod of 4 or 6, listening to what's going on around me. And then when Mark put down the phone, being able to say to Mark, oh Mark, listen, I just overheard you on that call there saying to the guy X, Y, and Z, why did you say that? And how does that work? And so that whole idea of learning in the moment in a hybrid world is maybe lost because you're not maybe sitting with your team. Because even when you're in the office, maybe you're in location-based zones depending on what it is you're doing. Maybe you're hot desking or maybe you're at home. Is that going to impact organizations, do you think, and how can they get around that?

Yeah, definitely. I think that's the beauty of hybrid. Hybrid doesn't mean that you're at home all the time or that you're at the office all the time. It's been very deliberate about where the work gets done, which I think provides an opportunity to be very, very thoughtful about the scenarios and different situations that people are in. I think the challenge is, you know, you've raised a couple of really good examples, the new employee coming into an organization, and I'm sure, you know, like I have, you've spoken to a number of people who've joined a company during this time and how challenging that's been for people. So once we're all vaccinated up and offices you know, are open to whatever extent they're going to be, then that provides an opportunity to be very thoughtful about your onboarding programs. Again, I was talking to a client yesterday and they were talking about the, the training program they have for people in their call center and how difficult that is to do remotely for exactly the same reason you gave. It's like, you know, people peering around the screen of their colleague next to them and, okay, that's how you do it. And that learning is really important. And I think all of that can be brought into an office environment. You probably want those people to be onboarding together where you can. But then there'll be other situations where hybrid— or sorry, working from home or another location, doesn't always have to be home— is going to be much more effective. So there's a beautiful compromise here and a beautiful sweet spot of having the, the best of both worlds that I think we need to leverage. But it's— and I've, you know, kind of done the work in, from a practical perspective, trying to create these sorts of environments as we did a lot of this work at RSA. It's really hard to do, and you have to think about lots of different scenarios. But again, a lot of it goes back to rather than providing a lot of control and guidelines and trying to deal with every scenario, is equip your leaders with the skills to kind of manage in this way. Give them the freedom, the autonomy, the kind of guide rails to manage it and let them go. And they'll do a great job. Trust them to do it.

Yeah, and that's been my take on this since the off, you know, and using a sporting analogy, paint the lines of the pitch, show them where the edges— show them where the edges of the pitch are, and then hand over the ball. Yeah, because no two teams are going to score goals in the same way. No, even, even the same team is not going to score goals in the same way two Saturdays in a row. So, you know, just hand over the ball and just say, look, you know what has to get done, we're empowering you to get it done, we hired you because you're great and you've got the skills that you need. We're going to talk about people who don't have the skills that they need in a second. But for now, let's assume they have the skills that they need and just let them off at it. But of course, relinquishing that control for organizations that have that hierarchical, top-down, command and control structure and culture is really hard. Not just actually from a cultural point of view, but also from a structural point of view. It's going to be very, very hard for them.

Yeah, for sure. And I think there's also scenarios where leaders don't want that. They don't want that control. They've quite enjoyed being able to say, well, HR said I couldn't do this. So the questions around that become quite fundamental in terms of embedding it in the right way.

HR said.

Yeah, you can tell. Sorry. The HR victim mindset is still there.

You'll never shake that.

No. Never shake it. No, it's cost me a lot of therapy, but still.

Something you touched off there that I wanted to just have a little chat about was the whole idea of onboarding. I was on a webinar yesterday, Denison, who do the organizational culture surveys. I was on their webinar and it was actually Dan Denison who was running the survey. And he said the culture surveys they've been running over the past 18 months, because of course what you're hearing from leaders is, well, hybrid working and remote working really has damaged our culture in the organization and the water cooler moments and all that stuff. Dan Denison said, actually, In the surveys that we've done over the pandemic, what we've seen is cultures actually grow stronger.

Right.

Which I thought was very interesting. But the one thing he did say, which aligns perfectly with what you mentioned there and actually with a story that I heard from another friend of mine in Ireland who runs an IT consultancy, was new joiners are really struggling. He said when you look at the engagement levels across organizations, people who've joined the organization within the past 12 months have the lowest levels of engagement. And alongside that, my pal that runs the IT consultancy said that they hired quite a senior sales guy, senior sales director into the organization remotely and kind of assumed that, well, he's a senior guy, he's been around the block, he'll be okay. He lasted 8 weeks.

Wow. Yeah.

Before he went. Now the cost, the hassle, the time, the everything that they're now gonna suffer as a result of that, it strikes me that onboarding is something that actually we've not really been very good at anyway. Here's the book of policies, here's the book of procedures, here's what you can and can't do, here's where to get your tax-free train pass. We've not been great at onboarding before. So what do organizations do you think need to do from an onboarding perspective in this new world to make sure that those new joiners are bringing the excitement, are bringing the new blood, the new ideas, the new perspectives, are looking at things differently, and they're not crashing and burning from an engagement perspective in the first 12 months.

Yeah, I know, it's really, yeah, I think it's a couple of things relating to the employee experience, which have been a real challenge to adapt. I mean, the onboarding thing always makes me laugh, because as an HR person, I don't feel I ever cracked onboarding in any organization. It was almost like that constant project that took from one organization to another. It's almost like gonna end up being on my tombstone. He never completed an onboarding project. Um, but yeah, I think there's also the, the talent acquisition part of it is a key part of successful onboarding, and that's been a difficult thing to, uh, kind of transition as well. So I was reading some research the other day just in terms of thinking about very high-level executive recruitment and the, the roles that boards traditionally would play in hiring, uh, your members of a senior leadership team, and that would involve apparently a lot of been recruited for those roles, but a lot of dinners and lots of kind of connection with people to make sure there's a good fit, and none of that's been able to happen. So processes are being delayed, um, and also I think, you know, all sorts of levels probably not being very effective in getting information over in terms of what the job actually entails, and that can result in some kind of reaction and shock from people when they actually end up in the role. So I think these things can be broken down and thinking through exactly what you do to ensure that you're giving people a full sense of what they're doing. I remember back in Sky, we had contact centers with 6,500 people. We were very diligent in our recruitment process to make sure people understood what the roles entailed. We had videos and we showed them screens of the different technology they were working with. We gave them examples of of how customer calls went, and sometimes they were great, sometimes they weren't so great, and really tried to give people a full sense of what the role actually entailed, meeting with colleagues, et cetera. So I think you can still do all of that stuff, and you can still do it remotely. I think when we do start to open up, it will be easier, and those things will be things that should be done in person, but it's deconstructing the processes you have, and it feels like we had a whole set of often kind of very manual, almost analog processes and we've tried to make them digital, rather than actually stepping back and thinking through the whole experience and, you know, sort of like customer journey mapping almost. And we do a lot of— you can do a lot of mapping around that from an employee experience perspective and think, well, how can we adapt this? What outcomes are we looking for? And approaching it in a very kind of systematic way, I think, is important.

Yeah, I think the question for me, from an onboarding perspective, and I love that idea of the kind of the meeting with people beforehand and that kind of thing, because is it's that idea of pre-onboarding, I guess.

Yeah.

So that actually when they arrive at your front door to join on day one, they're already fairly well indoctrinated. And I think the question that we're missing when it comes to an onboarding, from an onboarding perspective, is how is it you want the person to feel? So after they've gone through whatever that onboarding looks like, whether it be face-to-face, whether it be online, whether it be one session or nine, how do you want that person to feel Do you want them to feel excited? Do you want them to feel motivated? Do you want them to feel passionate? Do you want them to feel, "Oh my God, this is totally the right job for me"? If you go and work for Zappos, the shoe company, do you maybe want them to think, "Actually, you know what? This isn't the place for me." And then you get your €1,000 or €2,000 from the CEO because you've decided, "Actually, I don't think I fit here. So I've seen the culture. I don't think I like it. I don't think it's for me. That's not that it's bad, it's just not for me, and I'm off. I'm out of here." How do you want people to feel? That's a question that I don't think we ask enough. And if we did, we wouldn't make them sit through a day or a day and a half of this is what to do and this is what not to do in this organization.

Would we? Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, but I think this ties in even to some of the practical parts of onboarding, the forms that need to be filled in and just making all of those things efficient. Because if you're an organization that talks about digitalizing everything for the company and back to thinking about customer experience, but your employee experience involves you filling in your name and address with a pen and a piece of paper 6 times to ensure that they've got your right beneficiaries, then that isn't really giving you the right impression. So how you feel after that, you think, okay, that was a pretty smooth process. I liked how that worked. I think it's a really good point.

We are totally a digital company. Here is a clipboard and a pen and paper.

Yes, exactly.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.com. Sharingchange.ie for more. Let's talk a little bit about when leaders aren't quite so good, because I think we've both probably worked with and for leaders that maybe weren't.

Not me, Scott. They've always been great. Always. Let me just be clear.

And of course, we know that one of the key tenets of human leadership is humility. You totally tick that box. So yeah, there are definitely leaders out there who end up in roles, and we know this, who are really good technically, but from a people perspective, they're just not at the match. They're just not there. And what do you do in that situation? If I'm a listener listening to this podcast, I'm a CEO of an organization or an MD, and I've got 100 people working for me, and I've got this one leader who just isn't stepping up to the plate, who just isn't that human leader, who is a bit of a a bollocks, if you like, you know, from an Irish— if I was living in Ireland, which I am, you know, but they're known and, oh, that's just how Jimmy is, you know, he's always been like that. To me, that's not acceptable. How do you sort that out?

I saw a term a couple of days ago for those leaders we're talking about now. It's boss hole. They're a boss hole.

A boss hole. I love that.

That's quite good. So yeah, I mean, I think it's having a bit of a systems approach to it, I think, in terms of how you identify, how you deal with those situations, because there's no silver bullet here. And I think making sure you've got the measurement in place or the opportunity to identify who those leaders are is, I think, an important starting point. And that could be through poll surveys. In the old days, it used to be by, old-fashioned as it seems, kind of talking to people and kind of walking about and kind of just getting a sense of how things are. There's kind of always a way. And I think if you, as an HR person, it's not just about HR here, but let's start there. As an HR person, if you have that kind of curious mindset and a bit of intuition around what's working and what's not, then you can identify those potholes, let's say, relatively easily. But as you say, once you've identified them, it's then, you know, kind of what do you do? And, and I'm a very optimistic person by nature. I believe in people having potential. So I think the starting point is really thinking, how can you provide that person with some support? And there's so many things you can do. I think leadership development programs are great, but you're trying to provide a solution to so many different circumstances and so many different scenarios and so many different We're all individuals. So slightly biased in saying this as somebody who spends a fair bit of time coaching leaders, but coaching can be a really powerful way of quickly, in many cases, getting some good traction with leaders, helping them build self-awareness. But being able to do it in very much an individual way is really important. And through those conversations, you often get to a situation where you realize that somebody doesn't actually want to be a leader. It kind of drains them of so much kind of energy and it's not the route they wanted to go and they found themselves falling into it. Kind of think about the identity they needed to have, whatever it might be. So I think certainly trying to identify people, focus on building some self-awareness, I think is a really important step for me. And I think from there you can then provide the skills, you can start to really ensure people are getting the support they need, but then it ties into the whole system. What system do you have to kind of reinforce those behaviors and to recognize them and make sure the right people are being promoted and being rewarded? And if you don't do some of those things consistently, then a leadership philosophy, a kind of good leadership philosophy, can quite quickly become undone. And I've seen that happen. It's the performance calibration meetings where a leader is being rewarded more for the what than the how. And we're kind of stepping over the bad behavior because they've got the classic scenario of they've got the good customer relationships that we rely on or whatever it might be. And just that, that small thing, or what seems like a, you know, that— or that not small thing, but that unique example can have such big ramifications. So you have to be so diligent in this work. And that's why I, you know, I have so much admiration for HR people who, who really, um, take that seriously and play that role. But it has to be a— it's not kind of just HR's job. It has to be the, you know, the accountability of a leadership team to drive that forward. And if you get to that situation as HR person, then you've done 'You've done some great work. Frankly, better work than I was able to do. I rarely got to that situation.

I often had to be the person with the conscience to maintain the culture.' And I think the trouble with those, those assholes is not just the damage that they can do to their direct teams and their peers, but culturally the damage they do in an organization where there's people looking at them because maybe they're senior and they're going, 'Oh my God, is this the kind of place that we work in that puts up with that just because he's 'cause he's got the good client relationships. Well, you know what? I'm out of here, 'cause I'm not putting up with that. And of course, that damages the culture, it damages your ability to retain talent, and actually then ironically damages the customer, because you haven't got really good talent in your organization. So the guy that was protecting the customer and selling is actually damaging an organization to a point where it can't serve that customer anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. It seems so obvious, doesn't it?

Thinking about Back to the hybrid work thing very briefly, and just conscious of time actually before we wrap up. One of the things that I've been saying for ages is that what we've tried to do is, and I think some of the things that, one of the things that has undone organizations' ability to be really effective during hybrid from a people perspective is, or sorry, during the pandemic from a people perspective, is the whole idea of stuffing square pegs into round holes. It's trying to still do the team meeting the way we've always done the team meeting with 8 people on the screen, like we would've been around a table, and we can do a team meeting that way, which we can't because we know that there's none of the side conversations and you can't really talk over each other on Zoom or Teams because everyone gets cut off. You don't know when to jump in and it's not quite as fluid. But we haven't found a better way of doing that stuff. And it strikes me that if hybrid's gonna work really well, we need to find better ways of doing some of those things of putting round pegs in round holes and square pegs in square holes. So I just wonder from your perspective, what have you seen that's working really well from a remote perspective, or where you've seen maybe hybrid organizations, what's working well from a hybrid perspective as companies look forward?

Yeah, I think it's really important because I think unless we crack those things, we won't be able to sustain some of the benefits of this new approach. And we will be dragging ourselves kicking and screaming back to the office and the 9-to-5 routines that I'd argue weren't working for people if you just look at overall engagement results. I think there's a couple things I'd suggest. I think one is thinking about flexibility rather than necessarily hybrid work in the context of place. It feels like we also need to think about kind of time, think about how work gets done, and also think to an extent who does the work. I think there's all sorts of elements of flexibility that we can build on, uh, that, you know, this concept of it's about where I go to work work, which are going to bring more benefit. So, if somebody wants to be doing their emails at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning, and that means that they're kind of logging off at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, then what's stopping us doing that? It goes back to kind of the trust and autonomy. So, I think there's a concept there that some organizations are starting to think through. I think on place, in terms of the where work gets done. Again, it's rather than focusing on your job, I think it's focusing on the work. So this idea of democratizing work and thinking about the tasks and the activities. Those tasks and activities are going to need different situations. So some things are quiet time, I'm doing it on my own. Some things I'm going to need to collaborate with people. Depending on what that collaboration is, you then have a choice. It's like, well, I probably want to do this collaboration with other people. Therefore probably want to be in an office. So I'm going to do that on Wednesday, and I know that Jack, Fred, and Jenny are going to be in the office that day as well, so that's going to kind of work well for us. I heard this really simple quote the other day, the idea that the office is going to become the new offsite. So we'll have to be very deliberate about that time in the office to make sure that we're using it very effectively and making sure we're getting value from that time. And if you do that very successfully, and it's not, I think we have this romantic notion of what being in the office was like, and we're all kind of collaborating, but in reality, we were getting frustrated with the noise levels of other people. We were sitting with our headphones on. We were getting frustrated with the smell of the person next to me just heated up yesterday's curry. So this kind of romantic notion we had of work, I think, isn't actually true. There's lots of bad things about the office that we need to kind of recreate and create a much more enhanced experience. So there's a, you know, happy to send you the link if it's helpful for listeners, but there was this really cool thing I saw from an organization where they've kind of literally created 8 or 9 different categories of activities and using it as, again, as more of a guideline, not a set of rules around, you know, based on this activity, this is probably where you should think about doing it, which I think can be really helpful. And at the end of the day, you know, I think it goes back to trust. And focusing on outputs, not inputs. And if you have those two things in mind, I think hybrid could be really successful.

Yeah, love that. And yes, please do send that on and I will link that in the show notes after the— when the podcast goes live. I love that. As a closing thought, I love that. And that whole idea that actually that whole kind of dreamy think back, the, oh, this is how the office used to be. And it's all fantastic and wonderful. Yes, it was about connection, Yes, it was about people, but also there was, you're right, there was a lot of times that we went off to a quiet space to make a phone call or just literally sat typing a document for 4 hours. And you don't need to be in an office to do that. And you haven't been talking to anybody and you haven't been coworking with anybody. So absolutely being a little more deliberate in what you're going to the office for, why you're going there, and bringing along the people to help with that is absolutely key. So yeah, completely agree. Mark, listen, Listen, conscious of time, thank you very much for being on the podcast today. I really appreciate you taking the time. Where can people find out more about you if they want to find out more?

Yeah, thanks, Scott. It's been great. Really enjoyed the conversation as well. I have a website, so goatradioproject.com. So feel free to look me up there, or LinkedIn. It'd be great to connect with people.

Brilliant stuff. All right, listen, thanks for your time, and you have a great day.

Thanks, Scott. You too.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders in our podcast, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.