Episode 22 | HELEN TYNAN | Director of People Operations (Ireland), Google

Welcome to Face Forward, the inspiring change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Welcome to this edition of Face Forward. When you look at lists of places that people want to work and some of the brands that are really up there in terms of, you know, you ask people, you know, what brand would you like to work for? Google tends to come out kind of near the top of the list, if not the top of the list. Many, many times out of 10. So it's brilliant that I'm here today back in Google Docs, which when I lived here in Ringsend maybe 15 years ago, this didn't exist. This whole, all the buildings around here just weren't here. And now of course it's the who's who of global tech firms. So it's brilliant here to be back in Google Docs at Google with Helen Tynan, the Director of People Operations. Helen, thanks for coming on.

Very welcome. Delighted to be here.

Brilliant. So we're going to talk about some things. We're going to talk a little bit about Google rework. And we're going to talk a little bit about leadership in Google. Because actually— and I've been in here a few times. So I've seen the amazing kitchens and the amazing restaurant and the amazing facilities and the gym and all that stuff. But actually, I'm not convinced that that's why people want to work here. I actually think it's something more than that. And I'm pretty convinced— and we'll talk about this— that leadership is at the very core of that and actually just getting the best from people. Now, if that's not a leading question, I don't know what is.

It's OK. I'm totally with you, though. You didn't have to lead me, because that's where I was going to go.

Before we kick into that, why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself, where you've come from, and your role here in Google?

OK. So let me go very quickly backwards. I'm from Cork originally, grew up in Cork, and started when I studied to be a primary school teacher. And I was a primary school teacher at the age of 20 of 43 4-year-old boys in Cork City.

Oh my God.

I know, I know. And I realized within a very short period of time that it actually wasn't the right career for me.

But really? That massively surprises me.

Yeah, I know, I know. Yeah, I think most children in Ireland had a lucky escape. My children tell me I would not have made a good teacher. But I went back to college. I taught for a year, went back to college, and I did a postgrad in computer science. And then got into the sort of technology arena. I started in a software company, worked there for about 2 years and discovered the whole area of HR. Had never heard about it, knew nothing about it. At that time there weren't really careers in HR. And then I went back to college again and studied HR. So within a very short period of time, having had 3 very different careers, I had landed in the one that was for me forever. And so since then I've worked in HR for over 20 years And I've worked for a number of predominantly US multinationals, mainly in the tech space. I worked for General Electric for a while, but I worked for Amdahl Fujitsu, Dell, Oracle. And then about 8 years ago, came here to Google. So in the HR space for a long time, and mainly with US multinationals. Quite a lot of similarities between a lot of US multinationals, and then they all have their differences. But as I say, here about 8 years. Currently Director of People Operations, and my main focus is, I have two client groups, one is the Dublin site, which we are now nearly about 8,000 in Ireland, about half of whom are full-time employees of our own, and then we also do a lot of work through temps and through vendors and contracting firms. And then I also have another job where I look after the finance community across all of EMEA, or all of Europe, Middle East, and and Africa. So I move between those two roles on a daily basis.

OK, interesting. And it's been an amazing journey for Google in Ireland. And I think I was reading this morning that at the tail end of last year, you had somewhere in the region of 7,000 staff.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's come up really quickly.

Yes, it has, it has. And as I say, we're actually at about 8,000 now. Half of that is employees, and the other half is through partner firms. We were only 15 years old. We had our 15th birthday in November last year and had fabulous celebrations. But many of the leaders who started here started in, you know, sort of leased offices, small space, maybe 10, 15, and then growing to about 100. And we haven't had— like some companies, you know, they'll add or they'll announce— they're announcing 2,000 jobs somewhere. Ours has been slow and steady throughout. So every year we add a few more hundred. But we hire hundreds because a lot of people join here from all over the world and stay with us for a number of years, and then we export talent to other sites around the world. So the traffic moves through, but we're always hiring here.

Talk to me a little bit, before we get into the meat and veg of the interview, talk to me a little bit about the culture of Google. It's always struck me as really interesting that you have so many people from so many different walks of life, so many nationalities, so many different cultures. What happens when they all come together?

I remember somebody coming to talk to us once from another company in Ireland. I can't even remember the name of the company at the moment, and they wanted to know what we were doing to actually help international employees fit into our culture. And I was saying, we don't have an Irish culture, we actually have an international culture. So we have About 75% of our population are international, only 25% are Irish, because we support countries all over the world and we need people with their languages, we need people with knowledge of local markets. And so it's just, we say it's a little bit like walking through sort of what you'd imagine would be the United Nations. Like, you know, one minute you're walking through a team and everybody's speaking French, the next minute you're walking through an area, everybody's speaking Italian, next one is German, the next one is Russian, you know, so that— and then when you come together in somewhere like a restaurant, you have this mixture going on everywhere with the languages surrounding you all the time. And it's not just the languages, it's the flavors of culture that people bring with them. So, you know, you see flags flying, or, you know, there'll be a holiday in a particular country, it'll be celebrated. When something like the World Cup is on, people are wearing jerseys and all the matches are on. It used to be that if Ireland was playing in a World Cup or in a European Cup, you'd have to play those matches. We have to play every single match because every country is represented here.

So no work is done for about 8 weeks?

Well, they drift in and out because if you're Russian, you might not be interested in the English football playing. So they just watch the matches that they're interested in and they keep their work going at the same time.

And how do you avoid cultural clashes? Because I can imagine, you know, with some cultures, they're going to be very, very direct. I don't like this piece of work. I don't like the way you've written this. Whereas other cultures, perhaps British or Irish cultures, might be less direct in their approach and like to kind of pussyfoot around an issue. How do you avoid that becoming an issue?

Well, you know, it's funny. I think it's a bit like we were talking earlier about parenting. It's a little bit like if your children are brought up in a very insular environment, they learn those behaviors and so maybe have a little bit more difficulty adapting to the world, our employees have always worked in this international environment and so you become more accepting of each other, you become more accepting of difference in general and so you don't expect that everything in your culture that comes from your nationality or your upbringing is going to be the same as everybody else's because you're encountering those differences every day and you're learning those skills. I mean, that's not to say and not to be naive that there aren't difficulties occasionally, of course there are difficulties from time to time, but you learn how to intervene in those situations where you need to, and most people when faced with feedback that maybe one of their behaviours doesn't sit as comfortably with another culture will learn from that and will adapt accordingly. They're quite, they're versatile, people are versatile when you give people feedback or when they encounter a situation that doesn't go their way because of something they said or did, they learn to adapt that so that it works more smoothly the next time.

And I guess there's a huge amount of common sense. You know, when you're working in a mix of cultures, you're employing people who are smart enough to know this is the right thing to do, this is perhaps the wrong thing to do, perhaps I need to, maybe everybody, we all need to change our approach ever so slightly in order to meet the needs of the wider team and all their cultures.

Yeah, and it is a huge amount of common sense, but you know, something that's innate in you. You don't actually even notice that you're doing something sometimes until it's pointed out. I mean, the other thing I'd say is we have a lot of people who are early in their career. We've got a lot of very junior positions here in Google in Dublin. And so sometimes that learning is magnified in that first period. So what I would say is we may encounter more of those teething problems or learning curves for people who are learning, coming straight out of college, as to all the adjustments they've got to make for operating in a professional environment. When you join here directly from college, you know, from walking around here, it has a feeling of sort of a university campus. You know, it's very informal, people are dressed very casually. So sometimes it can take a little bit of adjustment for people to realize this is still a workplace, it is still a professional environment, and so what goes in college may not go here. So there's still learning opportunities. Even with Common Sense, people have to grow up and learn in their day-to-day interactions. And their daily work.

Okay, and I think we might talk about feedback later because we were again chatting about that just before we kicked the interview off around being able to give direct feedback and having those hard conversations. So that's something we might come back to. But actually it's a nice segue, I think, into what do you believe in Google makes a leader a great leader? What are some of the things that pop up?

For me, as I look at some of the leaders that I think are most successful and are most fabulous, because, you know, you work with so many different leaders every day. And I boil it down to a few different things. For me, the first one is this whole ability to be both a really strategic thinker and also get right down into the detail. And in some ways they feel like polar opposites. But a really good leader can do both because you have to be able to see the big picture. You have to be able to, to see the strategy and what's needed in a particular situation. But you also have to be able to be close enough to what's going on to be able to dive into the detail, to be able to spot when something is going slightly off course. You know, when you're being presented to— not to just look at the glossy slides, but to be able to really tease through and say, actually, this area is weak, and to keep nudging it until you actually get to the bottom of it, to realize, is it a weakness, or actually, no, that's okay. So that ability to go big but also to go small. And I would say the other thing is that whole ability to connect with people, that human touch. Like, you can have really great leaders who are incredibly cerebral, but they just don't connect with people. There's something missing. So for me, the great leaders also have the ability to connect with people at all levels. So whether it's frontline, the most junior employee, to their peers, to managing up, it's all of that, but actually real personal connections. Not just, I went on a great training course, so I know X, Y, and Z, but actually it's authentic. They really form relationships. And so through that, you pick up things that you don't in just sort of clinical professional interactions. And oftentimes those leaders who have those personal connections, they pick up vibes just from walking around. You know, you'll have a leader who will arrive into a room going, you know, I was talking to somebody in the coffee chat and I'm getting a sense that X, Y, and Z isn't working. And then the last area I would say is that whole area of communications, critically important. You can have this amazing vision, you can have this amazing strategy, but if you can't communicate it in a simple, clear, engaging way, it's sort of lost. It remains a strategy in a PowerPoint deck, or it remains, you know, something that's written down somewhere as opposed to something that's it's got life breathed into it and that people actually want to follow it. So that whole ability to communicate is that thing that inspires followership, makes people want to follow a leader. Those are the, I would say, the three areas. That whole area of big picture and small detail, the second one of connection to people, and the third one of communicating in a way that people want to follow you.

I think what's lovely about all of those is that they are massively intertwined. Because for me, in order to be able to communicate well, you need to know what the strategy is, but you also need to know how that translates in your team, for your team specifically, into what it is day-to-day we have to do, and paint that red thread for them or that picture to show them the role that they're playing in helping the senior team deliver the corporate strategy. When you might be down here in the bowels of an office in Ireland, 1,000 miles away from San Francisco and the West Coast of the States, the States. What's the part that we are playing in helping to make that happen? Again, that whole idea of connecting with people, for me, is about, for a leader, they're so important in communicating. When I think about from an internal comms perspective, it's easy to say, "Oh yeah, well, we've done the communication. We've thrown it up on the intranet," or, "We've done a phone call," or, "We did a town hall." But actually, what you're sending out, for me, with a corporate intranet message is a very vanilla —because it has to be, because it's going to impact people in different ways—a very, very vanilla communication, which actually ends up not really meaning anything to anybody because it has to be so vague and generic. And it's the leader's role then to bring that to life for people. What does that mean for us? So, so critical. Interesting when you talk about the connections with people and you've got those kind of cerebral type people, who I always think are the ones that, because often organizations don't have dual career paths, because we don't have, if you're a really good lawyer, then just do lawyering. We're not going to wait until you get to a certain point in your career and then say, "Well, you've got to this point in your career. Now you have to have a team." Because actually you might just be a really good lawyer. Let's just leave you at that. Let's get the best from you that way. In Google, how does that work? Do you find that people are just left to be subject matter experts? Does everyone get a team? How does that work?

So we would have parallel career paths. It's possible to become quite senior while still being what we would call an individual contributor. Because particularly, actually, if you take what Google is best known for, which is the whole engineering space, like, an amazing engineer can go the whole way as an individual contributor because we need the brilliance in terms of developing our products or in terms of coding or working on products that are already existing. In some jobs there comes a stage at which the maximum level from an individual contributor is reached, and sometimes the people management track can go more senior, but you're always trying to make sure that for people who are brilliant they can go the way that suits them, because you're right, there's nothing worse than somebody who is brilliant at something starting to play outside that space just because they want to get promoted and going into people management. What you want is people who are people managers are passionate about managing people. They love managing people and they're the people who are best at it. And you do see occasionally people will go into people management and then realise, this isn't what I wanted to do, it's just taken me away from my real passion, and they will move back again. So we do look after both. Okay, great.

And I just find it interesting that, you know, back to the lawyer one, you know, someone's a really good lawyer and they're told, well, you now have to be a people manager. I don't think there's ever in the history of time been an instance where somebody said, listen, you're a really good people manager. You should now be a lawyer.

I know that's true. Yeah, yeah, so if the reverse doesn't apply—

It doesn't carry. No, not at all. So when we think about, again, from the outside, you would see Google as being a very, very engaging place to work with a very engaged staff. What's the role of leader in helping to communicate that engaged workforce?

So in terms of communicating to the workforce, I would say it's critical. I mean, it's one of the things that I've called out as one of the more important attributes for a leader is this ability to communicate to employees. Like employees, people need to follow somebody. And if a leader is a great leader, they will follow them. But if the leader isn't a great leader, they'll follow somebody else because you do need to follow somebody. You need to be listening to somebody or taking your direction from somebody. So leaders who can connect and inspire that followership that I talked about, hugely, hugely important. I'm trying to think specifically what you're asking me about here.

In terms of, I suppose, what I'm looking for is what are some of the specific things that leaders would be doing day to day to help create that engaging place for their teams to be.

Okay, okay, perfect. So the first is you talked about where there is big messages, how do you actually take those messages and link them to a company? Because when we talk about leaders, we'll talk about leaders at all level. They could be a frontline manager right up to a senior vice president. Every single level, they're leading. They're leading people, they're leading projects, and they're inspiring people to follow them. So the day-to-day communications, the day-to-day translation of big picture and strategy into what's important, the part that they play in it. And feedback is a hugely important communication task that a leader has. So where they observe something that an employee is doing that's really, really good, giving them that feedback so it reinforces that good behaviour. But equally, when they see something that isn't working for the employee or that isn't appropriate or that is leading to poor outcomes from a business perspective, actually having that ability to be able to communicate that in a way that will engage and develop an employee, because that's critical. The workforce of today, they don't stay with you forever. It's not like 20, 30 years ago where people got jobs and stayed with them for lifetimes. If you're not engaging employees, there are so many different opportunities for them that they will just take off and leave. And particularly this generation, there's an awful lot of feedback about millennials and how they crave development and they crave feedback. They may not want it in a tough way, but they want it in an honest way. So being able to deliver feedback in a way that shows that you care about the person, you're not just having a bad day and throwing out a bad message, you actually care about this person, you want them to develop, you have a piece of feedback that you think will help them develop, just giving it to them straight. You know, sometimes we couch development and feedback Going back to the whole communication side of things, like when people are not good communicators or where they're not confident as leaders or as managers, they can end up waffling in feedback in a way that you've gone through all of this angst to give the feedback. It hasn't even landed. The person hasn't even heard it properly. So that skill of being able to speak simply and honestly to somebody is a huge part of a leader's role in engagement. And in communication, very important.

I'm interested, we might explore the millennial thing a wee bit because I'm really interested in that because I've kind of, I'm slightly on the fence on it that I don't know whether it's a case of the tail wagging the dog that we've decided that the people coming out of college now for this particular period of time, we're going to call them millennials and what they stand for are these things and how we manage them are these things and Don't be thinking that they'll stay in your company for any longer than 2 years because they're in, they'll get what they want, and then they're gone again. And I just wonder how much of a thing millennials, millennialism is.

I don't even know if that's a word.

Actually, I just invented a word. How much of a thing that is or how much of it is that society or academia or business has created this this thing that they're then just kind of following. They're slightly delivering. What's your take on that? Because you see them all the time, I guess, because they're probably a very, very big chunk of your workforce.

They are, yeah. So millennials, as per the generational definitions, would be a huge portion of our workforce. And actually, we're very like you as well. We're sort of on the fence. In general, we have a specialist department in Google called People People Ops Analytics, and they do a lot of our research and our— so they'd be the research arm for our people operations team, which would be our HR team. And their position is that they don't really subscribe to the idea of generational research and particularly around millennials. And there's a couple of different reasons. The main part of what all the attributes that are— that we that are ascribed to millennials, when you actually look at them, generally they're more to do with the phase of life as opposed to be this generation are going to hold them for life. So you're absolutely right. A lot of the things that we're talking about, you know, they hugely value work-life balance. They want feedback. They have options. They'll move around. A lot of that has to do with that whole liberation of coming out of college, first job. We all had great ideas about work-life balance. When we started work, and then responsibilities kicked in, in terms of, you know, you maybe got more senior, you got sucked into projects, you started to go after promotions. There's lots of different things at different phases of life that you particularly want or you need. A lot talks, I mentioned it earlier, around millennials needing an awful lot of feedback. But if you actually look at that, that's true of every generation. It doesn't matter if you're 90 or if you're 19, actually getting feedback in a respectful way that's going to develop you, well, that's just a great thing. It's a great way to manage anybody. As you say, you talk about the fact that they won't stay with you for life. That's more got to do with the change in society in that there aren't jobs for life. There aren't things like defined benefit pensions that hold on to you in a company to try and get you to stay so that you'll have your 40 years' service to get your full pension.

Or no other jobs to go to.

Or no other jobs to go to.

So you stay in your job for 40 years because God forbid you chuck it in.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And then it's also society has changed. If you look look at things like the world opening up, people travelling much younger. So the idea of going to work in Argentina for 2 years, why wouldn't you? Whereas that wouldn't have been on the cards maybe 50 years ago for people thinking. So as I say, we would be more aligned to your way of thinking, which is there's a lot of interesting stuff in the millennial research, but interesting in a way that maybe paints pictures of society and society at different phases of life as opposed to a group of people who were born born in this window of time.

I think we probably all exhibited some of those kind of those millennial generation things when we all went into our first jobs. I remember I was actually at a friend's 50th recently, and we had met when I worked in Apple. That was my first job when I came out of college in London. And his now wife worked there as well. So we were all a group of friends, and it's now kind of 30 years later nearly. And she says— we were sitting having a drink before everyone arrived at the party— she said, Gosh, you know, it's just so nice to see how you've grown into your confidence.

So you obviously were extremely confident back there, which is a very nice way of saying it.

It was just hilariously harsh. I think she meant, I think she may have meant confident in kind of inverted commas. For listeners, I'm doing that thing with my fingers. Tell me a little bit about a leader's role during change. Big organizations go through change all the time, whether that be a change of a change of strategy. You guys in Google are introducing new products all the time, and there are products rolling off. What's the role of— when it comes to really difficult change, what's the role of a leader in that situation?

I mean, again, hugely important. You go back to what we talked about, actually being able to articulate it in a simple way that's relevant for the particular team, particularly if the change is broader than their team, what it means for them. I think being able to paint the picture of the opportunity, why we're going through that change and why what will happen at the end of the change is better than what we have now, and exciting people to go along with it. Because change is difficult. I mean, one of the things we're really lucky with here in Google is we go through change so often. People, like teams change structure, as you mentioned. Products change. We go through them so often that we actually have a workforce that are incredibly agile around change and do tend to move terribly quickly. But it can be difficult depending on how wedded you are to it. So particularly if it is around change of your peers or who your manager is going to be, people get very attached to the people that they work with. So making sure that people understand it, that they're given support as they go through it, making sure that we're painting the picture of where we're going to. These are all really important elements of change. I remember when I started working in the tech industry, it would be that when there was like an upgrade to a software package that you were using, everything would pause and you'd go on a training course to learn the new features of whether it was WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Word or any of those. That's a very long time ago. Interesting. I know, yeah. Most of your listeners won't even know what that is. But you'd go on a training course for an hour to be updated on the new features. Whereas now, you know, and I know, you're using your smartphone and you look and you go, 'Oh, that button's in a different place. I'll have to play around with this a little bit.' So as a society, we're more used to this constant change and to figuring it out on the go. And so, as I say, our employees, our managers, they're used to it. But that doesn't mean to say that as leaders we shouldn't pay attention to it. We need to be thinking through it. We need to be thinking through all of the individuals and how they're likely to react to it, anticipating it and giving it enough time, making sure we give enough time that we're constantly present and available to answer questions. That's an important role for a leader.

And I think that, as you say, that present, being present and answering questions is for me the absolute crux of leadership during change, being there, being able to say, to run into a room and say, we're changing, and then run away again and lock yourself in your office, which you do hear about. Yeah, yeah. Albeit it's a bit of a stretch to the other end of the spectrum.

It sounds farcical, but in this day and age, it could be that you're just about to hop on a plane to go somewhere, and so you announce it with the nicest possible way. And the reality is what you should do is you should delay a change until you're actually going to be there, because people absorb it. It's only in the days afterwards that you start to hear the real questions, or you start to notice whether this is landing well or not. Whether you need to do more intervention. So being around and being present is actually a hugely important hygiene factor. It really is. Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about who some of your leadership role models are.

So I don't have one overall leader that I would think was absolutely amazing, um, but I'd have taken bits from people throughout the years, because I, I think actually one of the things that's I think we mentioned it earlier in passing. What's hugely important for a leader is to be authentic. So to actually find somebody and to come away and start mimicking them and everything, it's never going to be you. You're never going to be able to keep that up. You've got to actually— everything that you demonstrate as a leader has to be authentic. People just spot it. People can smell fakes, you know, 100 feet away. If I think about role models who have inspired me, I love a quote by Martin Luther King, 'If I cannot do great things, then I can do little things in a great way.' I think that's hugely important actually, and particularly in my line of work in HR or people operations, you know, the little things that you do that impact individual people, they're hugely important and they say so much more about you as a leader than, you know, standing up on a stage in front of hundreds of people. That's not it's not the stuff that defines you as a leader, it's how you treat people as individuals. So I really like that as a mantra and it keeps me true to myself and sane. I actually think that our Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, what I really like about him, and this was before he was Taoiseach, I'd listen to him on the radio, he'd just answer the question and he'd answer it in a way, whether it was going to be popular or not. And so he got that reputation of being honest and a straight talker. And again, I think that's hugely important. If you're standing at something like a town hall or an all-hands and people are asking you questions, it may not be a comfortable topic or a popular topic, but answering it straight or telling people that you can't answer it, as opposed to coming out with sort of corporate speak or spin and getting around it, like, again, people can smell that stuff. So for me, that straight-talking part of a leader is hugely important, and it would have been something that I, as a I would have admired in the Taoiseach before he became Taoiseach. And I think a lot of people picked up on it, actually. I think there's a lot of people who talked about why he would make a great leader. I know this one is going to sound really odd, but I look at Donald Trump, and I think one of the things that he has done that a lot of politicians and a lot of leaders could take note of is stuff that he said during his election campaign. He is at pains to show that he meant to do it and that he was going to follow through on it.

The wall being a prime example.

Exactly, and you may hate the policies on it, but what has resonated with people is he's a man of his word. He's saying what he set out in his stall is what he's going after. Whereas a lot of things that you hear about in election campaigns, you're listening and you're thinking, that's never going to fly, they're never going to be able to do that, and you never hear about it again. So I think again, as a leader, if you say you're going to do something, 'Your word has to mean something. You have to actually follow through on it.' And then I would say the last one I would pick is the other end of the extreme, complete polar opposites. I would pick my mother, who I would say I learned the skill of being a great listener. She was a— she is a super reserved, quiet lady, very, very warm, but did an awful lot of listening. And I think in a leader, if you talk more than you listen, then you're not going to be a great listener. You're not going to actually pick up from people. You're not going to hear about the things that really matter. So I think being a great listener as a leader is terribly important. Yeah, I think that's brilliant.

I was actually only reading an article this morning about how most of us listen to respond, but really great people listen to understand. Yeah, yeah. Very, very different in terms of how you're processing the information.

Totally, totally. And it's a super point because I think often when we're listening, You're so focused on what's the answer I should be giving. And sometimes things don't even need an answer. As you say, listening to understand is much more important. I'm sitting here and I'm thinking my mother is going to be horrified that I had her and Trump in the same answer. How am I going to explain that to her?

Just don't let your smartphone anywhere near her. She'll never hear it. I know. OK. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. That's good. Last question. What's some leadership advice that you would give to yourself If back at the start of your career, based on what you know now, what's the one thing that you think you'd have done differently?

I don't know what I would have done differently. Or more of? I think that the one thing I would have— one of the really great lessons that I've learned, I actually learned it from my husband, but it's not something about doing something differently. It's something that I learned early on and I've tried to live my entire career through it is not to take, take your role very seriously, but not to take yourself too seriously. And it's that whole thing that, you know, sometimes with a job, and particularly as you become more experienced and more senior in a role, you know, it can bring a certain amount of authority, it can bring a certain amount of status, it can bring a certain amount of respect, and sometimes you can be in danger of believing that that's actually all about you. Whereas the second you leave that job, you've left all of that behind. So you need to make sure you're really comfortable and happy with the person that you are outside of all of that. I remember my husband telling me the story of a politician that he knew very well. It was coming to the end of a term and he was driving in his car and his car literally nonstop, the phone didn't start, didn't stop ringing, just nonstop phone calls the whole way. And he went to whatever event he was going and handed over the you know, the end of whatever reign he had. And in the car driving home, the phone didn't ring once. And there's a humility that comes with that, to understand, as I say, the role that you play is hugely important and hugely responsible, but remember it is the role, and that you as a person just have to stay true to yourself and not get too caught up in the role that you play.

I think that is a brilliant point. Which to finish. I've run out of questions. I know that you have to run to a meeting, so I think we might wrap it up there. Helen, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure talking with you. I've really, really enjoyed it.

Thank you very much, Scott. I've really enjoyed it too.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a minute to rate it and maybe even leave a comment. To learn more about Inspiring Change, to read our blog, and to hear more podcasts, please visit our website at inspiringchange.ie.