Episode 27 | DENIS DOOLAN | Chief of Organisational Excellence, Special Olympics

Welcome to Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Change podcast, and today is a slightly strange one because the person I am interviewing is one of my oldest friends. We've known each other for 25 years. We used to bunk down together in London back in the day, and Actually, although we've never worked together, we've obviously followed each other's careers very closely. My guest today is Denis Doolan, who is the Head of Organisational Excellence in Special Olympics. We'll cut to Denis in a second. For those of you who follow this podcast and who listen, and thank you very much for doing so, by the way, we've had 5,500 listens so far, which is brilliant. When I set this up, back in 2018. I didn't know whether anybody would listen to it. And, you know, now we're getting to a point where, you know, we're getting 1,000 a month last month, which is brilliant. So please do keep listening and sharing and do give us a little review or a thumbs up on whatever your preferred podcast platform is. That's always really, really helpful. If I cast my mind back to the very start of that journey, back in episode 1, we actually interviewed Mary Davis, the CEO of Special Olympics, who Dennis, today's guest, works for. And before, before 2003, um, when the Special Olympics came to Ireland, I didn't really know very much about Special Olympics. But it's incredible as an organization— 5.2 million athletes around the world in 103,000 competitions, over a million volunteers helping them in 174 countries. And we're going to get Dennis to talk a little bit about Special Olympics in a second, but it's an amazing amazing organization that really does provide support to people with intellectual disabilities and further afield. And we'll again talk to, talk to Dennis a little bit about the Unified Sport Program that they are now putting in. But it's particularly leadership that I want to talk to Dennis about today. So Dennis, good morning.

Good morning.

Nice to have you on.

Thank you very much. Likewise. Yeah, I know I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk. I've been listening to a lot of the previous podcasts which have been really interesting, so it's a great honor to have the opportunity to talk.

And we'll try and get through this without laughing too much.

We'll do our best.

We're going to stay totally professional throughout, totally professional throughout. So first of all, let's kick off by easing you in gently by just you telling us a little bit about where you've come from, your background, and your role as Head of Organizational Excellence in Special Olympics.

Thanks. Well, yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting journey, I suppose, since I first met you. I started out in public relations and I worked in London for a number of years doing that. It was mainly high-tech public relations, so my main client at the time was a company that no longer exists, which is Compaq. And then after that I went off and— excuse me— I worked in Australia for a number of years and pretty much fell into an event management career then for a while, which was working on the Sydney Olympics and Paralympics, first of all, which was just a brilliant lesson in project management at a major scale. I couldn't have, couldn't have found better, I don't think. And came up, came back from that and ended up, as you mentioned, working on the Special Olympics World Games in Dublin, which was my first exposure to Special Olympics as well. I hadn't really come across Special Olympics before, and even though I have a sister who has really since that time been a proud Special Olympics athlete, so Emma is her name, and it's been a very interesting thing to be, you know, on personal life having that happening and seeing how an organization like Special Olympics can work with people with intellectual disabilities and make a difference in their lives, but also how it has been part of my career on and off since then. So mid-2000s, after the World Games, I did have my own company and I did a lot of consulting, mainly in project management and strategic planning. And then I also started to do some work in leadership development. With a wonderful man called Tony O'Connor, who I did a lot of work with then for about 10 years. And really, same thing, it was like, it was like doing a master's without doing a master's, where I just learned an awful lot about what leadership is, how leaders develop, what makes, you know, a leader work when they're working with others. And yeah, I just have built on that ever since because the Special Olympics career I then went into has really focused around leadership development and operational excellence. So part of my role at the moment is looking at how we roll out project management in Special Olympics and make that a methodology or approach that becomes the norm rather than doing things, uh, helter skelter. And, uh, some other aspects like policies and procedures and, you know, rolling out new guidance materials and things like that. But mainly the work is on the leadership development side.

And the big feather in your cap, of course, the award-winning feather in your cap has been the Leadership Academy that you set up and now run globally.

Yeah, that was, I suppose, coming out of my previous experience in the corporate world, I saw the power of leadership development and what it can do for an organization.. And I saw that in Special Olympics, which is, you know, really typical, I think, of the nonprofit sector at the moment. There's very little investment in leadership development, certainly in a continuous basis. And, you know, yet not just in Special Olympics, but I think this applies across the nonprofit sector where you see a lot of emphasis on results, on outcomes, on impact. And, you know, people are pushing for more and more. If you or I are giving a euro to something, we're really expecting transparency and performance and all these things. Yet there's almost no investment in the people who are tasked with delivering that. And if I look at, again, taking Special Olympics as an example, it's in 174 countries. Half of the leaders in those countries are volunteers, so they're not even paid.

Which makes it harder again.

In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. So I think that what the genesis of the Academy was simply saying, well, if we're going to ask all these things of all these people, then surely we need to be doing more to build their capacity and build their skills to deliver. In other words, to be great leaders. And then On the point of whether it makes it harder or easier, in some respects it's definitely harder because you don't have that mandate or that control that you might have in a corporate organization where you're able to say, look, everyone's doing this program, or we did, we'd, you know, strongly encourage everyone to do this program and you get your cohort together and off you go. You don't have that because someone has another job if they're lucky enough to have another job. Having said that, what you're not fighting is the motivational piece. So I think if any one of your listeners came along to one of the Academy workshops, that's been one of the huge pleasures of my life over the last 5 years is the amount of investment of energy and belief and conviction and time and effort by those leaders many of whom are voluntary, has been through the roof. I mean, really, really exceptional. So you have things like the reason for winning a couple of the awards was, and these were, you know, up against corporate competition and government competition. But I think the reason is we have been very, very careful to make sure to track outcomes and almost 5 million new donors $1 billion has been raised by the leaders who've been part of the Academy compared to what they were doing before that. They formed almost 300 new partnerships. So this is a global figures obviously, but still really shows you how they've taken the learning to heart and really looked at how they can improve and deliver over time. So we've, we've done our best, like I say, to try and capture that. And those are only the top line results, what you're also seeing is great results when it comes to things like their attitude, their mindset. So they're really trying to adopt a growth mindset now, whereas some of them, I think it's fair to say in the past, and they would say themselves, had a fixed mindset because they'd come up against a lot of barriers in trying to grow the nonprofit that they were working with. So yeah, it's been a brilliant journey and like I say, not just one to talk about, but seeing the results now has led to the ATD Award and a recent award from HR.com as well, a lead award.

Brilliant. So we mentioned there about great leaders and about great leadership skills and growth mindset and all those other things. What is it in your head when you look across what you've done with the Academy and you think about your own journey, what is it you believe makes a leader a great leader?

Well, I think that's the golden question, isn't it? Like, it's one so many people are seeking in so many sectors. Like, I don't— anything I'm talking about now, like, I hope is relevant for any listener, whether they're in the corporate sector or in any kind of organization. And I think it's really hard to put your finger on one thing. There are a few things I'll mention just generally, and then there's two that have stood out to me over the last number of years. So first of all, there's, there's, let's say, the obvious things, but they're not obvious when you look at— you and I both, and many others have seen poor leaders and poor leadership performance. So nothing is obvious, nothing is, is a definite. But I think certainly having a sense of vision, and I don't think that has to be a singular vision or just my vision if I'm the leader. It can be based on and should be based on taking into and listening properly to everything and everyone around you, but still having that clear sense of direction is really important. Inspiration is a bit of an amorphous thing, but I simply see it as having a real positive outlook and communicating that verbally and non-verbally to others. So that again, that sense of belief that something is possible rather than is impossible or not possible. And there's a great quote that I use a lot. It's by a man called Brian Tracy. And he says, 'Leaders think and talk about the solutions.' followers think and talk about the problems. So for me, that's, that's a great guide always when I, you know, because I'm like everybody else and sometimes you drift into, oh my God, this is happening and that's happening and it's, am I really going to be able to achieve this thing? And I go back to thoughts like that to get back on the right track in terms of what energy I'm then communicating to others. I think character is hugely important, so being consistent with people in terms of your actions and your reactions in certain situations and being calm. You know, you mentioned Mary in your introduction there. It's one of the things I've always admired with Mary Davis is that she's almost unflappable, you know, really no matter what the situation, she just retains a sense of of calm, which then of course leads you in a good emotional state to what you're actually going to do when something has not gone as planned. And there's a bit of courage, I think, that goes with character as well. That's really important. If you're going to, you know, try and do things that are not easy to do, which is what anyone, any good leader should be trying to do, then you have to have a courage and a conviction that you can do it. And the last piece I'd mention related to character then is care. You know, I think you're seeing leaders around the world now where that's absent, but you're also seeing leaders around the world where that's very present. You know, Jacinda Ardern is the obvious one, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, where she is, she's in a sense making empathy cool again. You know, where people can say, yeah, you know what, there's enough leaders that are divisive, there's enough people who are pointing to difference and she's a leader who's pointing to similarities and the need to come together as a people rather than, than split people apart in easy and lazy ways. And then the other general piece I'd mention is action. You know, leaders need to be people of action, and sometimes that means getting into the weeds. Sometimes that means getting into doing things that maybe you could say, well, I'm the leader, I'm not supposed to do that. But if it needs to be done and your team is struggling to do it, then you roll up your sleeves and you get on and do it.

And I actually think the power of doing that is hugely, hugely significant because actually getting wading in, rolling up the sleeves and getting dirty along with the team is hugely powerful.

It is because it sends a message. It sends a message that you're not above it. And, you know, humility is one of the things you hear and see about all the time, talked about about in relation to leadership. And I strongly believe that's a great character. And it's actually one of the two things that I was gonna then sort of pull out from all the stuff. One is humility. There's a great Tolstoy, the Russian author Tolstoy's great quote is, and forgive the sexism, it's from over 100 years ago. So let's take it that it applies to all people of all genders. Persuasions and Genders, but he said, everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. And I think that humility is so, so important to be able to sit back and say, I didn't get it right, or that's a blind spot for me, and step back and say, now what am I going to do about it? And maybe that's formal leadership development of some kind, or coaching, you know, being coached or whatever it is. Or maybe not. Maybe it's simply heightening your own awareness of that and then going away and saying, right, I'm going to be very diligent with myself now and address that and not let it happen to me again in the way that it happened in the past. And then the final piece that for me stands out in being great leader, but it would be far and away the number one, is that a mantra that I've been using for the last 5 years or so is that great leaders develop great leaders. So the very essence and definition of being a leader is that you are now working with others to get the most potential from them and, and for them to perform to their absolute best. And that's the greatest result I think you can have as a leader, is that if you're a great leader, you're developing great leaders and ultimately almost making yourself redundant.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I probably quite unfashionably at the very start of my journey with Inspiring Change wrote a blog post which said the same about internal communications people, that actually if you help to upskill, if you help to create great communicators in organizations, then ultimately you should be kind of making yourself as an internal comms team or an internal comms consultant redundant as well, for sure. Let's talk a little bit about, when you talk about great leaders, and I know that in the Special Olympics context, one of the things that you've worked on very hard is this whole idea of unified leadership, where you have people with intellectual disabilities on leadership programs and in leadership positions, but also people without. And I wonder how you balance those two things. How do you upskill and develop leaders with who are in maybe different places intellectually?

It's a good question. Yeah, just to— so I suppose how that all came about was I think you've seen a huge move in the disability sector, but really let's call it in the diversity and inclusion space overall, which is, you know, began with nothing about us without us, right? So this idea that you shouldn't— how can I go and speak for people with disabilities. Certainly I shouldn't be doing that all the time. There are times when you might have to, but generally speaking, that isn't really necessary anymore. And, you know, coming from that, so there's— it began with sport, as you mentioned earlier. So the simple idea of people with and without disabilities playing sport together, and that has then since led to things like activities together in schools, now working with clinicians in the health sector. So when we looked at that, we said, well, why wouldn't it extend all the way to leadership? Like, why should it be sort of regular activities? Why not have leaders who are different, leaders who are, who are diverse? And in terms of how that works then, There's two main pieces to unified leadership. One is you do need to put a deliberate effort into building the capacities of leaders who are different because, you know, maybe they're coming from a different type of background and may need certain kinds of skills or supports that others may or may not need. But I do think reflecting on it honestly, I think it's not that different at all because at the end of the day Every leader, including myself, but every leader that I've ever worked with has needed some kind of support or additional skill that they need to work on. So in that sense, it's really not massively different, but you do need to focus on building the capacity of the individuals who are different. And then, and by different, I simply mean different from the dominant group. I don't mean, you know, because everybody's different, right? We all have differences. But there's, you know, often in a situation in a company or in an organisation there's a dominant group and then there's others who are different from that group or diverse in that group. And the question of course is how do you leverage that to the best? So the second aspect of unified leadership or inclusive leadership, to use the broader term, is really focusing on the environment that the diverse groups are part of. I could do the best job ever working to build the skills of— let's take a Special Olympics athlete as an example— so that they really have got great skills working with each other, we develop that. But if the environment they go into then is full of people who really have no appreciation for difference, have low empathy, maybe have unconscious or conscious bias in certain respects, and often that's something that really affects people with intellectual disabilities because as soon as somebody sees them, they make a judgment. In the same way as has happened over, you know, many years when it comes to gender and ethnicity and so on. So that now is really where it's at, is focusing very much on creating the right environment for someone to go into and be part of so that they can succeed.

And that's cultural, ultimately.

Yes, of course. Absolutely. I mean, yes, what you want, again, to your point earlier, is what you want is that after a few years of working on that, and hopefully not even a few years, but these things take time. Culture change takes time. But that after a while, it is the norm that people are truly embracing, welcoming, empathetic, and not caught up on the fact someone's different, but rather saying, well, what are the skills that person is bringing that we don't have in our team at the moment, and that different perspective that someone's bringing. And I'm, I'm very influenced by the work of Stephen Frost and Rafi Al-Adeena. Stephen was the head of diversity and inclusion for London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. He and Rafi have written a book called Building an Inclusive Organisation. It's just come out and it's all about this work that you do on the environment and that really until you do that you're never going to get the maximum benefit from the diversity in your, in your organisation. But as soon as you start to do that, then you're really going to realise the exponential gains that research has shown over and over again are there for organizations that get it right.

Yeah, I mean, that whole idea that, you know, every journey starts with the first step. It's about just trying something new, about trying something different, about setting people up for success, both themselves and within the organization in which they're working, whether it be within Special Olympics or, or in a broader organization. If somebody, you know, you hear about diversity inclusion programs now being focused on and set up all over the place in organizations, and, you know, it's about, I think, you back to one of your words earlier on, bravery, of organisations being brave, but setting people and organisations up for success.

Yes, and I think the key aspect there is that it's not just setting up the individual, it's setting up the entire environment, like you say, so that the culture, so the norm is one of appreciating and making the most of difference, because that's where you really get the perspectives. Like if you think of a function like marketing where you're, you're marketing in a certain way, as soon as you really start to embrace and leverage diversity, you get a whole different perspective on, well, first of all, groups that you mightn't be reaching at all. Secondly, even groups that you're reaching, your message may be just a small bit off for really hitting the nail with that particular segment or market. And, you know, that's where having that different perspective in a group discussion might say, "Well, what if you said it this way?" or "What if you did it this way? Could it reach that group in a different and better way?" And I have to say, no better people than people with intellectual disabilities because very often they are looking for simplicity, clarity, and real certainty around what it is they're expected to do or buy or see or go to. And that can be really refreshing because often, you know, you've seen it, I've seen it, very often we get so caught up in our jargon and complexities and, you know, fancy, fancy words and ways of doing things that we lose sight of what the actual just simple message is.

Yeah, absolutely. I know certainly, certainly some of the people that I worked with on the games in 2003 and I've met since, one thing I've always loved is the honesty of feedback. It's almost in many occasions there's no filter, it's just here's the feedback. And again, that can be massively refreshing and extremely useful to organizations.

Yeah, it can, and it can be discomforting, you know, back to the idea of humility. It can sometimes be like, well, I think what you've just said or done is not great or rubbish, in which case you have to go back to the drawing board and start again. But isn't that better? And you're saving yourself time and money in the long term than if you as a business go out there and put something out there that just isn't clear to people.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I, yeah, it's totally— I couldn't— I literally, I can't— I keep not wanting to say I couldn't agree more, but I do agree. I do agree. A lot of the work that we do in Inspiring Change is around helping leaders during change programmes and during change cycles and helping them to be better leaders during change. And I wonder from, from your perspective what the role of a leader is during change. What are some of the big things they need to be doing and should be doing?

Yeah, there's, there's a few things, I suppose. One, one is there's a company I came across recently, YSC Consulting. They do a lot of Leadership Consulting, and they talk about conscious inclusion. So building off the previous point, you know, the question I think that we can all push now is instead of doing sort of, in a sense, almost compliance-driven training or reactive training like unconscious bias, what about flipping it and saying, you know, conscious inclusion? What are you proactively doing to include people? So I think that's the first step for any organization that's serious about change and about really creating a culture that goes to whatever the business objectives are. The second one is a much simpler point, and I won't say it's simpler to do, but in a lot of respects it is, which is I still always to this day remember Scott McInnes Sandy Holloway, who was the CEO in Sydney for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, every Friday religiously would walk the floors. This is a big building. We had over 2,000 employees by the time you get close to a Games. And he would walk the floors, literally walk up and down every single floor, quick chats, not— he would never spend, you know, 15 minutes talking to you, but he would spend 5. And, um, that was very powerful, really simple thing to do, but very powerful because not only did it create a feeling of connection to the very, very top, but also I think it truly did give, give him what I call a listening touchpoint. It gave him, I think, a sense of the temperature, a sense of the tone in the organization for that week or those couple of weeks.. So I think that's very powerful for a leader to do during a time of change because, you know, some of your listeners are, or many of your listeners are obviously in businesses. So you might say, well, that's a games, that's different. It's not really.

It's not at all. It's not at all different. It's a company.

It's essentially building a company for a very defined purpose.

Very quickly.

Very quickly. But keep in mind that company exists for 5 years, 5 or 6 years. It's not something that's done, you know, we, we are used to as consumers, the Olympics is something that gradually comes up over the last 6 months and is on for 2 weeks and then goes away again. That's not how it works in the, in the real world. That company that has run that or that event is there for 6 or 7 years. So I think it gave him a great listening touchpoint, uh, right throughout those 5 or 6 years that I think was very powerful. When it then came to what messaging he was putting out or the senior team was putting out during the course of the work.

And I think as well, just to add to that, I think it's during times of change when change particularly is going badly, that that's the time when leaders should be out doing that stuff.

Absolutely.

Because in my experience, more often than not, that's the time that they go into their office and shut the door.

Yeah.

Because there's panic, there's mayhem, there's fires breaking out all over the place. And actually I don't want to hear the feedback, 'cause I know it's all really bad. When actually that's the time when exactly you should be out getting the feedback. Because people may want to offload, they may want to have a pop, they may want to, and you have to stand up. Humility, back to that word that you said earlier on, you have to be there to stand up, to take it on the chin and say, we're going to make it better. I know it's not great at the moment, I know we've gone off plan, I know we're not gonna hit our targets, it doesn't look like it anyway, 'But we're going to do something about it.' And I think that sense of humility with people and honesty and transparency and openness and all those great words are the things that can really help just to resettle the ship, if you like.

Yeah. And if I go back to one of the words I mentioned earlier talking about great leadership, it's consistency. That's what people want. People want that feeling that, yes, you're not just there when times are good, you're there when times are bad, when times are tough. And you're with them on that journey because every single leader that I've ever known, and again, including myself, you go through tough times. That's normal. That's completely part of the furniture. And if you are, you know, running away from that in the eyes of your team or your staff, well, then, you know, that quickly permeates into quite a negative impact on the culture.

Let's talk a little bit for a second about the role of a leader as a communicator during change, because I know you've got I know you have an interesting, possibly slightly divisive example of somebody who's a really good communicator during change.

Yeah, well, let me start with one that might be more typical and then I'll come to that. So I think, look, there's a few things here. One is one of my colleagues at the moment, he's been a leader for a long, long time, very, very experienced. An experienced leader and, you know, been through multiple careers, not too different to myself. And he actually met and had a good conversation with Nelson Mandela before he passed away. It was in South Africa, I think in 2008 or 2009. And he just, you know, towards the end of the conversation, he asked the question we all would love to ask Mandela. He said, 'Look, what if you could say one thing 'As a piece of advice to me as a leader, what would it be?' And he just turned to him and he said, 'Keep it simple.' That was it. Keep it simple. So I think it's just superb to hear that someone who achieved so much and is such an iconic leader could boil it down to that. And I try to, again, you know, keep that in mind at all times. But the other one then is definitely more controversial, and this is not a reflection of my views on his policies, which would be certainly I wouldn't be in agreement with too much of what he's saying or doing from that point of view. But if you look at what President Trump does as a communicator, it's really interesting to look at. I mean, if you ask— I, because I've been traveling over and back to the US for the last 6, 7 years, and if you asked anybody in the really getting close to the election to say what Hillary Clinton's main pillars or promises were, nobody could say them in a short sentence quickly or simply. If you look at the alternative, if you look at what Trump did, every single one of his key campaign promises was 5 words or less. So again, I'm not endorsing, um, what he stands for or what he's been doing. But as a communicator, I had to stand back and say, you know what, it's working. And it worked, right? He got elected despite all the odds. He got elected because we can all repeat them. I'm gonna build a wall, drain the swamp, crooked Hillary Clinton, make America great again. You could go on and on. So actually, 6 or 7 of his key policies were all 5 words or less. So if we play that into the business world or the nonprofit world, why not have the same principle as a guideline that you're really trying to get to? Because if you take an organization, well, any corporate is the same where your frontline employees, if you take a nonprofit, it's frontline volunteers. That's what they need. They need absolute simplicity and clarity of message. So there's a lesson there. Whether we like it or not. And there's one other person I'd mention then just briefly. Hermione Ibarra is her name. She's a professor in INSEAD in Paris. And I recommend your listeners to try and listen to or read some of her work. It's quite recent, very good work. And she talks about a leader as a communicator being— essentially poses the question, do you want to be a hub or do you want to be a bridge? So if you're a hub, everything is coming through you, everything has to be seen or passed by you. And that's really counter to a lot of where great communication, change management, and leadership is going or has been going for a number of years, because of course the idea is that we should be empowering and essentially trusting others to get on with it and come back when, when they're in trouble or when you need to clear the path or open a door. And that's the idea of the opposite of a hub, which is a bridge. And this is back to communication theory. So a bridge is simply, like I say, creating a connection, opening a door. So it could be a simple example: bring a staff member to a meeting with you that you might not have thought of bringing that staff member to before. So now they're meeting some of the other key stakeholders, maybe even other senior leaders, but you're starting to create that presence and that visibility for them. That then allows them to continue on that piece of work directly, because you can step away from being stuck in the middle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great point. And, you know, there was another piece. I'm just kind of flipping back through my notes here again. I loved— there was a quote that we were, I think, maybe talking about earlier on. The measure of a powerful leader is that their circle of influence is greater than their circle of control. And I think that sits really nicely with that whole idea of being a bridge versus being a hub.

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's one other, I was lucky enough to be in, at a conference last week, a Skillsoft conference. Actually, Tara O'Sullivan, I think was one of your previous interviewees. So I had some, a great meeting with Tara when I was there from Skillsoft. And Dan Pink was the keynote speaker, who's a very well-known speaker on all sorts of things. But, One of the things he— what he typically does is he takes a load of research and then boils it down to really simple, clear points. And one of those was the importance of endings, of giving people a sense of when something is done and you can move on to the next piece of work. And in change communication, that's what he talked about, is, you know, if you have something that's a year away, it's very hard for people to get their head around, you know, that. And there's a natural, I think, human tendency to say, well, it's a year away. Whereas, you know, listening to him, what really jumped out at me is you need to then break that down. And I think you've been doing some of this in some of your work with some of your clients, and you break it down and give people, I don't know, like say something after a month, after 3 months, so that there's a real feeling of Progress. Progress. Well, and a continued sense of urgency, like everyone, many, many listeners will be well familiar with Kotter's work and that idea of creating a sense of urgency by having, you know, constantly new endings that are the next target. That's a really powerful tool for achieving results. And that's what, that's what he spoke about. Yeah.

Okay. Getting towards the end now, and you mentioned it there about, you know, what's happening in leadership and you give a nod to it in your last answer there. I wonder from your perspective, you know, what is it and what interests you when you look at the future of leadership and what's going to happen?

Well, there are two things. I think one is inclusion. I mentioned already, so I'm not going to go back over all that point, but I do think inclusive leadership, which is really going, taking diversity and going past just having a diverse workforce, but really looking at how you make the most of the environment and make the most of joint projects, joint training, joint everything to capture the benefits of that diversity. I think that's huge. I do think that's going to make all the difference as companies and organizations look forward because it is an infinitely more diverse world than it was a number of years ago in terms of how people end up in working environments. The other one is sustainability leadership. I'm actually going to do a course later this year in Cambridge where I want to go deeper into that topic because I do think that sustainability has been becoming more important, but it has certainly, I think, in a lot of cases come out of, you know, sort of being a CSR type thing, a good thing to do, a nice thing nice thing to do, yet the reality is there are finite resources, and I'm including human resources in this. In any organisation there are finite resources, and the reality is that sustainability is fast becoming a necessity rather than a nice thing to do. So I'm very interested in, in taking that further and working with leaders to become more, I suppose, conscious of how they create sustainability in their organisation rather than, like I say, seeing it as a side thing, weaving it into the essence of the culture and the way that that organization moves forward.

And it's really interesting, actually, because Mary said almost exactly the same thing in, in episode 1 about leadership, about that just becoming the way that we do things around here. And I have often said on this podcast the same thing about employee engagement, that it's not a thing. Sustainability is not a thing. Leadership should not be a thing. They should just be the way that business runs and works to a positively mutually beneficial end for everybody.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. I mean, and all those things are easier said than done. Of course, that's why we're here, is, you know, you have to explore how you make that happen. And for some companies and organizations, that's a really big question now because the way they've been working has been difficult to see how they would become sustainable. Sustainable. And I think, you know, companies like yours can be a great help in making that possible.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the little advert there. You'll get your 10 quid later. You'll get your 10 quid later. Final question, and this is one I ask everybody on the podcast, and I will— I keep saying I'll do this, but I will eventually do just a version of the podcast with this answer, and that's all it will be, a little compendium of leadership role models. And I wonder for you, who are your leadership role models?

Well, I have to say, not just because she's my current boss, but Mary Davis, I've learned a huge amount from over the last 20 years. It's been a privilege working with her for all the reasons that I mentioned earlier. She lives and espouses all of the characteristics that we talked about as being those of a great leader. I think beyond that, I actually love reading about other leaders. So they're not necessarily leaders I've worked with directly, but, you know, I take, take examples like the CEO of Patagonia who took the Trump tax cuts and literally turned around and said, right, we're just giving all of that to fight climate change. So again, very powerful and not just a symbol, like $10 million is a lot of money. And then, you know, I've already mentioned Jacinda Ardern. For me, she would be a real role model right now in the way that she's dealing with everything, not just the recent tragedy, the shooting, but I think the way she approaches, the way she governs is so much in contrast to so many other parts of the world and so many other leaders who are not living like that or leading like that.

Do you think, just as a little sideline on Jacinda Ardern, do you think that will ultimately potentially cost her her job because the political world will try and just push her out?

Well, I'll go back to what I said at the beginning. I'm positive in outlook, generally speaking. So no, I'd like to think that it won't. I think, you know, every political career, as any politician will tell you, is susceptible to ending. In one way or the other. Who knows what will happen? You know, things happen and they're sometimes out of a politician's control, but politicians then end up taking the rap for it. So look, no doubt she'll have tough times ahead, but I do hope that it wouldn't be for the reasons we're talking about, that it wouldn't be for being empathetic, for being inclusive, for being positive about, you know, how to lead and create change in the world. I don't think it'd be for any of those reasons. It could be for another reason, but not for those.

Okay. And very finally, tell me the one piece of leadership advice you would give to your 20-year-old self, knowing what you know now. Just imagine us back in London when we were 24. What would you have told me, or what would you have told me?

My first piece would must be buy a piece of property and hold on to it and don't wait 20 years to set up a pension. So leaving those things aside, there's a great piece of work on social styles. It's Bolton and Bolton are the authors of the original piece, and I would encourage anyone to read it, whatever age you are, but particularly at that stage start of career time because it essentially just sets out the different styles that people have and really teaches that, you know, you are different to everybody else, everybody's different to each other, so you should be treating people as they would like to be treated rather than as you would like to be treated. And I think that's just amazing for someone who wants to be a great leader because ultimately what are you doing? You're working with groups of people. Some are quiet, some will never speak up in a meeting. Some love to talk and will always speak up in a meeting. So realizing that that doesn't mean that the person who's speaking a lot is more intelligent or more able or more competent, but in fact it might be the opposite. That kind of realization, I think, comes with time. But, you know, that would be the advice I would give, would be to try and understand that as early as possible in your career so you can again work with people and get the most from them and with them rather than realizing it too late.

Brilliant. What a great way to finish. It has been strange and weird and insightful and really, really good discussion. I think you've touched on a huge amount of points that will be very, very interesting to listeners and actually points that some of which are new and some of which were reinforcing points from previous podcasts. So thanks a million. I really appreciate the time. Thanks for coming on.

Well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

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