Inclusion and cohesion: Leadership in a time of change | with Simon Haigh

Well, hello, hello, hello. Welcome back. We've been off for a week for St Patrick's Day last week. Hope those of you who are Irish are connected to an Irish person, had a great St. Patrick's Day. Probably at home, probably not outside already. Maybe this will be the last time we have to do that on a St. Patrick's Day. We had a great time here in the Campbell family. We had great fun with the kids outside. They gave us a mini parade and dance and some of the adults even partook in an alcoholic beverage or two. So that's as happy as St Patrick's Day as you can get. Well, welcome back. We're back on track. I'm going to ask my colleagues what show number we're on at the moment. We're up in the 40s approaching our year anniversary and for those of you who are new to the show, welcome. This is the shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I am your host for the next 45 minutes or so. I'm also the CEO and co founder of a company called Social Talent. And our job at Social Talent is to bring hiring cultures on scale to large enterprises around the world and really invest in that. As part of that, we look at a more holistic view of hiring, not just at the finding and hiring of somebody, but also the onboarding and engagement of that individual, which is why inclusion is such a big part of that. You cannot bring somebody into a workforce and and expect them to deliver on the job they were hired for if they don't feel included in that workforce. And that's going to be a big topic for our conversation for the next 40, 45 minutes. But a quick reminder to those of you who want to check out our back catalog or see what else we have coming up in April and May of this year, you can go to socialtown.com the shortlist. By the way, some of you might be looking on screen at a link because you're watching us live. We broadcast live every week on LinkedIn and YouTube at Irish UK time 4pm on a Wednesday. But that recording is also available on YouTub LinkedIn if anyone wants to check it out. But we also are a podcast. You may be looking at listening to me, not looking at me. If so, you're probably listening to us on Apple or Spotify. If you're not, do check it out. You can see our full show catalog there. For those listening live, we love your questions, we love your comments. We want you to be involved in the conversation. I'd love you to jump in and Add those comments and questions as some people already are doing. Deepak and Ashwin, welcome to the show. And for those of you listening to the recording or playback, I'm going to give a shout out to some of those audience members who are listening live and bring their questions in. And this is not a scripted show, so we like our guests to basically respond on the fly with some initial prompts that we've given them. But they we could go anywhere and we hope you will take us in the right direction. We want to be inclusive as possible to our audience. So let's talk about leadership. Let's talk about the role of leadership and inclusion. Inclusion and cohesion. Leadership in a time of change. Is today's topic vital? And you know, I, most of us understand that inclusive organizations, inclusive cultures, drive higher performance, drive better business results, and people are happier working in those environments. They bring their best selves to work. They have lower attrition rates. All of these things, these fantastic things come from inclusive cultures. But the most important driver of an inclusive workplace and environment is your leaders. Are your leaders acting in an inclusive manner. And that's the topic of today. What is the role of leadership in inclusion? And to that effect, I'm welcoming someone who's local to us on the show, someone who's joining us from Ireland for a change. I'm broadcasting from Dublin and so is our guest and our guest is Simon Hake and Simon is an author, CEO and successful entrepreneur. He's a growth strategist. I'm going to ask Simon to explain what a growth strategist is. But Simon helps leaders achieve their full potential and has recently just co founded a new venture in inclusion and leadership called inclusioninleadership.com Simon, tell us about what a growth strategist is. Give us a bit of background to inclusion in leadership as well.

Jonny, it's great to be here and hi everybody. Yeah, well, I guess I've spent 28 years living in five countries working across various different industries at various senior levels and what the common characteristic of every organization is growth. And of all of us personally in terms of our leadership, if we're not growing, if we're not moving forward, then we're effectively moving backwards. So I help organizations and leaders build their growth journey, whether it's business growth, leadership growth, brand growth or mindset growth through various kind of mechanisms and techniques. The whole area of inclusiveness and cohesiveness is really, really, really important, particularly during these sensitive, fragile times. You know the world, you know the world, our world changed dramatically. Johnny, in 2020 social unrest, pandemic, we've had Brexit, we've had all sorts of things going on. And those leaders and organizations who don't take on board the need for a cohesive and inclusive environment are going to be left behind. So that's just a little bit of a snapshot about growth and about a little bit about the work that we do at inclusion in leadership.com well, Simon.

I'm dying to get your thoughts on our two news articles we want to discuss this week. So if you don't mind, I'm going to ask Nod to bring in our first one. So Simon, the first article I want to discuss with you and our audience comes from Gallup. So Gallup famous for surveys and Gallup published very recently an article called Most US Managers Not Fully Prepared to Talk about Race. And in this article, the survey, essentially what they're reporting on suggests that 58% of managers in the US do not feel fully prepared to talk about race. But very interestingly, they highlight the difference between organizations that have rolled out some sort of training around inclusivity or diversity or equality to their leaders or even their staff. They're saying that those companies who have rolled out that training their leaders are much more likely to be to be ready if you like to talk about this conversation. So it seems to be a real strong correlation between even, even if they've had an all hands that they've been invited to that discusses this, there seems to be a much more willingness or preparedness for leaders to actually talk about race. Wanted you to maybe peel apart this article and get your thoughts on this. Is this surprising to you? What did you take for this?

It's not surprising to me. So let me just start from the positive end. So predictors of success for inclusive and cohesive organizations include openness to different points of view. So those organizations who are open to different point of views are much more likely to be on a growth trajectory. Second one is tolerance of diversity. And the third one is intercultural sensitivity. But to achieve all of that one, all, all of those three, you need to have a true leadership mindset around inclusiveness. And unfortunately so many leaders are still, I suppose, still not equipped with the, with the knowledge of the importance of this stuff. So I think, Johnny, it goes, it goes really back to awareness. Those smart leaders who are fully aware and understand the importance of inclusion and leadership. Inclusion and cohesion is not just a nice have. Of course it's an essential nice have, but it actually, if it's done the right way it drives profitability, productivity, and brand equity. So I think it's just a lack of awareness. There are also, you know, obviously lots of biases. There's all sorts of issues around trust and respect and dignity. But I think the key thing is awareness that the more aware leaders can be, I think the more likely they are to realize that this is good, not just for people, but good for business as well.

Do you think that employers and perhaps leaders are confused about what inclusivity is? Do they think it's, you know, it's a US race issue or do you think it's about, you know, it's only about one issue. It's about gender equality. Do you think there's a real understanding of what inclusiveness actually is?

That's a good point. And I see my colleague Nigel Sonoriwo from the States talking about the numbers that we just pulled out in the article, and he's saying that he thinks the numbers are probably even worse than are pulled out in that. Back to your point, I think there are geographical differences. So I think right now in the States, we're seeing a real focus on diversity and diversity training and diversity programs. But as I say in inclusionandleadership.com over here in Europe, maybe we're looking more at gender balance, but there's all sorts of things like, you know, how does a remote workforce, how is that cohesively managed and maintained and led in an organization? What about ethical Win Win communications? What about cultural cohesion? You know, I do a lot of work with, you know, large companies, particularly in the aviation, sec, aviation finance sector. And they would have, you know, employees from 50, 60, 80 cultures. And you and I are, you know, our first language is. It's English. It's easy for us to talk to each other, but if you're a Spanish or Nigerian or, or Indian or Chinese person living in Ireland, a, you've got to understand you and I, then you've got to convert it and then you've got to communicate back. So there's various different channels of inclusion. And, and I think the more we realize that this is the reason we talk about inclusion in leadership is top down, left to right. It's everything. It's everything that greases the wheel of a successful growth organization.

Yeah, I think, you know, some of the challenges when it gets confusing for individuals, I think it's just, well, one is when, when they, when they perhaps put investment into it to solve the wrong problem or they think they're solving, you know, we need to be seen to be doing this Right. We had Torin Ellis join us a few weeks ago and we dealt with that challenging question of, you know, whether companies are just putting money into it because they need to be seen to be doing it, or do they want to actually create inclusive environments? You know, you know, we've discussed this before, but you know, there's a strong correlation between, you know, inclusion and concepts like growth, mindset, psychological safety. And none of those are about diversity. They're about, you know, you've got a bunch of people, you can be all homogenous looking, but you may not be acting in an inclusive way because you might have a leader who doesn't listen to anybody else, who just, you know, wants to get her point across and move on, isn't aware of some of these, you know, non inclusive mannerisms that she or he might have. And that isn't to do with race or gender, it's just to do with, you know, somebody's style. But it seems that more creative organizations and we seem to be fast moving towards a world where the real value and the real growth is in creating something new. It's in the, it's in the creation of IP of knowledge. And those environments require people to work together. Dictatorships just don't drive great innovation, do they? It's never really happened.

No, you've hit it on the head. Right. It's, you know, obviously the most obvious manifestation of this is cultural difference or racial difference. Right. Which is significant, extremely significant. And the world has a long way, long, long way to go. But, but, but the core of all this is, you know, creating a culture of safety, of experimentation, of innovation rather than having a culture of suspicion and toxicity. Right. And, and you're only going to have the former if you're open minded, willing, and you're willing to be truly, truly inclusive, truly inclusive. Right. And allow for mistakes in the organization, don't allow for dishonesty or cover up. But you know, and I think profession, proficient, inclusive leaders, Johnny, build, you know, a unified team through collaboration and cooperation, a genuinely enjoyable environment that's critically important, not one of suspicion and toxicity. And an environment of just one race or one culture, of course is going to appear and be suspicious and toxic.

I was talking to a friend of mine today about a big fintech company in Europe that we're all very familiar with. I won't mention that's doing brilliantly. But their CEO by all accounts is just this unbelievable micromanaging dictator and they've had something like 60% attrition in the last year as they've been growing. Basically, you do it his way or nothing. Gets down to the nitty gritty of everything and it's just toxic. There's a quarterly review process where you will, you know, there's a chance you'll get sacked. That's the culture that you'll get sacked every quarter, you know, that's up for consideration and that, that's as, as non inclusive as you get, you know, and you might go, you know, that organization needs to act more inclusively. But you can't do it from the bottom up to the point of leadership. There's no point. If the bottom up starts to be more inclusive, it's gone. You got to have the top leaders working on that, don't you?

Absolutely. And you know, you need the top leaders working on that. You need them living and breathing this stuff because otherwise employees are not going to feel empowered. You know, employees need to feel heard and valued. All employees, all employees, across every culture, whatever diverse group. Right. The workforce. Because you know, the workforce becomes the largest advocate of your offerings as well. I mean 70% of what makes a corporate brand is the qualitative valuation stuff, which is how attrition rates, retention rates, how your suppliers see you, how the market sees you. So, so you know, this, this, this is important stuff. It's, it's feel good. Right. But it's also, it drives growth. I often talk about the three Rs of growth. Right. Revenue, risk and reputation. If you're a business, it sounds like the one you mentioned might be they were rushing headlong just for the pinnacle of that triangle, which is the revenue, but they weren't looking at their risk or the reputation. Right. They employer branding is going to suck. If you, if you're just rushing headlong for revenue and you're not being inclusive, then that triangle can topple over. Right. So you need to have a balance of revenue, risk and reputation, which. And inclusions in the middle.

Yeah, I think we all saw that in, you know, the examples of WeWork recently, which, you know, didn't have an inclusive culture it would seem, and eventually seemed to collapse, almost collapse in on itself where there was the Travis, the CEOs way. And that's it. You'd uber with cultural problems until they changed their CEO a few years ago as well and doing great things to fix that. And I move on to our second article. I think it brings on to one of the points you just touched on there on the three or ass Simon, and this is from hbr. It's actually from last year. It's a great piece by Juliet Burke and Andrea Titus. Juliette Burke was with the PWC in Australia at the time, was the their head of their DNI leadership group at the time. She's now with gunning academia in Australia. But here I really like this HBO article because it digs out six traits. The research that led to six traits of inclusive leadership. And I know many of them really hit home for you because a big part of what you've been saying for a long time drive inclusive leadership. So maybe if you wouldn't mind taking the opportunity to walk me through those traits and maybe have a conversation with me about how you've seen them play out. Which do you think are the most important? I know that the academic piece gives an opinion on it as well. But you know, you mentioned, you know, humility, you mentioned commitment. So maybe talk me through some of those traits that you see in action that drive that really inclusive and cohesive leadership.

Yeah, I think, you know, calmness, compassion and courage. Courage as well is important. I think trust is really, really important. Having an environment, being a leader and creating and fostering and developing and nurturing an environment of trust. If you're a leader, right, and, and, and you're not telling the truth, or if you're not being truly inclusive in everything you do and say and how, and how you come across, then what a human, what, what do human beings do when they, when, when, when, when they feel there's a lack of trust, Right. They become anxious. Right. So this is a drag on an organization. So truly, if truly successful inclusive leaders recognize that all employees are different. We each possess different, unique and different abilities. Truly inclusive leaders foster teamwork, respect, enthusiasm, integrity and honesty. And I guess, you know, finally foster a philosophy of do your best, right? Accept mistakes. And I guess finally they truly inclusive leaders define and live the cultural values. I work for an American tech company. I won't mention who it was really a really good one. And the CEO at the time over in Silicon Valley, a Belgian guy, instead of living his life in a corner office, would rotate around the whole campus every three to six months. That to me you might say that alone is tokenistic. But that was one of a number of things he did right. It was truly a feeling of inclusiveness there. And that was an extremely innovative, growth minded organization.

It's funny you mentioned that. That's one of the tactics that was discussed in the HBR article where they talk about, you know, getting up and having a senior executive move around the office, sit in different departments and really feel what's happening to get more that empathy, that deep understanding of what's actually happening in perspective taking. I think that was the two things that were mentioned as the additional behavior is humility and empathy and perspective taking. I looked at this, it's a great list this article here. It talks about visible commitment. I found was interesting Simon was they looked at the perspective of the leader and what the leaders felt was more important and then what the employees felt was more important which, which was interesting. So you know the, the kind of, the, the, the first thing was kind of the visible commitment. They were saying that without the visible commitment like the rest of it doesn't really matter. You know, you have to really, really have to show that. But then from the employees perspective they really valued the awareness of bias. So the leader showing that humility, showing the you know, their understanding of their own weaknesses, identifying that and even asking others to help. And I think one of the recommendations was putting together this kind of what they call a pad, a personal advisory board, A group of peers who basically would be honest with the leader and pull her up on examples where she maybe have bias or is displaying bias. And that can again if the person has commitment to start it off with, to change that you're held accountable by a group of your peers. To go it's going to be difficult road that we're going to go to down but we're going to be here for you. We're going to pull you up on stuff not in a critical way, not a negative way, not in a way that's going to get you into trouble, but in a kind of you want help. And we're here to point out things that will go wrong. You know, like do you see many companies taking this approach that our individuals maybe that deep commitment to really be more inclusive, to deliberately practice inclusive behaviors every day of the week.

Not enough. Right. But some companies are and you know I, I think what the aware leaders are starting to realize is that you can't, you, you can no longer assume. Back to your point about truly committed leaders people we can feel whether the leaders are truly committed to this stuff. So I think smart leaders can't, can no longer assume nice talking points. And you know, hiring diverse people making up the numbers is excellent. Diversity, equity, inclusion, they can't. That's not enough. Leaders need to realize as I said before, this is kind of like a marriage. If you don't put in the work yourself as the leader, the union will crumble. Right. The employer branding will go down, the reputation will go down. You can't simply say we're taking care of this stuff, right, and that everybody's treated equally without rolling up your sleeves yourself and actually being involved in the day to day. Of course you're running a major organization, but there are ways of being involved in this and truly meaning it. And I think in these, you know, these pandemic times, you'd agree, you know, we've all become very sensitive and very cynical and we've all become very much more aware of, of bias and of negative and of toxic stuff. Our patience is kind of wearing out. So I think we all have a much more attuned radar for the bs. You know, we want to see leaders who truly roll up their sleeves.

You're right. We've been living with a magnifying glass on us for maybe a year. And you know what happens when you put a magnifying glass on something? It starts to burn after a while. I think we're there. What do you think? You know, how come recruiters and hiring specialists who are perhaps frustrated with historical poor leadership or lack of inclusivity into the teams they're hiring for? You know, if you're a colleague of a leader who's hiring and you're perhaps working in the recruiting team, trying to help them, but you recognize that their style is probably not going to work out. You know, you're hiring big into their team and you just recognize that leader really isn't probably the most inclusive leader you've seen. You know, people churn out of their team. How would one approach having a conversation with a leader who maybe isn't quite at the point where they recognize that they have a problem yet? Like, how do you tackle such an issue? Simon?

I think, I think you've got to be empathetic, right? You've got to realize that not everybody's up to speed with this stuff. You've also got to have, you know, you've got to have a cutoff point as well. If you, if it's clear to you that the person you're talking to is not talking to you or doesn't want to talk to you, then, then as I said before, you know, there are three aspects of, of inclusive, strong, you know, roll up your sleeve leadership, and that's calmness, compassion and correct courage. And sometimes you have to call it and say you're just not, you know, this is not working right. You're not listening. I think the whole area of, you know, you need to be humble as, as a leader and empathetic. This needs to be given. Right. And I saw the article was talking about the importance of bias awareness and leaders and also humility and empathy. And there's already conversations I'm hearing Johnny, that you know, when we come out of this we're going to go back to the brutal, tough old days, you know that the bias days, etc, it's mind blowing that we're concerning ourselves already about going back to the old ways after the pandemic. You know, these two characteristics of humility and empathy, they directly feed into cohesive and inclusive growth. You know those and, and you know, you know, truly, you know, inclusive leadership provides a bridge to the future. That's what it does. And so you have a responsibility to, you know, be patient and empathetic. But there's a point because you're running a business, there's a point when you got to call it and say this is not on. So there's a balance to be had.

What's, what's the best place to start? Like if you're a leader and you're listening saying, you know, I think we have a problem or maybe we don't have a problem but we're not better than anybody else. And I'm looking at the data, looking at that Gallup poll saying gosh, you know, having, having some sort of training around equity and inclusion will triple the confidence my leaders have to engage in conversations like that. That seems like a no brainer investment. What's the best place to start? And a sister question to that might be what's the really wrong place to start that maybe some people typically look to but your experience says don't go there.

Well, I think the best place to start is always honesty. Right. And so you need to have, this involves having very few frank open conversations about what, why inclusion is important to the organization. It's important to the organization because this is, you know, this is an organ. Organizations are not remote from human beings, they're comprised of human beings. And we need, we need the diversity in this organization for the organization. Right. And, and also because you know, the organization is inhabited by people and they have souls and etc, so you need to have those frank open conversations about every aspect of the business and realize that a leader also this is important as well. Johnny, when you said where you shouldn't go is don't pretend you have all the answers, right? So because as a leader, if, you know, we've seen it with politicians, if you, if you, if you are, you know, we've seen some of the politicians pretending that the pandemic will be over by Easter or by Christmas. We all knew in our gut they were just saying it because they're politicians, right? And so the worst thing a politician, I remember Michael Dell, I used to work for Dell. And he used to say, as a leader, don't perfume the pig, right? Or don't paint lipstick on the pig. In other words, if it's bad news, you need to find a way of saying it honestly, right? Don't cover it up. And so I think the best thing is to have frank, open conversations about what this means for the organization. It's good for everybody in the organization. The worst thing you can do is pretend negative things are not happening. When they're happening, you need to call them out. And from a human level, but also, as I said, because of the triangle revenue, risk, reputation. This drives productivity, profitability and brand value if done the right way.

So I want to take you back to hiring for a second, Simon, so I know this is an area you're personally passionate about. When you look at the future workforce, the cohort that we're currently hiring for, what do you think are the attributes, skills, attitudes that we should be considering hiring for now so that we ensure we build an inclusive environment, and that's a sustainable, inclusive environment going forward? What are the traits and skills and attributes that you've seen typically lead to that? If we just start hiring for more of it now, what would that look like?

Okay, well, I start with a quote from my friend Marshall Goldsmith, the world number one leadership thinker. And he talks about the leaders of the future and the leaders, this is the future now, right? We're in the future. We went to bed in 2019 and we've woken up in 2030, right? And so the leaders of the future do these things. They embrace global thinking, right? We can no longer just think in terms of our little portions of the world that are called countries, right? This is one little planet, little tiny rock inhabited by 8 billion people. The worldometer clock is about to tick into 8 billion, right? So embrace global thinking, cross cultural diversity. So look for people who are aware, who are aware, right? And, or are aware, self and situationally aware, aware of how they come across, how they communicate. Are they, are they, are they veering towards unconscious communication which can be damaging to others? How assertive are they? How influential are they? What are their abilities to network? Do they have humor? Humor is actually a good way of disarming a lot of this negative stuff as long as your culture culturally astute. So that's the second thing Cross cultural diversity, understanding rapidly changing technology. Right. And you might be saying is the third thing, what's that got to do with this? There's increasing evidence that biases and stereotypes are actually enhanced online. You know, if we're angry online or if they're cultural challenges or, or conflicts, they can be enhanced online. So we need to be able to look for candidates who are collaborative and sensitive online. We need to number four, rely more on collaborations. And number five, which I think is genius for Marshall, the best leaders need to be facilitators rather than experts. Right. Mainly because I don't know about you, but my two daughters are 21 and 22. When I have a tech issue, I go and ask them to help me because they're much quicker witted. Right. There's increasing proof, apart from probably overuse of social media, apart from that, that the younger generations are smarter at closing deals, at negotiating because they're more sexually open minded, they're more diversity overminded, they're more cohesive thinking, they're more inclusive, they're more environmentally. So I'd be looking at those five points from Marcel are critically important places, but it's all about awareness. I'm always looking at the awareness of the person being hired and how, how aware are they of, of themselves and of their impact on others. That's critically important.

How do you assess for that, Simon? How do you try and figure out if somebody has that self awareness?

It's, it's not an easy one. I, I think it really comes. So communication is the manifestation of awareness. Right. And so I, I, I, I look to see a lot of the work that I do is looking at how people influence each other. Right. So for example, there are seven main types of influencing skills. And you know, from very positive, nice ones like you know, friendliness and negotiation skills and coalition and building support to the opposite end of the extreme, which would be sanctions or appealing to a higher authority. If you don't, if you don't pull your socks up, I'll go to my boss kind of stuff. So I tend to look at how people are communicating. Right. And how they're influencing others. And you're influencing it in an interview as well. Right. So I'm also looking for honesty as well. I'm looking for assertiveness as well. Right. So somebody who's assertive is, so I'm looking for assertiveness as opposed to defensiveness or passiveness and aggressiveness. So assertiveness is the ability to ask for what you want, feel or desire, number one. Number two, in a way that's respectful of others. So I'm looking for the cues around how somebody communicates. Are they asking for what they want in a direct way? Because the organization needs people who are go getters but in a respectful way. Example of that, you know, I, when I interviewed Fidel 20 plus years ago, I went through seven interviews, quite a rigorous process and it was, the final shot was between me and somebody else. And as I walked out of the, the place there in Bray, I just happened to turn around and say thank you to the receptionist. Just happened. I don't know why I did. I said thank you. Apparently if I hadn't done that Johnny, I wouldn't have got the job. So I'm looking for cues around communication, interaction and assertiveness and influencing skills. It's not easy. And you also have to be aware yourself as a recruiter or as a TA to pick up these cues. Again, it's awareness.

It's interesting. I've been thinking more deeply about what makes a great hiring culture and one of the attributes from the companies who really seem to do it well is you know, everyone in the whole business is aware of hiring all the time. And what we hire for our values down to for example the receptionist or the admin person who might meet and greet customers is highly acutely aware of what great looks like and is somebody who, if they meet a customer who acts or has the attributes of the company will flag that back to recruiting. Go. Hey, we did a visitor who just, I thought they'd be a great fit for organization. No idea what they do or their skills but you know what their attitude was, right? Because everyone's aware of that. It's, and you never know in a company like that everyone's hiring, you know, so you know, you just, you have to be looking at everyone equally to go. This is a hiring process. I'm engaged with the whole organization. It's different, different mindset. But I think it is, it is, it is, it is on the ball. I'm going to ask you, Simon though, when you look at the, the soft skills you, you mentioned before we came on air, what I thought was a kind of scary stat about Ireland and hard skills versus soft skills, tech skills versus soft skills. Can you maybe share with that with our audience and maybe comment upon it?

Yeah, so I mentioned before, you know that Ireland comes very high, number one in the EU for digital skills. But, but it's, it's actually not well ranked in, in terms of soft skills. And I, I, I imagine one of the reasons behind that is that there is an assumption because of the Irish way of communication is the crack. It's, it's, you know, it's that free flowing language is a great place to network. There's an assumption that that's enough. Right. And of course that is enough if you're white Irish and you've lived here all your life and you have your own circles. But if you're a Spanish person moving here and you don't know about the culture and you're not part of the in crowd and you're just not in, then that doesn't apply. You need to do something a bit, a bit additional to that stuff. So I, I think, you know, that this comes with different cultures. Certain cultures are more aware of soft skills and more aware of, you know, cultural cohesion and stuff like that. I do think, you know, there's, there's work to be done in this space, Johnny. And you know, it goes across from, you know, resilience training as well, self awareness training, you know, unconscious bias training. I think we also need to, I think we also need to embrace learning from each other, right. You know, in, in more multi cultural jurisdictions and Ireland is becoming increasingly multicultural, this becomes inevitable. So we need to learn from each other. And the second thing is no, no matter what level, right. And I've mentioned, you know, I was talking to the receptionist, that's number one. We also need to understand that we need to care for each other's well being, right. Which involves empathy. You know, we're all, we are all on this planet together, right. And I think we've seen with this pandemic, you know, when this, when it first started to emerge in China over a year ago, you know, I remember the media was talking about, oh, don't worry, this won't affect us. It's the other side of the world. There is very few things now that won't affect all of us, right. So we have a responsibility to be careful about how we communicate and our soft skills. It goes back to schools, Johnny. I mean, you know, nobody ever taught me, you know, how to interact with or what empathy was or what resilience was or what awareness was. So I think, and I think there's a change coming. You know, the work we do at Inclusion and leadership focuses on inclusion and diversity and equity and cohesive workforce environments. There's also great companies like Steer Us IO in the States, the world's first soft skills academy. So I think there's definitely a desire for this in Ireland. I know there is corporates are now asking for more of this stuff. I think Simon Harris is doing, he seems to be doing a good job of churning up the traditional way of looking at education. So I think it goes back to schools and it goes back to then how organizations hire. There's a huge amount of work to be done in this space.

I'm glad you brought up schools because it got me thinking. You know, we look at schools and colleges and universities and typically we rely on them to develop hard skills. But in the last few years there's been much more buzz about, you know, online software platforms that teach more hard skills, teach you how to code, teach all these tech things, right? And my end, I'm kind of like, well surely we kind of have that solved. Maybe access to education is a problem, Access to universities is a problem. So online platforms giving more access is a great move. But you know, you leave university, you leave school with the hard skills you'd hope, but that's it. To your point, there is no course in everything required. If I go back to that HBO article and your own teachings, everything they say drives, you know, inclusive leadership and good leadership just in general, all of it is soft skills. There isn't a hard skill to be found in the requirements list and you know, you cannot, no one's going to have learned that in college. So isn't that the responsibility of the organization to develop? Isn't it? How would we expect leaders to show up and just have these skills when we haven't given them any opportunity to formally learn?

It's so true. You know, and it also comes down to industry as well. I mean you've, I'm not going to knock the coaching consulting industry but you know, over the years packages have been provided of training and program and coaching to organizations, to companies. But, but, but are these third party providers really addressing the situation in an organization by coming with an external solution? Right. You know, if you're a coach or a consultant or a management team or leadership, bringing them in or looking to do this in house, first of all you need to assess, right? You need to assess truly where you're at, right? Then you need to learn, then you need to vet in order to then determine the best processes, the best, you know, the frequency of where your organization is to bringing the right soft skills training that can then guide you to success and profitability. It's all very tailored to different organizations. Different organizations are closer or further away from that three R risk, revenue, reputation, nirvana. So this isn't simply about providing training to managers. Or directors. It's about facilitating and this is where the soft skills come back to leadership. It's about facilitating difficult conversations to determine the best solution that holds everybody accountable while you can scale this and sustain it across the organization. So it's a different mindset back to schools in the consulting industry and in organizations. But the key I just want to emphasize is if you do this right, if you do these five channels correctly, diversity, equity, inclusion, cultural, you know, cultural cohesion, ethical, win win, communication, remote management, workforce, you know, cohesion and gender balance. This isn't just nice to have. This drives cohesive and inclusive growth, which means revenue, profitability and brand value. The problem is that so many leaders don't know this yet. Right? And even if they do know this, they wouldn't believe it. And even if they did believe it, they would just say, oh well, well, this is not real. We'll just give it to hr, right? This is real. If you do this the right way, from the, you know, the lowest ranked person through HR to the leadership and you do it down again, you have true inclusion and true growth.

Yeah, I think, you know, you're speaking there and talking about the layers that are involved. You know, analogy that sprung to mind would be, you know, saying to somebody, we need to teach you how to build iOS apps. Like, and you've never done anything in technology before as like, we'll go on the iOS app course. Like, no, you can't just do that. You need to, you know, first of all understand how computer works, basic programming, you know, visual design, ux. In the same way, there isn't really an inclusion course. There's lots of sub levels and they're mainly soft skills. There's empathy, there's trust, there's listening. All these different things are make up an inclusive culture. And that inclusive culture drives growth and drives, you know, higher retention rates. And I think, you know, when you go, when you, when you look for the wrong tool to fix the problem, like, let's just roll out unconscious bias training, right? That will fix everything. Doesn't that not create inclusive culture? It's like, no, it doesn't just like teaching somebody how to turn on a computer and, and boot the OS does not make them an iOS developer. Like, Jesus, you've got long way to go, you know, but it is, it's, it's an understanding to your point, at the high level of the complexity of it and living by example, you know, if you don't have the executive team doing this, then you won't expect the rest of Management leadership to do it. And then you can't expect your individual contributors to do it. So you do have to think about the layering of that and how, how you drive change in an organization. It's, it is typically hierarchical in terms of you look up and you say, how are things done here? If you see it done differently, you go, well, that's how they got to where they are, by acting this way. Like, well, that's kind of how you've got to do it around here. I know I went to this DNI training, but like, come here. That's not the way they do it up there in the executive board. So yeah, hey, I'll just, I'll just follow their lead because they're successful.

Correct, Correct. And as I said before, you know, you know, this is a, this is not, this is just not nice, soft, fluffy stuff. And of course it is, right? It's good to be good to people. This is, this is about growth. This is about, you know, really, truly pushing the ticket and getting hold of this stuff. And you know, company leaders, let's face it, you know, lead. How easy is it going to be for leaders to hide coming out of this pandemic? It's not going to be very easy. Right. You know, leaders are balancing, on the one hand, maintaining costs and efficiencies while also maintaining, you know, communications while also having, being expected to have three to five year plans. That's very hard when there's so much uncertainty out there. So you can't hide leaders, you can't lie, hide. You know, the world, as I said, the world changed dramatically in 2020. Right. Social unrest, pandemic, Brexit and all the rest. And so I think company leaders are basically compelled to demonstrate that they can be more diverse, inclusive, fair and balanced from not just at the bottom level or the top level, from frontline workers right up to upper management. And while being remaining profitable and productive, they need to be willing and open minded about this journey and they'll find, you know, I mean, I'm going to plug inclusion in leadership.com. this is what we're doing. You know, we go into organizations, we, number one, we assess. Number two, we coach, number three, we do organizational assessments. Number four, we manage communications. And number five, there's measurement as well. But leaders need to understand that this resource is available to them, right? So that's half the battle is getting this out there. And you know, this, the work that social talent does through this podcast and other channels, this is phenomenal stuff. It's spreading the Word out there. It's wonderful.

Yeah. I think in your point around visible commitment is really important. You've got to show that you're doing stuff, but you got to do the rest of it. And back to the Gallup article we started the hour with. It highlighted that large companies are more successful in terms of more leaders. And individual contributors responded that they had received some sort of equity inclusion or diversity training done in smaller businesses. You know, what do you think the right approach is for a smaller business who perhaps, you know, maybe the owner or owners feel like they don't have the budget for this stuff? They don't, you know, they're not big enough. You know, you could be a 50 person firm, a 200 person firm. You know, how do you, how does that kind of an organization go about tackling this problem if their leader or leadership has addressed that there is a problem in the first place?

You know, I work with big multinationals. I also do work with SMEs as well. And for me it's about alignment. Right. So, you know, I think you got, you got a, you know, a small company. Okay. It's, you know, it's harder to have lots of different systems and processes. But I, but, but, but any organization can have policies with objective measures. I think any organization can educate and check on biases. I think any education, any organization can create a safe place for sure, sharing communication. This doesn't have to be complicated stuff, right? It just needs to be, you know, the willingness, the open mindedness, the honesty about, you know, this stuff is not just a nice to have. Of course it is. This stuff is, this stuff is critically important for growth. So I think for those small business owners who think, well, this stuff doesn't apply to us, I ask you, I implore you to think again. This is about your business growth journey. And if you're not doing this stuff, other SMEs will be doing this stuff.

Great comment as we come to a close from Julie west saying definitely need to be looking at soft skills in schools. I read Recently, I have four boys, my eldest is 12 and he's a big gamer. Right. I'm not a gamer, never was. And so therefore I kind of, I don't like the fact that he games a lot, but I was reading recently about research that suggests that the generation of kids that come up who are heavy gamers, they are more collaborative, they've learned how to work together because they're in these online multiplayer games where you have to. And I see it in the games. My, my eldest plays you have to collaborate as a team of three or four, like in a war zone to win points and whatever. But individual, individualism doesn't win because it's a team of four. That's how these games are played, whether it's Fortnite or other games. I hadn't thought about that as a, as how, you know, how perhaps games, online games are teaching that generation how to be better at collaboration. And it got me thinking about what else is perhaps slightly out of the academic world but is actually doing more to drive those soft skills than perhaps the schools are. So Julia, I agree with you, more must be done. But perhaps, you know, you might find soft skill development is happening in places where we don't really expect it. Simon, I'm going to, I'm going to move to. I can't believe we're at time already. It's been great to have a chat with you over the last 40, 45 minutes. Is that time of the show where I ask you to perhaps leave us with some advice to add to our shortlist. What advice in addition to what you've already given us would you give to our listeners? Whether it's advice from your own experience or you were handed by somebody else over your career?

For me it's very simple, right? I'd ask anybody who's watching and listening or running a business or planning to planning for change. Ask yourself how important is it for you that other people do three things? How important is it that, that other people trust you? Number one, how important is it that they respect you and how important is that? Is it that they like you? Ask yourself those three questions and then if you feel that it is important then ask yourself how do you think you come across? And then I guess the third thing is how important is it for you that you trust yourself like yourself and respect yourself. It's very hard to get out of that puzzle when you start thinking about it and you know, if we all start having that more that more deeper aligned awareness around authentic, the authentic self, right? And the fact, and the fact that we are, we need to be authentic but we also need to interact, right? And it's all about trust, respect and like that's all it is. It's not more complicated than that but let's all aim towards that.

Johnny, be a good person. It isn't that complicated, is it? Simon, it's been amazing challenge here. Thanks so much for joining us Simon. I'm really excited about you hopefully joining our platform and building some content for users over the next coming months as well. We'll hopefully have you back on the show at a later stage. Simon, thanks for joining us. Have a good Wednesday and thank you all for joining us. But don't forget we'll be back next week, back on track as usual. So it's gonna be our last show of the month on the 31st of March and joining me will be my good friend Kevin Blair. Kevin is the VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Berlin based kind of unicorn startup Salonis who are doing amazing things and blowing up all over Europe. But Kevin is somebody who's got a an amazing career from talent acquisition, having previously led IBM's global talent acquisition team. Cisco worked at Salesforce for a while. Kevin is one of the best thinkers in kind of TA leadership that I know and what he's going to be doing is coming and chatting with us next week around how slowness is using prioritization and agile swarming to hire corporations critical time twice as fast as they were prior to implementing those two innovations. Really interesting model and story that any organization of any size can adopt. Kevin's going to walk us through with through us through this model with us next week in a special edition. We're going to skip the news and go straight into it and there's so much to unpack and I'm sure you'll have tons of questions. So come join us next week. Try and make the live show so you can ask your live questions. That's 4pm UK Ireland time and that is back with time zone differences to 11am on the East Coast, 8am on the West coast of the U.S. thanks to all those listening. We're shedding in their their their comments. Thanks to Peter, thought provoking and thanks to Simon and Johnny as well which is wonderful. Thanks for you for listening to the show and supporting us. You can find us again at downloadable podcasts on Apple and Spotify or find more on the show on socialtalent.com the shortlist. And as Simon has left us with the advice this week is hopefully you can spend the next week being a little more human to each other and being a bit more self aware of your humanity. We'll see you next week. Thanks for joining us.