Grand Slam Journey
This podcast discusses various topics around - sports, business, technology, mindset, health, fitness, and tips for growth. Topics range from what sports have taught us and how we transitioned from a singular focus and pursuit of our athletic goals and dreams to the decision to end our sports careers and move into the next phase of our lives. My guests share how they found their passion and purpose, tips for maximizing potential - holistically - physically and mentally, how they transitioned from one chapter of their lives to the next, and how to drive success in sport, business, technology, and personal life.
Grand Slam Journey
50. Skip Bowman: Exploring Growth Mindset, Leadership, and Tennis History
Picture this: A kid growing up in Perth, Australia, watching his father - a famous Australian tennis player - coaching tennis legend Margaret Court. I am fortunate to have Skip Bowman in conversation with me in our latest episode about all things tennis, scuba diving, and leadership, whether it's on a tennis court, in a deep blue ocean, or a corporate board room.
Skip's journey from being a Master Scuba Diver and Instructor to studying organizational psychology and coaching and consulting leaders in some of the largest organizations in the world is an intriguing one. We chat about the revolution of tennis in the 60s and 70s, the remarkable women who paved the way, and the challenges they faced. We delve into how Skip's scuba diving experience and his international cultural immersion when he moved to Switzerland and then Denmark without knowing the language can unleash the next level of growth mindset, leadership, and understanding of the true meaning behind psychological safety. We reflect on the significance of curiosity, reflective capability, and confidence in nurturing a growth mindset and how leaders can tap into these elements to unleash team potential.
We explore the digital age, its influences, and implications. We underscore the need to discern between manipulation and exploitation, the various leadership styles we see in global corporations, and how Dolphins - a metaphor for an exemplary leadership style - can shape a safe environment for self-expression. Skip argues that relationships play a crucial role and proposes an interpersonal theory of growth mindset that focuses on helping each other grow and mobilizing supporters. We also discuss the societal programming that leads to the promotion of narcissistic leaders and the need for more complex and clever strategies in today's world.
Finally, we address cognitive and collaborative overload in our workspaces, the potential benefits of hybrid working, and the role humor plays in leadership. Join us as we journey through topics of tennis, psychology, leadership, and more - you're in for a thought-provoking ride!
Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skiporgcoach/
Website: https://www.skip-bowman.com/
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So growth mindset must include that our success as adults and in our business lives is very, very much based on our relationships and whether we have those supporters, those people affording us, those ambassadors, those angels, and likewise the opposite. The reason why people who are a part of a protective mindset is often the fact they have a leader who's an asshole.
Klara:Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Grand Slam Journey podcast, where I, together with my guests, discuss various topics related to finding our passion and purpose, maximizing our potential, sports, life after sports and transitioning from one chapter of our lifestyle next, growing our skills and leadership, and whatever we decide to put our minds into. For my guests today, areas of transforming organizations through concepts of psychological safety and growth mindset. My today's guest is Skip Bauman, an author, consultant and keynote speaker focusing on how to transform organizations to the green economy. Skip grew up in Perth, australia, and has worked the past 20 years in Switzerland, england, france and Denmark. After studying finance in Australia, he attained his Masters in Psychology and Languages in Copenhagen. He also holds master's degree in organizational psychology and has completed additional training in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, coaching and cultural change. People First is Skip's mantra for success in business leadership and change, and it certainly comes through during our conversation.
Klara:I had so much fun discussing many topics with Skip, including him growing up in Perth, australia, and his childhood. Growing up in a tennis family, his dad was an Australian tennis player back before there was even a professional tennis. If there was one, he would certainly be one of them, and so Skip had an interesting insight ever since he was a kid into the way tennis players trained, and specifically Margaret Court. Skip and I talk about the evolution of women's tennis and the pioneers who paved the way, which Margaret Court is certainly one of them, a true legend who up until yesterday held the record of 24 Grand Slam wins, which is now tied with Novak Djokovic and his great win yesterday at the US Open. Anyways, back to the podcast. Skip and I reflect on the challenges faced by women in the early days of the sport. He has an interesting insight into the background of Margaret Court, as his dad trained with her at their tennis court behind their house in Perth, australia.
Klara:Skip and I talk about discovering passions and learning through experience. We talk about the impact of cross-cultural experiences on personal and professional development. We talk about scuba diving and meditation, developing a growth mindset through reflection and curiosity. We talk about the practice of curiosity and the avoidance of judgment in fostering a growth mindset. We also discuss the societal programming that leads to the promotion of narcissistic leaders and the need for more complex and clever strategies in today's business world. Skip also defines what productive mindset and growth mindset mean, including his tips on combining growth mindset and psychological safety. We talk about the importance of leadership in unlocking team potential, how we can bring out the best in our team to increase performance as a whole. We cover leadership styles and their impact on relationships and collaboration, the challenges of safety and technology in society and organizations, as well as Skip's view on today's hybrid culture. And, last but not least, skip talks about the cognitive and collaborative overload that leads to stress and burnout.
Klara:I hope you check out Skip's book Safe to Great. I have been reading it for the past few days and it's been such an amazing and thought-provoking read. I believe you'll get a great insight from this conversation. Feel free to check out the episode notes for links on where to order yours. For context, this episode was recorded the last week of August. If you enjoyed this conversation, please share it with someone you believe may enjoy it as well. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode, and consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. This is your host, clara Egochova, and now I bring you Skip Bowman. Enjoy the listen. Good morning, skip, or afternoon for you. Welcome to Grand Slam Journey podcast and thank you for accepting my invitation. How are you?
Skip:Very, very good. Clara, Thank you very much for inviting me to chat today. Yes, it is the afternoon. It's warm and sunny and open. I'm really looking forward to talking about some of our many shared interests, both sporting and leadership and life. It'd be a lot of fun.
Klara:Yes, I feel like we have so much to talk about, so my only concern is to make sure we don't talk for four hours, because I feel that it's possible between the two of us, and just to kick us off. I think there is so much regarding your background and tennis, about leadership and actually our joint company. We both worked for Ericsson. I know you're an avid scuba diver and you have written a fantastic book, safe to Great and thank you for sending me the summary. It was such a fantastic read and I can't wait for it to come out. I'll definitely order it, but before we talk about all the things and questions I have prepared, please introduce yourself to the listeners.
Skip:Hi everyone. Thanks, thara Skip Bowman. I'm an Australian who's lived in Copenhagen for a really, really long time. I'm an organisation psychologist. I started my career in Ericsson after graduating in a Danish university in psychology and working in leadership development, organisation development for that great company in the late 90s Really amazing time. Ericsson was one of the world's biggest companies at the time and then when all the governments of the world decided to tax the hell out of the telecommunications industry by charging a fortune for 3G licenses which killed off Nokia and Ericsson, paid off a lot of state debts. I moved into an insurance company, worked with brand leadership development in that context. But pretty much since the mid-2000s I've been working as a consultant. Companies from BHP built and working in the mining industry. I've always sort of had a lot to do with software development and engineers that kind of thing and had been in Australia, worked there as well, but then came back to Copenhagen part of moving my kids and family around the world. But yeah, I have had my own company for about 12 years.
Skip:I do organisational development or change driven by leadership. In other words, we use leadership development to bring about really sort of trying to change the culture, transform the cultures of organisations. That's my specialty and it's about six or seven years ago I started working on ideas in one of my books and started thinking that I liked the two ideas around psychological safety and growth mindset one of the combined together and felt the title safe to great sort of captured something obviously from the original good to great by Jim Collins and have been degraded then to 360s and team assessment tools and used that to sort of not only myself but other people, consultants to develop organisations to be both great in terms of the results they can grab. It's also great to work for, you know, great companies in general. So that's the things I like doing. And book comes out next month, in September, so that's a super big achievement. That's my big growth mindset achievement was to get that book, to get it there.
Klara:I can only imagine what it takes to write it, so maybe we have time to dive into all that process. And congrats on that again.
Skip:Thank you very much.
Klara:Based on the summary you've shared with me. It's so insightful really food for thought book. Again, I look forward to diving into many of the topics with you, but before we do, I've assembled somehow international guests and I'm always curious about how our upbringing shapes us to be who we are. You've grown up in Australia and actually it's interesting that you have grown in a tennis family where your dad was a professional tennis player. Tell me a little bit more about your background and upbringing.
Skip:Yeah, I grew up in Perth, western Australia, which when the Australian Open was played on grass they would come to Perth to practice and the Perth Open back in. The sort of like, if we say, late 60s, early 70s, all the great players of the world would come, they'd sort of have Christmas and then they come out to Perth to prepare to go to Melbourne to play at Cuyong. In the old days we grew up in Perth and we had a grass tennis court in the back garden and I was quite young at this point. I mean, I'm a 1968 kid. Some of my memories sort of start a bit later, but obviously I've had many of the stories told to me of my brothers and so on. But our tennis court was where the particularly important stories of my father, steve Mark Court, who's arguably one of the greatest female players of all time certainly her Grand Slam record is still very, very difficult to beat my father is very, very close to her and I think where we are, you and I, connected with this conversation around women athletes and families, children etc and others, we were sort of discussing how Billie Jean King quite recently was calling women tennis players to sort of remember and respect the work that was done in the early 70s, sort of create the women tournaments in the circuit and to create more opportunities for equal pay etc. And I've just reminded, of course, because in more recent times it's been their conversation. Caroline Wozniak has just come back to the circuit etc.
Skip:After having her children, but Mark Accord did all of this back in the 60s and comes back and wins another Grand Slam and in that transition to from the amateur to professional days of tennis then we get into the world of the Virginia Slims competitions and all sorts of things were happening back then.
Skip:But my father's role in that was that he was convincing her and coached her on our back tennis court to come back and play. So every afternoon when the kids came home my dad would be playing tennis with Mark, as he would call her, on the back court or she'd be there practicing. And one of the reasons why was that our court was private. So when somebody is well known as that, I mean my court was the greatest tennis player of the year when you're famous and you're trying to sort of find your feet again after having kids. She just needed a place to be able to practice and to prepare physically and mentally before stepping back. And that's what our tennis court provided was a private place. She could come and we had a one of those old fashioned wooden boards at the end of the tennis court, where you know. You come home and she'd be bashing away privately, without journalists or anyone else knowing where she was, which was part of the thing.
Skip:And so in my early childhood, whenever there was tennis tournaments in Perth or famous people would come and play I mean, I've been in the house and Pam's rival was out in the back having a hit up with her coach, or because my dad was such a well known player and he was the West Strait Perth champion etc and played in the quarterfinal Australia and open that kind of thing. So he's a member of the last eight club. It just became such a part of our life and, as I said, so many famous players, whether it be the Australian players, even Gullagong Corley etc. All came and played. So I've always had this sort of like relaxed attitude to sort of like walk out the back there'd be a famous tennis player to see the ball right.
Skip:As I said, I think it had something to do with the fact that they could have played at Kings Park Tennis Club, which is the name of the court where they played the Perth Open back then. But I think they liked the privacy. You know that they could just come and perhaps relax, play without having everyone around them, whether it be, you know, people wanting autographs or whatever that kind of thing. So it was just a little private place. They would go come. I spent quite a lot of time studying my father and Margaret Court's sort of story and I have written some semi historical fiction stories around their tennis play etc. Many years ago. But what's interesting about them is that when you're gifted in that way that puts you in the top 150 or top 10 of the world's players. You have a talent which is so overwhelmingly dominates how your personality develops. Unfortunately, lots of other things don't necessarily come with it. So you get really good at playing tennis, but not particularly good at leading your life.
Skip:So back then of course they didn't necessarily have quite as much of a the kind of mental, professional coaching that a top player would have today. Certainly, margaret Court was one of the first women players to really be given the kind of coaching and training required. But her story is also fascinating. She came from a very poor background, famously learnt to volley because she was playing at a private club locally without anyone knowing, and she played one of the courts at the back. If she stood at the net nobody could see her from where the members area was. So she was standing at the net so nobody would throw her out of the tennis court, the tennis club, and so she got to play at the front of the net and became a fantastic volleyer.
Skip:But my dad would always say she was a fantastic athlete. Mainly she could have pretty much done anything like yourself could ski, or if she, I mean she was a fantastic runner, physically extremely capable. Tennis just happened to obviously be something that grabbed her attention and she had that ability to play to us and fabulous people. You know Billy Jean King was also a fabulous tennis player, so it was an era filled with Arthur Ashe, etc. These are great champions of that age. One of the worst things, what I've always had to live with the fact that I can't play tennis anywhere near as good as my father, and he tried to coach me, and the only thing he'd ever say to me was keep your eye on the ball.
Skip:That's a very important advice, but exactly, but he couldn't really coach anyone because it was so natural to him.
Klara:Yes.
Skip:He just pick up the tennis racket and he just hit the ball beautifully. And I mean, of course there was practice involved with it. But yeah but it comes so naturally. Not everyone makes a great coach. Yeah.
Skip:And often the best coaches are people who've got enough talent to understand what it takes to be great, but may not have had whatever that takes whether it be that mindset of that to managing the pressure, whatever that means but they can still be fantastic coaches. They kind of know enough about what it is and can translate it and understand the person they're coaching really well. And I suppose, having had lots of bad experiences my dad trying to coach me with a good tennis play I think I learned to be a better coach. I've always been better at coaching and teaching than I have been a tennis by a mile.
Klara:I love that and that's an interesting perspective. I connect with so much what you say and one I totally resonate. I feel like I have always been physically gifted, but the tennis game was always something I really have to learn and because I knew how to learn and break down the technique, I actually think I'm way better at coaching others and letting others know what to fix. I think the things that come naturally to me and I just do, I just can't explain. So when somebody asks me about a specific area that comes naturally, I was like I don't know, I just kind of do it, I don't think about it. So I think there's interesting perspective about being so good at something that you don't have to think about it versus needing to gain that skill. And I'm actually curious. May it all connected to your writing and psychological safety later in the book?
Klara:But one question, because you have such an interesting perspective, you mentioned how Margaret Court or Billie Jean King that I'm undoubtedly great for their existence and paving the path for women's tennis and sport and really giving me the ability to play a sport that now has so much potential to become the one thing that you're passionate about and be your professional career, if you choose so, or even the ability to go play for college. And I always wonder whether our generation is a bit ungrateful, because when you think about the mental toughness, I mean what these women had to go through when there was really no money in the sport at the time. They really helped pave the path of WTA versus kind of the players now and how they're complaining about the pressure that's now versus then. Maybe it's different, but may from your organizational psychologist view, how do you see it?
Skip:They had more fun in the 60s and 70s when you were competing for $100 and a trophy, which is what the amateur date.
Skip:I think Wimbledon was 100 pounds in 1963 or something like that. It was completely nothing and only the one or two top players in the world were technically sponsored. So Dunlop or somebody like that would provide them with a job. My dad worked for Dunlops. He was given a job by them that he was allowed to play as much tennis as he wanted to. That was a way that in the amateur days they could work with that and of course what happened is he would then for Dunlops, which sold tennis rackets and lots of other stuff. He would do demonstration matches and that go out and play. Like 1960s there was television but not quite the same way. But they do these demonstration matches all across Australia selling the products and playing tennis. And I think my dad got the offer to go to the Virginia Slings when it sort of started becoming professional for both men and women. But I think if you've been in the amateur days you played because it was fun. You had a job as well. My dad worked in a company, was salesperson, and for that it was driven primarily because you love to compete, you love to spend time with the people that you competed with Fantastic camaraderie it became, with Virginia Slings, a professional circuit. That was the start of it.
Skip:I remember my history relatively well and I think that changed what the game was about.
Skip:There's nothing wrong with that, but part of, I think, the way that they dealt with it was that they created a way of both fantastic tennis playing and competitiveness, but at the same time it was that sense of this was a fun life they got to live and they enjoyed it in a perhaps a different way, but they all had all of them had double jobs. You know, they had a normal life and tennis life as well. They practiced after they finished their work. That's why my dad I hardly ever saw him because, of course, from after his work he would probably spend three to four hours playing tennis, practicing, because he'd been at work all day and that's how a lot of the players were. But today, of course, it can be a full-time job and lots of amazing things have come out of that. But I think for me it was important just to recognize that, if we think about the 70s or late 60s, that we have women like Margot Court, billy G King, who are trying desperately in a world that's considerably more man-dominated than we have today.
Skip:I'm not saying we solved that problem, but they really had to push it, yes, to even vaguely be accepted. It was incredibly difficult. So I think there was that pioneer, the real pioneers, and that should be respected and, I think, remembering that they did do all those things at a time where there was zero support, they didn't have the coaching support, they didn't have the entourage that a lot of the top players would have today. They often were traveling with their husbands and children. That's it. Yeah.
Skip:Famously Margot Court's son, danny. He's drank so much Coca-Cola that all his baby teeth fell out. Before he was four. He'd sit up for the stands with his dad drinking Coke. The naughty 70s, it wasn't exactly so much attention. I mean. What do you do when you're only four or five years old and mum's playing Wimbledon? What do you do?
Klara:Just sit there in the stadium and watch the ball going left and right for a little kid. Yeah, that's so hard to do so.
Skip:Barry, her husband, brother, just sit by and have another Coke, danny, away you go. They're all good people. I mean, I met Margot, my dad's funeral a few years ago and she's chosen a different path later in life. I think Billie Jean King has chosen a path which is more about creating a legacy around the sport and continues to amazing stuff to support it. Margot's different path. She's chosen a spiritual path which is also a legacy wanting to help people, just in a very different direction.
Klara:Yeah, that's amazing and again, I'm definitely grateful for all they have created and paved the way. Yeah. Just one more thing on Margot, as I've been reading about her, because your story in our last conversation made me dive in a little bit deeper. Yeah.
Klara:I actually always saw that it was more of the later generation who started the physical prep, but it seems like Margot was always very disciplined early on and was doing little sprints and really understood the athleticism that goes with the game and was perhaps the pioneer in establishing fitness workout on top of that. Yes, have you observed it? And any comments you want to share?
Skip:When she was picked up initially by Australian tennis, which is back where I think she's only about. I think she wins the Australian Open when she's only about 18. They do two things. Firstly, they get the dentist. She wouldn't smile because she had such bad teeth. Wow.
Skip:So when she wins I think when she's 18, she wins the Australian Open and she's got a mouth close like they're trying to talk because she's got such bad teeth, it's a very, very, very poor background. That was the first thing and the second thing was they started weight training and physical training with her. So you're absolutely right, and part of when she came back after childbirth etc was also she'd go to the beach every morning with my dad. They'd go for a run along Potterslow Beach in Perth all year round and there's a famous photo of them running along the beach from that time. So absolutely it was about training and physical sport.
Skip:But I mean Perth beaches every morning is a pretty nice place. If you're going to do a training run along the beach, that's a fantastic thing. But yes, absolutely A disciplined person. They pretty much early in her, very early in her well, not today, but today's standards they picked her up and they started working with her physically and, as my father said, she was a fantastic athlete and really took to it and really had that discipline and ability to just sort of like become so physically strong.
Klara:All right. Should we transition to maybe your path then in psychology and organizational psychology? What led you to that skip? How did you go from observing tennis players in your childhood through several corporate different roles to now really become passionate in psychology and even writing this book? How did you uncover that's what you want to do and that sort of area fits with you?
Skip:It's because I discovered what I didn't want to do. I trained as an accountant after school and I got my bachelor degree in it. Like dad said, you could get a job doing that and then I got interested in diving. I have been diving for quite some time and then I decided to sort of like take my diving instructor, go through that process with Patty, and on my first or second day of that sort of process it takes several months to sort of go through that process I just realized that this is what I was meant to do and through the course of becoming instructor and working in Queensland and the famous place of Ailey Beach, I discovered I could teach. I didn't never really thought about it like that and I've been teaching ever since. So my first job, my first passion, if you like, and skill. Some people hit a lot of forehands, of backhands. I've just spent thousands of hours in classrooms with adults teaching them about, well, pretty much anything. I started with diving and I ended up teaching leadership, development etc. And I've done that. So for me that teaching is really important.
Skip:As I tell on the story too in the book, I think I learned about psychological safety. We didn't call it back then, because we're talking about in the 1990s, when I was a diving instructor and it was primarily this idea that being a confident diving instructor is not the same to be a confident diver yourself and to make other few people confident as a diver. And our job as teachers and coaches is that. And that's a very different skill and I think it's back to what we were discussing is that there are some tennis players that can transition into coaching and some that can't. And I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that as coaches, we're there to bring out the best in somebody else, which is my definition of growth mindset. There's a little bit about that ability to bring out the best in others and to do that is this other things that are necessary, and diving is a fairly terrifying thing for quite a lot of people. And so building up that psychological safety, that trust, that OK, I wouldn't do it by myself, but when skips there, I feel I can do it, I feel confident, I feel competent, and that's really the essence of psychological safety, that's the essence of learning, or the relationship between teacher and student, or coach and coachee. I can do this. You know, I can dive 20 meters under the water. I can explore that, those underwater caverns, because I feel confident in myself and so on, what I'm doing, and it's like winning Wimbledon's the same thing. I've got to feel confident, and confident enough to do that, and that's what the coaches spend thousands of hours trying to help these tennis players do. So I really learned it from there.
Skip:I went on to fall in love with a woman and that meant I moved to Europe and that meant I had to start learning foreign languages, firstly French and then Danish, and that taught me something which I hadn't expected is that learning a language is really, really hard. I'm bilingual in Danish and English today, but certainly back then it really shaped how I think about learning. How I've written about in the book, it's really that adults can learn a language. I learned Danish at 23 and studied psychology in Danish, so you know I successful at learning it to a high level. But I didn't realize that what learning is really about is managing the social implications of being crap at something, and in this case language is particularly tricky, not because you mentally can't do it, but because the social consequences of sounding like an idiot or a two year old are very high for an adult. So there at 23, trying to talk to friends and have a social life and sounding like you're two years old in Danish isn't good for you. And it made me very curious then to start rethinking. I mean, I didn't invent this idea but essentially, looking at social learning theory, that learning fundamentally for adults and that means in companies and corporations and to a certain extent on the tennis court as well has got an awful lot to do with the social consequences or the social influences. Do I feel good being a learner? Do I feel that people accept me in that consciously incompetent phase, or do I feel so overwhelmed by rejection and feeling less valuable? So I wrote a master thesis called the reduced identity of speaking a foreign language and it sort of started me on a journey. So I didn't actually know. I didn't study leadership at university at that point. I studied language and what we call psycholinguistics. So that's really shaped me still.
Skip:And now that I'm sort of relearning French and as my wife and I bought a farm we're renovating in France, turning into a hotel, I'm back revisiting what it's like to sound really stupid. Trying to explain to an electrician I'd like the lab put there and he's looking at me going you're stupid or I don't understand what you're saying, or both, and then he'll say something very quickly. I mean I've got a lot better. But I revisit that every day where we are working in France, or like today when a customer for our hotel rang and was asking me about the hotel, etc. And I've got a lot better at it. But you have to overcome that feeling of they're not so making a mistake. I think we've got the literature they talk to. Oh yes, we've got to not fear failure. I don't know it's about that. It's feeling stupid, looking stupid, and every time we throw ourselves into a new language or a new job or there is that potential. So that's something that shaped it.
Skip:And then I started studying leadership and organization development and then masters in that and then has spent years as a practitioner and coaching and facilitating leadership development. As said, thousands upon thousands of hours working with so many different types of people in very lots of different industries has led me to have some experiences, which is helpful sometimes when you're coaching people. I mean I can understand them quickly because I've worked in like telecoms, like you have, and I've worked in heavy industry and worked with fish shops. I coach people who own fish shops many years ago, or sorts of things that bring perspectives and the possibility to understand what is it that coach is actually experiencing and how can I help them make sense of that and then add some of that competency so that they can structure and get better at whatever that happens to be. And so there's something that I'm very passionate about and the work that I do.
Klara:I want to touch base a little bit on the experience you mentioned. You landed it in Denmark, 23. I mean, it's a, I think, important age and I had similar thing happen to me actually coming to America in 20. I thought I knew English, but I didn't really right. I was asking excuse me, more times than I probably could understand at that point.
Klara:So, I can very much relate to that feeling. But I'm wondering, either from your experience or the studies and analysis you have done, do you think that perhaps going through that experience at that I would say somewhat formative age for our establishing our social self, helps you later on in life be better in overcoming similar situation or tapping into that growth mindset, because you've kind of at least done it before? So from that preparation or experience you gain more confidence that you can then later on do something else that's at least equally as hard.
Skip:Yes, you're absolutely right. That's really the key point of it. If you look at some really good learning about developing talents, it's fundamentally being put in situations where you can't control much of it. Otherwise it's mostly out of your control and you have to learn to adapt and build success from scratch. That's really formative and that's clearly what certainly I learned from that. I mean, the difference here too is a little bit that when I came to Denmark we didn't have the internet. I think I spoke to my parents once, probably twice in a year collect call to Australia. We wrote letters.
Skip:There was a different sense of separation on your own. That would be very hard to imagine today without turning off your mobile phone. But psychologically it's good for you to have that experience where you are somewhat left, where everything is more, you can't get any help from where you traditionally get it. It is good for you and it gives you a humility to be able to do many things. That's why a lot of people consider that experience of.
Skip:In fact, I've always hired people in my consulting business who've had a profound cross-cultural experience. In other words, they're either in a family which is very cross-cultural or have moved like yourself in their 20s, like me, have moved to a new country and had to really dig deep to build success, both personally, professionally, socially, etc. And I think it gives you a sensitivity and a courage that is good for you. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone because it can be very lonely to do it, but I still think it was very formative for me. There's no doubt about that. I can't imagine me being me without those experiences and it's absolutely a growth mindset, Absolutely.
Klara:And I do want to go back one more time to your story of diving and discovering that teaching is something that you enjoy. Curious about your opinion, because I love scuba diving. I'm not as good as you are, I'm an advanced diver but obviously, as I'm continuing on my diving adventure, I have a number of instructors and I can totally understand that importance of safety, especially on the water, because if you panic and I've actually had a situation where I saw a person panic and he started gagging water it was terrifying Just watching it.
Klara:Luckily, the instructor was fantastic and helped him in no time to put air because he panicked and couldn't take his other reserve in time, and so there's some really dangerous situations. But one of the other reasons why I love scuba diving I think it's a really good sport for me because it gets you to this relaxation mode. It's almost like a meditation underwater for me, and meditation can be many things, because you have to focus so much on your breath to keep the buoyancy. So I wonder. I've never seen a high strength scuba diver. I guess that's what I want to say. Usually people are just very relaxed.
Skip:No, they do. They definitely do exist. But you're right that becoming a great scuba diver well, not the only thing, but certainly meditation is a good, or yoga breathing is good. To become a more calm diver and that translates on being able to stay underwater longer. That was my challenge when I first started. I'm a big guy so I would use a lot of air quickly, particularly at depth. As an instructor, I really worked on that and was basically then able to keep up with all the very, very small women in particular, because they're extremely good. They tend to use no air at all. I could keep up with them, but it required real concentration to calm and to be centered.
Skip:And there is something fundamentally very, very inside yourself diving simply because the lack of sound in a sort of normal way, and that sense of sort of like you're in a box, no matter how good the equipment is. It is a very isolating experience. So I agree, I think that I have seen lots of divers that are very hectic underwater, particularly ones who like to catch fish or spear them, stuff like that. They're all zipping around everywhere trying to do something. I tend to just sort of let move with the water. I particularly like drift diving.
Klara:I love drift diving.
Skip:It's like a movie yeah it's fabulous, and learning to control your buoyancy with your breath is the closest you'll ever get to flying. It is an astonishingly amazing experience, so I'm so highly recommend that as well. But yes, breath control, consciousness around yourself. I'd never really thought about those things, but I became conscious of it very much because I had some challenges I wanted to make, which was to just get better at air consumption underwater, and so I just basically get down. I just sit down, let the movement of the water move me around, because the harder, the harder you fight the water, the more energy is. So I think there's some wonderful learnings there.
Klara:Yeah, which is that's one of the reasons why it's a fantastic sport for me, because I'm not very good at doing nothing. There's literally that perfect sport to practice, just like letting it go with the flow and do as little as possible. But curious, just going back again to that instance, because it could not have been that easy Do you remember that moment when you realized this is what I should be doing? Was there a precise moment where, as you were going through that master's diver instructor who had this seems like epiphany I just got to teach. This is what I really enjoy.
Skip:Absolutely. I can remember I was walking along by the Ailey Beach Caravan Park, which probably nobody on this podcast would know where is. I suppose it was meeting new people doing something new. It just came very naturally to me in a way I hadn't quite expected and it was definitely an epiphany. I've had some since I described that. I mean, I do think there's two types of learning. There's learning from scars and there's learning from scars Scars in the sense we learn by failure and we screw stuff up. But epiphanies are stars. The stars align Suddenly. You just know that this is what I should be doing and I've been lucky to have those moments a few times in my career.
Skip:That was certainly one of the diving instructor and later choosing psychology, I suppose in a similar kind of way, but it was also in that case. It was Professor German, professor Klaus Schulter, who just said this psychology piece comes naturally to you as well. Have you ever thought about studying it and doing a full degree in it? And of course, that's where another epiphany, in a way, you go. Everyone says, oh, everyone gets fascinated with, oh, yeah, we have to really struggle and it's terrible.
Skip:And I say, well, there are these moments that come to us not everyone, but I think being open for experience, being putting yourself out there, moving to the US like you did, or moving to, in my case, first Switzerland and Denmark these are things that suddenly just change it all. I have the same feeling when I go to France today. I can't quite explain why it just this is what I have to do. My wife calls it fate. I don't actually believe in fate. I tend to believe that it's more of an epiphany. It's all that sense of there's something in you that's emerging, and then there is that moment that it becomes clear. And when it becomes clear, it becomes like a value or something that defines you.
Klara:That's what I'm going to do and when it becomes clear. I'm actually also wondering if there's two types of people the ones who take the action and then dive into what they're feeling, and the ones that continue to just think about it. How do you get yourself into that action and, from your organizational psychology expertise, how do you see the two types of people differentiate? What action is taken on that feeling or not?
Skip:There's no doubt that people who are more open to experience, as it's called, psychologically, have a bit of a tendency just simply to put themselves out there and, at the same time, also be absorbing things in a different way. I think people who have a practice self-reflection is a practice, not necessarily a gift Something you can definitely learn that reflect on, that not only can feel something open to experience but actually then cognitively pay attention to it and think, oh, what's going on there? And I do wonder whether all those many, many hours in Denmark with people talking in Danish English and me not understanding a word, that I suppose had more time to have to reflect on things. So reflection is also part of the key Growth mindset skills. Wise, you need to have improved reflection skills and not just any reflection. They need to have a certain criticalness about them. In other words, I can sort of say where is my thinking just being drawn by fairly what I would call protective thinking as opposed to growth thinking and being aware to say, yeah, it'd be easy to blame everyone else why I'm here. Blaming is a protective approach, but rather I could say, well, no, I probably adjust as much to fault why I'm in this situation, so let's park that and let's focus on what I can do something about, and that's a mental activity, and again, trained, perhaps by moving to Denmark, having to sort of like tackle some difficult things without the traditional support network. So that can enable it.
Skip:But certainly the difference is open to experience, then having the kind of reflective capability, and I suppose it does help if you've got a certain type of confidence that means you're willing to try and say, okay, well, give it a shot, nothing to lose. So I think that would probably be three things at least. I'm sure there's lots more, I'm sure there's a wonderful book written about it somewhere, but those three would be really helpful. I found those three have come to me is I'm a relatively good learner. I may not master everything, but I don't fear jumping into that learning phase. I go okay, I can do that, and so that's a curiosity. Curiosity too, if you can practice it. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and I think the older we get, the more important is to keep practicing curiosity, because if we don't, we practice judgment, and judgment don't lead so good. That leads down all the wrong paths.
Klara:Yeah, how do you practice curiosity?
Skip:By asking questions, okay, by not letting yourself come too comfortable in your judgments. Soon as you hear yourself making judgments, stop. That's a mental discipline, is to say, I don't know when I first hear it it doesn't sound quite right, but there must be something here. And that's just a mental discipline of turning around, because judgments general tend to limit our ability, limit out you know what we can do something about, because as soon as we make a judgment, we tend to lock in a certain set of actions. So if you want to open up your ability to have more options, you've got to stop judging. You've got to be able to say okay, let's explore this a little bit, and I think we have to work on that. I think that's a lifelong journey.
Skip:I've been lucky to meet some very inspiring people in their 80s who had that quality and that has always inspired me. To have that, to try to work on it and I think this is something in particular as you get up in your career is to. In my case, I've been in the industry for a long time 25, 30 years so remaining curious about what it is and how people are experiencing it is super important, but it is something you just have to practice and it's so easy just to say, oh, we've tried that, we've done that, don't like that. You say, okay, what is this? Is it really as bad as I think? What could be in it? Don't let yourself off the hook. I mean, it's so easy to judge. The judgment is simple. Anyone can do it.
Klara:I 100% agree.
Klara:I love being curious, and maybe that's one of the reasons my podcast it literally is self-serving most of the time, because I learn from my guests more than probably anybody else, and if it helps even one person it's a bonus because I'm just learning so much.
Klara:But I also realize situations where the judgment steps in, especially when we feel at least from me unsafe, and so I think that's what's been programmed in our brain. I think that's better than I do. But to keep us alive, we have judgment to save us from dangerous situations, and so when I reflect on times when my judgment has been the hardest, it was literally when I in some way or another felt threatened, and so at that point it was really hard to consider other opportunities, such as maybe this person doesn't mean it that way, maybe they had a bad experience that make them act that way, and this is even from leaders that are quite high up in the organizations I have been part of and that sort of behave that way that maybe they don't realize it. But maybe that's a good sequence to the safe, to great book, and what made you write it? And how do you see this judgment versus curiosity mindset?
Skip:I mean, you've just explained it. Really, when we feel threatened, we want to reach some sort of inner safety. That's why I call it protective mindset rather than characterically a fixed mindset. I mean, yes, it leads to fixness and judgments, particularly very firm ones, black and white thinking, et cetera, stereotyping these are all examples of it. They are fixed. But when I first read her book differentiating between growth mindset and fixed mindset, I thought the growth mindset idea I dug that I get that the fixed one was a bit like.
Skip:I've done a lot of work on mindset, culture, leadership, et cetera, work with a lot of models which would have said that's a bit simplistic, and I think that's the problem I always had and I still do. It's not quite as simple as fixed versus growth. It's not like that, because our protectiveness, that seeking inner safety, takes different forms depending a little bit on that programming that comes with us when we turn adults. Some of it is our parents fault and some of it's our DNA and some of it is what life does to us. And so understanding that there are at least three different overall types helps, because the development path from a certain type of protective mindset is the three of them is very different.
Skip:There are some people that when they face uncertainty, challenge, et cetera, they tend to become quite aggressive. They tend to rely on their own abilities, they tend to focus on their own ego needs, et cetera. They're quite confident, they get out and do stuff, and some of it is that a fixed mindset. Yes, it is, because essentially what happens is that by relying on yourself, you cut yourself off from the ability to get help and support from others, naturally. In other words, you're not very nice, you're rather selfish, et cetera. So don't play doubles. That's why it caused me. No, that's another story.
Skip:Now you can have a real thrill, a real excitement about the fact that when you're threatened, you get a hit and you shake the tree, you make it all happen, et cetera. There's lots of leaders that respond in that way, what I call the control and competitive mindset. The problem is that one the only way you can really get other people to help you is you have to be coercive and bossy, because they're not going to follow their own free will, because you're being an asshole. So while you feel strong, you actually create very poor relationships.
Skip:Now those two relationships can take typically two forms, one of which is the people around you just do what you tell them. They comply with you. They may not do anything amazing, but they'll basically do anything just to shut you up and stop you punishing them anymore than you've already have. All that will resist you directly or indirectly. They will challenge you, and that's the problem of that position. And lots and lots of leaders operate from that kind of tough, alpha male position, not very empathetic, not very relationship oriented. And, yes, it means that quite a lot of the things that happen around them are actually fairly poor quality Poor information sharing, poor collaboration, very low psychological safety. So there's not a lot of sharing of challenging information either, so it's not a great position, but confident leaders get promoted.
Klara:Yes, I've never seen a leader who doesn't come off as confident. I think that's one of the key prerequisites.
Skip:Yes, the issue is that there's two types of confidence. You're gonna have the people who are confident very like a soloist I call them hippos, a metaphor I use in the book. But that's that aggressive, sort of like alpha male, female type of leader that just bosses people around and it said we like to promote them because in a period of uncertainty, we're naturally programmed, sort of from survival instinct, to look for leaders that appear strong physically, mentally and confident. It doesn't mean they're the right choice, it's just how we're programmed a little bit. Now the thing is is that, as opposed to the jungle or the savannahs, where we learned that programming the workplace is actually pretty complicated and we actually want leaders that are much cleverer than that, so we actually don't want sort of like your Mark Zuckerberg, senior Elon Musk, who wants to have a cage fight right.
Klara:Seriously, I was just talking to colleagues about this and maybe I'm wrong, but wondering is this just a male thing? Because I have never seen two females that are leaders deciding that we're gonna step into the cage and fight each other. So sometimes I'm wondering also kind of the differences between the aggressiveness that comes with that sex.
Skip:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not so much that there's a default mechanism in our cultural sort of programming around when we meet uncertainty, that we fall for narcissistic leaders, particularly ones that display physical strength. That's how we respond, because when the world seems extraordinarily confusing or uncertain, we actually regress mentally. We seek simpler forms to generate a feeling of confidence. And narcissistic, confident leaders look right and what you'll tend to see is that the more uncertain their business strategy is, the more they tend to behave like apes, which is what we're seeing right now. So I don't have to have a bit of a theory, but in principle that's how, if you look at, say, like Jeffrey Pfeffer's book on power, where he exams it more academically, but what he'd be saying is these displays of aggressiveness and masculinity have a way of keeping stakeholders and shareholders and other leaders feeling confident of having their money in those companies. That's interesting.
Skip:Because the strategy itself doesn't feel good enough. Now, I mean, people could be very much asking that question around Elon Musk's investment in Twitter. So what did he do? He replaced the smart strategy with a tough strategy. He didn't sort of say I'm gonna create a really clever way of doing this, I'm just gonna look like I'm tough, so I just sack a lot of people, and that looks strong and we like that. So that's unfortunately when we aren't programmed to be threatened to like a complex, clever strategy. What we want is something simple, because if it's simple, I don't have to think, and when we're threatened, we don't wanna think. We just want something that solves that problem and gets us going. And unfortunately, most businesses and things we face today are so complicated that CEOs fighting in cages is really not a great way to decide what the best strategy for our company is.
Klara:It's entertaining.
Skip:It's very entertaining. It throws the mud in there for a good measure. I mean, I explored it in the book because I think there's a societal issue around uncertainty and anxiety, which is why the sort of term psychological safety has become sort of like a magic word. Everyone's talking about it and have been for quite a while, and I think my argument in the book is that because we are feeling the uncertainty of the world that we live in, that it has become very different to how it used to be, there are very, very few sort of stable traditions and approaches to think. There are so many choices and potential off-ramps that lead to fairly poor outcomes, and so that's why safety oh, I wanna feel safe.
Skip:Now, the problem is that real psychological safety isn't comfort zone, it's discomfort zone. So in fact, unfortunately, what I'm talking about is not like a teddy bear. That's not what she's thinking about. She's actually talking about a very robust idea, which is that I feel comfortable enough to challenge the comfort. In other words, I'm willing to say or do things that create discomfort for myself and others, to speak the truth, to speak up about things that matter and important ideas, express myself, et cetera. That's not comfort zone, and so I like that idea and that led on to sort of considering well, growth mindset's also a really powerful idea. Is there a way of linking the two things together without getting too technical about? There is, but fundamentally they're two different types of theories. Psychological safety is a theory about relationships, about what's happening between you and me. When we talk, do we feel like we can say things that matter to us and the other person will listen and value that, even though it might challenge your value set, and likewise, or is it something else? So that's what psychological safety is Now.
Skip:Growth mindset originally, by character, was an individualistic theory. In other words, there are some people that learn better than others. But if you look at her theory, it's not a social learning theory. Now get back to my experience as a learning language. I realized that the biggest thing I was fearing in growing and learning was what other people thought of me, not my internal cognitive process around learning. It's whether the people around me said skip, it's okay, you sound like an idiot, but I still like you. So the relationships matter a lot more in mindset than Carol Dweck would have us believe.
Skip:So my point was to bring this relation approach, and that's where I mine is what we would call a interpersonal theory about growth mindset. In other words, how do we help each other grow, how do I bring out the best in myself and bring out the best in you? And that's how I would define what a growth mindset is, because, in reality, for most leaders and for most people, in principle, your potential, what you can achieve in life, is vastly determined by your ability to mobilize the people around you. The people want to help you, they want to invest in you, they want to support you when you're having a bad day. They want to take your idea and tell it to somebody else. They do that at their own free will, right.
Skip:So growth mindset must include that our success as adults and in our business lives is very, very much based on our relationships and whether we have those supporters, those people applauding us, those ambassadors, those angels, and growth mindset needs to have that quality to it, and likewise the opposite. The reason why people who are a protected mindset is often the fact they have a leader who's an asshole. And I had the other day I was coaching a leader and I said oh yeah, people around here are very complacent. I call them snails. He was like yeah, they're all snails, they're very complacent, they don't take any responsibility of being here too long and stuff like that. Well, let's just assume that probably 90% of their behavior is conditioned on the kind of leadership you're giving. So let's just assume for a second that the fact that they're complying and just following orders is because you actually don't care what they think, which is usually the case.
Klara:What was his response? I'm curious.
Skip:I just said it's not a good position either, and he said, oh, I hadn't thought about it. I've done this challenge before because I said that if you tell me about your employees and all the challenges they're having and then they tell me there's a long list of all things that your employees are terrible at, and I'll say, then well, let's just assume that 90% of what your employees are doing is directly related to your leadership style. So let's sort of make the connection that the reason why they're not being proactive is because whenever they did or have you ignored them, punished them, told them it was a really bad idea and don't do that again.
Klara:Everyone listening, every person can probably come up with at least one example of a situation like that. They have been, including myself, and I've been, just to be frank, have been that leader at some point as well. I think that is our default mechanism. Coming from a tennis game, you're by yourself, you control a lot of things. So I think early on in my career actually was the privilege that I really had to learn how you mobilize team and trying to think about how do you unlock the potential of the team, because one thing that stands out to me actually there's many things from what you just said but sometimes if the leader is too strong, it almost weakens the rest of the team and kind of the overall team effort and potential itself Versus. If you distribute and empower your teammates to do their best work and things they're passionate about, I think that will unlock so many more ideas and opportunities and things that the directive and the controlling for leadership doesn't have the ability to do.
Skip:Absolutely, and this is a super important lesson. People transition from an individual contributor to a leadership role. Not everyone learns it, but they often unlearn it as they get more senior, for a couple of reasons that are both natural and unnatural at the same time. But it is saying that if I coach a leader, I can say well, I can improve your performance by organizing your time, managing your energy, communicating more efficiently, et cetera, but can probably improve your performance by about 5%, 6%. So that's pretty hopeless. That's not a very good return on investment for a coach. But if I can get you to bring out the best in others, then what's the percentage of performance in careers? 40, 50, 100. I mean, I'm only useful in so far as I help you bring out the best in others, because that's where the particular for leaders, but not just for leaders, but that's where the real gain is.
Skip:It isn't about you, never has been and the leaders that get caught up in themselves and their own agenda and how much time they have or how little time they have. It's their usual conversation when you first coach them oh, I've got time for this and they'll probably. You might not, but that means that your teams are sub-optimizing massively because you're not there to provide the right framework for them to be able to do their best work. You only have to multiply it by one, two, three, four, five direct reports and it starts getting really big. So that's again what the book is a little bit about. Again, to remind people of that lesson Situation of leadership Ken Blanchard, if you've read any of his stuff, it says exactly the same. He said it in 1960. I'm saying it in 2023. I think I try to put it within the terms of the way we would theoretically talk about it today, but it's a similar idea, similar idea.
Klara:And I love what you're mentioning. It's when the growth becomes. It's almost like compounding interest, right, Because everybody is growing and so you're not growing just a one piece at a time. Why is safety great now, Skip? What do you see is happening in the world that the safety might be more important now than it perhaps has been in the past?
Skip:It's the ongoing unraveling of institutions that provide our communities and societies with a sense of existential safety. I don't think that helps. Oh, those people are scared. We see that the way they vote and the kind of news they consume. Conspiracy theories live off anxiety. They always have, they always will. They've done that for thousands of years. There's nothing different about what we see today. Conspiracy theories are essentially mystical thinking. It's believing that complex things can be explained by really, really, really weird ideas. We have a bit of a vulnerability to this, and particularly when we're feeling threatened and uncertain. So that's a little bit of a theory that I and others would put on it.
Skip:I think it's also got to do with the way we've approached and continue to approach leadership as fundamentally to hyper individualize the relationship between the company and the employee. In other words, the employee is more or less responsible for everything, and under current circumstances, where we've got AI introducing productivity gains of between 25 and 50% and also replacing job content by about 40 to 50, depending on what you do, I mean, some of it's quite low, but an awful lot of white collar work, it's very, very high I think there's reasons to be worried. I think there are new jobs out there. I mean, I've spoken to Lloyd's Bank Group, who do a lot of work on this. In other words, they're retaking job groups and trying to retrain them. But there are some job groups that have an enormous leap into data security or AI ethics. You just can't step into that job from one day to the next from perhaps a white collar clerical, whatever kind of middle manager role. It's not that easy to do. So I think we're seeing that concern about where that's going.
Skip:We have climate change, which is also a huge one, and we don't have to look anywhere other than just what happened in California this week to be concerned, and it seems like everywhere we turn, and some of that's, of course, generated by the news. But there's no doubt that we have to change things, and we are. The question is can we do it quick enough? So all the research about climate change and AI for that matter, the people who've looked into the work and what it means for people's livelihoods, et cetera they say the similar thing we must make it fair and equitable, because otherwise too many people will lose too much too quickly, and when they do that, their willingness to choose paths which lead to social unrest is pretty likely, and that's not an outcome we want.
Skip:Whatever company you are, you can't sell to communities that have no social coherence. You need customers that feel confident and safe living where they live. If they don't, they're not going to buy your stuff. So we're seeing this big change, and that's why I think safety is both a philosophical issue, a societal issue. If you look at AV Edmunds, it's much more of a transactional issue about how a leader creates an environment where people speak up, and that's an ongoing, everlasting problem. The societal challenges we face in the next five to 10 years I mean 2030 is not very far away and we're already way over the two degrees that we're meant to hit. So not everyone buys into that, and I get that, particularly in America, but the ice is still going to melt, whether you believe it or not, so it's just how it's going to go down.
Skip:So I think these are things that are influencing, and I think a further feature is the whole digital dark age that we're in. At the moment, we don't know what the internet does to us. In other words, we have to learn to think critically about cyber both robots, ai but also about social media and the internet. I was talking to an expert at AI. Deepfake production and the ability to create digital copies, clones, ceos is relatively easy nowadays. It introduces some extraordinarily problematic issues. I don't think there's a blockchain solution or video so that we can somehow work back and guarantee the authenticity of video material that presents our society, which is so social media driven, with some extraordinarily difficult challenges, and that's why I call it. We're in the digital dark age, because we are consuming all this stuff. We don't really understand what it is. So we need an enlightenment digitally so that hopefully, the kids today who are a little bit more born digital than my generation, but still the main voters of my generation who aren't they have to learn that.
Skip:And I think the safety grade is designed not about the past, of leash, it's about the future. It's about how do we hit two degrees or under by 2030?. It's how do we make sure the dislocation of workers in the next five to 10 years due to AI doesn't hurt us too much. It's about how do we think critically about how technology is changing, what's possible and how we can potentially be manipulated into poor choices. So I think all those things really matter and I think I don't believe in making things simple for people.
Skip:I think people have to learn to understand complicated things. I think our culture needs to progress by getting smarter, not dumber. So the book is very much in that space. I don't want to get too philosophical, but I think that's the outset of the book and I talk about it at the very beginning of the book and then I say that's the context where we have to bring not only a positive version of what great leadership principles are I have six of them and they're in the book but at the same time talk of critically about manipulation and exploitation is pretty easy and we have to know the difference between the two. And if we don't learn to know the difference between the two, we are going to be misled and that doesn't go anywhere. So we have to sort of progress, we have to get a better mindset. We have to think better about our society we've created. We have to integrate technology into that. But we'll be bumpy.
Klara:How do you explain the manipulation, exploitation difference gap?
Skip:The difference between the two. Yeah. It depends on who's doing it.
Skip:Manipulation in general has a political origin Exploitation has a commercial, and it's a bit like somebody said to me the politically correct crowd were running the world. I said can you tell me what is the political or commercial interest backing the political correct crowd? Is there some financial benefit of being politically correct? There isn't, actually, there is no money in work. So absolutely, it's. Manipulation is the political version and exploitation is the commercial version, and both are pretty rife. We're going to have to fix it and I'm afraid that that has to happen.
Skip:What you say online, they have the same weight as what we say on the street. We've got to get rid of that stupidity which seems to think that I can abuse you, threaten you online which I could never do at your front door and somehow get away with it. Our world is digital now and therefore the rules that apply in a healthy, safe, constructive social space physical space has to be the same online, because we spent so much time there. Now I mean a bit of an advocate here, so you can see, in the philosophical critical corner, the book contains some humor, I should point out, but I still think. I think there are some serious things we have to tackle and that's why the name safe matters. There are some big threats out there.
Klara:I have again a lot of questions and thoughts on what you have said. I understand, agree that digital posting there's many things I think comes off, even if they're meant with the best intention, in a written format in the wrong way, and so I think one of the things that's really understanding that perhaps what we mean or intention cannot really be always understood in a written way and if they cannot be understood I think posting is worse than better. So consider kind of the consequences. I think there might be different ways to discuss and debate in like any personal experience versus the digital one. Even just with an email, if there is a complicated conversation I want to have with a partner or customer, I never have it in an email form.
Klara:I was like let's set up a call and let's talk about it for 10, 15, 30 minutes to see where the sides are and where we're coming from. I don't know what people are thinking that we're just going to post some of our idea and nobody's going to take it personally. So I think thinking through a little bit more before we post is super important, and I love and hate social media.
Skip:Yeah, but the issue is, the algorithm is designed to pick up emotional intensity. In other words, if you write something reasonable, critical and reasonable, the algorithm will not see it. It's looking for strong, emotional words, like hate words. It's looking for them because they have emotional content. They know that that generates responses and therefore it is the ones that get highlighted. This gets back to us. As an author, my biggest concern today is that we write for the algorithm and not for humans, and the more that AI and I use AI for helping in terms of not the book per se, but it is a very helpful tool for writers. But you have to ask the question am I writing for another consciousness or am I writing because the algorithm will like what I'm writing? And when we start getting down that path, then we're not writing for humans anymore. We're writing for a digitalized version of a human who, in principle, is a stone age man.
Klara:That is true, yeah.
Skip:Right, I'm a big fan of Douglas Ruschkopf, who's written quite a lot of books about learned to program or be programmed as he would call it in some of his books and seeing human, which really looked critically at technology and the algorithms etc. But we really have to look deeply at what kind of algorithm is this and what is it actually? Encouraging, because if it's the alpha male from the stone age, I'm not buying into that. I just saw Barbie last night. I mean, come on, that's a fabulous film about exactly what we're talking about. I hadn't quite imagined it coming from Mattel, but there you go, it was really, really good.
Klara:I haven't seen it yet. I don't know what. You've seen it, you have to see it.
Skip:Just to see Ryan Gosling prancing about with peroxide in here. Oh, considered.
Klara:I don't know why I have some sort of resistance internally. In going to see that movie, many people commented how amazing it is.
Skip:It's better than you think it's a satire. It's a really really good satire and it's not provoking.
Klara:Okay, I'll go check it out and report back on how it resonated. Yeah, I do want to still tie your safety grade and a lot of the comments you have discussed to how people are currently feeling in organizations. I've recently read the 2023 report, the Gallup report, and I'm curious what you're thinking about those results, because it seems like the engagement at work is around 20% or, I believe, 22, which is not growing. It seems to be quite steady, but not high. Certainly, it seems like people in general are feeling more and more stressed.
Klara:I've been thinking about this a lot. There's the burnout thing that's going on. I've personally gone through my own version. I actually feel that every person needs to go through at least one burnout to understand how it makes them feel and what their limits are, and learn when they need to say no so they don't get to the next one. Actually, in some ways, believe that the burnout is a personal responsibility, as each of us need to be able to voice With confidence I can't do this much anymore. I need to disconnect or I need to take time off or no. I cannot take on this project because my schedule is already full. How would you look at it from the leadership perspective or even your safety grade book, and these big societal trends of stress at work.
Skip:I've got a couple of paragraphs around cognitive and collaborative overload. That's where it starts. In essence, the problem is that we're cognitive overloaded because there's a lot of things we have to try to understand quickly, etc. There's also an attention problem which contributes to it. In other words, it's quite hard to concentrate. They put everyone in these terrible open offices and nobody can think straight and have too many meetings, etc. That contributes to cognitive overload.
Skip:Collaborative overload is different. It's simply because we have to relate to a lot of people in a very transient way. In other words, we tend to have to collaborate with a lot of people who are quite different and yet we don't actually work with them very much or only work with them once. That means that our what we call collaborative overload of relating to each other comes extremely stressing and then leads to people then saying I've got to have less meetings. I've got to have less meetings. Unfortunately, that's not necessarily a solution, but I'll get back to that. These are the two things that drive us into burnout, drive us into stress, their unprecedented levels of it. My point in the book would be that you can never solve any of this from my individual perspective, and unfortunately, mindfulness and lots of other things don't work. They never prove in particularly helpful, because the point is that people who go through stress will never be able to solve it by themselves. That's the whole problem.
Klara:How so.
Skip:It's simply. I mean, I had stress when I was in my 30s. I didn't have a complete breakdown, but I was really struggling. I had problems seeing straight, talking straight, etc. When I had extreme stress symptoms. So, quite aware of that, I had to learn to handle it. But the issue has got a lot to do with the fact that at work it's almost impossible to share the workload. I've worked with lots of organisations around stress. The first thing I say is that you can't solve this with a one-on-one conversation with an employee. The leader has to actually manage the workload and make sure people are sharing the workload correctly. That's what managers have to do. When I do a 360 measuring the effectiveness of a team, one of the behaviours that stands out for leaders that have a team that's very, very effective is that they manage the workload. The leader manages the workload. Why? Because it's a collective issue.
Skip:You can't go in and say to your colleague I'm sorry, you have to do this, I'm not doing it. That's not going to work. That's what leaders do. They go and say okay, I can see that you've got a little bit more this week and you've got a little bit less. We have to shift that. You can't have an easy week and everyone else has a hard one. I mean, that doesn't fly.
Klara:But don't you think that there is a specific, even touch base on the commitment, because I love it the way you wrote about it and even just the summary and the portents. I also think that some people do better with more versus less. Actually, personally, I think my brain thrives on this rhythm and speed. When I'm in this fun swarm of things that I feel like I'm making progress, I almost feel like I can go a bit faster and faster and be effective versus others are better at thinking kind of slower and solving different types of problems. So I'm wondering how much of it should be the responsibility also of that employee and I guess there is an importance of safety right. Feeling safe to go to their manager and say I can't do this or why, or I want to focus on that and that sort of creates that self commitment and helps rebalance. I guess in a natural way there's a safe relationship between them and manager that they can shift some portion of the work to some other teammate.
Skip:But that's, the likelihood of having that relationship with your boss is less than 50%. My point is that, in principle, when we have people who are stressed and saying what we have is usually a lot of people who are collaboratively overloaded or cognitively, and what happens when you get that, you essentially stop self regulating. More stressed you are, the less you're aware of the needs of others, so you actually start behaving in poorer and when you do that, you start stressing other people, not because they're stressed about the work, but stressed about because you're being an asshole. And then we get the classic thing is I don't have time, I'm in too many meetings. Sort that out yourself. Then it get a little bit short tempered and say stop asking me questions, we stop helping each other as soon as we lose all of that. And then you're going to stress candidates everywhere, everywhere, because the way we're working together is the problem. So you don't solve it by saying I'll just do this. You have to solve it by saying okay, how do we manage the workload in the team? There is room between us to share and do the work better.
Skip:But if we don't and we just work in our separate little silos, which most teams do today it's just basically not just the silo between another team and you, it's between you and your colleague. There's no potential to really create more resources. So every person is feeling they've got less resources. Why? Because nobody wants to help you. Now, why don't people want to help you? Because you don't help them. Because helpfulness is race or prosody. In other words, if I help you, you help me, but if we're all too busy, none doing that.
Skip:What happens is we're just getting more and more ineffective, working in silos within our team and slowly burning out. So the only way to solve that is we have to start thinking about how could we work together so everyone feels there are more resources available to do the work that we've got. That can only be solved beyond one individual, because it's what you and I could do better together, which can give both of us an opportunity to feel less pressure. Now, if we divide at times that by two or three or four, then there's more capability, and we also have to make sure that we're not making it hard for each other when we have a meeting. So instead of me saying hey, I've got this challenge, this idea, so I haven't got time to talk about it, is I say, hey, I'd like to help you with that, because that would help you, that would help your stress.
Klara:Yes, right, rather than going to your boss and say oh, I'm so stressed, give me a week off.
Skip:My point is that and this is that hyperindividualism argument the more we're forced to work in our own little silo, the less resources are available yeah, exactly. And the more you feel that you've got too much to do, you don't have enough resources, you feel stretched, and the more I separate you from your colleagues in the sense that you've got no one to help you. There we have it. There we have the ingredients for ending up in hospital or whatever else could happen. So it's a relational. It's a relational solution, is my argument. There is no one on one solution. It has to be through the team.
Klara:Love it, and actually, your comment made me maybe rethink my own perception of effectiveness. What do you think about, then, the hybrid or kind of this new working environment?
Skip:Yeah.
Klara:And I've been thinking about this quite deeply. I literally don't know what the right solution is. I think that's why everybody's struggling to figure out how all of these things will work out. Do you see the effective? Does it depend on a culture or a role? It seems like people in some ways enjoy working from home and having a little bit of that freedom, not needing to commute one and a half hours Distraction. If the commute is hard, right, they can focus because they don't have a colleague walk by their desk.
Skip:You're reducing cognitive overload and you're reducing collaborative overload. Both of them get reduced by working hybrid. You can focus more, you can control your space, you don't have to interact with people who you don't like. The thing is that everyone thinks that going to work is fun, which is a great dream, but it's usually not and your workplace is full of people you don't really like, including your boss probably. So, yeah, I prefer to stay home because then I can control the interaction. I can reduce the collaborative risk, be through the screen. So one of the reasons why a lot of companies. There's another reason too, where a lot of leaders are asking me. I mean, the evidence is out. Sachin Adela, Microsoft Big Study, said employees feel they're more productive, Bosses think they're less productive. He said I have to give the benefit of the doubt to the employees, and this is all.
Skip:Research prior to COVID showed pretty clearly that hybrid work is actually usually more effective in most circumstances. So the reasons I just explained because you just get more stuff done. That doesn't mean that certain work needs an intensity of emotional engagement, which can be hard to achieve hybrid, and I can get back to that. But the point being here is that the reasons why bosses want people back at work. Zoom, for example, the platform that we're currently on, suddenly invited everyone back, even though they invented kind of invented. Hybrid has usually got to do with the fact that leaders cannot use various forms of physical intimidation online. They can only do it if you're in the office. Secondly, it's very, very difficult to manage effectively upwards, In other words, to keep your boss happy. Online is very difficult to achieve. Both of these are not so talked about, but absolutely crucial aspects of most workplaces, which is the manipulation either by bosses downwards or by employees upwards, managing impressions. This is how you get promoted, et cetera. Very unlikely in a hybrid context.
Skip:So what happens is that, if you look at the research done perhaps in the early 2000s, was that particularly underrepresented groups women, people of different race, nationality, et cetera found hybrid working bringing up. They don't feel observed, they felt more in control, and that's simply because at work, if you're not the boss's pet, then hybrid suits you. You don't want to have that interview. Being watched, observed, evaluated by your colleagues is not a pleasant experience, I feel judged, in particular if I'm a non-represented group. So online is much easier.
Skip:Now, of course, what happens is that there are two forms of impression management. We impression management is that we make our boss like us. We can do that by various social signals, most of which are fairly below the radar, the things we're very conscious of. Or we do it by doing our job really well. So what the research showed prior to COVID is that people manage impressions, in other words, get their boss to like them by working harder, and I haven't seen very much research that is particularly psychological.
Skip:A lot of it's just do I subjectively feel I do more work, or et cetera. This is not serious research. It's just not enough. It's a bit like the Gallup is engagement increasing or decreasing across hundreds and hundreds of companies? I don't know whether that background is really useful.
Skip:When I do culture surveys in organizations, there's so much variation from one leader to the next in terms of how engaged the team is. That's really what matters. But yes, you could argue that people are more cynical. So I think hybrid can certainly be a part of things, and it certainly will be, because AI is going to make it a lot easier for the global workforce to work. In other words, the knowledge gap between the developing countries and Europe and the United States is going to erode very rapidly. So global teams are a huge reality and they are all hybrid, so there's no point even to say you're not going to get them in the office anyway. Most big pharmaceuticals I work for have all got CO2 restrictions on travel, so you can't travel anyway. So yeah, so hybrid's here to stay. I think some people are worried about real estate in the way. I've got this fancy office and it's empty.
Klara:The Sankt Kost policy. I feel like sometimes the more you invest in the real estate and the more money is in it, the less likely you are to change the rules, because you now have so much money to stay around in these fancy offices.
Skip:We're about to see a massive. I think I don't know, I'm not an expert in economics, but I think there's a massive readjustment in commercial property. It's already happening and we're going to see more of it. Because it doesn't pay to, your employees are spending an hour and a half each way in traffic to get to work. It's not good for the environment and it's not good for their mental, you know. And if they already are have to work with people all over the world anyway, why bring them to the office? Now, that's not to say.
Skip:The key to is how do we generate emotional involvement? Because emotional involvement is crucial to the ability to share information and to innovate. Now that, yes, on old technology, it was probably because of the time lag and the compression of sound in the systems that we use. It meant that it was quite hard to get that sense of authentic emotional involvement online. And it's also because humans are programs. It's a bit of research done many, many years ago that if there is a slight delay in visual compared to sound, we tend to then generate mistrust subconsciously. That was I start to think oh, you're a bit weird. So this impacts because of the way the sound and visuals have been compressed on this call as well Same problem, so that indirectly takes some of that intimacy out of the conversations that we have online. But I think people are becoming more capable also on the newer platforms that are simply so much better than what we sold 20 years ago.
Skip:So I think that ability to create emotional engagement in a hybrid context is absolutely there and, in reality, participation-wise hybrid can often usually be better, for a simple reason is that the hidden, subconscious ways that we prioritize certain people and express biases when we have people in the physical room is harder online, and so I think there's distinct benefits. But you see, there's nuance here which I think is super important in understanding what a hybrid strategy should be. I have worked as a consultant for so long now and had such great relationships with people online. I do not understand why you can't create that emotional involvement, that engagement that enables you to innovate, create your products. I mean, I worked with one of the editors in my book. I've never met him other than I, and we've had a fantastic collaboration. I think it all depends a little bit on how we approach it, but if I had a boss who wanted me in the office so that he could boss me around, yeah.
Skip:Or wanted his fancy office so he could look important, as opposed to wearing his pajamas and sitting in his closet Because he can't be important. It removes all the status and so much of work is about what I wear and my status and who I talk to and who I have lunch with. All of that's gone.
Klara:I love it. It actually provides, as you mentioned, less room for manipulation. Yes, for sure. I definitely can relate in many instances where I actually been in a meeting and say, oh my God, thank God this meeting is virtual, that I don't have to sit there person or specific meetings where, like this is so great, I just feel so much safer sitting behind the screen and the conversation goes better. Actually, for what a reason I actually have meetings with specific person at work that every time I am behind the screen that person is so much nicer and we actually have a better conversation and even just diet. You know, recently I was reflecting on the whole relationship with my family is based on pretty much a virtual thing. I have a sister who's 11 years younger. I moved out of my house when I was 13 to train in a tennis academy.
Klara:So she was two years old and I moved to US when I was 20. She was nine and so learning. When you think about it. Our sibling relationship is based over FaceTime or some sort of phone conversation and I mean, it's a person I love and I would give my life for any day, even obviously with my family now, which you can say there's some base established because you know grandmas and aunts and mom, dad. But I've lived away for almost 20 years now and I actually sometimes love them more.
Skip:Living in America, I feel like yeah, no, I think the point is that these things can be created, but the issue is that for psychological safety, the most important thing to work on is differences in social status. That's why they created the campaign around for Know-It-Alls to learn it all at Microsoft. That makes sense, but people often don't really get the point. The point is is that Know-It-Alls use information and knowledge to define social differences between who knows something who doesn't. It's the social differences that are problem. So if we want to create a learn-it-all culture, we have to remove status differences, and one of the best ways to do it is to go hybrid, because as soon as we go to work, somebody's got nicer clothes and somebody's this and somebody's that, and it all becomes game playing. There's so much game playing in an office. It's outrageous. If you're good at it, you'll love it. You want to be back at the office tomorrow. There's an awful lot of people who have an awful lot to contribute, who don't feel comfortable in that. They don't want to play politics and they don't want to play those games like a school yard. You know, I'm hanging out with the best girl in class and I'm going to a party with you know all that kind of carol. So we have to eliminate social status. Hybrid is pretty good at that.
Skip:I think a lot of bosses just want to are more comfortable and feel more in control if they can see their employees. But it's not true. But again, it's back to this idea that so much of leadership is about coercion. It's about me forcing you, using my confidence, to intimidate you, and that's very hard to do. Online it can be done, but it's not easy and it's also feels somewhat like somebody's watching you and that's even worse. So it actually makes people behave better. Yes, I agree, because I say I mean, I've been in so many cases, he'll skip. You know, I want to change the culture and you've got this gross mindset. So well, yes, actually what I'd like people to do is just to behave a little bit better, because most people know how to show respect, to ask polite questions, to be engaged. If you come through your childhood and don't know how to do that, you're probably very dysfunctional. The reason why a lot of leaders don't do it is because it makes you look weak, and at work you don't want to look weak because then you will lose your status. If you lose your status, you're not important, and if you're not important, nobody pays attention to you and you won't get a raise and you won't get promoted. So a lot of what happens hybrid challenges all those models, and so it should. I think there's draconian ideas.
Skip:That zooms in on. I think it must be more participative. I think teams need to find their way of working to achieve emotion. I'm not interested whether it's hybrid or not. I'm interested in emotional involvement. Are we involved with each other in a way that enables us to share challenging ideas, for you to feel that you can express the things that matter to you, the things you discover and learn as you're working, that you can share them with me and we at times find solutions that make us both better? That's emotional engagement. I don't care whether it's hybrid or whatever it is on the tennis court or wherever that happens. As long as it happens, it's a great workplace.
Klara:I love it, Skip. I have three more questions because I feel like we can talk for hours. I would just want to be mindful of your evening plan with your family. I love the four types of people you describe dolphin, hippo, snail or clam and obviously dolphins are the ones that we want to be like, so maybe talk a little bit about how do we become dolphins?
Skip:It depends on whether you're a clam or a snail or a hippo. Hippos are controlling, competitive, aggressive types. It's not the type. I don't want you to necessarily think that mindset is like a personality. I mean personality contributes to mindset, but it's not the only way you should understand it. It just means that they tend to relate to people and problems and the world around them in ways that are controlling, competitive. That's how they relate to the world. That's their mindset. They tend to tell stories about themselves in their head and when they're in front of the mirror they make them very focused on themselves.
Skip:And that's a hippo. And the hippo is the most dangerous animal in Africa. And when it poops, it throws the poop around everywhere, which is a perfect description for somebody who's a little toxic, a little bit narcissistic, a little bit caught up in themselves. So that's why I use that metaphor. I think it's important that we can laugh at our development areas and that's one of the reasons I chose that animal. Then you've got another group of responses or ways of relating to the world, which are that I create safety by being friendly and nice, and that's a snail position, complying, complacent position. It has a couple of different attributes, but essentially people are responding to threats, challenges and uncertainty by becoming a bit of a snail procrastinating, waiting and seeing, following orders, not challenging, et cetera, and that's a response. It's not necessarily a personality there are certain personality types can lead you into a mindset of that type but in principle because hippos are the most powerful and most common type of leader a lot of people that work out themselves. They are adapting and finding ways to cope with what's going on around them, and so the snail position, while there are personalities that tend to come into that group, is more of a coping strategy.
Skip:I deal with my bossy boss by doing what he tells me or what she tells me. I've only mainly had female bosses and some of them were quite bossy. So I'm in HR, so there's a lot of women bosses and some of them aren't great and some of them are fantastic. The one is the clam, which is this idea that comes from a great author, manfred Keith DeFries, who was psychoanalytic organization development guy. He didn't call the clam, he called the muscle, but a clam is a better word. It's the same animal, but essentially, when they're swimming around as larvae, they swim around until they find a suitable spot where they then cement their head to a rock and they stay there the rest of their life and they're opening and shutting their mouth to filter all the stuff that floats by.
Skip:So there's something of stubbornness, a sort of like an open and a closeness about people, and this sort of combines what we call, in sort of like psychology, the fight, flight and freeze responses. The fight responses the hippo, the flight responses the snail. The freeze position is the clam. These are positions, these are operating modes.
Skip:Your psychology or your background can lead you into that space, but I can reassure you that if you're surrounded by a fairly hostile environment, you'll either cope with it by becoming a snail or find a position to resist it by being a clam. In other words, I start operating as if I'm a clam to deal with and cope with what's going on around me. What my logic brings is a bit of a step away from that sort of classic oh, this is my personality, this is who I am. It's to understanding that relationships and situations shape so much of what we present and how we respond to the world. And under most circumstances we, the copal, resist rather than copy or create.
Skip:Now, dolphins create. They are team animal, very intelligent, use their collective intelligence to do amazing things. They also live in the ocean. It's a very dangerous, challenging, dynamic place when to hippos live. They live in a mud pool where there's no transparency, where they hide most of the time, which is the characteristic of people who are aggressive. It depends. They don't want feedback. And one of the most common things you can find. In fact, you only really have to have one question. You could really ask anyone Probably a couple of questions. You could determine whether somebody has a growth mindset or not. Do they actually ask for and take action on feedback? Do they ask for help from others? Are they available to others? Ask those two questions in your 360. And we'll know. Love it.
Skip:So that's very, very important characteristics of dolphins. They are available Because I was saying I wrote a blog on empowerment recently. People say, oh, I just have to give people that task and then they can run away with it. So that's not very good, it doesn't work. You have to, yes, delegate, but you also have to be available, because people who feel that they've got a mandate and they feel that they are empowered also say they've got a boss that values them, respect them, is available, listens to feedback, etc. So you need a bit of both. So it's not just the delegation, it's the staying close and available while the other person is executing the work.
Skip:But back to that idea that bringing out the best in others, leaving people alone to manage all the burdens of their work by themselves, is a really bad position, and way too many people in lots of workplaces feel way too alone. And Safety Grade is a book about reminding us there is no efficiency in making people more alone. Hybrid needs to make people feel more connected and can achieve that. Like you're saying, your family is probably more connected than they have been if they lived next to each other in the local village?
Skip:I don't know.
Klara:We have a catch up every morning which really would not happen if we lived in the same city Exactly.
Skip:They'd be driving you nuts, wonderful. So that's the animals, and they help us laugh. I think humor has a role to play in development if we're going to be critical which I am, but at the same time we have to be able to smile and say, hey, I didn't get it quite right today. I was a bit of a hippo, or I was a bit of a snail, et cetera, or a clam, and that helps all that vision. Ah, I've got to open up. If I'm a clam, I've got to relate better and be more, more approachable. If I'm a hippo, I've got to speak up and hold more accountable if I'm a snail. So you see, those three development journeys are quite different, and so there are different ways to become a dolphin. Okay, so I said, well, most countries like dolphins.
Klara:Yeah, who doesn't like dolphins? I like flipper.
Skip:I like flipper and anyone in America who's as old as I am would have loved flipper and know the song. Yes, the cute animal.
Klara:Any top things how to become a dolphin, or does the book give the manuals?
Skip:No, the book is sort of like presenting the overall idea around that we want commitment rather than control, and commitment the commitment premium is created by what I call growth leadership principles in the six of them, um, which we've researched over the last seven or eight years. So we know what it looks like and we can measure it et cetera. So we have a certain level of evidence to be able to say what great looks like. There's not really sort of one singular tip of how people might get there. The book sort of presents the overall idea. Commitment is better than control, but control feels better.
Skip:Commitment involves the discomfort zone. Control is about the comfort zone and that's the sort of a principle about leadership. I think that the book explains that. Explains also in particular around that if we don't challenge and disrupt toxic or bad behavior in teams and at work, we tend to get a workplace that's very, very devaluing, very uncomfortable rather than discomfort. It's uncomfortable and disrespectful and that really increases the likelihood of burnout. So we need to work on that.
Skip:I've got some more books coming out soon which will be more workbook like, which will be able to help people. I've got a little book about dolphins which is a way of learning a bit more practically about how do you work with this, and we work with leaders and have done it for quite some time, using 360s to develop their profile and, as I said, it depends on what your mindset challenges are, and then you have to find that unique path forward. I don't believe in one size fits all. I think you need to have a sophisticated way of analyzing where your mindset is, what are the stories you tell yourself, what are the patterns you have and the way you feel and think and behave. When we have a clear idea of that, we can then start making really important small but potentially very impactful interventions that can really change and transform your impact on others. Love it.
Skip:That's the fun bit.
Klara:Yeah, we've talked in this conversation about many of the things that's going on in the world. You write about them beautifully, about the big trends that we're all facing. Given the reality, what would you want to inspire people to be doing more of or less of?
Skip:We have to get out of our somewhat socially constructed bunkers and start interacting with each other. Indecent, wise, that would help. Love it.
Skip:Because it doesn't help. We don't solve any problems with disrespectful, indecent, excluding behavior. It doesn't lead anywhere. It won't get us anywhere and, considering genetically, there's almost no difference between you and me or anyone else on the planet. Humans are incredibly genetically similar. In fact, we're one of the most similar animals genetically on the planet. How about we just start thinking about that one? I know that can sound a bit naive and so on, but it really does come down to that.
Skip:I work with a product development department that had a huge $200 million dollar catastrophe product development wise and I was called in to help them out with that. And just the fact that I participated in meetings they were all so much more constructive and effective. I didn't do anything, I just sat there and one of the leading engineering sets. Can we just pay you to sit here? Because every time you're here it's just a better meeting. And that's led me to the conclusion that people know what decent respect. I don't have to teach adults how to talk. I don't know if people love to tell you you're being politically correct. No, no, no, no, no. I'd like you to say challenging things, but you can still be decent about it, right and be willing to take it back. In other words, there's a strong likelihood, if you have a strong opinion about somebody else, that they probably have a strong opinion about you. So toughen up, and it's surprising how touchy people with strong opinions are when you push back on them. Be a bit decent be a bit respectful.
Skip:I also agree with Mr Bean. That's not his name. Rowan Atkinson did a speech recently about public speech and debate. He said we need to be learned to be a little bit less sensitive, but it's primarily the people who are in power that need to learn to be a little bit less sensitive, so that would be a nuance on it. I've got five children, three of which are under the age of three and a half and they're girls. I have one boy, but I have four girls. I definitely am trying to present a way of leading like in the Barbie film. So go out and watch that. Safe to great. It's a little bit like where Barbie ends. We have to find leadership that is inclusive. We have to find more inclusive than it is today. We have to find a smarter leadership, a leadership that is more connected to our societies, makes more coherent societies. Despite the fact that technology is going to give us the power to do anything we goddamn want, we just got to learn to say no. I love it.
Skip:There are some things you just don't want to use nuclear weapons and there are certain types of things technology that we're developing you don't want to use either. It's just a bad idea and we'll get there, but we have to accelerate that. We have to have a conversation about leadership which is both ethical and about effectiveness. It's great not just in terms of great outcomes, but in terms of it's ethically good. It makes our society stronger and better and more inclusive. It has to do both. It can't just be all is because it works, because then you would scan it up with a bunch of hippos running everything.
Klara:Yes, be like a dolphin, love it. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for that. Thank you, skid. For anybody who wants to follow you, learn more about what you're doing, get in touch. What's the best way? Obviously, I hope many people will order the book, including myself I'll definitely. Can't wait for it to come out.
Skip:That would be huge. If you type skip moment, there aren't very many of us. There's an admiral from the submarine world, frank skip moment and me.
Skip:I write a lot of LinkedIn At the moment. I'm writing a lot new material which sort of nuances stuff that's in the book try to provide some different perspectives on it. I think that can be really cool to follow and love to hear thoughts and comments there. That's probably the best place because I'm most active on LinkedIn. There are videos and things out there which we put out there on YouTube, et cetera. There's a lot more coming in the next two or three months. The publishing house and my marketing team are going to be super active. There's lots of opportunities on it. I'm hoping the content is. Obviously I want to sell a book or two, but I really want to inspire people and provoke some thinking about important issues like we've discussed today, about leadership and society, about hybrid, about all these issues that really matter in the future of work. I'd like that to be provocative and to be in that space. I don't yell and scream and I try to avoid sort of emotional outbursts of the algorithm like so I need reasonable people to follow me.
Klara:I love it. I have to like what I do. I definitely am one of those. Hopefully, whatever my network is worth will help re-share the positivity and tips that you are writing and sharing. Thank you for that. I appreciate your time.
Skip:Yeah Well, thanks for this podcast. You're doing an amazing job of bringing people together, discussing things you're passionate about, and I know you do that in your free time and that's really cool. So thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to hearing some more podcasts from you in the future. If you enjoyed this, episode.
Klara:I want to ask you to please do two things that would help me greatly. So when? Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, spotify or any other podcasting platform that you used to listen to this? Episode Two please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.