52: Reflecting on Unforgettable Moments and Conversations

Welcome back to a special episode of “Truth, Lies & Workplace Culture”! It’s a celebration – we’ve reached our one-year podcast anniversary, and we’re popping the champagne to mark this fantastic milestone. Join us as we take a trip down memory lane, revisiting some of our favorite guests, conversations, and moments from the past 12 months.

Episode Highlights:

🔮 Nostalgic Reflections: We’re kicking off our anniversary celebration with a heartfelt look back at the incredible journey we’ve embarked upon over the past year. From our very first episode to the inspiring guests who’ve graced our show, it’s been a rollercoaster of insights and laughter.

🎙️ Sparkling Conversations: What better way to celebrate than by reliving some of our most engaging conversations? We’ve handpicked snippets from episodes that left us enlightened, entertained, and wanting more. Get ready to hear from your favorite guests all over again.

🥂 The Power of Podcasting: It wouldn’t be an anniversary celebration without a toast to the magic of podcasting. We’ll share some behind-the-scenes stories and memorable moments from recording, editing, and bringing you these insightful discussions.

🗣️ Cheers to Our Listeners: Of course, none of this would be possible without you – our incredible listeners! We’ll be raising a virtual glass to thank you for joining us on this journey, sharing your thoughts, and making our podcast community thrive.

Join the Party:

So, grab your favorite glass of bubbly (or whatever drink you fancy), hit that play button, and let’s celebrate together! Here’s to a year of growth, learning, and laughter. Cheers to you, our fantastic listeners, and here’s to another year of amazing conversations ahead. Cheers!

Tune in to this special anniversary episode for a dose of nostalgia, insights, and a lot of fun. Thank you for being a part of our podcast family! 🎉🥂

Resources

All the links mentioned in the show.

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• Connect with Leanne on LinkedIn
• Join the discussion about this episode on LinkedIn
• Email: podcast@TruthLiesandWork.com
• Follow us on Instagram @truthlieswork
• Chat with us on Twitter @truthlieswork
• YouTube channel for the podcast @TruthLiesWork
• Check us out on TikTok (LOL!!!) @truthlieswork

The Transcript

⚠️ NOTE: This is an automated transcript, so it might not always be 100% accurate!

Stella Smith 0:00
There’s a winner and a one and a joy in standing up and trying. And when it starts to work like perks does it actually help people? It feels amazing

Leanne Elliott 0:14
Hello and welcome to the truth lies and workplace culture podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I’m a Business psychologist.

Al Elliott 0:25
My Name Is Al, I’m a business owner and we

Leanne Elliott 0:27
are here to help you simplify the science of people create amazing workplace cultures and celebrate our very first birthday.

Al Elliott 0:38
Mine doesn’t work.

Leanne Elliott 0:42
Oh no did. Oh Peanut’s making an appearance.

Al Elliott 0:53
So yes, we have 52 episodes,

Leanne Elliott 0:57
I believe you did. Bless you. I’ll be honest, the balloon looked a little bit bigger in the packet and it didn’t really

Al Elliott 1:04
hold it closer to the camera than it looks bigger. Anyway. So is our first birthday 52 episodes. Pain has been emotionally and isn’t

Leanne Elliott 1:20
in limbo. It’s been a ride.

Al Elliott 1:23
I think by episode six, we’ve done about 400 downloads in total. And now are we on for 100,000 downloads in total, at the end of the month. Yeah, by the end of the month. So that’s just in one short year. And thank you so much for listening. If you’re watching this on YouTube, thanks for being one of the very first people to watch it on YouTube. As we said all along. We are what we’ve only just started four weeks ago, and we get excited every time we get one new view we get excited. So if that’s you, and you’ve watched it, then thank you very much. You’ll be a source of excitement later on.

Leanne Elliott 1:55
Yes, you will. Do you think we should spend? I guess we should explain what we’re going to do this episode. And then maybe should we start by kind of a little, little history of the podcast? Yeah,

Al Elliott 2:05
yeah. So the last episode, we decided we would just look back on the last two episodes and pick out some of our favorite quotes and clips from some of our guests. If you’re watching on YouTube, we don’t always have all of the videos of the guests because we only started the video YouTube. So we’ll do our best to entertain you during those people who don’t have the the video for bought it. It’s been a tough job because there’s so many clips that we just wanted to include everyone.

Leanne Elliott 2:30
Yeah, it was a really, really difficult choice to the point where I ended up going back a little bit further. Because I think it like recent recent people, they’ll know how much we love them, we would have picked them up recently. So I’ve kind of tried to dig back into the archives a little bit for mine. So instead

Al Elliott 2:47
of the news roundup, which we will pause again for this week, but don’t worry, it’s back soon. A promise a promise a promise. So shall we just do the little history? Potted history of the podcast? Lee? Yeah,

Leanne Elliott 2:59
I think so one of the questions I often get asked the most is why did you start the podcast? Why don’t you answer that one out? Why did we?

Al Elliott 3:08
Because you wanted to know we think I

Leanne Elliott 3:11
think I did.

Al Elliott 3:13
We had a podcast, I travel podcasts, we still have it. Although it’s a it’s a little bit put on pause at the moment. Cuz this takes a lot of our time. But we had trouble podcasts got up to about 150 episodes, start to get some real traction. And we couldn’t believe that people were actually reaching out and saying, Hello, we listened to your podcast. And we got really comfortable the medium we’ve been doing for about three years. So we got really comfortable there. And so when the alumni were talking like okay, right, we’re starting the business, the consultancy our blog, and we’re like, can we do should we do blogging, we do advertising, shall we do YouTube videos? And we’ve all said, Hang on. We’re really good at podcasting? Well, we think we were podcasting up the judge. And, and that’s how I started, isn’t it?

Leanne Elliott 3:48
It is how it started? Yeah. So then this would have been, I think we actually recorded maybe July last year, but released in August. And then October came actually before that it was over the semester, we probably had maybe three or four episodes down. And then you saw the HubSpot thing.

Al Elliott 4:08
Yeah, so HubSpot, were offering basically they got this creator program where if you are a nascent or not even necessarily nascent podcast, just establish podcast, you could join or you could apply to join. And I’ll give you some investment in return for some advertising, which obviously, if you’ve listened to any of the podcasts, you’ll know that we do a little bit of advertising for HubSpot. And so I just wanted I didn’t tell the and one night just applied for it. Fill in the application form for nothing’s gonna happen. And then and then we got through to round one, didn’t we? But you were a bit shocked about because you’re like, What the hell is this?

Leanne Elliott 4:42
Because I didn’t really understand and I remember in split and you kind of like we’ve got this interview with HubSpot tonight. And I was like, what’s it for again? Like, the podcast like they might they might sponsor us or we can enjoy the network or something like we’ll just talk to them and say, okay, very chill. board didn’t do any preparation Maria for listening, sorry. She’s our community manager, I didn’t do any preparation showed up like, hey, and then very quickly understood the scale of the opportunity that we had on the table. And at that point, it’s almost like we were like, hey, there obviously knew me like

Al Elliott 5:24
just moved out gin and tonic, slightly out of focus from the camera.

Leanne Elliott 5:29
And I think it was maybe by Christmas that we realized, if we were going to make this work, we needed to maybe Level Up Up effort level a little bit. So it just kind of feels like since Christmas, it’s really been the focus of what we do,

Al Elliott 5:45
we have probably takes about combined about 30 to 40 hours a week to put these together. Because we’re obviously interviewing, we’re going through the transcripts of planning, the antennas do most of the planning of the of the episodes, because you read through all the transcripts, pulls out clips, and then I do the editing, which is again about another 20 hours. So it is a fair amount of work. But the feedback we’re getting is great. And if you if you’re enjoying it, just let us know somehow. We’re on Instagram truth lives work. We’re on LinkedIn all over that EMF. There’s email at the bottom of all the show notes. Just let us know let us know you’re enjoying it because he’s odd. We were recording now in a in an apartment in Sicily. And and we just, you know, it’s a one way medium is weird. I’m looking at the back of my iPhone camera, you’re doing the same. We don’t get any feedback. In fact, I’ve just seen a mosquito as well just flying around. So we may we may have to destroy that shortly. Anyway. So before we get on to the clips, fancy little bubbly?

Leanne Elliott 6:42
I do Did someone say bubbles.

Al Elliott 6:46
So we have this lovely bottle of champagne. From our lovely friends Andrew and funny over at carbon positive, which we were one of the very first people to sign up for that means our podcast is completely carbon positive, fantastic place so if you do have a podcast or you know somebody’s got a podcast, go to carbon positive.com. And we’ll put a link in the show notes.

Leanne Elliott 7:10
Say yes, thank you to Andrew and Fannie. We love you guys. Thank you for supporting or so much over the past 12 months. Thank you for the champers I’ll lift that baby up a little bit so the good people can see it.

Al Elliott 7:23
Now a very fancy I’d love to be able to pop this and make a really big noise but our dog is a bit frightened of noises. So I’m just going to do a little bit of a

Al Elliott 7:43
and because because we’re an air b&b, we don’t have champagne flutes. So we’ve we thought, let’s be Sicilian and drink an espresso cup. So there you go. Leon,

Leanne Elliott 7:53
thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Al Elliott 7:56
We’re breaking the fourth wall here by by passing it to us. And now you can see exactly how our studio is set up. So I had tiny little espresso cups of oh, I’ve just built it.

Leanne Elliott 8:09
Don’t waste it.

Al Elliott 8:12
So cheers. Happy birthday.

Leanne Elliott 8:14
Cheers. Happy Birthday owl. Thank you to everyone who was listening downloaded this year.

Al Elliott 8:19
Thank you. It’s such an idiot. I was expecting to come back with liberal party hats. I thought that’s what

Leanne Elliott 8:26
I tried. I tried to find a party hat and none. There were none to be had. No, I was I was very pleased. I managed to get this little one balloon, which isn’t very large.

Al Elliott 8:40
But it’s good. It’s good. Anyway. So should we get on to the clips then? So do you want to kick things off with your one of your first favorite clips?

Leanne Elliott 8:49
Yes. My first clip is from the very first guest that we secured on treesize on workplace culture. And this was back in November, when we were doing our the truce back Twitter episodes. And we managed to get Dr. Candace Shafer, who is not only a Board Certified Clinical Psychologist, she was the former what was the employee title head of employee well being? I think at Twitter. Yeah. So I was very excited to get cameras on the show. It felt very relieved to have another psychology person. Explain everything that was going on, I think actually mentioned that on the episode as well. I think for me, the Twitter episode, I remember listening back to that, and it was actually the eve of my birthday. Do you remember? Yes, 14th of November, and you’ve been editing until maybe like half past 10. And then we we sat outside because it was split in Croatia. So it’s still warm in November. It’s delightful that we sat outside on our terrace, and you played it back and I was like, wow, we’ve been podcasting for four years. And this is the first time that I feel like a podcast.

Al Elliott 10:01
Yeah. Well, let’s go and listen to Dr. Candice Shaffer,

Speaker 4 10:05
you express that empathy to your your employees who may be suffering job losses, just because you’re letting them go doesn’t mean you can’t treat them like a human being. And I think that’s the biggest thing that I have noticed from not just layoffs with Twitter, but with a lot of different companies over the past couple of years is you’re really taking the human dignity out of it by treating all of these people like they’re a number, or just, you know, a being that’s works for you, rather than an actual person who has a family or doesn’t, you know, have enough savings, left them in their bank account to make sure that they’re going to get through to whatever the next step is. And so being considerate and being empathetic is really about giving your employees the benefit of the doubt that they will understand. But you also work with them to make sure that they have enough time so that they can put everything that they need to do to get their life in order so that their world doesn’t come crashing down completely.

Leanne Elliott 11:15
What I loved about Dr. To Candice and the other guests as well, that we had on that episode was really the headline was, it’s not about a business having to make the decision to make redundancies. But how that that decision is executed, can be done in a more empathetic and human way. So yeah, I think it was just a nice, I think it was a nice episode to kind of show that we can get different from building different backgrounds, different experiences to come together, and bring their own perspectives to people and culture in still very people centered way.

Al Elliott 11:49
And my first favorite clip is from Robert Keller Loski, who is incredible. He’s got the leadership Launchpad product is God the leadership Launchpad podcast. And the episode he was in was how not to be an asshole boss or fact, because he’s Canadian was asshole. So here’s Rob talking about being an asshole boss.

Rob 12:07
Actually, one time when I was the Polo coach, I was putting the guys through a really hard workout. And one of the guys on my team got up and got out of the pool during the swim set, and went over to his back. And I was walking down the pool deck, and I was thinking of all the things I was going to yell at him for. And that he pulled a diabetes needle out of his bag. He was going to he was diabetic, and he needed an insulin shot. And that was like a screeching moment for me going, you know what? I’m an asshole. Even though I’m not trying to be, and those moments we’ve all have them. Right? But does that mean that I’m doomed to this? Rob’s an asshole forever, and I cannot change and I cannot be? No, it just means that now I have to do the work on my mindset. What are the beliefs that about me? How do I show up as a leader? Turn on the lights of self awareness turn on the lights of empathy and compassion. And now I can start to look at what behaviors do I make that are impacting other people in the negative ways.

Al Elliott 13:20
So there was Rob Rob recently did a TED Talk based around exactly this. So we’ll leave a link to that in the show notes. Leah, you’re next.

Leanne Elliott 13:27
So my next clip is from another What I thought was a pivotal point in the history of the podcast. So this is going back to January of this year journey 2023. And it was episodes on burnout, I could have picked clips, so many clips on these episodes, it was really, really hard to choose one Kate Well, and Sally were just phenomenal guests. And I felt this was the first time that we start to maybe have a conversation that people were really, really engaging in both in terms of our numbers on the podcast, but also in terms of our socials as well. I have picked this clip from Sally, because we have quoted it a number of times on the podcast, I think maybe even once last week. So yeah, here’s Sally talking about burnout and the role that organizations have to play in its prevention.

Speaker 6 14:17
It’s one that really sort of makes me a little bit incensed, because I really find that quite cruel to some extent that there is this constant focus on the individual should be more resilient. We are offering the individual more meditation apps and yoga classes and I say this as a qualified yoga and meditation teacher that will not prevent burnout. I like to use the metaphor of if we have for example, a toxic Lake and this the fish or or getting sick. We don’t look at each individual fish and try to make it better and heal it. We look at the water quality and we detoxify the water and we improve the quality of the lake so that the fish become healthy and I think That’s how we need to frame burnout as well, that if you have a healthy, high functioning individual in a toxic environment, eventually that chronic workplace stress will will wear them down. And it doesn’t matter how many things they put into place necessarily when they’re in that environment. It’s just, it really is often just a matter of time before burnout occurs.

Al Elliott 15:23
So that was Sally from Episode 20 and 21. My I’m continuing the theme with burnout because episode 22 was called the untold heartbreak of male leaders. It was with the incredible Jim Young, it was very first episode where he was just me. So Leann introduced us and it was just a conversation between me and Jim. And it was just amazing. And you’ll hear the quote in a second, there just for me is one of the quotes of 2023.

Speaker 7 15:53
Yeah, there is an ocean of untried male tears sitting out there, because we’re not supposed to do that. And your original question, is there a difference between male and female burnout? symptomatically No, feels the same. How do we get into it? I think there are differences there. And that’s one of them is, as men we’re taught to hold all those emotions inside. And that is too much to bear. That’s we just can’t. We can’t be healthy. If we only have two emotions, happy and mad.

Al Elliott 16:25
There’s an ocean of own cried male tears. What a quote. The whole episode was amazing. It was just such an honest conversation with someone who has burned out he talks about lying on the carpet sobbing unable to stop. We just sometimes as men don’t hear that enough. We hear the likes of Dr. Jordan Peterson, Grant Cardone, that weird guy over in. In Romania. I forget his name, who are just like, man, yeah, we do this. We don’t do that. It’s just it’s just nice to hear someone say Do you know what sometimes you just just inconsolably sad. That put a bit of down on it. But I don’t mean it to because you should definitely go back and listen to that episode, Episode 23.

Leanne Elliott 17:09
It was a really awesome episode, I think actually remains our only linear interview we’ve ever featured on the podcast. I think what was really important about that episode is it raised a lot of issues that often a very difficult for men to raise in a way that isn’t confrontational seen as anti feminist or distracting the conversation from something else. It’s very important. And I think, you know, we can including these things are not mutually exclusive. You know, mental health is a is a human issue. And I think as well, you know, the way that Jim explains it and expresses himself and his experiences and that of other people he’s worked with, it breeds empathy. And I think that is really the key to all of this. We followed up that episode A few weeks later with a sibling episode on women’s health a guide for male leaders. I have picked a clip from Dr. Claire, Ashley, all of the women on that episode were phenomenal. Hannah and Kelly, incredible. The reason that I’ve picked Dr. Claire is that I think she has a similar approach to gym in that she’s able to explain things from a point of knowledge, and empathy and honesty, and raise a really important point in terms of the ongoing inequity that women experience, which can sometimes be muted in the social media conversations that are currently happening. So here is Dr. Claire Ashley, discussing the gender health gap.

Dr Claire Ashley 18:41
When it comes to medical education. We you know, we’re we’re very biased towards the male perspective, I think traditionally, if you look at how scientific studies are conducted, largely,

Leanne Elliott 18:53
I think, off the top of my head, it’s about 80% of scientific trials are conducted on men and male bodies. Women are really largely excluded from the scientific process. And of course, when it comes to practicing medicine, we have to be evidence based. But if we’re basing our practice off of, of, you know, trials that have been done purely on men and male bodies, then we’re missing data to do with hope for half, you know, half the population. We went on to discuss in that episode, how some examples and I think the one that stands out for me, was around the crash test dummies and cars until very, very, very recently, like in the last six to 12 months, that these tests have actually been done using crash dummies that are based on female anatomy. So I think it just goes to show that as much as it feels we’ve come so far, there is still inequities and gaps that we need to address. So thank you very much to Dr. Claire, and of course, our other panelists, Hannah, and Dr. Kelly for helping us do that.

Al Elliott 19:53
So switching gears slightly. My next clip is from Dr. JJ Peterson who if you’ve ever Ever heard of a book called Story brand? While he’s the co author, the co host of the of the associated podcast, and just such a cool, cool guy, he was in the middle of a seminar teaching a seminar in Vegas, I think, took an hour out to talk to me of his own resume. And he’s on the network as well. But I mean, they’re super superstars. So he was just so nice to go. Yeah, I don’t know who you are. Yeah, you’ve probably only got a few 100 followers at that time, we probably didn’t have that many. But he’s still said, Yep, I’ll take time out to talk to you. One of the things that I love about this is, if you are a leader, it’s so difficult, a business owner is so difficult to not make it the story for everyone about you and about the business. He talks about turning it on his head, and making them the hero of the story.

Speaker 8 20:45
If you’re trying to communicate to your staff, they are the hero of their own story, you are not the hero of their story. So you don’t need to tell your story to them, you actually need to tell their story to them, you need to invite them into the story that they get to be a hero. So you need to clearly communicate what it is that they want. You need to be able to articulate what problems are experiencing how you can help them overcome that. How have you what’s the plan for them to do that? What are they supposed to do next and then cast a vision for success and failure? That right there’s a very high level of how you take, like, if I’m saying to anybody, hey, we need to hit our fourth quarter goals, or we’re not going to be $100 million company this year. Let that’s where a lot of leaders come in and say like, Alright, guys, we need to get going because we need to hit $100 million, we’re gonna be $100 million company. How at all? Does that contribute to their survival and thriving? How? What? How does that overcome a problem for them? Have you given them a clear plan to do it? Have you cast a vision for what life is like? If they do? Do they know what action they’re supposed to take to get there? Or are you just going rah rah, everybody, we need to hit $100 million. We need to not position ourselves as the hero of our story. We need to position ourselves as the guide in the story. We are the guide and the people that we’re speaking to are the hero. What does it look like to be the guide, a guide offers empathy to the hero story. So offers empathy to say, I understand the problems you’re experiencing, but also authority, I have the ability to help you overcome those problems. Okay, that’s kind of how you position yourself as a guide. The only time you ever should talk about yourself is with empathy and authority.

Al Elliott 22:35
If you want to hear why he thinks that Hillary Clinton lost the election, and Donald Trump won it, go back to Episode 39, some fantastic stories in there. It

Leanne Elliott 22:47
really was an awesome episode also featuring Orly, who brings a really interesting perspective on brand new as well definitely check that out, along with the 1000s of other people that have that is actually our number one episode over the last 12 months. Yeah,

Al Elliott 23:02
so thank you so much.

Leanne Elliott 23:03
So from one inspiring leader to another, my next clip comes from our very first founder story with the formidable stellar Smith from Parks, the more I learned about stellar, both in the media and from her team, the conversations I’ve had with members of her team, she is just the type of entrepreneur, the type of leader that I want in my life. And I think my my favorite thing about stellar is that she completely understands that we can be purpose led, we can make the world a better place we can prioritize the health and well being of our employees. And we can still make money.

Stella Smith 23:51
Part of me and perks has changed, I think in the last three years, which is, you know, we get up in the morning, and I’m looking at, you know, can I make this thing profitable? So it’s sustainable forever, you know, what’s my gross margin? And how long am I sales cycle, all the good stuff that you would do as a leader in a business that’s growing. But at the same time, I’ve got, I think I can put doctors into areas in South Africa that have no affordable health care for sub a pound this year. And I think I can make a difference on and I think my team can make a difference to that statement. And it’s very odd, as a character of with my background that’s kind of, you know, fought my way out. So then find yourself in a position where you actually think you can do something that’s there in real life. We have 13,000 customers that can access a doctor and a counselor today, right now, this second, because pokes exists and that’s a different driver. And I’ve never, you know, I’ve always hopefully done the right thing by people but I’ve never had that. It would be remiss for us not to move forward with it that that’s how I feel about it now, and I think that’s a that’s an interesting place to sit as a human being

Al Elliott 25:00
So my next clip is stellar again. She had so much to say she was such an interesting lady and she was just so down to earth and no ego about. And I think what I love about this clip is she’s, she seems genuinely wondrous at the world and of people, and how cool people are. And actually, when we’ve you listened to the happiness episode from last week, then you’ll know that actually the way that she because she makes other people happy, she’s happy herself. So he’s stellar again,

Stella Smith 25:32
the biggest thing is, isn’t it amazing? What you can do with a collection of people. And I say this to my team was like, we created a noun, it’s a noun. And you know what it was seven people sitting on some laptops in their spare rooms or home offices for those that were lucky enough to have them. And, and Dan is part of that story, you know, how lucky we are to have had ash in my team, who’s in charge of our SEO, sit down with the X Md of Google, UK and Ireland, to get SEO tips. We’ve got a beautiful blend of people who know nothing but have the right attitude, willing to roll their sleeves up, and some amazing experience intellect characters that surround perks. And, you know, the more people that can attach themselves to admission there is even if it’s just saying perks is call, have a look at it, so that somebody knows it’s there fast enough. I don’t know. I’m everyday bewildered and humbled by what’s happened on our story. And I think if I could give that little bit of magical feeling that we feel every morning to every little business, that standing there trying in a backdrop of economic uncertainty, and difficulty and strife and troubles and only crises, I would give that little bit of magic, which is there’s a, there’s a will and a one and a joy in standing up and trying. And when it starts to work, like perks does actually help people, it feels amazing.

Leanne Elliott 27:03
I love that so much. There are not enough business leaders out there that prioritize being nice, prioritize kindness, I also love as well, the lessons we learned from stellar in terms of engaging Gen Zed, which seems to be the the elusive generation, allegedly, we’ve talked a lot about generations on the podcast, which brings me nicely to my next clip, which was our generation panel episode. Again, there are so many great clips here, I really there’s a big part and they’re really wanted to showcase our Gen Zed representative, there is a who is just a phenomenal young person and a psychology superstar in the making, she is going to make me she’s just gonna, I’ll be privileged to even like have had a conversation with her in 10 years time, like I wouldn’t be on her radar. It’s not true, actually. Well, because she’s lovely. But I really wanted to include is a, but at the same time, I think my biggest I guess the learning point and reflection point from the episode wise baby boomers, and how perhaps they are misunderstood how they are underappreciated, underrepresented. And really, that we can still continue to learn a lot from this pioneering generation, as our guests carry cardinally explains,

Speaker 9 28:23
boomers have kind of become a generational scapegoat for everything that’s going wrong on the planet. And and that’s not necessarily the case, you know, they they were the largest generation in the United States, but they’ve now been eclipsed by millennials. But nonetheless, I do believe it was huge generation that emerged after World War Two, that broke a lot of molds as they went through each generation. So the Boomers were in many ways, pioneers, that they took an era of great predictability, coming out of the 1950s in the post war when everyone just wanted things to be quiet and predictable and simple. So you saw the rise of suburban households and moms being at home and cookies after school. And there was this need for things to be consistent. And yet this generation, the Boomers were became the hippies and the rock and rollers and playing with drugs and jumping out of those predictable career paths. And all along the way, finding a desire to do things different in a different way. And not everything was reckless that, you know, the boomers are known for, you know, making traveling interesting and passing seatbelt laws. At the same time. They were really the generation that pioneered activism. It took through the activism of the 1920s a woman’s right to vote and took it to another level of activism, as well as volunteerism, the creation of the Peace Corps. So it’s a generation that continues to this day to be highly innovative as more entrepreneurs, which I can speak a bit more about later. When it comes to business, and and some of the highest philanthropic giving, coming from this generation, so I do think they’re a bit misunderstood and, and you know, as you had said, Claire, there was sort of a flattening of the generations, but then there was also this, okay, Boomer, okay millennial, there’s still these levels of, of not fully understanding the different generations. And you know, my rule of thumb is that anyone who’s 15 years older than you feels old. So, you know, we just generationally struggle sometimes to fully embrace someone who is 15 years younger or older than we are. And yet, there’s so much richness to learn.

Leanne Elliott 30:39
I think of all the episodes we’re going to mention today, that is definitely want to check out if you haven’t listened. Again, it’s very different from other formats that we’ve done, we actually had Ashley and Carrie and Claire, on the same call together, and then we inserted is a afterwards time differences will explain on the episode. So it is more of a live discussion, which was really interesting in all, all four of them had incredible viewpoints. So yeah, definitely worth checking that out.

Al Elliott 31:09
So that was episode 35, the generational panel onto Episode 36, which is all about the four day workweek. So we had Joe O’Connor on along with a couple of other amazing guests talking about the four day workweek. Joe is such an interesting guy, because he’s done it. He’s kind of like a mixture between academic and entrepreneur in his very entrepreneurial thinking. But also he knows how to manage data, etc, etc. So let’s go and hear from Joe. Oh, it

Speaker 10 31:38
is a challenge. And it does mean that if you’re a law firm or a marketing agency or accounting practice that bills by the hour, that is an additional complication that you need to deal with in order to make this work. But you can make it work and businesses in those sectors who, you know, bill by the hour have made it work. And the way that they’ve done it, for the most part is either number one, they have found enough efficiencies in their non billable time are in their non billable overheads that they’ve been able to maintain the level of billable hours and the level of client time that they have add in and around the same level. Or they have changed the way they build. So they’ve either partially or wholly moved to fixed fee value based or project based billing, and which has obviously meant that they’re effectively decoupling the direct relationship between time and and revenue. And often the solution might lie somewhere in between. We’ve seen law firms and we’ve seen marketing agencies who have achieved this through some combination of those two things.

Al Elliott 32:42
What I really love was the whole lesson from Joe was even though he is he and everyone else banks, and very on that podcast, were really fanatical about the four day week Joe was saying, Look, just try it because it’s not the silver bullet. Don’t try don’t assume that you got a bad workplace change the four day work week and everything’s gonna be fine. That’s so refreshing to hear that.

Leanne Elliott 33:02
It really is. If you haven’t heard of Joe O’Connor, he actually was the person who led the entire global study pilot into the four day workweek. He truly is the thought leader in this space. What I really liked about it as well is it’s kind of like a four day workweek will be a fad. If we just go let’s try it. And that’s the only change we make what Jerry’s saying there is it’s a full organizational operational transformation that is required to make the four day work week work. And I think that’s true so many other people and culture interventions as well. Without that, that being embraced by the organization and within embedded within it and ways of working. It will just be a fad. Brilliant. So on truth and lies from very early on, Alan, I always said we wanted to talk about things that were trending things that are popular in the media, and debunk some of the truth and lies or lies and truth or even prove it behind each one of these trends. I think quite quitting was maybe our very first one. And that was actually the episode that got the attention of HubSpot. Thank you very much. Great. Good thing. Thank you Gen Zed once again. Honestly, you’re gonna keep me in a job. I love you guys. So yeah, another another trend that we saw quite a lot of media attention over the past few months has been neurodiversity, and specifically the increase in ADHD diagnoses. We brought you on neurodiversity 101 episode just a few weeks ago, my guests that have picked out from that panel and again, all three were incredible and brought very different perspectives. If you are a parent, I’m sure you really valued what Jim had to say on that. And if you are an adult with ADHD, I’m sure Kristin was your and his now your new hero. For me the hero was Dr. Nancy Doyle. I have followed Nancy’s work for a number of years and her work the work of genius within it is game changing and I’m so pleased to see both Nancy and the organization really starting to hit mainstream conversations. Now, what I love most about Nancy is she explains things so simply, so beautifully. And a way that we can all understand.

Speaker 11 35:13
We have this concept in neurodiversity of the spiky profile. So if you think about people’s abilities, most people have an IQ of 100. And most people, and IQ isn’t one thing. It’s made up of verbal skills, visual skills, how quickly you process information, how well your memory works, and your attention. And so you’ve got these kinds of different areas. And most people, when you plot their abilities on a graph, all of the areas will be more or less 100, there’ll be somewhere between 85 and 115. And 67% of the human population will score between 85 and 115, for all areas of IQ. And then you’ve got your neuro divergence. And what we will do is have some of our scores 140. But then another thing will be sort of down at 75. So we’ve got these big spikes between our strengths and weaknesses. And what we’ve got into is the autistic spike, which is the people that are really, really good at fine detail processing. And we’ve kind of maxed out on that. But my neurodiversity strength, the one that I have the highest IQ point is visual spatial reasoning. It’s abstract reasoning, which makes me a good problem solver. I see gaps, I see risks, I see problems, and I see gaps way before anybody else does. And this is even true in my company. You know, I’m going Whoo, I suppose a bit problematic. I’m a bit worried about that number there. I think that’s going to be an issue. And then three months later, it turns into an issue and everyone goes, Oh, I didn’t listen to Nancy three months ago.

Al Elliott 36:41
So that was episode 41. The neurodiversity so many great guests on this it’s funny when you look back at these you go oh, yeah, we had this person. Oh, yeah. They said this, and yeah, it is this phenomenal, man. We have like, at least 50 hours of content now Lian of like audio content? That’s, that’s insane, isn’t it?

Leanne Elliott 37:01
I know, we need to look into some kind of like, I don’t know, group or something. Because we’d like to say we have so much content that hasn’t even been published on the podcast from our guests. So So yeah, maybe some bonus bonus things coming your way soon.

Al Elliott 37:14
So my next choice is Kevin del strim. He was such an interesting guy is another founder story. He founded a company called swell, which is a fintech. I think I’ve read that he’s now sold it. He’d only been running it for about sort of 912 months and already sold it or merged it or something. He’s done something with it, which is quite significant. One of the things I met him on Twitter, I didn’t meet him as much as you meet people on Twitter, I saw him on Twitter connected with him and said, look at you got to get you on the podcast, around a story, which I won’t I won’t spoil. It’s in Episode 44, if you want to go and listen. But the one thing that I loved about what he said was

Speaker 12 37:55
this, that the way you do anything is the way you do everything is the famous quote from an American poet that I really like named Annie Dillard. And, you know, I, there’s lots of ways you can go with that quotes. Sorry to kind of go on a tangent here. But but, you know, even when it comes to hiring, when I interview people, I will often ask more questions about their personal life than their work history. Because of this idea that the way you do anything is way to everything. It’s often more telling, do you understand how someone thinks about their personal life? Because we’re not, you know, we don’t become one person in our personal life, and then a completely different person at work. It all works together. We are who we are. And so I think there’s a lot of ways it’s a, that’s a great pearls of wisdom, there’s a lot of ways to apply it in business.

Al Elliott 38:43
So like he says, the way you do something is the way you do anything. I have been saying this for quite a while. What never clicked though, was this idea that if you go and look at someone’s interests on this, you know, they send their resume or CV, a CV and you look at their interests, and find out how they treat their interests and how committed they are to their interests. That tells you a bit more about how they might be committed to work, which I thought was a really smart way of thinking.

Leanne Elliott 39:08
Yeah, I really enjoyed our founder theories, and we have some really cool people call me up as well. So look out for those. We have mentioned our four day workweek one on one we have mentioned our neurodiversity one on one. We had another one on one episode, and that was equity, diversity and inclusion. What a topic we touched on it very lightly, and I’m sure we will dive in again, two incredible guests, Sonia Thompson, you know, one of our most favorite people in the world and on the network, brilliant show inclusion and marketing. I haven’t chosen Sonia just because we will be live Sonia, we’re always worried bigging up son Yeah, I’m sure you listen to Sonia show as well. I wanted to share a clip from Katherine and Garrett are incredible experts and the author of conscious inclusion. Again, I think Katherine just has a way of explaining things that make it so exciting. Support, particularly for owner led businesses.

Speaker 13 40:03
So there’s a really important distinction here between positive discrimination and positive action. So positive discrimination is illegal, don’t do it. So you can’t hire somebody purely for a diversity characteristic, right? It’s unfair, it’s not right, the person doesn’t want that job anyway, you’re not going to be setting them up for success. People are gonna say horrible things about you, and you got hired, because you will diverse and all the rest of it, so So don’t do that. What positive action is, is saying, I recognize in my team or my department, we’ve got lots of people from this group. So we’ve got a high degree of over representation, actually, over the next kind of, you know, six to 12 months of hiring, we want to do more to attract more people from this demographic group. So it’s all about before the recruitment process, though, what that might look like is building relationships with local community groups, or having a partnership with somebody who has a more diverse pool of people in their networks than you do, you know, because that is something deliberate and intentional, that they have built and engaging with people from those populations to share more about your organization’s and the kinds of jobs that you have, so that they look at your organization or somewhere that they would consider working because perhaps they haven’t done before, because perhaps what they’ve seen or heard or the perception that they have has been, I wouldn’t be in your organization. So positive action is everything beforehand that says, we recognize we would like to build more inclusive teams. We don’t have much talent with these demographics. But we absolutely want to do better. Can we come and spend time getting to know you and telling you about our organization, and you know, sharing what we do and see if it’s something you would be interested in? At what point when you then advertise the role, the role needs to be open to everybody. If you’ve done the positive action bit, right, you’re gonna get much greater mix of applicants applying through your usual routes, and through these new routes that you’ve been really deliberate about creating, and then everybody goes through the process of working out who who may get the job or not. And where I’ve seen that work really well, it works really well. So positive action is okay, right? It’s that it’s not about I’m only going to interview women, or I’m only going to interview black people, or I’m only going to interview people with disabilities. It’s about everything before that, that makes your organization and the jobs that you have more attracted to the people that you haven’t previously.

Al Elliott 42:43
So that was episode 45, EDI, 101 for leaders.

Leanne Elliott 42:47
So I picked that clip on positive discrimination because Alan high Believe it or not, we do actually do some research into what people want to hear. And one of the questions that we actually had was around EDI. And exactly this was a line between affirmative action and positive discrimination. So that’s why I wanted to include that if you do have questions. As a listener, if there is a topic you want us to cover, get in touch, we will.

Al Elliott 43:12
So my last clip is from Oliver Yan, Jeff Episode 38, I think, yep, Episode 38. If you’ve not heard of Oliver, then you’ve definitely heard of his business partner, which is Steven Bartlett, who’s got a web he’s got a podcast called Diary of a CEO. He also co runs the Agency Flight story with Oliver. And Oliver was just so generous with his time, his thoughts, his stories, what I love in this clip, was he telling the story about Amazon,

Speaker 14 43:40
they fundamentally believe that teams work better in smaller cohorts where you have influence. So they have the pizza box rule, where teams shouldn’t should be able to share two pizzas, right? Once the team gets bigger than that becomes ineffective. So structurally, that changes how you think about hiring and depth of team and how companies interoperate and how teams work together. When you have that kind of philosophy. The other is they ban PowerPoints? So they reverse engineer a report. So what do we want the outcome to be? Let’s reverse engineer what the post project report and that’s the business case you submit to get funding. So there’s like philosophies that exist in an organization like Amazon that started very early, were very intentional. And that’s now shaped how, and undoubtedly fueled a lot of their success. So I wouldn’t say they’re a shining example of what we a typical example of great culture, but they’re certainly very intentional and set systems around what they believe to be a high performing culture.

Al Elliott 44:48
That’s from Episode 38. definitely well worth listening to such an engaging guy such a great guest. Leah, what’s your final choice?

Leanne Elliott 44:55
My final choice is Dr. Ryan share I’m in chief science officer. At Hogan assessment systems. I couldn’t quite believe my teeny tiny little psychology mind was blown. When not only did Hogan assessments engage on one of our LinkedIn posts because we did an episode with Sandy Mackenzie way back when around how not to be psychopath as a leader, also a really great episode. I just didn’t want to give Elon Musk any more time to be honest. But yet, blow my mind that hug and commented on our post. I remember texting Sunday, like completely freaking out about it could not then believe that why I’m agree to be on the podcast blown away. Again, when I think we were on I think we’re on a call for about two hours. And he has since featured in maybe three or four episodes on truth and lies. He is so knowledgeable, so kind, so focused on building awesome workplace cultures that are fair, free discrimination yet are continuing to evolve with the demands of the workplace today, Ryan, I consider you a friend of the show one day, I hope you’ll be a friend of mine. I am sharing this clip. Because for me, I think it was one of the things that I enjoyed listening to the most. I especially enjoyed watching Al’s face when he listened back.

Ryne Sherman 46:15
Yeah, so we have data on hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs. Gosh, we’re probably getting into 1000s now of entrepreneurs who have taken our assessments of Hogan. And so there is actually a really clear profile that we see with entrepreneurs, it’s just quite amazing. Like, every time we collect a new entrepreneur sample, like I can just plot out what that profile is gonna look like because they just all it just always comes back the same. And a few things that we see. One is that they tend to score really high on a scale that we call excitable and excitable is about sort of volatility, being really feeling emotionally attached to lots of things and being willing to change and flex and, and having a lot of energy towards projects. That’s what we see with a lot of entrepreneurs makes a lot of sense. They’re really flexible. about change. What they want to do is go Oh, no, this isn’t working, get rid of it, stop, do something else change something new. So entrepreneurs are really good at disruption. Part of it’s because of excitable, they’re also very high. Imagine that they can be creative, they tend to think in new ways. They tend to score pretty high on ambition, they tend to score pretty high on what we call inquisitive, which is again, it’s about creativity. So basically, what we see with entrepreneurs is they see problems, right, they see a lot of problems, they want to fix those problems, right. And they’re really committed to doing whatever it takes to fix those. And they are happy to break down the current systems to blow everything up, to restart to to fix that particular problem. And that’s what makes them so great at what they do is that they can say okay, this is bad. Let’s get rid of that. Let’s change it they can disrupt whatever’s going on. The problem is when you start running a really successful business, right if you’re an entrepreneur, you started this business to start to grow starts to become successful, because you did solve some problem that was really critical that people needed solve. All you’re looking for more problems to solve. And many times that’s not what your business needs, your business doesn’t need more change. What it needs now is stability, it needs someone to sort of steady the ship, right? You’ve done all the disrupting and you’ve done all the changing and now it needs someone who can really fine tune and get it on that long term progression.

Al Elliott 48:20
So Ryan first appeared in Episode 26 personality and family business. And then I’d like the answers he’s popped up in multiple episodes just because he’s always got something cool to say and something good and clever to say. If you are interested in Ryan then go and check out his podcast the signs of personality. He’s just such a genuine like we’ve seen it all i guess but he’s so genuine and generous with his time and knowledge and is well worth a listen.

Leanne Elliott 48:46
He is I think they just released an episode called the psychology of patience this week. Yeah, very interesting patients as in hospital people or as in the practice of patient one being patient. Yes. Oh, it’s just such good memories. Allison, it’s well, there are so many people that I wanted to feature I guess special mentioned would definitely go to Rita and Bonnie and pull out from our toxic workplace episode, possibly our longest and most comprehensive comprehensive episode ever. Also one of our highest performing and I think is well just a big thank you to our friends from HubSpot and the people we’ve had on the show from across the network, especially Ashley and Sarah there are so many people and Sonia Of course, thank you so much. Yeah, we love being in your company.

Al Elliott 49:38
Okay, so we hope you’ve enjoyed that as much as we have and I hope that is gonna bring back a few memories if you’ve listened to it but more importantly if you do like what you hear then check the show notes out because we will mention every clip will number them while I won’t be unwell, number them and we’ll also link to the relevant episodes you can listen to the whole thing, always looking for feedback. So if you’ve got Any thoughts anyone who has your particular favorite? Then let us know on LinkedIn or Instagram or tick i We on tick tock we are

Leanne Elliott 50:08
on tick tock. Yeah, we’re actually a bit more active on the tick tock now as well. We’ve got a YouTube podcast, so go and check it out. What we’re actually getting quite a bit of traction on the tuck. INS Instagram, just saying Mark.

Al Elliott 50:21
Yeah, come on, Mark. Get your ass in gear. Right. We’ll see you next week. Bye bye.