[00:00:00] Dex: Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hello, my friends, this is Dex. And today I am delighted to bring you a special guest, Amy Fox, who is the founder of BrightFox, a workplace culture consultancy helping foster strong management and happy staff. What's not to love about that? So BrightFox really reimagines what a genuinely positive workplace culture could look like.

[00:00:46] And randomly, Amy lives in Somerset in England, which is startlingly near to my own birthplace. Hi Amy. How are you today? 

[00:00:55] Amy: Hi. I'm good. Thank you for having me. 

[00:00:59] Dex: Such a pleasure to meet with you. And, listeners, here's why Amy is on the show today. I met Amy via a LinkedIn post and I'm going to quote you part of that post.

[00:01:13] And it says, "If you have an employee assistance program that is a phone line; a counsellor on the end of a phone in a centralised system; a system where the person may get support after assessment; or a system where if they get better but need support later, they have to restart the process, then I'm sorry, but that's not good enough."

[00:01:39] It's slightly aligned with my views and I wonder what you listeners think about that too. But I rather thought that you might appreciate hearing what Amy has to say on this topic because many of you I know have experienced both ends of EAPs. And many of you tell me that the experience didn't go terribly well and certainly a lot of my clients have been very blighted by that system particularly.

[00:02:07] So I think let's begin here. I'm going to throw you in the deep end, Amy. If you could change one thing about EAPs via your training and consultancy that you do, what would it be? 

[00:02:21] Amy: The reactivity of it. If I could change one thing, I would move it from being a reactive service to a proactive service.

[00:02:30] It's the thing that's wrong, I think, with most well being strategies that workplaces employ, but EAPs in particular they wait for the person to become poorly and rely on them to be able to recognize that they're their poorliness or their stress and have to ask for help when they're already feeling, they might have been carrying it for months and often they do and then the Employee Assistance Program will react to their poor mental health, whatever it might be and hope that they get better.

[00:03:04] And then if they do, and better is a relative term, but when they do, that support stops until such time as they have to ask for it again. And I think that is the most weirdly backwards way of looking after people. And it has plagued me for decades. And it's the reason that I set the business up to try to do something about it.

[00:03:24] Dex: Yeah, that's grand. And I also think that the stigma associated with admitting that you some support at work , it's almost regarded as a failure if you need that support. They didn't provide it to you in the first place, which I think the opportunity is always there to do. So then you fell by the wayside and then somehow it's your fault and you get put on a performance plan and you're very naughty.

[00:03:47] We're going to monitor you in case you're naughty again. 

[00:03:51] Amy: I always use Usain Bolt as an example, but I might have to think of somebody new , cause he might be a little bit out of the zeitgeist now. If you look at any performance based thing, people don't wait until they're doing badly before they bring somebody in to help them.

[00:04:05] Usain Bolt had a coach when he was running well and he was the fastest man in the world because they recognized that proactivity is the thing that makes people do well. And most things within workplaces are proactive. They want staff to be proactive. They want their outcomes to be met.

[00:04:20] They want to be innovative in the way they do things. But when it comes to people feeling well, I talk about EAPs, but really my job is around culture, right? So not just the mental health aspect for staff, but generally how people feel within the workplace. And EAPs do play a big part in that. It seems to be the only thing that is reactive .

[00:04:38] So staff are expected to be on it, innovative, forward thinking, solution focused, but when they start to feel stress, that proactive approach just isn't there. And often the skills that have to sit within the management space, decision making space, the culture is also not there.

[00:04:56] So not only are EAPs reactive, they also tend to be the only tool in the toolbox . So it's late, it's not good enough. It's time limited. And it is reliant, like you said, on the employee being able to recognize, but also ask for help when there are huge stigmas attached to that anyway.

[00:05:12] And the culture is just not set up for it.

[00:05:15] Dex: Yeah. And as I receive quite a lot of those people, who end up in burnout because of the chronic lack of the kind of support that would have helped them stay on top of things. And you yourself in your bio, you mentioned you've seen colleagues suffering from burnout without support. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience for you. 

[00:05:34] Amy: Oh, 

[00:05:34] If only there was only one Dex, I could be here all night telling you about these stories. So if I go back, I remember I was working in Surrey and I've always worked in jobs that were on the front line, supporting people that had complex issues.

[00:05:47] So people coming out of the care system, ex offenders, people that have complex safeguarding needs. Real sort of front end cold face work. And I remember it was probably my third day. in the care leaving service. And I was sitting in a team meeting and you do your best and you try to be very impressive and you don't swear too much and you sit with your legs crossed and you try to make a good impression.

[00:06:09] And the area manager happened to talk about stress and she said, cause as we know, this job's got a shelf life of about two years and everyone around her just started nodding. And I said, and I was quite young and not very discerning, didn't understand the political landscape of workplace.

[00:06:23] And I said, sorry, excuse me. Why? And she said, what do you mean? I said, why is there a shelf life of two years? She said, oh, it's a very stressful job. I said, okay, so what do we do then to make it so we don't have a shelf life of two years here? And the way she looked at me was like, ah, we've employed a troublemaker.

[00:06:40] It was that look of, ah, we're going to have to re recruit soon. And that kind of followed me through all sorts of different jobs, but very similar types of people that I was supporting and people around me that were there because they had such a passion to help those people and they poured their heart and soul into it.

[00:06:57] And I just saw people experiencing so much stress, really high caseloads, it was underfunded. They had people that were doing things that were really genuinely upsetting. And I would hear things like Have you taken annual leave? And why don't you just go home and have a bit of a break for an hour?

[00:07:17] And I would ask how else do we support people here? And I think the best I ever heard was we have staff reps. that were part of the same culture, so they were feeling the same stress as everybody else , they were having to do it on top of their full time job, there was no recompense, there was often no training, there was no barrier to entry, so it was the person that volunteered that just wanted to help, and if I went to them, because I had a problem with old Mary in accounts because she'd upset me, a week later, the staff rep just happened to be having lunch with Mary from accounts.

[00:07:50] I'm not going to fully trust that what I'm saying is taken confidentially and is in a safe space. And it just wasn't good enough and it never has been good enough. And then the EAPs that got brought in, I work with organizations now that have EAPs that they pay 50p an employee for per month .

[00:08:06] And the organization still bring me in because the staff just don't access them. It's an incredibly low percentage of people that actually access the EAPs. And even when they do, I think it's about a fifth of them actually get any kind of genuine mental health support through counseling and, different talking therapies.

[00:08:23] There's a whole raft of reasons why they are just not fit for purpose in my view. And it does come from just watching people drop like flies around me. And the absolute best that the managers had was, can we see if we can get you a couple of days of annual leave booked in quicker than normal?

[00:08:39] Dex: Yeah. That's been my experience as well of EAPs that they're not productive in the way that they were notionally designed to be. To me, it's a bit like here in this country when you see an advert for gambling on the TV, they say gamble responsibly. I'm thinking, oh, good. That'll work.

[00:08:58] But you talk about it as well in your bio, you talk about EQ. Emotional intelligence. So, in this systemic context, what does that mean for you? 

[00:09:09] Amy: The two things that I do with my work, one of them is management mentoring, because that's where a lot of this stuff starts.

[00:09:15] So when we're talking about culture, which is also feeds into the other reason that I think EOPs aren't really fit for purpose, is a lot of the time what people are experiencing and what people get trained in around mental health are signs and symptoms of depression, anxiety, even signs and symptoms of much more complex mental health issues like schizophrenia and, things like that.

[00:09:34] In all of my time working within workplaces, both employed and self employed, I think I've seen one person have a proper, mental health break right there in the office. And the people that helped them had never been on mental health training in their lives because they just knew that they had to try and keep them safe for as long as possible and get them to the right people as soon as possible.

[00:09:56] Which is essentially what we're talking about when we talk about mental health in the workplace. So what I want to talk to them about is all of the other stuff that comes around our stress. So the fact that, we don't manage our time very well, the systems that are put in place don't work particularly well, so we're constantly fighting against them.

[00:10:12] That supervision's a tick box exercise is because managers don't have the emotional skills to be able to hold people in safe spaces. They don't have particularly high levels of self awareness, they don't know how to model what emotional regulation looks like. All of the things that actually feed a positive working culture Including, how to handle conflict well, how to set expectations, how to have clarity in your communication .

[00:10:35] Those are the things over the past seven years that staff have repeatedly come to me with and said, these things are stressing me out. These are the things that are really making me not know whether I can do this job. And a small percentage of them have Gone on to or had some, real, legitimate mental health concerns, which we have dealt with appropriately.

[00:10:56] But they account for a tiny number. And even though in my experience, and even though those people may have perhaps needed some mental health support at the time they came to me, none of them were ringing up the EAP to ask for help. And the reason they told me is because the model that we use at Bright Fox is proactive staff support.

[00:11:17] So people come and talk to us anyway. Sometimes they come and talk to us because they're a bit stressed out or something that's going on at home, or their managers annoyed them a little bit. I had one person, we spent 45 minutes talking about the real housewives of Atlanta. 

[00:11:29] They wanted to just build rapport with me. And we got to do that. So in three months time, when they started to just change a little bit, just start to talk a little bit differently about their job and how they were managing their time, we were on it and dealing with it.

[00:11:42] So we never would have had to have gone down the EAP route anyway. And at the same time as me doing that, I'm providing real time mentoring to their managers in all of the skills that they need to be able to support them going forward So we create this pincer movement where the EAP becomes less and less needed because the employee assistance is happening within the organization in real time. If I had all of the resources in the world, every single company in existence would have that same model.

[00:12:11] Dex: Yeah. A lot of people who come to me are very senior in their professions, they're executives, leaders. So they're having problems with their teams, but they're also having problems themselves, in their own role. Most of them, like me, I come from software development background.

[00:12:31] I got trained to be a manager in terms of what the expectations were of my performance, monetary and logistically and, deliverables, but I never, ever got trained in anything remotely to do with how to manage people. And at the beginning, I had to really learn on the job and teach myself. And a lot of leaders have,

[00:12:50] I think, not being given any support in, okay, now you've got this gigantic team because we promoted you , times. But the system is really harsh and punitive and we're not going to tell you how to get the performance and keep them on side, keep them even coming to work, keep them from having enormous scraps.

[00:13:09] So what do you think about the way that many managers, even these days, are trained to deal with the breadth of support that their employees need, to not just to be well, but to function. 

[00:13:24] Amy: And I think there's some statistic that floats around the internet somewhere that says that people generally get promoted for the first time about the age of 36 or something, and they get their first formal or informal management training at about 44.

[00:13:38] So there's this sort of huge gap between, the job they're expected to do and the skills that they should have to do it. And even when you look into what those skills are, it is competency based, it's performance based. If there are issues within the team, it's how to run good disciplinaries, how to make sure your appraisal ticks all the right boxes.

[00:13:57] And it makes me almost laugh that we're still having these conversations in this day and age, but we know that nine times out of 10, especially with internal promotion, people get promoted because they were good at the job they did. 

[00:14:08] Dex: This is all my people as well. They're huge high flyers, really super high achievers in the technical aspect of their role, the hands on aspect, the personal success.

[00:14:18] And then they're like, Oh, quick, we must bump you into leadership. 

[00:14:21] Amy: That happens so often and that's what I mean about the systems that are around them that just don't work. There is a system that has been created that most workplaces have adopted that look at what the promotion pathway looks like and what the metrics of success are in order to go onto that promotion pathway.

[00:14:39] If I had a magic crystal ball and could look into each individual organization's, whether there would be anything in that metric that looked at emotional intelligence. And looked at their passion and will to want to support people. And even if you have willing managers, people that want to know how to do a good job, the idea that you have somebody that is, at the same time, responsible to meet the organizational need and individual employee happiness,

[00:15:06] when nine times out of 10, those two things do not rub along particularly well together. They're put into a pretty impossible position, the system does not set them up well to support their team because they're having to meet organizational objective that often will go against

[00:15:21] team morale or, team engagement or what the team want. And more and more in the workplaces that I tend to work in the most are contract based, outcome based, because they tend to work with vulnerable groups of people, and they're full of people that are passionate and really want to do a good job and then they get promoted into management and they're hit with these pressures to hit targets where they've recognized that the actual contract is based on outcome and not really people.

[00:15:48] So then all of a sudden they're in a position where , okay, so I've got to try and make my team motivated to want to do the right thing by the people they're supporting. But when I turn this way and I'm looking up at my management and the funders and the stakeholders, I've got to completely ignore that and do whatever it takes to try to hit the outcomes that they're giving us.

[00:16:04] And if I don't, then are my people going to have a job at the end of this contract, or are they going to hand it over to someone else? Again, coming back to the system sets them up to fail anyway. And those are the things that I want to go in and do. Like the Desmond Tutu quote about, pulling people out of the river but not figuring out why they're going upstream and falling in.

[00:16:22] I want to be at that point of the river, making sure they don't fall in the first place. And the only way you can do that is proactivity and looking at what actually causes these issues. And it's not as simple as people sometimes have poor mental health. There's a whole raft of things that go into it.

[00:16:37] So it's complicated. And it's a challenge, but it's certainly something that I'm trying to fight the good fight and make changes where they're needed. 

[00:16:45] Dex: Yes. And I see that about you. My way of seeing this is the system, not just any particular industry system, but the work system as a whole has a deliberate blind spot to that inconvenient thing of, Emotions, connection, belonging, thriving.

[00:17:04] Oh no, don't do that touchy feely stuff. That's awful. That's dangerous. We won't go there. And my clients have come up in medicine or law or accounting or, something very rigorous where the training immediately on impact says we don't do the personal shit.

[00:17:21] We just leave that at home. Thank you very much. You must manage that by yourself. But yet the people who come to me in burnout are wonderful humans. They're excellent leaders. They're really people centric and it really hurts them to have that aspect of their work and themselves and their people shut down and not to be able to support their teams through cutbacks, project changes, increasing quotas or something awful that's happening to them.

[00:17:49] It's oh yeah, we don't talk about that. It's Victorian 

[00:17:52] really. 

[00:17:53] Amy: It's woefully behind in terms of how we've moved on because systems take a long time to change. And when you think about culture, I always try and explain to the decision makers I work with that when somebody walks into your organisation, they absorb the culture like they learn their first language.

[00:18:08] They don't really realise it's happening. They just pick it up and they go we do this, but we don't do that. And I don't really know why, but everybody else does it that way. So that's how we do it. If you're trying to change the culture, it's like asking people to learn a second language.

[00:18:20] It's difficult and clunky and people are resistant to it, but they don't really know why, even if it's better for them. And they have to unlearn a lot of the stuff that they just learned naturally when they walked in. So decision makers go, Oh, we tried, but it didn't work. 

[00:18:34] Dex: Wow. 

[00:18:34] I think people are willing to change. I think people are desperate for change. They just find it a bit difficult and threatening because change is difficult.

[00:18:40] Amy: Not unwilling, but when they see it not working, They will then switch and try and they go, Oh, that didn't work. We knew that wasn't going to work. 

[00:18:48] But what they tend to do and with lots of wellbeing strategies is they don't take a whole systems approach to it. If you imagine like a pyramid, the individual at the bottom, then the group, then the environment, then the organization, and then the policies.

[00:19:02] And if you take a whole systems approach, all of that should try to underpin what you're trying to do. What I tend to see happening in workplaces is they very much focus on the individual. So what's best for them, EAPs are a big part of that. Let's offer them something where they can ring a phone line and they're going to get sorted or we'll introduce a ride your bike to work scheme or, any of these wellbeing strategies that are all very well intentioned, but they don't necessarily take into account the dynamics of the group.

[00:19:29] And whether it's going to work for most people or for everyone. The environment's not necessarily conducive to it. I had a company once that wanted to introduce this ride to work scheme. Just so happened the CEO was a massively avid bike rider. And when they didn't pick it up, I said have you asked why?

[00:19:45] And they said, no. And when I asked why, they said there's no showers. I'm biking in 10 miles, I'm absolutely dripping in sweat, and there's nowhere for me to go and freshen up. So the environment just didn't work. And even if you take things like shared lunches.

[00:19:59] I was working with a company a little while ago, and they were trying to introduce it, and the decision maker was getting really frustrated that people weren't turning up. And I said are the managers doing it? Oh no, the managers are really busy. So they're covering the workload so the staff can do it.

[00:20:11] So I said, okay, so it's not the group then. Have you got a nice space for them to go? No, we all just pull our chairs away from the desk and sit with our Tupperware on our laps and just, I expect them to just shut their emails down and listen. I said, oh, okay. And what are your policies like around breaks?

[00:20:26] And when you looked at them, they were really draconian. So staff had spent years knowing that they could only take their half an hour for lunch and toil was very tightly monitored and, And then all of a sudden they were like, Oh, we're going to introduce these two hour lunches guys, but we're going to do them at our desk with a limp bit of cucumber in a roll and the managers aren't going to do it.

[00:20:43] So you're not going to really feel like you've got permission to do it. And they were wondering why it didn't work. And if you extrapolate that out into far more complicated wellbeing strategies , that same thing happens. It tends to fall down at one of those points in that whole systems approach.

[00:20:55] And simple, but consistent is going to beat shiny. but inconsistent every single time, especially if you don't have the systems to back it up. And managers, who are so desperately trying to support their staff in really difficult circumstances, but haven't been given the traits of resilience and how to have difficult conversations and understanding.

[00:21:19] This is a huge one I do with managers . That staff don't have to agree with you, but they do deserve to understand. It's not about being liked. It's about being clear, so people understand where they stand with you. And the ability to be able to sit in that difficult space and not crumble, not pass their anxieties or insecurities onto their team, not overshare.

[00:21:39] Understand what professional authenticity looks like. And I don't see that training happening anywhere, really, in a way that is meaningful, and also crucially, asynchronous. Not sitting in a room for a day and learning it and then hoping that people remember, or having to wait three weeks from the time that something terrible happened to sit in front of somebody and talk about it.

[00:22:01] My staff actually voice note me, they text me, they email me, they call me, and they say, in five minutes, I'm about to go in and do this thing and I'm shit scared. What do I say? What if they say this? What if they say that? And we talk about it in real time and upskill them in real time so they don't have to sit with it, not knowing what to do and then come along to something for a little bit of time and then just hope that they remember to do it.

[00:22:25] All of those things just aren't good enough , they set them up to fail. They don't like difficult conversations, they shy away from it, their confidence drops. Then the team suffers, performance suffers, they get, decision makers breathing down their necks, and that's when their mental health begins to suffer too.

[00:22:41] But it's not necessarily, it's not about them, it's about systems. The systems around them to support them are just not there and they're not good enough. 

[00:22:48] Dex: I'm not going to argue on that one. 

[00:22:50] I used to work in technology startups, and I was working in one once, and they had a beautiful cool warehouse with this gorgeous designer lighting, and they had the shared lunches , and they had a table football thing, but I got bullied at work, and I actually took it to them, and they let me go.

[00:23:06] That was their response. They just let me go. And I think that type of thing happens a lot in the medical industry, performance measures tend to be do this or you're out. So I've got a lot of very senior physicians, for example, who lose their jobs or are on constant threat of losing their jobs, had one on a five year performance plan.

[00:23:26] Amy: Ooh. 

[00:23:27] Dex: I also work with quite a lot of people who've been stood down at work , because their mental health hasn't been robust enough because they've gone into burnout and not had the support. And they're like, okay, go home for a few weeks and come back when you're fixed, in three or four weeks time.

[00:23:42] I don't feel that solves the problem. So how do you support managers working with conflicting priorities and strong emotions? 

[00:23:52] Amy: I am a really strong advocate for what I would call the foundations of the self.

[00:23:58] So , we look at them as human beings. And one of the things we look at that comes up time and time again, no matter how far up the chain people, are the conditions they've placed on their own sense of worth.

[00:24:08] And if we follow the thread of the things they really struggle with at work, it goes back to that conditional worth that they place on themselves. How am I of value here? Why did I get this job? Why have they trusted me? And it means they don't really get to speak up because they're trapped in this prison of, I have to make sure that I'm impressive, I have to make sure that I'm saying yes to everything they've asked of me, because surely if they're asking me, they must know that I'm capable of doing it, and they must know that my time allows for me to do this.

[00:24:37] So if I can't, it must be me. So the first thing that we look at is How do we increase their sense of worth? How do we move them from perception into perspective? And look at their job for actually what it is, and not all of these stories that they're telling themselves. And I don't know about you Dex, and I would imagine that you have come across this, but when you start to see burnout creep in, it's almost like their job is all of their worth.

[00:25:05] They base it all on how good I am and not being able to handle rejection, or difficult conversations particularly well. So we start with those foundations of self awareness, self regulation, resilience, self worth and compassion.

[00:25:18] And make sure that we've got a really good handle on how that's showing up in their management, first and foremost . My little go to saying is, if you play Monopoly, you play it like your life depends on it, but you never forget that the money's not real.

[00:25:35] And I think what I see in managers sometimes is they're playing like the money's real. This is life or death for me. And it's important to put them in a place where they've got perspective on their job. And the higher up you go, I think the harder that gets. And especially if you're trapped in, like you said, with physicians.

[00:25:50] And academics and they say if I'm not here, There's no other universities around, where am I going? They've got me, what else am I supposed to do? And it's a really difficult conversation to move them into a place where they recognise that even though their job is wildly important, it still isn't the thing that if they have to prioritise their real life or their job, they should prioritise.

[00:26:16] I have to get people to the stage where they would be willing to walk away, or willing to have the difficult conversation, because they're willing to take the potential consequence that scares them.

[00:26:25] But if they're there, they get to be effective. Because there's very little point in them coming into a job and just being the conduit for the bad culture that's coming from decision makers because the shit rolls downhill. So they have to be able to stand up, see it, put it into perspective and do something different so their staff aren't feeling the same things that they are and do something to change the culture that they're experiencing 

[00:26:47] But again, if you have interview processes that are not set up to bring in the right candidates, and it's based on previous experience in roles that perhaps didn't demand the same kind of managerial skills, and you have somebody only based on how impressive they are;

[00:27:03] How smooth the transition has been through the interview questions; how well they've been able to jump through the hoops and perform. It's very unlikely that you're going to get a manager in the first three months of their job that all of a sudden knows how to switch from not just being a yes person,

[00:27:17] but actually look at what their team need and do it. So that's the first bit of it, that groundwork. And I can't stress enough how much I say to people, the first three months of the job is the bit where we can do the best work. Setting your stall out early, being proactive, so we're not trying to unpick the stuff that's already been done a year in.

[00:27:39] We're setting what you want your management to look like now, and giving you the tools to be clear in that communication. Knowing how to have the conversation with your manager that creates the framework that you want, without massively pissing them off.

[00:27:52] We do it through role play, them sending me their email draft, and we work it out together. What happens if the worst case happens , we talk that stuff through. And just slowly over time, they start to understand that they have moved from the perception where everything's terrible, they're the bottom rung of the ladder.

[00:28:07] And the only way they survive is saying yes to everyone. To one where they realise that, they've brought them in to do the job, and part of doing the job is recognising what they need to do the job well, and giving them the confidence to ask for it. But it's a tricky, messy, layered process, because they're humans.

[00:28:23] And it's not formulaic. If I'm working with more than one person, the process probably isn't going to be repeatable because they're really complex, unique individuals.

[00:28:33] Doesn't stop the work from being important, but it certainly isn't one size fits all either. 

[00:28:38] Dex: And I think it's quite interesting that you raise academia. I get a lot of people with academic burnout coming to me. It is cutthroat in very particular ways, isn't it? And very status driven. And I think it impacts people very negatively over time.

[00:28:56] A lot of industries do, the training teaches them to be competitive in a way that sounds productive, but ultimately is unhelpful to the longevity of their productivity in their career. All of those things, when you say it's a system, you keep coming back to the system. I agree.

[00:29:13] This conditional worth thing as well, the way that you've talked about remedying that for leaders is the same work that I do to be self supporting, to see your own worth, to allow your humanistic tendencies to relate with people to come to the fore a little bit. I think that can be fixed at any time in your career.

[00:29:33] So if you've been in your career for 20 or 30 years and you're very entrenched in an organization, even there is no barrier to turning around the kind of leader you can be and that the relief for you personally. will be as gigantic as it is for the organization and for the team who are working for you.

[00:29:52] It's proven to be more profitable to run a team that cares about its people. People's performance will naturally rise when you look after them as if they were human beings. 

[00:30:04] Amy: As if, Dex. Can you imagine? 

[00:30:06] Dex: As if. Yeah, as if. 

[00:30:08] Amy: That bit is such an important point , because none of our conditions that we place on our worth come from work.

[00:30:14] They come from when we're like six. My daughter's ten, she comes home and she says, mum, I got 10 on my English test. And I say, did you try your best? Cause I'm one of those woke parents and I know what's important. And she says, yeah, I tried really hard and I go that's amazing,

[00:30:28] like ring nanny and tell her you got 10 out of 10. And then she comes home the next day and she says, I got six out of 10 on my math test. And I go, did you try your best? And she says, yes. And I go, that's amazing, Seren. But I don't tell her to phone her nan, and I don't think to, because I'm conditioned to think that 10 out of 10 is better than 6 out of 10, just as an example.

[00:30:44] I see it with other people, if she wears a dress, she gets complimented a bit more than if she's running around in jeans with mud all over her, those conditions start really young, so she's already thinking, I'm worth more if I get 10 out of 10, because these things happen to me, but when I get 6 out of 10 these things don't tend to happen to me.

[00:31:00] Being able to recognize where those things come from, regardless of how old you are , is a real game changer. Even people having space to explore it, you know that saying shame dissolves in safe spaces. A lot of that stuff we keep internalized is because we don't have a space necessarily to say it out loud. You might have performance and competency based conversations with your managers or with your team, but are you really going to sit and say things out loud that you might not have said since you were 15, but you know is directly impacting your 

[00:31:34] management ability because, you have a deep need to be chosen or liked or, your metric of success for managing your team is that they think you're a nice person. All of those things that sound very lovely but actually cause an awful lot of problems. So it's a really interesting space to be in where we feel like we're battling against this system that's been in place for decades.

[00:31:55] And doing something to try and flip it on its head and bring different language in, and different ways of looking at things, that is often not done. And like you said, makes people very, oh, hang on a second, because if you're going to all of a sudden get a load of insight and emotional awareness, then where's the spotlight going next on what we've been doing for the last 20 years?

[00:32:12] And it's seen quite negatively, and sometimes it can cause problems within organizations. If you have people that know what they're about and stand up for themselves and have a really high level of self aware, then how are the decision makers meant to tell you exactly what to do, when to do it, if you have the skills to be able to question that and say no.

[00:32:29] Which is not an accident or is linked to why I used to get managed out of my jobs quite a lot. And I used to get fired for the same things I get paid for now, because I would do that stuff, which was very obvious to me, but wasn't particularly well received by the people that perhaps caused that culture in the first place.

[00:32:48] Who, I should add, also are in need of exactly the same support that their managers and the rest of their staff are, and I don't know if it's your experience, Dex, but I certainly get the, what can you do for my staff? And I say who's supporting you? And they say, oh, it's not about me. It's about my staff.

[00:33:08] And I think, ah, okay. So it's definitely about you then. But I can't always quite get in at that level. 

[00:33:14] Dex: I've been the same kind of squeaky wheel. 

[00:33:17] What I learned is how to manage up as well as down. I am able to speak to leaders in a way that they're receptive to, rather than generally speaking, ejecting me on my ear.

[00:33:29] I think it's a skill and it's certainly something that I teach my clients how to protect their own energy, but how to be able to create positive influence in all directions, without bearing the brunt of that. And it's not always possible, as you say, and there are some people who are so embedded in that way of being that it's safer to take care of them without mentioning it.

[00:33:55] Take care of their deliverables without saying anything and just let them go on being them. Yeah, I think so too. We're running out of time today. It's been really interesting and I probably could go for another hour with you, but I'm just curious if you have, for our listeners, if this has sparked an interest in them and they're also wishing to learn more about this, they can come and consult with you, but do you have any books that will help people ground in some of these concepts? 

[00:34:21] Amy: There's two books. There's three actually. Two of them aren't really anything to do with workplace culture and leadership. But there's a book called Humankind by Rutger Bregman.

[00:34:30] You'd have to you'd have to read it to know why it's such a brilliant book. He spends the whole book basically turning on its head all of the things that make us fearful as humans. It's a fascinating book and you come out of the end of it just feeling better about humanity in general.

[00:34:47] For, just us as how we feel as humans, because as you quite rightly pointed out Dex, it is humans that go into the workplace, not some other weird creature that doesn't need, a bit of uplifting. I really recommend that book. And the other one is called Leadership 2. 0. And it's the only book that I've read that I thought oh, the book that I would have written has already been written. Because he's saying all of the things that I would have said if I'd written a book. 

[00:35:11] Dex: Travis Bradbury .

[00:35:12] I'll put it in the show notes anyway. 

[00:35:14] Amy: Yes that's a really good book. And then things like, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and trying to understand why we act the way we do. I suppose based a little bit in like psychology but not really.

[00:35:26] That book is brilliant in why we might show up the way we do sometimes and the way we think. And those are the three that I come back to quite a lot that I know helped me in my work and hopefully would help the sorts of people that I support as well.

[00:35:39] Dex: Yeah, good. Might help people see the way that you work and perhaps come to you and make contact with you. So on that front tell us about your work. If people are listening and they want to know more about you and what you do. 

[00:35:51] Amy: Primarily my passion is in either new managers or managers who feel like they they're just not getting it quite right. It doesn't tend to be the really high up decision making people.

[00:36:03] It tends to be the ones that have a whole raft of direct reports and they're trying to sit in that really uncomfortable middle space. And that's the management mentoring. And then the other part of it is for pretty much anybody that's an employee that might be struggling with stress, with the culture of their organization, a manager that makes them feel really anxious, colleagues that are driving them mad and I'll work with them too, normally through the organization and the organization pay for it instead of an EAP, but I have lots of private clients too that just need that little bit of extra support .

[00:36:34] Dex: I'm really getting the feel that those people would be in very safe hands with you.

[00:36:38] Amy: I hope so. It's the main component of the work you do, isn't it? Being able to provide that space for people to, tell the ugly truth. There's the bit you tell your husband, the bit you tell your manager, and then you come to me and you go, Amy!

[00:36:49] This is how I really feel about this. And I go, great, we can work with that. Let's go. 

[00:36:55] Dex: I think so. The more permission we give ourselves to be our full, splendid, brilliant, flawed, amazing self, the better. The better life goes, the better work goes. The more productive we are as humans and the more our influence spreads in a positive way in our environment.

[00:37:15] And I found that very difficult in my lifetime and that's why I had burnout, just to be allowed to be me. 

[00:37:23] Amy: It's huge, 

[00:37:23] isn't it? Which is why all of that foundational self awareness is so important. To know why, what you're misaligned with, why your values are rubbing up against the values of the organization, or to understand what, bullying looks like, or, aggression when it's dressed up in fancy legalese from the HR department, and it moves us into that state of perception where we are the wrong one, we are the one that should, try to make things right.

[00:37:47] It triggers us with our self worth and people pleasing and all of that stuff. So to be able to work through that with somebody that is not part of your organization, doesn't have a dog in the fight, can see it for actually what it is and act as an example for how you could deal with it and to have an advocate in your corner.

[00:38:03] And that person that you think, Oh, if only had someone that I could ring. That person's me. And that person's you. And thank goodness for that. 

[00:38:10] Dex: Thank goodness for that. I think that's perhaps what we share is I love all my clients. They're amazing people. I believe in them 100 percent at least.

[00:38:19] I'm always there for them. And I just help them come to the same understanding in a world that hasn't always reflected that back to them. 

[00:38:28] Amy: Yeah. And that's so important, isn't it? Just being able to say you've got inherent value because you're you and not because of what other people might be reflecting back at you because that's their stuff.

[00:38:40] And that's the thing that gets missed so much in workplaces that we see the people that are making us feel bad as perfect. But they're reflecting back the best that they've got to give. And when it's wanting, it's a reflection of them and their deep work. And they should be able to access the same sort of support that for the people that I work with, but that's a really important point about being able to recognize that it's not necessarily you, but also being able to have conversations where you go, do you know what, it is a little bit you.

[00:39:06] Actually, it might be because you're being a bit of a dick. Have you thought about that? And teaching resilience through accountability too. Cause a lot of what I see is all of these things happen to me.

[00:39:18] My boss did this, my colleague did that. And I think where are you in that? Because I know that I've experienced things at work when I was employed. And I look back now with the benefit of hindsight, and I was just a grade A dickhead. I really was. Like, I wasn't discerning enough to realise the part that I played.

[00:39:35] It doesn't mean that I was completely wrong, but it certainly didn't serve me to not learn Where my accountability was in it. And not all the time. I'm not talking about like real toxic places and people that bully and those horrible situations. But a lot of the stuff is because you don't quite have the skill to be discerning or you don't like holding your hands up and going actually, maybe I could have handled that a little bit better as well. And some of the best outcomes I've ever had are people that learn to walk that line, to have their boundaries and know when they're being treated badly, or know when something needs to change, but also to be accountable and to model what that accountability looks like.

[00:40:13] But the organisation, which is the other bit of my job, is when all these people tell me things, I give anonymous feedback analysis to the decision makers, and say, these are where all your blind spots are, because your staff are telling me. And one of the big things is whether or not an organisation approaches difficulty with punitive measures, or whether they adopt a culture of no blame and judgement.

[00:40:37] So it's accountability rather than blame, and it's making things right, rather than just, Inane punishment. And what they incentivize. And I said to an organization the other day, how would you incentivize your staff to care about each other? And they looked at me like I'd grown 15 new heads.

[00:40:54] You're telling people they need to be collaborative, but you're actually incentivizing selfish behavior. So what are we going to do about it? And then they never got back to me. 

[00:41:04] Dex: Yeah, that is really one of the core problems of the structure of most organizations.

[00:41:10] So I think books about teamwork are very good, like Sean Achor and people like that have written about how to achieve good teamwork by Incenting people to contribute as a team, but also how that raises the bar on performance organically as you go. Absolutely. So much stuff we could discuss on more, but we're out of time and I thank you very much for being here today, Amy.

[00:41:38] It really has been delightful to chat with you. 

[00:41:43] Amy: Thank you, Dex. I've had a wonderful time. Thank you for having me. Sorry if I got a bit passionate . 

[00:41:47] Dex: Never apologize 

[00:41:48] for your passion on this podcast. We share it, I'm sure. And don't forget listeners to have a look at Amy's links in the show notes today and look her up if you have any problems that she can help you with .

[00:42:01] And if you've enjoyed today's show, I would love you to rate and review the podcast. It's how we reach out and help more people who suffer in burnout. And if you yourself are in burnout, you must come and talk to me about how to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance, leadership, and most of all enjoyment inside work and out.

[00:42:24] And that, my friends, is true, whether your organization pulls its socks up and creates a better culture, or not. I would posit that anybody can recover from burnout. You can take control of your own career and that's what I show my clients how to do.