John Amaechi: It’s not magic, it’s leadership

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. I'm a bad CEO. I'm a bad CEO. It seems like half the people are told that you are too impotent to make any difference in this world. And the other half are told that you should wish it and it will just happen. What if you knew that actually here are 10 very simple skills that anyone can develop, 10 simple ideas that anybody can nourish. And if you do those things, you'll be better. If you think that you're doing your best work after your 10th hour of work because your boss is still here, you're not kidding anybody except for your boss who thinks that being present is the same as being high performing.

1:20And perhaps the best thing about storytelling at all, which is that it'll be all right in the end. And if it's not all right, it's not the end. John Amachie, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. We'll get into your fantastic book. We'll get into APS Intelligence and your wonderful work in Insight. But I want to start very quickly with something that your mother used to say, which I loved because it was just brilliant. And I want to really know why this still has resonance in your life. so she said the most unlikely of people in the most improbable of circumstances can still become extraordinary so i think the reason it resonates is because we live in an era of either you're terrible and unfortunate and you can never be anything or we live alternatively in this place where snake oil salesmen tell people as long as you think it you can be it and both of those seem insufficient and cruel to me.

2:14Whereas what she said is, it's got so many little asterisks with it, which is the idea of if you're willing to work, if you're willing to plan, if you're willing to be diligent, if you're willing to endure setbacks and recognize setbacks as a part of the natural lumpy state of future success, then no matter where you've come from and how unlikely your circumstances, you can become extraordinary. So I like it because it's both poetic and more practical i just wanted to touch on your background a bit can you tell us where you grew up what your childhood was like formative years were like i grew up in stockport which is near manchester it is it was not a particularly salubrious place back in the day i was really i was talking to somebody uh yesterday and i mentioned stockport and they were like oh interesting choice i was going back there for christmas and oh interesting choice because it still has this reputation as being awful but there's lots of like most places there's lots of parts of it that are lovely and some parts of it that are less so but it it still feels very familiar to me i don't i mean i think home i now live in london and i think home feels like london now yeah um but there's something so warm and lovely about being back in stockport do you get nostalgia i don't know if i get nostalgia because my memories as a child were not always so positive especially school and interactions with other people in stockport but there is something about the permanence of the place like the rugby club i used to walk past when i was 11 and 10 and 9 it's still there yeah and there's something very strange about that the place where i saw my granddad play bowls once is still there and there are still old people playing balls and they're probably my age nowadays but still people i thought of as old back then playing balls so there's a permanence to it that feels quite lovely you wear so many hats obviously you're a professor you know you do great work with APS intelligence you are an author you're an NED you do so many different things I mean these are these are quite there's a lot of hats going on there how do you kind of juggle things and you know how do you kind of get through the day I suppose there's a consistency to it one is that But I think a life for me, not for everybody, but a life for me without real ambition and striving and the possibility of disappointment and yet the reward of effort seems a little thin to me.

4:40So doing more things is exciting. But also, it's all incredibly congruent for me because I'm not like an electrician for six hours a day and then, I don't know, an educator, a primary school teacher for another six hours and then something else unrelated. I am a psychologist. I am a psychologist who's interested in the areas of research around leadership and culture. And that is a consistent thread across what I do. I'm interested, our kind of tagline, if you like, with APS intelligence is the idea that we want to help people thrive at work and workplaces succeed with thriving people. So that's what we want.

5:21We don't think there's any juxtaposition. So if you think of that in mind everything I do fits within that narrative so it all seems almost like I'm doing the same thing in a slightly different context and when you when you look back at maybe you in those formative years do you do you think you'd be able to recognize the person that you are now no no I don't think so I mean very much like today the idea that anybody who's 10 or 11 can close their eyes and predict the kind of job they'll do 10 years or 15 years later is absurd. And we think that now because of AI and lots of other stuff, right?

6:03But it was absurd back then too. Of course, there are some jobs you could have just done. But I didn't know that this kind of psychology was available. Nobody had ever told me. When I went to school, psychology wasn't even available as an A-level. It certainly wasn't available as an O-level. so it wasn't available you had to take i took biology chemistry physics and general studies i think for my a levels right we won't discuss how well i did i did not do well um because i had no interest in those subjects at all it's just that i needed that those three i think at an aab in order to study psychology as if your raw intellectual horsepower is a feature of psychology which I'm not convinced it is but yeah so I can't have conceived of this but I'm glad that this exists.

6:53So do you think 10 year old you would be proud of where you are now and who you are now? I think 10 year old me would be relieved more than proud just like oh thank god it's not awful all the time it's not relentlessly awful all the time and it's not worry and anxiety and all of those things all the time because I was an anxious, I was going to say anxious little thing, but I was never a little thing. But I was an anxious child and a worried child and very concerned about the gravity of the world. But, you know, lots of stuff happened in my childhood that led to that, including having a mum who had cancer two or three times before she actually succumbed to it.

7:35So that stuff makes you feel a bit unsteady. So I think now it's just been like, oh, it can be quite good. I want to just fast forward a little bit and we may jump around the timeline, but I just want to fast forward to what is now APS Intelligence. What kind of led you to set up APS Intelligence and what kind of problem were you looking to solve? Ego. Ego. Fundamentally, I realized that on my own, there's only so much I can do. I'm an in-house coach for a number of large organizations. it's a really amazing position to be in. It's not like, I know there's a TV show out there that has billions, is it?

8:14That has an in-house coach who is not like, that is not how I coach, right? But the access you get when people know that they can trust you because each person I talk to is my client. So I am beholden to the organization, but I'm also beholden to transfer themes, not individual things. So I don't go around saying, oh, you never guess what this person told me. But instead I can carry intelligence and the stuff you can find out is remarkable to help. You know, the thing that I saw Adam Grant talking about the other day was the idea of exit interviews are a great idea, but they should happen while you're still there.

8:45It's almost like having that kind of access to day-to-day intelligence to help you drive the performance and the thriving of your organization and your people. But there's only so many of those I can do on my own. So I realized if I want to influence for the better lots of organizations, I need scalable help. I need an organization that can help facilitate it. And even working with one large organization, as you'll know, sometimes the bureaucracy of it can mean you spend more of your time negotiating communications with people than you do actually doing the job. So having people around me who do that, that often very difficult work, and kind of not really the same reward that I get for doing my work is essential.

9:28So that's what it was, I wanted to be able to do more with more people and the only way i could do that is with help with a team and i guess how much has it changed since you first set up oh radically we've we got very big at one stage we brought on people i think we were somewhat naive no we weren't i was somewhat naive about that people would get what we're trying to do and and it was really fascinating to learn how wrong i was about so i i held psychology with a bit of a halo i think which is it's all you i think you do this for your own profession i'm a journalist it's it's a really ethical and and you realize you you can't put those rose tinted glasses on and i actually encountered people who were interested in psychology because they love theory but were not that interested in people they were interested in in statistical analysis within psychology because it was interesting intrinsically but not interested in what it meant for the people.

10:28And it was a really big wake-up call for me that finding the kind of people who consent to the evidence base but also recognise how important individual people are, even if they're not statistically significant, it was a real wake-up call. And so we've grown, we've shrunk back to a point where I think we've got a group of people who are engaged and understand what we're trying to achieve. Speaking of growing and going back, What's the first cultural crack you tend to see when a business grows too quickly? I do have a sense that the grow too quick narrative is not the heart of the problem. One of the things that we experience, and I promise I will answer the question, one of the things that we experience is that people come to us telling us what they want to fix.

11:15And what they want to fix is a symptom. So it's like they've come into the doctors and they say, I've got a rash on my arm. Give me some cream for this rash. but the rash is caused by something and so if you're going home and rubbing against i don't know nettles or foxgloaf or whatever else that's irritating your skin we can give you a cream for it which will make you feel better very temporarily until you go home and rub against that thing again and so what we're interested in is looking past the symptoms recognizing their importance and their discomfort but what's causing it because if we can target that and i think that's the thing with the growing too fast.

11:51People are like, oh yeah, we're growing too fast. And that's what we're identifying as the cause of attrition too much or performance poor or burnout or whatever the other thing is. But it isn't growing too fast. It's that there was no structure or infrastructure put in place because we're young, we're agile. We don't need structure. There's only three of us. But you do. We're a relatively small company, but we work with multinationals in America. And you better believe that we've got to have policies in place that normally you'd only see in companies of 5 ,000 plus people. But it's as annoying as it is in a way, it forces us to be more mature in our operations, which helps us identify when people are burning out, helps us identify when people need real support, helps us identify when something is being stretched in the wrong direction.

12:35So it's not the growing too fast, it's the fact that people think that the advantage of being young in your company's kind of timeline is that you just don't have to worry about the stuff that big companies worry about. And then guess what? But the second that crunch hits, and usually it's a point of great success or a pivotal moment that's going to decide between success and failure, stuff starts falling apart because you don't have basic systems in. I'm sorry I needed a break so I took half a day off. And you didn't tell anybody and the system doesn't allow that to happen. So then a client got left waiting for more than 24 hours, which you don't do.

13:08And then they're upset. And then you see what I mean? it just leads to this cascade of failures or one person constantly picking up what other people have dropped but only after they've dropped it because nobody realized there's a system for telling each other when we need to hand over stuff yeah it's boring and dull but there's i think there's a lot of perfunctory reasons for that failure absolutely what would you say are the most common symptoms that you kind of going back to your metaphor yeah the most common symptoms are differential attrition, usually between people who've been around in a company for a while, kind of four plus years, and people three plus years, and people who've just joined the company less than two years.

13:46The idea that one of those will have an attrition level that's relatively stable, what most people think is manageable, and then still higher than it needs to be. And then the other will have this radically elevated four times attrition level. That's something that's common. Burnout is really common. What's common is people coming in and realizing that the place is a transaction and so behaving transactionally. It is a constant surprise to me. If you treat people like they're a widget of productivity, you can't expect them to treat you with floods of loyalty and love, right? And if you think that providing free bananas and a colorful workspace is the answer, it's moronic.

14:27So this is another one of those symptoms. You get people who just, they show up, they do their job, and they leave. Why would you be surprised by that? when you treat them like employee 17429 in X location and you don't care about them. So it's these types of things I think I see. How can leaders make sure their personal growth kind of keeps pace with the growth of a business? This is dead easy. It's just, it's dead easy. As long as you realize you're not the finished article, then the world of possibilities is open to you to find learning in lots of different places so leaders things you can do find other groups of people in similar circumstances and when when something about somebody resonates with you and makes you feel a bit uncomfortable recognize you might be seeing it in yourself and and talk about it and do something about it um recognize you're not the finished article and that if you've been managing a small startup an agile startup of five people, 10 people, 15 people, and it's now growing to 100 or so, you probably don't have the management skills, just the management skills.

15:37Forget leadership, the management skills to deal with that. And you probably don't have the processes. So recognize there's expertise that's required. My biggest tip for leaders like that is to get coaching. And I'm not even talking about from me, but just find somebody who is robust and challenging and can bounce back your assumptions and tell you things that feel uncomfortable but in service of your development. Not just things that are harsh because they're trying to be a jerk, but things that are harsh in service of your development. And then the other piece is to build on your cabinet. That's in my second book, The Promises of Giants, where I talk about build a cabinet.

16:14Find a group of people, disparate expertisers, but with one common thing, which is that they care about your advancement and the things that you say you want to advance in. They don't care about deciding your path of development. But if you say, I want to be a C-suite executive at a FTSE 100 within six years, then they're the kind of people who are going to say, really interesting you said that, but I noticed that this piece that was missing six months ago is still missing. And it's not done through malice, but because you said this is what you wanted to do and now they want to support you. So those are the things that anybody can do.

16:49It is effortful, but it is simple. yeah and I mean you know all I'm hearing here and it's a theme that just comes through all of your books really um is about self-awareness and really making sure that you are self-aware and one of the brilliant stories about you is that you were CEO at APS Intelligence and you got to the stage where you were like I can't run this business yeah I deserve to which is great because a lot of people don't have that self-awareness they almost run it into the ground and they don't get out of their way so i guess for you was that an easy thing do were you self-aware enough to know that you were going to take it to a certain level and you know i guess people that you work with do you have any kind of tips for them to kind of take stock and actually realize and come to that conclusion that i can only take this business yeah i mean you've given me too much credit i think uh i'm a bad ceo i'm a bad ceo i'm a bad ceo right so um if i with the ego that is the size of mine, if I can say I don't want to be the CEO because it's not good for my ambition, that to me is something anybody can do, right?

17:57It's not good for my ambition. This is what I want to achieve. I see the shining city on the hill. That's what I want. And the person who's going to lead us there is not me. And so instead, there is somebody meticulous and driven and ambitious and aligned. And I've not stepped away, right? I have a strategic role and I'm deeply involved. But there's somebody else who's better at that day-to-day operational, who's better at making sure that the logistics of our organization is growing at the pace it needs to. But I just recognized I was crap at it. And sometimes as ambitious people, we think, well, if we're bad at it, we should work to be better at it.

18:36And I'm like, not always. some things we're bad at and it's a bad use of our time to get good at it. I'm sure I could. I could have gone to one of those very expensive executive training courses somewhere out in Oxfordshire. Surely I could have done that. Maybe even gone to Harvard and done it there. But I just don't know that it would have been truly valuable and not being the CEO has released me to do tons of other stuff creatively to think of interventions and to read a little more widely than I was able to do. So everyone should consider this. Are you in the right place in your organization?

19:15Are you in the right place, especially if it's your organization or you're a shareholder in the organization? Are you in the right place for it to get to where you want it to go? And it's only a selfish person to me that says, I'm going to stay CEO because that title to me is more important than our collective ambition. How did you go about finding your successor? I had a slight advantage in that my CEO is somebody I've known since I was 11 years old. We went to school together. He became a surgeon, Peter, and he did that surgical thing for a while and then finished with medicine and decided he wanted to go into business.

19:54And then ended up running a number of much larger businesses than ours for a while. before I dragged him in when really I was trying to run my company into the ground, I think, is what was happening. Not intentionally, but by just not being as good as I needed to be. And he came in and did a remarkable job of thinking of things that quite literally I'd never thought of. Now, he's been a part of my executive education. But if I look back, it's like, yeah, I didn't think of that. Every day he would tell me something. I didn't think of that. No. They didn't know we needed that. And so remarkable to find somebody like that.

20:33But there is a part of you that just has to say, I think some of us as people who like to be good at stuff have forgotten that it's okay to marvel at other people who are just good at things you're bad at. We do it when we go to a bakery, right? Yeah. We don't sit there resenting the person who made the amazing croissant. Oh, you with your buttery croissants, what a dick you are. We just accept the fact that somebody's found their way into something that they're really good at. And I just wonder, why don't we do that around a board table? Why don't we do that around, like, you know, in our business environments, instead of the jealousy or the suppression that we want to do to save ourselves, just think about the freedom that comes with their presence in a position that frees you up from doing stuff you're bad at.

21:15Yeah. It's like, yeah, I've got a whole orchestra around me who are brilliant at the instrument they play. and I'm not trying to make them good at the things I'm good at and they're not trying to make me good at it. But we play in a way that is conducted now by somebody who knows what they're doing finally, which is great. But I mean, I guess my kind of pushback to what you've said a couple of times with you, you know, setting up the business because you have an ego and, you know, wanting to run the business because you have an ego. Not many people could step back and have that self-awareness of the bakery that you the example that you gave some people their business is their baby they want to have and I also hate that term of you know it's my baby but they want to have the control to do whatever they can and I guess saying that you want to be part of an orchestra as opposed to being the the person who is front and center it there is a little bit of a disconcerting some people struggle with that I still get to be front and center I mean I doubt that many people know about Helen, our chief of staff, who does amazing stuff in the background, right?

22:24If you've interacted with a company, you'll know her. But just from the outside, when I do a speech, you won't know the part that she played in that. When I am advising a company, they won't know the part in making sure all the materials I need are ready. So I have the easiest of jobs in that I am often the soloist. And people have forgotten that there's an entire audience behind you. It's like backing singers, right? how difficult it is to be running the organization but be seen as a backing singer. So I've not taken on the difficult role here at all. Somebody else has. And in terms of my baby, listen, if you're the kind of person who says that, OK, this is my baby, so when there's something wrong with my baby, what I'm going to do is decide what's right for my baby despite not having all the expertise.

23:07If you're one of those people who goes in front of a doctor or a GP and they say, you should do this, and you say, no, this is my baby, I'm going to do what I want, then the demise of that baby is the likely outcome of that it means you don't really love the baby you love the power you have over the baby and and i liked i mean this analogy has now played itself out yeah i like the crisps better right yes yeah well i guess touching on that as well is how do great leaders kind of balance their vision while also trying to be open to being wrong. Oh, my God. I don't know if it's a balance. I think there's the hard part when people think that it is competing, juxtaposed ideas.

23:49It's not. It's not. There are some things, and I know this will come as a shock to many people, but there are some things that are just right, objectively true, factually proven. Yeah. Right? Gravity is a real force. We're learning new things, actually, in that scope, but gravity is a real force. The Earth is not flat. No. Right? these things are objectively true um the sky is not blue because it reflects the sea these things are objectively true and there are lots of those things within business and within the world of psychology that are the world psychology is a lot more gray space where there's things we think we understand you know for example one of the earliest examples i learned is that we know that lithium has a really good impact for people with bipolar disorder as a good leveling impact but nobody even today as far as i know can tell people why it works we just know it works we don't know why it works right the mechanism for it right so it's fascinating but there isn't this fight between the two listen if you want to be successful embrace a love of being wrong i remember the first time i thought i was wrong in front of people i respected i was at uclan university in preston they'd asked me to pull together a course to do for their executive development program.

25:08It was years and years and years ago. I didn't know anything and I thought I knew a lot. It's ridiculous. That's what every grad student I think is that function. And I got there and I was talking about emotional literacy, which was the foundation of this course. I thought it was really important and I've forgotten his name now. It's kind of the father of emotional literacy. It'll come to me. And I didn't realize that that theory had been surpassed. a four branch model and then since it's been surpassed four or five times refined as to something more effective and i remember the devastation of realizing this thing that i thought was right it was elegant it was beautiful it was correct it could answer all the answers had a better answer somewhere else yeah and i had two choices in that moment to say to all of you people for daring to confront me with this or i could say how exciting is it to find myself in an environment where people can refine me so that I am less wrong.

26:08And that's how I think about it. Holy smokes. Every day there's an opportunity for me to be less wrong, to acknowledge I said a wrong thing or a less refined version of a thing in the past. But today I've got the best possible insights. I love it. Yeah. I actively seek out stuff. This does not mean, by the way, I endorse all views or think there's a kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other for most things, because there isn't. There are some things ethically that I stand opposed to. Right. But when it comes to science, when it comes to advancement of technological learning, it's like, yeah, show me the new thing.

26:44One of the things that is definitely going around, especially in the last year or so, is, you know, Reed Hastings writing about the culture deck that Netflix had. And it was very much, I remember in the geek way, Andrew McAfee says that he almost twitched when he heard someone, you know, stand up to the CEO and challenge his ideas. And he was very much like, oh, this is a bit strange. And some people, you know, coming back to the ego piece, some people, they see a challenge, someone kind of similar to what you've said, someone standing up and challenging them as, you know, almost a fight or flight macho needs to stand up.

27:20And, you know, I guess you've got to throw men into this as being an ego driven piece. But, you know, some people still struggle with that. And I guess, you know, if you're in an if you maybe are watching this or, you know, you're kind of going, oh, actually, that's something that I do. It might not be as easy as kind of just next time you have that just turning around and being like, OK, I'm way better now. Sometimes you've got to really, really work at it. I guess with the people that you kind of advise at APS Intelligence and people you've come across, do you have any kind of advice for people to really, really change their view on something such as that?

27:54Do you want to win? Do you want to win? That's it. It's how you feel. I mean, this is the amazing part, and it is mostly men. It is mostly men. This is the amazing part of this thing with men, where they want to talk about women being emotional. and yet here we are with a prime example of your emotion or that person that we described that apocryphal person their emotion getting in the way of listening to an insight now there are good ways and bad ways of delivering that insight i'm not here to have somebody tell me i'm stupid to my face right just like you're an idiot you know but that's not what happened to me in new clan all those years back they just were gently like oh shit this guy actually thinks this old method has not been and we got new information so they mentioned it and I was like oh and it sent me down a rabbit hole I learned all about it and now I recognize that we have to keep running down that rabbit hole right but stop letting your emotions get in the way of winning do you want to win all these big strong men who want to talk about winning then act like you want to win winning is a function in this society in this current era that we're in of adaptability and that adaptability can either be your sole responsibility to read every book and every piece of research and be across every single market and sector insight, or it can be looking around at your people and recognizing, yeah, you've probably got somebody who's been using AI since they were six in your group.

29:21You've probably got somebody who's been an expert on UI design since whenever. You've probably got somebody who's got a real tap into some of your market areas right next to you. And either you want to be the kind of person that you say, can somebody please tell me some holes in this? This is my thinking or not. And do you want to win or do you want to be right? That's always the question for leaders. Do you want to win enduringly and through the future turmoil or do you want to be right right now? And anybody who picks right right now is the smallest. and often in the context of workplace is the most despicable.

30:03Right. Yeah. I'd rather win. Absolutely. In the long term. I like being right too, don't get me wrong. But if one of those things has to give, being right is going to give. Yeah. Is there a mistake you see experienced leaders make repeatedly? The theme, I get asked every once in a while, is there a consistent theme that runs through all of business? And we work internationally with lots of different sexes from the built environment to professional services to you name it, like engineering companies and on and on and on, big finance. And so as hard as it is to pull a theme out, there is a thing that I think that leaders do, which is the idea that when it comes to it, when push comes to shove, they will choose personal comfort or the avoidance of personal discomfort over organizational performance every time.

30:55It is really fascinating. And often it's in the micro, right? To your example, just not listening to this person, this junior colleague who could really inform them because it feels uncomfortable for themselves, even though it would be better for the organization. But even on the macro level, you can see it occurring. The BP oil spill a few years ago, this idea that even the narratives they use were about the avoidance of personal discomfort. The CEO said something along the lines of, you know, I don't want to be here either. I'd rather be at home with my kids as there were dead people floating in the Gulf, right?

31:31This avoidance of personal discomfort made him do something so radically stupid it ended his career, but also dropped BP stock price by 25%. Yeah. So these types of things, I think that's the consistent theme for leaders. It's hard, right? One of the most consistent pieces of being a leader is the onerous and mundane and consistently effortful nature of it. but that's what you're being paid often 10 or 20x your average employee that's why you get paid so much yeah and I want to come back to something that you've already mentioned that you see a lot in the businesses that you are working with is is executive burnout and again if you have this notion of it's my baby I need to work on it I need to make sure that everyone's accountable and working super super hard to make it successful at some point it becomes counterintuitive and you actually end up, you know, being more of a hindrance than a positive.

32:29Yeah, I mean, one of the things about burnout is it removes the possibility, it's called anhedia, it removes the possibility of enjoyment, right? So it means that this thing that you love so much will be something that you cannot love. Quite technically, you'll be so cognitively impaired by the burnout and the stress, you won't be able to enjoy it. So there's no point. this baby analogy that we both hate, we're going to use anyway. Imagine there's, you know, in this case, the woman or the man who is the parent to this baby that they love so much. And they've got a limited amount of food or resource.

33:06And they think, I'm going to give all this resource to my baby, all this resource to my baby. And it sounds really sensible and almost we congratulate them for that. But this baby is six months old or eight months old and it's in a wilderness surrounded by predators. That's the analogy that lots of startup people like to have, right? Competitors and predators who grab my baby and kill it if they got a chance. But what are you going to do when you're so weak that it doesn't matter what resources you have? You can't even give them. What are you going to do when that baby is left alone? because you are no longer capable of the kind of support that your resilience is evaporated.

33:49Think about it smart. You've got to fill your own cup. If you're really interested in helping other people, you've got to fill your own cup. I have a rigorous schedule for an old man. But I spent two days this weekend in Ibiza in the quiet bit. I'm too old for the... You were not a rave. I'm not a big fan, right? but um and i did that purposefully and i spent most of it i slept for like 10 hours the first night i was there it was very rare for me i'm not one of these ridiculous alpha type people who thinks you should wake up before you know whatever four in the morning and go for a run or whatever but i'm normally got full days i slept for 10 hours and then i woke up i went for breakfast and essentially had dessert for breakfast every pastry i could find and then i went lay by a pool and I fell asleep again and it was just an awesome experience I was there with my partner and we just we just chilled out yeah you got to do that if you then want to come back and deliver I'm here with you I've been with clients this morning I'll be with clients after this and then I'm heading to Spain and then I'm heading to Shanghai and then Seoul and and then Dubai and And I think if I'm going to do that stuff well and respect the people that I'm working with, then I need to fill my cup.

35:07The other side of this is looking after your employees, right? Because it definitely feels like maybe now post-pandemic people are a little bit more turned on to this idea of, you know, looking after people and, you know, making sure they don't run them to the ground. Not everyone. But, you know, that's the sentiment. It used to be make sure you're getting every waking second. and you very famously have said to your employees, you almost get annoyed at them if they message you out of working hours. And I guess that's something that, where do you kind of see our progress? Do you think it's good?

35:38Do you think companies still need to keep that in mind? Yeah, I think companies are terrible at it. I think it's performative is what we've got right now. Bananas in the lunchroom, maybe amazing dining rooms as places rather close to here have where you can get food from around the world, but the implication is you should probably bring your laptop with you while you do it, where there's a gym on site so that your life and the gravity of it can revolve around this long building. And I just think you have to recognize there's a reality. What is the number one reason? And you guys know this. What is the reason for most of the pain that colleagues in workplaces feel?

36:19It is their direct line manager. if you make managers better you make people's lives better it is the most consequential person even beyond a partner for most people yeah in terms of their mental health it's a certainly more consequential than than your gp certainly more consequential than your therapist imagine having that responsibility and no training for it right yeah it's just you're a manager because you're so good at your job that if we don't make your manager you might leave and we can't afford that but do you care about people do you care about your responsibilities are you kpi'd for the happiness and the thriving of your people and i'm not warm and fuzzy nobody who's ever worked with me thinks that i'm a softy i am not i am robust you better not send me a document with spelling mistakes in it in this era of grammarly and every other spirit well right i will be furious that is not acceptable it is a is you know it's an abdication of your responsibility but I also know that I want to keep you for the longest period possible you're doing a great job I want you to be here forever if you're sad at work that's not going to be compatible to that if you're if you're working at 10 o 'clock at night all the time and there'll be times for us because we're an international client organization right so there are times when two in the morning I'm being I'm up and I'm doing something with an Asian client or something else or five in the morning I was up at four the other day doing something with somebody.

37:44And it's just one of those things. But even I have restrictions. If I'm doing that thing at four in the morning, there's this little block appears in my diary. And if it can't be the same day, it'll be the next day where an early morning is taken out. Because my team wants me, whether they think of me as the cash cow or something else, I think they legitimately want me to be around for as long as possible. and it's not possible to do that amount of work and and be brilliant this is the thing i'm amazed by with workplaces why don't people recognize that you've got good four hours in you and then you need a break and most people you need a break within that four hours and and if you think you're doing your best work after your 10th hour of work because your boss is still here you just you're not kidding anybody except for your boss who thinks that being present is the same as being high performing yeah i really want to start talking about your book okay it's not magic how did you know this was the right time to write this book and how did it come about so people have been yelling at me to write another book uh and this is not necessarily a clamor from the people who've read it but as much as the some of my academic peers and others they remind me that the average pace for somebody in my position for producing a book is like every two years i don't know how they do it by those people who do yeah so it's been what three years since um the promises of giants i think and and so this was long overdue in that sense i didn't know what i was going to write about because my problem is that i forget what i write about much like i forget what i say yeah that's why i had to look at our old podcast together because i was like i have no idea what i said um and it wouldn't have mattered if it had been two days ago i just forget so even in the book the only thing that's helped me with this book with it's not magic is the fact that i've just read the audiobook so i had to read the book again right and i was like reading it was like i was the the the production engineer stopped me a couple of times said no you're gonna read that again and it's because i was grinning i was like that's really clever that lines that's a great line it's awful but it's like i didn't realize i'd written it in the first place yeah so the book came from a colleague of mine from the University of Exeter, Michelle Madden.

40:02She's amazing. She's a PhD. She's a teacher, educator. And I asked her a question. I was having this problem with people who thought that I was magic, which appealed to me greatly. And instantly I knew it was wrong. The idea that I do stuff with such ease interpersonally, whether it's speaking or or the coaching or the L &D interventions or the dealing with some of the stuff, the work I do in kind of conflict de-escalation in boardrooms and stuff like that. But it just doesn't seem to affect you. You don't seem to need to think about it or plan. It just happens. And it was actually getting in the way of progress.

40:41Because if people think it's magic, then they think, oh, I can't possibly do that. And it's like, it's not magic. It's just really basic skills. I asked her to do a piece of research or rather she suggested we did a research on me. She followed me around coaching, teaching, L &D, lots of different environments. And I was hoping she would come back saying that 97 % of what you do is basic skills and 3 % is we'll have to research it because it's special. And unfortunately, she came back with 100 % of what I do is really basic, ordinary stuff. Right. And the best you can say of it is that sometimes I use it in interesting combination.

41:16And that's what led to the book. Her, I don't know, 1 ,400-page summary led to this idea that what if everybody realized in this world where I mentioned before, it seems like half the people are told that you are too impotent to make any difference in this world. And the other half are told that you should wish it and it will just happen. Neutralizing both groups of people. what if you knew that actually here are 10 very simple skills that anyone can develop 10 simple ideas that anybody can nourish and if you do those things you'll be better at leading in your environment whatever that environment is yeah i guess it comes down to as well how people let's say people who are great at public speaking um people say well it just comes naturally to you i can't do that i'm shy um but if you you can develop that skill i think it just comes down to fear within a lot of people yeah some of some of it is definitely fear yeah but it's a fear of the unknown right because once you've spoken in front of a group of people you recognize that they're not rabid dogs who are going to tear you to pieces not game of thrones style yeah and so some of it's fear some of it is fear of failure yeah some of it is fear of success like what what happens if i'm good at this what new responsibilities do i have yeah if i'm good at conflict mediation what responsibilities do i have in my workplace or my life well and it can be ugly at times like i don't want to that guy's a jerk i just want to tell him he's a jerk but if you're good at conflict maybe conflict mediation maybe that shouldn't be the role you play in this Yeah.

42:56So I think that's part of it. And for the public speaking thing, I need to tell everybody listening or watching this, you can be an epic storyteller. It is not conjecture and it is not because I think everybody's amazing. It's not that. It's just that you can do it. And most people have proven it. because at some point in your life you've met somebody who's been devastated by some news or a child who's been upset because they've fallen on a playground or their friend didn't like them anymore. And you have sat with them and listened and then told them a story, almost inevitably, of some description.

43:33It won't have been written from a book, but it'll be something from your memory that you tell them with the complete intention of them making some connection with it and feeling better. and this is the nature of storytelling there are not very many different types of story but the ones that exist are designed to connect with real people to help them feel that their moment is more understandable to them and more manageable and perhaps the best thing about storytelling at all which is that it'll be alright in the end and if it's not alright, it's not the end I like that, I like that a lot and what I love about the book is you do get some other books that you read where it feels maybe a little bit wishy-washy.

44:14You kind of read it and it's almost like reading inspirational quotes. Like, that's great. You get a little bit of a high. You're like, oh, I'm smart. I'm reading a business book. This is great. But you were very intentional in the way that you've structured it to give tools, to give, ask provocative questions that kind of stick with people. But you also say like, take your time because this is something you need to talk to people because this is a big thing. That was very intentional, wasn't it? Yeah, I was advised for the Promises of Giants to create more structure because I, you've heard me today, all right, I can just talk about stuff.

44:46And so I realized that was important here. And Michelle was really elemental in this, the idea that if you want to make this stuff accessible, you've got to say how you do it. So you've got to reveal the kind of magic trick. And this is the beauty of it is I love the idea that people can go, oh, this thing that I thought was magic, you suspending the pencil like this. It's just two strings. Yeah. Oh, spoiler alert. Sorry, it's just a piece of guitar string. That's it, very thin. Or fishing line, that's all it is. And that's what I've tried to do in the book. At the end of every chapter, no matter how complex or even if you're thinking, oh, here's how you do it.

45:24Start here with this one thing. And maybe that one thing will be a question that you ask yourself. And then maybe after asking yourself, talk to one person who loves you, who cares about you about it. but there's always a path through i imagine that for some people it'll be a slow read because they'll read a chapter maybe read bits of it again and then get to the the tools and be like okay i've got you know with my busy schedule kids work i've probably got a couple of weeks or three weeks worth of going through this before they move on and i'm really good with that it's not gonna be great for the reviews i'm really good with that yes i know this may be a tough question because it may be you know picking your favorite child type thing but is there one story you said you've just done the audiobook so hopefully it's fresh in your memory but is there one story that you kind of reflect on and go that's one i'd love even if people don't necessarily read the whole book this is something i'd like to stick with them yeah i mean instantly you said that um i the story and the thing is i don't even know if it's the best or most powerful story but there must be something meaningful that even is there one story the first time you said it it was right there so So this was, I was going to the gym.

46:32I used to live in Covent Garden. I moved because I'm old and it was too loud. And so I used to go to this lovely gym, Third Space. It's like absurdly expensive. I don't know why I went because I never used any of the facilities. I had a trainer there and she was great. And I would go and I would lift in the morning and, you know, bone density stuff for old people. And then I'd walk back past the coffee shop and I went to this coffee shop and I walked in. it just opened. So it's just me and these two kids, young people. And it was very clear to me that both of these two kids spoke English as a second language, but neither of them spoke the same first language.

47:09So they spoke to each other in English. And I was almost invisible to them. You know, they took my order, but it was as if I wasn't there. And not in any way that was rude. It was just very clearly they, I had walked in as they'd been having a conversation while opening up. and they were talking about their potential and their ambition in the world. And I remember being surprised by it, which was embarrassing because it showed a bias in me, the idea that if you're a barista, why would you have any ambition in this world, which is mind-blowingly crazy and close-minded. And I'm listening to them and he says, well, but I've got stuff to offer but how can anybody see that when they look at us, all they can see is this?

47:49And they kind of pointed to themselves and I couldn't tell whether they meant immigrants or whether they meant barista, the thing that made me assume something about them. And it was just a story that stuck. And I got my coffee and I wanted to make sure that they saw that I saw them. So I got my coffee and I looked at them both and waited and they didn't look at me and they didn't look at me. And it was not a big deal for them, I don't think. But I just wanted to make sure that, you know, I know that you think people don't see you, but I saw you. And then I walked out and this story was in my mind, just in my mind.

48:19The idea that many people listening to this will be at some stage talking to somebody senior about the war for talent. And we forget that it's right there. It's got the wrong job title for you to notice. It's got the wrong accent for you to notice. The name is too complex for you to pronounce to notice. But it's right there. These people who have ambition and drive and are willing to get up at four in the morning to open up a coffee shop to be invisible for an eight-hour shift. They're there. I just it it still ruminates in my mind I often it's one of those things where you've no idea what happens but I'd love to believe that these two young people found somebody who saw them yeah John I just want to really take a step back I guess and look at the state of leadership you know we're living in a in a time where you know a lot of the headlines get you very down and you There's the Charlie Kirk thing that happened recently.

49:22There's a lot of stuff across the pond that seems to be bleeding its way over here. And there's a train of thought where people are like, it's happening over there. There's a disconnect almost. But we've already seen a lot of companies roll back on their DEI initiatives, their climate initiatives. And we're living in a stage where it's very, very, sometimes very difficult to see the positives. But I guess if you could just reflect a little bit on the kind of state of leadership and maybe, you know, some green shoots that you see personally. So the state of leadership is dire. That is not to say that there aren't great individual examples out there.

50:01But the consistent gravity is towards people being able to abdicate their leadership responsibility. Is towards powerful people being able to be cruel with no sanction or recourse. is to people being able to treat other human beings as if they are machines, even as they are attempting to make machines that are like people. That is the movement, even when you mention people like Charlie Cook. And the thing is, I don't believe, and I include myself in this, when I pop my clogs eventually, I don't imagine that my flaws should be ignored, that the damage or harm that I may have done incidentally, I hope, in this world will somehow be retroactively amended because it's not.

50:52And he was a bad leader too. It's not about him being deserving of what happened to him, but he was a bad leader. We can't not pretend that. There were lots of people out there right now. They seek power. In psychology, there's this thing called a personalized power motivation versus a socialized power motivation. and we have way too many people who seek personal uh personalized power motivation right they they want power because what it means for them what they can do for them with it as opposed to wanting power because it what it might mean for the people who have granted them that power they want power they'll still take many advantages right so i'm not saying you can never spend any money or go on nice holidays or whatever else but that socialized power means you recognize that you are you are bestowed with this position and with it comes a custodial duty of care and that is absent from too many and what is a shame about it is that socialized power dynamic that is a performance enhancer because it creates an effect where people do not just stand behind you because that's what personalized power dynamics they do it creates lines of people legions of people who will stand behind you, those closest to the back of you, hoping that some crumb will fall from your mouth as you gorge yourself and they too will feed.

52:15But everyone else stands with their head bowed, hoping that they will be invisible to you and therefore left unscathed. Whereas the socialized power dynamic, it creates a group of people who revolve around you, rotating to the front as their expertise and context demands, who stand beside you when you make difficult decisions, resolute, agreeing to disagree, even when they do disagree, you can see the image in your head is a completely different scenario. The reason people like the personalized power motivation is because it's selfish and human beings can be selfish. And while we do not train our leaders to be self-aware, to be referential to their duty of care, they will continue to be punitively selfish.

53:07But there is hope if people remember that if there is to be change in this world, it is not any one of us sat here that will do it for them. It is you, dear listener, dear watcher. It is you as an individual who make the difference. It is your choices that you make, the idea that you see something that is callous or cold or cruel and you choose to not support that, that you see something that is harmful and you choose not to endorse that, even if it means some discomfort for you. It's you.

53:50Absolutely brilliant. That was fantastic. So to kind of close this conversation, I wanted to ask, hopefully you like this question. Okay, we'll find out, we'll find out. You're hosting a dinner party for five people. Oh boy. Dead or alive, fictional, real, anyone who would be at that dinner party? So, my mum would be at that dinner party. feels a bit ghoulish he's gonna say that but you know what i mean yes um um oh my goodness his name has just gone from my brain he's he's an author i absolutely adore i aspire to be like him and now his name has just disappeared from my head he's a black uh queer american author he um oh my goodness how has his name gone from my head i have all of his books i read them so many times uh giovanni's room uh do you want me to look it up please do because otherwise it'll just it'll just kill me james baldwin okay that took way too long so james baldwin will be there for sure i would be interested in in like carl rogers a psychologist humanistic school same school of psychology indeed i went to the university that he taught at yeah in america um so there's three the next two I would want somebody witty and clever, but not in a way that historically now makes us cringe.

55:25Because I think there's a lot of... But even somebody like Billy Connolly would be interesting to me. Nothing in common with him, but there's something about his humour that I think appeals. And then somebody contemporary and ridiculous, Michelle Obama. Brilliant. I love that. I like that. That's a pretty fun one, to be fair. Hopefully we get an invite. Yeah, I don't think we're there. My final question for you. If any business leader listening could change just one behavior tomorrow, what would you advise and why?

56:04Self-regulation. We've asked a bunch of people this question. What are the qualities that you would really want to be able to thrive with your leader in these high pressure environments? And one of the things that's always near the top is self-regulation. The idea that when your boss has a difficult commute, your day is worse. When they've had an argument with their partner over the weekend, your Monday is worse. When there's a stockholder or shareholder meeting and it doesn't go well, your week or month is worse. Self-regulation. And this doesn't mean never showing emotion, but just recognizing that we should all curate our emotions based on our power dynamic with other people.

56:45so if there's one thing they can do stop showing your contempt through your eyes when people ask a question you think is stupid if you think the question is stupid then that's a conversation you should have with that person or you should have with their manager to have with that person to say and you shouldn't use the word stupid and your face shouldn't convey contempt because when powerful people do that it's devastating and it's not devastating in a way that's just cruel and unnecessary, it's debatizing in a way that has a cognitive impact. It makes your people dumber. It makes them second guess.

57:19It makes them less useful to you. It means that something that they do know, they're now less likely to tell you, lest they get that completely humiliating stare. Self-regulation. Big people, giants, we have to be aware of our space. We can't just go flailing around with our body language and expect nobody to get hurt. Yeah. That's fantastic John thank you so much for your time If people want to find out a little bit more about yourself How would they do that? I am prolific on LinkedIn and TikTok Even though I know I'm too old for TikTok I don't care I'm still on there And Blue Sky But also our website APSintel.com Come and find us The Business Leader Summit 2026 Is set to be bigger, bolder and more ambitious than ever Don't just watch Britain's growth story unfold Be part of it Secure your ticket today by visiting the events section of the Business Leader website and using the code BLPODCAST, all uppercase.

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