RTO mandates are caused by middle aged men not liking their wives

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1:03Nick Shackleton-Jones: this is eat sleep work repeat it's a podcast about workplace culture a brief fun episode today for you i posted something on my newsletter last week which got a lovely response from people i put on linkedin actually i'd lifted a tiktok from a guy called nick shackleton jones and he posts these sort of gentle rants about the futility of bureaucracy he posts them on tiktok but i wanted to share it. So I went to search for his stuff and he doesn't cross post on LinkedIn or Reels. So I lifted it and with his permission, I put it on LinkedIn and it got a explosive, wonderful response. I got in touch with him saying, I'd love to record a conversation.

1:43Nick Shackleton-Jones: And TikTok's like a fame machine, really. If you drop a banger on TikTok, it goes viral. And Nick has posted some content about neurodiversity or about working in corporate that has had millions of views. He's had a series of hits, which I think just illustrate his clear-sightedness. He's one of those voices who just says things that maybe synthesise some of the things we've been thinking into something very, very succinct and pithy. It was his take on why middle-aged men wanted to return to the office that were put on LinkedIn. It made up the reason why we chatted, but there's so much more to this conversation, not least him talking about adaptive behaviours and masking for people on the spectrum.

2:24Nick Shackleton-Jones: Great listen. If you don't use TikTok, and genuinely I think it's the best social media for finding stimulating stuff for curious people, if you don't use TikTok, then I've given a selection of his best TikToks in the show notes. This is my quick, fun, stimulating conversation with Nick Shackleton-Jones. Nick, to kick off, could you introduce who you are and what you do? Sure. I'm Nick Shackleton-Jones. I do lots of kinds of things really, but I guess the reason I'm here is I'm an annoyance, a nuisance online. So I talk about all kinds of things like the ridiculousness of work and what it's like being on the spectrum and, you know, random philosophical thoughts before I've had coffee in the morning.

3:02So yeah, that's me.

3:04Nick Shackleton-Jones: I adore your TikToks and the TikToks appear pretty frequently for me. Although you don't cross post, I understand, you know, you don't cross post to LinkedIn, but you don't cross post to Reel. So I've had to share a few links to people on TikTok. But the one that really caught my attention, and I think captured a lot of people's attention, was your perspective on why buses, why middle-aged male buses want people to return to the office. And it sort of, it seemed to hit a chord. I don't know if I can ramp you up into full rant mode, because that's what the TikTok delivered quite effectively. but tell us what was your perspective on why you felt middle-aged bosses wanted people back in the office yeah so i think a lot of what happens in corporate life is just weird and you realize that especially if you're on the spectrum because you become this kind of anthropologist looking at stuff and thinking what's really going on here and i did this post and the title was one of the main reasons you're asked to return to the office is because middle-aged men don't get on with their wives.

4:10And I think some people, they got a lot of traction. They got like 2.6 million views. There were 6 ,000 comments on it. The vast majority of people saying, yes, this is absolutely right. And I think some people thought I was being provocative. So I did a follow-up, which said, look, you just think about it, right? If you're a man like I am, and you've worked your way up through the ranks and you feel now respected, which is a big part of the reason why people become leaders. And now you're marching up and down in a tie and everybody wants to, you know, give you attention. They want to have coffee catch-ups.

4:42You know, you go out to lunch with your buddies and discuss big, important things. And then all of a sudden COVID hits and you're stuck at home in a t-shirt on a Zoom call. And, you know, there's stuff going on in the background. The kids are screaming and, you know, maybe the wife wants you to help out with, you know, the dishwasher. And you're like, you know, I've got a job to do. This is the problem. And part of the reason, a big part of the reason I'm sure why people are being asked to return to work is that people who are stuck in that management by walking about want to go back to feel respected again because that's their identity.

5:15They've lost their identity at home. So it's no wonder that senior people want people to return to work so that they can worship them. And in case that just sounds completely made up, I was working at Deloitte towards the end of the pandemic and we were doing quite a lot of research on return to work. And the people who most wanted to go back to work, by a mile, were middle-aged, predominantly men. You know, they were more senior leaders who, as is the case, many companies were mainly men. So, yeah, it's a real thing. And it caused lots of heated debate anyway.

5:51Nick Shackleton-Jones: What pushback did you get to? What did people say in the comments? Most of the stuff I saw in the comments was overwhelmingly saying, oh, what, you've hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what's going on. What else did you witness? Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot interesting. There was, let's be honest, there's a lot of women who are saying, yeah, that's been my experience either as a woman in the office or as a senior leader, as a woman who doesn't feel the need in the same way to be in the office, or as a partner of a man who was home during the pandemic and sort of discovered that, you know, this is how they are.

6:26And then there were a couple of sort of grumpy old men. I'm caricaturing him slightly, but But one chap really struck me. He was like, you know, I get a lot of value out of being in the office. I just feel there's so much more buzz and creativity. He said, you know, I used to commute two and a half hours each way, you know, because I felt it was so important to be in the office. And it's like, yeah, okay. But just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for everybody else. Frankly, the research is overwhelmingly in favor of people being more productive at home. and the other thing was that five hours you spent commuting did it never cross your mind that you might be better spending that time with your family it's just this kind of i recognize this old-fashioned view of you have to as a man you know your your whole life is kind of bound up with the the kind of the work and everything else has to kind of fall by the wayside but i think thankfully we're starting to kind of move move beyond that really it's interesting every time

7:24Nick Shackleton-Jones: I think about work, the best articulations of why so many of the structures about work exist or sustain is identity. And we often don't talk about, we often talk about purpose or these, these things that are often appropriated by corporate marketeers and actually identity, getting to the heart of the roles we're playing in the job or the way that we collectively feel is right at the heart of it. And another thing that I think is right at the heart of successful working is the notion of autonomy. And you're really hot on that. Probably you did a whole string of TikToks about the challenge of working into corporate and broadly, as I interpreted them, I'd love you to sort of try and summarize them, but they were broadly about how you take adults and you rob them of autonomy and effectively you give them this sort of depressing, meaningless existence, just nodding along with what the bosses are saying.

8:22Nick Shackleton-Jones: Talk me through your perspective on corporate, this sort of robbing of autonomy that we do to adults. Yeah, I have a lot of perspectives, I guess, on corporate because of my background. And this robbing of autonomy, everything happens for the best reasons. Bad things happen for good reasons. And I think what I see as an example in corporate is, you've joined corporate and you want to make a difference. You want to do something to improve the business and your boss says well you're going to have to take it to the senior leadership team and now you've got to put together like 20 slides and you go backwards and forwards talking to 123 different people about this presentation deck that you're going to present to the senior leadership team and every single person that you talk to has an opinion on it you know the font isn't right you need to add a slide take a slide out and then eventually you get in front of the senior leadership team and you've got 20 minutes to present your slides and they ran over on something else now you've only got five minutes and they start a big debate about one of the words that you used on slide two and they don't get to make a decision and they tell you you need to go away and socialize the deck some more and come back in another four months and it's like it's insanity and we we disempower people systematically because we're so worried about everybody being involved and this is the thing a lot of corporate it's about consensus And you think, well, why?

9:43Why do you do all that? And it's because you need to keep everybody happy. And so we do these utterly ridiculous things. And a lot of decisions are just consensus. And as somebody on the spectrum, that's one of the things that really hits you hard when you're going to corporate, because you sit in meetings trying to figure out the solution to what we're talking about. And quite often, the solution that is the right solution is not what people agree on. And so you learn to shut up. You learn to basically kind of pipe down because it's a process where you need to figure out who's the most important person and then watch everybody kind of fall in line with that point of view and then kind of play out the conversation.

10:21So yeah, I think that loss of autonomy is kind of characteristic of many organisations, but it varies. Some delegate authority better than others, and I think that's key.

10:32Nick Shackleton-Jones: You talked about being a bit neuro. Some of the posts that you've done that have got the best response are your coping strategies or proposed coping strategies for how people might learn how to manage small talk or deal with different office scenarios what was the reason you posted those i guess that i've probably spent about 35 years trying to figure out how as somebody who is neurodiverse to survive and even thrive in corporate and i've risen to kind of chief learning officer at big four so I have actually been able to succeed and you can succeed as somebody who's on the spectrum you can actually be better at some of these things than other people and one of the things that really pushed me was being ineffectively in a consulting role in a sales role because you have to build relationships you have to pitch ideas you have to you know really get on with people and that's super tough but the the secret is you can do it better than people who are neurotypical.

11:29It's like learning a second language because you learn all the rules. You learn the scripts, you learn the masking. And the number one thing is just really listening because most neurotypical people are just in such a hurry to say, that's just like me. That's just like me. And so what happens in conversations and you watch them, you can see them is that somebody starts talking and immediately they want to chip in with their own perspective, their own story, their own experience. And if you're somebody who can just kind of stand back from that, really give people space and listen actively to use the jargon, but really care about people and use your curiosity to explore their life.

12:11People really appreciate that. And so you can be really good at those things, I guess, is the upshot. And now this isn't a plug, but you know I run my own business and a lot of that is leadership training and you know I design and deliver that and that the whole idea is to enable leaders and people in general to be better at those sorts of skills so the answer to your question is I do it for two reasons both because it's something that I do you know now as a business but also because I care about people like me and I want to say things that are practical and kind of helpful.

12:43Nick Shackleton-Jones: Is that effectively teaching leaders to relearn listening skills or to relearn how to appraise situations afresh rather than bringing sort of heuristics to them what sort of things would go into a training session like that a whole bunch of things and I don't want to be boring but I think one of the things at the core of it is really how do you get to know each person in your team because organizations worry about things like performance engagement and so on and so on and so on and they don't understand that It's really hard for somebody in a team to be engaged and perform well if their leader really doesn't know them as a person, like how they're different from everybody else in the team, what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they like doing, what they don't like doing.

13:24Do they like communicating via WhatsApp or do they prefer a phone call? Do they have to pick the kids up on a Friday afternoon? And leaders generally are very bad at really getting to know people because, like I say, they don't take the time to really kind of listen. So we teach people techniques and systematic approaches for just being better at working with people. But that also extends to like selling, working with clients. How do you build those relationships? How do you get people on side?

13:50Nick Shackleton-Jones: There's something we've talked a lot about on the podcast, which is the notion of mattering, the notion that when people feel seen, when they feel significant to the people around them, that it's transformational for their own motivation, for their connection with work, for the relationships they have. And what you seem to be describing is something which is the application of that. It's about bringing those micro observations into holistic approach to dealing with people, to notice that John is very different to Janet and that you need to treat them differently if you're going to get the best out of them.

14:26Nick Shackleton-Jones: And a lot of leaders pay lip service to that, but then deliver the same approach to everyone. They say, you know, bring your whole self to work, we'll adapt to that. But then broadly just shovel out the same emails. You seem to be taking an intuitive sort of micro approach to building that structure of management. Most leaders, I learned this, I've spent probably 30 years doing leadership training one way or another. Most leaders are just being like their parents. When you say to somebody, congratulations, you're a leader. the first thing they do in most cases is they act like their parents and that typically means they start telling people what to do and telling them off and that is not good leadership so you are absolutely right but the problem is that a lot of this is tacit and implicit these rules for relating to people but this is the thing if you're on the spectrum and you're forced to survive in those situations you have to figure out all the rules so you end up knowing exactly what the rules are to build relationships with people and kind of you know flex your approach and on all this kind of stuff and and that's i hesitate to say a superpower but that gives you some kind of an advantage if you can put that to your to your advantage you talked about reaching that level of chief learning officer and was your experience of doing that about masking the differences that you felt that were happening to you or were you even aware of the different differences that you've now observed in yourself.

15:54Nick Shackleton-Jones: Was masking an important part of you prevailing in that competitive environment? Yeah, it is. It's an important part of prevailing in any social environment. And I've done some TikToks about specifically what that means. What autistic people do for work? How are y 'all out here, me? Three things. Limit your exposure to neurotypicals. Remember that for every one hour of exposure, you're going to need two hours to recover secondly masking and scripting remember the neurotypicals function by looking at each other nodding and agreeing at things and secondly develop some scripted questions things like where are you going on holiday what did you do on the weekend what's your favorite cheese and third but not least try and get a job which is 80 to 20 ratio in terms of doing to talking as opposed to a neurotypical job which is the other way around obviously.

16:47So it's things like as soon as you meet somebody, I'm monitoring everything. So are they smiling? Am I making good eye contact? Am I making too much eye contact? Am I matching their style? Am I matching the way that they talk? What are the things that they really care about? Am I redirecting the conversation towards the things they care about, not what I care about? Am I standing too close? Am I standing too far? What's the body language saying? Am I matching the body language? So a lot of this stuff is sort of done unconsciously in a kind of roundabout way. um but yeah um in order to really succeed i think you need to know how to do those things in a systematic way but the problem is it's like speaking a second language it's incredibly draining so you can do it and you can do it really well um but you have to focus all your energy on it and it's exhausting and this was part of the problem was i think i pushed myself to the limit really i and i ended up doing people think that lockdown was good for introverts and and good for people on the spectrum it was horrendous for many because instead of having like six or seven meetings a day I was having an average of 13 zoom calls a day I worked it out and what I noticed about myself was really weird it was like by lunchtime by the time I'd done sort of six I was going into some sort of autopilot mode where it was almost like an out-of-body experience where I could see myself and hear myself sort of talking to people but somehow I just I'd sort of stepped away and and that was slightly sort of frightening um and it made me realize that okay yeah i need to do something different at this point it's interesting though because your

18:22Nick Shackleton-Jones: experience there like a doubling of the amount of time you spend in meetings is pretty much mapped out by all the data you know all the data suggests that the amount of time we spend in meetings is trebled since the pandemic and so all of the people who may be with similar situations to yourself are probably going to be finding they've got their own challenges of the moment of these back-to-back meetings but maybe don't have the the opportunity to step away from it or they're early enough in their career that they've got no choice other than to to go through it it's it's just a an interesting perspective that i think often gets neglected it doesn't really get much attention and i think the reason that meetings are so painful especially zoom meetings if you're on the spectrum is that basically people on the spectrum don't pick up as much social information.

19:09So if you're neurotypical, you thrive on social information, which is why you like going to social context. There's all these things going on. You're noticing all this, you know, micro reactions. Whereas if you're on the spectrum, you don't see that stuff. So it's like watching paint dry. You're just processing, if you like, a very narrow bit of the bandwidth and the rest of your mind is going crazy because it's just unbelievably dull watching people just build some consensus so I found the only way I could cope in some meetings was by sort of dual screening or having some other kind of window open so that I could be doing something which kept my mind active while I was using sort of 20 % and you might say that's terrible or that's kind of rude or whatever but it's like if you're not fascinated by all of the tiny little social ins and outs, then, you know, there's very little actually really going on in a meeting.

20:02You know, there's a couple of factual exchanges, the skeleton of a simple argument, and kind of that's it.

20:09Nick Shackleton-Jones: I just want to ask finally sort of about TikTok and what made you, you've got a great voice on TikTok. The people who really stand out on TikTok feel really authentic, feel like they're talking directly to you, have got a strong opinion, got a captivating way to tell a story. You've got all of those things you're absolutely first class alec but what made you start using it what made you think i'm going to do a few tic no no just just a lot of it's just ranting and the thing is that there's strengths and weaknesses right and one of the strengths of being on spectrum is you don't care too much what people think so i'm constantly trying to encourage people you know my wife included to make more tic tocs and that their anxieties about what people will think right Many people have that, about how people will react or whatever.

20:58And because I don't really care too much about that, I just am quite happy to talk about whatever is on my mind in quite an authentic way. It's not too contrived. And there's a lot going through my mind. If you're on the spectrum, you've constantly got 101 things going through your head. And frankly, I'm surprised that anybody cares. I'm surprised anybody watches them. And there's a few that people have watched a lot. and but I'm not really hurt by the comments because you get people some people are very encouraging some people are incredibly rude but I don't really worry about cringe so that that's the answer to your question because I don't care about being cringe your best ones always are the

21:38Nick Shackleton-Jones: ones that feel like they've been furiously spat out immediately before or after your morning coffee they feel like they've just been expelled from your body like some sort of it helps me somehow I don't know. It's some mysterious thing, but it's like I have this stuff knocking around in my head and it just helps me to get it out. Yeah. Of everything that you do and everything that you say, I think the thing that's so powerful is it's so clear sighted that, you know, most of us find ourselves sitting in these back to back meetings that are pointless, that are meaningless. Or, you know, we find ourselves being told to go into the office for the culture and there's nothing happening there.

22:12Nick Shackleton-Jones: And it's just it's wonderful when this savant comes along and articulates exactly why this is all bullshit. in a very snappy way. It sort of makes it like the sort of content you want to forward to four friends. And I think that's why your voice is so powerful there. I love it. I love it. I love it. Thank you for the feedback and also for being complimentary. I can't watch my own TikToks when I look back. I think I'm such an idiot. But it helps me get it out there.

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24:42Nick Shackleton-Jones: well i've put a link to a few of my faves in the comments but i'm uh immensely grateful for the it took the time to to chat to us and just to remind us one more time about your training consulting business oh sure yeah shackleton consulting so i have like a maverick ranty kind of tiktok side and then i have a very you know dependable which is why i quite liked it you ported the TikTok across to LinkedIn because generally I sort of show up as this kind of corporate individual on LinkedIn. And, you know, it's nice, I think, for people to know the other side of me. But yeah, Shackleton Consulting, I do all kinds of learning stuff, training stuff, leadership stuff, all that.

25:19Nick Shackleton-Jones: That's it. I broke the LinkedIn code switch. There was you in a suit on LinkedIn and you with all your tats out on TikTok. So I loved it. Code switching, that's it. Good. Nick, I'm so grateful you've taken the time to chat. Thank you so much.

25:37Nick Shackleton-Jones: Thank you to Nick. I've linked to his training consultancy in the show notes. And like I say, there's a link to some of my favourite TikToks of his in the show notes as well. You can always find out more by following the newsletter. I've been Bruce Taisley. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next time.

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