E203 - Tessa Clarke: What YOU can do to save the world

0:01Hey, everyone. Welcome along to episode two of our leadership series in association with PwCWC. We're really excited to partner with PwC once again to bring you conversations with people who've done incredible things, who know incredible things, and have so many lessons for you for your life. Today, we welcome someone who is not only a leader, but they are a leader with purpose. We welcome to High Performance the founder of Olio, Tessa Clark. Now, this is such a purpose-driven conversation because Tessa is going to share with you the story of how the Olio app was created, an app that is all about us doing everything we can for the environment, about sharing, about less waste, about caring for the most precious resource we have, which is the planet.

0:44But she also talks about how to build a brand, how to remain resilient in the face of setbacks and knockbacks. And in fact, she gave us a really cool tip about what she does when she's recruiting. And since this, actually on the high performance team, we've been recruiting new members for our business. And we've used the tip that Tessa gave us for getting the right kind of people into the business. So have a listen and I'm sure you'll learn plenty. As always, these conversations are designed to teach you as much as possible. So take an hour and learn some great lessons from the founder of Olio, Tessa Clark, on episode two of our High Performance PwC Leadership Series.

1:23Enjoy.

1:28Tessa, thank you so much for joining us on High Performance. Thank you for having me. What is your definition of high performance? Well, I think there are all sorts of metrics and frameworks and stuff about high performance, but what I listen to is my guts and how high performance feels. And I think for me, it's like sort of true love. You know it when you see it, right? And you know it when you feel it. So for me, high performance is when individuals are really fulfilling their full potential. And when you look at a team, the whole is the greater than the sum of the parts. So how do you learn to follow your gut?

2:03Because I don't know whether it comes with age, does it come with experience? Does it come with confidence? So I think it's really, really, really important to follow your gut. It is probably one of the most overlooked skills in the business world, but not just the business world, kind of any world. Our gut has evolved over millions of years. We're taking billions of data points at any one point in time. So I listen to my gut very, very carefully when I'm making decisions. And I think that it does require confidence and that probably does come with age. So yeah, I encourage people to lean into their gut as quickly as they can.

2:42Could you give us an example of when you've done that and, or maybe when you've not done that and it hasn't worked out? Well, I'll give you an example of what I see happening the whole time when people don't listen to their guts. And that is around recruitment so a lot of people when they're recruiting they sort of recruit to a logo they see someone's cv and they say oh they've worked at this amazing place that amazing place that amazing place we should hire them even if their little spidey sense is saying oh there's something a bit off about this person i'm not quite 100 sure about it they tend to ignore that because they're blinded by the logos and i always say to people that recruitment is it's this real sort of mix of the art and the science and it is really really really important not to ignore those red flags that your gut's giving you when you're recruiting and every single time I've ignored those red flags it's ended up in a bit of a disaster zone.

3:34Interesting. So what are they then what are the key attributes that you do look for when you would recruit somebody? I think it's very hard to give a generic list it's the same with performance I think it's actually very hard to generically define performance because the reality is that someone who would work well at Olio in the organization that we're building or someone who performed well there might be very different to someone who'd perform well elsewhere but in oleo but in oleo specifically so we recruit religiously against our company values and we've only got four so they're really simple no excuse for anyone to forget them so they're inclusive resourceful ambitious and caring and so we're really looking for people who kind of cut them and they bleed those values they really exemplify those values not just at work but actually in terms of who they are as a human being and if you kind of show up representing those values then chances are you're going to perform really well in our environment so we interviewed johnny wilkinson on this podcast who said that one of his frustrations is you go around any rugby club and you'll find the same values of unity hard work teamwork that every rugby club talks about it the ones that make the difference are the ones that actually live it yeah so i'm interested in if we go through the all the old company values how do you see that somebody cares so i i'm smiling because i often say that our company values are not on any mouse mat they're not on any mugs and they're not on any posters on the wall but they are in the heart and the soul of every single person at the company and um how i test for it is i actually start off my opening interview question is asking people to kind of dial back to their childhood and really just talk to me about their childhood what kind of values they were brought up with what lessons they learned from that experience and i find that you can very very quickly learn a lot about people's attitude and mentality to life around that and i tend to rather than sort of walking through people's CV because my role at Olio when I'm interviewing really is getting that culture fit bit right and so I don't often go to the CV at all I'll be asking far more bigger picture questions about you know what is the role that luck has played in your life or asking people to really reflect on when they could have done something better and how they thought about that and if they were to lie on their deathbed what would they want to look back and to have achieved And I think when you ask those much more open-ended questions, you get a real flavor of the human being.

6:10To answer your question specifically about caring, I don't tend to ask a specific question about that, although sometimes actually we do in an earliest phase of the interview, we do ask people to give an example of a time when they've been caring. And that's fascinating watching where people go. So sometimes people will talk about caring in a work environment, but where I get quite excited when people open up about their life more broadly and they can demonstrate that they're caring outside of work as well. So to turn one of your interview questions on you then what was it in your own childhood then that instilled the values in you?

6:50So I grew up on a farm up in North Yorkshire it was a very isolated rural existence and And it's funny because I spent most of my childhood being very embarrassed about my upbringing because no one else was really from a farm. And all the other kids were shopping and listening to music and watching TV. And I was outside with the cows and the pigs with my workforce of two, which is my two younger brothers. But through my upbringing, I've realized actually that a lot of the skills I learned on the farm have been invaluable for me as an entrepreneur today. so specifically on a farm you have zero control over all the variables that are happening in your life so you can't control the animals you can't control the weather you can't control the price at which you sell your outputs at you can't control the price at which you buy things at and what that means is you just have to be amazing at problem solving you have to be super adaptable every single day there's going to be something that you did not predict that morning that is going to happen to you and you have to think on your feet you have to solve it really fast you have to be super unflappable i think also you need to think very creatively and laterally about you know how am i going to block up this space to stop these animals from coming through here with these inadequate materials i have to hand so you have to think very very creatively very laterally and i think resilience is another core factor you know on a farm it can be tipping it down with rain it It can be minus 10 degrees.

8:21It doesn't matter. You have to get outside. You have to feed the animals. You have to look after them. And you always put the animals first. So I was very much brought up with that sort of animals first, humans second. And again, I think that's just a principle that I apply to my life. I try and put other people first and then follow with myself after that. I think it's a lovely comparison, actually. As someone that also comes from a farming family, comparing farming and entrepreneurship. It's very interesting and not something I'd ever considered. a lot of people from the outside look at entrepreneurship as exciting and dynamic and rewarding and you're in control of your own destiny and it's kind of the holy grail for anyone that has a job what do you want to be on work for myself be an entrepreneur would you mind for a couple of minutes just telling us the truth the unfiltered truth about entrepreneurship so much of what you said is true um i often say that i've had sort of three zero to one experiences in my life one was meeting my husband one was having my kids and one was setting up my own business it is transformative being master of your own destiny and that's incredible it's also transformative in our case doing work with purpose waking up every single day knowing that what you are doing is genuinely truly making a difference to communities to the world however there's a big However, it is an emotionally exhausting, long, hard slog.

9:47I often say it's not a sprint. It's a series of back-to-back marathons. And at times it can feel like you sort of wake up, get punched in the face, go to bed, wake up, get punched in the face, go to bed. And on it continues. So I do think that to succeed in entrepreneurship, you've got to have oodles of resilience. You will have heard that, I'm sure, the whole time. but I think you've also got to be a glass half full type of person you've got to just have that optimistic outlook on that world the belief that somehow you can and you will make that happen and linked to that you've got to have passion because at the end of the day passion is infectious we're all human beings and we get excited by the passion of other people and you have to rely on that passion and that resilience to kind of get you through the dark days.

10:37So you've spoken about gut instincts and now you're talking about passion as well which leads us beautifully into discussing Olio. Would you mind sharing with us where the idea came from and you know maybe maybe the very first time in your life that you had this idea because quite often we speak to people who go well I first thought about it here and then 10 years later I finally got around to actually turning the dream into a reality. Yeah, it's funny you should say that. So I think it's really important to say that I had never imagined becoming an entrepreneur. To be honest, I spent most of my life not even knowing what one of them is.

11:12I also, I did study for my MBA for two years at Stanford Business School. I was in the heart of Silicon Valley and at no point did entrepreneurship feel like it was for someone like me. And I feel really strongly about this because when I look back at who I am as a human being, it's kind of obvious that I was going to become an entrepreneur. I'm someone who loves, you know, dissecting stuff, approaching stuff from the first principles, challenging things that just make no sense whatsoever. And yet I just completely written out entrepreneurship. And I've reflected on that a lot. Like how was I living in the middle of Silicon Valley for two years?

11:48And did I not think that entrepreneurship was for someone like me? And I think it's because there were no role models who looked or sounded like me. And that's a real problem which i'm super passionate about sort of sharing voices yeah it was young men who perhaps dropped out of university lived in hoodies and ate on ramen noodles i think we've we've all sort of heard that but even today i listen to business podcasts obsessively and it's extremely rare to hear a female voice so i think obviously doing my little bit to try and change that so um entrepreneurship was something that did not feel like it was for me having said that I'd had a corporate career that spanned about 15 years and for the last couple of the years I had this growing entrepreneurial itch I felt I asked myself that same question how would you feel if you were to drop dead tomorrow and I think well you've got a great CV but that doesn't feel like enough I'm not proud of that I want to be on my deathbed and to look back at my life and genuinely be proud of the positive impact that I've had I want to feel like I've contributed and I would find myself going to leadership events and listening to all these incredible inspiring people speaking from the stage and I'd be so inspired by them and their stories and then I'd stop and reflect and realize that I was profoundly uninspired by myself and I just reached that point where I was sick and tired of not being inspired by myself so I was in an entrepreneurial mindset and unfortunately I wasted a couple of years because I thought I didn't have an idea and I was sort of wandering around hoping that an idea would land from the heavens.

13:27I've retrospectively realized that I was going about it in totally the wrong way. What I should have been doing was looking for a problem to solve and if I'd gone out into the world looking for problems to solve that I was passionate about I would have got to entrepreneurship an awful lot more quickly. So how did I arrive at Olio? It was through a seemingly inconsequential moment in my life. It was about eight years ago now. I was living and working overseas and moving back to the UK. And on moving day, the removal men told me I had to throw away all of our uneaten food. Obviously, the inner farmer's daughter in me said, no, I cannot possibly put perfectly good food in the bin.

14:04So much the irritation of the packing men, I stopped packing and instead bundled up my newborn baby and toddler at the time and I set out onto the streets clutching this food hoping to give it to this lady who was normally always in this one spot outside our local supermarket and for some reason she was not there that day. I shed a few tears of frustration that I'd gone to all this effing effort on a super stressful day to try and share this food and had failed so I turned back very despondently to our apartment and then when the removed men weren't looking, I smuggled the non-perishable food into the bottom of my packing boxes.

14:42And that was the moment where I just thought, Tessa, this is getting ridiculous, the lengths you're going to, to avoid throwing food in the bin. And I'd worked in the digital world for a decade at that point. I knew there was an app for absolutely everything. And I couldn't believe there wasn't a simple app for me to be able to give away my spare food to people living nearby who would like it. So that was the light bulb moment for Olio and took me off on this crazy, roller coaster ride great story it's brilliant and i'm interested in a concept though when we were talking about giving away food and the kind of narrative in the cost of living crisis that seems to be endemic everywhere we look at the moment is the topic of shame you mentioned that you felt ashamed being the farmer's daughter yeah and the lifestyle that you grew up in but shame seems to be endemic everywhere when we talk about whether it's people using food banks or we try and shame the supermarkets for the prices they charge or the government for the lack of work that they're doing i'm interested in how you've taken a topic that seems to revolve around shame and try to reduce that and get people to see the value in it yeah this is something we feel really very strongly about so if I kind of dial back and look at what's happened and how are we in this situation how have we got widespread waste how have we got millions of people going hungry and struggling to kind of get by I think one of the reasons we've ended up here is because we have allowed our communities to be completely decimated and charities have had to spring up to fill that gap and unfortunately all the research shows and I'm sure you'll know this as well as I do, is that people do feel an enormous amount of shame and stigma when receiving help from charitable sources.

16:35But we have a view on the world, which is that actually, if we had a lot more community, we wouldn't need so much of the charitable support. And the beauty of Olio is that we are connecting people in real life to give away things that they don't want or need. And I should stress, it's not just food, you can give away other household items as well and the beauty of it is that we position oleo very very carefully as being a part of modern mainstream everyday sustainable living this is absolutely about community and not about charity and so everyone who uses oleo is as equal as everybody else and then what ends up happening is people are meeting across different socioeconomic backgrounds different ages different genders different ethnicities and they start building connections and they also start getting to know each other better getting to know different people's perspective and a lot of people say that they have just learned so much more about humanity and also just how good it feels to be part of a community to connect with someone else living nearby thanks to their experience of sharing on so how has it happened then that we've allowed community to kind of disintegrate i think that part of what has happened is because so many people have moved um they've kind of moved away from their families and from their communities for their careers perhaps so you know if you just have to look here in the uk it's not as bad now as it was when i was starting my career but if you wanted a career you had to move to london and so you just had these massively sort of transitory populations and what we discovered if you look at sort of the problem of waste for example and why is that happening it's not because anyone enjoys throwing away food or enjoys throwing away other household items they do it because they're no longer connected to their local community they no longer have anyone to give this stuff to and so what we're trying to do is give people back an easy access to that local community so i love the idea of reframing a topic that like you say shame or embarrassment or we try to create a fair culture of frightening governments and supermarkets to do something about it you've reframed it which is about connections and relationships yeah what's been the most powerful example that you've seen of these relationships that has reaffirmed that instinct that you had on that moving day i've i mean honestly so many but one that is very top of mind because we've got a forum section in the olio app where people will go on there to share their experiences of the oleo magic which is what they often call it and um there is someone on our forum a guy called terry who has been sharing with the community how he has been rough sleeping for quite a long period of time and he has recently been given settled housing and he was sharing how incredibly grateful he was that he had been able to completely furnish that new housing because he was given a house but nothing in it and he'd been able to completely furnish that thanks to his connections that he had made with the local oleo community and that's just you know that's literally life-changing for terry but not just for terry for the people that have met terry who is just a wonderful character and human being and And he's just brought so much richness into his neighbor's lives as well.

20:05So that's kind of, I guess, the extreme end of things. But just in terms of more everyday examples, people on Oliw are constantly kind of gifting one another things to say thank you or sending handwritten cards or helping each other out mowing the lawn or whatever it might be or lending people some cutlery or something like that. So it's just those sort of everyday moments of kindness that are really powerful. And also we've run some research recently and 40 % of our communities say that they've made friends through the Olio app. And if you think sort of nowadays how hard it is to actually make friends, that 40 % of our communities say that they've made friends is unbelievable.

20:44And 66 % say that sharing through Olio has improved their mental health. and 75 % say that sharing has improved their financial well-being. So I think Olu is just a brilliant example of the fact there's an awful lot of doom and gloom in the world right now. Every single day feels like a bad news day. But if we just reconnect people with each other, empower people to take small actions, cumulatively that kind of adds up, that has a snowball effect And actually it starts to be pretty transformative when we have two thirds of people who are on the app saying that it's improved their mental health.

21:25And for people listening to this that aren't plugged in to the world in the way that you are, and they maybe think, well, there's not really a problem with people needing to share food or share things they don't want. I mean, you would have done the research. You would know the numbers. Yes. How big is this problem that Olio is looking to solve? so we are solving the problem of waste we started off solving the problem of food waste and now we're solving the problem of waste more broadly and it is no exaggeration to say it is one of the largest problems facing humanity today and it's sort of hidden in plain sight so if we just take food waste very quickly first globally a third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away which is worth over a trillion u.s dollars alongside that we have 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night who could be fed on just one quarter of the food that we waste in the western world you know and here in a country such the uk we have almost 10 million people living in food poverty in the us we have about 50 million people living in food poverty so we've got widespread waste widespread hunger and then the environmental impact of food waste is absolutely devastating so if it were to be a country food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the usa and china and that's because a land mass larger than china is used every single year to grow food that's never eaten so it's all pretty mind-boggling but what's even more mind-boggling is that in a country such as the uk half of all food waste takes place in the home so that means that kind of half of that big problem that i've just described that is within our means to actually we're half the problem but if you flip it on its head it means we can be half the solution and that's what we want to do is empower everyday people to take 10 seconds to share their spare instead of throw it away and then if you move on to kind of the waste problem more broadly because we now connect people not only to give away their spare food but also their spare household items as well globally households are throwing away 2 billion tons of waste every single year which is clearly mind-boggling and And what would you categorize as waste?

23:32All the stuff that we're throwing in our bins and sending off to the tip. Right, sorry. Yeah. And then that is sort of reflective of kind of a society that we live in today, which is all about just buying, buying, buying stuff brand new. We use it for a fraction of its useful life, and then we sort of toss it in the bin, and we're kind of rinse, washing, repeating on that. So there's a concept called Earth Overshoot Day, which is the day in the year in which humanity has used all the resources that the Earth can replenish in a year. and back in the early 70s earth overshoot day was the end of december so that means that humanity used in a year what the earth could replenish in a year if you fast forward to last year earth overshoot day was the 28th of july so what that means is that every single thing that every single one of us eight billion people consumed after the 28th of july last year was net net depleted to the planet.

24:24So it's really, really clear that we cannot continue with this model of consumption that we currently have. And we've got to flip our mindsets and we've got to be fully utilizing the resources that already exist in our local communities. So we want people, when they want something, to think, I'm going to go to Oli, I'm going to go to my local community and I will see what I can get for free, or I can buy secondhand from my neighbors, what I can borrow, or eventually kind of what I can rent. The interesting thing from my perspective is what you've created is amazing and it's solving a problem. Why is the problem there in the first place?

25:01Because I saw something interesting in the paper the other day and I'm not going to get this completely right, but it was something like things that kill people compared to what is reported as things that kill people so for example like a terror attack kills 0.001 of people in a year terror attacks account for 30 of the coverage of things that kill people you know plane crashes it's even lower and it accounts for 15 you know in other words the media is scaring people or pointing people in a certain direction in the wrong direction in the wrong direction yeah right damien and i read lots of things we go on the internet all the time we've got kids we care about the future how are you not hearing about this neither of us know this and i would imagine almost everyone listening to this podcast doesn't know this either they don't know have you looked at why and how that's happening so obviously i've thought about this a lot because i can remember so vividly when we first founded olio i had that experience with looking at potentially having to throw away some food and i thought i'll do some research to find out if there's a problem here or not and i was absolutely stunned and horrified and i could not believe that it wasn't on the front cover of every single newspaper that problem that i outlined in particular given that we've got another two billion people joining the planet by 2050 and to feed us all we need to increase global food production by 50 and today we don't know how we're going to achieve that and i do not know why this is not being talked about and being written about i think that perhaps people don't understand why food waste is such a problem because it is quite counterintuitive so food is seen as a very natural organic thing so it's really hard to understand why food waste is such a big problem from an environmental perspective similarly if you look at where food waste is taking place most people would assume it's the supermarkets but actually half of all food waste takes place in the home and only two percent of all food waste is generated at a store level and that's just a simple maths game there's 28 million households in the uk throwing away roughly 20 % in the weekly shop in comparison to 10 or 15 ,000 supermarkets throwing away half a percent to one percent.

27:15So it's very counterintuitive certainly in the area of food waste and then with regards to the problem of waste more broadly this is not being discussed because to discuss it would require us to challenge the fundamentals of the economic system that prevails right now and quite frankly no one has the courage to do that i say no one there are some incredible voices who are pointing out the absurdity of the fact that we have a system where the north star metric the thing that everyone is optimizing for governments optimize for that filters down through businesses that filters down to us because we're told to consume and play our part the north star metric for humanity is increasing gdp growth and infinite GDP growth on a planet with finite resources by very definition is not a long-term strategy and as I've already pointed out with Earth Overshoot Day we are way exceeding the boundaries of the current planet that we have so the message that I have to everybody who's listening is one it's a climate emergency it's no longer something that we're talking about that might be impacting our children or grandchildren it's going to affect pretty much every single person that's listening to this podcast in their lifetime and so we all need to kind of get involved and figure out how we can play a part and then secondly the sustainability revolution that is going to happen whether we like it or not is going to make the digital revolution look like a walk in the park it really is we've got to reinvent everything about our society and our systems and our ways of operating and we've got a handful of years to do it how does that even start if the entire capitalist western mindset is the total antithesis of this like yeah i can't i'm scared i can't even sort of see the art you know what i mean well i'll tell you how it starts is we start listening to diverse voices i genuinely believe that we wouldn't have a climate crisis if we had had women in senior leadership positions in businesses for the last 50 years because i think that so i'm drawing sweeping generalizations right and we all know that gender is on a spectrum um but i i kind of you know think back to evolution um and there are lots of i guess stereotypically male characteristics that require you to go out and hunt and extract and come back and deliver and generally um the women were kind of tending the hearth managing the resources thinking very carefully about the impact on community not wasting things making sure that things went a long way and i think that female voice about well how do we deal with waste how do we manage our resources effectively how do we think about the impact that this activity is having on our community well those voices have not been heard in the boardrooms for the past 50 years and so all we've heard is growth at all costs profit at all costs and there's been close to zero consideration for the climate or communities if we allow those diverse voices into the room and not just women you know this is people who um are from you know multiple kind of ethnic backgrounds people from different socioeconomic classes the people are at the coalface of feeling the worst effects of untrammeled capitalism then the solution lies with those people so what would you see to replace gdpr then as our north star metric there are many people who are experts in this field and i am not one of them um but for sure i would be you know why do we all exist to have a happy hopefully fulfilling life right so i would have thought that we should be optimizing for human fulfillment and the improvement of the quality of life of our citizens.

31:12And there are a whole bunch of metrics that you can use to look at the quality of life of your citizens. And also you would want to make sure that you are living within the means of the resources that you have at your disposal. The guy who invented GDP quite famously said, whatever you do do not use this metric by itself and unfortunately we have all collectively ignored his warning and have just focused on on just gdp growth and um it's taking humanity over a cliff edge right now do you remember a few years ago when david cameron introduced like some happiness index for the country and like the cynicism the mockery the the like the belittlement of that process yeah so it meant that very rarely do you ever hear that used again so how how would you overcome the cynicism of those people that are that wedded to the current system when they hear things like human fulfillment this all sounds like blue sky thinking it's great in theory but not in reality how would you address that i mean the reality is you know and i can't speak with any real credibility to the political system just to be completely fair but um i do feel just as a regular citizen of the country i do feel that our politicians do not take the citizens on a journey they don't um sort of share the truth with us all and certainly in my experience i say when i'm leading oleo actually we've really built the business in collaboration with our community And so just yesterday, for example, we did a webinar with our community, really sharing with them some of the challenges that we face as a business.

32:57We were extremely open and explicit in a way that I think 99 up 100 businesses would not be. And they understood it. They got it. They really, really engaged with it. And they're going to help us co-create the way forwards. And I think there is just a lack of respect, really, I think, from the politicians to us as citizens and as voters. I don't think we're nearly sufficiently kind of up to speed on the reality of the challenges that we face. And I think you need sort of specific examples. And it can't just be with something like reorienting your North Star metric. It can't just be one of 25 initiatives that you're launching.

33:37It has to be the initiative that you are launching. and um yeah and there needs to be a serious national conversation about that what you're talking about there is trust trust with your the people um the trust with the businesses trust with the people using the app i know damien wants to talk to you about the trust trifecta which you will in about two seconds time but i need to dive in beforehand just to wrap up where we've taken this conversation which is the which i was not expecting by the way so i just free formed a little bit. It's been fascinating. But there's a crisis in front of us. Yes.

34:11Oleo is one of the ways of helping, but probably you'd even admit not solving this problem because it's so huge. You know, there are things that have to happen at the very top of government. And like with the advent of business, with people being educated better, with social media, allowing people to get information that previously was denied to them. Because I think, you know, again, going back to those boardrooms in the 70s, I think you're right. But I also think the people in those boardrooms weren't told the truth were they they weren't given the information to make the correct decisions now we do have that information particularly if we look for it so are you you said that you have to be an optimist to be an entrepreneur yeah are you optimistic or pessimistic about our future on this planet when i look at all the data and when i kind of go super deep about our reality when i listen to the scientists and what they're saying i'm not at all optimistic.

35:05However, I can't live in that space and I'll kind of die fighting. So every single day I'm getting up trying to do my bit to help solve this. What gives me hope is a very, very simple philosophy, which is that it was billions of small actions that caused this mess in the first place. And so by the same logic, billions of small actions can help get us out of it. And it doesn't require these big, grandiose actions. It just requires tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of people challenging their employer about their business model and how they operate, or even quitting or proactively setting up their own projects and i think we have so much more power than we think we're referred to as consumers right which i which really infuriates me because i think we're all so much more than consumers actually if we identified as citizens then i think we'd think a lot differently about our agency and the role that we have to play and the fact of the matter is that governments and businesses are enormously powerful but they are not taking nearly enough action on the timescales that we need and given that that's our reality then we as individuals have got to start sort of taking the power that we've got making a difference well when we're looking at the success of olio what we saw was that you were a business that seems to have addressed that small word with huge implications trust and there's that famous phrase in from the harvard business review of the trust trifecta that says for trust to exist you've got to have a level of competence to be able to do what you say you'll do you've got to be authentic that there's no hidden side people have to believe what they see is what they get but then the third element is about connection bringing people together to achieve that common aim and what the trust trifecta says you get those three right trust happens as a consequence and olio seems to have nailed that and i'm interested if you tell us a little bit more around those three areas and why they're important what's the order of importance if you would recognize it and how people can utilize the same three principles remind me again authentic authentic yeah competent competent and connection connection so for authentic and for us that's the one we lead with because that's our mission we have such a strong and clear mission and the reason why we have a community of 7 million people we've got 85 000 volunteers who are collecting and redistributing food 50 000 ambassadors were spreading the word about olio they're all doing that because they believe in our mission and that's because we have taken the time to explain to them what our mission is and why it's important then in terms of competence well I guess this is the high performance topic that you guys talk about a lot and that's extremely important and I guess myself and the team are just collectively every single day trying to show up and be competent or ideally a bit better than competent and then the third one which is the connection piece again I imagine that is one that is often underestimated but that is incredibly powerful because trust is a multiplier there's almost like a chemical reaction that sort of takes place when you have that connection between multiple people happening between one another up down across and that is certainly something we have got a very high degree of connection at but even that comes back to the mission the reason why we have such a strong connection is because we all share that same mission and as i touched on earlier on the same values and so if you have a group of people who share the same mission they show up with the same values by definition you're going to have a really really high trust environment because we interviewed the organizational psychologist adam grant on this who was the author of a paper that said for the leader of an organization you almost have to repeat your point 10 times before somebody at another level of the organization has even heard it once yeah so i'm interested for you as a leader that's trying to build trust how much of it is about just the repetition of the same message the same mission the same values and how do you stop yourself getting bored with that so i think repetition is really really important but just as important in my experience this is just my personal leadership style is transparency and i am extremely transparent with the team and as a company we're extremely transparent with our community and i think that that is also critical for trust and for building those relationships brilliant we always end our interviews with some quickfire questions and the first one is the three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you at oleo should buy into well i won't use our company values that's cheating that's That's also four.

40:27So I will go for honest, humble and curious. What advice would you give to a teenage test just starting out? I would say to her, all the things that you think that make you weird and different and an outsider, they're going to be your superpower when you grow older. What is your biggest strength? What is your greatest weakness? Greatest strength. Oof. i'm extremely passionate i'm unafraid i do what i think is the right thing always even if it comes at an enormous personal cost and i really value clear communications and the weakness something i'm struggling with right now is i have an extremely thin skin i am very sensitive i'm a people pleaser i want everybody to be happy all the time and that's really really difficult and i can um sometimes just take things far too personally how important is legacy to you i think legacy is extremely powerful and through trying to understand behavior change and how we get people to change their behaviors the research that i have seen shows that if you can appeal to people's desire to create a positive legacy for themselves you can encourage them to change their behaviors and so specifically when it comes to kind of what i'm doing which is trying to solve the climate crisis and build stronger communities i think that legacy is quite important to a lot of people a lot of people are motivated to think i want to feel like i had a positive impact on the world on my local community on my family and the final question um for the high performance listeners and viewers to this episode who no doubt like demie and i will feel um as scared as we feel educated i think after the past hours conversation what would you like to leave ringing in our ears what is your final message i guess for a high performance life for a high performance life you need to find your problem in the world that you are uniquely well placed to solve i believe that everybody can be not just a high performer an exceptional performer when they find their thing but too often we don't do that hard work of introspection and really figuring out what is it that we are really truly passionate about tessa you've scared me you've educated me and I think the people listening to this conversation would feel exactly the same way.

43:16There is an emergency right before our very eyes and it's an emergency that we are not allowed to see because it clearly causes too many problems for too many people too high up the food chain. So for you to come on this podcast and share your amazing mission, share your entrepreneurial mindset, share the threat in front of us, I think is really powerful. And thank you very much. Great, thank you. Damien. Jake. I meant it when I said that that was scary and it actually is scary and I feel stupid for not knowing the things that Tessa spoke about and I feel that all of us should yeah I agree I feel a similar emotion but I'd go back to Dr Pippa Grange with us that when we feel scared we need to see it face it and replace it and I think that's what Tess is doing there she's helping us understand that we have to first of all acknowledge that we're facing a climate crisis then we have to face it and say well and and think what can we do how can i play my part and she said in the rap after we'd finished there was that people often think that you have to be perfect to be able to take action that you have to be a vegan when she's saying well no just cut your meat consumption down you don't not have it not every pair of clothes you have has to be second hand but we can all do make small steps to then replace the narrative that we're currently they face it yeah i think it's um i think it's a really worthwhile conversation i'm really glad we've had it and i hope that you know because i know a lot of people come to high performance because they want to be entrepreneurial they want to set up their own business they want to change the world they want to make some money you can do all that but it's not going to be much use if there's no world to worry about at the end of it so you know i'm even listening from you know with my whisper group head on thinking well i've got 300 staff at that business how much food are they throwing away every month and what would the oleo app do for whisper if we passed it around the team and everyone you're saying with high performance you know get it out there just get people making a difference but i'd pick up for you with whisper like one of the things that i know you do that test described was you do have diverse voices in the room people that are challenging that narrative and i think once we start to just introduce these topics and hopefully for people listening to this that might be the start of it in their world we start to be open to new ideas and to challenge some of these old conventions that we've allowed to grow up around does.

45:35I really enjoyed it, mate. Me too. Thank you. So there we go. That brings us to the end of this conversation with Tessa Clark. I hope that you learned a lot from that. And actually, as soon as that was over, I went home, downloaded the Olio app. And I think it's like, I've got two young children, so they are really plugged into environmental issues. But I was kind of embarrassed, actually, as a man in his mid-40s, not knowing many of the things that Tessa spoke about. Of course we all know we're living through an environmental crisis at the moment but the depth of it and the scale of it and how preventable it feels when you speak to tessa is kind of sobering really um and i really hope that not only have you learned a lot about your life and maybe your business your career and your passions but i also hope that this has opened your eyes to the world we're living in at the moment and the fact that as tessa says all of us can be the ones that make a difference thank you so much for listening and we've got another fascinating episode coming your way in a week's time as we continue this leadership series brought to you by High Performance and PwC.