235. How to make work work for you, with Isabel Berwick, best-selling author of The Future-Proof Career

0:01Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. As always, we are brought to you by the wonderful people at the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. We'll have a quick word from them before we dive into today's episode. Yes, we'll see you in a second. Welcome back. We have a very special episode for you today. Isabel Berwick friend of the show the incredible professional behind the Financial Times working at Brand her award winning book The Future Proof Career is out in paperback as of this month yeah Isabel not only is a fabulous podcaster we've learned a lot of lessons from Isabel she's famous for being part of the FT she's done lots of fancy jobs in the FT but Financial Times if anyone doesn't know what the FT is of course you know what FT is she's also just a really really nice person and really honest I sat down with her And I talked about a book and asked her things, which I suppose might not always, people might not always want to ask.

1:05Like, for example, why did you write another business book? Does the world need another book on work? So let's go and join Isabel Berwick with Al. Al did the interview on this one. I did. So we are joined here with the incredible Isabel Berwick, friend of the show. She's been on before, but we've never had a full episode with her. So I'm delighted to introduce her as she is the host and editor of Working It podcast. She's got an accompanying Working It newsletter. She's the former business editor of The Independent on Sunday, journalist for The Financial Times, editorial lead for Financial Times Women in Business Forum, author of a brand new book called The Future Proof Curriculum.

1:39Why am I introducing you? You introduce yourself. Tell us who you are, what you do and what you're famous for, Isabel. So I'm Isabel Barrett. I am the host of the FT's Working It podcast about the workplace management leadership. I write the Working It newsletter, which goes out to FT subscribers us every Wednesday and my book The Future Proof Career How to Thrive at Any Stage is coming out in April. What I liked about this is when I opened it up I realised that it's split nicely into two sections one for managers and one for people who are employees or potentially want to become managers I thought that was really smart so when I was listening and going oh does that apply to me yes it will there are thousands of books on work why did you feel the world needed another one?

2:22I really did hesitate before I signed the book deal because my desk is so full of books about work and management and leadership. And I thought, what can I add to it? But I suppose what I am trying to do is write a book for people who are probably not the natural audience for a lot of those leadership and management books. it's firmly aimed at people who want to get on at work and enjoy it but as a part of a fuller life you know you may not want to be the ceo but your job is important to you and you want meaning but you just want to learn how to get on with other people get a pay rise thrive it's a book about work for for mortals really for ordinary people yeah i wrote it for myself because i've made so many errors in my career and I just thought where am I going to put some of this I hesitate to call it wisdom but life experience I suppose and uh hosting the podcast I come into contact with so many amazing people and some of their words are in the book and some of my experiences are in the book so it's a kind of it's a mix of everything it's a kind of everything I've learned about work is there anything that sticks out to you as perhaps an error you did make but in retrospect was quite a big learning moment.

3:43I guess my biggest one is I have a lot of regret around the fact that when my kids were small, I took a step back with my career or rather I didn't put myself forward for promotion or management jobs. Now I can sort of be slightly kind to myself and say culturally at that time, at the start of this century, it was much harder for women who wanted to work part time to have senior corporate jobs. And I did have a terrible experience where I was essentially, you know, removed from a job because I was part time, not because I was bad at it. And that really scarred me. But it took me a long time to step back up.

4:23I thought I wouldn't have enough bandwidth for my children and for work. And I regret that now because I think, you know, can do everything. We don't have to be perfect in everything we do. And I think I was tripped up by partly my own perfectionism and partly by the cultural atmosphere of the day. But I think that's changed now. A lot of women now are able to work flexibly and fit work around family and caring commitments and other commitments. And not just women, people, men too. so I hope I wouldn't have made the same mistake no but I don't know I mean we we get you carry a lot of guilt as a mother when your kids are small particularly so I really don't know and also you know I was able to pick my kids up from school two or three days a week all the time they were at primary school and that's uh you know in retrospect that was a huge privilege you mentioned something in the book which made me chuckle and it was around this idea of the andrew tates of the world where white males are kind of feeling marginalized now obviously all hilarity aside it is a silly problem but it's still a problem so as someone as enlightened as yourself and someone who's seen like in your book you do talk about these stories of where workplace wasn't very friendly to women back in the day how do you as a manager help these people help these white males who are feeling marginalized to get over themselves i think this is a huge problem and i think it's going to be the one of the most pressing issues in workplaces and i'm not sure if saying get over yourselves is would be the way i would frame it because i think a better way to frame it is to say, when we talk about inclusion, that means everybody.

6:23And I think there have been some groups in workplaces, I mean, white men particularly, but not just, who have not felt included by inclusion. They feel that everyone else is getting special treatment. That may not be true, but that's how they feel. And actually how we feel is very separate from what's actually going on. And it's very important. So I'm quite keen on this idea. It's a kind of new jargon word but of belonging which sort of moves on from inclusion somewhat and says everyone should be able to belong but I think we still have some way to go in terms of the kind of conversations we have in workplaces and how people feel about workplaces so you know I do not want DEI to go backwards but I do want us to sort of look forward and say actually some of the people have not been part of these conversations.

7:16You know, there's been a sort of air of if you're not with us, you're against us. And people have felt marginalized and silenced. And I think we're still in workplaces generally navigating how to bring everyone into the conversation. I do think things have moved in the last couple of years, but there's a lot more to go. But I think that if you look at these polls that show that young people, you know, young women tend to be very left-leaning and very liberal and young men not you know there's a massive gulf the ftp had a chart that went viral a couple of weeks ago showing the gulf between uh attitudes between young men and young women and there there is this kind of risk of polarization with young men becoming more and more you know reactionary some people are outright misogynist you know the the the Andrew Tates of this world have a huge influence.

8:12So the impact of online culture has not really been taken account in the workplace yet. And I really hope that's something that people are going to be thinking about in the next few years. Otherwise, we might end up with polarised workplaces. And that's just not something that's going to be helpful for anyone. Thanks to social media, there does seem to be almost like it's got to be a them and us. What's going on here? There is this massive intergenerational shift, I think, and that's, as you say, driven a lot by social media and TikTok particularly. I think it's part of the same thing as the polarization of men and women, for example.

8:50How do we not have generational polarization? And that's another part of the, I guess, the management piece. We can't fix society's problems in workplaces, but we can make workplaces places where everyone feels that they have a role and they belong. It might not be where your best friends are. You may not get on with your colleagues. But I suppose what I have always tried to do is suggest ways in which we can make things better. I mean, it might not be a fantastic solution, but any improvement is an improvement. So for those of us who are in Gen X, we can try to understand where Gen Z are coming from.

9:32And that might involve looking at TikTok, as I do quite a lot. And it might also involve, as I write in the book, not putting a full stop on the end of your texts and emails, which they find hostile. And from a Gen Z point of view, it might be acknowledging there are different ways to do things or maybe learning to listen to people's experiences. But that's not a Gen Z thing. That's a youth thing. It's always been the same in workplaces. I think what has shifted is that when you and I were probably first in a workplace, we expected not to be heard. You know, it was sort of do your job and just be grateful for it.

10:13And actually, it's quite good that I think it's great that Gen Z are not grateful for their jobs because there's a lot of soul searching that hasn't been done in workplaces that really should be. So actually, it's keeping us on our toes and saying, how can we improve? I'm not saying they're right all the time because there are some aspects of youth culture that I think are always going to be problematic for older people it's not a right now this minute thing I find the speed with which some younger people expect their careers to progress quite alarming because actually there's no substitute for experience and you need to get I've heard of lots of instances of people with trainees who are asking for better tasks or more meaningful work without having mastered the basics.

11:05So I think internet culture, you know, has given everyone this expectation that we can all have purposeful work that makes, that fulfills us. But actually, sometimes there is grunt work that still needs to be done. We have to lay the foundations for our careers. And I suppose what I hope doesn't get lost is the need to work hard and be good at our jobs. I don't think that will end, but I think there are some, you know, part of the intergenerational pressure is a pressure from below for rapid acceleration. And that's not the fault of people in Gen Z. It's what they consume their whole lives from the internet.

11:47You know, we're all about self-optimization, self-actualization the whole the podcast culture is so heavily weighting towards being the best version of ourselves that it's actually quite a lot of pressure on everybody i think there does seem to be a little bit resentment i i have to hold my hands up and feel a little bit of resentment myself towards the younger generations like i when i started out in management in the pub sector allied damek back in the day uh 70 hour work weeks were common i signed the opt-out of the working time director whenever that came in was it 98 99 yeah um so i can see the argument of like why should the younger younger generation have it easy they should have bagel stations they should be have massages and still expect the same results for half as much work i think i would question whether they're expecting to do half as much work especially when you've got you know when you've got younger people going into what are called greedy jobs, you know, the law, consulting, investment banking, you know, these are jobs that take up your whole life.

12:52You don't have work-life balance. So I think they're going in with their eyes open, but I think surely it benefits all of us. You know, that group of young Goldman Sachs trainees did a presentation a couple of years ago saying, look, we've had enough. We're doing these 70, 80 hour weeks. And they actually presented to senior staff about why that needed to stop. Now, I don't know what happened in that instance, but that's an example of how maybe everyone could benefit from working a little bit less. I think I'm sure everything's going to come to a kind of equilibrium in the middle. So when massive change happens, you know, we all go over here and then, or some people go over here, but actually I think it tends more towards the middle.

13:36So I hope that what Gen Z will bring is a recalibration of workplaces that benefits everyone. But I suppose the bottom line is if they don't like it, they'll leave. I think all the stats show that Gen Z are much less loyal than even young millennials. They will job hop. They don't care. They will find another job. So if they don't like what you're offering, they'll go. and actually that's quite refreshing because it means i mean it's annoying for managers but it means that the people who stay are brought into the corporate culture and you can bring them on board talk to them learn from them they can learn from you so i think there's a kind of post-pandemic leveling out going on at the moment i think it'll settle down so in your book you talk about spending a lot of time on tiktok i'm guessing not learning dance moves i'm guessing just looking to see what's going on what was there anything that surprised you about their attitudes to work as a work expert such as yourself yeah I think it's a place to vent right so there's a lot you know the whole the quiet quitting lazy girl jobs all of those trends started on TikTok and that's not a surprise I think when we were young when all of us were young we probably had shit jobs and shit managers.

14:50The difference now is that people can go on TikTok and vent about it. And why not? And some of them are really funny. I find it really funny. And I think what I like about TikTok is that it brings a kind of humor that I think has been lacking. I mean, much as I love LinkedIn, it can be quite a humorless place. TikTok is, you know, work is part of our lives. And I guess this is part of what I was trying to doing the book you know work is so so baked into our lives and yet sometimes it's over here at a distance you know we don't count it as our real life and tiktok is i think integrating real life into our sense of humor into who we are as people and even if we're gen x as i am too we can look at that and think yes that's absolutely that's really funny you know the the crappy manager who gives you 15 extra tasks at 529.

15:44And on TikTok, they'll just say, you know, pick up their Stanley Cup and leave. So it's kind of inspiring, actually. I like the attitude. You just picked on a really good point there. From a managerial point of view, or from an organizational point of view, I remember Google used to be called the database of intentions. And it was great for researching what people wanted next. Whereas it seems now you've just made me think that TikTok is almost like the database of reactions. and it's a great way to find out what you're doing, what generally we're doing wrong as managers. Was there anything, any sort of recurring themes that managers should be aware of?

16:21I think it is this respecting of boundaries, which is where quiet quitting came from. You know, you're not actually quitting, you're just working the hours that you're paid for and not more. And I think the idea that you should go the extra mile just because you should go the extra mile has been rendered redundant by the quiet quitting trend. I mean, that's passed somewhat, but when you go on TikTok and you see what people think about their managers, and these are generally in sort of service jobs or admin jobs, office jobs, sort of entry-level jobs. You know, you are just paid for the time you're paid for.

17:00You've talked about your time in the pub, but if you're the manager, that's a slightly different thing from being the person who's being asked to do the, you know, pulling the pints or the grunt work as it often is on TikTok. So, yeah, I just think be aware that younger people have very different boundaries and we may not agree with that. That may go against all of our hard-earned tendencies to want to please our bosses. But I think generationally boss-pleasing is possibly a thing of the past, particularly in those kind of jobs. How do managers appeal to the younger generation and get them to go the extra mile or is that just the wrong way of looking at it?

17:45I think you're right. People will go the extra mile once they've bought into the culture of the company. So if you're in a professional, you know, knowledge worker type of job, the kind of people that are going into those jobs do want to buy in. They do want to go the extra mile. but I think there is something to be said around boundary setting or as a thing that wasn't a thing when managers who were in their 40s and 50s were young and even if you don't do anything about it just to be aware of it and actually not to exploit your workers you know but to gain their trust to communicate well, to listen to them.

18:29I think all of these are skills for the ages and it's not particularly generational, but it will help enormously with your younger employees that you're aware of where that generation is coming from. But I think you're right. People going to the law or consulting or any of these things are going to be prepared for long hours culture. They have to be. And if they don't want it, they leave. You use this phrase in the book, which I love, called the accidental manager. I want to know, first of all, what is it? And secondly, how would we recognise an accidental manager? Okay, so it's not my phrase.

19:02It's what it's, I think the Chartered Management Institute came up with it. And it's great. So an accidental manager is someone who hasn't had any training to be a manager. And that's a lot of people, something like 70 or 80 % of managers haven't had any training. So, you know, a lot of jobs, you're good at your job and you get promoted. But why does that mean you're going to be a good manager? So the sign of an accidental manager is someone who hasn't had any training, has no idea about how to manage people as distinct from do the job properly. And I think that the managing of people part of it has often been forgotten, particularly I think the British are particularly bad at this, actually.

19:44And it also plays into why our productivity is so low, because we invest so little in management that we don't think about the impact that has on how well people work. So an accidental manager is probably not a great communicator. They're probably not listening to what their staff say. They're probably telling rather than listening and cooperating. So one attribute of a very inexperienced or insecure manager is micromanaging, which is a very common thing. So a micromanager doesn't trust the team. And that might not be because the team aren't trustworthy or good at their jobs. It's just that the manager hasn't learned how to let go.

20:30hasn't you know if you've been doing a job really well and then you get made a manager you still you've still got it in you to be wanting to control how that job is done and you just take that into your management role but that's such a counterproductive way I mean I've had some appalling micro managers in my time and it's such a counterproductive way to work it it destroys you because your mental health will be affected and it destroys the morale of the team because it feels like they're being, you know, surveilled all the time. Early in my career, in the late 90s, when management was actually not very much of a thing, you know, I had one manager who trusted me so little that when they were off sick, I had to travel to their house on the other side of London to visit them in their house and show them what I was doing.

21:24I mean I kind of laugh about it now but you know the whole the whole situation I mean you know I made a cup of tea and I took cake and stuff but um that was a very strange relationship I was you know quite young I was in my 20s and my manager was much older but to invite your subordinate around to your house when you're sick to check up on them is I think uh something that wouldn't happen now let's put it that way when we're young in our careers and we don't have a lot of experience what is it that how do we know what is right and what's wrong i mean the internet gives a little and this was pre in i mean not pre properly pre-internet but you know before the world of careers online and linkedin i had no i none of us had any idea what else was going on in the world So if that was what my boss said was normal, that was what was normal.

22:24Okay, so we're going to take a really quick break. We're back in a few seconds with more from the wonderful Isabel. Welcome back. Let's rejoin the interview. There's a story, horrific, and horrific story in your book about a manager and two pound coins, which we won't go into here, but that's another example. Oh, not a manager, actually, just a colleague. Just a colleague. Yeah. And I think you should buy the book just for that story because it is just pretty horrific. But also, like you say, there was nothing to compare it to. Honestly, we were just living in a kind of vacuum. And I think that's part of the goal that we don't really think about generationally.

23:00People in Gen X, you know, I'm in my 50s now, people in their 40s and 50s and 60s didn't grow up with the internet. so we have a a worldview that at a very profound level is very different from the our children and even people in their late 30s actually so we don't think about it that often but it's it's really profound and it and it and it is part of our dna really that we grew up before the online world and that makes your outlook very profoundly different absolutely yeah it does um just reminds me if we had another guest on who was talking about um who's kind of in the same bracket as we are and he was saying that the difference is that there was so much more um culpability when you were a kid in that if you were caught on the street doing something naughty someone knew your mom or your dad yeah but i wonder if we're going back to that you know post-pandemic with people working from home more people are at home a lot more you know we had that whole 20 or 30 years where a lot of women particularly were out at work all the time um and the community aspect of things got a bit lost and plus the rise of the internet and now men and women are at home a lot more people get a lot more involved in their communities so i i wondered if we might go back to some of that more old-fashioned kind of way of living.

24:27I think one of the key themes of what goes through, certainly in the second part of the book, but I'm pretty sure in the first part as well, is communication. And it's a bit trite to say communication is key, but you express it so perfectly. And one of the things I really like about what you said was that actually listening is probably more important, the most important part of communication. So what are managers getting wrong with the whole idea of listening? I think listening is really hard and I'm really not that good at it myself. I'm on this kind of mission, partly through writing the book and talking to interesting people about listening, partly through doing the podcast.

25:04I think we have underestimated so profoundly the difficulty of listening. It is a skill that has to be learnt and nobody's been teaching it. and in workplaces where we're on deadlines and it's you know you might be harried so the single i've heard this over and over again the single most important thing that managers can do is give time every week to each of their reports so you know talk to someone every week and this is particularly relevant in terms of mental health issues or you know people being unhappy in some respect and you can't fix it as a manager but it's a kind of early warning system and there's so much pressure on managers now you know they have to act as coaches therapists as well as occasionally disciplinarians and that's a lot of pressure but if you can spend time every week with each person who is your report it doesn't even have to be completely work focused I mean it might be cheesy in in your particular work context but just finding out how people are is so important because I suppose the flip side of listening is that as someone said to me everyone wants to be heard so everyone sometimes people want to just vent they want to just talk or maybe they don't want to talk and quite often you can't do anything about it but you can listen to what they're saying them and that is I hope I haven't underestimated how hard that is because when I was writing the book it was when I was at the beginning of trying to listen better and I'm still trying to listen better and I I've still really struggled so I think this is the biggest challenge in in workplaces is that the good communication and good listening is at the root of everything and yet nobody teaches is it very few people talk about it or they talk about it in a very trite way how how are we going to get better at it it takes a lot of time and that's something that's in very short supply there's the part that you say about people about setting aside time to actually listen to people but then there's also the part which i think a lot of people find difficult which is setting aside within that conversation setting aside the silence required to allow someone to expand on a particular point so you say you're halfway through or three-quarters way through your journey of becoming a great listener what is it that you've developed or learned on your journey so far that others people might be able to emulate so what i find particularly hard is that i'm always looking for the point or the conclusion or the the thing that i'm going to take from whatever the person's saying It's a sort of distillation and I think that is probably because I'm a journalist and all of our conversations are about what am I getting.

28:03They're extractive conversations. What am I getting from you? I might be interested in you, but I'm getting something. so my journey so far has been about letting go of that desire to extract meaning and when you extract meaning you then think what is the next thing that i'm going to do with this piece of information or what is the next thing i'm going to say so letting go of extraction and letting go of a pre a fixed idea of what i'm going to say next that's as far as i've got i can't say I'm brilliant at it. I went on a leadership course a couple of weeks ago, which was wonderful. And I met some amazing people, but it taught me more about my own shortcomings.

28:50That has been, I think if anyone listening has the chance to go on any sort of course and just be aware of how they're listening, that's a really great start. Or even just, you know, in conversations with friends, just being more aware of how you're listening and letting go of the desire to make meaning and to think of what you're going to say next. That's as far as I've got so far. But what you said about holding space, you know, that the Samaritans do, allowing silence, that's, I think, incredibly hard, particularly in a work context, because space can be uncomfortable, can't it? I haven't got to the point where you think, how do I bring silence into this at work?

29:37Because it just seems awkward often. But I think it's something we, if we're serious about listening and if we're serious about some of the things we talked about earlier, about including people whose views we might not agree with, we have to allow for silence. So how do we fix this? How do we tell the younger generation that silence is actually all right and it's okay to not know what to say next? I think that's really hard because you're right, social media is all about filling the void completely all the time, 24-7 if you want. I think in workplaces we might have a really good opportunity to expand on silence.

30:18Because often you're grappling with quite difficult things. It might be a process thing, it might be a psychological thing. but you know i think as managers there's a really good chance to just allow people to think you know there were some companies is it amazon or google one of the big tech companies used and possibly still does you know sends people meeting agendas in advance and then there's just a bit of silence at the start of the meeting while you all think about it and i think building silence into our work day might be a brilliant thing. I know it's an aspirational thing and as you say, hard for younger generations to do.

31:01But I suppose on the flip side of the always on social media thing, for a lot of younger people, wellness and taking care of themselves, self-care is very big. And part of that often is a meditation practice or a stillness practice or a gratitude practice. and if you can link that kind of impulse to the workplace and say actually we're just going to take a pause that might be that might be a way in because a lot of people do those things now and i i think they're great for for well-being i'm quite bad at meditation i have tried it a few times but it's incredibly popular especially with younger cohorts and that might be the way in you have a bit in your book which i've not seen before it says if you're a manager how do you make your manager listen to you um there's a hot if you listen to this you should definitely go and read the book because there's a great section on that but what are the highlights of that section i think it's about being prepared actually having something at your fingertips for those unexpected moments with your manager because it's quite hard to get face time i mean i'm talking in real life here when you're someone who's quite hot you know higher up in the hierarchy and i do think there's something to be said for those unexpected moments so there's the unexpected moment you know you're making a coffee your boss is in the kitchen to that kind of moment have have something there that you can say that you're ready for preferably something that your team has done uh you know you don't have to self-aggrandize if that's not what you're about or just ask you know ask a quite ask an ordinary question they're people too and the second part of getting bosses to listen is to be quite intentional about networking which sounds really um cynical but i i don't mean it in that way i mean how can you make the most of the limited time that you might have with a boss just think about how not i guess it's about preparation so you don't panic and I've suffered from this a lot in my life you know being quite panicky about talking to senior people and I think there are a lot of tricks you can learn around preparation that allow you to stop being panicky and allow you to say something that makes sense to them and even if it doesn't really make sense they might remember you although I was recording a podcast this week and this is not in the book but it's interesting we were talking about people pleasing and about the wrong way to talk to people higher up the food chain than you in terms of taking on tasks that you can't really do you haven't got the capacity for in order because you think there's going to be some sort of reward for you further down the line so it's a sort of brown nosing so that i guess that's the that's the wrong way to try to project yourself upwards I think I read in your book that there was a particular manager or number of managers who you admire and you learned a lot from so I mean can you maybe I don't know whether you can tell me who they are but I'd like to learn a bit about who taught you how to be a great manager yeah so I've had some really great managers um at the FT and elsewhere, I've been really lucky.

34:21But I think they've been people that have been slightly ahead of me in terms of their life stage often. Not always, but I had one particular manager called Debbie Hargreaves when I had very young children. And she had three children herself. She had a very senior job at the FT. And she was a very good journalist. but she was also showing, modeling that you could have three kids and be a great journalist and be a great manager and be a really interesting, funny and kind human being. So for me, I'm someone who likes to look up to a manager. I'm probably, because of my generation, I have a fairly sort of old-fashioned view of setting an example, I guess, while also being human and humane.

35:20So I think she was someone who really made a big impression on me. And it actually really helped to keep me in the workforce at a time when I was struggling to manage having kids and a big job on a national newspaper. It's hard, but she'd already done it and she modelled it brilliantly. You talked in your book about reverse mentoring. So was there a symbiotic relationship between you and was it Debbie you said? Oh, I very much doubt it. I really like reverse mentoring. I think it's one of these things that's quite new and it wouldn't ever have been a thing when I was young. but I love the idea of it and I can see how it's becoming much more popular I wish it had been a thing but I'm not sure I feel that I didn't have very much to offer when I was younger but that's really probably wrong and I think one of the good things about younger people now is that I think they do have quite a robust sense of self-worth often and I think that's good I mean reverse mentoring started as you know young people showing managers how to use social media often and it's and it's progressed way beyond that and the best sort of reverse mentoring is often younger people in workforces who come from diverse backgrounds reverse mentoring senior executives who are often although not exclusively white men and they're so it's a it's a It's a bringing of life perspective as well as what you can learn in terms of the workplace or social media.

36:59So it's a much richer kind of experience, or it should be. And I've talked to some people who've had really great experiences with reverse mentoring. I've got a mentee here at the FT who's in her late 20s and I learn a huge amount from her. The way you spoke then about younger Isabel and the, oh, I'm not sure I've got much. She learned much from me. Sounded very British Gen X modesty, which doesn't sound like it was. I mean, you just said that you learned a lot from your mentees. So what would you say to the younger Isabel who doesn't think they've got anything to offer to someone older? I would say give yourself a shake.

37:40You know what I mean? It's very difficult to throw back, isn't it, though, because the society and the workplace was so different. It's very hard to explain now the constraints that were on younger people in the 90s and presumably before then. I think it wasn't until probably, I think Julia Hobsbawm, the workplace commentator, has made these distinctions between different eras of the office. And when I and probably you started our careers, we were still fundamentally in the same era as the 80s. And things hadn't really moved on. And I don't think I can really project, I can say, oh my God, you know.

38:25And I suppose what I did have to say was, you know, when you're young, you can feel quite lost. And I think what would have been lovely would have been to have a much closer relationship with older colleagues and a more kind of mentoring or guiding relationship. It was a bit sink or swim. when I started you were expected to know how to do it and if you failed you were chastised whereas I like to think now there's a lot more guidance so what I would have liked when I was younger to it would have been to have a mentor and I mean one when I was in my very early 20s in my first jobs and I that just wasn't a thing people who are younger might feel they don't have anything to to contribute but I think they do they have so much I mean is there a message you can give to someone out there who might be feeling the same self-confidence you you might be might have felt back then going i don't really know i've got much to offer but can you empower them a little bit because you're bringing a fresh perspective exactly you know there are this idea of the corporate structures particularly in a corporate environment there is an element of this is how we've always done it or this is the easiest way to do it so a fresh eye whatever your age actually is fascinating.