254. AI-xiety, dreamers vs doers, and toxic COVID culture. PLUS! Can you really fake it till you make it?

0:00Coming up this week in work. The COVID inquiry report is out and it is brutal. It's claimed Downing Street was toxic and chaotic and that culture slowed the pandemic response. The findings suggest that leadership behaviours and toxic workplace dynamics inside number 10 had direct measurable impact on how fast or slowly the country responded to a global crisis. So what does this mean for business owners and leaders who find themselves in a crisis? Also this week, we're talking about the new anxiety around AI. Sarah Braga reports on just how many employees feel overwhelmed, not by robots replacing them, but the unrealistic expectations to be a bit more productive with them.

0:43So is AI a disaster for employees or just the growing pains of a potentially useful tool? Plus, why do so many people fantasise about changing careers, but stay stuck year after year? Well, a new study has uncovered the mental patterns that separate dreamers from doers and it might just reframe your New Year's resolutions. Plus, in truth or lie, can you fake it until you make it? We'll test the evidence on whether confident performance buys you real career progress or if it's just a short-term illusion. And we are going to end with a brilliant question from a younger listener who very much enjoyed our Ask Old People segment over the summer.

1:22She wants to know all about our biggest risks and regrets. This is Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a chartered occupational psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. And together we help you build amazing workplace cultures. We'll get stuck right into today's episode after a quick word from our sponsors. Does your experience with AI sound a little like this? You prompt for 20 minutes, the output is polished, is confident, and is completely flipping useless.

1:59Well, that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. But you know what does know something about your business? HubSpot. HubSpot's AI. It works with your actual customer data. Every interaction, every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

2:27Welcome back. Welcome back. And it's December. Happy December. Anyone who knows Leanne. All the days are coming. All the days are coming. Anyone who knows Leanne knows that the first December is the time we go and get the tree. Yes. And that's just because one, Leanne is a child at heart and she loves Christmas. but number two we usually head back to the UK around about the 16th, 17th and driving back for Christmas takes us three days because we drive from Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina which is about 2 ,000 kilometres to Manchester so yeah so we bring it in early anyway I don't think it's particularly early I've seen a lot of people that have had their Christmas decorations up for a couple of weeks what?

3:04no like tree and all yeah right okay you need to give me those names and addresses I need to go around there and have a chat with them also just realise I hope nobody knows exactly where we live because we've just told burglars where we're not going to be we're not going to be at home over Christmas so moving swiftly on it's time for the Anne's favourite time of the week it's time for the news round up it is, I'll cue that jingle usually in December we put some Christmas bells behind the jingle yes we do yes we can do that absolutely if I've still got the MP3 from last year which I'm sure I do anyway Leigh, what have you seen this year?

3:36well we'll be talking about that soon won't we yes we will very soon but in terms of this week Yes, that's the word I'm looking for. COVID Inquiry, Al. Have you seen it? COVID? Now, what was COVID again? I've forgotten. Something like flu type thing. It was just a flu, wasn't it? It was a flu with, what do they call it? A flu with a marketing budget. That's what some people called it. Goodness. But anyway, Bojo has been in a spin. Just in case people don't know who Bojo is. Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of the UK, who was in charge during the pandemic. Honestly, it's brutal. And this is from the BBC as well, which there is also some chat around the impartiality of the BBC right now.

4:14But that aside, the journalist Paul said in the San Francis have not minced their words. Really? The headline was, Downing Street under Boris Johnson was a toxic and chaotic workplace and that culture made the pandemic response worse. I feel a little sorry because this is unprecedented. Yeah. So I'm not saying that anyone who creates a toxic workplace culture is, you know, they've got an excuse or there's any kind of reason. But at the same time, can you imagine, like, it's bad enough managing our little family of us two and a dog during that lockdown, let alone managing the entire country, 56 million people.

4:52But anyway, maybe I'm being a bit soft. I'm not really a big Bojo fan, if the truth be told. He's a bit of a knob. I can't say that. I can say it. He's a bit of a knob. Yes. Well, let's see, shall we? So this was reported by everybody, but I think the particular article that I enjoyed was from the BBC. So according to Baroness Heather Hallett, who led the inquiry into all four UK governments, so England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, basically concluded they were all too slow to understand what was coming. And her summary of the whole thing was basically too little, too late. And it does get very specific.

5:30She says that Boris Johnson didn't respond with the urgency the situation demanded. His communication style didn't really give people a sense of caution and often accidentally undermined official health messages at the time. Do you remember when at some point on the telly he said, yeah, I went and shook hands with everybody in the hospital? Oh, no. That's akin to bleach gate, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, goodness. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably worse, isn't it? I don't know. Anyway. But what's interesting about this is that regardless of, you say, the unprecedented nature of the pandemic or how well prepared we were to respond, a lot of the report has come back to the workplace culture inside number 10.

6:11So the inquiry says there was destabilising behaviour from Dominic Cummings. Not exactly a shock for anyone who followed the news during the pandemic. The report also goes further than it ever has before to say that Dominic Cummings created a culture of fear, used misogynistic language and overstepped massively trying to make key decisions himself. And the important thing apparently is that Boris Johnson didn't push back. According to the inquiry, he allowed this dynamic to exist. Matt Honkencock also gets a pretty tough write up. No shock there. so Hartlett says he developed a reputation yes he did for over promising and under delivering he developed a different reputation for me during the pandemic was he the one a bit handsy a bit handsy handsy Matt and then was Dominic Cummings the one who went to get his eye tested up in Newcastle was that the same guy or was that a different guy oh because he wanted to go to his weekend house yes so but yeah just had to go there for his eye test yeah yeah short sighted of him really wasn't it Yeah, Matt Hancock though, apart from getting very up close and intimate with his assistant, the report also found that civil servants were regularly having to double check things because they weren't sure that they could rely on him, which isn't really ideal in the middle of a national health emergency.

7:33The big question raised in the report though was timing. The report states that the UK was late to even consider lockdown as an option. By the time it happened, stricter measures had become unavoidable. And this is a painful bit. It says lockdown could have been shorter or may be avoided altogether if earlier steps had been taken. It also criticises the lack of an exit strategy for lockdown and highlights decisions like the eat out to help out, which encouraged people back into restaurants, even though ministers knew more waves were coming. so according to the inquiry it falsely reassured people that the pandemic was basically over um it isn't all about all about number 10 though um across the devolved governments the picture was much the same in scotland decisions were taken in too small a circle in wales the early response is described as inadequate and in northern ireland the whole process is called chaotic our thoughts I said before at the top, this is unprecedented.

8:35And granted, Churchill dealt with almost unprecedented because, you know, the war and stuff. It was the Second World War there, wasn't it? So to be fair, there was already one to learn from, I guess. True, true, true. Look, I'm not standing, I'm not sticking up for them. At the same time, it must have been a pretty tough place to work at that time. So I'm going to stop because I'm going to get us cancelled. No, you're not. I think, yes, this seems a little bit sort of like tabloidy where they've gone, oh, look, the government messed it all up. And it's like, yes, but what did they do that was right?

9:09I want to say a bit more of a balanced article saying, OK, these were things we did wrong, but also what was done right. But I suppose that doesn't make good news to them. To be fair, the full inquiry report may well have had some of that in. I was obviously drawn to the bits around workplace culture and leadership. But even anecdotally, Al, do you remember during the pandemic, we were in lithuania yes and we went into lockdown on like the second third of february yeah i remember talking to my sister and she was like what why i thought you had like six cases and i was like yeah we do so villainous the capital city that we were living in shut down about a week before the entire country did and we were locked down for six weeks and then basically had free openness until we left which was the beginning of june whereas the uk went into lockdown mid-March.

9:58I can't remember. So a good six, eight weeks later. Right. And they were still in lockdown until the beginning of July. Right. Okay. So that kind of experience. And also in Vilnius, literally they were putting like police at the end of the street. Strict. Yeah. Really, really strict. Really strict. And that was fun trying to work out how to get home deliveries when you're a different country, you don't speak the language and you don't know the address because it's an Airbnb. And being outraged when they substitute your tonic for bitter lemon. Oh, come on. That does not a substitute make. No, no.

10:27That was the biggest mistake of the entire COVID period, wasn't it? Yeah. Do you know what? I think it's really interesting that leadership and culture is brought into this. And I think as a business owner, it's worth remembering that in this time of crisis, when things are under pressure, it's really going to show the cracks in culture. I know that sounds like such a cliche, but if people are scared to speak up, if there are certain voices that are dominant and they're not the right voices then it is gonna really impact how well you're gonna be able to respond to this this crisis or it could be a turnaround or transformation any significant change within your business secondly people need that consistency I think where people struggled with the leaders in charge as you said Al you had Dominic Cummings going up to Scotland even though you weren't meant to leave you know the town which you lived in you had boris johnson saying everyone stay home help the nhs and he's having office parties every other day and then you got dominic what's his name matt hancock who's just starting an affair with his so when you're seeing all this as an employee it's kind of like well why am i having to hold myself to this high standard when this isn't being modeled by the most senior leadership not only in the room but in the country that's fair so i think i totally agree with that that they might have mismanaged the situation but individually but then to be honest i mean we've got a new government in the uk relatively new like what 18 months old they don't seem much better so i think they're all a bunch of anyway yeah so anyway there you go i'll leave a link uh to that article in the show notes what have you seen this week just want to pick up on the um on the woman who wrote this i think it It is Lady Harriet Hallett.

12:13Who led the Baroness Heather Hallett, who led the inquiry. Love it. Shout out to you. I'm a very big fan of alliterative peers. Okay, so I've been reading something by a woman called Sarah Bragel. Apparently she's pretty cool. She works for the BBC News at some point. BBC Features, she does. Nice. Yeah, very nice. But she also writes for Fast Company, among other things, which is where I read this. she's talking about anxiety around AI and she's called it anxiety. AI-xiety. How are we spelling that? Anxiety, but instead of the N, it's an I. So AI-xiety. AI-xiety. Now, it all credits to Sarah. In print, it works well.

12:55In an audio format. AI-xiety. Yeah, on format, it doesn't really work that well. But anyway, just imagine you're reading that bit. It's quite cool. So AI is supposed to make work easier, is what Sarah says. but an Upwork report suggests that it's doing the exact opposite. So this Upwork report found that 96 % of C-suite leaders, they expressed high expectations that AI will enhance productivity. Of course they did. 77 % of employees say using AI has added to their workload and 47 % of employees using AI report they do not know how to achieve the expected productivity gains. So I think the problem is people thought that AI was coming for our jobs, But actually what it's doing is it's making our jobs more difficult because leaders, any sort of stakeholders thinking, well, if you're using AI, surely you should be able to get more done because AI is doing more of your job.

13:45But the two problems with that are, one, is that the expectation has increased. And two, nobody really knows. The average person in the street doesn't really know how to use AI properly. They just type a sentence and hope that an entire document is going to come out. That's what I do. What do you think, Lee? What are your thoughts on this? I totally see the yes that AI is causing anxiety. It's a new source of anxiety in our lives. Because we didn't have enough, Al. We didn't have enough. We need to get some more in there. So I think Sarah's absolutely right. I think, do you know what? I think it's always my frustration is that these things come in to, and people see it as a different way, right?

14:27It's been such an issue in our workplace for so long that workloads are just too high. You and I do employee insights with any and every client we've ever done. High workload always comes up as a challenge. So AI could arguably be a really great solution to reduce workload. But what business leaders are doing is going, oh, well, that means I can give you more. So we can maintain this high level of workload, which has been unsustainable for decades. so I think that's the key issue is that people are talking about it as a productivity tool rather than a way of reducing workload yes and then I also I think there's no real as you say greed consents in terms of how AI is used what that looks like arguably these senior leaders how close are they in terms of actually using something like chat gbt or claw to actually do the elements of your day job it's not that easy I mean you can say I'll rewrite this in this tone but it still requires you to kind of go through it and edit it and sometimes i use it and think i'd actually would have been much quicker doing it myself from the beginning um so yeah i don't know i think i think the anxiety will come from the fact that workload isn't going to get any lower and maybe ai was seen as a potential reliever of that um and there's no real consent in terms of how how it's used what good looks like all that lack of clarity i guess well you hit the nail on head this is exactly what sarah was saying she said that the answer is to acknowledge it and talk about it more uh so saying that 63 percent of people were asked in a separate separate survey said communication about technology is essential sounds like corby speak to me and then they got a really good quote they're saying if you explain it we'll accept it if you don't we'll resist which makes total sense so i think the problem is that if you don't say if you say here's ai here's a little bit of it's a pile of ai for you go and use that and make your job better then everyone's like well i can't go back and say i don't know how to use it because then they might take it away from me or if you just go oh well you know i know you're using ai but to make your job easier but you know we're recalibrating what we're expecting from you and the person's going i am using ai but it's taking me three times as long the problem is this silence the problem is that people need to just be honest about it i think leaders going we know you're using ai even if you're not even if we've said you shouldn't.

16:47We know you're using it. So why don't we just all work together? Do you know what? It's the same organisational problems that we just haven't solved and now we're adding another layer of complexity. Agreed. Agreed. Lee? And another thing. You should be president. You should be prime minister. Lee, what else have you seen, my love? Why do we dream of changing careers, Al, but we rarely do? I don't dream of changing careers. I enjoy doing this. I did once dream of changing my career. Yes, you did. Or shifting, pivoting, pivot rather than change yeah you're gonna be a burlesque dancer yes i was um anyway yeah i thought you know what this is some new research i came across this week and i thought it was timely out because it's december the finish line is in sight and this is the time of year usually between that lost week between christmas and new year where we start to reflect we start to realize how exhausted we are and how overwhelmed we are and we start telling ourselves right in january i'm going to change my job i'm finally going to pursue that qualification i'm going to start that business um and it's it's disappeared by february yeah yeah so this research basically looked at this gap so it looked at what happens between wanting to change and actually making a change so the research followed 306 workers who'd all registered for subsidized career counseling okay so this wasn't people vaguely daydreaming about something new they'd already taken that first step um so the researchers tracked them across four months to see who actually made a move now the focus bear with me there are some words here that are irritatingly psychologized um but you'll understand so the focus was on something called temporal focus which is basically where your mind naturally spends its time are you someone who thinks a lot about the past are you someone who's firmly rooted in the present or do you spend more of your mental life in the future almost a psychology christmas carol if you will i love it i'm now just really trying to think of a clever pun for christmas carols and psychology i'll come back to you if i think of one i'll interrupt this important the important news story with my thank you so the researchers then used a statistical technique to basically group people by mindset and found three distinct patterns.

19:11So first, there was a large group with what's called a balanced temporal focus. Any guesses on what that is, Al? They spend roughly equal amounts of time in the past, the present and the future. Exactly. So they reflect on what has shaped them, they've understood their current reality, and they're connecting those insights to where they want to go next and this group was by far the most likely to take meaningful action so applying for roles following through on their plans and actually making a career change by the second wave of data so i think it was over four months wasn't it that they tracked them so probably within a month or so then there was a group the researchers called anytime but now right so these individuals spent a lot of time thinking about past experiences and imagining imagining future possibilities but paid very little attention to the here and now.

20:02They expressed the strongest longing for a different career, but they were the least active. So lower job search activity, higher feelings of inaction, and the lowest likelihood to actually move jobs. Then we had the final group, which were called the carpe diem individuals. Seize the day. Seize the day, very present focused, less concentrated with old regrets or big future plans. And they actually reported the highest well-being and confidence at the start, but were also less likely to uproot themselves. So they didn't seem especially distressed and may simply have valued the comfort of their current situation more than the disruption of pursuing something new.

20:45So, you know, that cliche of kind of like you have to live in the moment to really be happy. Yeah, the past has gone. The future's not here. Live in the present because that's why it's a call of present because there's a gift or some shit. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So the Carpe Diem people are doing this and it is showing that they're experiencing high levels of well-being, but they're also less likely to change because they don't want to rock their present boat. Yes. So yes, the pattern was really clear and I thought really interesting in that it all depended on where we spend most of our thinking time.

21:19There was another finding which was perhaps more obvious and that was the more people that actively search for a job, the more likely they were to move. That's fair. I don't think we needed a big study to be able to kind of, yeah, understand that. But yeah, interestingly, none of the profiles predicted big changes in mental health over four months. So where the Carpe Diem lot enjoyed feelings of well-being in the present, in terms of more significant mental health impacts, there was no, there was no change. But I thought it was really interesting. What is really important to know if you're thinking about this change in January is this is trainable.

22:00So just because you might naturally prefer to be in any time but now or a carpe diem, you can train yourself to have more temporal balance. And it is things that sound cheesy and don't sound particularly scientific, but really are. So, you know, that journaling exercise at the end of every day, you say, what am I grateful for about yesterday? what am i grateful about today what am i looking forward to tomorrow exercise like that will help temporal focus a balance yeah temporal focus yeah exactly exactly so yeah there you go i'll leave a link to the um original study in the show notes i'm not gonna say it's a fun read because it's very scientific um but it is very very interesting um so yeah i'll leave a link in the show lovely thank you so much okay so after a very quick break we're gonna come back with our truth or lie segment this is where we take something which everyone believes to be true and then i say to leanne is it actually true and we're generally trying to make it around work or psychology or science or something like that don't we yeah so we've got a great one coming up after the break we'll see in a second okay welcome back to the truth lies and work podcast and the time for the truth or lie see what we did there it's all on brand it's a format point so this is as we say our weekly myth-busting segment where we take a big claim, usually from psychology, and say, is it true or is it a lie?

23:24Now, we've done birth order, as in are older people better looking, earn more money, and nicer people? And Leanne said, yes, because I am. No, that was untrue. We've done sleep. Can you really sleep for four hours a night? We've done lie detection. This week, we're going to dangerous territory for us entrepreneurs. And anyone else who's felt slightly out of the depth of the work, can you fake it until you make it? If you've never heard this phrase, I'm sure you have, we've never have, then usually when in entrepreneurial circles or startup or founder circles, people will often just go fake it till you make it.

23:56It's fine. That's the way you do it. I've done it a hundred percent. I've done it. I think on every single venture I've started, I've faked it till I've made it. But is it true? Can you actually fake it until you make it? I think this does all start with stories, doesn't it? Whether it be stories of people, you know, or your own experiences or the ones out there in pop culture. And there are so many. Anna Delvey. Have you watched Inventing Anna on Netflix? I started watching it. I didn't get on with it. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. So if you haven't, basically, she pretended to be a German heiress in New York's elite circles, presented herself perfectly.

24:35The clothes, the tone, confidence, the pitch deck. She convinced investors to give her millions of dollars towards an arts foundation. She lived in hotel penthouses, borrowed private jets. An insane amount of things happened. But eventually the illusion did collapse and she was convicted of fraud and is now in prison or recently released. I'm not sure. Then you've got Frank Abbegan... Abbegan... Abbeganale. Abbeganale. Are we talking about Cashmuth again? Yeah. I think it's Frank... How does he say? Abbeganale. Abbeganale. I think the G is silent. Oh. Abbeganale. Abbeganale, I think. So yes. But yeah, Leonardo DiCaprio his character you can catch me if you can he impersonated a pilot a doctor a lawyer all before he turned 21 he forged documents ran elaborate schemes uh finally caught in the end um and he ended up consulting for the fbi on fraud detection so a man literally faked everything became a world expert in how to do it um and then of course within the business world elizabeth holmes founder of theranos uh she modeled herself on steve jobs convinced global leaders and investors that a single drop of blood could power hundreds of medical tests the company itself hit billions in valuation before the science collapsed and she was prosecuted i've got one i've got one i learned about the other day is that there's a quite a famous note-taking app that has just gone to like the moon like one billion valuation or something and it started off with the two founders would they join the video call as the app and they would just be typing out they'd be typing out the summaries that's how it started they were living on someone's couch so they faked it till they made it and now it's starting to bite them in the ass a little people are going that's not cool that's supposed to be like privileged information anyway data protection all that anyway so they're not in prison they're millionaires well there you go so it does raise the question can you fake it until you make it uh what happens when things go wrong are they just the stories we hear about and why there's netflix series made with them um so in terms of where does the idea idea come from in from a psychology sense it's rooted in social construct theory so it's the idea that identity is partially built through behavior so if you act confident people would treat you as confident and that changes how you feel and then sometimes how you actually perform so the idea isn't ridiculous but whether it actually works depends on what fake it means so in terms of a case four let's say it's true identity shifting can improve performance so this was a study from stockholm university they interviewed and tracked people who deliberately behaved more confidently at work so speaking up taking on projects mirroring senior colleagues these participants weren't lying about their expertise but they were adopting confident behaviour to counter any feelings of imposter phenomenon.

27:26The key finding was that acting as if they were a confident helped to reduce anxiety over time, but only when it was paired with real skill development. So behaviour helped, but they had to be anchored in some kind of professional growth. So you couldn't just blag it? You couldn't just blag it. No. The second thing is confidence signaling has also been found to influence early opportunities. So what this basically means, this was from a qualitative study looking at newcomers trying to gain credibility in professional settings. So they did interviews, followed them over several months, workplace observations, that type of thing.

28:05They found that people who presented themselves confidently, so again, things like clear speech, decisive communication, very professional posture, they were trusted faster and even given stretch opportunities sooner. So really that's because humans rely very heavily on social cues to judge competence when they don't yet have the data. So yes, signaling that confidence can create momentum in someone's early career. Then there's the fact that some people genuinely can just play multiple identities. So they're very good at self-monitoring and people who are good at self-monitoring naturally adapt their behavior to different social settings so they can shift into a more professional version of themselves without any kind of negative psychosocial or psychological effects.

28:57So these participants basically in the study completed personality inventories and behavioral tasks and the researchers found that people who were very good at self-monitoring had less internal conflict, experienced less stress, fewer negative emotions um so when they performed a confident version um version of themselves people saw it as authentic not just kind of playing up professionalism makes sense that all makes sense so far yeah then we have the entrepreneurs enter the chat uh-oh we're in for a we're in for a kicking i suspect in this bit you're not in for a kicking at all there is some new research into entrepreneurship that shows that some faking it is actually very normal So like you said, everyone in their circle said, oh, you've got to fake it until you make it.

29:39Behind every success is a lie. Someone once told me that. Oh, nice. Nice. So this paper examined how founders exaggerated in the early stages of their business, so polishing their pitch, talking up future potential, maybe even creatively presenting progress to attract support. And what they found is there's three things that determine whether this is helpful or destructive. Right. So first is controllable versus uncontrollable claims. so promising things you can deliver like we'll release a beta version the next six weeks is fixable that's fine what's more problematic is if you're promising things that you can't control like guaranteeing a regulatory approval or something like that okay i've got yeah okay then we have sole action versus contingent action so basically claims you can deliver alone are much safer, whereas claims that require hundreds of people or external systems to behave perfectly usually unravel.

30:40So it needs to kind of be in our control that we can deliver directly. Makes sense. That's good. The alternatives, not so much. And then an extension of that limited stakeholder interaction. So basically the more people you have to maintain the illusion for, the harder it becomes to sustain. and I think that's probably where we saw Theranos kind of unravel wasn't it when that started to get such high traction was even Barack Obama was like talking about Elizabeth Holmes and how awesome her work was and stuff yeah something like that yeah crazy um so yeah so basically the key takeaway from this is that some early stage exaggeration is very common and isn't a problem but once the gap between promise and reality grows too wide then founders start slipping into misconduct and this is where the faking it starts to unravel is the stress of it so that that performing as if you are confident and competent can create real psychological strain because it sounds harmless but it is heavy work if there's a difference between how we're presenting ourselves and how we're feeling internally so a study on this which is relevant looked at imposter syndrome 212 employees um basically measured anxiety role conflict and coping strategies and when people tried to act competent when they didn't had higher anxiety higher stress lower job satisfaction and worse long-term coping yeah um so pretending you're coping is worse than just saying i'm still trying to figure this all out makes sense the next issue is that pretending to be an expert burns our cognitive energy, our brain energy.

32:19So one experiment asked people to act like experts on topics they didn't understand. I asked that quite a lot as well. And they kept the performance. And as they kept the performance going, researchers basically measured working memory, reaction times, and decision-making accuracy, and all of them dropped off because the brain hates holding up a lie when we're doing real work. And then also, finally, people notice. people notice the performance gaps over time. So a workplace study measured how co-workers rated people who exaggerated their competence and the pattern was likely a short-term likability boost, a sharp decline in trust and the biggest backlash when the gap between words and ability got too big to hide.

33:03And then of course entrepreneurs, just to finish the story, have very specific risks and their own special risk patterns. So one major study which is really interesting, published in May this year, basically says you should get worried when these three things happen. So if you're an investor or a stakeholder, start to get concerned. The founder makes claims about things completely outside their control. The success of the claim depends on other people behaving in very specific ways. And the founder has made those big claims to multiple stakeholders. So exactly what we said before, if you're an entrepreneur doing this, if you're a stakeholder hearing this then this is a massive red flag and quite likely will escalate and often founders are then faced with fraud charges.

33:49So there you go verdict truth or lie can you fake it until you make it? Well the truth is you can fake confidence but you can't fake competence. Oh I like that. Yeah. So if faking it means that you stand a bit taller, you speak like you back yourself up, you take on challenges, even when you feel nervous, you behave like somebody who learns fast, then yeah, the research supports that. Yeah, people genuinely grow into that identity and you can fake it till you make it. But if fake it means you pretend you're an expert, you say you've done things that you haven't, or you're just bluffing your way through the work, then it's a lie and a dangerous one personally professionally and sometimes even legally i love that that's really really interesting there's a great podcast i'm listening to at the moment um it's it's not part of the whole podcast network perhaps i'm gonna get contractly obligated to uh and it's called sea of lies uh by the canadian broadcasting society or something cbs and it is really good and it's um there's a lot of that in there and it's cool nice i just realized i'm on episode five four or five and i was about to give it away i think so yeah yeah yeah yeah interesting well there you go that's another podcast recommendation for you um but yeah that's a takeaway fake the confidence if you need to but do that whilst you're building the confidence because that's the bit that actually lasts and we could also put it like this when we look at every study that we looked into all lines up to the same point.

35:20Confidence can open a door. Competence is what lets you stay in the room. I love that. I love that. Thank you so much. I'm really, really enjoying these. I'm going to give you a little applause for that. Well done. Yeah, that was fantastic. Fantastic. Okay, so we're on to the world famous weekly workplace surgery. I put your questions to Leanne. You've got more talking to do, Leanne, I'm afraid. Yes, you better hand drink that water because you've got another 15 minutes of talking. So this is basically where we take your questions and I put them to Leanne and she answers them perfectly. Do we have anyone, any guests this week?

35:52We do. We have Harry back this week. We continue understandably to get a fair few questions about occupational health because as an occupational psychologist there's an assumption that these two worlds collide and cross over more than they do. So yes, Harry is back to answer a question that actually does move a bit more into our world but he had such an interesting take on it I wanted to include it. Lovely. So we now know what to do with those big bundle of questions that we didn't know how to answer before. Sack of letters. Yes, sack of letters. So this question number one, should I be hiring people who think like me or challenge me?

36:30I've noticed a difference in leadership styles on my team. My boss prefers to hire and promote people who closely match how she thinks and works. She says that she values people who can execute her vision exactly as imagined. She sounds fun at parties. I'm the opposite. I like it when my team brings new ideas, challenges, and push things in directions I wouldn't have considered. I still value alignment and clarity, but I don't hire for sameness. Is one approach better than the other? Yes. Okay, question number two. Do you want to answer this one, Al? Right. If you ask me this, I would say the person who wants someone who closely imagines what they think can work, I think they're a fool.