276. Is your career giving you the ick? PLUS! A.I. literacy for managers, finding hope and the verdict on NLP

5:12Leanne Hughes:It's time for the news roundup. I'll cue the jingle.

5:15Stefanie Sword-Williams:I know, I'll just shut up and cue that jingle. Okay, my love, what have you seen this week? i've got a new word uh yeah you know by now she leanne comes out with a word i try and guess what it is so what's the word career come down career come down oh well well if you if you could back in the day if you went to like a nightclub or something and perhaps you you availed yourself of certain substances then you would at three o 'clock in the morning go for a come down session would you not or that would chill out session i don't know i didn't party like that no i didn't

5:46Leanne Hughes:I didn't.

5:47Stefanie Sword-Williams:I'm trying to be cool. So come down, I always feel like it's a bit like, you've had a huge high, now it's a come down. So career come down might be like, oh, you've had a brilliant thing happen at work. And then a few days later, you just can't keep up with it. It's a bit like, oh, it's a bit of a come down.

5:59Leanne Hughes:Yes, but less about a day and more about career. So career come down. So basically it's defined as the slump that can hit after you've achieved the milestones you've wanted to work towards. So the promotion, the pay rise recognition. only to find once you get there, it doesn't feel as satisfying as you expected.

6:21Stefanie Sword-Williams:I mean, let's be honest. Who do we have on recent? Richard Clarke, if you're listening, Richard. Richard and I, he's not been published yet, but when he is, he's really talking about happiness. And one of the key things we talked about there was that if you're not careful, then you go, I'll be happy when, I'll be happy when. And that's when this come down is probably a very, very dangerous thing. Whereas if you sort of just wake up and go to bed and in between do something you really enjoy, then you're probably not going to have a come down. So give us the science behind it. Give us more.

6:47Leanne Hughes:Yeah, well, I mean, I'll give you more in terms of where this comes from because I didn't coin this word. It was coined by Stephanie Sword-Williams. Excellent name. She is the founder of a career platform and community called Fuck Being Humble.

7:01Stefanie Sword-Williams:Nice.

7:01Leanne Hughes:Yeah, which focuses on helping people overcome the fear of self-promotion at work. And she's also just released a book called Career Come Down.

7:09Stefanie Sword-Williams:Right on round.

7:10Leanne Hughes:So this was an article I actually saw in a magazine. I think it was like Grazia or...

7:17Stefanie Sword-Williams:Really?

7:17Leanne Hughes:Yeah, like one of those magazines. It's on my Apple News subscriptions, just anything that's about work will pop up from all over. So I think it was Grazia. Anyway, she describes a pattern that she started to notice amongst her friends and eventually in her community, which was that smart, ambitious women who had done everything in kind of bunny ears right so the promotions the pay rises awards the milestones you're meant to want to want um weren't feeling fulfilled they were feeling flat irritated and actually questioning whether they even wanted to be on the path that they're on and she calls that feeling a career come down so it is the slump that can hit after that initial thrill of climbing the ladder and she compared it to when relationships um you get the ick in relationships i've never understood what that really means what does it mean when you get the ick um so for example if you walked into the bathroom and the girl you were dating brushed her teeth with your toothbrush oh that's the ick oh i see you're like oh i'm that's icked me out so much i'm not sure i want to spend any more time all right you don't do that do you no oh no no i do not do you know fun fact leanne won't even

8:28Stefanie Sword-Williams:let me use her mouthwash she said you can't use my mouthwash because you'll have to buy your own because i just can't deal with you potentially drinking it from the bottle i didn't say that

8:36Leanne Hughes:I said you're more than welcome to use my mouthwash, but can you promise me you will pour it into the cap and take it from the cap and not swig it from the bottle because that gives me ick. I said if you'll promise me that, then I'll trust you to do it.

8:48Stefanie Sword-Williams:And I have done it a couple of times, but it does taste a little bit like petrol.

8:52Leanne Hughes:Tastes awful, doesn't it? Yeah, really bad. I'd rather have bad breath.

8:56Stefanie Sword-Williams:Anyway, sorry, you were up to. Where were you up to?

8:58Leanne Hughes:Anyway, so yes. So she also found from conversations that she had in the research that she did for her book that there are three possible responses to a career. Come down, either you can stick with it, stay where you are, but reshape the role to better suit your current needs. That's called job crafting in psychology, where we look at the things that bring us joy, use our strengths, and at times stretch us a bit more if that's what we need. Twist, you reinvent yourself, change direction, start again. I think this is where we see a lot of people leave corporate careers and go self-employed.

9:27Stefanie Sword-Williams:Yes, yes. That's what I was found just called blowing it up or what I like to call etch-a-sketch, where you just shake it and start all over again. Yeah. My bankruptcy was an extra sketch of my life.

9:37Leanne Hughes:And a very successful one.

9:39Stefanie Sword-Williams:Well, yes, it wasn't a successful bankruptcy. Post-bankruptcy. Post-bankruptcy. Yeah, yeah, sorry, carry on. So you had stick, which is where you stay where you are, but you reshape, you do job crafting. You had twist, where you basically reinvent yourself, change direction, go become a goose farmer.

9:51Leanne Hughes:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly, or drive over lemons.

9:54Stefanie Sword-Williams:Yeah, driving over lemons, great book, if you want to read that. It's about moving to Spain.

9:58Leanne Hughes:Yeah, or you can tap out. So basically, quiet, quit, de-centre, work from your identity altogether and just consider how it defines success for you and I think this is a really important thing that we can get into the trap of psychologically speaking on the kind of corporate hamster wheel of just the work hamster wheel is we can often as you say lose touch with that what's actually important and this is where I'll always say things like the self-coaching is really good way of kind of grounding yourself for a minute and evaluating as you go and then you can make those little adjustments to the journey.

10:37Leanne Hughes:So things like the vitals, the values, interest, temperaments, model is really good. The wheel of life is simple and really good and gives you an idea of where things might be out of balance or where you're getting your joy. And I think it's important to remember that that doesn't have to all come from work. It can come from community, from family, from volunteer work, from hobbies. There's lots of different sources of that. So I think that's a really important thing to hopefully stop you from experiencing this career come down at a point where it might be hard to shake things up.

11:07Stefanie Sword-Williams:Can I ask you, right? So this woman, I just want to say her name, Stephanie Sword Williams. I love it, Stephanie Sword Williams. Is she saying that you can either stick, twist or tap out? Is she saying that tap out is a bad thing or any of those are a bad thing? Or is it just like those are your realistic options?

11:21Leanne Hughes:I don't think these are just the choices. I don't think she's said, I haven't read her book. I should say that. I've only read this article. So I haven't read her book. she might go into more detail in terms of right or wrong but how i kind of interpreted it was it's there isn't a right answer it's just how you how you respond you either kind of try and improve your job to to feel more fulfilling you completely change what it is you do for work or you start to find fulfillment in other areas of your life and work is just part of of what has to happen

11:48Stefanie Sword-Williams:excellent love it love it love it what was the name of her book career come down career come down by stephanie sword williams go out and is it out now do we know i believe so yeah i'll leave

11:57Leanne Hughes:Leave a link to her LinkedIn in the show notes along with a link to that article. There you go.

12:02Stefanie Sword-Williams:And get onto LinkedIn and just say you heard. Heard it here first. Heard it here first. Well, actually, you didn't probably on her, but anyway. Right, Lee, something caught my eye. I know you didn't ask, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Something caught my eye this week. Google Cloud has launched something called the Generative AI Leader Certification. Again, we've discovered that I can't really say that word. How do you say it? Certification?

12:23Leanne Hughes:Certification.

12:23Stefanie Sword-Williams:Not certification.

12:25Leanne Hughes:Certification.

12:26Stefanie Sword-Williams:Certification. Now, what's interesting is there's a lot of these on Google Cloud Platform, but they're mainly for developers or data scientists or engineers. This is for someone who's a leader. So it's pretty much any job role. It could be a founder, leader, manager, someone who wants to be a manager. Now, what's cool is there's no prerequisites. You don't have to know even what generative AI is, and I'll talk about it in a second. It's a 90-minute exam, and it costs$99. That's right. I know. And it's not really about sort of credentials or going, oh, I've done this exam. it's more that or i found is more interesting it's more like a signal that leaders need this do you remember back in the day when you used to like your manager would go i'm not really an excel person so can you or a google sheets person can you go and do that for me or we'll get it to do that and now if a manager said oh i don't really know how to use a spreadsheet you'd be like what's wrong with you how have you possibly become a manager i think that's where we're headed with this so just quickly let's just talk about generative ai just in case you don't know what that actually is.

13:22Stefanie Sword-Williams:Generative AI is something that creates something. So like if you do chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, anything like that, mid-journey to create an image, that is generating something. It's not thinking because there's other types of AI, like for example, there's predictive AI, which is fraud detection. And so what, well, they use it in fraud detection and that's what predictive AI was used for. And it's basically spotting patterns and making predictions. Generative AI is different because it produces new content. So essentially it doesn't understand meaning it just predicts patterns based on like massive volumes of data and then it'll generate an output that looks human.

13:57Stefanie Sword-Williams:Okay, right. So we're on the same level there, whatever I'm trying to say. So$99, 90 minute multiple choice exam. The exam isn't about coding. It's not about nerdery. It's basically how you can improve or how you can use generators of AI to improve your leadership model.

14:12Leanne Hughes:And do you go through like a course first? Like will it teach you things?

14:15Stefanie Sword-Williams:Well, there is a course by uh code course i think it's called uh let me have a look and see what the what the course is called uh yeah it's on uh i haven't got the link right now but it'll be in the show notes there is something which is on youtube right now which you can go through um and oh for free for free and yes yeah uh code course camp or something it's all camp coast called code course quite a big like sort of education platform but they've got this thing on how to how to help you gets through it. And I've done some of these for Google AdWords back in the day and they let you have another go.

14:47Stefanie Sword-Williams:You can also have your notes up when you're doing it. Obviously not cheating, but you have your notes up when you're doing it. So it's something which, for$99, and you can go into work and go, go on, something just occurred to you.

14:55Leanne Hughes:Well, what happens if you use generative AI to cheat your generative AI exam? Is that actually allowed because you're using generative AI in a way that's giving you the information that you need?

15:05Stefanie Sword-Williams:Hmm. That's an interesting idea. Have you seen those things for interviews where you can run it on your phone and it'll listen to what they... Yeah, and then it'll tell you what to say.

15:17Leanne Hughes:Yeah.

15:17Stefanie Sword-Williams:I can't recommend that. No, I can't imagine you would recommend that.

15:22Leanne Hughes:But yeah, that's some really interesting things.

15:24Stefanie Sword-Williams:Anyway, the point of this is not... Although that's an interesting conversation, I think the point is it's starting to become mainstream. It's starting to become, okay, you are... Let's say you're a mid-level manager for a paper company based in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And you...

15:37Leanne Hughes:Specific example there.

15:39Stefanie Sword-Williams:It's an Easter egg. people will get it. And so you're like, okay, I want to be a better leader. It's not a question of going on courses anymore and going, this is how you deal with conflict. It's like, okay, you need to know how to use generative AI. Thoughtsly.

15:51Leanne Hughes:Yeah, I think that also ties in really nicely with Andrew Palmer, who's coming up on Thursday's episode this week. We talked all about exactly this, like how managers are using AI, how they're using it effectively, how they're completely messing it up and how it is just now a fundamental skill that managers have to have. So it makes all the sense. I think if you're not already fairly comfortable with generative AI, you need to get on with it. I'm also kind of interested to do the course myself and the exam. Just more curiosity, like how, like I think I'm all right with generative AI, but I'm sure there's lots I could learn.

16:26Stefanie Sword-Williams:Yeah, well, I don't know. We do use it quite a lot. I don't know. I don't think there's too much you can learn. I think you know a lot. But it would be interesting. I think it's maybe about a 90-minute or two-hour course to help you get through it. Free co-camp. Actually, you know what? Check the LinkedIn. Check the LinkedIn. Check the notes. It'll be on there. Anyway, Lee, so you're going to go and do the course. But before you do that, what else have you seen this week?

16:53Leanne Hughes:What makes work feel meaningful, Al?

16:55Stefanie Sword-Williams:Well, this is very meta, isn't it? What makes work feel meaningful? For me, something where I can create some things. Maybe this is why I do like Jennifer D. If I feel like at the end of the day, something exists in the world that didn't before, that for me is the biggest. You've seen me at the weekend. So the last two weekends, I've spent most of Saturday and Sunday.

17:13Leanne Hughes:Whilst I've been watching the Olympics. You've been watching the Olympics.

17:15Stefanie Sword-Williams:And I've been building my top secret project for managing podcasts. We won't tell you about that. But if you're interested, DM me. And I've been building that in Laravel and Livewire. And I really, really, really enjoy it. And it feels like I look up and it's like, how the hell is it 5 p.m.?

17:30Leanne Hughes:Yeah.

17:30Stefanie Sword-Williams:Anyway, sorry, that was a very long answer to a very short question.

17:33Leanne Hughes:No, but I'm really pleased for you. That's lovely. Really nice.

17:35Stefanie Sword-Williams:I hope the people understand the I'm genuinely is. It does sound a little bit sarcastic. Oh, no, no, I genuinely am.

17:40Leanne Hughes:That's lovely. Yeah, no, so this was some research that came out and it was asking, is happiness actually what keeps people going? Is it happiness that makes work meaningful? And this was research from the University of Missouri. And the answer is basically no, it's not happiness. so this study was led by Megan Edwards and Laura King from the Department of Psychological Sciences and the research suggests that hope not happiness is the emotion most strongly linked to a sense of meaning in life

18:12Stefanie Sword-Williams:I love that I also enjoying that those two surnames Megan Edwards and Laura King put them together you get King Edward potato you can enjoy a King Edward potato

18:20Leanne Hughes:yeah good for roasties

18:21Stefanie Sword-Williams:good for roasties anyway talking of roasting things so what were the findings what did it basically say

18:27Leanne Hughes:So basically across six separate studies, which involve more than 2 ,300 participants and they were from diverse backgrounds, the researchers examined a wide range of positive emotions. they looked at amusement contentment excitement happiness and consistently found that only hope only hope reliably predicted a stronger sense of life meaning and that is really significant because meaning is what as i mentioned before underpins so many important outcomes for us in terms of our life laura king actually put it experiencing life as meaningful predicts happiness high quality relationships higher income and even improved physical health so the question is what do they mean by hope because it can i'm not sure i'd be able to define hope very well so the research deliberately moved away from the traditional idea of hope as goal setting or motivation and instead framed hope as an emotional experience so the sense that the future holds possibility and that situations can change and they do point to some practical implications so first noticing progress matters so hope is strengthened when people can see forward movement even the small signs that things are getting better or going in a positive direction is really really impactful second future orientated activity builds hope so long-term projects skill building mentoring investing time and something and all of these reinforce a hopeful mindset and finally and perhaps most importantly hope begins with the belief that situations are not fixed even in difficult moments the perception that change is possible appears central to sustaining meaning in life so let me just double check and check in here with you i've got this

20:21Stefanie Sword-Williams:so in order to have hope in your life and at work you first of all need to notice when you're making progress so actually notice oh i'm better at this than i was last week yep second you need to have some kind of something to look forward to so future oriented i think future oriented something activity activity um and the third thing you're gonna do is that it is if you've got even those two things but you believe you can't get out of the situation you're not gonna be hopeful but if you can believe that actually you could change situation like becoming a goose farmer then that those three things together mean that you almost certainly have hope in your life and work is that

20:56Leanne Hughes:right exactly exactly it's the it's a belief that situations aren't fixed like they can change like this whole like this to shall pass kind of mentality is is really really important and these are all things that i think people will agree listening are pretty practical in terms of noticing progress in terms of engaging these future for you exactly and controllable and that belief that situations aren't fixed is really comes again from things like gratitude practice is really going to help with that because it's noticing that things have changed it's noticing that things have got better and that reinforced it what was the study that you brought up in the pod out about rewiring the brain because negative negative thinking actually changed neural pathways

21:41Stefanie Sword-Williams:i don't remember it but i know what you're talking about essentially it's like negative self-talk one of the things that we got taught when we were doing sales is you say hi how are you know at work hey how's it going and the british thing to reply is not bad which gives you that sort of like subconsciously saying well you know it's not too bad it is bad though and they were like no just changing how's it going really good thanks and it kind of changes the way that you think and so

22:07Leanne Hughes:yeah is that what you were talking about yeah absolutely and it's this it it needs to be intentional doesn't it can be practiced it's not that this only applies to people who are naturally sunny by disposition we can we can work on this and i think for business leaders listening going oh well this is nice but what's it got to do with me a lot friend because in terms of meaningful work which is that we have so much research on meaningful work like tens of thousands of studies it is the highest the biggest predictor of work engagement which is basically the opposite of burnout so if we're engaged in our work we feel energy we feel this sense of purpose when that flow state you were describing before where you look up and it's like six o 'clock it's really really good for us to be engaged in our work and to experience meaningful work so particularly in an environment where burnout is still raging on and we're seeing lots of cynicism and and people just feeling a bit a bit lost this could be really important so in terms of your your work environment having a clear direction is going to be really important in terms of that noticing progress because if you know where we're going you're going to notice those milestones you hit along the way same in terms of that communication around long-term projects skill building mentoring you're going to give people hope if they have a clear development pathway a clear career pathway the genz especially we know really really love that and if times are hard being honest about the point at which things will change people can put up with high workloads for for a period of time but not if they can't see an end in sight they need to know that this situation isn't fixed it's a blip whilst this project finishes or while this team is getting um it's recruiting more people into it that type of thing so it's it's actually really important this stuff for business leaders much more than anything in terms of of your other well-being type activities that might be your team away days all your I think we're past fruit in the break room now but still you know all the mindfulness apps this is probably gonna have more impact on your people in terms of their work engagement and their performance than something like that individual level well-being intervention would so I think this is a really really cool study I will leave a link to it in the show notes because it is actually available not open access but in terms of the Missouri website it was published that before it went to publishing.

24:34Leanne Hughes:So you can read it. Read it all.

24:36Stefanie Sword-Williams:Thank you very much, Megan Edwards, Laura King. Okay, so we're going to take a short break. And after the break, we've got our truth or lie segment. We're going to be tweaking a, this is where we basically, I'll say to Leanne, I've heard this. Is it true or is it a lie? And she will tell us the answer. So we'll see you in just a second. Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

24:58Leanne Hughes:Join venture capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures and hard lessons of the creme de la creme. So you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in business and in life.

25:12Stefanie Sword-Williams:Maybe start with episode 124 where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube define leadership.

25:18Leanne Hughes:Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

25:26Stefanie Sword-Williams:Welcome back. So this is Truth or Lie. This is the part of the show where we take a big idea from the world of work or psychology and ask a simple question. Is it true or is it a load of goose shite? This week's topic is one you've certainly come across or almost certainly come across if you've ever been in a leadership course or a sales training program or a coaching qualification or even just spent some time on LinkedIn. You can hear this in communication training, confidence workshops. You can hear people talk about rapport, mirroring, reframing, powerful language patterns. sometimes it sounds scientific scientific sometimes it sounds a bit mystical i think you might have already guessed what we're talking about it's got a huge claim behind it but is nlp neuro linguistic programming is that does it work is that true or is that lie

26:12Leanne Hughes:lee you have some personal experience with nlp yeah back when i was maybe about uh i don't know

26:18Stefanie Sword-Williams:mid-20s or something i went to nlp weekend yeah and we learned about nlp and at the time i was like oh i understand this is great i think that's that's one of the weird things isn't it like myers-briggs i've admitted before before i met you i thought myers-briggs was cool and then i really met you and you explained why i was wrong um nlp i thought it was cool but the fact is it actually helped me to like it gave me a mental an idea for a mental model and just and just by doing the course i felt like i got better rapport i was in sales so i felt like i could build better rapport with people so truth it helped me at the time yeah yeah i believed it

26:55Leanne Hughes:remember that thought okay remember that thought because it'll be important it'll be important in a sec foreshadow nlp neurolinguistic programming in terms of how it was created it was created in the 70s by richard bandler and john grinder in the u.s their backgrounds were in math computer with science they weren't from a psychology background but did get very intrigued by psychology and psychotherapy especially john grinder was actually a linguistics professor who specialized in how language shapes meaning and thought and their goal wasn't to run experiments their goal wasn't to build out a traditional psychology theory or framework their goal was to model excellence.

27:42Leanne Hughes:They studied recordings of three very famous therapists, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson. These were therapists known for getting unusually strong results with clients. So Bandler and Grinder believed that if these people were so effective in the way they spoke, the questions they asked, the behaviors they used must follow hidden patterns. and if those patterns could be identified, then anybody could learn them.

28:12Stefanie Sword-Williams:Makes sense.

28:12Leanne Hughes:Makes sense. So the idea was that modelling successful behaviour and turning it into teachable techniques would be beneficial for people in all sorts of industries and that is basically the foundation of NLP.

28:24Stefanie Sword-Williams:Okay, so I've gone through a lot of transcripts of people who do things really well. I'm going to be a scientist about it, a nerd, and try and find common things they do and build that up into a framework. Exactly, exactly.

28:37Leanne Hughes:And because it did promise these really practical tools and approaches for things like communication, influence, confidence, NLP, unsurprisingly, very quickly moved out of therapy and into the workplace. It became hugely popular, as you were saying, in sales training, leadership development, coaching. I did a seminar on it in my MSc. So, yes, it's all over the world of work. And it's the claim, the big claim that's problematic, I think, that NLP techniques can improve communication, influence behavior, boost performance, and even help people change how they think and feel. So, of course, we need to look at the research and see if this is the case.

29:16Stefanie Sword-Williams:Of course we do.

29:17Leanne Hughes:Some of the research on NLP focuses on whether its techniques can produce these measurable changes. So in things like confidence, communication, or performance. A number of studies have explored this. They've looked at NL-based training programs in education and in professional settings. And some of these studies do report improvements in confidence, motivation and communication skills after people have completed an NLP course. So participants will report feeling more self-aware, more confident speaking to others and more capable of managing stress. Like you were saying before with yours, you felt more confident.

29:53Leanne Hughes:one reason for this is that nlp does borrow heavily from established psychological ideas even though it didn't originate through traditional psychology research there are techniques in there that have so things like goal setting visualization which we talked about not too long ago reframing negative thoughts that we've just talked about and building rapport they all overlap with well-established areas of psychology like cognitive behavioral approaches and sports psychology.

30:23Stefanie Sword-Williams:So this sounds like it is a true, it's true that NLP works.

30:28Leanne Hughes:It's true that goal setting, visualization, reframing negative thoughts and building rapport can help.

30:35Stefanie Sword-Williams:I sense a twist.

30:38Leanne Hughes:There's a nuance. There's always a nuance. But yes, it's true when people learn structured ways to set goals, they practice conversations or think differently about challenges. Yes, they feel more capable afterwards. Some studies also reported improvements in areas like self-esteem, communication skills, interpersonal effectiveness after these types of workshops. And in workplace context, participants often say they feel more confident handling difficult conversations, giving presentations, that type of thing. So there is some evidence that NLP style training can make people feel more confident and motivated.

31:14Leanne Hughes:But then it comes a bit more complicated when we look at actually the body of research that we have. Because when researchers started testing NLP more rigorously, because remember, the research came retrospectively because NLP was already in the world. It wasn't based on psychology theory or it was kind of retrospectively testing this. They started to ask a much stricter question, which psychologists and scientists do. Not do people enjoy NLP training? Not do people feel more confident afterwards? but does NLP actually work better than existing psychological approaches? This is where it kind of falls down.

31:53Leanne Hughes:So across multiple reviews and research papers, it's fairly consistent. There is very little high quality scientific evidence that the core claims of NLP are reliable or effective. I think one of the biggest kind of, I guess, indicators of this, of the tens of thousands of studies out there on NLP when people have done systematic reviews or meta-analysis, the number of studies they've been able to include after putting down the strict scientific criteria we need to, it's dropped to like tens of studies. Right. Maybe 20, maybe 30. So of all these thousands, we've not got the kind of the rigor to really look at it.

32:35Leanne Hughes:So yeah, a large review examining NLP encouraging organizational settings basically concluded the evidence base is weak, it's inconsistent, that many studies supporting NLP have small sample sizes, they have really weak research designs, they lack proper control groups. And most importantly, some of the central claims of NLP have been directly tested and failed to hold up.

32:56Stefanie Sword-Williams:Well, that's not good news.

32:57Leanne Hughes:No. So one famous NLP idea is that people have preferred sensory communication styles and that matching somebody's language or communication style improves persuasion and rapport. but multiple studies tested this directly and found no reliable evidence at all about matching communication styles much like the learning styles we might have a preference for it but does it actually improve our level of learning no it's actually improve the level of persuasion and report no okay you might like the person a bit more but see now my my problem with this is

33:32Stefanie Sword-Williams:that we learn this mirroring thing okay so we learn to mirror people and i believe in my sample survey of three people that it works so i believe that i do build better rapport when i mirror someone not too much it's not too weird but when i mirror them when perhaps they're talking and we use a um you know i might use a particular way of phrasing something which mirrors the way that they talk i don't know i just feel that at this stage okay i understand that it's that that the researcher said no but it does still feel to me that some of these techniques are good yeah i

34:11Leanne Hughes:mean mirroring can can help to build record can help to build trust but also it's mostly unconscious because if somebody mirrors really badly you're gonna notice that and be like dude why are you copying me yeah why have you started to exactly why have you started to put your hands out like that why do you move when i move it's just a bit weird yeah yeah whereas what is called the chameleon effect in psychology is a real thing but it's mostly unconscious right and when because of that it just feels that again that familiarity effect that we talk about so often that we like it right so it's it's it's it's not that mirroring can't help build rapport and build that sense of connection but you have to be really good at it if you're doing it intentionally otherwise you're just going to look a bit creepy you know and basically i'm thinking i've i've got no sort

35:02Stefanie Sword-Williams:of scientific way to judge whether my rapport got better after that i just felt it did which is again one of those things because i did nlp i'm probably thinking oh i'm better at rapport now because i've done the nlp not necessarily because i am i think as well it's that as the research

35:15Leanne Hughes:kind of shows there are techniques within nlp that are already well established psychological effects and techniques that do improve communication and influence or mindset and positivity, put them all together in the package of NLP, it's almost like they've stumbled across some bits in psychology that already existed, wrapped up in something really saleable. And basically what they brought to the party doesn't do anything.

35:46Stefanie Sword-Williams:Fair. Okay. Fair, fair, fair.

35:49Leanne Hughes:Yeah. So in terms of a verdict, I'm not sure you'd be that surprised. at this point. But yeah, the sweeping claims about NLPR are a lie. There is no scientific evidence that it is reliable. It's not an evidence-based method. It can't change behavior or improve performance very reliably. So yeah, it's a lie. But it is nuanced because as I've said, many of those techniques do overlap with real psychological principles. So things like goal setting and and all the things that we talked about so so yeah it's not that the idea of nlp is complete nonsense but it's more the things it accidentally got right psychologists did first

36:33Stefanie Sword-Williams:right so it's more like someone's taken some existing ideas band packaged it up and said this is nlp and given a fancy fancy sounding name because even like the name of it but padded it with stuff that is complete nonsense right because even the name of it like neurolinguistic programming sounds science-y to those people who aren't scientists. Yeah. But actual fact. So the verdict is the NLP, as it stands on its own...

36:59Leanne Hughes:Is not scientifically validated in any way.

37:02Stefanie Sword-Williams:Talking of asking questions, it is now time for the world famous weekly workplace surgery where I put your questions to Leanne. Specifically this week, we don't put your questions. I'm doing things a little bit differently. So we've got questions here. So as Leanne talked about at the top of the show, there's a new platform called the Business Psycho. Is it really called the Business Psycho? Yeah. I love it. I absolutely love it. It's a new platform called The Business Psycho. It's launching in April. So we've got four questions all sent in from this platform. So just to give you a bit of a background, so The Business Psycho's blog, forum, is focused on business, occupational psychology.

37:33Stefanie Sword-Williams:It's especially for students and early career professionals who want to understand how work actually plays out inside real organisations. There you go.

37:40Leanne Hughes:Yeah, this is a really interesting project, actually. It's coming from Mary Lou, who regular listeners with an excellent memory for names might remember was one of the first msc dissertation research oh yes we featured she looked at voluntary work so yeah aspiring occupational psychologist finished her master's now and i

37:59Stefanie Sword-Williams:think it sounds like a really really great platform great yes so here we go question number one this is again just to give you an idea this is what's going to be on the platform could you share how you secured your first role or internship in business psychology i'm wondering that you can basically expand that to I'm guessing to the majority of things how do you how do you go your first role or internship so there's going to be lessons here even if you don't want to be a business psychologist but specifically Leanne I didn't I didn't I graduated in in 2008 which was

38:32Leanne Hughes:a really bad time to find a job particularly one in people and culture as a start of the global financial crisis and some of the highest unemployment rates the UK has seen in in a while so it wasn't a great time I when I was doing my master's I did do an internship with a HR consultancy and that was just advertised through the university so I just applied for that and went I then ended up basically looking at jobs that were similar I couldn't get a business psychology and occupational psychology there was a few out there I did apply for one and didn't get it with a very famous uh northwest-based consultancy but there you go so what i did was i looked for roles that were adjacent and things that would continue to build my knowledge and experience in the areas of organizational psychology which as we know are things like organizational change in well-being training and development recruitment or psychological assessment employee engagement leadership that type of thing so i worked for rbs doing competency-based interviewing which helped me in terms of my psychological assessment in work i continued with the hr consultancy for a little while but wasn't getting much out of it so i completely pivoted and went into welfare to work which was hugely beneficial for my experience as a psychologist and as a manager and i think it's also as well there's a there's an element of advising people about it and then also having experience of doing it so if I talk to people about management and leadership I know how freaking hard it is because I've done it at a time where you know I've done it in from startup I've done it in environments that needed turnaround and transformation I've done it in environments where there's lots of infighting and incivility so it's it's good to have that experience and connect what you've learned with the actual real world practice so I found in that role I ended up going into management roles which meant I built loads of experience in psychological assessment and work in terms of recruitment I was developing training I was delivering training so it's ticking off lots of boxes there it was a high pressured high targeted role with very unpredictable customers multiple barriers to to work so the well-being emotional labor toll on staff was massive so well-being was always part of the conversation employee engagement was something I was asked to look at when I got promoted to a national level and there were other teams that were experiencing high levels of turnover.

41:01Leanne Hughes:So there's so many areas of my, probably all five, I was able to apply in this very real world example. And I think this is really important for anybody who is graduating thinking they need to go and work for the cabinet office or in public sector or for a small agency. Yes, you can do that. But there are also plenty of roles you can do that are going to build your experience in all five areas of psychology welfare to work being a really good one if we are in a bit of an economic slump which i think we kind of are at the minute and imagine there's more coming that is a really really good one or as they're going into roles where you are going to be potentially on a management track is going to be very beneficial as well so i didn't take the traditional route i went into an adjacent industry that i was able to apply my experience and knowledge of business psychology and then i went freelance and did my chartership by finding my own projects so there's lots of different ways to do it you don't have to get that that typical job you know okay that's quite

42:07Stefanie Sword-Williams:i think that's such good advice there and also um i would say just to just reiterate go and get some experience actually being a manager or working you know working with people because people like me are going to know straight away people like leanne are going to know straight away if you come up and start talking to us if you've never actually done the things you're saying that we should be doing so very very important okay question number two from your experience leanne working with founders and leadership teams what are the most common people problems businesses think they have versus what's actually going on beneath the surface so have i understood this so we're saying what are the most common people people problems that businesses think they've got but actually there's something under the surface that is affecting is that what we're

42:48Leanne Hughes:saying yeah i think you can help to answer this one as well based on the clients we've worked with i would sum it up with love with love to our beautiful clients um past present and future i think the main probably the most common problem is that founders think the issue is with the team where more than often the issue is with them or the workplace design

43:10Stefanie Sword-Williams:Yep.

43:11Leanne Hughes:Is that fair?

43:13Stefanie Sword-Williams:Yep, 100%.

43:14Leanne Hughes:The team is the issue, whereas really there's things that they're doing as a leader or in terms of how they've designed their workplace, in terms of how they're kind of governing their culture, that it's having a negative, albeit unintentional, impact on the team. And I think that's probably the most common thing I see. I think the other common people problem I see is turnover. turnover is usually the trigger that people start talking to to us isn't it or an inability to grow because something's just keeping everything held back and i think in terms of what's actually going on beneath the surface is they don't know and as a psychologist walking into the business i'm not going to know either i need to do that discovery phase i need to ask those questions have those interviews do those surveys get to know the business and figure out what what's going on But typically, it's high workloads without the resources to do it.

44:08Leanne Hughes:And by resource, I mean extra team resources, getting recruited in more streamlined processes, better technology, which is making high workloads feel even more difficult. fault sometimes you'll see things around a lack of a disconnection with what the organization is trying to do in terms of their mission and the values what what they do and how they want to do it and either not being communicated in a way that resonates with people so they kind of feel a bit detached or they're not invested or the business has grown so far away from that original mission and values that nobody connects to anymore including the business owner so that needs to be we worked exactly because of everything we said about meaningful work earlier in the episode and i think the final thing i'd say is that sometimes it can be particularly for founders almost a an element of wanting to protect staff and so not communicating basic things around business performance that will make things make more sense they're not giving the context the fear of worrying them and i think we see this typically in organizations that have grown quickly from that kind of 12 to 20 mark they're still gatekeeping a lot of a lot of information and that causes distrust and a perceived lack of um organizational justice so how decisions made and how things are communicated can seem unfair and that's not the intention it's just kind of how that lack of transparency is impacting things what about you are because you work with our

45:37Stefanie Sword-Williams:clients as well yeah i think that's that's that's you've basically summed it up perfectly in terms of the actual problems. I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that people go, well, my business is different. And as Steve Kemmish said from last week, from last Thursday, he said, basically, look, change the logo, change the haircuts, same business problems. And he said he worked on British Airways. He's worked on lots of different clients. And it's the same marketing issues. There's the same issues in an organization, like you said. And what's really interesting is that most of the surgery questions that we come up with, the people saying but i've got this specific situation and i don't quite know what to do they all end up with you going well talk to them ask them and of course what we're saying there is that leanne um obviously has come up with the rx7 which is a um which is a way to build an amazing workplace culture which starts off with a survey and we ask people we ask them we ask them and i think that's basically a lot of the problems can be solved by just basically going in there and doing a survey a proper survey not one to make yourself look good but a proper survey to uncover what the problems are at least.

46:38Leanne Hughes:Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the thing for any kind of aspiring psychologist or consultant, management consultant, change consultant. Your first job is to come with all the questions. You're not coming with answers initially. You're coming with all the questions because it's going to take you time to figure out exactly what's going on because then it means you can design a solution that's actually going to have impact. So for anyone also business owner listening who's being sold off the shelf solutions to problems, I wouldn't trust it necessarily because if they're not taking the time to understand the problem, the solution probably isn't going to work.

47:11Stefanie Sword-Williams:Yeah, I think that applies to everything. Okay, brilliant. So question number three, what mistakes do leaders most commonly make when trying to fix culture? And fix has got inverted commas around it. And how can psychologists help them avoid these pitfalls? So what mistakes do leaders make when they're trying to fix culture?

47:26Leanne Hughes:That they're trying to fix culture, that they think they can fix culture. Culture is really complicated and really nuanced. We don't have an agreed definition on culture as psychologists we don't have an agreed methodology for assessing it or influencing it or moderating it or changing it in terms of psychological science and research culture is really complex and really really nuanced in a way that I think for most business leaders is just too hard unless you're working hand in hand with a very experienced psychologist in culture change then then that's going to be very very difficult in terms of how psychology can help them avoid these pitfalls i think culture is almost like the most we think about culture being quite sophisticated and quite nuanced and interconnected how do we get the foundations in place first and those foundations are psychosocial risk factors so the elements of an organization that can cause psychological harm and stress to an individual if they're not managed in the best way and that's going to be things like how change is managed within the business how it's communicated the input people have how clear people are in their roles and responsibilities how they can have autonomy they can decide elements of their job in terms of how they prefer to do it that we have good relationships all of these things are are elements of the workplace that are very practical and very operational that are going to improve the employee experience it's going to reduce stress because of that it's going to have a better it's going to have more of an impact on achieving task cohesion team cohesion and in terms of inverted commas culture what we're

49:14Stefanie Sword-Williams:actually doing is creating civility right because we've got an organizational environment which isn't causing harm and where people feel able to do their job in the most effective way and have some meaning to it as well from that point you can start talking about exactly what type of culture

49:31Leanne Hughes:we need to achieve where the organization needs to go to next because it might be you start with a very very kind of salesy culture very results driven culture it might be then you need to pivot to a more innovative culture depending on what's happening in the economy it's almost like culture can be a a lens that you put on the organization in terms of what it needs to achieve and how that fits with the strategy of the organization but if you don't have this foundation in place it's not going to work anyway and i think leaders typically the mistake they make is they think this this foundation is culture and it's not the foundation is a psychosocial

50:04Stefanie Sword-Williams:risk factors well there you go that's a perfect explanation i think i love it got nothing else to add. Lee, question number four and the final one. What trends in leadership and workplace culture do you think aspiring business psychologists should be paying attention to right now? What trends should they be paying attention to?

50:22Leanne Hughes:AI, definitely. I think it goes without saying at this point, doesn't it? As we've heard today in terms of your training course that managers are looking to go on in terms of how generative AI is currently being used. We talked about how the financial services industry is looking to hire majority psychologists and behavioral scientists into the AI departments to help with the ethical side of AI and how it's managed in a human environment. So I think anything about AI is going to be really important to keep up to date to and particularly the ethical side. I think that's where behavioral scientists are going to be brought in to have a big impact.

51:04Leanne Hughes:Loneliness I think is something that has been around for a little while as something to have on our radars because it is it's been called an epidemic this was before COVID it's not because of COVID and loneliness is really bad for us it is linked to conditions like heart disease and dementia impacts our health and from a work perspective it reduces productivity employee engagement leads to turnover loneliness is something to work into connie hadley we had on the show didn't we talked about loneliness so i definitely go and check out that episode if you're looking to kind of dive into that area and build up your knowledge we've got loads of ai just scroll through we talk about ai probably every other week i think other things leadership as we heard from us at shm that did the survey sure was it them yeah yeah that it's leadership or ineffective leadership management is the number one workplace concern for 2026 and it was up there for 2025 as well.

52:00Leanne Hughes:So I think things around leadership we haven't fixed yet. And of course, the ongoing debate argument between hybrid remote on site, which is interesting, but it's a power struggle. It's not about the context of the work environment. Definitely follow people like Nick Bloom from Stanford, Ina and Elena that we had on the podcast talking about how to design hybrid that is most effective yeah i'd keep an eye on that as well

52:25Stefanie Sword-Williams:fabulous thank you so much leanne if you are interested not you leanne if listener if you're interested in business psychology or you're thinking about a charge ship or maybe you just want like decent conversations about leadership and culture keep an eye out for the business psycho and it launches in april love that name by the way so much so there's so much fun you can

52:42Leanne Hughes:have with the memes from american psycho on that definitely there is already a linkedin and instagram pages for Business Cycle where you can get updates in terms of when the website will launch. I will leave links to those in the show notes.

52:54Stefanie Sword-Williams:So also, don't forget to join us on Thursday. We're going to be joined by Andrew Palmer, one of the very few people who've come twice on the podcast. Yeah. Very, very pleased. He is the host of Boss Class Podcast. That's the Economist Podcast. He's also vying with us for number one in our category on Apple charts. I think we go number one, then he goes number one, and we go number one. But he's got a brand new series coming out, which is diving into the real impact of AI in the workplace. So, right, Andrew's a proper journalist, like, you know, time-served journalist. We're not journalists. We're not journalists.

53:27Stefanie Sword-Williams:So you're going to have a really, really great insight into what AI really, what the impact is really having. He's also been testing AI on his own work. He's been speaking to the people who are building AI. They're asking the questions that most leaders are too polite to ask. What actually changes? What falls short? and what managers are getting badly wrong right now. You do not want to miss that.

53:48Leanne Hughes:You absolutely don't. You'd be a fool.

53:50Stefanie Sword-Williams:You'd be a goddamn fool.

53:51Leanne Hughes:Fool. Until then, subscribe, follow along on LinkedIn. The password remains to get on the show, Cherry Vibes. Still only one person used it, so only Danny would win. So yeah, apart from that, we'll see you on Thursday, yeah? See you soon. Bye. Bye-bye.

54:12Thank you.