302. How Do You Stop Being the Person Everything Falls On? PLUS! Bot bosses, poisoned chocolate and the dumbest Teams call mistake. With Cait Donovan

19:47Is that the whole universal...

19:49Cait Donovan:Basic income. Yeah, which is nonsense. It then makes us a welfare state, which again famously doesn't work very well. So yeah, I wasn't entirely convinced by the predictions, but I do think it is, I think everyone's feeling a little bit anxious right now and just kind of waiting to see how this all turns out. So I'm 44 this year. That means when I was graduating, I graduated high school in Y2K. We were years of like dying over Y2K and like what is going to happen and we had so much anxiety over Y2K and some things broke. Then I graduated, my master's refinished my master's during 2007. Oof. 2008, we had a recession.

20:26Everybody was anxious. I mean, we go through these, like, this is just, like, maybe this is just normal. This is just a new thing that we're going to be anxious about. And I think there is definitely an element to that. It's another cycle, isn't it? We had it with the internet. We had it with social media. I think my concern with this one is how quickly things have changed, how disposable people have come to a lot of the big technology companies, and how little conversation there is around the ethics of this. So less like, can we do this? Should we be doing this? So yeah, I just think as the technology gets more complex, but then maybe that's, yeah.

21:01Again, it's the younger people being anxious where this feels a little bit, a little bit different.

21:07Cait Donovan:And to be slightly more sort of capitalist for a second, which is going to annoy, I'm sure, both of you, but if you have a publicly traded company, then your fiduciary duty, I think, God, that's a fancy word, isn't it? A fiduciary duty, I believe. Kate's just looking and going, how the hell do you know that word, Al? A fiduciary duty. Can you spell it or can you spell it? Can I spell it? Yes, I will. Yes, if I can Google it first. But yeah, you have a fiduciary duty to keep your costs as low as possible. So therefore, it's almost like forcing your arm to replace people with AI if you're a publicly traded company.

21:42Cait Donovan:I don't know enough about the ins and outs of it. But I know Jack Dorsey was apparently, seemed like a pretty decent guy. And he started a couple of decent companies. Obviously started Twitter as well. And then recently just got rid of a lot of people. But in a very, I think in one of the best ways you could get rid of people. But still, it still happened, didn't it? Anyway, Kate, Kate, tell us, what have you been seeing? What have you seen this week? So I was choosing this article and I was thinking, it's got to be something that annoys me or else we're not going to have any fun. So this article really annoyed me.

22:12The title of it alone, I mean, Henrico Castro, Piers, I think you're probably an amazing guy. But the title of this article is When Candor Hurts the Business, The Economics of Employee Retaliation. And basically, he's saying that managers are giving like overinflated performance reviews to mediocre employees because they're afraid of what the employees are going to do to retaliate against it. They're going to gossip. They're going to work slower. They're going to damage company products. There was a story in there about how somebody dumped something into something. There was like a chocolate company.

22:46Somebody dumped something into it and it had to. What was it? Oh, yeah. A person dumped ethanol into a tank of melted chocolate in order to lash out.

22:54Cait Donovan:Oh, that's not lashing out. That's killing people. Like, so they had to dump it, obviously. And listen, if you have a company culture where people feel like they have to retaliate to that degree, the problem isn't performance reviews, sir.

23:11Cait Donovan:Totally agree. And so they're talking about how awful performance reviews are, and I don't disagree. I don't know if you guys, have I told you guys to have Mike Goldman on your podcast? Because if I hadn't, I meant to. Because he does something that he calls talent density, and he wants to replace the performance review system completely. And he's got a way to do it that I think is actually quite useful. And so, yeah, are performance reviews outdated and broken? A thousand percent. Should we stop doing them because we're afraid of ethanol in our chocolate? I'm not sure that's the response that we should be creating.

23:48That's like letting the child run the parent-child relationship. Like, no, no, they're not in charge here. It does seem a bit of a step up, doesn't it?

23:58Cait Donovan:It escalated quickly, as they say in Anchorman. Yeah, that really did. So let me just see if I understand this. So the argument is that if you tell someone that they're not performing great at work, then they're going to go and put either ethanol or feces in your chocolate milk. Is that what we're saying? Yes. So did they suggest what we should be doing? He said, yeah, managers can take two approaches. The first one he calls using sticks and carrots. Well, that's a revolutionary idea. Right. Tying pay to performance, rewarding with bonuses and penalizing with pay cuts. You think that people are going to retaliate over a poor performance review, but they're going to be fine when you dock their pay?

24:42Wow. That's not like this helps companies measure effort more precisely. I'm not sure that that's how that's going to work out. Like weaponizing pay is I don't think weaponizing pay is a smart choice. No. And then there's a second approach that says use only carrots. Managers can reward strong performance while overlooking weaker performance knowing retaliation can occur. No. Say that again. Say that again. Managers can reward strong performance while overlooking weaker performance knowing that retaliation may occur. Wow. So you're just going to avoid the problem. We're just going into avoidant behaviors.

25:30This is a genuine article. Yes, that's why I wanted to bring you were like pint an article. I was like, oh, I got one. This is in Harvard Business School. Seriously. So this is not this is not like a psychology today dot com or like Elephant Journal. This is Harvard Business School. And so now there's a section called restoring harmony at work. So if we're not going to use the sticks and carrots and that's sort of the old method, he's saying. For managers, this is how you restore harmony. Let small issues slide. That is like a fast track to ruining everything. First. The next one is decouple pay from negative feedback.

26:08Well, yeah. What? Yes. And three, clarify the reasons for a poor review. Okay. This is groundbreaking work from Harvard. This poor kid, because he probably did, like he probably really worked really hard on this. So I don't want to like despair, Like, I don't want to disparage him completely, but this whole idea, I think the biggest issue that I have overall, regardless of any of the individual sentences, is the idea that we should be really worried about retaliation in that way. You should not be treating your employees poorly enough that retaliation is their first response to a problem. If retaliation is the main response to a problem, then you've got a bigger issue at play in general.

26:57And that should be dealt with. So if you're seeing employee retaliation as a systematic problem in your research and you keep coming up against different styles of retaliation, which could be as big as, you know, throwing ethanol in the chocolate and as small as gossiping at work and like decreasing morale. but like if you're seeing retaliation on a consistent basis because of how people are being treated then treat people better it sounds revolutionary yeah yeah i mean you're right let's be let's be generous to this person who has spent good time and effort on this i on one hand i can see it but social media is a big a big element of this isn't it because we see like the rage quitting and all that type of thing and and people talking very very candidly about their employee experience if it hasn't been very good and that can damage brands and they got things like glass door haven't you where people can leave reviews and stuff like that so i understand element of of protection but like you said kate if we're starting to see retaliation at this level and yeah you know it starts as you know a bit of incivility and then and then works its way up Dealing with the retaliation isn't the solution to focus on.

28:14As you said, it's why are people getting to this point anyway where it's escalating to that level. And the whole pay thing, yeah, of course, especially these days across the living crisis and costs going up every day, financially people are struggling, so how much we're paid is important. But we know it's a very small percentage actually in terms of what motivates us at work, particularly once that salary threshold has been met and we can have some form of relatively comfortable life it's not as motivating but how you treat people that's motivating how you give them something to believe in and work towards create great relationships and and help them figure out some type of of segregation between work and life so they don't burn themselves out that's what makes the big difference and doesn't piss people off to the point they want a poison and chocolate.

29:06Yes, this is absolutely solving the wrong problem. And I feel like also if we're talking about like Glassdoor and, you know, rage quitting and writing things on LinkedIn about like how terribly you were treated, to be honest, I'm not sure how much that's hurting companies anymore unless it's happening like super consistently. It's like if you we both have podcasts that are both fairly popular, right? So if you have only five star reviews, people don't trust your reviews because they're like, well, those were your friends. Congratulations, you have 183 friends who officially are willing to take the three minutes out of their day to give you a five-star review and say, I love the host or whatever, you know?

29:43But if you have, you know, 200 reviews and six of them are one stars, you look more legitimate. So I don't know that these, like, unless everybody in the company is writing all this crazy stuff about them, it makes the person look like the crazy person and the company just look like a regular old company where somebody just wasn't a good fit. You know, like it wasn't the right place for that person. You don't like my podcast. That's fine. But that doesn't mean it's total garbage, you know? And so I think that even that part of the retaliation, there should be a little bit less fear because nobody trusts anything that has only five star reviews anymore.

30:22Cait Donovan:And also the one star reviews help you to sometimes can make you more, more inclined to go like, say, for example, We're going to a restaurant, right? And so it's a beautiful Thai restaurant, and someone's given it a one-star go. They didn't have chips or fries in your case. Then you'd be like, well, this is the place for me because I don't want some work. Or they're like, I'm allergic to peanuts. And it's like, well, there's peanuts in almost every Thai dish. Like, why did you go to a Thai restaurant if you're allergic to peanuts? Like, why? No. This is the onion. Have you heard about the onion soup theory?

30:52No. Because this went viral. So this was funny. Somebody posted a recipe for onion soup, and the number of comments underneath it saying, well, I don't like onions. What else can I replace them with?

31:07And people were like, just go look for a different recipe. Don't read a recipe for onion soup if you hate onions. What? No, I'm not going to. What are you talking about? But people have gotten so particular about, like, because our feeds are, you know, adjusted to us. Our algorithms are set on what we like and what we want to see and what we. So we're so accustomed to having everything set to our own preferences that when something doesn't match up, we lose our minds over it. But I think that that's really obvious to people on the outside. So while, of course, you don't want ethanol in chocolate, like I'm pretty sure that it wasn't just a performance review that led this person to this result.

31:47Yeah. And we need some friction in our teams, don't we? that's how we ideate and create and improve. We want some friction there. Yeah.

31:59Cait Donovan:Wow, what an article. So that's a fun one, right? Yeah, well played. Yes, so the link will be in the show notes. Do you know what's funny? I had no idea what you were going to say, Kate. Absolutely no idea. And you're going to see in a second how kind of so related this one is. So just set the scene. If someone gets fired from a company these days, Generally, what happens is that they go to log in and they can't log in. And then they'll get a ping saying, we've got a call with HR in 20 minutes. And you're a bit like, oh, shit. And I mean, yes, that's brutal. No, it's not humane. Is it smart? From the company's point of view, well, maybe it is.

32:42Cait Donovan:Because I want to take you back to February the 18th of 2025. It was end of the working day and two brothers, Manib and Soheb Akhtar, They get called into a Microsoft Teams meeting. They're fired and the call ends at 4.50. Now, I'm just going to double check what this. Yes, so the company they're working for is called Opexus. And this is probably the most important thing. They do a lot of stuff with the government. So they deal with government contracts, et cetera, et cetera. So these two brothers, call ends at 4.50. So he tries to log back in. Can't do it. Tries VPN. Can't do it. Everything's terminated.

33:24Cait Donovan:Manib. Oh, no. Someone forgot about Manib. So at 4.56, six minutes after being fired, Manib is inside a US government database. And he's issuing, first of all, issues a command to lock everyone else out. And then secondly, he writes these four words, drop database DHS prod, which basically, if you don't know SQL, Kate knows what it means. It just deletes the entire Department of Homeland Security database. It deletes the whole thing. Now, this is where it kind of gets a little bit weird or comedic, I suppose, because then Manif stops to Google. Well, I can't remember if it's where I can't remember if you said they'd chat to you or Google it.

34:07Cait Donovan:how do I clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases? But did it on his work computer? Where are you tracking the history and all the queries? So close.

34:19Cait Donovan:No, it went on in this, and the article, honestly, if this makes you chuckle or makes you a little bit sweaty, you should definitely go and read it because they did all kinds of things, including discussing about whether they should actually have extorted some money out of it. And Manib shuts that down by saying, no, you do not do that. that's proof of guilt man it's like yeah because everything else they're doing is absolutely fine and then they ended up going they're probably going to raid the place and of course they did three weeks later they were jailed uh they were raided then a year later they were jailed the brothers were jailed the brothers were jailed sorry yes you're right the brothers were jailed one of them took a plea deal one of them is now saying oh well it was um it was just it was a mistake i didn't quite mean it so just so i understand this timeline they're in some kind of virtual zoom call yeah they get sacked they're in teams call another conversation yeah even worse they get sacked yes and then automatically logged out of all of their systems one of them gets automatically logged out and the other one doesn't the other one doesn't and the one that doesn't then goes back in and basically tries to delete the entire system and yes yes besides the whole thing but what's kind of funny is that they they stayed logged into the teams call with hr hr left the call they stayed logged in and that's how we know what they said because they had the entire conversation on the team's call the brothers did the brothers they just stayed on the call so the transcript obviously was brought up in court and they were like we know exactly what you said because we've got the full transcript from from our team's call so anyway as funny as that is my my thought was to ask the two of you because you're you're probably the best people to ask about this.

35:59Cait Donovan:Where's the balance of protecting the business, but also treating people humanely when you do get rid of them? My initial reaction is like, people need to grow up and get over the fact that they were locked out. And then of course, you're getting fired, like figure it out, move on. You're an adult. I don't know. It's come on. Is this inhumane? Or are you just come on? So I think a little bit of that. And then also, I think the difficulty in this is that we expect because we're so used to everything being automated, we're expecting to be able to do all these things simultaneously. And that requires like a certain, first of all, a certain number of people to be involved in it.

36:33And who knows globally where people are that do different functions? Like what if you are firing somebody at the end of the day on a Friday and the people that close down the computers and your access are in Bangalore and like they're not working anymore? You know, like I don't I think that there's something to be said for doing it when you can get it done so that it's done. Is that jarring to someone? Yes. Is life not jarring? Like, life is jarring. Kind of deal with it. Interesting. That's not gentle of me, really, but I don't know. I think, I mean, you, and you didn't know you were going to get fired.

37:13You didn't read the signs. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, they didn't build much of a case for themselves and potential unfair dismissal, did they? No. In terms of their reaction to that. I think I'm kind of okay. You know, the fact that they were fired on the same team's call as brothers? True.

37:30Cait Donovan:Ooh. That's weird. That is a bit weird. That is a bit weird, yeah. Can you imagine getting called into a team's call with your sibling because you work at the same company? Are you doing the same job? Like, why are we in the same team's call? This is awkward. Yeah, and you hear companies, don't you, kind of doing like mass firing with, you know, a few people at once but it's that's that's not the best practice it's better to do it do it one-to-one but that is weird on a more general like in a more general way what do you think about the idea of locking people out before you fire them i'm with you isn't it it's a chicken egg situation isn't it where you want to if it is particularly if it's a concern of of this type of retaliation to go back to what you were talking about kate there is a there is an element of protecting the company isn't there and and that is that is a business decision um it's the it's the human aspect of how that fire is and dealt with that I'd be more more interested in and I'm presuming there wasn't a very long lag between people being locked out and then finding out so we famously with Twitter didn't we we talked about this when you first came on the show Kate was how you know lots of people on Twitter got locked out of their systems and then hours later have found out that they've been laid off that's not great you want to have it coordinated in a way that doesn't cause distress to the individual again that that kind of sense of ambiguity and then that gossiping within with amongst um amongst kind of team members albeit not on the company system um so I think there needs to be a clear plan for these things but it's like any kind of essentially change isn't it it's a change in the structure of the organization whether it be one person being fired or 10 ,000 people being laid off change isn't often planned at that meticulous level of detail that it goes flawlessly um but i'm not i'm not mad about them being locked out like yeah like how would you do that like say you're firing 4 000 people next week and you're not gonna do like a mass email how do you time how do you how do you organize that i think even get people to show up to a party at the same time but i think that's the thing isn't it where you have this you might have this this kind of group scenario where people will get told it at the same time and then told that individually managers are going to follow up with them talk through very much like jack dorsey did with block didn't he announced it but then runway that i think they do they have three to six months of pay and then at least another month in the job for handovers and things like that wraparound care so i think it's just it's it's being swift in that if you have to do it on scale and then being detailed enough to have those individual conversations via managers to make sure people are supported.

40:15And I think it goes back to what we're saying about the retaliation aspect. If you're treating people well through what is a very difficult process, you're going to be less likely to experience retaliation. You know, particularly an organization that treats people well in general. Yes, Stripe did a really good job of that, I think, about a year ago.

40:35Cait Donovan:Right, the link will be in the show notes and you definitely need to go and read that story because I don't think I did it justice. We're going to go and take a very, very quick break but after that we've got the world famous week of workplace surgery where I put your questions to Kate and Leanne. We'll see you in a second. If you're like me and you hate all this workaholic hustle nonsense on the socials and somebody's getting up at 3am to drink butter then here is a brand new podcast that I know by. If you're like me and you hate all this workaholic hustle nonsense that's all over the socials, You know, that dude who's getting up at like 3am to drink butter.

41:08Well, here is a brand new podcast that I know you will love. It is called Seven Day Weekend and is, of course, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals where all good podcasts live.

41:20Cait Donovan:I'm going to try and get through this. The Seven Day Weekend is your weekly dose of business finance and side hustle motivation. So go subscribe and get brand new episodes featuring a mixture of guests and Laura's hard-earned tips that'll teach you how to build the digital tools necessary to build your own seven-day weekend, no butter required. For a taste of what's to come, go and listen to A Day in the Life of an Anti-Workholic, where Laura explains how to maximise your productivity with some fun and quirky techniques while living your best life. This is so up my street. Listen to Seven Day Weekend wherever you get your podcasts.

42:01Cait Donovan:Okay, welcome back, welcome back. It is time for the world-famous weekly workplace surgery where I put your questions to Kate, Donovan and Leanne. By the way, quick shout out to Jeremy Klein, friend of mine and also great listener. Well, he's a great listener, he's a great guy, but he's also a listener. And he said, I asked him for feedback on a couple of weeks ago when we had Jake on and he said, I really like it. I like the idea of getting someone else in to answer some of the surgery questions because I get a different perspective. Okay, so question number one. How do you stop being the person everything falls on?

42:34Cait Donovan:So this person writes, over the last year, I've taken on the responsibilities of at least three roles, none of which were agreed. It just landed on my desk because we were understaffed. And I was the person who wouldn't say no. I haven't had a pay rise or a promotion. I have had a thank you in a team meeting, but that's it. I feel completely burnt out and I don't even know how to push back at this point without looking like I can't cope. Kate, thoughts? Well, the first thing I'll say is that I didn't agree to. Yeah, you did because you didn't say no. Oh, interesting. You did agree. By not saying no, you agreed.

43:11So that's number one. Number two, you are expecting yourself to be able to cope with four full-time jobs. Why? You are more worried about them thinking that you can't cope. Meanwhile, no one can do four full-time jobs. Susan, I don't know what your name is, but no one can do four full-time jobs. So this is actually a perfect question for me because my whole work is burnout related, right? And resentment is my number one tool for figuring out what's wrong. You are resentful right now. Things are not okay. You need to step up and have a conversation like a big grown adult.

43:48Cait Donovan:Well, this didn't go. Yeah, I totally agree with all that. But that was some tough love there. I'm curious, Kate, some of the things they've said in this letter, how old am I? Some of these people said in this email is, I was the person who wouldn't say no. I don't want to blow up my reputation. I don't know how to push back at this point without looking like I can't cope. That feels like four very significant words. Well, and all of those things are, I was protecting my reputation instead of my energy, time, and person. I was protecting my reputation over my health. I was protecting my reputation and what people think of me over my capacity.

44:29I was protecting everything over my energy and my time. So you're willing to protect your reputation over everything else. Well, this is the kind of situation you find yourself in. And yes, it is tough love. And also, I think that we get stuck in these situations often because we are not willing to have those conversations. And so right now, you have to grow up and have that conversation. You have to say, I cannot cope. You don't avoid looking like you can't cope. You actually cannot cope. So you have to just say that. I have taken on four roles. I can't cope with this. I managed to do it short term.

45:06I'm really nervous about disappointing people. I'm really scared about that. But I honestly can't continue doing four roles. And here's the thing. The next piece, how they respond and what they do next, is your data that you need to gather. So if they say, oh my gosh, we understand you must be so frustrated, pat on the head, and then do nothing, it is your time to look for a new job. They officially do not respect your capacity at all because you have not taught them to. That is a really difficult thing to change once it's embedded in a system. They have made you out and you have agreed to be the person that takes everything on.

45:51You are going to probably need to leave this job, go somewhere else and create a new persona for yourself from the get go where you are not the person that always says yes and always takes everything on. This is your inner work that needs doing.

46:04Cait Donovan:I love that. I love that. Lee, any thoughts? I agree entirely. entirely she's on her feet by the way applauding she's standing on a chair i agree entirely and i i guess words of reassurance i give you this is very common lots of people find themselves in this situation because they either yeah find it difficult to say no or see this as a short-term thing where they can help out in an organization they feel very engaged in this happens i'd be interested to know if they're still understaffed um there is some unpicking to do here and as kate said it's going to be really hard because you now have the perception of you as a worker is that you're the person that takes these things on.

46:44This could be an opportunity and it depends on the organisation, as Kate said, how they're going to respond to it. This could be an opportunity for you to engage in what's called job crafting where you've got three or four roles at the minute and it's kind of starting with, well, what do I want to do? If I could design my perfect job here in terms of taking aspects of these three roles to potentially create a new role that I, you know, are hugely fulfilling for me and fits my ambitions and my strengths and all that type of stuff and that could be a really good starting place for you but also having that conversation if it is awkward saying you know I've done some of the work here to figure out what the role should look like I don't want to be the person who's doing everything averagely I want to be the person that's doing specific things brilliantly these is what I think they are and have the conversation from from there and if you are going to have this conversation as I always say to people practice it, practice it out loud with your partner or a friend or a colleague that you trust.

47:40Get the words right, the tone right, that feels comfortable, because it's going to be awkward and you're going to feel really squirmy and icky in this meeting because you are the person that said yes. And if you are truly burnt out, that means that there are parts of your brain that have changed. And you don't, might not have the capacity to job craft at the moment. Job crafting might feel like and sound like a good idea, but your brain might literally not be able to do it. You might just be thinking to yourself, I just can't do any of it right now. So if you've been brought to that far of a place, it's also okay to not have the capacity to now think up a new role for yourself, right?

48:25Like your brain might not be able to do it. And if you find yourself in a place where your brain can't do it, please know that that's a normal part of burnout.

48:32Cait Donovan:Yeah, absolutely. excellent excellent answer okay so question number two is kind of simply we touched on a lot of things you've just been saying there so question number two it says i'm a senior leader and i'm burning out but i genuinely don't know who am allowed to tell my team needs me to be steady and my board expects me to perform the higher up you go the less safe it feels to admit you're actually struggling i've started to wonder if leadership at this level just include involves a kind of sustained pretense that everything is fine. Wow, Kate. Is that the reality? No. And the first, there's a lot of assumptions in here.

49:14My team needs me to be steady. No, your team needs you to be human because they can't be human unless you're human. So by being the person who is overloaded but still functioning, what you are modeling for them is that they should also be overloaded but still functioning. That's number one. Number two, burnout is actually contagious on a biological level. So if your stress hormones are through the roof all the time, guess what you're doing to your team? You are not being steady for them. You are creating burnout for them, too. So you do need to talk to your team. You don't have to sit down and cry and say, oh, I'm so burnt out.

49:49My life is a mess. You can say, hey, you guys, you know what? I really try to be really steady for you guys. I'm actually finding that I'm really struggling and I'd like to figure out if there's some ways we can adjust how we're all working so we can take some of the pressure off. Maybe we prioritize things differently. You guys are doing the work all the time. Is there something that we've been prioritizing that you actually think is not that important? When we have a senior leader that's burnt out, the first thing we do is called pruning. And we go through their list of tasks in their calendar and we cut off 10 to 20 percent of the stuff that they're doing on a regular basis that literally doesn't need to be done.

50:23They could stop doing tomorrow and no one would notice and or people would be relieved. So oftentimes when you get to that state, you think you have to be busy all the time in order to earn your money and prove your value. When you grew up a certain way, you get to a certain pay level. You're like, oh, my God, I have to perform for life now. No, no, no. You deserve your pay. You're doing a good job. But you might have added stuff just to keep your schedule full. So we've got to figure out what that stuff is and we've got to eliminate it. We've got to talk to people and figure out what things can be dropped outside of the things that you're thinking of because your team definitely knows.

51:02And you need to create some psychological safety by being open and vulnerable with your team to a certain degree. And also, you might need some time off and some support from your board and from your leadership. So they need to know so that you can hire somebody like me. You don't have to hire me because I'm pretty straightforward and you might not be able to do that. But you would hire someone that does the kind of work that I do to help you work through burnout while you're still working. Because this is all doable, but it's not doable if the assumptions that you have written into this question stay, if they remain.

51:37Cait Donovan:Excellent. Leanne, there is a little PS I didn't read out. It said something like, is there a version of this job that doesn't require you to hide how hard it is? And that's quite telling, isn't it? There shouldn't be a version of this job that does require you to hire how hard it is. And I think that was Kate's point. You don't, you know, you're human. You're not operating in a vacuum. You're going to experience stress from lots of different directions being a senior leader. but you need to know the people you can talk to and that screams to me that you don't have the psychological safety that's not being role modeled for you in terms of the board or the senior leaders for you to be able to have these conversations and there isn't that investment in leadership development either because usually the first thing that that will happen in leadership development is you'll get you'll have a conversation around coaching and how you have these conversations where, you know, it is a way of almost emotional regulation.

52:32So you're not taking out stress on your team either directly or as Kate said, indirectly because emotions are contagious. I had a brilliant manager who called it hiding the wires. And it was only as I kind of got more experience that I realized he was talking to me about emotional regulation. But he was like, I'm your person. If you're stressed, if you need to vent, if you've got a problem that you need to work through, I'm the person that you call. and go and find a couple of other peers that are also the person that you can call. And yes, there will be times where you can have these conversations with your team, but it will come from a more objective place in terms of how we prioritize and if we're all individually struggling and didn't realize, because you've taken that time to initially kind of have that explosion with somebody that you can trust in an environment that's safe.

53:23Cait Donovan:Fabulous. Fabulous. Thank you so much. Okay, final question here. And this person, he says, I've got no time to actually think. He said, I spend three quarters of my day in meetings. By the time I get to actual thinking work, I'm cognitively empty. I know this is making me a worse leader. I've tried protecting time, declining meetings, and pushing back on the calendar. It doesn't stick. That's what you were talking about before, Kate, wasn't it? The organization runs on meetings, and if you opt out, you lose influence. so how do you fix a culture of meeting overload when the meetings are how power and information flow there's a lot there's a lot in here Kate what are your thoughts well the first thing is one person doesn't change the culture so my initial series of questions for this person would be is this a culture that supports your best work and if not then how do we get you to a place where you can work within a culture that supports your best work then my next series of questions would be.

54:23If you're a leader, then most of your work should be on people. So what is the, I would love to know, and we're not going to get this information right now, obviously, but I would love to know what is the thinking that you need to do that can't be done? I think that's really important. And then on top of that, when you have short periods of time in order to enter thinking, there are things that you can use to get into that space. So my background is in Chinese medicine in acupuncture, there's something called a Qigong face wash. So this is a silly thing that basically, in order to settle your energy in your body and clear your mind, you clap your hands right in front of your face loud.

55:10So you make a noise. Rub your hands together until they're warm. Place your hands over your eyeballs until you can feel the warmth from your palms in your eyes and go over your head, just like kind of sweeping, sweep your hands over your head. And you do that three times to clear out the meeting that you were just in or the thinking that you were just doing or whatever was just happening. And it actually helps to reset your brain and put you in the here and now. If you do that and then set yourself up with, there are certain types of music that help people focus and enter flow state. For some people, it's going to be binaural beats.

55:42For some people, it's going to be Baroque classical music. You've got to find your EMDR that's, you know, without without lyrics or whatever your thing happens to be you've got to find the thing that allows you to enter that space as quickly as you can so you can utilize the time that you do have you should be able with practice to enter a space like this within a couple of minutes okay it's absolutely right you can't change the culture if you're not being able to do stuff that you need to be doing because of meetings your performance is gonna is gonna slip so it doesn't really matter how much power and influence you've got if you're not performing very well you'd hope um so it sounds like there's definitely things you can do to as Kate said find that flow time and and give yourself that that opportunity and I think as well it's it's doing what Kate said before about pruning you know try and be a bit more disciplined about that in terms of pushing back on on certain meetings um but this fundamentally does also sound like the culture is not not a great it's not doesn't sound like a great culture but also maybe isn't a great fit for you in terms of how they do work so it's yeah it's also having a little think about whether the organization is is the right environment for you beautiful thank you so much for joining us

56:59Cait Donovan:people want to find out more about you including your fried podcast including your first book and potentially second book where's the best place for them to go kate donovan got dot com but kate is C-A-I-T. Thank you so much. We are back on Thursday with Richard Clarke, who's been talking about happiness at work. A true founder story, but also he works with businesses now to help people be more happy. And also one of the most patient people because we've been in contact with him for quite a while. We recorded this interview a few months ago and he's been like, no, it's all right, guys, calm down.

57:26Cait Donovan:Put it out whenever you've got the time. So it's coming out this Thursday. We're going to absolutely love it. Definitely go and check out Fried, the podcast. And also go and check out Kate Donovan. And thank you so much for your time, Kate. Thank you so much, Kate. Thank you for having me. I should also mention that it's a great week to check out Fry the Burnout podcast if you haven't already, because I'm on it. Lovely. I know. My conversation with Kate goes out this week. So what an opportunity, what time to go and check out Kate's incredible podcast. And she's got a black castle. Was it, you were just saying it's episode 350 coming up soon?

57:58I have to record episode 350 next week. Yep. Wow. So you've got, you've got so much binge worthy content there. Go, look, enjoy. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

58:07Cait Donovan:Bye.