329. Toxic or Just a Bad Fit? How to Tell the Difference at Work with Cait Donovan [Fried: The Burnout Podcast]

0:02Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name's Al, I'm a business owner. We are the co-founders of People and Culture Consultancy Oblong, and together we help leaders simplify the science of work and build amazing workplace cultures. Now today's episode is a little different. Over the next couple of weeks we're taking a short break from our usual format and sharing a couple of conversations that we've had on podcasts that we genuinely love.

0:33These are shows we actually listen to ourselves so we thought we'd bring them to you too. And honestly as a podcaster, as a person, there's not a lot more exciting than being invited onto a show you genuinely admire. The first is incredibly Fried the Burnout podcast hosted by Kate Donovan. If you've not come across Kate before, I mean, she's awesome. She is so cool. She is one of the leading voices on burnout. Pride started out focusing on burnout recovery, mainly an individual level, but the more recent series has broadened the conversation to look at organisations, leadership and the systems that we work in.

1:10I was so looking forward to this conversation and Kate definitely didn't let me off lightly. She challenged me on everything from culture and psychological safety to where the managers are being set up to fail and where, importantly, individual responsibility ends and organizational responsibility begins. Yeah, this is exactly the sort of discussion we love listening to and we hope you enjoy it too. So after a very quick word from our sponsors, Leanne and Kate will be in your ears. The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across three teams and four systems.

1:47And in our case, it's about 216 ,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it. What you should be doing is using HubSpot because why? HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already narrows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more. Nice. Check out Hopspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

2:19Creating a podcast that people listen to is hard. And in the world of podcasts, there are some standouts that get a ton of accolades, a ton of downloads, and the right sort of attention. And today, I'm lucky enough to interview one of the people behind one of those podcasts with what is over 4 million downloads, 250 ,000 downloads a month. It's just this like wild, huge, magical thing that you've created. So today we get to speak with Leanne Elliott, who is a chartered occupational psychologist and coach known for building workplaces that empower teams and drive performance. So you can see why she's here in this season.

3:08Makes sense, right? She co-hosts the award-winning Truth, Lies, and Work, the UK's number one work podcast and a top 10 global business podcast. Folks, breaking through that space when you are not a celebrity is like near impossible and never happens. So this is so impressive. Leanne has a reputation for developing high performance cultures at major organizations, including the NHS, DWP and RVS. Currently, she brings this expertise as SMES. What's that? Small and medium enterprises. Oh, to small and medium enterprises as co-founder of people and culture consultancy, Oblong. So, Leanne, welcome to Pride.

3:52Thank you so much. What a beautiful introduction. And I have to point out, Kate, to all of your lovely listeners, we first met when we approached you to being a guest, when we were babies. I think at the time we maybe had like a thousand downloads in total. And the episode that you came on talking about the Twitter layoffs was a real pivotal moment for our show and really started to launch us in ways we couldn't imagine. So huge thanks to you. You've been such an important part of our journey. The thing that I love about you most, even from like on a personal level, is you're very much a no bullshit kind of gal.

4:34And you write really funny LinkedIn posts about the state of work and what we're all looking at and what we're all facing. So you have this like pretty serious job. You have this incredibly popular podcast. You're doing all these big things, but you're still just being human out there. Like, it's a relief to me to see someone continue to be real and continue to be themselves and to maintain their personality through that kind of growth. Thank you. I'll be honest. I'd love to sit here and go, that was always the point, Kate. I was always confident enough to be myself and put myself out there as a northern English woman from state schools and all that stuff.

5:17The truth is, my kind of inner saboteur was always thinking to myself or telling myself that you don't sound clever enough to be a psychologist. You didn't go to like Oxford or Cambridge and you haven't worked in a big four. Like who are you to go and post on on LinkedIn about these things? And I was talking to an old colleague of mine who used to be part of the same writing team doing professional branding and she is now phenomenal on LinkedIn and I talked to her and I was like I just can't get into the flow of it and she was like I listen to your podcast and it's you it's it's just authentically you I read your LinkedIn and it's not like just write how you talk so I was like but people might not take me seriously and she was like they take your podcast seriously try it so I must admit it's all down to to her advice and and yeah and I've had lots of feedback that there's similar things that it's nice not to see linkedin content that isn't performative and isn't kind of selling something but I have also had people get in touch with me asking if it's pushing some of my content sometimes push into a gray zone of ethics in terms of what psychologists should be saying and talking about and I'm all right with that.

6:30Yeah, yeah. What kind of zone? Because I can be quite direct. I can call out the BS. I can, you know, fall into things that it doesn't depend. Myers-Briggs is BS. Let's just call it what it is. I don't like it and I'm going to say that. But it has no actual background or validity to it. So that's not an unethical thing to say. Do lots of people use it? Yes. Do lots of people get help by it? Yes. Does that mean it's a statistically valid and useful tool? No, that's not the same thing. I know, I know. And understandably and rightly, ethics is such a central part of our practice and how we qualify.

7:11It's always, you know, front and center of everything that we do. And that's what distinguishes working with an occupational psychologist and working with a management consultant. We're not going to sell you something that isn't going to work because ethically we're bound not to. But I think at times we can stretch that to a point where we almost silence ourselves. And I think that's where, you know, probably stems a lot from why organizational psychologists, occupational psychologists aren't a firm feature of businesses in terms of their senior management teams. Yeah, well, and I think that there's this like awkward idea that if you offend someone, you're being unethical.

7:50And that's just also not true. Like I have I have been reading your posts and been in your world for what, four years now, maybe something like that. Right. Like, it's been a long time and I have seen your content consistently over that time. I have never once thought that you were crossing a line. I thought you were being honest, but honesty is not a lack of ethics. I agree. But as we both know, honesty can be hard to hear sometimes. Oh, yeah. Not everybody likes it. Yeah, that's true. That's true. All right. So I want to jump into this idea that occupational psychologists are not part of the workplace.

8:30And I want to first tell you why occupational psychology bothers me. And then we can get into why it's still necessary. Because I do think that it's necessary. But when I started researching burnout, every piece of research that I found was done by a social scientist of some sort. there was no medicine-based, medical-based, physiology-based research into burnout. That means to me that we're only telling a very small part of the story, because there's a huge physiological component to burnout. And there's a huge physiological component to behavior. so sometimes i feel like some of the suggestions that are made are like cool in theory but people's bodies aren't going to let them do it because of hormones because of inflammation because of all different things so i would love to see an organizational psychologist with someone who understands the stress response on a physiological level sort of work together like I think that would be a better space because you can't just tell people how to behave that's not how behavior works yeah I think you're you're absolutely right and we need this this collaboration between practitioners to really have a sustainable and significant impact and there are organizations doing that in the UK who are doing phenomenal work.

10:13The RSPCA, which is an animal charity, has a chief medical officer partnering with organizational psychologists to especially around the emotional load and trauma that staff go through. The BBC is another organization that has a chief medical officer. So there are pockets where that collaboration is happening and it is having a phenomenal impact. I think when it comes to organizational psychologists you're right we can't tell people how to behave we can do various things to try and influence behavior and modify behavior my focus and the majority of most organizational psychologists is about the environment that we're creating and the things that leaders can control you're right we don't have any control over somebody's physiology or their genetics we can't control that we can't change that but we can change elements of the environment that are going to impact that individual and and may make you know make it harder for them depending on what they're dealing with as an individual.

11:12Yeah so when you are looking at you've got a new client coming in what is your first step? Are you doing a diagnostic procedure? Are you reading surveys? Are you what are you doing? Yeah diagnostics I think that's the biggest myth that I first experienced when I started as an OCC psych was people expecting me to have all the answers from day one. It's like, I don't have any answers right now. I have a load of questions and, you know, and I have a structure behind those questions. But yeah, it's about diagnosis, about understanding the environment. And yes, that does involve surveys, which I know can be triggering to some leaders out there.

11:54But I think I'd start by saying not all surveys are equally created. You always want to scrutinize the model that sits behind the survey and how well those questions measuring what they're intended to measure. And it has to be complemented by other activities as well. So yes, I will do a diagnostic survey with staff, but I'll also do focus groups. I'll also do group coaching sessions with leadership teams. I'll also look at the policies and procedures that people have in place, the work environment itself, whether it be physical or digital. There's a whole host of things that we look at to first define what is going on.

12:24One of my favorite books is by an incredible psychologist called John Amici. And he says that the most important thing that you can do for somebody who's lost is tell them exactly who they are, where they are. And that's my first step as an ox psych is to go, let me tell you where you are. Then let's look at where you want to go. And then we can figure out a route to get you from A to B. All right. So the where we are portion. So if we're talking about where we are as a company, I mean, I'm only one person, but we're just going to say where we are as a company. You're going into someplace and you're looking at where we are.

12:57What kind of map are you describing that on? Right. So. Is that a clear enough question or no? I think so. So kind of what am I what am I looking at? What kind of framework am I using? Yeah, like when you say here, like if you are going to paint someone a picture that says here you are, what are the components that tell them? We're not talking northeast, you know, southwest. We're talking there's but there are cardinal directions that you're looking at in order to orient someone within the workplace. What are those cardinal factors? I always like to start with what psychologists call psychosocial risk factors, which are basically aspects of organizational life.

13:39that can cause stress and over time you know it can be problematic in all sorts of ways to the individual and to the organization and they're usually very transactional observable observable things it's things like the quality of relationships between people as peers and direct report to manager it's things like how change is managed in the organization the resources people have to do their job so the training they get to to do their job and the workloads that they have the support they're given the level of recognition which is going to include yes things like salary and benefits but also in terms of how feedback is given how career development is managed how performance is managed it's going to be also things now that we're in a remote world of how remote work is is handled in terms of whether it be fully remote in terms of hybrid how communication shift how belonging is fostered and it's going to also come down to things like really transactional stuff like role clarity does somebody know what their job is what's within their area of responsibility what isn't and are they working in a team that all know that and how they're contributing to the overall mission of the organization so it stems very much from a research perspective in in stress research in health and safety research because the idea is it doesn't matter what the culture of the organization is necessarily.

15:03Culture is almost a tool to help you get a strategy in place and execute a strategy because the underlying psychosocial risk fight is what's actually driving people's behavior. You can't bring in like, oh, we're going to have, we need to really grow. So bring in this high growth learning culture, but nobody's got the resources. There's lots of instability and infighting and nobody knows what their job is. So it's really starting at that foundational level. And often I'll work with clients for 18 months just to get those things right and identify the areas they have strengths in that we can build on and celebrate and the areas that are real risk factors that we need to pay close attention to.

15:45Once we've got a level of stability, we can start to talk more about what culture means and how it complements the strategy of the organization. In my mind, and we can play with this, but in my mind, the culture is what allows for or disallows for the psychosocial risks. Okay, say more. So you're saying the psychosocial risks come first, but in my mind, the psychosocial risks are based on what the culture allowed to happen or didn't allow to happen, right? In my mind, culture is basically determined by what we allow and what we disallow, what kind of behaviors we allow and disallow in the workplace and what kind of environment that creates within that structure.

16:35So if there's a lot of psychosocial risks, to me, that means that there's a weak culture. Like you can't have a lot of psychos, like if you have a high degree of psychosocial risk, you have a shitty culture at the same time. Like you can't have, if you had a good culture, you wouldn't have those psychosocial risks. true true and it is a bit of a chicken and egg i think my thought is is that the culture exists anyway and changing culture is like trying to to steer a cruise ship it takes a long time and it's it's one you know it's that bar macquarie is one degree at a time if we're looking at psychosocial risk factors they're much more transactional and much more tangible i agree with you my favorite definition definition of culture is the worst behaviors tolerated and that again comes from John Amici we don't have an agreed culture definition in the literature there's more than 50 yeah so if we're even trying to talk about changing culture we first have to define it and understand it and there isn't really an agreed way of of doing that they're all very very good and robust ways of doing that but still not not agreed and it's almost then like you're changing something that feels intangible which for leaders is is really hard and I think this is where culture has become a buzzword and people are starting to kind of disconnect with what culture is and whether it's all that whereas if we're talking about yes there's a psychosocial risk that there's infighting but where is that coming from is it coming from the fact that relationships are really bad and people are bullying this harassment in the workplace or is that incivility coming from nobody knows what their role is therefore everyone's stepping on each other's toes or managers are micromanaging you know there's so many different different drivers that could be influencing what pockets of toxicity we've got so to really make a change we need to first address those little pockets and they're the psychosocial risks oh in my head just went yeah but if you're having those things there's also a hormonal thing happening that you might not be able to shift without awareness of the fact that that's happening.

18:41So like I'm still going, my head always goes into the biology. So for instance, like if there is a really well bonded team, like there's a team that really works well together. There's five people, they know each other well, they bounce off each other well. That doesn't mean that there's no risk. It just means that this team in this company is really kind of doing a great job. But when you do that, there's a high level of oxytocin bond between everybody on the team. Oxytocin, yes, bonding hormone, love hormone, intimacy hormone, okay, cool, so we're all connected, we're bonded, we're cool. Except for, if we try to add one person to that team, that same oxytocin bond will encourage the people that are already bonded to reject and even violently attack the outsider.

19:32on a biological level, you don't know this is happening. You know that there's a team that, like, you need another person on, but you can't seem to get one on there. If you don't understand that there's biology behind it, I guess you could change it without, because really all you have to do is break up the team and introduce them one by one. It's not a difficult process to actually go through, and that you can make that decision from any perspective. but to me it's like knowing that that happens allows for a deeper understanding of why people are acting the way they're acting right we're back with leanne and kate after this very short break did you know that the uk's number one management podcast that's us by the way and the uk's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network we actually have a lot in common we both use behavioral science to help people do better at work and we both had to wrangle rory sutherland on an episode.

20:28And two out of three of us are devilishly good looking. And you're not going to say wit. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you, we need to do this in threes. The HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination. Or business professional. Seamless. Seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business and brands as well.

21:08It is. It's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that will be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better? It can. And are we all just status-seeking monkeys? I am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcast. But come back. Yeah, come back. Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in.

21:41I agree that educating people on these things is important, understanding the why. And I think it's the same when we look at neuroscience research that it can translate really well into organizational life because it can give a lens to behavior that leaders have been struggling to understand or influence. So I agree, it's all part of the conversation. But like you said, if that's just kind of the biological default, then we still need to look at ways of how we do introduce that new person, how we do communicate how this is going to be beneficial for the team and the organization. It's how we do that.

22:18And that is going to come down to the role that we need in this organization. or how it's going to further our mission or how it's going to, you know, lighten workloads or height, how it's going to improve other people's development because maybe this person is more senior and they can serve as a mentor and coach. It all links back and it's all part of the same ecosystem, the same web. And I think this, again, is where, you know, this cross collaboration of practitioners can be really powerful. Yeah. And I think this is like that part is natural to me as an acupuncturist. we're always as part of a bigger team.

22:52We're not usually the only practitioner that someone is seeing. So we're used to that sort of very interdisciplinary way of looking at things. And also Chinese medicine is interdisciplinary within itself. There isn't such a thing as separate psychology and separate physiology. Those things are not separate for us. So I keep trying to pull them back together in the Western world, and they're just not there yet. So let's talk about, You said a few words that I think are important. And I did an episode maybe two or three years ago on the research of what actually constitutes a toxic work environment.

23:28And you've just said almost all the words within, you know, the past couple of minutes. So I think that that's an interesting place to go. And one of the things that happened after that episode was that we had a coaching client that talked to the coach at the time, who was Sarah, and said, you know, for the past couple of years, I've been complaining about my toxic work environment. I listened to that episode. I realized that my environment isn't toxic. It just isn't a good fit for me. So can we talk about the difference between toxic work environment and just not right for you? yes yes yes yes i love this i we had a guest on our show called dr audrey taryn who's one of my favorite people that learn psychologists in the world and and she described it as right parcel wrong address yeah i love that i just thought that was so beautiful beautifully put yeah yeah all of her work is incredible and i think it comes down to a level of self-introspection and reflection that we don't often indulge in and as you know as you talk about all the time is so important to understand exactly who we are and what drives us and what meaningful work means to us to know if we're aligned to an organization because it's that dissonance that's going to cause that that stress and and and that um that pressure that tension it's not to say that the organizations are so toxic or in fact the individual is toxic you know we talk about you know toxic superstars and toxic employees as well and an exercise that I really like and it comes from a psychologist called Meg Selig and it is in Dr Audrey Tang's book The Leads Guide to Resilience I talk about it all the time because I think it's so useful and I use it myself it's called Vitals and it basically stands for values, interests, temperament around the clock so what kind of time of day you're at your best, life goals and strengths and it's just a positive psychology exercise, self-coaching exercise to go through in terms of just thinking what's important to me what are my values what do I you know that holds me and grounds me what are my interests what do I love what gives me loads of energy what are my life goals what do I want to achieve what are my strengths and just having this almost like this checklist of what your vitals are and what to look for in an organization that's going to align with those vitals because if you're in an environment whether it be an organization or a community where your vitals aren't aligning that is going to take a toll on your well-being, on your mental health.

25:58So I think for anybody who's finding or isn't sure if the organization is a problem or maybe they're just out of sync, is to do an exercise like that. Because if you're thinking, you know, my values are completely opposite of the organization I'm working in and I get to serve none of my interests to serve this organization, just use any of my strengths, it's not contributing to my life goals, then yeah, there's a chance it's not the organization. It's just you're not in the right place. And so then what does make toxicity? behaviors toxic behaviors it comes down to behavior and i think it's that in the literature it's it studies is incivility because we often think it's toxic work which is being quite dramatic that you know has to be lots of bullying or harassment infighting shocking you know people being treated terribly underpaid overworked and yes there are organizations out there and that's what makes them toxic but for the majority it's more subtle behaviors it's withholding information it's just doing something day to day that makes somebody else's job harder and people don't necessarily turn up with that intention but they're just in this environment that that just isn't serving them and probably was you know going back to the psychosocial risk a lot there that people just get into this pattern of behaviors you know unconsciously that just compounds and causes real real issues so I think for anybody who isn't really sure if you just feel this this this slight tension this withholding of information elements of cynicism resistance to change that you know has been managed fairly well then that's probably a sign that there's just slight slight issues there that are a little you know little pockets of toxicity that if they aren't managed they are gonna are gonna spread and it's gonna rescue it let's talk about the concept of incivility a little bit more like this is something that i um don't have any physiological research on that i can find in my head like as i'm like scanning my brain and i can't find any um that i've already read so it might be something to look into but when i you know when you read elements of a toxic workplace in the research you see incivility harassment, bullying, you know, whatever, these things, like these are the elements.

28:14And if those elements aren't there, then it's not really toxic. It might just be a bad fit. But incivility, let's talk about how we would recognize that, like really and truly, like on a Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. how are you recognizing whether someone is being incivil or not I worked in an organization where sadly I had to make my entire team redundant and it was a really brutal brutal job because we'd all been together for years from start-up and the performance was great it's just it was government funded contract it got pulled that's it you know we didn't have jobs for anyone else and I had to make everyone redundant before I was made redundant myself.

29:02I knew that was the score of it. I had a meeting with a member of staff and I purposely scheduled it towards the end of the day because I also had a personal relationship with this member of staff prior to us joining the organization. So I had a feeling that it might require a little bit more time. So I scheduled it towards the end of the day for an hour knowing that if it took the extra half hour, that's kind of getting towards, you know, end of play anyway. So we'll take that time if we need it. um there was no incivility in my team but within the organization there was absolutely aspects of incivility because there was a lot of pressure on the organization there was a lot of change there was uncertainty ambiguity you know it's that classic kind of threat state people kind of withdraw and and these dots of you know these sorts of incivil behavior start so i got a phone call from um a manager on another contract who basically said to me I've had this customer issue I need you to deal with it now and this was mid-meeting and I could see my phone flashing and the third time she called I was like I might need to answer this and it was after the allotted time so I was like I'm sorry I need to take this I'll be back um so yeah told this and I'm like I understand but you can see I'm in a meeting you can you know the process I'm going through this is hard this is emotional and I need to take the time to make sure that this conversation concludes in the most positive way possible no that's not acceptable that meeting was meant to finish 20 minutes ago I need to deal with this now I thought your team was all about customer service and there it is and there it is so not only is it unreasonable expectations a disregard or lack of empathy for the situation I'm currently dealing with and then throwing values back in my face to get what it is you want done.

30:52And it's that psychological, emotional manipulation that can turn up as a key red flag for incivility. This is something I think I see more frequently than I would like to admit. And now I'm wondering what drive, like what really drives this behavior? We had a conversation not long ago, a leadership team that I'm on separately from my role here and as a speaker. someone came to us and said, well, we'd like to, I'd like to talk. And I know that you're going to take this in well, because you care so much about this company and da da da da. Like there, there was a, you can't act any differently from how I expect you to act in response to my complaints right now, because I'm telling you that you care.

31:37And that, and that's underlining what my expectations are. Like I'm supposed to be allowed to whatever on you right now, and you're supposed to take it and do something with it because you care. And it's very sneaky. If you looked at it on a transcript, you might not know that that manipulation was happening. Yeah, it is subtle behavior. And that's why I was saying it. It's not always, you think about toxic work environments as being very explosive. They're often not. It's these little behavioral nudges that just undermine our work, the work that we find meaningful, that questions our values, that ask questions of us in terms of our integrity.

32:25Yeah. So the thing that I'm thinking of now is like generational mismatches, you know? So you have someone who, I'm a millennial, but I have a lot of Gen X sort of behaviors and I do a lot of things by myself. I'm hyper-independent. It's a trauma response. It's not great because I'm working on it, you know, but I am hyper independent. So I often have difficulty when people ask questions that I think that they should have the answers to already. Like, I told you that six times, Sandy, get your head out of your ass. Like, I, and I wonder with the generation changes, if there isn't some of that just because like, well, I didn't get everything handed to me, like, figure it out.

33:09I can imagine some of the older employees being frustrated that the new employees are constantly asking for information that they should know how to access and acting in an incivil way, not even thinking about it, just being like, dude, figure it out. like dismissive you know what kind of organizational fix sits behind allowing that to not be the case because on one hand like yeah I guess maybe you should help all the time but on the other hand if you've asked me six times like you're not doing your job it's a very good question I think generations are such an interesting area of conversation because they're not a very interesting area of psychological research because when we really drill down into it there's not really any difference between generations in terms of what we want from work and and how we want to to operate in it but it is a contextual difference and often a lot of that difference comes from how we were treated when we were younger and what always makes me smile is I look back through how youth was described throughout the the times you Yeah, Gen Z are obviously, you know, talked about in all sorts of ways.

34:29You know, they're entitled, they're not proactive, they're too needy, they set too hard boundaries. Millennials were snowflakes, the me, me, me generation. Gen X were slackers, boomers were rebels. And there's even, you know, even it was Aristotle talking about Greek youths and places where we're talking about how nobody wants to work anymore. Youth is disruptive. Youth questions what and why things are done. Youth wants to find a better way of doing things because why is it that we haven't found a better solution to this and we need that disruption in our organisations? So it's not necessary, I think, that Gen Z are wildly different to any other youth or generation.

35:13Of course, we have to kind of bring technology as a contextual factor into that, which is also going to cause some tension between Gen Z and millennials and older generations. But I think it really just comes down to what is our agreed consensus around how we manage young early career people in our organization. That doesn't necessarily have to be with age either. It could be somebody who's transitioned career and is in early career in their mid-40s. How do we deal with that? And that goes from, you know, really basic like onboarding. What does that look like training and development do they have a buddy in terms of a mentor in a more experienced role how do we how do we deal with things like problem solving and critical thinking yes we want to you're right we want to train people to think critically especially in an age of AI where so much of that is is not getting practiced as much so I think a lot of it is is being overly formal and having these conversations as a team what does this look like when is enough enough if six requests and you're still not getting it you know then you're missing something out in terms of your obligation and your accountability in terms of the team and what it achieves and it is really having these conversations and whether you do it formally I always want people to do it formally and put it into this team charter and what those behaviors look like and and that's when values can be really powerful because we're talking about the behaviors that underpin those values and it just then serves as a framework to have conversations when things are slipping and tension is there, you know, it gives us that vocabulary and it gives us those expectations or shared and agreed expectations to have these conversations.

36:49So, yeah, these tensions, of course, they exist. But I think it's lazy to just put it down to generational differences. Well, then the question is, I guess, and maybe this is too nuanced to no, but what is the difference between friction and incivility then? Like, when does it become a toxic factor? And is it so like, if you look at long term chronic stress in the body, so I'm back to the brain, I'm back to neuroscience, I'm back to the body. If you look at long term stress, so say you have someone that had a lot of adverse childhood experiences, their brain develops differently. They're more susceptible to stress later in life just because they are.