LIVE! Can Cultural Intelligence actually improve performance at work? With Polly Collingridge and Bernadette Thompson OBE

23:45Polly Collingridge:I always use my mom as an example. My mom is of a certain vintage where she will ask the doctor lots and lots of questions and go off on a tangent. Now, if you have a 10 minute rule to see every patient, you just cut my mom off. you know and she could be a bit disgruntled whereas if you're seeing someone like me that fears everything needle blood everything I want to go into the GP and literally rush out as fast as I can and so you could think about how much time do I need to give to these two patients to make sure that they have a good experience so it's really thinking about what we need to do as individuals to adapt and flex and during the training you know I always say to people you we hear a lot of adaptation and flex being mentioned because that's just what it is.

24:30Polly Collingridge:All of us doing our bit to get the best out of our interactions. And how do people respond to the training? Because from what you were saying there, and what you mentioned in terms of the psychometric that sits behind CQ, is there quite a lot, an element of self-awareness building in this training and in education, both about how we perceive the world and others perceive it? And how do people react to that? Is there any discomfort? There is. Do you want to see you leaning in? No, no, no. Feel free.

25:04Bernadette Thompson OBE:No, I think that there is sometimes discomfort. Not everybody wants that level of self-analysis. So just talking more generally, I think some people do shy away from that. But one thing that I think is a great opener, and I'm sure Bernie is going to talk about this, is the behavioral preferences, because that's less, so there's no right or wrong with the behavioral preferences. If you're direct or indirect, if you're expressive or not expressive, the whole thing is presented as it's okay. And that for a leader might be uncomfortable. If you're convinced that direct communication is the way, and it might be in a multinational organization because ultimately you probably need to bring your more indirect communicators into a more direct way of communicating.

25:42Bernadette Thompson OBE:But you have to bring everyone together to do that. But if you're convinced that your way is the only way, you're going to have to do some slightly uncomfortable rethinking. but with the behavioral preferences even those who don't love self-analysis are generally quite curious to see where they show up and how they compare to their team members so that's what I was going to say but I know at BART they kind of literally put up their behavioral preference maps kind of in the staff room or I don't know you tell the story.

26:07Polly Collingridge:Yeah absolutely and you could use the behavioral preferences in different ways but I'll go back to I'll use my it's always safe to use yourself as an example, right? And so I went through the training, even though, you know, I was leading the program. And I remember when I saw my kind of psychometrics around the four capabilities, I'm like, you don't say me, of course not. But you know, when you reflect on it, it was strategy. It's really thinking about, I'm going to meet this group of people, what do I need to do? Really reflecting on that before you jump into the meeting or you jump into the situation.

26:43Polly Collingridge:And, you know, that was my lowest capability. So I had to work on that. I had to take it on the chin. You know, I can work on that. But when we talk about behavioral preferences, one of the things that my teams and I think since then I've had two, three teams. And we've gone through the psychometrics and we've got a team sheet on the wall around behavioral preferences. and I'll use one as an example. No matter how I try, and I'm looking at my hands now, no matter how I try, I am very expressive. There is no way I can communicate with my hands not moving. It just won't happen. My hand, my head, my eyes, you know, I could maybe for two seconds try and concentrate and not be expressive, but, you know, I'll give it away.

27:32Polly Collingridge:I just can't, that's me. that's how I am so I'm very expressive. Now if I'm in a bad mood and someone has wound me up or they're the particular point that I need to make it won't change how I my hand might just be a bit more animated my head might just twist a bit more and my eyes might widen. Now there are people who will go through the same situation and they're non-expressive and very calmly, well, I get this said to me a few times, calm down, mum, my daughter, who's non-expressive. It's all right, mum. You can calm down. It's all right. Calm down. And so think about how those two different people receive their interaction with people.

28:18Polly Collingridge:The non-expressive person can be perceived as they don't care. They're very chilled about this. You don't really care about what's going on. Whereas someone like me, I will be, I could be perceived as, oh my God, she's a bit of an alarmist. Calm down. It's not that. And so, but it's understanding the two different perspectives. There is no right and there is no wrong. What do you need to do to adapt and flex? And I specifically talk to leaders. If you are a leader and you've got someone like me in my team, in your team, and I come to you with, oh my God, oh my God, something happened. Just try and match my energy.

28:57Polly Collingridge:Just turn it up a bit, you know, just so I actually feel that you care about what I'm talking about. And vice versa. Someone like me might need to chill out so that I'm not frightening the whole, you know. And so it's, for me, it's when you see that plotting against the 10 behavioral preferences, you stand back as a team and we say, right, with regards to our stakeholders, you know, what do we need to do? Because if all of us are on this side and we're interacting with people that might be outside of our behavioral preference, what are we intentionally doing to adapt and flex? That's one thing.

29:41Polly Collingridge:The second thing is around within the team. You can see maybe on one side, the team is very expressive and you might see a few people who are not expressive. How are we interacting with them? How are we making them feel? So with these kind of discussions, especially in team that are really valuable, because then there is no right, as Polly said, and there is no wrong, their behavioural preferences. but how do we get the best of our communication with people and it's just so important to understand that better and it's an interesting framework to have these conversations around isn't it I totally relate to what you were saying there Bernadette because I'm I'm quite reflective but when I'm excited about something I will talk a lot quicker I'll use my hands more and my voice might get a bit louder and that was interpreted in my earlier career before I could explain myself as me being emotional to a way that it was almost weaponized at times when there were large you know workplace decisions to be made I mean Polly is that is that something that people in the training also share with you maybe a darker side of people I guess lacking the cultural intelligence to understand how you know team members might be expressing themselves and what

30:55Bernadette Thompson OBE:that means yeah I think that comes all the time it's these kinds of little micro details that you hear that people share about, oh, we're more expressive, they're less expressive. And the problems exist in the assumptions that each kind of camp are making about each other. As Bernie said, you know, basically the concept of what's polite or what's rude is cultural. The concept of what's respectful and not respectful is cultural. So, you know, if you're really expressive and whatever, you might seem unprofessional to some people. You might seem, as you said, overly emotional or not serious or not, you know, not able to handle something or whatever.

31:33Bernadette Thompson OBE:So someone who's not, who's less expressive. So yeah, I think it's really common that we have these differences. And I think it's really interesting because we use these nouns all the time in the workplace, like respect and trust. And certainly the NHS, I know this notion of what's polite or not, you know, the respect one's interesting, just the very, like it can be even nonverbal, it can be eye contact so around us you know some for us in our culture in western culture certainly in the uk making eye contact feels like the very least you can do when somebody's talking to you about something important um but uh somebody literally the other day and i won't reveal who was talking to me about the fact that someone they just employed just wouldn't look them in the eye when they were talking and they just couldn't tell if they were really listening or not and it was this person was from a different culture to the to the manager and it was just so obvious to me that that was it could also be that they're neurodivergent in fact that was also one other thing and I suppose this is maybe the point at which to say it's complicated always you are not just one it's not just one cultural problem because culture is so intersectional you might be from a different you know might be not from the UK and you might be neurodivergent and they may you know from a different generation and all of these things are coming into the mix so having the CQ framework and the behavioral preferences is like a first step to just kind of maybe it's this maybe it's that um it's just a way like a simple sort of way through what can

33:03Polly Collingridge:feel like a real minefield I guess I want to talk to you both about leadership buying but before we do let's go to Georgia associate producer I'm seeing comments and questions coming in Georgia

33:15Bernadette Thompson OBE:what what people say yeah yeah so we've got uh Danny Wareham um asking what are the first steps you would recommend starting with when addressing a low CQ environment?

33:29Polly Collingridge:It's a great question. Great question. Do you want to start, Polly? Yeah, I think, well, for me, it would be asking questions and asking a lot of questions.

33:42Bernadette Thompson OBE:This is obviously if it's like a prospective client coming to me, just trying to find out what's going on.

33:49Bernadette Thompson OBE:I don't know Bernie whether you want to sort of come in with an NHS angle of sort of being on the other side

33:56Polly Collingridge:So I think for me it's really important to understand what is going on in the organisation and you can see that from the data, data is king you know qualitative and quantitative not taking the numbers in isolation the voices of the people in the organisation explain what the numbers are saying And so you could look at, for example, representation data. Okay, you look across the board. I use London, for example. The population of women in London is, let's use the NHS, 75 % of the workforce in the NHS are women. Oh, when you look at the top table, oh, hang on a minute. There are not many women who are directed.

34:34Polly Collingridge:What's going on there? Okay, let's look at the staff survey. Let's look at the gender pay gap. Let's look at the lived experiences of women. And so you kind of look at bullying and harassment. Okay, let's look at the data. Who's complaining about this? Is it the people in the more junior grade or is it upward bullying? Is it senior people? And so you look at the data. you get staff networks are brilliant people to give that qualitative analysis as well. So it's bringing all that together and then recognising where are the hotspots? Where should I start with first? Because sometimes what I've found in organisations, an organisation that will remain nameless that I worked with many years ago, there was an issue of bullying and harassment.

35:22Polly Collingridge:And they just said, well, we'll just do a whole organisation. approach. And that can't work. Where are the hotspots? And when we broke it down out of the 14 directorates, there were seven divisions who really, you know, they were outliers. So why are we going to waste our energy on focusing on seven who are doing really well? So let's look at those seven forensically and let's look at what the issues are. And so from my perspective, first step, quantitative qualitative data understanding what is going on what are people experiencing and talking to sometimes you know you would have um shall i call them listening circles speaking to the most senior leaders speaking to the most junior person i remember working with in another organization um and um one of the leaders leaders said well i don't recognize this I said, well, therein lies the problem.

36:15Polly Collingridge:People within your organization are saying this is their lived experience navigating your organization and you don't recognize it. The popular quote that says the culture of an organization is set by the worst behavior a leader is willing to tolerate. And so leaders, any leaders listening to me on the call, I always say, you know, it starts with leaders. you are the people that set the direction and you are the people that can turn that ship around and so it's really making sure as well uh danny that that top table has a focus how do they show up what is their behavior how are they making sure that the how are they creating that sense of belonging is there a say do gap they say one thing but they berate people in the corridor so I'm a bit harsher on leaders because they have the power to turn that ship around and start to make sure things matter.

37:13Polly Collingridge:You know, that's saying again that what gets measured gets done. If it's important to the leader, usually in the hierarchy, it will be important to everyone else. So, yeah, those are my reflections. Quantitative and qualitative data burned out. You're talking my language and I love it. I know you're talking Danny's too. And then there's leaders. Oh, chef's kiss. Georgia I think we've got a question about implementation in in large organizations

37:37Bernadette Thompson OBE:absolutely yeah Bev Blacklock sorry um yeah so once the initial training momentum slows down how do you prevent CQ from fading into the background what structural or systemic changes did you have to bake into the trusts daily operating to ensure that shared language stays alive 12 months later.

38:00Polly Collingridge:Come on, Bev. Come on, Bev. I mean, I want to give Bev a hand clap. She's really putting us through our paces today. But you're absolutely right, Bev, because you see what gets done in organisations is, well, we've done the training, tick, and that's it. We've done the EDI training. We've done cultural intelligence, you know, and that's it. But it can't be because if we're just training people without testing how they're applying it is so important. And so that's why I mentioned looking at the employee cycle, make sure it's baked into the employee cycle, make sure it's baked into recruitment, make sure it's baked into the organizational processes.

38:42Polly Collingridge:One of the things that we did at BART, I introduced newsletters. What is the capability of the month? engaging with people who have done the training come and tell us what have you been up to we had shall I call them podcasts not as suave as this one NHS style podcast webinars on teams let's just call it that let's just call it what it is right where we brought people together to say well how have you been applying and it was across different specialties so hearing from the nurse hearing from the midwife, AHB, doctor, consultant, and so on and so forth. We also had reviews. So when we launched it, we were quite intentional.

39:25We had the launch day to remind people on this date,

39:29Polly Collingridge:we launched it. One year on, we came together to say, how is it working? What have we achieved? And one of the, I think the best things that we did, well, certainly that I did, I did I wish I had done more at the time created worked with an organization um communication practice I think it was called Cyrus Lowe just find Cyrus Lowe but we worked with them it was absolutely brilliant and so we we developed um some bite-sized scenarios it was fantastic recruitment and it was having a one-to-one doing it the really rough way the on cultural intelligence way and then again during the recording the right way and using that as a tool bringing leaders together to say let's watch this video only about five minute clip tell me what seeing.

40:26Polly Collingridge:I mean, it's timeless. Whenever we do this, and I did it a few weeks ago in my health unit, I mean, the line managers, just, you know, the commentary that was coming through that, oh, gosh, no, you wouldn't do that. And that's CQ in action. So it's really, what can you do with an organization to bring it to bear? And one of the things also, making sure that the chief executive, So at the time, we had Alwyn as the chief executive at BART, and then it moved to Shane DeGaris. And whenever we called an event around cultural intelligence, Shane was always there. He is always there. And he's not one of those chief executives that would just pop in for two seconds, say a few words and run off.

41:09Polly Collingridge:No, he will stay. And so that sent the signal that it matters. And so, yeah, those are the kind of things that we did. It's tough in a massive organization. It really is. It's so much easier in smaller organizations because you can kind of reap the benefits almost immediately. But I always say cultural change takes time. And so for those senior leaders, chief execs, permsecs, some that I've worked with, they say, well, can you come in and do this? And in 12 months time, I'm like, whoa, slow down. It took you about 25, 30 years to get to this culture. is going to take more than one year to get you out of it.

41:47Polly Collingridge:And so what I always say to organizations, don't just become, oh, we're doing cultural intelligence today. We're doing, I know, you just pick so many different things and you don't sustain. What is important is doing one thing, focusing on the initiative five years down the line so you can see the outcome. I have a question for you, Polly, but before I go on to that, is there anything you'd want to add or comment on what Bernadette's just said?

42:17Bernadette Thompson OBE:Yeah, I completely agree with obviously with everything that she said. I think it's just how do you keep it sustainable? Having the leadership buy-in is absolutely critical. I know that was going to be your next question, Leanne, but that's just a key piece of the puzzle. So yeah, I think that's, there's other bits and pieces I could say, but I think they might come out. So go for your question, Al.

42:38Polly Collingridge:Well, it was about leadership buy-in. And I think this sounds like something that a senior leader goes, well, of course, I'm going to sign off on this because this sounds like the right thing to do. But does that mean that necessarily they are on board with this? Is it difficult to get people on board with this, Molly?

42:55Bernadette Thompson OBE:It's definitely difficult because people don't know what CQ is. We sort of started off talking about that. So I think that's a challenge. And I think they think, oh, it's just one other thing. Sort of some of the misconceptions are that it's just another thing. We've got to get our heads around like another initiative, another thing to tick, you know, another box to tick, another sort of inclusion initiative. Oh, we haven't got money for DEI right now. It's not the right climate. You know, all of that sort of a thing. That's the typical pushback. So for me, the challenge is to get them to understand that CQ is not just about DEI and the inclusion and belonging at the bedrock beneath all of the other sort of organizational development initiatives that Bernie's already been talking about, like talent retention and recruitment and onboarding and change management.

43:45Bernadette Thompson OBE:And, you know, what do you do when you've got to sort of bring, you know, merge two departments together or whatever else it is, you know, whether it's NHS or beyond that, there is so many reasons why CQ provides this kind of linking piece. So lots of what I see is often quite fragmented, different initiatives. So I would try and talk about that and talk about what's the cost or the risk of you not doing this. But in order to get there, they really have to understand, first of all, what CQ is. So that's the challenge for me. It's sort of there's an education piece before they realize that they've been sort of getting by without this thing.

44:23Bernadette Thompson OBE:But then the other challenge is that to do it and to feel the impact, as Bernie's been saying, you've got to do it properly. So there's a sort of leap of faith. And that's why I'm excited by the work with BARTs, because, you know, whatever it is now, four years on from when they first launched it, and still being in the sort of cash strapped situation that all NHS organisations are in right now, they still consider it a strategic priority, and they've understood that they're in it for the long haul. And that's the thing, I think you need to just be, yeah, keep at it and kind of keep the faith.

44:55Bernadette Thompson OBE:But you've also got to do all of these things to keep it alive. So it's sort of somewhat unsexy for this day and age. It's not a quick fix. It's not a silver bullet. One workshop isn't enough. It's much more. It's a longer process that's going to sometimes be a bit difficult at times, but it's worth it in the end. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Bernie.

45:20Polly Collingridge:well ben benedette before you do can i just ask you something quickly poly you mentioned there um the cost of not doing it the risk of not doing it is that something if someone was interested in in sort of getting dei more mainstream in organizations is there a particular cost you can actually identify saying is costing you this much per employee is that possible to do that

45:41Bernadette Thompson OBE:no i think that would be challenging but i think it's more about what are you what are you spending or what are you losing out on by having a less culturally intelligent organization than you could do? Like, what does it cost to replace an employee? You know, those costs are huge, I think. And I think that a lot of money is wasted on, you know, one of our facilitators in the NHS at a different trust now was talking about spending time using CQ in a formal grievance process, in a sort of formal kind of mediation process. And the outcome was that that employee didn't leave. So how can you weigh up the cost of, you know, the training that trained that facilitator who then spent five hours or whatever it was with these two people to then save that person, but that may have saved the company at least£30 ,000 or more depending on whatever they earned and however long it would take.

46:37Bernadette Thompson OBE:I was looking at some research earlier that shows that apparently the average is at least 28 weeks to get up to capacity and sort of, you know, from hiring someone new to them being sort of able to do their job. And yeah, so that's a long time. That's several months of really lost earnings. So if you kind of start looking at it like that, I think it is challenging to measure, you know, the exact ROI. And that's our other difficulty because CQ has been shown through all of the research to be related to lots of positive measurable outcomes like, you know, greater well-being and better decision making in the workplace and more effective leadership and more psychological safety and more innovation and all of these things that are in themselves measurable and also tied to sort of essentially more money on the bottom line.

47:32Bernadette Thompson OBE:But it's very difficult to directly relate CQ to that unless you are very, very intentional in how you measure your sort of training initiatives. So we can measure, obviously, development in individual CQ with our assessment. You know, you could take it at one point in an assessment and you can take it again several months down the line. And if you've seen interventions in the intervening period, you should see an increase in CQ. But that's not enough for necessarily for a board member or a chief exec to be convinced because they're like, okay, well, what do we do with that higher CQ? So then you've got to try and tie that to the outcomes that they want to see.

48:12Bernadette Thompson OBE:And you may see a staff survey kind of going in the right direction, you know, greater inclusion, greater belonging. BARTs are starting to see that. But it is very difficult to, unless you're actively measuring it in the right way, to attribute that directly to CQ initiatives, because there's always loads of other things going on as well. But they did do a bit of that at BARTs. And I know that Bernie did that, that they designed a survey to try and directly link, which people took straight after their training. And I think maybe again, some months later, like six months or a year later, potentially, where they could say, do you use your training in these?

48:46And that's how we got those sort of great statistics around

48:52Bernadette Thompson OBE:improved team dynamics and improved patient care. Because people were saying, I am using CQ, and I feel that it's improving my patient care. But that's the only way you can do it that I've come across. I don't know.

49:06Polly Collingridge:I'm going to come in on that point because I'll forget. So I always say there is a cost to the poor culture, full stop. There is a cost. I think it was Roger Klein and somebody else, you can Google it, listeners, who did a research, particularly in the NHS, what is the cost of the poor culture in the NHS? How much do you pay solicitors for tribunals? I'll just mention a particular case. Everyone knows that I usually cite this case. payout was£1 million. There was another case recently,£2.3 million payout to the employee. So there is a cost to a poor culture. Let's just look at the solicitor's bill.

49:48Polly Collingridge:Let's just look at the damages and the payouts to the... So let's even forget the time that we take when we go, you know, we go through one hearing and let's just say how much we've paid out. What is the sickness bill? How much are we, you know, from an NHS perspective, we are focusing on trying to remove our bank and agency spend. And what does that mean? When somebody's off sick in a frontline clinical role, that clinic needs to go on because we're here to save lives and take care of people. So we need to book a bank shift to get someone to fill in for that sickness. Now, there's the sickness that is linked to somebody genuinely, you know, doing some extreme sports falling over and that's it, they break whatever.

50:31Polly Collingridge:But there is sickness linked to stress, which is linked to employee relations. There is sickness linked to bullying. There is sickness linked to poor mental health as a result of a poor culture. And you can calculate that. And so from my perspective, the focus needs to be on how do we keep a good culture in any organization? Because I always say to them, and I'm speaking to a bunch of finance colleagues tomorrow. And my focus is going to be finance colleagues. Whilst we are talking about finance, can we remember? Can we remind people? Because the voice of finance is usually quite strong across the board table.

51:11There is a cost to a poor culture.

51:14Polly Collingridge:And now, are we saying that CQ is a silver bullet? Absolutely not. Whatever you're doing with your DEI training, you do that and CQ. You need to make sure that you throw the kitchen sink at having a great culture. Because there is nothing like, you know, no matter what business you're in, whether the NHS, whether the private sector, at this point, it's not done by all robots. It is done by people. And so how do you make sure your people are having the best lived experience? Because that translates into their productivity. Now, I can be at work, but if I'm having a horrible time, if my environment is not great, if I feel that people are not treating me in the right way, I'll be at work.

52:03Polly Collingridge:But I'm not productive. I'll be giving 25 % of my. And so that's what we need to think about when we're trying to say, well, can we afford this? OK, go do the maths. when you're paying a 1 million for one person you will know that cq affording it rolling it out it's probably a quite a cheap option in the grand scheme of things i'll come up my soapbox now no i'll come up i'll come up to you because i'm with you it's going through the data isn't it you know we know we know so much about the the links between employee engagement and well-being in in absenteeism and productivity and even profitability and growth rates of companies but it's following the data through which takes takes a little bit of time and maybe a little bit more more convincing what I'm really really enjoying about CQ the more I'm learning about it is how behavior-based it is and my beef with a lot of psychometrics that are done in large organizations is they're very much putting people in a book in a box you know you're a blue you're an INTP, whatever.

53:06Polly Collingridge:Whereas this sounds like we're talking about behavior, we're talking about behavior modification, behavior change, and how we can show up better, differently for our colleagues, for the benefit of the team, the organization, our customers, our patients. For a lot of people watching this, the NHS scale is not their reality. They might be running a team of 20 or 100 or 200. So Polly, I'm intrigued. What does CQ, how can it help a small organization? What does that approach actually look like at that size?

53:36Bernadette Thompson OBE:So yeah I mean with a small organization we probably wouldn't necessarily go down the route of certifying individual trainers within that organization. That's how we worked with BART and it's how we usually work with NHS Trust because essentially it's the cheapest way the most sustainable way and in a large organization but with a smaller one I mean it would depend on budget it always depends on budget of course but if they had the money for it, I would love to do some perhaps individual session with the leader or the small leadership team and maybe do some coaching and just sort of get them on board with it.

54:12Bernadette Thompson OBE:Because whether it's a small organization or a large one, I still think you need to focus on the leaders. But then you could also, depending on psychological safety levels, do some training perhaps all together as a group. If it's literally only 20 people, you could definitely do that. If better to keep the leaders out of it for a bit, you could do that too. But I think that that it's all about every time we deal with any client, however large or small the organization is, it's about really trying to get those challenges out of them and trying to tailor the training to be specific to whatever those problems are.

54:45Bernadette Thompson OBE:So maybe we would deal with only a few of the behavioral preferences, the ones that seem to be causing them the most problems, and we would make it a really practical session focused on strategy building, an awareness piece about what those behavioral preferences are and then a strategy session around what problems have they got how could they use the um you know the stress how can they come up with strategies to bridge the differences and preferences that they've got going on but then if at all possible for me what's key uh the same as in a large organization is the follow-up piece because that whole thing of just a one workshop it just it's just it sets you up for i worry it sets you up for not failure but just limited impact because all you're really going to get with one workshop is awareness, probably, but you really want to make sure that you can kind of hold people accountable, which always sounds like a sort of strict teacher, but more just that they are actually using it, you know, that they actually understand how to apply these strategies and get something out of them.

55:42Bernadette Thompson OBE:And even if it's leaving them with one or two things, people always want the quick takeaways, but literally everyone's so time poor that you have to just give them some idea of what they might do different in their day, the following day, you know, to sort of keep this alive. So some sort of follow up session doesn't need to be as long as the initial sessions, but a kind of a check in. Peer coaching can be really successful as well. Just having them sort of having one person talk about some of the challenges they've had, trying to implement some of the strategies and having people listen and then having a structured session where they take it in turns.

56:13Bernadette Thompson OBE:That can be incredibly useful for people. And that can happen, you know, a month after the training or three months after the training. But the point is they all know it's coming and they can sort of help them focus their minds a little bit. Otherwise, I worry that you go in and it's nice and people come away with an understanding that, oh, right, OK, I understand a bit more how culture influences me and therefore other people. But then it all kind of fades away and the day job gets in the way. So it's about how do you, whether it's a small organization or a large one, it's like how do you keep it going, keep it alive?

56:45Polly Collingridge:And Bernie, you were saying about how in a large organization like the NHS changes is sort of small organization. You can see those benefits almost immediately. If a leader were to investors, as Polly just described in CQ, what are they likely to see in their organisation with their people, with their performance over, say, three to six months? I think what they would certainly what they would see is the drive, people's drive certainly go up because people would understand what their role is in getting better outcomes. It's either to just point the finger at someone else. So I think they'll begin to see that energy from people around really trying to be intentional and making sure that their interactions with people from different, whether different demographics, whether it's, you know, different age, but whatever the difference is, you will see a bit more, you know, a bit more intention in that.

57:42Polly Collingridge:And I think you'll begin to see the experience change, whether that's for the customer, whether that's for the patient, whether that's for the team themselves, you'll see happier teams. And I think I would probably say 12 months, I think three to six months is quite sure. I would say 12 months from a reality point of view, because that way you can really kind of capture before and after and really looking at this. So the survey, a survey was, as I said, you need the two. What are people's lived experiences? As a result of doing the training, what are you doing differently? So really working with, we worked with an organization when I was at Barx to develop a questionnaire that asked the right questions to get the right answers, if that makes sense.

58:31Polly Collingridge:But certainly you would see conflict diminish because everyone is trying to think about, I'm going into a conversation with Laura. What do I need to know about Laura? What do I need to know about what she's working on? What do I need to know about the pressures of Laura, that Laura is encountering, before I go into it? How do I need to open my meeting with Laura? So that as soon as I open my mouth, I've already set the tone and already in a good mood. I always talk about this story about the guy that was going to do a deal with someone from another country. And there was someone who was from that country they wanted to do a deal with.

59:08And they were listening to, gosh, I don't think they know what they're doing.

59:12Polly Collingridge:So this guy just said, look, I hear you want to do business. I'm from that part of the world. If you do this, that and the other, you've almost, you don't need to say anything. The deal is done. And what this leader said, you know what? You actually go down and receive the people from this country since you know. And the deal was almost done at the welcome. Everything else, you know. And so with what kind of intel do you need to know to get that outcome? And so from my perspective, I would say about 12 months in a small organization. But you would see that level of conflict diminish. You know, if we're talking about if it's depending on the company, you should start seeing more deals going through.

59:53Polly Collingridge:You should start seeing better outcomes. You know,

59:59Polly Collingridge:feedback from customers to say, you know, I had an interaction with someone in your team. that was brilliant and that's what you would expect to see um yeah over six to twelve months to be fair fabulous georgia anything um anything we've not covered already in the comments or no i had a question though if that's okay um does cultural intelligence become more important as

1:00:29Bernadette Thompson OBE:organizations move to a more hybrid way of working or AI enabled workplace? I would say so definitely I think it's really hard to read people when you're only working online or if sometimes you've got some people who are all together in person and then a few people sort of beaming in remotely I think that creates a strange dynamic so we often work more in the corporate sector with people who are in sort of hybrid teams and are struggling, particularly ones who are maybe have expanded rapidly overseas and they've got like different time zones to contend with. And the fact that not everyone, they have this problem in the NHS too, is a native English speaker.

1:01:09Bernadette Thompson OBE:They have a lot of problems there. So all of these things, I think, can be magnified in a remote setting. And AI is really interesting because there's some really new research that's come out that's around the benefits of what they call cognitive offloading to AI and how that can be sort of moderated by how culturally intelligent an organization is. So in other words, a culturally intelligent organization will benefit from, will know how to kind of reap the rewards of the so-called cognitive offloading, whereas a less culturally intelligent organization could end up suffering by just not knowing how to do that properly and not knowing how to embed it into their sort of processes and stuff so I mean I would say that there's so much it feels to me like it's a really difficult time to be talking about CQ because we're so time poor and we're very distracted with you know we're forced to kind of make quick judgments everyone's terrified of being cancelled you know kind of immediately and yet now more than ever we need to slow down and think about the value of relationships and suspending our judgment and you know as Bernie he was talking about how the deal was done as soon as they sent this different person to, you know, from the same culture.

1:02:21Bernadette Thompson OBE:And I think it's, we forget that all of the systems and processes that an organization is kind of made up of, but behind those processes are just people and their relationships with each other.

1:02:37Polly Collingridge:Interesting. Yeah. Thank you.

1:02:42Polly Collingridge:Fabulous. Fabulous. thank you danny for your comment there lee any closing thoughts i mean i have i have so many so many thoughts and i think this is such an interesting area to to dive into and i think what i would encourage leaders because i know that a 12 month wait to see some tangible commercial outcomes might sound like a really long time but as polly and bernadette have said you're going to start to notice those incremental changes almost immediately and investing in in particularly managers and team leaders being able to have these conversations with people that mindfulness that awareness you are going to see almost instantaneously in terms of how your team interacts and behaves in the organization so I think anything around behavioral change modification and building awareness is well worth investing in and I love what you said as well being that this is this is one solution in you know in a big canvas of many many other solutions big tapestry so um so yeah I think it's definitely worth looking into before we go I we always like to ask the question the same way if you could leave every leader here watching today with just one single truth about what it actually takes to build a workplace where people feel that they belong and they perform at their best what would it be Polly can I start with you I think it would be to kind of honestly and

1:04:05Bernadette Thompson OBE:sincerely believe in the power of authentic kind of connections and kind of walk the talk on that you know we always there are so many companies that they've all got their sort of values proclaimed on the website or whatever but i think it's to have the most senior people people at the top who have the power to influence others to really believe that yeah connecting authentically with people um will make a difference and that creating a company that everyone feels they can belong and contribute to will eventually impact the bottom line for sure. I love that.

1:04:40Polly Collingridge:And Bernie? I'm just going to go rogue and just randomly say what I've got in my mind. And so when we talk about leadership, I always default to some work, some research that Deloitte did about the six signature traits of inclusive leaders. And one of those signature traits is cultural intelligence. being a culturally intelligent leader and so being a leader you need you know go and look at that model six signature traits you might be ticking all the other ones but from a cultural intelligence lens have you built that trait have you built that particular trait that they've made reference to so yeah brilliant self-awareness is always worth investigating i i say thank you so much we could easily talk for another another hour and i think we're going to have to do a follow-up on on this and culturally intelligent to dive into it again i feel like we just scraped the surface but thank you both so much for joining us if you are watching this on the recording please feel free to still put in any comments or questions below uh us and the guests do tend to pop back to the event and have a look and see what the conversation is where the conversation has been headed so please do leave any questions we'll do our best to get to them um anything else from you al georgia any other business just to say that sorry excuse me not spoken for a while just to say that they be on the uh on the stream on the podcast stream um i think on friday as well uh so uh everyone's going to get the chance to have a little listen to it um i think that's it really we've got another linkedin live coming up soon so if you've liked this go and make sure you follow leanne on linkedin because uh she makes she's the one who organizes all these because i don't know how to do it uh I believe that is true, but I've learned, I am contrite and I have learned my ways.

1:06:31Polly Collingridge:No, that's it. Thank you all so much for listening. And yeah, join us again very, very soon. Thanks very much. And go follow Polly, go and follow Bernadette on LinkedIn. Fabulous guests. All the links in the show notes if you are listening on there. Thank you.

1:06:48Polly Collingridge:That's it for this one. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to connect with any of our panelists you'll find all their details in the show notes if you'd like to be a future guest on one of our linkedin lives we would love to hear from you drop us an email at podcast at truthliesandwork.com and if you enjoyed this please do leave a review it genuinely helps more people find the show see you soon