The Wellbeing Hour #45 Leadership: Collaboration is Key

Text transcript

Amy: This is the Headtorch podcast. Welcome. Our mission, to create a mentally healthy culture at work. Keeping the conversations alive, our podcasts bring you great presenters and stimulating discussion on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace.

Enjoy.

Welcome everybody. It is fantastic to have you here with us today for the Wellbeing Hour. I am Amy McDonald.

Angus: I am Angus Robinson, and we will introduce our guest, Dr. Sarah Jackson, Chief Medical Officer of EDF in a few moments. While you are settling in, we are recording this and you will be able to follow this up on the usual podcast channels or Spotify or whatever you listen to. The Wellbeing Hour’s a really important extension of our work.

At Headtorch we’re all about creating healthy cultures in the workplace. I’ll be back in a few moments time, to field some of your questions to our guest.

Amy: We’re really looking forward to hearing those questions, aren’t we? And your thoughts indeed, so do throw those into the chat and we will refer back to them later on in this session when I’m going to be asking Dr. Sarah Jackson questions like, what did you learn about leadership styles in the Army and what is collaborative leadership?

What does it mean? And I’m be asking culturally what’s needed to shift all leaders to Lead with Wellbeing in Mind? Today’s session folks, as you are aware, is called Leadership Collaboration is Key. And this is the question here that Dr. Sarah Jackson is posing to us all today. Psychological safety is key to collaborative leadership.

How do you ensure your team gets it? So we’re going to put that into the chat and please do refer back to that as we go through the session. So as we are in conversation please just do add your thoughts to that key question that Sarah’s posed.

So let me introduce Dr. Sarah Jackson, Chief Medical Officer at EDF UK. We were delighted to meet Sarahfor the first time it was I think Sarah last year wasn’t it? We met when we began working with all the leaders at EDF. Now Dr. Sarah Jackson is a Consultant in Occupational Medicine.

She joined the British Army whilst at medical school and initially trained as a GP before completing her training in occupational medicine. Her work has ensured that she was awarded a fellowship with the faculty of Occupational Medicine. In the Army she served in Canada, Bosnia, Iraq, and Cyprus, and she left the army in the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

She joined EDF back in 2018 and was appointed the Chief Medical Officer there in 2022. She chairs a couple of organisations, this is the first one. It is the Nuclear Industry and Ionising Radiation Occupational Physicians Forum, and she also chairs the Health and Technical Committee for the Energy Institute.

Sarah, it’s absolutely fantastic that you are here with us today. We’re really privileged to have you for this hour, we know how precious your time is. Please do introduce yourself to everybody here today with your mystery object.

Sarah: Hi everyone. As you’ve heard, I’m Sarah Jackson and I’m hoping that I’m going to get you guessing a little bit with my mystery object and hopefully you will see that it’s relevant to what we’re going to be talking about today. And I do caveat this entire hour with the fact that I am definitely not an expert in terms of, there’s things I’ve learned along the way, but am I getting it right all the time? Probably not. Feel free to challenge or question me. So my mystery object, for those of you who know me, I bet you’ll get this quite quickly. So it’s a kind of cylindrical object. It has something that detaches and it can do weird things like fold out into a different kind of arrangement. And hopefully those of you who have seen these things before will recognise this as what we call a selfie stick.

So this is an object that lets you take pictures of you and your friends or your family, in my case, to be able to take pictures of your loved ones or your social groups. And I suppose the reason that I have chosen this object is because what we’re talking about today, reflection is quite key.

And one of the things what I found when my children were little is I had tons of pictures of my husband and the kids in various poses, but I had practically no pictures of me with any of them, because I was always the one taking the pictures. And so I bought myself a selfie stick and for the first time ever I had pictures of myself with my family and poses of what we were doing, and it made me really look on what we were doing slightly differently, because suddenly I was in that picture. I wasn’t taking the picture, I wasn’t remembering what I was seeing. I was in that picture and part of that narrative. And I reflected that actually when my children grew up, from the moment that that I bought that selfie stick,

because the family don’t really like it, they moan when I get the selfie stick out, but from the moment that I bought that selfie stick, my kids’ childhoods changed or their memories of their childhood changed in that I was suddenly in the picture. And I suppose I find that useful because sometimes I think of my selfie stick when we’re doing something difficult at work and I think, right, if I got my selfie stick out and took a picture of what was going on right now, how would I feel about that if I was looking at it right now?

How would I feel about it in six months? How would I feel about it in a year? And I find it quite a useful analogy to help me do some self-reflection about where I’m at, where the team is at.

Amy: Wow, how powerful. Thank you for sharing that. So Sarah, is that then about, you know, in psychological safety, we talk about being on the dance floor or being on the balcony in order to think of that bigger picture. Is that where the whole use of the selfie and thinking about the selfie within the workplace environment, where that comes from?

Sarah: Yeah, I think it’s about taking yourself out of the here and now and the weeds of whatever you are in and trying to take that bigger picture of what does this mean? How’s it feeling for everybody else? Are people coming with me on this journey or have I actually gone ahead and done things on my own?

And we talked a little bit, didn’t we, about army leadership? We mentioned army leadership, and of course the leadership that you need in battle is very different from your day-to-day leadership. And I think, collaborative leadership in battle whilst important in the planning phase, actually in the heat of battle, you need somebody who’ll direct as to what’s going to happen otherwise the confusion is significant. But actually, for day-to-day leadership, that’s not always that helpful, and that ability to take yourself out of the picture and look at the bigger picture, how is that feeling for everybody else? Do they see what I see? Can they see the plan that I can see in my head or have I not explained it properly? Are they not with me on that journey?

It’s really important. That self-reflection for me is is really important. Partially because I run away with myself, and I’m a super geek when it comes to occupational health. So when we are talking about occupational health and things we could do, preventative health, it’s very easy for me to run away with myself and potentially not think about either my team or the organisation or are they in the same phase of change that I’m in? Because it’s not always the case.

Amy: Mm. Yeah. That importance to take a moment, to pause, not rushing in to make those decisions, but actually just taking a step back is really powerful. Thank you so much. Can I just remind you folks that the chat is there, so if you have any thoughts or comments about what we are talking about, do add it in there, and do respond to Sarah’s question around how we ensure psychological safety within our teams, and we’ll get those responses shortly.

Let’s stop the clock. Let’s do what we’ve just been talking about and whisk ourselves back to Sarah quite a few years ago. When do you think you first realised, or noticed I suppose,the impact and the importance of leadership style?

Sarah: I think when you come through the British Army training, you talk a lot about leadership, and a lot about leadership style. Things like, lead by example, demonstrate that you can do every job in your team so that people know that you understand what’s happening to them.

However, I think the leadership styles you can choose in the military are relatively limited, although I think that is changing. But it, in my day, it was very authoritarian and the hierarchy was there and that was the way that leadership worked. I think probably as I became more senior within the military,

and I remember one really significant conversation actually with my Mum, where it was on the occasion of me promoting to Lieutenant Colonel, and my Mum said to me, well of course you’ve got to act like a colonel now, you you can’t be Sarah, you’ve got to act like a colonel. And I thought, gosh, I don’t know if I can do that,

it’s not really me. And I did try it for a little while and it was very wooden and it didn’t feel right for me. And then I read a really, really good book, called Lean In by a lady called Sheryl Sandberg, who was quite senior I think in Facebook. And she wrote a whole chapter on authentic leadership and being yourself and how that was more impactful than trying to put on a front, because people would always know that was

a front, and I think that was the first time that I thought, I’m going to give it a go. I’m just going to be me and see how it goes. And actually I found that was far more effective because people knew that when you were trying to be more formal, that wasn’t really who you were and they couldn’t really see what made you tick and they couldn’t really see what you were struggling with,

and actually that was so much easier than trying to do what I’d been doing before. And I think that was the real window for me of actually I don’t have to do it the way that I’ve traditionally been taught. I’m not on a horse. I don’t have to charge into battle.

I can actually take the time to be me, show the good, the bad, the ugly, but also then start to try and get this collaboration, because actually when you get more minds thinking about something, you get a much better outcome, you get a much better answer. And somebody will keep you in check to say, I think you’re going a bit off piste here,

or, this isn’t achievable in the timeframe. Whereas, if you are the person charging into battle, no one’s going to challenge you, no one’s going to tell you you’re getting it wrong, and you will leave people behind.

Amy: It’s interesting isn’t it? Because I think that what we pick up sometimes is that there’s a almost a call, if you like, amongst some leaders to think, just like your Mum said, they need to be a certain way. And there’s almost a fear isn’t there around actually showing up as their true self? Showing vulnerability, saying, “Hey, I made a mistake”. There seems to be a fear of doing that. What’s your thinking around that?

Sarah: I think when you are a more junior leader, I think that fear is really significant. And when I look around, thinking about the case work we do as well and the managers that we work with, actually it’s the younger or more inexperienced managers who feel greater pressure to be a certain way.

And quite often that can mean that they’re not potentially behaving in the way they normally would. Or a real example is we all know as managers you keep an eye on your team and when they’re taking annual leave, but I suppose as you get more experienced you realise there are obviously IT systems in place that keep checks and balances on that.

And apart from de-conflicting to make sure your team can function when you’re on annual leave, actually you don’t need to physically count up people’s days or watch when they’re taking them etc. And it’s that kind of approach that as you become more experienced and less worried about kind of things that you think you’re supposed to do, you realise actually that’s not where the true leadership and management comes,

and you don’t need to do that unless there’s a problem. And so it’s that change of allowing yourself to be yourself, but the more inexperienced you are, I think it’s harder it is to know where that line lies. And we often reflect, that certainly, although we’re trying to change it, no one really tells you how to manage people.

You’re told what functions you must perform as a manager, but you’re not really told how do you do that. How do you have the conversation about performance? How do you have the conversation about sickness absence? How do you have the conversation about business changes? And I suppose this is what we’re trying to in EDF change the dial on, is to give people some of those skills to have some of those conversations and to know how to broach them in a human way, rather than in the I’m a Lieutenant Colonel, I need to be wooden way.

Amy: Yeah. So there’s a need for that upskill, isn’t there? There’s a need for that education I suppose. You’ve talked already a little bit about sort of the differences in a way between army leadership style, workplace leadership style. What can workplace leadership style learn from Army leadership style?

Sarah: There are times when you need to take charge and make decisions I think.

Obviously times of crisis are a key one, so you know, if there is an accident or something, a road traffic accident and you stop. It doesn’t help if you stand around going, oh, should we resuscitate that patient?

Somebody needs to go, right, let’s go this, let’s do this, let’s control the traffic, etc. But I also thinkone of the negatives about collaborative leadership is it would be very easy to never make a decision if the group aren’t on or able to come to a consensus,

and at some point someone needs to make that decision. So I think clear direction, what we would call in military terms, command and control in a particular event, so that it’s very clear what’s happening and for good, bad, or ugly, at least you’ve got a plan. I think they’re the things that you can definitely learn from the military leadership style.

Amy: Yeah, so more in in a sense when it’s a crisis, and being more directive within that framework.

Sarah: So I always said that military leadership was, when we talk about military leadership, sometimes it’s quite different from what the civilian environment would call leadership and I think that’s changed. I think the military have now encompassed more strategic leadership and things like that.

But certainly as a junior officer, it all focuses on that command and control aspect.

Amy: Yes, because there’s that interesting bit of research wasn’t there, would you like to share some of that about the research that happenedout in Afghanistan around leadership style.

Sarah: So we often talk about the importance as a leader of knowing your people. And I think whatever your leadership style, I think that’s hugely important. And if you speak to people, what they really want is a leader who they understand. They know that they know them. They know that they know what makes them tick and they care about them.

That’s really important. But actually, there was a really good piece of research conducted when I was in the military out in Afghanistan. And they sent a couple of psychiatrists to the patrol bases in Afghanistan. These are the very far forward small bases where they were seeing,regular contact, i.e. fighting with the enemy on a daily basis, a very high stress, very high pressure, quite scary.

And they sent the psychiatrists out and the psychiatrists undertook a number of questionnaires, and a couple of the questionnaires were looking for symptoms of common mental health disorders, so symptoms of anxiety, symptoms of depression. And at the same time, they administered a questionnaire about the leadership.

And the questions were along the lines of, do you think your leader knows you? Do they know about your family? Do they care about you? How much do they know the people they look after? Do you think they have your best interests at heart? And what they found was the leaders who knew their soldiers and the soldiers felt that they did have their best interests at heart and they knew about their families and that they were bothered about them.

Those soldiers had much lower instance of symptoms of common mental health disorders compared to the soldiers who believed that their command didn’t really know them and didn’t really particularly care about them. Which is interesting because actually part of the way the army used to teach, is you’re all a number and we’re all expendable,

and that’s the nature of battle. But actually, in the lived experience of battle and the stress and the fear, actually knowing your leadership and them knowing you is absolutely crucial. At the very base level, taking the time to get to know your team is so important.

Amy: Yeah, definitely. It’s such a great piece of research isn’t it? Let’s think about collaborative leadership a bit more then. I suppose it’s helpful, isn’t it, to have a kind of definition. How would you define that?

Sarah: I think it’s leadership whereby you are not the final answer and you can take critique and thoughts from your team and incorporate that into whatever your plans are going to be. Where you can tackle difficult problems as a group and share them so that people are aware and you can then work through them and make sure that you are getting a balanced view on whatever the answers to those problems are.

So again, it’s not necessarily about the team making all the decisions, but it’s about having a team that can inform the leader in an unfiltered way, so the good, bad, and the ugly, so that you can make a decision that is more informed than if it were just you on your own.

Amy: Yeah. And how does that tie into leading with Wellbeing in Mind?

Sarah: So I think again, if you have collaborative leadership, then you get lots of different views, which means that the people that those decisions are going to be affecting are often better represented. So it also means that people feel they have a voice, and one of the things we’ve learned is that, and I think I can see some of it in the chat, is that not everybody has a loud voice.

I have quite a loud voice, so I never really struggle to speak up, but actually not all of your team will be like that. And actually the people who are quite often have some really, really insightful thoughts, so your reflectors, your deep thinkers, but they will take time to come up with those thoughts and they’ll also potentially struggle to put them forward.

So I think having a forum whereby you recognise whose voice is louder and whose voice is quieter. And you give those quiet people a chance to speak up, whether that’s in person, in a meeting if they feel comfortable to do so, or you float an idea and you come back to it so they’ve got time to reflect and come back to you either in writing or verbally if they’re happy to do so.

I think that’s really, really impactful. And again, because in the military I think we all, especially as officers, had quite loud voices, that’s what you were selected for, but it did mean sometimes that actually we potentially didn’t hear the voice in the back going, hold a sec, that’s going to lead to a disaster.

And again, if you look at safety events and things like that, quite often there was somebody who spotted that it was a problem, but didn’t feel that they could speak up or didn’t feel they could challenge. And I think when you think about collaborative leadership, you absolutely want an environment where everybody can challenge because one time in ten that challenge is going to lead to something significant being prevented.

Amy: Yeah, so it’s about encouraging voice all the time. We talk about Nancy Klein’s time to think, and that space where people basically have uninterrupted time so everybody knows there’s going to be uninterrupted time. And also, the importance of the leader going last actually.

Sarah: That’s definitely what I found. It kills me though. It absolutely kills me again you have to recognise your strengths and weaknesses, but you’ll often see if I’m trying to be quiet, I will quite often sit with my hand on my mouth just to remind myself not to interrupt and not to get carried away.

And again, when you’re really passionate, obviously for me it’s Occ. Health, but when you’re really passionate, it’s very easy to want to interject, and what about this and what about that? But actually again, for your quieter spoken people or your reflective thinkers, that’s not really helpful.

And one of the things that I often think about is my medical training has really helped with this. So when we were training to be GPs, we did a lot on consultation styles. So how you approach a person. So for example, some patients like you to treat them like an adult. So you have an adult-adult relationship and you explain the pros and cons of any treatment plan and you decide together.

Some people really don’t want that. Some people want a parent child relationship where the doctor is the parent and they say look, this is what we’re going to do and the child is just grateful that they’ve got a plan because for whatever reason they don’t feel able to be part of that planning.

And there’s varying other models as well, but what that taught me was that when you’re speaking to somebody, if it’s not going well, you try a different tack. You try a different approach, a different model if you like to see if you can get them to open up and you can really find out what’s going on.

And I find that really useful as a manager because everybody’s different and everybody responds to something different.

And I think the more we can teach people different ways of approaching things, and if that relationship’s not going so well or that conversation’s not going so well, what can you do about it?

How can you come in from a different angle or explain? And I think those things are really, really useful. And again, thinking about collaborative leadership, sometimes if you’ve got a difficult organisational problem, I might have a couple of approaches to how to tackle that, but quite often if you can get your team talking, you can often get a different approach that you hadn’t thought of, that actually for that organisation or that problem is going to be much, much more effective.

Amy: Yeah, absolutely. It’s about giving people voice, it’s about encouraging that and well, together with that comes that sense of belonging, doesn’t it? That sense of being a part of the team. It’s almost like giving autonomy isn’t it to everybody? Why do you think people find that difficult when actually everything tells us that when you do it, you get so much richer and better results from it.

Sarah: I think it can result in decision paralysis. I think obviously you can give everyone autonomy, but if you dwell on that too long and you don’t make a decision and you don’t take things forward,you won’t be effective. So it’s being able to do that and then still go, okay, I’ve heard everything this is what we’re going to do. But I also think one of the things that makes autonomy difficult is there will be people in the group who think very differently to you. So I’m a real get on and do it, a bit, probably like the military horse charging ahead.

Let’s do it, this is exciting, I can’t wait, I’m so excited. And there will be people in our teams who say, well, ooh, I think that’s a really bad idea, and that’s not what I want to hear when I want to charge forward on my horse. And so actually it takes real training to stop and open your ears,

and instead of hearing a no, which is what it’s easy to hear, and then you switch off, because you don’t want to hear the no because you’ve got a plan. It’s hearing why? And really digging into that and then thinking, could that cause me a problem? How can I mitigate that? But I think it can be challenging because you can’t spend too long doing that if it’s a time critical decision, you have to do that in in a kind of proportional way, if that makes sense.

Amy: Yeah, it’s about having that curiosity, isn’t it, and getting behind and underneath the meaning of what somebody’s saying,within that. Absolutely. It’s still common, isn’t it, to have leaders brought into a role because they’re good at their job, rather than because they have the qualities of a collaborative leader, as a leader who will lead with wellbeing in mind. How can we, as a society, as a culture, how can we shift that?

Sarah: I think especially say for example, technical roles in the NHS is a perfect example, where we train as doctors and then suddenly you’re a senior consultant, so you’re in a management role. You’ve never really had any management training apart from the experience you’ve had as you’ve grown up through that organisation.

And the challenge with that is if you’ve got bad habits in that organisation, they just get repeated in senior leadership roles because that’s what they know. That’s the only training that they’ve had. So I think taking management and leadership seriously and teaching people real skills to help them manage and lead is really, really key,

but it’s not necessarily just knowing your kind of leadership type it is those really softer skills of how to talk to people, how to manage difficult conversations. How to manage tricky issues in the workplace, like performance, like attendance, like significant problems.

How can you support people? It is all of those things, and I think if you look at all the technical courses, for example, if I look at medicine in the UK, there isn’t really any space in the curriculum still for management or leadership. And I think the technical kind of areas are cottoning onto that,

so certainly in the medical space we now have colleges of leadership and management that you do after you’ve qualified, before you do some of those management roles. But it’s taken a long time and I’m not sure all the kind of technical areas have that yet. But I think if we are going to promote technical people to management roles, which we absolutely need sometimes, because in order to lead a technical team, you need to understand what they’re doing.

But we need to upskill people with those specialist skills to how to manage people. And again, when I reflect on very technical roles, like some of the engineering roles where a lot of the training is to do with mathematics or models or computers and design. Quite often they really haven’t had any training in how to talk to people at all, and if you suddenly find yourself in a management role, that could be really frightening.

Amy: Yeah, definitely. Can you give us an example of when you have personally felt that sense of collaborative leadership, whether it’s come from you with your team or you within another team.

Sarah: So a recent one with me and my team actually was, we recently, last summer as you know because you came, ran an occupational health conference. And it was the first time we’d ever done it and we opened it up to the entire team. So normally up until then, we’d run meetings for the occupational health nurses,

the specialist nurses who are embedded in the teams around EDF, but not for the wider teams and not for the non-specialist nurses, not for our occupational health technicians or our occ. health administrators. And this time we opened it up to everybody, which makes it harder to cater for because, not everybody’s clinical, so you have to be a bit careful about the kind of clinical sessions you hold otherwise you’ll lose the admin people, and equally not everybody is administrators, so don’t understand all all the admin procedures. And I was really nervous about doing this

I thought it was going to be really hard to meet everybody’s needs. And it involved quite a few people traveling for the conference. And my team very much persuaded me that it was the right thing to do and that we could make it work and that we would get the balance right.

And it was a huge success, it was absolutely phenomenal. But, if I’d been left on my own to make the decision I think I’d have wimped out because I wasn’t sure how we would make that work for everybody. But what it did do is lead to a lot of people coming together who’d never met.Cross collaboration, again, a very different view of the world because you’re getting your nonclinical teams thinking about it.

It was a real success, but left to myself, I probably would’ve wimped out.

Amy: So what you’d done then, it sounds like, was really given out to your team. How can we make this work? What ideas have you got and lots of listening I’m guessing?

Sarah: Lots of innovative ideas. So we held our in-house award ceremony, which again I was thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I don’t know how do we get people to vote? Will we get enough people voting? But again, the team ran it and it was great because it acknowledged people that their peers, it was mostly peer voted, so people that their peers had voted for as being really amazing performers in what they do.

And again that recognition is so important isn’t it in a collaborative space? It’s great that people see me as the Chief Medical Officer and that’s what they think about when they think about O.H. But actually that’s not really O.H. because I’m not delivering the bulk of it, it’s the wider team.

And so trying to make sure that people understand that wider team and the value of it, because again I wouldn’t be successful if my team weren’t amazing. Your team is what makes the service not me.

Amy: And it’s a few months on since that, isn’t it? What have you felt in terms of the impact of that? EDF’s across the country, isn’t it, right across the UK? As you say, people came from all over the place and it was people meeting people that hadn’t before.

What are you feeling as an impact from that at this stage?

Sarah: I think we came together and felt more like a team because we’re so geographically dispersed, but also we have different business units. So occupational health can be very different in EDF depending on who you’re looking after, and what the work is like.

And I think it brought everybody together, but also had lots of knowledge sharing. So lots of people saying, oh, this is how we do it, this is what we’ve learned. And again, that collaborative view that we are one O.H. team and actuallythere are things we can learn from the different business areas in EDF if, for example, we all gather data in the same way or we all execute our processes in the same way, we can learn what works and what doesn’t work and what’s most effective.

So that collaborative approach was huge, and we’d also just implemented a new medical IT system and anyone who’s implemented new IT systems know however good it is, it’s painful. And so it almost felt a bit like therapy for that because we got together and people were able to say, gosh, that was really tough.

We’ve come through the other side, but they could see the value of this system, which would gather data in one way for us as a collaborative team.

Amy: Fantastic, and so brilliant in this day and age that we are living in. The world is changing it feels like, and there’s almost a drive,to discount that need, to encourage a sense of belonging within the workplace, and encourage that inclusive environment.

How do we answer to that?

Sarah: I think again one of the areas that we need to work on particularly is things like what is the evidence base behind wellbeing? So we talk about wellbeing, but we all know that encompasses a huge range of things from things with really very little evidence base that look and feel great when you do it, but probably don’t last, to actually more significant interventions like manager training, where actually there is a good amount of evidence about return on investment and about changing the cultural dial. I think we need to look at demonstrating those kind of benefits in terms of, we know for example, that if you feel like your work has a purpose and you’re clear on what the purpose of that work is, you will not only feel happier at work, but you are more likely to be productive at work and you are more likely to stay in that workplace.

And so understanding these kind of drivers of what make people not only enjoy work and feel well at work, but we know that feeling well at work and feeling that you want to stay at work links to productivity and the success of that company overall. But we need more evidence in that area to really demonstrate the value of these things to people. Because I think inherently we know it’s useful, we know it’s important, but it’s still very difficult to say for every pound you spend on a collaborative conference, what’s the return on investment in terms of productivity or output for the business. And I think the more evidence we have in that area, and the more we practice evidence-based wellbeing and move away from the things that perhaps don’t have an evidence base, I think the greater the kind of impact will be.

The other thing is we’ve been helping recently with the Charlie Mayfield report. So you may have seenlast week there was a big launch within government of this report that’s looking at what’s happening to the working age population. So it’s called the Keep Britain Working Review, if you haven’t read it, it’s worth a read.

And it’s looking at the fact that we always knew in the workspace we would struggle with an aging workforce. And we’ve all seen that haven’t we? Ill health retirement doesn’t really exist in the same way it existed, 20, 30 years ago. People are going to have to work till they’re much older because of the pensions.

But also what we hadn’t expected was this really significant epidemic of mental ill health in younger people. And the fact that so many younger people are what we call NEETs. So not in education or training and not looking for work, and trying to understand this population and what’s happened there.

And I thinkthe Mayfield Review really makes it clear that actually fear is a huge driver of that. People aren’t telling their workplace that they have a medical problem or they have a disability because they’re terrified that they will lose their jobs. And inherent in all of that is psychological safety.

If you have an employer that you think will look after you and will treat you right, you will disclose and then the employer can help you. But it also said actually, it’s going to put more pressure on employers and employees to be an active part of that workplace health picture if you like.

So it talks about having a healthy workplace from start to finish. So looking through the entire employee cycle, from pre joining to then all of the stages of going through that career, but it also says that employers should have a workplace health provision. They should be thinking about how to help people with medical problems or with disabilities to get into work and to stay in work. But it also says that employees need to think about their responsibilities, and if you are unwell, there is an expectation that if you’re in receipt of sick pay, for example, that you participate in rehabilitation and try and get better.

So I think it’s a really important kind of line in the sand in terms of what we need to do in setting out roadmap for how to move forward. But at the heart of that is psychological safety and managers being able to have those conversations with people and understand, that actually even if somebody has a disability that means there’s a bit of their job that they’re not able to do, that actually, again what we know is those people often will be super hardworking, super loyal because they understand there’s a bit of their job that they’re not able to do, and there’s so much value in that group of workers that we really need to appreciate.

Amy: Yeah, absolutely. When we create that inclusivity, then everybody benefits from all the qualities and the skills and the talents that, that, each one of us, each one of us can bring. Absolutely brilliant Sarah.

Angus, where are you? Let’s have a , sift through the chat.

I’ve been so engrossed in the conversation haven’t seen anything at all.

Angus: There are a ton of questions and comments. A lot on authenticity and being vulnerable as well. There’s a really good one here from Brian, and he does say this is not his experience at EDF, but he said it’s unhelpful for wellbeing when a leader thinks and says they’re open to listen, but the real lived experience is, they are not. Challenging these behaviours is usually very, very difficult.

So what would you say to that, Sarah?

Sarah: I think this is about the selfie stick, isn’t it? This is about we’ve got to teach people to be able to look openly at what they’re good at and what they’re not good at. And interestingly, I had a great example of this in that I was managing a case where the manager really struggled to talk openly.

They just weren’t comfortable with it, it wasn’t the way they did things. They did things by written communication and again, when we talk about neurodiversity, for example, this individual had autism, andautistic people don’t necessarily find those conversations that easy, and find it very difficult to listen because they don’t necessarily hear the nuances of feeling and the empathy doesn’t play out in the same way for somebody with autism.

And so what this individual had done is recognised that he knew that wasn’t his forte, and so he’d asked another leader, another manager at the same level to come and help with a situation for him to help him translate what his employee was feeling and what the employee needed.

And I thought that was really strong because whilst he didn’t have those skills, he recognised he didn’t have those skills and he recognised he struggled to listen.And it meant that actually the outcome of that was really good because he brought in somebody else to help. So it’s not always about, you have to be able to do everything yourself, but it is about, you have to know what your strengths and weaknesses are.

The other thing we see is when the leader’s not listening. Quite often it might be because the leader of themselves are overwhelmed. And when you are feeling overwhelmed yourself, it’s very difficult to hear somebody saying, you can’t do that, or I’m not doing that, or I’m falling over because you are falling over.

So the thought of someone else falling over, you just can’t even countenance it. And again, if you are able to get that selfie stick up, but go, gosh, I’m falling over, you can then do something about it and ask for help and not necessarily pass on those negative experiences then to the employees that you look after.

And I think, again, going back to the Mayfield Review, they talk about these cultural issues and the fact that we have to try and identify them and walk up to them if there are problems. We have to be able to walk up to them, but not necessarily in a disciplinary way. If a leader’s not doing something, instead of getting cross with them and saying, well you are failing because you’re not listening, it’s about why aren’t you listening? What are you feeling? And trying to work out is it training? Is it actually there’s a neurodiversity present, which means they struggle to deal with that? Is it actually, they just don’t see it at all? In which case can you get them to hold up a selfie stick and learn to look at themselves in that way?

And again, when I go back to that conversation with my Mum about being a Lieutenant Colonel, if I had done what my Mum suggested and kept that up, I wouldn’t have been able to reflect because I’d have been reflecting on something that I’d created. Soyou can’t really reflect if you’re not being yourself, because you don’t know what you’re reflecting on.

So again, are we putting people into these environments? Are they feeling that they have to put on a persona that then doesn’t react in the way that they might react as a human being? And can you teach people to take off that persona and actually become themselves and then think, actually, how would I want to be treated?

How would I want to know about it? And I think Brian mentions whistle blowing. Whistle blowing is really last ditch resort, isn’t it? That’s when something’s really bad and it’s almost irretrievable. But actually the ideal is that you can get that leader to see that what they’re doing isn’t being helpful, because then you’ve got a leader that’s been educated, but also a relationship that can grow.

Angus: Yeah. Yeah. And EDF are putting a significant investment into this programme, Leading with Wellbeing in Mind, andthere’s great reasons for doing that and great feedback and whatever. Why do you think other organisations don’t do that when it’s so obvious having psychological safety at the heart of things?

Sarah: I think, when you look at, say for example, the Thriving at Work Report, which was a report written by Stevenson and Johnson They were looking at , the burden of mental ill health in the workplace, and what they found is what they found that it was a huge cost to UK businesses, but not necessarily in sickness absence. They found that it was present in lack of productivity, but most significantly in presenteeism.

And I think they probably over costed presenteeism, which isone of the challenges. But mental health costs the industries a lot of money. Not just because people are off work, but in loss of relationships and safety risks etc. and I think one of the challenges of that, if you read that Stevenson Johnson report, they get one of the big kind of accountant firms to look at return on investment.

It’s very clear from that report that management training is a clear return on investment. It’s one of the things that’s very clear. But what it doesn’t say is what does that management training look like? And I think that’s what a lot of people are struggling with is, what do we do? What is going to be impactful?

And really when we are looking at the success of manager training, and we’ve talked about this quite a bit, you’re not just looking at, did the training tick the boxes in terms of the knowledge, skills and attitude deficit that you’ve identified as an organisation, but it’s wider than that.

Did it change the culture? Did it get people to the point where they didn’t have to lead with a persona? Did it get people to the point where they can put their hand up and say, I got that wrong, I’m really sorry and know that the team will receive that well and support them? And vice versa, if the team member puts their hand up, got it wrong, will the business support them?

So I think it is about no one’s really sure what that manager training looks like, and I think where we need to get to in the evidence base is to demonstrate what that manager training looks like. And again, like we’ve spoken about before, it’s probably not a one hit wonder.

There’s probably a basic level where you learn some of these abilities to have difficult conversations. You know how to be yourself in the workplace, how to deal with challenges, but it probably then needs to increment, doesn’t it, to things like unconscious bias. So if somebody joins the team and they’re called Francesca and you had a

girl called Francesca who bullied you at school, are you inherently finding Francesca difficult because they’ve got the same name as the kid who bullied you at school? We all have this unconscious bias within ourselves, but especially when you’re a manager and a leader, you have to know that you’ve got it and then tackle it rather than give it a stiff ignoring.

Also things like how do you improve equality and diversity in your team? When again, we know that you have a tendency to select people like yourself. I like high energy people who talk all the time because that’s exciting, and we can have a real conversation, but actually that’s not necessarily what I need because I need somebody going, Sarah, stop talking,

and you haven’t thought about that. And so how do you teach yourself to recognise the things that you don’t have in your team and recruit the diversity that you need to make sure that you are getting that balanced view of the world? So, really trying to hone down what that manager training is.

But I think the evidence is there for return on investment, but we need that evidence base to grow so that organisations who don’t have a me, who reads the research can go, okay, we know this works. This is what we’re going to do.

Angus: Great. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe one more point, from Jim here. He’s saying that psychological safety should be there irrespective of if the leader is around or not.

Sarah: Completely. And it needs to be there at every level of your team doesn’t it? Because what you find with psychological safety, if you lose it, the whole team loses it

because everybody gets paranoid and shuts down. And the other thing to say about psychological safety, my experience is I think you are weird If you have a team that’s always got perfect psychological safety. I think it goes through peaks and troughs, and recognising when you’re at a peak or a trough is really important. But it’s not something that’s always a hundred percent because things happen and people get a bit wobbly and that’s okay and you have to get through those times, but recognising that you want to get back to that point where the team are really comfortable with each other.

And it is about that bit of I’ve got your back, isn’t it? It’s a bit about, actually whatever comes, I’ll be honest with you, there won’t be any surprises. We’ve got each other’s backs in terms of what we think and being able to be open with each other at any level.

Angus: Great. Thank you. Thank you to everybody who put comments and questions in there. I’m sorry we didn’t get to them all.

Amy: Yeah, it’s very rich, very rich inputs. Thank you so much. Sarah, let’s hear some of your top tips then. We’ll just go through them one by one as they come up. So we have, take time to reflect on where you are and the team dynamics and what they need. You’ve spoken a bit about that already in terms of the selfie stick, What else would you like to add?

Sarah: I think for me, I think when I give myself time, I can reflect, and I can pull myself out of where I am at the moment, what’s going on and really think about it. The key bit in this sentence for me is time. Time is what stops you reflecting often. If you’re able to reflect and you are not too bad at reflecting,

the big barrier is time. Do you give yourself time to stop, step out of where you are at at the moment and think where are we? What’s happening? But also, I might be thinking about I need to present to my manager and to the business and what’s happening here? But thinking about different people in the team and where they’re at and what they’re dealing with and how that feels and what they need. And again, you need time to do that. You can’t just bounce out of where you are at and what you’re thinking, into right, where’s my person at? What else is going on in their lives?

What else do they need? So for me the crucial thing is time. And Friday afternoons are my best time. So we talk a bit about stress bucket. I use the stress bucket all the time. Friday afternoon is my stress bucket time. Where am I at? And is that impacting anybody else? And then it’s, where’s the team at and how are they doing?

Because usually I say the traffic dies down on a Friday, and you can get that head space to think about, right where is everyone at?

Amy: Yeah, I suppose it’s finding where it’s working for you, isn’t it? Where you can fit things in, even it’s just a few minutes sometimes can be super helpful, can’t it? Just to go, where am I? Okay. And and then on. Great. So the next point, create a shared vision and objectives. Be bold and incorporate your teams’ ideas.

Sarah: So again, I think quite often we have business plans but actually that might not encompass all of it. This is about where do you want to be? What kind of team do you want to be? What does the business need? So what is our vision? You know, where are we going? What does that look like and how are we going to get there? What the objectives to achieve that? And I think sharing that is really important because again, you might not be able to do it. Some of the objectives might not work. And I think sometimes leaders feel that they need to keep that close to their chest in case it doesn’t work, or in case somebody doesn’t like it. But I think sharing that is absolutely key, because that is that psychological safety. This is what I’m thinking and then incorporating your team’s thoughts. Even like the conference if you’re nervous about it and you’re thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to make that work,

you know, incorporate it. Because look at that, that was a huge success and that wasn’t on me, that was on the team.

Amy: Fantastic. Be authentic.

Sarah: Be yourself. It’s very difficult to hide who you are. It’s very difficult to hide for me if I’m distracted or if I’m upset. And I think for me that if you hide it, it creates more barriers and you lose that psychological safety because people know you’re hiding something.

Be authentic. Be yourself and don’t be afraid to share the good, bad and the ugly. And again, if we think back to that study in Afghanistan, if my team are going to know that I know about them and I care about them and I know what’s going on in their lives, but they have to know that about me. You can’t share one way,

it has to come both ways. And that doesn’t mean to say you have to overshare. I know some people aren’t really comfortable sharing a huge amount in work, but I do think you have to lead by example. They have to know where you are at if they’re going to believe that you really want to know where they’re at.

Amy: Definitely. And next bullet is be vulnerable, discuss your own weaknesses and errors. that’s such a powerful, powerful thing to do, isn’t it?

Sarah: So I always remember when I was doing my GCSEs, my Dad told me that he’d failed his chemistry O level and not to worry. And it was so impactful because suddenly all that pressure went. And it was self-imposed pressure, it wasn’t my parents, but all that pressure went from, oh my gosh, what happens if this goes wrong?

To actually, someone I know love and respect got it wrong, and he is all right and he’s come out the other side. And I think you can’t expect your team to share their errors or weaknesses unless you do. And I think again that’s a very much lead by example thing. And it’s scary sharing when you’ve got something wrong.

Particularly if it’s a big plan or a big strategy that didn’t work out. But I think for me, once you do that, it’s almost like the floodgates open and people will share. Also, they have to know that you’ll treat that error or weakness in the spirit of what it’s meant in terms of most people do not go out to work to make an error.

So if you’ve made an error, it’s about understanding why, understanding what the drivers were, and trying to make sure that no one else can make that error because they learned from that the error itself.

Amy: Absolutely. And it ties back again to psychological safety, doesn’t it? If you’re being vulnerable, it enables other people also to be, as you’re walking the talk. Encourage all the team to take a seat at the table.

Sarah: So again, back to promoting to Lieutenant Colonel and,I was a doctor, I was in Army headquarters. Lieutenant Colonel’s a really low rank in Army headquarters sadly, and so when we had these big meetings with generals, I would always sit not at the table, but you know, the little row of seats outside of the table.

And I always thought, well, if they want me to sit at the table, they can call me forward. And you know that would be polite. And then I read this Sheryl Sandberg book and she’s got another chapter, I’m giving the book away here, but about take a seat at the table. And I thought, I’m going to try it.

And the first time I sat at the table, I had sweat dripping, I was absolutely terrified. I was waiting for the generals to say, oh, Jackson move. What are you doing? And people took what I said completely differently. I mean, I was treated completely differently from the minute I took a seat at the table than when I was seated in the back row.

And it really taught me a lesson that actually they can always tell you to move, but actually take a seat at the table. And so for me, it’s really important that the team all take a seat at the table and they feel that their voice is going to be heard, because it’ll be the quiet person who often comes up with something that you’d never thought of.

Amy: We’re getting lots of claps and love hearts for that one. Look at that, that’s brilliant. And I believe there’s one more. There we go. Try and make sure that you are always fair. Lovely.

Sarah: So this is the biggie, isn’t it? We talk about wellbeing andfor example, if somebody has some very specific needs such that youchange the way the team does everything to to manage that person with specific needs, the danger with that is that it’s not fair on everybody else, and you’ve over catered or you’ve gone too far.

And if you lose the fairness in your team, you lose everything. You know, if things don’t feel fair, if you don’t feel like you’ve been fair handed, you’ll completely lose the psychological safety. But fairness is difficult because, for example, if somebody’s not performing and they’re not carrying their weight within the team, it means that if you ignore it, you will lose psychological safety.

And so you have to tackle some things that perhaps are really difficult to tackle, but I think, and I’m not saying I always get this right, I think this is the hardest thing to do, but it is really important that you consider the needs of the team as well as the needs of the individuals. And sometimes that means difficult conversations, but if you’re not fair, you’ll lose everything.

Amy: Yeah. Right. Okay. Sarah, I’m going to ask you some rapid fire questions, and they require a rapid fire answer. Are you ready? Okay, here we go. Here we go, even. What does vulnerability mean to you?

Sarah: Vulnerability means showing the things you’re not so good at and showing what makes you upset. So showing the things that are much harder to share.

Amy: Great. What little thing do you notice, zoom in to celebrate every day?

Sarah: I think it’s really important to be grateful every day. I love the job that I do. I love where I live and, it’s those things about, the team, the enjoyment you get from your team. It’s really being grateful for the little things because it’s easy to see the big problems and not the little, wonderful things that you see when you open your eyes.

Amy: What message would you give your younger self?

Sarah: Be yourself.

Amy: Lovely.

Sarah: and not try and be someone else.

Amy: Sarah, you have been utterly magical. I’m going to pass you on now to the marvelous Angus to give a more formal thanks. Thank you.

Angus: Sarah, that was fantastic. Thank you very, very much. That was a wonderful Wellbeing Hour and we’ve heard about taking a seat at the table and being fair. Taking time. Thinking about, where am I? And also where are my team as well? Sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s been an hour of self-reflection, authenticity, and vulnerability.

So on behalf of everybody at Headtorch and on behalf of everybody who’s here and who will watch this at a later date as a podcast, thank you very, very much. It is a great pleasure and an honour to have you on the Wellbeing Hour. Thank you very much.

Sarah: Thanks guys. Thanks for having me.

Amy: Thank you so much.

Angus: Thank you. So we have coming up on the Wellbeing Hour, the next one is in January. It’s just coming up now. So it’s coming up in January and it is with Enoch Adeyemi and he’s founder and CEO of Black Professionals UK. 300 knocks and Standing Strong. So join us on 22nd of January. Keep an eye out for the link and you’ll be able to register for that.

We also have coming up in the Headtorch world we have some taster events. So we have fourth December, we are with the Center for Engineering Education and Development and Mitsubishi Electric. That is in Livingston in Scotland, so if anybody is round about there and you’d like to come along, please let us know.

We have another one on fourth February, which is going to be in Glasgow, again looking at Leading With my Wellbeing Lens. And then we are planning, we haven’t done it yet, so it’s to be confirmed, to have another taster event down in Harwell in Oxfordshire. So again, keep your eyes out for that and it’d be great to see you there.

Please also follow us on LinkedIn and Spotify, it does make a difference. We do appreciate it, and you’ll see these types of free events there. We’d love to hear from you. What are you doing in terms of psychological safety and creating that healthy culture in a workplace? Please get in touch with us, my contact details will come up in just one minute and get in touch with us and we would love to hear from you. Thank you again for joining us on the Wellbeing Hour, and that is it for now. Please have great days and we look forward to seeing you at the next one. Thank you very much.

Amy: Thankyou everybody.

Thank you. Great to see you all.

Amy: Thanks for listening to the Wellbeing Hour. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. These events take place regularly, so do join us for more. And if your organisation would like to develop a mentally healthy culture, we’d be happy to work with your senior team, people, managers, and frontline staff. Please get in touch at Headtorch dot org.

We look forward to hearing from you.