Do you want to know the quickest way to tell if you or the people around you are high achievers,
so high performers, people who you want to kind of take with you that will fly, you want to promote,
you want to give the pay rises to. There is a very quick principle that you can use to do a litmus
test on this, and it's called above the line thinking. Now, the people who sit above the line
are the people who take ownership, acceptance, and responsibility over their own shit. Essentially,
when things happen that are outside of our control, we decide to bring them internally and
say, what could I have done about this? The people who sit below the line, below the line being blame,
excuses and denial they will are people who it's not necessarily that they can't be high
performers, it's just that right now they won't be operating at that level because we naturally fall
into this like blame, excuses and denial zone. And in this episode, we're really going to explore
this concept of ownership. And how do we get people if they are in the blame, excuses and
denial? How do we coach them above it? Like how do we get them to take ownership and accountability
of their work? And likewise just for us as well. We're going to do some real personal reflection
on how we have to take control of our own shit in life. It's the only way we're going to achieve
what we want to achieve. So welcome to the boardroom. This is the podcast where we just open
the doors on all those conversations that happen at work that we so often think we shouldn't be a
part of, or we're not supposed to be a part of. So Gallup, who do all the big surveys for the
workplaces, recently dropped their study, which looked at the full recce of like 2025
businesses and how engaged people are at work. And for the second year in a row, employee engagement
has dropped. So it means that employees are just feeling more disengaged with work. They are just
backing out. They don't care as much as they used to about hitting targets, about new initiatives,
about giving their all at work. This is costing businesses a shit ton of money. It was estimated
something like $10 trillion for the US economy alone. That drop in engagement is going to cost
businesses across the US economy. So if you just think about your team, you may have a team of two.
You may have a team of 200. You may have a team of 200,000. If every single one of those employees
just drops their engagement by just a couple of percent, think about the day to day decisions that
people are making. But the most important part of this research for me was that managers are over
and over again, shown as the biggest lever as to whether or not your team will be engaged or not.
So, I mean, I knew that I could tell you that it seems obvious to me, but apparently they had to
spend millions of pounds doing this research to figure this out. It's not actually the company or
the SLT that will decide whether or not a team is engaged. It is their direct exact manager. And
if you just imagine like how much better, how much more efficient, how much more fulfilled and
challenged a team would feel if all of them had brilliant managers. So what we're going to do
throughout this episode is kind of move through. First of all, us taking accountability for
ourselves because we have to do that. Our team will only do as we do. They will not do as we say.
So we have to take accountability ourselves first, then all the way through to what if our team are
letting us down on deadlines, on targets? They just don't seem to care. We're going to go through that.
And exactly what I would do in that moment. In order to talk about ownership and accountability.
We have to first look at its worst enemy. Blame. Blame is ownerships. Worst enemy. Blame is
something happens. Maybe it's a client. Maybe it's a different team. Maybe it's the economy, the
weather. Something happens that it's completely outside of your control. And instead of thinking,
how do we take this on? How do we fix it together, we immediately go to blame and we say, oh, it was
them. And therefore I am not going to be part of the solution because I have outsourced the
problem and it is not my fault. And as you can probably feel, it's so much easier to do that. It
kind of takes it away from us. It means we don't have to find the solution. It's it's like
outsourcing the issue. It's saying, you know, I'm not going to take that on to something I'm going
to fix because I didn't break it in the first place, which arguably sometimes it's nicer for us
to do as managers. But the issue with that is when we move into a position of leadership, we no
longer can afford the luxury of blame. If you want to be a middle manager who kind of moves
information around, pushes information, does the reporting, you know, ticks the boxes, does the
project management, then fine. You can probably get away with blaming and gossiping and just moving
problems around. But if you truly want to become the leader and I know you do listen to this
because this is what you're listening. If you truly want to become the leader that just
achieves incredible things with their team, you know you have a great career that supports your
life and supports whatever kind of family you ever want to have in the future. Like, you need to
make sure that you are not falling back on and relying on blame. I'm going to give you an example
of something that happened to me this morning. So just before we started recording these podcast
episodes this morning at 10 a.m., I had a sales call at 9 a.m. and the sales call finished at
half nine. And then I had only 30 minutes to drive to the podcast studio. It's basically a 30 minute
drive. Like door to door. And I was a bit panicky. I was a bit rushed this morning, like, I'm going to
be late, but I need to do the sales call. I got t shirt to come here separately. I was going to give
her a lift. And so this sales call was kind of like dictate in the morning. Okay, I got up early
to make sure I was prepared, blah blah blah. I get on this call 9 a.m., it gets to
901902903904 and I'm like, this person's not turning up. And I start to feel myself get a
little bit frustrated, like, you know, thinking I've moved my whole morning around. I'm letting other
people down for this call and this person hasn't turned up. And my brain obviously clicks into that
like egotistical mode of, well, they shouldn't do it and they shouldn't. You know, it's really
disrespectful of other people's time. And that's immediately where our brain goes because we try
to outsource the problem to someone else. It's their fault, it's their problem. And whilst of
course it is a little bit disrespectful to not turn up to that sales call, what I have to do have
to have to now do as a leader of a business, a leader of a team, someone who wants to grow and
develop, who wants to quite literally like revolutionise a whole industry. There is no way
that I can blame someone else for being in that situation. I have to take it back internally. So
after a couple of minutes of feeling sorry for myself, I had to look myself in the mirror and be
like, well, did you get double confirmation from this person that they were happy to turn up? No.
Did we, um, you know, send them an email a day before to get some more information to see if
they were excited to double check and confirm? No. Um, should we have even had the call at that point
in the first place? Like, should I have moved it to a different day as soon as they booked it in?
Because I knew I was going to be rushing and I knew it was going to move my morning around. And
when you start to do that, you really start to be able to actually solve problems. As the business
gets bigger and bigger, as we start growing and we have more of these sales calls and I, um, delegate
these sales calls to other people in the team, we need to have better process around them. We need
to have confirmation. We need to do information finding. We need to. Yeah. Just double confirm it.
And so for me this morning, even though it shouldn't have been there, it was a bit too
stressful. Now as a business owner, as a leader, I have been able to bring that back to me and go,
here's how I'm going to solve it forevermore. Here's how I'm going to make sure this doesn't
happen again. Systemise it, delegate it, move on. Big learning take in and big learning made. If I had
constantly and at not one point if I just constantly blamed and never brought that back in
like never internalised it and gone, how could I have been better in that situation? I would have
never made those learnings. And just think of the impact that that's going to have over the course
of the next few years. As I delegate sales calls to different people in my team, we might even end
up having a full sales team. You know, we've just launched clustered, which is our new piece of
software for managers to level everyone up. We're going to need to have like demo and sales calls
eventually for those. These learnings I have taken on this morning will be put on there. So can you
see now where I'm starting to say the difference between high performance, the difference between a
manager and a leader, the difference between people who will go far in their career, who will
level up, who will go, you know, go for gold. Do not allow blame to be an excuse. It's okay to have
a reason. What I mean by that is we don't have to be super hard on ourselves all the time. If it is
someone else's fault, it is a client, it is a different team member. It is a the economy or
whatever. It is okay to understand and respect that. That is a reason as to why this thing has
gone wrong. It's just that it can't stop there. We have to then go and what am I going to do about
it? There's a difference between a reason and an excuse. An excuse is the end of the road and
excuses. I'm not moving forward because it was the client's problem for not giving me this
information. A reason is the client didn't give them the information. Okay, now what are we going
to do about it? So do you see do you see where I'm getting at? And the reason we're talking about
engagement and ownership together here as two concepts that come together is I truly believe
the way you get a team engaged is to get them feeling a sense of ownership again. So for example,
if you are managing a team right now inside a business or a business owner, this can apply to
anyone. And you. What what excuses are you telling yourself for why your team aren't engaged? I could
probably list them out for you now. They're young, they're Gen Z, they don't care. They're not
passionate about what they do. They're lazy. These are all just excuses that you're telling yourself
as to why they don't care. So then answer me the question. When was the last time you pulled one of
them up? If you felt that they were being lazy, if you felt that they didn't care. When was the last
time you spoke to them about it and really dug into the issue as to why? Like, why do you not care
about this thing? Because I was under the impression that you did and therefore wanted to
give you those opportunities. But that's not now translating into your work and what I'm seeing. So
we need to have a conversation about what's going on here. Then also consequences. Consequences speak
volumes. And when we're talking about consequences, by the way, it's not just negative. It's not just,
you know, difficult conversation. Performance management consequences can also be positive to
recognition, praise, reward. If someone in your team is a high performer and is doing excellent things,
are they being properly rewarded? Are you publicly praising them? Are you recognising them? Are you
giving them the promotions, giving them development paths? Because when we start to go, oh,
my team are just lazy. The question we have to ask ourselves is, well, show me what consequences then
you've put in place over the last 6 to 12 months, have you fired someone? Because if people truly
are lazy, why are they getting away with it? Why are we still paying them a salary? And I would
guess the answer is probably oh, actually, they're not lazy. It's just that they've switched off
because, you know, they've been doing the same mundane task over and over again and no one's
asked them about it. And so take ownership first ourselves. Also, if you have a team that feels
really disengaged, that feels really switched off. A big question I like to ask myself here is, is it
the whole team or is it just one person? Like, is it the full team that's lazy, disengaged, switched
off, whatever? Or is it that you've got one, maybe two problem people inside that team that could
potentially be intoxicating? The rest? I always like to think of teams where you have, let's just
say, for example, you've got five people in a team, right? The top 20%. So in this case it'll be one
person. One person out of five will always be a high performer. And it could be to do with a
previous workplace. It could be to do with it. Had it been brought up, I don't know. It could be to do
with their academia or whatever. They will always be a high performer. You can put them in any given
scenario and they will give it 100%. They will try hard, they will support other people. They will
like be this real kind of leader. You've got that person. You will also have the other side of the
spectrum, which is potentially like the lower performing 20%, and which is one person in this
team. You've got one person. And when I think about kind of like difficult people, I think of blame. I
think of excuses, I think of they have just really switched off and they don't care. and we have
tried things to get them back, for example, difficult conversations, but it's just not worked.
The problem we have is not the top person. It's not the lower performing person. It's the three
people in the middle. It's the other 60% of people because those people are somewhere in the middle.
Meaning they can be influenced either way. So if and this is why we call people toxic. You know,
people love to throw around that phrase. Oh, this is a toxic person at work. Toxic. Toxic. The reason
we use that word toxic is because they intoxicate other people. So what we have to make sure of is
when we have this really low performer, if we tolerate them consistently, aka there's no
consequences, we aren't exiting them when things get really bad. We're not kind of pulling them
away from meetings where they might be making other people feel like crap. If we're not doing
any of that, we might as well expect the other 60% to follow suit. And therefore, when we say things
like my team or disengage my team are lazy, blah blah blah. Is it your team or is there someone
who is potentially pulling us back? And this is why when I go on and on and on on the
internet about having difficult conversations quick, it's so much easier to have a quick
conversation with someone. It's so much easier to just nip something in the bud over the course of
months, years, sometimes even decades, sometimes even decades, those people will very slowly
shrink everyone around them and pull them into their world. Because think of the day that you get
a budding new employee who is excited, buzzing to be part of your team. They come up with this new
initiative. You know, maybe we don't hit a target and they come and say, oh, I've got this idea of
how we can hit the target next month. I'm really excited by it. Then the employee who's been there
for three years, who's negative as hell, just sits there and goes, nah, we've tried that. Don't work.
Don't. You'll hear my Yorkshire now don't work. Um, you know, we've tried that before. Doesn't work,
blah blah blah. If you get that, what do you think that new employee is going to do? Exactly. Because
it's just human nature. Like we're going to shrink because we've essentially someone's made us feel
stupid. And so it's those people in the middle. That when we talk about dealing with difficult
employees, you have to remember it's not just them that they are affecting and it's you. It will be
you as well. Like you're being impacted by this difficult person. So what do we do about it? This
is a really great I love talking about this in terms of leadership. If you have someone in your
team who is consistently falling below the line aka constantly blaming other people, constantly
making excuses in denial, what do you do? So the very first thing is we
as their manager cannot allow them to perpetuate that blame. What I mean by that is, let's say
you're in a meeting and you've got to hit a target and you don't hit it and they come up with
the excuse. It was a different team and they come up with the excuse. Well, that other team over
there hasn't completed what they needed to, and therefore I couldn't do mine. What a lot of
managers would do in that moment is kind of go, yeah, I know it's annoying, isn't it? I get that
like, yeah, I'm gonna see what I can do about that. What we are going to do, because we are true
leaders is we are not going to allow that blame to be perpetuated. And so the way that I like to
respond to stuff like this is just with a question, just close it off with a question. So I
would say to that person, yeah, I appreciate that's a bit tough. So what did you do about it. And maybe
they say, oh I've been chasing them. I've been asking them for the information. They just hadn't
got it over okay. That's that's tough as well. So how do we make sure this doesn't happen again.
Because this has been happening now for for weeks. So how are we making sure this doesn't happen
again? Well, the other team just need to be better, right? Well they're not we know that now. It's been
a pattern for months. They're not going to be better. And we can't control that. We don't manage
that team. We're not part of that team. So I actually can't tell you that they're going to get
better. So what are you going to do about it? Like, what are we as a team going to do about this? I
truly think that questions are one of our biggest superpowers in leadership. Just ask more questions
than we ever answer. It also helps to like, coach and develop and pass the ownership back to that
person. If someone gives us an excuse, it's very, very easy for us to perpetuate that
blame. It's very easy for us to just be like, even if we don't sort of agree and acknowledge it.
Quite often what we'll do is something like, you know, if they come with an excuse to say, oh, I
couldn't hit the target because the client didn't, um, send me the information in time or the client
didn't get over the line. They promised me they would do what we then often do as managers is
jump in and try and fix that. So we'll say something along the lines of, well, next month I
want you to try calling these new clients. I want you to try posting on LinkedIn. I want you to try
sending these emails. We jump in and try to fix again. We're just perpetuating that people don't
have ownership. We're just basically saying, oh, fine, don't bother bringing me the answer again.
Then next month. Because you don't need to. Because I can fix it for you. I can, you know, bring it in,
out, bring it in back to me. And as you can see, over the course of the months, the course of the
years, we as managers will then complain about time, everything being back on our plate. People
are not doing things as well as we can do, not being able to delegate because we don't trust
people. Yet it all goes back to these small moments of people giving us blame, giving us
excuses, and we just lap it up. We just perpetuate it. We allow it to happen. Instead of pushing back
with questions and saying it's not to avoid the fact that it's hard. It's okay, I get it. You know,
it's tough this it's annoying that this other team won't give us the information, but this has
been going on for months. So you came to me last week and told me the same thing, but you've just
done the same actions this weeks and expect a different results. That's the definition of
insanity. So what? You know, we do the same things and we expect different results. It's not going to
happen. So what are we doing next week to make sure we don't get the same results? This is how we
build accountability. This is how we build respect with our team. Another great way you can do this
is with reporting. So I see ownership now as like a physical holding of something. Either I
physically own the ownership around a certain number metric, initiative project, or someone else
physically holds it and owns it. And back in the day before, like laptops and computers, that's how
it would have worked, you know, if you were on the Ford production line and you owned one section of
that production line, you physically would stand there, own it, review it, make it better, make sure
before it moves on to the next step by the given date that it was perfect. I think when we have got
laptops and we work remotely and things are done through spreadsheets, all of that gets a little
bit convoluted. So we need to make ownership feel as clear as possible. And I think a really
important distinction that we have to make is your team report into you. So what I mean by that
is when you do these reporting meetings. So whether it's weekly, monthly, whatever you have,
your team need to be reporting the data into you. You should not be inputting the data into those
spreadsheets because, you know, when you go say, if every Monday morning you're going around trying
to find the data, you know, what did we do last week? How well has it looked? You know that when
you go through that process, you find things out because you look at number go, hey, that doesn't
seem right. Let me go and check up on that. Or, hey, that feels like we need something else in that,
you know, do we need to start looking at this number? Instead, you go through this really
critical thinking process of winding around, trying to find answers, then questions and, you
know, digging and digging to eventually come to this conclusion. That is this is the data. This is
why it's here, and this is what we're going to do about it. If you, the manager or the person who is
inputting the numbers into the spreadsheet, you are stealing that reporting opportunity and like
journey of exploration, you're still an opportunity away from the team. But also it means
you own it. It means like, truthfully, physically, you own that number when realistically your team
need to own it. So that's kind of like a quick fix, I always think, because delegate the reporting
over to your team. That's why they're called direct reports. They report into you because they
report the numbers into you. That's kind of you know, why we use that phrase. But I know that it
gets mixed up. The lines get crossed a lot of the time. So can you see how you know we love to blame
the team aren't engaged. The team are lazy. It's so easy to kind of fall back on this idea that
people are more and more disengaged by the day, whilst you know they are the fact. Yes, it may be
true. I just take it internally. I'm not letting that happen in my team. I'm not letting that
happen in my business. And so if you don't want to either, there's just some things that you can do.
Make sure you do not allow that blame to perpetuate. Make sure you use your communication.
Ask questions. Ask really deep and challenging questions. And don't be afraid to just sit in the
silence and allow them to answer it. I'll always remember. Louis Theroux went on Amelia Goldenberg
chicken shop date thing, and they were talking about like, being interviewers who ask hard
questions. You ask, a person stood in front of you a really difficult question. It's very hard not to
like, fill in the gap because you can feel the awkwardness. And what Louis Theroux said was, I
have built an entire career on being the person who is willing to sit in an awkward silence for
longer than anyone else, because he asks the question that no one else dare ask, and then he
just shuts up and he gives someone else in that room space to answer it. When I step on a stage
and deliver a public speaking gig, or go into a workplace and do a workshop, when I ask, does
anyone have any questions? Or how do people feel about that? There is at least 30s of silence in
every single motherfucking room, and the first few times I did it 20s feels like three years. It
feels like you've got all these eyes on you. No one's listen. No one cares. That is not the truth.
People are just processing the information. They just need a little bit of time to think. What is
my question? Yeah, actually, you know, I just need 30s to think and understand. Actually, where do I
want to go deeper. And so start to get really comfortable with using questions to pass that
ownership back on to other people. And I also think my mum used to say when I was a bit younger,
when I was a teenager, she was like, God, Heather, you always ask the questions that no one else
dare ask. Like you always ask the things that people shy away from. Like I remember growing up,
there was always difficulty happening, whether it was in family or friends or at school. You know,
always difficult things like someone would be ill or someone would be struggling with work, lost a
job, um, going through divorce. Like there was always things happening around my sphere of
living, as I'm sure there will have been for all of you listening. Like there's always those
moments in childhood that really stick with you. Something I could never understand was why people
avoided talking about it so much like all these situations would be happening, whether it was with
family who were getting divorces or whether it was with, you know, friends who were ill, and you
would see them and everyone would be like, just don't bring it up. Like, just don't mention it. And
I would always think, obviously, you know, publicly there's a time and a place you're not going to
embarrass someone and ask the hard hitting questions in front of a group of people. But when
you're one on one with people, why would you not just ask them how they're doing about that thing?
That's really hard in life. Like that never made sense to me. And so and never have I ever, like,
been met with someone saying, oh, I don't want to answer that, or I wish you didn't ask me that.
Normally it's just the beginning of a very important deepening conversation. And I think as
leaders, we need to be asking these questions more. Ask them in one on ones, ask them in reporting
meetings and questions can just be your biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest asset as a leader. So
don't be afraid to ask the tough ones with above the line thinking as well. It's kind of like the
victim versus ownership mindset. None of us are fixed in it, so there's definitely times where and
I'd say probably to do with things at work. I very much take ownership of shit because I have no
choice. Because I am a business owner, there is no one. The book does stop with me like I have
literally no choice. But then there I will sometimes like move back and forward into victim
mindset. Maybe sometimes it's when I'm in my luteal phase I'm feeling really sorry for myself.
I'm like, everyone hates me, this is hard. Why did I choose this path? Like and so we do kind of
move through from victim to owner to blame to accountability. Like it's okay to flip back and
forth. And I think what we have to remember is there's there's a big difference between thinking
it and doing it. And so it's okay when shitty things happen to feel shit. I guess there's no
better word for it than that. Don't remove the feeling of this thing is crap. It's okay. No
feelings are bad. Anger is not bad. Sadness is not bad. Frustration, jealousy, all of these emotions
are completely normal. None of them are bad. It's just. What do you do with that next? You know, if
you're frustrated, do you go and take it out on all your team? If you're sad, do you go and let
that go into the energy for the rest of your day? If you are angry at something that someone's done,
do you then go and let that dictate how you speak to that person for the next week? Or do you allow
yourself to feel it 100%, but then go and have whatever conversation needs to be had with
someone in response to make sure that we don't allow that to dictate our week or journal. We just
had a conversation in the studio about journaling and how helpful journaling can be. Like, I remember
when I used to feel my most sort of nervous and shaky before I went to bed. If it was something
new that we were doing, I would journal. I would literally have a notebook by my bed. I still have
it there every single night. If I feel something's really difficult, I've got to do something hard at
work the next day. I just write those feelings down because I don't want those feelings to kind
of infect my reaction too much. And that truly is emotional intelligence. It's just having, you know,
knowing the difference between an emotion and a reaction. You cannot expect your team to be
accountable. You cannot expect your team to take ownership, to be buzzing, to come up with new ideas,
to come up with initiatives. If you don't do that first. Your team will do as you do. They will not
do as you say. And so you have to be this beacon of accountability, this beacon of ownership. Get so
organised. Always do what you say you're going to do. Like always, be true to your word. If you say,
I'll get you that thing by Friday, you better get that thing to that person by Friday because they
will remember. Trust me, that will be a marker in their brain if you don't, that you're not
necessarily an accountable person, that you're not necessarily to be trusted. And then likelihood is
give it a few weeks, give it a few months. And why would your team do it? You have to be the manager
that does what they do. You have to realise that that is kind of the crux of leadership. Your team
will do as you do. They will not do as you say. And so really make sure that you get this right. First
you start to take ownership over your own problems, the things that happen externally to
your team, how do you bring those internally and start to fix them? And then you will just
positively infect everyone around you, inspire everyone around you to be accountable to and for
the very difficult performers who don't, who will never be inspired and who will never come on that
journey. Deal with them separately. Have the difficult conversation. Put them on the
performance improvement, but do not ignore it. Make sure that there is consequences because if not,
they will infect the whole team. So thank you for listening to the boardroom. Please comment below
on this video or on Spotify, wherever it is you're listening. We really, really want to hear from you.
I personally read every single comment. I want to know what topic would you like us to cover next?
What is your biggest struggle and your leadership role right now? Comment it below and we will get
to the topics eventually. I want this to just be me and you together. So tell me what you want to
talk about. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next Wednesday.