Foreign.

Hello, welcome back to Promoted.

I'm your host, Felicity Fury, CEO and co founder of We Aspire.

We are building the most effective first time leader training for people in construction and infrastructure.

And today we have a very special guest on the podcast, my co founder, Michael Furey, Chief research officer and our head coach.

And we're diving into some of the things that have been big wake UP calls in 2024 for the people that Michael and myself have been working with.

And I'm really excited about today's topic.

It is all about resilience and the double edged sword of resilience.

And I feel like this is a word that gets bounced around a lot, particularly in construction and infrastructure.

I went to an Infrastructure association of Queensland event just a couple of months ago and one of the panelists was saying resilience wasn't really even a word that was talked about a lot in the last 10 to 20 years.

So Michael, what does resilience mean to you and what are we getting wrong about it?

Well, great to be here.

Thanks for the invite onto this.

So I think firstly, resilience is super important, right?

Resilience is ultimately the power to kind of persist when things are tricky.

The challenge with resilience is that there are times where you actually don't need to be resilient.

In fact, you need to be not resilient.

And you need to kind of like stop or give up or just give in sometimes.

And in fact, like for example, let's think, right, if you are in the middle of a construction build, in the middle of a concrete pour and it is absolutely baking hot, which I'm sure many people right now are dealing with.

Now, in the middle of the day, mid, mid pour, it is not the time to start to go, oh, you know, I'm really not feeling great, time for a nap.

That's it.

There are times where resilience, no matter how you're feeling, no matter what's going on, you have to show up and perform.

And that may just be a silly, a small kind of silly example.

There's other times though where actually if you're feeling exhausted, if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're feeling stressed, then actually being super resilient and kind of pushing through, being tough and you know, I'm strong, quote unquote strong meaning not talking about it.

Actually that does the opposite.

And so one of the things I've seen a lot this year is that you need to have space where the wheels can fall off either on a personal level, on a business Level, like, a lot of the people we work with, their jobs are incredibly demanding.

Like working in construction, if you're in infrastructure, the demands on you are so much higher.

And the consequences of unperforming or, sorry, not, not performing or mistakes, they are significant, then it's not like, oh, yeah, sorry, try better next level.

Like, if you get the concrete pour wrong, that's a pain in the ass for everyone.

Right?

But resilience is.

Is very, very important at times.

But there's the duality of it, which is you need the opposite.

And that's actually when resilience, you need to show a lack of resilience and be willing to be vulnerable and open and not suffer through certain things.

I know for myself, being a female who's worked in infrastructure and construction, my career, it's something that I feel like has been able to have me stay when I've had very challenging work situations or challenging program projects that I've worked on.

Resilience has really helped me feel like battle through.

And sometimes it has been a battle.

There has been times I have had to survive, like when my work colleagues have been inappropriate and I still need to deliver a project.

And so you got to do whatever it takes sometimes to survive.

And I'm not saying that was the right approach.

And it was very early in my career and that happened.

And so I found that even, you know, being in a minority group, being the only woman in the team, I didn't want to show that weakness.

I didn't want to turn up to work and not perform or have any reason my colleagues could judge me.

And so I had to be really tough.

And that was almost like it almost came with a sense of pride of.

I had this, you know, sense of pride of being tough at work and surviving through these super challenging circumstances.

So I think if you are in a minority group and in something like construction, you are tough and resilient.

And it's really, really challenging to almost unwind or unlearn that process.

And I think as we get into those leadership roles, it's something that.

That we really need to do.

So what would be your advice for people who are listening to this thinking?

Oh, that is me.

I am in survival mode.

I am in this tough resilience mindset.

How do you think people can.

Can navigate that?

What would help them?

I think one of the most powerful things you can start to do is just understand that life is full of contradiction.

Right?

To be successful, you need to be arrogant, and you also need to be humble.

You can't be humble all the time.

Otherwise no one will ever know how good you are.

You can't be.

If you're not arrogant, then no one will back you.

Has to be periods where you have to show that, yeah, you know, I believe I can do this and put yourself forward.

And so you have to be resilient.

Absolutely.

You also have to be not resilient at other times.

You have to be really.

You, you use the word tough, which I think is a really interesting word because it depends on how you define tough.

Tough often means I am, you know, thick skinned, I can push through things.

Yeah, you do need to be that sometimes.

You also need to be able to crumble.

You need to like understand that if you want to be or need to be tough, quote unquote on site, then you need to make sure if you want to do it sustainably, the wheels in your life can fall off somewhere.

Because we are all dealing with our health, we're all dealing with getting older, we're all dealing with aging parents, we're all dealing with the economic situation.

Right now, if you look at the stats, about 40% of the people surveyed show that they are impacted by the financial conditions of what's going on.

And that has an impact on how they work.

So you've got these people going on in, through life and you can't just they're at work, but they've got, their life hasn't stopped.

They still got other stuff going on.

And I think for leaders right now we have to create, help create space for people.

That's why a lot of people we work with have no idea what a coach is.

And so when we offer coaching, most people actually never take.

And then slowly through the program there's a few people are brave enough to put their hat in the ring and they go, oh, actually.

Well, this thing's actually kind of quite helpful.

And more than anything, coaching is about providing a space to actually share and talk about what you're doing and how it's actually going.

A lot of people would kind of confuse it with counseling because counseling is usually as a reactive period, as in like when things you're in real strife.

People use counseling as a way to let them, you know, they have the kind of next step is mental breakdown.

Counseling is kind of just before that or something like that.

Coaching is a much more proactive methodology in terms of its design to understand that again, if you're a high performer, if you're stepping into leadership roles, if you're doing anything, which is working with on these Big projects, life is tricky.

The demands on you are significant.

Okay, cool.

If you've got high levels of demand on you, you're having to achieve and perform at a much higher level than normal.

So then if you're needing to do that, you have to then make sure you've got the support around you to enable you to do that on a sustained and ongoing basis.

The other thing for me is that that tough mode is.

I don't even think about it.

It's like default.

It's just like, that's just the go to way of operating.

Like, I need to produce a result.

I need to perform.

All right.

Tough mode on, like, it's not even.

It's almost like it's a part of my identity, a part of my personality, because I've just done it so much to survive.

And I mean, it's worked, right?

It's been effective for certain things in certain periods of time.

The thing I really struggle with is, when do you turn it?

When I find it really hard to give myself that permission to take that pause to crumble.

Like, it's like, it's like not even an option.

It's like, I need you basically to tell me this is the time you need to stop.

So, asking for a friend here, how would you.

What would you recommend to our listeners, Michael?

So we touched on last time, again, mental models around performance, right?

And I think we inherit models of performance from our parents, from schooling, from people we work with.

You know, if you look at people, you might go, I like how they do things, but they just seem to be able to perform 24 7.

Right?

Yeah.

Yes.

If the more you can reflect and look at your own model of performance, which you have, we all have one.

So if you sat there going, I don't.

I'm not sure I've got one.

I don't think you do have one.

Whether it's obvious to you or not, the only way to reveal or very easy way to reveal is, okay, cool.

When the pressure's on what you do.

I spoke to a lady just recently and she said she was going through this real super tough project.

And I said, you're incredibly resilient.

And she was like, isn't that just what everyone would do?

And she was like, I never thought about quitting and quitting just wasn't an option.

When I said, well, for most people, quitting would definitely be the one of the first things I think of.

And I think I've learned a lot about pushing through, being tough, keeping going from you, actually.

And I think I really admire that in you.

I think it's an incredibly powerful trait.

And in fact, if you're trying to be a leader who can't push through when things are tough, you're gonna struggle because ultimately, leadership, you know, when the, what's the, what's the quote any sailor will do in a, in, you know, on a flat sea, right?

But as soon as the, the waves start coming, as soon as the winds pick up, you.

You look for the experience leader, you look for the experienced captain, and that's really when it matters.

And again, resilience, if you look at, and I think this is kind of the mystery around high performance, is that if you look at these top athletes, you look at these top performers in any domain, it looks like they're doing it on their own.

It looks like they can just perform at this incredible level.

But just take a sport team, let's say take soccer, kind of come.

My English bias is that they've got.

If you look at the people around the top performing sport teams, the players get paid, but then actually their money is typically managed by a financial advisor.

Okay, cool.

They've got cooks who cook their food 24 7.

You've got physios, you've got coaches, as in people who can guide them, they've got access to counseling, they've got so much support around them, not to mention the people in the exact same team who are also going through, then they've got access to the very best people in the whole industry.

They've got all these people around them.

And again, if you think that being tough, being successful is about being, doing it on your own, pushing through the whole time and just being this kind of stoic, heroic figure, which, Felicity, I'm not sure if you would resonate with this or not, but if that's your mental model, well, you're going to struggle to actually change that.

So the opportunity, first of all, is to recognize your mental model performance, because we all do have one.

Then ask yourself, okay, cool, where does that serve me and where does it actually cost me?

And if you think you have to be tough all the time, you'll find that you can be tough most of the time.

But there will become a point where you'll reach stages in your career where actually you'll start to crumble, and then you'll typically turn to some sort of coping mechanism that might look like alcohol, it might look like some sort of drugs.

If you think, if you look at statistically about 40% of leaders at executive level will deal with extramarital affairs like statistics, it's very high.

It's wild.

If you look at the stats, 3% of people will turn to it will be drug addicted, currently in an executive role.

Wow, that's right.

So like that.

See, not everything is as it appears.

And if you look at executives, they often have interesting relationships with food.

I say interesting is not good.

Very interesting relationships with alcohol that, you know, not great relationships with perhaps their partner.

And those cracks, those things where they're not allowed to kind of be not tough, show up in ways where the wheels start to fall off in other ways.

So again, a high performance model, a much better one and I would say is where you give your yourself space to crumble such that you don't crumble when you don't want to.

All right.

I find it with my own coach.

I've hired a few coaches this year and it's been phenomenal being able to get on the call with them and say, look, I'm just in a mess.

I'm finding it really tough dealing with this and oh man, my parents, my marriage, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I can crumble, fall apart, cry, you know, be sad and whatever, get some insight.

And then when I walk back into the room where I need to show up, I press.

So I'm in much better shape.

And I think it points to something that we talk about a lot, is that when you get to the end of your skill set, and we see that a lot with first time leaders because people are coming from being an individual contributor.

And it's that, say, what got you here won't get you there.

And as an individual contributor, you're usually rewarded for a lot of those behaviors and working hard, delivering producing results.

And then when you step into that leadership role, it's actually I read this in Daniel Flynn, the founder, co founder, thank you's book this week.

The leadership is learning just more, more people.

And I really liked it.

And you know, we don't get a lot of those tools to step into leading.

And so we do find a lot of these things.

But you know, when we're trying to perform as a leader in a completely new thing that we've never done before that we've often noticed, not been trained for, where at that end of the skill set and the skills we're using are those ones of an individual contributor.

So I feel like this resilience piece is another one of, okay, what are the new tools that you need in your toolkit to get to that, to be at that next level and perform at that next level when other people are relying on you and the stakes are even higher than when you're an individual contributor.

I think it's a great point.

Again, I think it can feel really scary to say you actually have no idea how to, how high performers actually do it.

Where do we lose it?

Exactly.

And unless you've actually performed at a high level.

And even I've coached athletes who have performed at the highest level, they've competed in the comm Games and even them have actually have struggled to correlate or kind of transfer that model of high performance into a workplace.

Because actually if you look at, if you contrast a typical construction firm or any infrastructure company, typically they have none of the infrastructure which a high performance team typically has.

The counseling, the support, the coaching, it's all seen as this kind of stoic model.

And I would say, largely speaking, these people don't understand how to perform.

And so companies don't equip themselves.

But if you look at McKinsey as an example, I've got a friend, a friend who works there and they were sharing how they have access for any member of staff to high performance coaches.

They get, I think it's a session every two months, so it's six a year.

Then they've got access to counseling, they've got all their internal development and training around leadership and improvement.

It's phenomenal.

And McKinsey being one, one of the absolute top when it comes to consulting at the highest level.

And so success is often, you know, it's a well banded phrase, but success leaves clues, high performance cultures leave clues, high performers leave clues.

And you only have to scratch at the surface a little bit and understand how do high performers do it.

And I'd encourage you to just get on ChatGPT and ask what are the traits of high performance teams?

Like what do they do?

How do they actually sustain high performance?

And, and you'll see even top, highest performance.

If you've been following Man City at the moment in the Premier League, they've won more premier leagues, I think, than anyone has in recent history.

And I think they've got the pep, his pep.

Who's the manager?

He's never lost more than five games in a row.

And he's now, for the first season ever, he's lost seven games or something like that.

And it's like even the top, even with unlimited resources, unbelievable amounts of money, even high performers have bad days.

And even people who fully understand high performance and have a track record in winning have bad days.

Too.

So I think there's also that piece.

And doesn't mean you're weak, doesn't mean you're not tough if you fall apart.

In fact, it's the opposite.

If you want to sustain being tough at work, and if you see that as an important trait, which I think in many ways it can be very helpful, if you want to sustain being tough, quote unquote, then you need to have an area or a space where you can, the wheels can fall off in a safe space with someone who's trusted, who can provide that.

That freedom for you.

And, and that could be a friend, you know, could just be.

But someone who understands that if it doesn't mean you're in a bad place if the wheels fall off, it just actually means you're trying to be.

And not trying.

You actually are doing what high performers do.

And that safe space to do with the right person is really, really critical in that conversation.

Absolutely.

Great reflections on resilience for 2024.

Definitely some key takeaways for me that I'm going to have heading into 2025 and some interesting points to reflect on over this Christmas break.

Thanks for being our special guest.

Michael Fury on the Promoter podcast.

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