Here's an interesting thing about this whole getting run down and feeling

rough that occurred to me recently.

I noticed, obviously, because I had the accident and I had that

cage thing on for Several months.

Of course, I can't do any physical activity at all.

I run and I go to the gym a couple of times a week.

Obviously not like a lunatic when I was in my twenties, but I still go to the

gym, try and keep myself, bone density, muscle mass and all that sort of stuff.

And performance nothing.

Just sit so clearly my body's atrophying.

As soon as I could, I think it was about six months after the accident,

I started to go into the gym.

Clearly as weak as a baby, I couldn't lift anything.

I couldn't move anything.

I couldn't, I had very little movement and flexibility, but I noticed that

every time I did go to the gym, two days later when an athlete would normally get

delayed onset muscle soreness, I got a sore throat and I started to feel ill.

I realized that my body's efforts to repair itself and to do all

the things that it needed to do had dropped my immune system.

Obviously you're watching your body very carefully.

I was having to come off morphine and all that stuff, but over

the next few months, so it's now nine months since the accident.

It's only been about a month since after going to the gym or running or whatever.

I don't feel a couple of days later that I'm coming down with a . So

clearly my body's building up.

Its strength and resistance.

Yeah.

But I think one of the the reason I'm saying this is that I see a lot of

people at the moment who feel not quite right, a little bit run down, feel like

something's coming on, and there is as Rob says, a lot of stuff going around.

But I just think stress and the rigors of daily life.

are a burden upon our our metabolical system that people

don't, often don't take into account.

I was watching the Southport thing on TV last night.

I was watching the people, because, that's my thing I'm watching groups of

people, I'm interested in group behavior.

All the people rioting and that stuff on the street, it's

a massive release for them.

You can see on their faces that they just need to, and it just occurred to

me last night, it's took me 10 minutes to get here, but it just occurred to

me that, People are just under enormous pressure with bills and things like

COVID and elections and all the other stuff going on that we, I think our

bodies our system and metabolic system is under an ongoing burden all the time.

You don't need much to drop it below the threshold.

No.

I agree with that part because I'm on the bounce back.

I was two years pretty much out of the game with multiple illnesses, but

one of which was primarily the result of a parasite, intestinal parasite

that, that took a long time, I was heavy antibiotics for a long time.

All different types to try and clear this parasite that was basically

eating me away on the inside.

Anyway, they finally got rid of it.

But my body shut down after that.

I had nothing left, nothing intrinsically built up to fight back, so I got a very

rare skin disorder called PRP, which was probably the most antisocial thing

you could ever wish on anybody, where basically your body can't regulate

temperature, and you, like a snake, you're shedding skin, but it wasn't just that.

It was that it's most acute.

I was like a burns victim.

So head to toe, I would bath every day in oat milk.

Sounds great.

Sounds like Cleopatra, but it was far less than Cleopatra.

I'd be bathing every day in oatmeal just to desensitize, try

and take some of the pain away.

And at the same time, I was trying to maintain.

Trying to be stoic and continue to work and doing all those crazy things.

But it was the worst.

We could spend all day talking about the symptoms.

They were awful.

The symptoms were awful and lasted an acute level, best part of 12 months.

So a daily routine, I had to wear surgical gloves, 24 hours a

day, had to wear cling film on my feet and my lower legs every day.

When was this Tony?

2017, 18.

And then there's a backup to that I was getting.

So I had a stent put in several years ago, back in 2012.

I was one of those young guys that had the Widowmaker, blocked artery, went out

for a run, got chest pain, got nausea.

When I stopped running, I thought, Oh, that's weird.

Must have flu or something like that.

And I was working for Sheffield United at the time, went to see the physio.

He was treating me for like my sternum and because there's

clearly nothing wrong with you.

I was in a decent shape.

Anyway, he was treating me and two weeks later, I thought, Oh,

I'll go out for another run.

Feels okay.

Went out for another run.

Same thing about two minutes in, tightness in the chest.

shortness of breath.

That's really weird.

Stopped running.

The symptoms went away.

Got a sense of nausea.

So I'm going back, went back and he said, go see the club doctor.

I went to see the club doctor.

He said, you need to go to hospital now because it could be one of two

things and neither of them are great.

So that was 2012, but wind it forward to after this illness, I

was starting to get I suppose what would be less stable angina symptoms.

So lots of typical heart attack symptoms, like your left arm going funny but no

chest pain and nothing on exertion.

Like it was just happening randomly, which could be stress really.

It could be any number of things, but because I had history, it was

like, you've always got to be really mindful of what the possibilities are.

Anyway, it took a long time for them to say look, we'll get you in and we'll have

a look it's happening too many times.

We need to go in and have another look.

So they have to do another angiogram.

So they went in and they said, look, we're going to, we're going to put

another stent in just because I feel like I'm in tune with my body.

I feel like I know when there's something not right, but

I'm not a doctor, of course.

Anyway, they went back and said, yeah, look, we're going to put

another stent in and it's just below where the last one was.

We're talking about these are micro tubes of steel that basically

go into your arteries, right?

So fascinating what they can do.

And you're obviously lying back, watching all this tape take place as the dye

goes in, you can see where it's going.

But as they started to do it, I was getting this extraordinary

buildup of pain in my chest.

I'm having a conversation with them.

I'm in pain here.

This is really uncomfortable.

Look, it's getting worse.

So they start pumping me with morphine and all of those types of things.

Anyway, cut a long story short.

It took quite a long time to do the operation.

Unbeknownst to me, I'd had some sort of heart attack on the table.

So good time to have it.

If you're going to have it.

They hadn't given me an anti, nausea tablet.

So I was sick all over the ward.

When I got back to my bed, I didn't know at this stage I'd

had some sort of heart attack.

And even then the doctor wasn't that clear with me.

In terms of recovery, so last time in 2012, Within two weeks against doctor's

orders, I was back out running in the hills of Denbydale and feeling like

I was on three lungs again, feeling like Park Ji Sung all of a sudden,

like I had a new lease of life.

And I'm thinking the same this time.

I've had another stent, I'll be right to go.

I couldn't walk to the end of the street without running out of steam.

It was the incredible like realization that hang on a second,

that was some sort of major event that you've just been through.

And that took a fair bit of time too to recover, and those two things

happened pretty much back to back.

So 2018, 19, then.

Obviously COVID came in.

There was a big chunk of time that was, and all of that time was when we

created this business that I'm doing now.

It was it gave me plenty of time to recalibrate and

decide what I was going to do.

I know, Tony, this is Rob, sorry, this is not business

related, but I'm fascinated by it.

It might be.

Yeah, because I think we all have to deal with things that impinge upon our

norm, our ability to operate normally.

And I had a conversation with somebody last week, a potential customer.

It depends.

I have a very high attrition rate because I tell people very quickly.

what I see and sometimes they don't like it.

So I had a conversation with somebody last weekend, and he was

saying some of the problems that were occurring within his business.

And I just mentioned that a group of people, whatever they might be,

have a culture, which we all know about, you walk into a building or

a church or a factory or whatever.

And you get a vibe for how this place functions.

It's best translated by when people say, this is how we do things around here.

This is how we are.

And you get that feeling when you start to come amongst those group of people.

I said, but when you join that group of people, whether

it's two or 10 or 200 people.

You become a part of it, you are now part of the problem, and you go in there

thinking you're doing all these different things to improve the place, but you

are actually adding to the problem by virtue of the fact that you're there,

you become a part of the dynamic.

It's almost impossible to stand outside and observe objectively.

And I think I always come at any problem with the idea that.

It should be good.

It should be fine.

A person's health should be great.

Anything that's outside of that is an anomaly.

If there are problems in a business or problems with a person or a relationship,

as Rob knows, then that's an anomaly.

We should be able to operate at a really harmonious basis.

Things should be able to function well, and if they're not, something has

happened to it, and people talk about things like cancer as if, these have

always been a part of the human race.

I personally don't agree with that.

I think something is impinging upon the human state to make

this happen much more frequently.

I know it's existed, but not at the levels that it does now.

And it's clearly because outside forces are exerting

themselves on us as individuals.

It's good that you're in touch with your physical makeup so that you're

aware, because most people just keep going till they keel over.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think my purpose is clear.

But as a part of that, I talk about performance and the speciality of

performance and what it means to perform.

If you're an athlete, you can't perform if you're unhealthy.

You can't be at your best if you're physically well, if you're mentally

unstable, if you're not connected to something important in order to

pursue this goal, this ambitious goal that you're trying to achieve.

As part of any intervention that I do with a group, and I think there's a

lot of power in the public disclosure.

Because there's vulnerability in it, people don't go to work and say in truth,

how they're feeling, how you doing, mate?

Yeah, I'm okay.

Thanks.

Great.

Going fine.

Let's have a proper discussion about that.

So when I raise this in a group, I'll do it early and do it on day one or the

morning of a group session or whatever.

I always use these four pillars, which are physical, mental, as in cognitive,

emotional and spiritual health.

It's like a, it's like out of 10 score.

Give yourself a score out of 10 for each and, for your lowest one, give

us a description of what's going on.

So for me at the moment, I had back surgery last year.

I'm about probably 5, 6 out of 10 for where I'd like to be in optimal health.

Mentally, I feel pretty sharp.

I'm around sevens, eights, nines all the time.

So that's pretty good.

Emotionally sevens, eights, nines and I wouldn't have said that when I was

going through that two years of hell and then on the spiritual pillar,

which is the one people touch the least, it's not necessarily about the

ethereal spirituality and seances and candles and all of that sort of stuff.

It's more

what's the meaning behind, what's your aspiration?

Who are you serving?

Who gets the value from you being good at what you do?

Because there's something more than just you going for

a, it's great to have a goal.

What's the aspiration?

Who are you serving?

Where's the value?

So you can start to very quickly.

And by the way, I've had groups where they were scoring themselves

for cognitive and mental threes and fours out of ten en masse.

And this was just feedback for me that what I'd observed Was now getting

fed back to me in person by people who were going through absolute.

It was a stressful environment.

Couldn't meet any of their objectives.

Pressure was on to perform every day.

And the demand for resilience was constant.

What's being said who 's pushing back.

What are we going to do about it?

Because right now you're dying in front of my eyes.

This is a serious conversation.

Can I, of course, I'm in a private discussion, albeit I'm

within a business who've engaged me to work with the business.

I've got a group of leaders saying they're getting pushed to breaking point.

Is it okay if I take it upstairs, if you're not going to, because

I think there's a problem here.

So when you look, and you must do this with relationships as well, Rob,

when you talk to these groups of people, or when you're working with them, and

you're obviously observing all the time, and you're gathering data, there's a

pain point somewhere within that system.

Whenever I'm looking at a group of people, I'm looking for where the pain is.

But there comes a point when you realize, for instance, as you just said, that

mental acuity is low, for instance.

People are suffering an enormous amount of stress and it's

affecting their cognitive ability.

How do you then gauge?

You just talked about, for instance you do a questionnaire where they're

scoring themselves out of 10.

How do you

gain That's a conversation, but that's an open conversation.

They're doing it verbally.

Yeah.

There's a thing that I always, in all conversations, even now talking

to you guys, in every interaction I ever have with anybody ever, but especially in

group, large groups of people, my question to myself is, what's the standard?

What's the benchmark?

What is normal?

What is stasis?

I need to figure out what that is, because I need to know whether

we're above it, below it, whatever.

Even above it can sometimes be a bad thing because that can't be sustained.

But you need to know what the standard is.

And I'm constantly, and when I'm working with groups of people, very often it

can be frustrating for them because they can come to me with a problem.

And I'll say what is this a problem compared to?

What's the standard?

In your mind you've got something, there's a gap between where you are

and where you want to be, I need to know what that other part Yeah.

So you must figure some way of gauging what the harmonious

stasis is for those people, right?

How do you do that?

Firstly this initial disclosure is all about if we want an individual to be

at peak performance, they need to have all these, Pillars pushing towards the top.

Ah, so you put

standards in place.

Yeah, so this is within a group setting.

The individual's disclosing, today I'm 6, 7, 5, and 9.

And you go, okay, great, tell us about the 5.

What's going on emotionally.

If you want to share, if you're comfortable sharing, share, and of course

you start to like Johari window, you start to get, we don't know what we don't know.

We start to learn that just through that exchange of personal information in a

group setting, you've brought incremental building trust within the group.

I don't know it.

That's not what we're doing but it's a by product of sharing

what people can't see about us.

And it's just one step to go, okay, we can recognize that when we turn

up for the day and these ridiculous expectations have been put on us to

sustain an unsustainable level of output, then on the best day, I might be able

to get at it and do okay against that.

But more days than not, something's going to be impacting because

these things fluctuate, right?

Some days, my kid had an accident at school and I got

a call on the way to work.

So I'm feeling she's okay, but I'm feeling whatever it's going to impact

your readiness to hit the ground running.

Let's say those things are important and they're so easy to just do a pow wow in

the morning or once a week or just see how everyone's going and you get a real

sense, hopefully you start to, to grow a sense of what's actually important here.

These are human beings, not human doings.

That old saying that, and we keep asking them to do a load of stuff,

but let's find out who they are and how they go in really, so that we

know, we might have to pull back a little bit on this person today.

We have to give them some latitude give them less to think about give them some

support, give them some time out to have a conversation whoever they have

conversations with when they're struggling emotionally or whatever it might be.

They are benchmarks, but they're individual benchmarks.

But out of that, you do get, as I did in the case where lots of people with

threes and fours, there's a systematic problem that is driving Emotional and

cognitive levels down across the group.

They're feeling stressed, they're feeling pressure.

So let's unpick it.

Let's work out a strategy on how we can help them elevate these levels over time.

You can't just stop working, but they will, they'll burn

out and take sick leave.

But we don't want them to do that.

We want to help them build and grow and be more sustainable and find

out, not what their break point is, but what their optimum state is.

What's the optimum environment that we can put these people in where they

can harness this, what we brought them in to do, what they're really good at.

You just said something there, Tony, where you said you would potentially

go upstairs and have that conversation if nobody else was willing to.

And that was the point I was speaking to earlier when I was saying

about a person's health is often impinged upon by something outside.

The analogy that I use in my work is that of a submarine.

That all vessels that go underwater that have to withstand

pressure are stress tested.

And a human is able to withstand a certain amount of stress and a group of

people is able to withstand a certain amount of stress up to a point if

they've been stress tested and they're resilient enough to deal with the sort of

pressures that are expected to undergo.

But a submarine can only go so deep.

Once the pressure becomes too much, then it will just implode.

When you're talking to a group of people and you're seeing threes and

fours, instead of seven, sevens, eights and nines, it becomes clear that the,

either these people have not been stress tested, which clearly they have

because they functioned at one point.

They were there, or they've gone too deep, and the pressure is too high.

And that's why you have to think about going upstairs

and having that conversation.

Yeah, it can only ever be one of those two things.

The system itself is not resilient enough to handle the pressure, or there's too

much pressure coming in from outside.

When I was looking at that group of people in Southport yesterday, all

pressure has to be released somewhere.

When you're looking at a team, as you just said, if they get constant threes

and fours, they're going to go sick.

That pressure needs to be released in some way or other.

All systems, all groups of people, have a threshold beyond which they

can't pass when it comes to pressure.

If you start to see anomalies compared to what you think the standard should

be, then you have to start looking at what the outside pressure is.

And I'm convinced that the system that we're functioning in has been

a self sustaining house of cards that cannot continue any longer.

It reminds me of and I'm going to go into strange territory here,

but the Roman Empire, could only ever expand because it had to keep

taking captives and new territory and winning wars and getting more land

to feed this ever growing machine.

I think the system we're in at the moment is at that point now where,

it's reached the tipping point.

And everybody within that system now is feeling the effects of it.

We all manage it, in whatever way we can, but I've started to realize now that when

I'm talking to organizations about the problems that they have, I have to start

thinking outside of the organization for where the pressures coming from, because

it's not all just within this bubble of a business that they think is just

this isolated part of society is not.

There's an outside impingement now that's causing bigger and bigger

problems for people and you see it.

All the time, even, when you went upstairs to have the conversation with the bosses,

they're feeling it the same as everybody.

The Conservative Party just completely folded, and everybody says how

useless they were, but when you look at them, clearly they were unable

to handle the pressures that were placed upon them, and it will be

the same, I'm sure, with Labour.

Interestingly, I think politics is an interesting one for that.

What you were talking about before when you become immediately part of the

problem when you step into that domain.

I'm not a politician, but I can only imagine the ideal, the idealistic

politician that has a vision to change something to make an impact in their

community and in their environment and how easy it would be to lose that singular

intent and focus when you step into the role, when you're surrounded by group

think and a different way of being.

Politics provides a brilliant example of how easy it is to be taken out of

what your original intent was and your original purpose, but then who are you?

So then you're in the public domain, operating outside of who you really

are, and nothing's congruent anymore.

Nobody believes a word you're saying.

And why would they?

That's why when I talk to people, obviously I'm constantly

pushing this idea of the 10th man.

In my book at the moment, the point that I'm at is how the 10th

man differs from everybody else.

And this is this idea that when you come into an organization, you

suddenly become a part of the organism.

You become a part of the dynamic.

When you talk to people Obviously, bosses, directors, leaders, senior leaders.

When you start to explain this idea of the 10th man, they say, Oh, yeah, I know that.

I know the devil's advocate.

Yeah, they just argue that the opposite point.

No, that is such a tiny part of it.

The reason they have to be so proactively different from everybody else within

the organization is because they cannot be a part of the problem.

Otherwise, they may as well not be there.

They may as well just go and get on with some other stuff.

And I talk about this thing called detached involvement.

You have to be involved, but you have to be detached, not just objective.

You have to be completely on emotional outside of the normal

functionality of the organization.

And it's such a difficult thing to do.

You have to find the right person first before you can even start

talking to them about training them up to be this 10th man person.

But the value of having somebody outside of an organization, who actually operates

within it, but is not part of it, and is able to objectively say, look, The values

that you guys adhere to and subscribe to are this, but you're going off in this

direction is so enormous because, when you're all running towards the edge of

a cliff and everybody's saying where we're going, we're following that guy.

You need to say we'll, and it sounds such a simple thing, but,

for you, the 10th man was that pain.

There was something in your body that said, hold on a minute,

hold on, something's not right.

And you have to have that, because without the red flags to say,

something's not right here, you just continue down the same road.

What was the term you used for it?

Not the 10th man, but the, what was it say again?

Detached involvement.

Yeah.

Detached involvement.

So I use the term self differentiation, which is, I think the same thing.

Now I feel and I was trained in this by a really brilliant,

Coach, who's a good friend of mine, Murray Bingham in Australia.

He used to be a pastor and became the like club chaplain for the

football team that I was managing.

He stepped out of the church and went into the executive coaching

works at really high level.

He's an outstanding psychologist and coach and all the rest of it.

Brilliant guy.

Anyway, he taught me all about self differentiation and from

the perspective that I was.

So naturally self differentiated within the environments that I was in so I could

step out of the chaos and be different now that came with its challenges

and this was why we entered into this conversation and why I'm agreeing with

what you're saying that for this person to be outside of the organization itself

and why it's most helpful because on the inside of the organization, as I was

at the time being self differentiated.

You can very quickly become triangulated and isolated.

You can get factions that are working against you, and life becomes hell.

So I've experienced being self differentiated on the

inside of the organization.

So you're trying to be that.

You're trying to be what You think is the right thing to be but people

are not comfortable with it because are you one of us or are you not?

It's really interesting dynamic.

When you think, as we've just been saying that all organized

groups of people, all individuals are subject to a certain amount

of pressure in that situation.

You have to be able to withstand a much higher amount of pressure than

the average person within that system.

There was a TV program called Hannibal.

I never actually watched this thing, but I saw a clip that highlighted it for me.

The actor that plays Hannibal, plays it perfectly because it's so unemotional.

The guy that he's befriended in the program is a real empath.

I find that interesting because we have become more empathetic, I think.

Thank goodness.

It's good that the world has more empathy now, but it has its downsides.

For some reason this psychopath Hannibal is following this

policeman who's an empath around.

He happens upon somebody that's just been attacked by a killer.

So she's on the floor bleeding she's dying.

So you have these two people, the empath and the psychopath, in the same

room with a person on the floor dying.

And I just found that fascinating the way they portrayed it because the

policeman, whose job it was to protect and save this girl, went to pieces.

He's panicking, he's trying to dab her, she's bleeding from the neck.

And this psychopath is just observing, he's just interested,

doesn't care what happens.

Just detached.

But he sees that this guy is really freaking out about this

girl, so he decides to help, he steps in, pushes him away.

And because he's calm, he gets hold of the bleeding and he saves her life basically.

And I found that fascinating because, You can care too much.

And the point of detached involvement is that you care, but not so much

that it, it affects your ability to do what needs Hundred percent.

And that's

exactly what self differentiation does.

It detaches your emotional attachment to the situation.

Surgeons do it all the time, and it requires a degree of skill,

you can be trained how to do it.

It requires a lot of self awareness and it's incredibly

helpful on the empathy thing.

If there's an increase in empathy, that's fantastic.

I suppose a warning shot for me is.

is I think there's also an increase in people pretending

to be really nice publicly.

And that's got real danger for me.

There's a narcissism attached to how nice I am, and how publicly nice I am.

I suppose lots of stories of, Hollywood types, Ellen DeGeneres

and people like that, who have got this public face of nicety.

And yet all the stories that are not for me to comment, but all

the stories behind the scenes are.

It's not really wolf in sheep's clothing.

It's not really what is what you get in real life.

It's a mask of empathy, isn't it?

Basically in the field I'm in, I'm probably the least empathic person.

But it's not that I don't care.

I like, I care about people, but not specific instances.

That makes sense.

All of what you've talked about is something that I've naturally

came from a different basis.

So when you go back to talking about benchmarks, I've worked in two fields

that I've always thought the benchmark of people, what people felt was

flawed, so happiness and relationships.

And people are happy because things are going well.

And my work in happiness was, okay, there's a separation.

The empathy is about the emotions.

And then there's the foundations, which are the pillars that

determine the emotions.

And the emotions are temporary and transitory.

And you might be feeling well because everything's going well today.

But next week when you become more challenged you're then going to be,

flip flopping based on the tides.

If you have the pillars and all the foundations are sound, then

you're going to be more stable.

You're more able to sustain that stress.

And the same thing in relationships, people get married.

When you look at the curve of relationships, people are, when

they When it goes up, they get married there's a honeymoon phase,

and it just gradually goes down.

And it goes down because they didn't have the foundations.

They're judging the quality of the relationship on how they feel in the

moment, rather than, there's certain qualities that, whether a relationship

is going to last or not, is going to be how well you communicate,

and The key to communication is how well do you handle difference?

If that breaks down communication, you're going to break down connection and

then the feelings are going to change.

Right from the beginning Clark, you talked about stress and for me In

teams, in business, in relationships, in everything, we're operating at a deficit.

We're not operating from a starting place.

For me, there's three key themes.

The first is we live in an innately stressful environment.

So our biology evolved as a nomadic we lived in small tribes in a nomadic way.

We lived, we wake up when the sun rise.

We'd do a little bit of work, we'd have some fun, we'd go to

bed, all of that kind of stuff.

Once we had electricity and we had machines, we live in an artificial way.

So it's stressful to be on the tube.

Environmental psychology tells you, the more people that are around, the

more violence there's going to be, the more stress there's going to be, the

more hostile people are going to be.

It's harder to have a sense of belonging in a community of 6

million people in London than it is in like a tribe of 100, 150 people.

So the whole workplace is based on social, political, ideological, Demands

that we can't meet biologically.

The whole thing of be professional, keep your emotions at bay.

All of that means that people can't be themselves.

So they're innately stressed.

Even before anything's gone wrong they're predisposed to the environment,

creating more stress on their body.

And then I think for me, I think we have a relationship model that doesn't work.

We have a conflict model that doesn't work.

We think conflict danger means difference.

So we're Inherently stressed when we come across conflict.

So that stresses us.

And then I think the society runs on an economic mindset

where it's profit over people.

And so all of these things put people at a place where they're devalued,

they don't belong, they don't so if you go back to your I can never remember,

is it self determination theory, like autonomy, belonging, yeah meaning

relatedness, so autonomy, competence,

just like a sense of mastery and relatedness

yeah.

Before I heard of that, I had my own, which is belonging, value and

meaning but basically the same thing.

So I think inherently the system stressful and we go too much on how we feel in the

moment rather than the pillars of it, which always comes back to me and the, the

three little pig story where one builds his house of straw and it gets blown over.

One builds it of.

Cardboard or something sticks and that falls over and then the other one

builds and breaks Bricks yeah, okay.

I don't know how a pig does bricklaying but Yeah I think we go too much on how

we feel in the moment and not enough on the house that we've already built

I've just got a question there because I agree with everything

you've just said everything this idea that so much of what we do is built

on foundations that were developed thousands of years ago and we're now

living in this artificial environment.

But here's an interesting thing.

The the reason I got into looking at things the way I do from a work point

of view, having worked in factories with large groups of people for

such a long time was because having been in the military, I saw people

in environments, extraordinarily stressful environments and thriving.

And I, when I looked into this a little bit.

I especially was interested in PTSD, the way it affected ex military

people, because I had some friends that suffered enormously with that.

And what I found, there was a doctor in America that looked into this, and he

said that the, Symptoms of PTSD tend to only manifest themselves when the military

personnel is away from a stressful environment, which seems odd, right?

That when, where, when they're in Afghanistan or Iraq or Northern Ireland

or wherever they were with the people that they're part of their organism their

organization their group, their tribe.

They're fine.

They operate because they are operating according to the culture that's

within that group of people, right?

The minute they leave, so ex soldiers obviously suffer PTSD

enormously, and this is obviously vastly more complicated than that.

But as a general rule, when they leave, the PTSD starts to manifest

itself because they suddenly realize that they can't trust anybody.

This to me was an enormous revelation that they were under enormous stress in

places like Afghanistan, but the people around them, the group that they were part

of functioned, albeit dysfunctionally.

But it functioned to their benefit.

They were a part of it, and it functioned well.

Outside of that, they couldn't function at all because they couldn't trust anybody.

And the problem seems to be that even in this industrial age, where

everything's artificial and we work in these long days and these strangely

put together work weeks and so on.

It can work, As long as the culture is for the benefit of the people that are part of

the organization, whatever that might be.

So in a factory, for instance you can talk to a boss of say, 200 people

on the shop floor and you can say to him there's enormous problems

with morale on the shop floor.

People are off sick.

Accidents are happening.

There's conflict with management and so on, why?

What are you creating?

Because it's your culture, right?

You're the boss.

What are you creating that's causing this?

Nine times out of ten they don't even know that half of these problems exist.

And therein lies the problem, I think.

And this is the value of the tenth man.

Because the tenth man can ask those questions.

What is the culture within this organization and does it exist

for the benefit of everybody or does it just exist for a few?

I think I mentioned this before.

I worked at a company a couple of years ago where I was talking to the directors

and one of them took me to lunch.

And we decided that I was going to work in there for some time to fix

some problems within the quality department and do some things.

I was probably going to be there for the next 12 months or so.

We walked out the main doors of the office building.

And as we walked out into the car park and we were going to lunch, he said, by

the way, if you work here and you're going to be on the shop floor predominantly.

You can't go in that front door.

And I said, oh, why?

He said, that's only for directors.

And I just thought okay.

So now I know exactly where I'm going to be started.

Wow.

This is the culture that you're creating, right?

And most people that are a part of a system in whatever shape or form that

system might take, It has to operate for the benefit of everybody inside

of it, because if it doesn't, the weak links, the ones that are suffering the

most pain, will cause it to collapse.

So when you talk about the dodgy foundations and so on, Rob, I think

in a marriage, for instance, if somebody's losing out, they will cause

the downfall of that system, because Why wouldn't they for goodness sake?

I

was talking to someone about this.

So just to start from where you started from, it makes perfect sense to me that

the military the military example of more PTSD out of, combat than in it,

because what the military does is they break people down and they rebuild them

in the way that they want them to be.

And I think the great crime in that is you're building people so that

when they go back to their normal life it's so difficult to function

because, you've created someone to work within an environment, but not

to function in a normal civilization.

Related to that, I think it also affects people who are in the police

force because if all you're dealing with is people who are untrustworthy,

who lie, who cheat, who steal when you come away, it's very difficult for

Someone to trust people, it's difficult for them not to look for the bad.

If someone works in insurance, they're typically looking for all the risks and

all the dangers that are going to happen.

It's probably relevant in sports that if you have to function at that kind

of level it's, it, those kinds of environments where you're working at

such peak levels, it's hard to then come back to a normal everyday life.

That's such a lower level of function.

But those founders set up a company and they set it up for them and

they build to grow and whatever.

Everything is shaped and unless we're conscious of the biases we

create these situations and we create these environments where

people are never going to be engaged.

And then we wonder why people aren't engaged.

And it's because of the way that they're set up and relating to relationships.

Tony can see I'm chomping at the bitty cause you've

said something now that's

driving me mad.

Okay.

I'll just make this point and then I'm going to, and then

I'll let you have your rant.

So in terms of relationships I was talking to someone recently that often

people will have a strategy of...

if I just please someone, if they're happy if they get what they want

They'll be happy And then they'll do the same for me and then they're waiting

and they're going then years later.

They're like what about me?

Don't you care?

They do shut down.

And the problem is if the flawed thinking is, if you tell someone

that they can do whatever they want, they descend to the worst of

themselves, we have to have benchmarks.

We have to have standards.

We have to have values and we have to demand more from people.

Same in teams as in relationships, because otherwise people will just go

to whatever is easiest and laziest.

That's just one point.

But.

Go on, have it.

Actually you finished up by answering the question that I was going

to ask you because we never disagree, but I absolutely don't agree with that

about the breaking people down stuff.

It's not how the military works.

I don't have any experience other than people who've been there,

but that's the way I've understood.

It's a preconception.

It's what, and you've just answered it.

The problem in a lot of.

businesses is that, as you say, founders will put together a business

according to their own standards, their own principles and values.

What happens when you bring somebody into an organization like the military.

You expose them to universal values.

There are timeless and beyond subjective evaluation.

These are values like trust, Loyalty, you cannot tell me that when a person

leaves that into what you call a normal environment The person has

to adjust to this better normal.

Actually, they existed within a better normal and have now had to go to

what you have just said, the lowest common denominator, where everybody

basically does what they want to do.

And the problem that within any group of people or any organization is that whoever

sets the tone, whoever sets the standard and the values, we have to hope that the

standards that they've set are good ones.

So for instance you could go into a factory and the most important thing

is getting the product out the door, regardless of safety, regardless of

quality, regardless of the mental health of the people that work there,

and that's because of the value that the founder has put in into the

place is get that shit out the door.

Because we need the money.

In an organization like the military, the most important thing

is the person standing next to you.

You will do anything to protect that person because you know that by doing

that, he will do the same for you.

It's a self perpetuating set of standards that encourage things

like loyalty and honor and so on.

A person that comes into the normal world suddenly realizes that you

can be stabbed in the back at any time of the day or night.

And the answer to a lot of these problems, and it's certainly something that I

talked to people in organizations, and I'm tongue in cheek, having a little

bit of a pop there Rob, but you're actually right, you're dead right.

There need to be values to which we can look and adhere, benchmarks as you

say, beyond which most people wouldn't ordinarily gravitate towards because

it's not in their self interest.

It's not exigent for them to do that.

In the military you're not broken down, but you're exposed to a set of

standards that you must adhere to them.

Otherwise you've gone.

When I work with an organization, especially with the leaders of that

organization, I need to ascertain very quickly what their values are, because

mostly it's keeping the shareholders happy, lining their own pocket and buying

a new car or whatever is the thing.

These are normal wants.

However, in places like the military and the police and the fire service and so on,

you have to sacrifice a certain level of your own desires, for the greater good.

And therein lies the issue.

Most people in normal civilian life are not interested in the greater good.

Of course they say they do, they recycle stuff and so on, but what

are they prepared to actually do to benefit the greater good?

In the military you adhere to a set of standards that you think,

wow, if everybody was like this, the world would be fantastic and

it probably would in many ways.

But how do you accomplish that set of standards in the normal civilian

life, unless you want to put in a dictatorship, or police state

or something, you can't do that.

How do you raise the standards?

Therein lies the problem.

But with any organization, you need to understand what the, when you go in there,

what are the values that are being pushed?

Obviously most bosses will say we want to empower people and we

want to give them initiative and authority over their work and agency.

No, they don't.

Because I've literally worked in places where we've started to devolve

power and authority down to the workforce and the bosses hate it.

And this is why I worked at one place on a 12 month contract.

I was gone in seven months.

Because it started to become clear that I was running into that many roadblocks

because they just did not want.

The people on the shop floor were loving it, because they started to

realize, wow, this is we're starting to adhere to values and standards

that have never existed before.

And they like it.

Did they have pictures of you on their t shirts?

They can see you riding your motorbike.

No, they all knew I was a complete dick, but I had some decent ideas.

And the funny thing, actually, about that whole 10th man thing,

and in that sort of environment, I consider myself to be the 10th man.

You can't be anybody's friend.

You can't, you have to be so outside of all the cliques And the silos and all

of that sort of stuff that whilst you're creating something, I hope that's good.

You're not particularly loved by all you're doing is creating change.

And it's not until the change starts to come together that

people realize, Oh, wow, okay.

Yeah, this works.

But up until that point, you're everybody's enemy.

Thankfully, I like that.

So that works for me.

So for me, I think every relationship and every team has to clarify.

Like really be aware of what are the values that drive

that relationship, that team.

And then it's about holding it accountable because that's what high

performing teams do is they create a standard that you have to live up to.

And I think what you're saying is that the military holds people accountable.

And when they go out, they don't have anyone that's holding them accountable.

I think that's what we need to create more interactions, relationships

where we hold each other accountable.

The problem the military have is that when you leave,

you remain accountable and realize that nobody else is.

And there's an

imperative, obviously, for the military to be designed that way.

Where there's a good mirror between the military and, say, the

modern workplace, is in the Amount of ambiguity and uncertainty.

The military go into an environment that you just do not know, you've

got reconnaissance that's giving you as much insight as you can.

But where is the threat coming from?

We know it's there, but it's a minefield literally.

Without the implication that goes with being in the military, as in

life and death the workplace sort of mirrors that in terms of it's a

volatile place that we're existing.

It's changing rapidly, and we have one set of standards that need to carry us

through all of these different things.

So the military's designed brilliantly to maximize its ability to sustain

and succeed within the most uncertain terrain possible, which has got to be

a brilliant model for any environment.

If you carry that into a business what's the worst thing?

What's the worst situation we could be in?

Let's build something that can deal with that so that everything

else comes nice and easy.

I think I love that.

Rob, going back to something you said earlier, and like Clark, I

agree with everything that you said.

Once we'd let you have a say, it was brilliant.

But you touched on what I call the state and trade balance.

As I'm working on this psychometric tool, the score model.

We've got these traits, which are inherent.

So if we talk about genuine empathy, we touched on before, we're all

wired to have an innate amount of that's predisposed to us.

We either genuinely like connecting with people and want to build

unified, deep relationships or less.

So we're more independent or we've got no empathy whatsoever.

We've got no compassion.

We might be on the right at the psychopathic state.

We might be right on the empath state, which are extremes.

And most of us sit in this normal zone in the middle where sometimes

we like people, sometimes we don't.

And we've got our natural predispositions across multiple things, same with stress.

So the stability trait or the neuroticism scale, as it's unfavorably called is all

about predisposition to resilience and Anxiety and withdrawal and depression

and all those types of things.

So where we sit on that is going to have a great impact as a trait on

how we respond to the environment that we're placed in at work.

So if we're high in low in emotional stability as a baseline, and we get

consistently put into threatening volatile, uncertain situations.

It's going to peak our anxiety and it's going to make us perform badly.

And we're going to get stressed and we're going to underperform.

They're traits.

So we can hire for that.

We can put people in the right environment.

We can understand each other enough to know when I can increase the heat on

someone, or when I can turn the heat down.

It's a constant as a leader or a manager, it's a constant tuning in the dials

to everybody just to make sure we're bubbling away at the right spot, ideally.

Where are we talking about linking what you said about states versus

traits to what I was saying before about measuring your, these four

pillars of physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual well being?

Where are you at?

That's your state.

We know who you are.

You come to work every day and we know what you're good at.

And we're trying to tune these dials so that we're getting you going perfectly.

But something just happened that state that's environmental.

That's something that's impacted you.

That changes how you show up in your natural world.

When you're autonomous, when you've got good relationships, when you're pursuing

the role to the best of your ability, and you're given all the empowerment

to go and do it happy days, but still Your grandma died yesterday, you're

not feeling too good, and for the next two weeks that's where understanding

who people are at a foundational level and how they're motivated and all

those great things help us drive and build optimal environments for people

to express themselves, which is what, you put your players out on the pitch.

You can't tell Cantona just to dig in and close down and press

and stop him being himself, right?

You're killing, a number of league championships that United

would have won if we did that.

He would have broken down a lot earlier and left the game a lot

earlier if that were the case.

But there's a great example harnessing that Mavericks individual expression

is what we want from everybody.

Whatever that individual expression is, I want to Just fill out spreadsheets

all day without making a mistake.

If that's your thing, go do it.

And how good are you at that?

Brilliant.

But the state versus, so those are traits, that's aligning your environment.

The motivation is understanding your people, what makes people

tick, how much autonomy is enough autonomy for Clark to feel like

he's in control of his own destiny.

How much is micromanaging Clark?

Might be, he needs one piece of information, then just let him go.

He might need it every step of the way to encourage that he's on the right track.

That's what we've got to find out.

That's all trait based stuff.

It's all personal needs and understanding what makes people

tick, it's all that sort of stuff.

And then there's state what has actually just happened that's changed the

way this person's showing up today.

They're no longer that same person that we know that we're building this

environment around because something happened and that's where, you got

injured playing five a side or you.

So if you're on the shop floor and you're normally rushing about, or you're in a

warehouse and you got whacked the night before you got a dead leg and you're

moving at half speed, it's going to impact your productivity on that day.

Without, if you're just masking it and nobody knows, people are

just thinking he's not putting in.

What's wrong with him?

He doesn't try.

Yeah.

So it happens every Thursday.

Comes in on a Thursday and he just doesn't move as well.

What's going on?

It's that kind of stuff.

I think there's a big difference between predisposition and state

the whole situation that's driving someone's current behavior,

what you're trying to do there, I think, is building some

some movement into it because all organizations work according to processes.

It goes back to Rob's point about this, since the Industrial

Revolution the environment that we exist within now is artificial.

And so we have these artificially imposed rules placed upon us.

Such as working from nine to five, only having a break at 10, you

can't smoke until you have your lunch break, et cetera, et cetera.

Depending on the individual traits that a person might have that

they can adapt to that or not.

The problem is that most organizations have far more processes than they need.

Yeah.

When you look at a set of values or principles the thing about the

difference between principles and rules is that rules change constantly,

depending on the environment and the current state of the organization.

But principles, and this is the point going back to the military, never

change if an officer tells a soldier to go and punch another soldier.

the soldier knows that there's something wrong here because it's violated one of

the main principles of that organization.

And so as long as there are some rules, but the principles are unchanging, the

values never never adjust according to the environment, then that group

of people can operate with a fair degree of certainty, even in very

uncertain and volatile environments.

Because what happens is the, your process might be to do X, Y, and Z.

But on any given situation, you might need to miss out the Y and just do X and Z.

And what happens is somebody else, knowing how this thing functions, will

jump in and take over Y or whatever.

But it has a built in flexibility because everybody is, rather than

working to rule and adhering to a set of principles and processes,

they're functioning as an organism.

I've been fascinated with, for years, with swarm theory, the way, herds of

animals, flocks of sheep, flocks of birds, all of these things, the way they

function, nobody's deciding let's all move this way or that way, it just happens.

Because they're functioning according to a certain set of principles.

And so I think what you're doing there with your state and trait thing

is trying to build into a degree understanding amongst everybody that you

work with of who you're working with.

So you're trying to impose upon this.

Most organizations that operate within the civilian environment don't adhere

to these principles, or a factory or a business may put up a set of

values, but nobody sticks to them.

Very rarely does anybody actually adhere to them.

And you're trying to put something in place that, Functions in place

of that because clearly whatever values they have aren't working

unless they're really bad values.

. Yeah.

Yeah.

So you're putting something in place that will create a level of

understanding that will allow the organ organization itself to function flexibly

regardless of the principles around it.

If you've got, if you've got a 50,000 person organization.

Who claimed to have a fantastic culture.

What does that actually mean?

It's like mythology.

It's not possible for that to translate from the boardroom down

to the shop floor in Indonesia versus the shop floor in, in the U.

S.

if it's such a massive, global organization.

I think it's, It's imperative for the people who are close to the

work to be able to create what I would call like a micro culture

that their own version, as long as the principles are adhered to 100%.

I think a company's principles are a better statement of intent and

aligning intent and its values.

These principles are not movable, but your values will be driven by

the people that are doing the work.

At the place where the work gets done.

And it's the manager's job to get visibility of that, understand it, get

people aligned to their environment.

On a trait basis.

Somebody that likes routine do that.

Somebody that likes creativity do that as much as we can optimize

the environment for them.

That's autonomy.

Optimize the stretch, set the standards high enough that they're

mastering what they're doing and getting better all the time.

So you can praise them and support them when they need support and driving when

they dial it up and down depending on where people are at and keep them engaged.

That's you relating this, have they got the right manager in place to help

them achieve what they want to achieve?

Because they've all got wants and needs.

And if that's all principles led and it's happening at a micro

Level within the organization.

You can translate across the business from one function to another because

you're really good at what you do.

I think you do really well to be able to achieve that wherever you are.

You've done something interesting there actually, Tony, because I'm

just looking at the organizations that I know what you're doing is you're

creating an environment by putting this state and trait metric in place

where you're overriding The boss's inability to understand his own people.

There's a guy I think I've mentioned before, Konosuke Matsushita, who

was the chairman and founder of Panasonic way back in the 70s.

And I'm always talking about the fact that he gave a speech back in the 80s

to a group of Western delegates because they wanted to know how the Japanese

were able to produce such good quality products in such good time delivered well

and on time, obviously for a good price.

And he said to them, to the West, he said you guys are going to lose.

We'll win in the East.

And the reason we'll win is because, and he actually said the words, the reason

for your downfall is within yourself.

And it stuck with me.

I read this years ago.

The reason for your downfall is within yourself because you believe

the workers are just a resource for you to move around at your own whim.

Whereas we believe the times are so difficult now that we must use

the intellectual resources of every single person within the organization

for the benefit of the organization.

So it's really the difference between an egalitarian point of view.

And a command and control point of view.

And in the West, we have this ideal still, I can't believe that it still

exists in the 21st century, that if you don't like it, close the door.

I'm the boss, do what I say, I will empower you to do X, Y, and Z.

And seriously, I've had some barnies in boardrooms about this, because when

somebody says that we need to empower people, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do?

Give them a magic wand.

You've got the power and you're giving it to them.

Why have you got the power in the first place?

What, this idea that we're going to do this for these people.

We're going to bestow this free, freedom and agency on people.

It's so arrogant.

This whole command, control thing.

And what you're doing is basically saying, we accept that you're rubbish as a leader.

So I'm going to put the tools in place The override your rubbishness and let the

people operate at their best functionality because you clearly can't do your

moron, and You could have done that on

your sales page.

Exactly.

I'm going to be on your sales page.

I think in an ideal world.

The people at the top get it and they empower me to go and do that work.

That's really what it is because the world has become so specialized

that we can't expect every manager.

It's the whole political thing that they always say it's down to bad teachers.

You're always going to have the odd bad teacher.

We always going to have the odd bad managers.

So you have to have tools like this that can mitigate and Bring up

the general standard of everyone.

But when you're talking I think there's actually a third column because you've

got the states, you've got the traits, but you've also talked about the fate.

When you were talking about, like someone's gran's died or

something like that, but there's also the fragility of people.

I remember reading if someone misses four nights of sleep, they

age, their body ages by a decade.

How am I looking today?

It's been a, I feel a decade older than last time we spoke.

So I think there's things that come up affect that physical well being,

that mental being, that spiritual well being, that are outside of the business's

control of that, but still play into their ability to perform and their state.

Yeah, one would hope

that this idea of some sort of benevolent overlord within an organization

that the boss would hopefully in an ideal world be somebody that is

compassionate enough, but driven enough to understand what needs to be done,

but do it, do so in such a way that everybody benefits is an ideal that,

is a little bit unrealistic to expect.

However.

It works.

It does happen.

There are places and the success of the, of so many of these big Japanese

companies like Toyota back in the sort of eighties and nineties, was a

consequence of people like Te Chio and all these guys who got changed in the same

changing room as the shop floor workers.

They adhere to a set of principles that forced them to behave in certain ways.

And I find it amazing that when you give the ordinary worker.

the ordinary person a little bit of respect and show them that

you have some concern for them.

They very rarely take the piss.

They generally step up and give you way more back.

And this whole command and control thing, you guys can tell.

Most people can tell fairly quickly that I'm a little bit anti leader.

I don't like the idea of a leader.

You, you did well at a particular company, and you've now got the job of general

manager or senior director at such and such a place, Let's have a look at you.

Your life's a shambles.

Your marriage is a disaster.

Your kids don't talk to you.

How on earth can we expect you to honestly look after a group of 200 people, really?

We need something, a system or a set of ideas and principles that

will help you become the person That your organization needs you to be.

This for me is the key to a lot of the problems that we have within

organizations or countries, for that matter, who holds the upper structures

of that organization accountable.

The guys at the bottom are all accountable, but who's holding these guys

to some sort of benchmark or standard.

There's an enormous proliferation of books on leadership at the moment and

people everywhere are crying out for good leaders and not getting them.

When was the last time you saw a decent prime minister in the UK that you would

go for a drink with and sit down and have a conversation with without wanting to

kill them before the night's finished?

A long time ago, I think the last time I saw a decent prime minister was John

Major, not particularly effective as a prime minister, but A decent person.

And the problem that we have today is that the title of leader bestows

upon a person a certain untouchability that needs to be addressed.

This idea that I keep coming up with of the 10th man.

In my book, I say something about the leader of a company can't be the 10th man.

He can't be the person that decides whether they're going

in the right direction or not, because it's the same as asking the

king to be his own court jester.

Doesn't work.

You can't take the piss out of yourself.

Not as a leader.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The only challenge is, in the face of this huge, complex task

that we've got ahead of us.

How do we mobilize who we've got optimally to meet that challenge?

That is the job and doesn't matter who you are, what position of

authority you've been given or how much power you assume that doesn't

change the demand of the leader.

Doesn't change the demand of the leader is in the face of this

complex, dynamic, moving thing that we need to learn together to solve

it, we're going to have to it.

Create that environment where collective wisdom comes to the fore in order to

solve this in the most optimum way.

Where each of you is, situation, external situation aside in Europe in the prime

version of your work is given that opportunity to go and make it happen.

That's the job.

It doesn't.

And the title then becomes irrelevant.

Obviously, there's formal authority that's given to people in positions of

so called power, but I decide whether you've got authority over me, regardless

of What car parking space you've got.

Why is it then?

So here's the thing, thinking of military officers.

Yeah.

I always marveled at the fact that when a young officer leaves

Sandhurst as a newly badged officer as a second lieutenant,

he's got one pip on his shoulder.

They're usually kids, and nobody takes the slightest bit of notice of them.

They're ridiculed by everybody, literally everybody.

Then they become a lieutenant, then they become a captain, and a major, and so on,

and they start to develop as officers.

However, officers command respect.

And the reason they command respect is because even if they're

idiots, and a lot of them are, the respect is garnered by them.

By virtue of the uniform, the rank that they hold, the commission

that they've been given.

By the queen who is our boss.

Or the king now, so it's nothing to do with the person.

And this is one of the problems with leadership.

The stanford prison experiments clearly demonstrated that the minute you put

somebody in authority They become an absolute dick and the problem with

that is that I become a leader, I now have to start acting all leaderly

and throwing orders around and being authoritative and not able to make any

mistakes or ask people what do you think?

Because that would detract from my leadership qualities.

The best officers I ever saw, we had some exercises in the military

in Germany, where we did a lot of mountain skiing type stuff.

And I remember sitting during this exercise with our battery captain.

So he was what they call a Rupert, he's a proper plum in the mouth officer and

we sat all night and we got absolutely hammered and the next morning he was back

to being my boss again because he put his uniform back on the point is these guys

are still people and they can still mix with the rest of the gap and the problem

with leaders in business situations is that they lose that humanity.

They may maintain it when they're at the golf club with all the other bosses.

But the thing is that there needs to be a way.

I've always been convinced that it's the 10th man that keeps the person or

somebody that plays the role of the 10th man that keeps these people real.

So in a boardroom meeting, the boss can say, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We're going to do this.

And the 10th man says after...

you didn't know what you were talking about then, did you?

Why didn't you say?

Why didn't you ask somebody for help?

That was a stupid thing to do.

Why are we all now going down this road just because you didn't want to lose face?

Come on, what's the matter with you?

Those are the things that consultants and coaches do, right?

Because they're allowed to have that personal relationship with the boss.

The 10th man does that and says that thing that you just did was stupid.

Why didn't you ask that guy?

He's been here for 30 years.

Why didn't you ask him how to do it instead of telling him what to do?

Because we both know now that operative thinks you're a moron

because you just told him to do it in a way that he knows won't work.

So this idea of keeping people real, bosses real, I

think is massively important.

In the Japanese culture, in other Eastern cultures, it comes naturally because

there is a certain amount of humility.

That is part of their role as bosses.

We don't have that over here.

We have to be macho.

And we need to find some way of diffusing that.

Because look at the state that the, Ukraine is one of the most macho

orientated situations I've ever seen.

It's all about dick swinging at its best.

My country is going to beat your country because we are the

motherland and blah, blah, blah.

Come on, grow up with this in the 21st century, for goodness sake.

Yeah.

Rant

over!

When you were talking about benevolent leader, it makes me think

of like the Bournevilles or Cadburys.

And hasn't that become the archetype that we strive towards?

So people strive to reach a position.

They strive to make money.

And then when they've made money.

It's like trying to buy that I'm a good person by philanthropy

and it's the charitable donations and all this kind of thing.

It comes to mind that it's an artificial environment, we've created.

These kind of artificial roles.

You're a good person because you give to charity.

I think there's a lot of myths.

So when you talk about the Stanford, that's also like the alpha myth.

The whole alpha leader idea that you have to be a certain way.

I think there's a lot of myths that I don't know what you have in your

archetypes whether leader or something like that, but there's something

about striving to become that leader.

And there's a lot of myths when we feel we're in that role, it's the

whole imposter syndrome people have of, I'm not worthy to be a leader.

You were given the role of leader because of what you're doing.

It doesn't mean that you necessarily have to change.

Your role has to change, but you don't have to change within that role.

It's part of, it's part of the whole setup, like the office

of having those certain doors that certain people go through.

There's, it's like a velvet barricade thing.

They're self perpetuating, aren't they, Rob?

Those archetypes are self perpetuating because once you become the boss

and you start acting as the alpha, all knowing omniscient, omnipresent

leader, everybody has to buy into that because you're the boss.

What lunatic of a worker would say to the boss, come on boss,

that's stupid, don't do that.

That's the problem though, isn't it?

Nobody is buying the boss like that, but around the table,

they're all nodding their heads.

So we're back round to, we're part of the group.

We've got another one of these meetings with him.

Let's just, agree to disagree, go along with it, and then we'll sort

it out when we get back outside.

It's that kind of stuff, which is totally unhealthy.

That's not leadership.

Nor is leadership a set of characteristics, like going back

to the archetypes of the leader, people are naturally leadership.

Not really.

People naturally like the sound of their own voice, or are happy to get up in front

of a group, or are naturally assertive.

They've got all these natural tendencies that make them

comfortable being in charge.

But great leaders can be somebody that's got the opposite characteristics of that,

because they understand how important that connection with other people is.

If I genuinely are more aligned to the team's goals than my own if I

genuinely put the team's results ahead of my own, doesn't matter what my

traits and characteristics are, it's got to be an advantage for the group.

And I can find a way to work on my weaknesses to the degree with which

I can go and engage with people and mobilize them to do things, regardless

of what my characteristics are.

If underpinning these this comfort with engagement and stuff is a personal

ambition that outweighs my ambition for everybody else it's frought with

danger, like the chances of that being successful when people are looking to

you for how can we boss prosper here?

How can we succeed?

So it's a disconnect.

Is it possible that leaders find it difficult to lead or to have

empathy for the difficulties of the people that work for them because

they don't understand the difficulties of the average working person?

So for instance when I've spoken to a recent place that I worked at and this is

where I had that little bit of a friction with them because they were talking about

empowering the people to do x, y, and z.

I said, They don't want that.

I don't even understand what you think you're trying to do for these people.

They don't want that.

They want to be able to make their own decisions about where they

walk and what time they go to the toilet and if they can go for a fag.

These are simple things that should be basic human rights and you clearly

have no understanding of that.

These guys go home and they don't eat.

Because there's not enough money in the house, so they feed the kids, so the

kids can go to school with a full belly.

Half of these people don't eat proper food.

And you're sitting there thinking, yeah, we're going to

empower them to do X, Y, and Z.

It's nonsense.

You have no understanding of the life that these people lead.

And when you look at the Rishi Sunaks with all their millions and millions

of pounds, and you look at them and think, You need a flipping slap.

You need to understand.

You need a reality check of what's actually going on in this country.

Now, half of these people that live on the council estates in this country,

we look at them as the great unwashed.

They're uncouth, uneducated.

They would do better if they could.

They just can't because you won't let them.

They're paying flipping stupid electricity bills and so on.

And one of the problems that we have, I think, is that the leaders

have no comprehension of what the average person, the minute you start

to go up the ladder, you forget what it was like to be down there.

I've always had this idea that the best leaders are the ones

that don't want to be leaders.

By virtue of the fact that you want to be a leader should

disqualify you from being a boss.

The fact that you want to be in charge, yeah,

exactly.

Ego is it's balancing our primitive desires.

It's the balance between what's driving us to go and eat and go and populate and

all the rest of it, and a moral compass.

So you've got your moral compass on one side.

You've got your primal desires on the other, which are innate.

And the ego is the dial.

It's the bit that moderates between the two.

So if my desire is to go and accumulate as much as I possibly can for

myself, cause I'm greedy and my moral compass doesn't do anything about

that, it just lets me go with it.

I'm out of control.

I'm off chasing my dreams, and everyone gets trampled over.

I'm on the slippery slope, up on the greasy pole.

What it takes is a lot of self awareness, and it reminds me of in

relationships, people are looking for unconditional love and yet, Every time

they've tried to study unconditional love, they've had to abandon the study

because they couldn't find enough people.

They'd find instances, but they couldn't find someone that

could repeat repeatedly do it.

And when we look at self awareness, 80 to 85 percent of people think

that they're self aware, but only 10 to 15 percent actually are.

And what we're asking is when someone has risen to the top, there is a natural way.

When you're talking about the self determination theory So it's a basic need.

It's a basic needs theory, right?

So sorry, Rob, to interject, but what Clark just said before about

telling them when they can go to the loo, when they can eat, when they

blah, blah, blah, you're robbing people of a basic need for autonomy.

And as soon as you rob people of autonomy,

You create friction, but also, or contrarily is when I

talk about belonging status.

So what we want is status once we feel belong to someone, a leader

wants to is looking for status to meaning and they have to deny in

order to understand someone else.

There's a natural way of a leader is saying i'm better than them because i've

risen to this i've gone beyond this.

Yes, I faced those challenges where I rose above it But so they have to deny

that someone doesn't have the same abilities They have to deny because

everyone frames the world as that they're at the best they're doing So

that they feel good about themselves

It's counterintuitive though, isn't it?

Because whilst they're craving status, everyone thinks they're dick.

It's you've got no status in our eyes, mate.

You're a clown.

Look at the car you drive.

Look at the way you park on two lines and block other people

from parking next to you.

I used to work for a boss that parked on the lines between two car parking spaces.

And his ego was out of control.

I used to like him.

I had a great rapport with him.

He was a very smart guy and a good operator, but bit of a goose.