Hi, and welcome to WARP Speed Leadership, a podcast about everything you need to know to be an incredible leader in this rapidly evolving world of work. As this is our pilot episode. Thanks very much for tuning in, let me introduce myself, give you a bit of background on the podcast and our team, before I hand you over to the main discussion. 

My name is Richard Parton. I'm an organizational coach and consultant over the years have helped hundreds of leaders in businesses create high performing thriving teams. So in this podcast, my co-host and I will be talking directly to the leaders and experts shaping the new world of work. Every episode, we'll unpack one major trend. To provide practical insights for you to stay ahead and empower your teams to do their best work. So we'll be looking at what I call the big four tectonic changes in the world of work right now. leading edge science and the ways of working for enabling a high-performing teams and organizations. AI and tech and the [00:01:00] right way to incorporate them into the workplace. How to build purpose, environmental and social outcomes and diversity and equity inclusion into your work. And breaking down economic and geopolitical dynamics, impacting workplaces, the focus on what you need to know and practical steps you can take. The main podcast will come out monthly and we're aiming to record this with a live studio audience. 

So check out the show notes for how to get involved. We'll also drop many episodes in between. I'll be joined by my two amazing co-hosts Nikki Tugano, CEO, entrepreneur, founder of SeenCulture a decision intelligence and diversity equity and inclusion startup. And Helen Worall, who's an occupational psychologist and principal consultant at a company that I hugely admire. Cappfinity and they're really the global leaders in understanding people's strengths and skills and how to bring them into work. The three of us have actually been running a meetup together, covering similar themes for the past [00:02:00] five years. 

So to help you to get to know us in this pilot episode, the three of us got together at the Everest engineering office in Melbourne Australia. To talk about the backstory of the show. Share insights that we've gained from the meetup over the past half decade or so. , we are big believers in hands-on learning. 

So part of the idea for this pilot was to live test our recording set up. So we hope you can forgive that the sound quality is a bit less than perfect in a few places. Finally, let me also kick off the podcast by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land, where we met the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin nation. We'd like to pay our respects to indigenous elders past, present and emerging. 

And in the spirit of reconciliation also acknowledged that sovereignty was never ceded. I'd encourage our listeners to develop your awareness of the historical and ongoing injustices facing first nations people. So with [00:03:00] that, let's kick off the show. We hope you enjoy it.​

Today I am joined by My two co hosts, Helen Worrall and Niki Tugano. Hello. Hi. Cool. So, the first thing we're going to do is do a little bit of introductions.

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And to get us started, we're going to do a thing that Helen saw a little bit earlier today, which Helen completely knew about. I didn't know about this.

I'd forgotten completely about this. What is it? I think it's a quiz. Ah. From Simon Sinek. Yes. Oh, right. It was about, uh, purpose. Yes. Why are you friends with me? Why are you friends with me, Nikki? Really? Can I answer? Yeah. Okay. Um, oh my God, so many reasons. I mean, well, we met through the, the meetup that connected us all in general, but you, I love [00:04:00] that we've got this alignment in interest.

Right. But then we've got a complimentary sort of synergy between us in our personalities, but with, but with the common foundation of like really, I don't know, having this shared interest and passion and energy for understanding how we can optimize the behavior of people within a workplace context. Um, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes, but also, like, it's not even just the work stuff. I think there's, and this is for all three of us, that it's not just our common interest in the work context. It's, you know, we can hang out and have lunch at your place on the Sunday and, and that's also just really fun too. Okay. Now, why are we friends with Richard?

Oh, why are we friends? Yeah. Why are you friends with him? I drag you along to, uh, to things like that. [00:05:00] Richard is inspiring, has all these ideas, and he's passionate about bringing new ways of working, thinking about things into work. Like a lot of people, I think, Would read something interesting about like how you can do work or they would listen to a podcast about how you can do work And be like, oh that sounds nice, but that'll never happen at my workplace because you know XYZ Restriction or boundary they're putting themselves But Richard would listen to something like that or read something like that and be like, okay, cool.

Well, let's give it a go. Yeah. Just going to do that. Yeah. And make it just like, make it happen. And it will be. Yeah. You're like totally the pioneer starting things like you, you were the pioneer for the original meetup that we did on organizational, which was very lonely, quite a long [00:06:00] time until of course we came along.

Yeah. We were meant to be pioneers. For this podcast, like you're the one that starts it all. We would not be here without you. That is true. Yes, it is. It is true. Oh, thank you. Okay, now we have to say why we're friends with Nikki. Ah. Wow. Nikki, a spark of energy. Yeah, a spark. And inspiration, creativity. She's the thinker.

She's the idea generator. Along with Richard. They would spend a lot of time. And you're the one that actually makes it all happen. Well, I just wait for them to get off an itch. And then we'll be like, right, how are we going to make that happen then? So, yeah, just like Blank [00:07:00] faces at that point. They're like, full of passion.

Like, so much passion. So many ideas. And then, yeah, just like waiting to bring them into fruition. And the fact that I can be, I can be grappling with a problem. And I'll be going round in circles in my head and I'll say it to you and you'll be like, what about this, this, this, this, this, this, this? And it's like suddenly like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, oh dear, it exploded.

Yeah, and so much passion around what you do and this whole world of work and making it better for people. I think that the time when you turned up first at the meetup, it totally encapsulates your personality because What I remember is that after the meetup, I was talking to a few people about, you know, what, how should we run this meetup going forward?

 , and Helen and I had started talking, I think almost immediately you, you were like, do you should do? And he had about 10 different ideas. [00:08:00] And then, and then you were like, and also we should probably run it at my workplace and we can host it or we can do all of these different things. And I was kind of like.

Wow, that's full on, but also amazing, and they were all great ideas, I think we did pretty much all of them. Because that's where shifting to a different location, which was great, came from, um, Yeah, and kind of hosting properly, because before it was basically I would just turn up at the university. You do have meeting people.

Yeah. Hosting people, greeting people. Yeah. And it really was a meet up, especially in those years before COVID.

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And then I think this segues us nicely into what are our favourite things about the last 5 years? Has it? Ish? I feel like it's been, has it been that long? For me, Tuck's been going more than 5 years, uh, yeah, [00:09:00] it's gotta be nearly that, yeah. I want to, I want Richard to go first. I mean, cause it was his move.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Maybe connecting us a little bit with why you started it and then the favourite moment. Uh, so the reason for the meetup in the first place was, like Helen was saying before, that I'd been starting to bring positive psychology and better ways of working into into my work and I just wanted to share that more and I just was not finding a community of People who are already talking about this stuff and just quickly Yeah, the one liner on what positive psychology is the way that I frame it Which I know is a little different if you ask academics would be what it looks like when as a human you're working well, so Performance and well being are the two main elements I think about.

What does it look like when you have a team of [00:10:00] people working really well together? When you have multiple teams of people working really well together? Yeah. I think the other element of that as well is the fact that it's empirical and scientific approach as well. So it's just, it's trying to have a solid foundation.

Even if what you're not actually practicing is necessarily, well, somebody did this in a lab like context, and now I'm going to do the exact same in a workplace, which is not a great idea, but yeah, I think that we spend so much time at work. 90, 000 hours. Yeah. Yeah. We deserve for it to be good. And there's really no reason for it not to be good because actually when you enjoy it.

You perform better, you're more creative, all of these, all of that. It's like, if we were to focus our energies on one aspect of our lives that has the most impact overall, given how much [00:11:00] time we spend in the workplace, makes it a ton of sense. In the workplace or doing work? Yes. Because, yeah, you could think about work.

Oh, at the workplace, in a digital sphere, in the physical sphere, mental sphere. I don't know. about Yeah. I don't know about Okay, but now go into your favorite moment. I would actually say, and I, I feel like I'm probably gonna steal somebody else's thunder here, but I would say probably one of my absolute favourites was Rob Baker.

He's a friend of all three of us. Yeah, who's Baker from? From Taylor Thinking. We know him so personally. He's just a job crafting extraordinaire. Yeah, yeah. So, I find job crafting an amazing approach in the first place. Oh yeah, good point, we should talk about that. Or maybe, maybe, actually, yeah, do you want to?

Yeah, no, there was a whole argument about definitions on [00:12:00] Friday. Anyway, I would say making tweaks to your role or how you do your role. So it could be like the tasks, it could be how you interact with other people, it could even be how you think about. Yeah. Your work. The little tiny tweaks that you make to your job, or the way you do your job, that make it more you.

Have, have you though, introduced another element? So there's cognitive crafting, task crafting, relationship crafting, relational crafting, and then. I think those are the three. Those are still the three. Okay. Well being crafting he also talks about. I think that's just, that's just the wrong thing. Yeah. Okay.

So incidentally, we just had dinner with him last Friday evening. Oh, and drinks with everyone. And which is a, which is a big thing because he lives in the UK, right? And came special. [00:13:00] Not to see us. To go to a conference where he was invited to speak. Anyway. He, he just is the most amazing speaker. He talks so well about job crafting.

He's got a TED talk. You need to check it out. Yes. We'll do, we'll show notes. We'll do show notes. Should it work? Yes. Which was reviewed by Adam Brown. Adam Brown. And Carrie Cooper. Yes. And there were some others, but I probably, yeah. Yes, yes. Anyway, sorry. Continue job cramping. Was your ? Well, I'm just thinking, you know.

Uh, so Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist. Organizational psychologist. Yeah. I think we all have a of, a bit of a research crush on . Well, Adam Grant. Kerry Cooper. Cooper. I actually, yeah, I know where you're going with this. Stop. Who actually is one of my kind of. I actually was lucky enough when I was at uni to be lectured by him.

That was actually how I got connected with [00:14:00] psychology as a thing. That is, did you not know that? The thing that I loved about Rob's session and that just came more. Back to me when I saw him present again on Friday was this beautiful synergy between strengths and job crafting like while strengths Um, is the, strengths is kind of like, I don't know, the meat in the soup and the job crafting is the broth.

It's, job crafting is the vehicle. I love what you've got with this analogy. The strengths. I don't know. Rob gives a great analogy, which is way better than that one, but it's something about like job crafting being the vehicle. So if you know your strengths, so you know what you're great at and you know what you're energized by.

Yeah. And then you use the job crafting to say, so for example, [00:15:00] I am really driven and great at hitting targets. I'm so excited by having a target to work towards. And I'm actually really good at doing that. So maybe that's my strength. And if you know that about yourself and you have that awareness, you can then use the job crafting tool so much more effectively to say, okay, so then I'm going to tweak my role myself by giving myself little targets.

That even if my workplace doesn't give me targets, my manager doesn't give me targets, like I'm maybe going to challenge myself to, or how many of these documents can I finish correcting in a day, or whatever it is. Like you can just make these tiny little adjustments if you know these things about yourself.

Yeah. Whereas when sometimes you look at the job crafting tools, it can be a bit overwhelming for people. If they don't know the baseline of what I'm good at and what do I enjoy and therefore what should I be looking to craft around. Exactly. So this is great, it's so good. So it's once you get the strengths in [00:16:00] sight, job crafting is an avenue to practically apply and develop those strengths that we know we have.

Yeah, yeah.

And. Maybe this is a good moment to point out that our first official kind of main episode. If this is the pilot, we're going to have Rob on because when we were talking about interviewees, he was the one person we were just like, yeah, he's got to be, he's got to be one of our favourites. He's, he said yes.

Doing an interview in the next couple of weeks. Now we have to move on to Nicky's favourite part from the last episode. Oh, I know because we could talk for three hours about Richard's favourite part. So why he got into psychology through Kerry King. But we don't have time. He was just very good. That's literally it.

He is a very good speaker. Very charismatic. Very, yes. And he is actually Sir Terry Cooper. Because he's been like literally knighted. For his contributions. [00:17:00] In the fields. I should really get back in. So, I'm meant to be co authoring a book with him. We started, and you've got quite a lot on, Nicky, so I think it's understandable that it's on the back.

Yes, I mean, Nicky, we haven't, we actually managed to introduce you without Seeing Culture. Ah, what is that? Nicky's amazing company. You've got to tell us a little bit. Seeing Culture is I like to describe it as the third delivery model of what I've always done in my professional. So having started first working in HR or people in culture, designing and developing programs internally within organizations, and then moving a little bit more into a combination of academia and consulting.

And yeah, in that world and having this common interest, positive psychology, coaching psychology. Um, Richard and I both having [00:18:00] a hand in teaching positive psychology at Melbourne Uni and getting really deep into the empirical evidence of that. And so a big part of my thing was how do we bridge the gap between what science knows and what business does.

And, uh, and then starting seeing culture, which is basically, Oh, how do I use tech to scale all of that? You know, so all of the practical. Sort of stuff that I knew, know and learnt from working in industry combined with empirical evidence that supports it from having done research and getting involved in a bit of teaching, including the research that I did with, um, with Carrie Cooper around the book that we were writing, um, which I do want to revisit, which is still, I should, it's just on pause, it's just paused right now.

Um, and, and now looking at how can we use Technology to help scale all of that impact and actually it's quite nice and fitting that we're sitting here in the Everest office who are my technology [00:19:00] partners, where Richard works, um, uh, that, uh, yeah, helping me make it all happen. Oh, but I didn't actually say what scene, the scene culture.

Yeah, yeah, you do need to say that. What is that? What is that? Um, What do we do again? We work in the space of, I don't know, like the future of work or HR tech. It's a decision intelligence platform that enables people leaders to make more data driven and informed decisions around things like paid performance reviews, team design, and succession planning.

So, it's a bit of a combination of like, Data science with behavior science, we enable a little bit more democratized decision making, let's just say, so that we can really identify and recognize talent, but not just from this person at the top of the hierarchy, but, you know, collectively from everyone in the organization.

But the one liner that I often reference is the money ball for teams in organizations. Oh, I was like, [00:20:00] money ball is in the film. Yeah. Yeah. Based on the book, a lot of people don't realize. Yeah. So the book. Um, it's called Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game. So, some people might be familiar with the movie.

It's got Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. Looks like it's a movie about baseball. Um, it's based on this book called Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game. And I guess what the movie really demonstrates is how they can use data driven approaches or In, in the movie, player analysis to identify players who had traditionally been overlooked and undervalued by other teams.

But, um, in looking at a little bit more of the analytics around how these players are actually contributing to the overarching sort of goal of getting runs. Realizing that actually in the current, in the problem that they had where they had three of their star players leave. They're trying to identify how they can replace these star [00:21:00] players.

And interestingly, Jonah Hill comes in and he's like, well, you know, let's replace the players in the aggregate. Looking at what value do they have in terms of contributing to the shared team goal? And yeah, looking at it from that lens, which enables us to really our mission is to shine a light on that untapped potential that exists within organizations and and looking at what are those hidden strengths or Capabilities that we often overlook, typically due to a variety of, um, cognitive biases, the more popular ones are like Dunning Kruger effect, where we tend to mistake confidence for competence.

There's things like affinity bias and the halo effect. And so our platform is really set out to mitigate against that bias so that people leaders can make more data driven and yeah, informed decisions to how they recognize this talent. Cool. So as much as this is not actually an advert [00:22:00] for , for seeing culture Helen as somebody who looks at how to strengths to measure.

Yeah, exactly. You've gotta talk about how to measure what helps people to do well in the workplace and who looks at strength. Yeah. How do you what? How do you see what the platform does? I about work that you helped . Oh, okay. What do I do? So I work for Certy. Everything we do is based on skills and strengths.

I say. How much more than that? Yeah. I mean. Organisational psychologist? Sorry. Occupational. Occupational psychologist. Yes. UK chartered occupational psychologist. You have to be very specific. Yeah. So my background is organisational psychology, but strengths and positive psychology has always been super, super interesting to me and just seemed to make sense.

All the reasons you already said. We spend so much time at work. Why would you not want your work life to be better? There's research out there and evidence out there that we can [00:23:00] apply to help make our own lives and other people's lives better at work. So let's go out there and try and do that. That's why I became an occupational psychologist.

At the moment I work with an organization called Capfinity and everything we do, you might have heard of Strengths Profile, it's a well known tool, everything we do in terms of creating assessment or development solutions is based on skills and strengths. So I like to say we're measuring. for skills, but we're looking for strengths.

That's not the company line. That's my line. Yes, I like that. You should impose that on their PR, on their marketing comms. Yes. Yeah. So my role is really around helping organizations to work out what makes someone successful in a role from a strength based perspective. And then helping them to find those people.

So again, it's around like looking for potential in people, not being blindsided by like their previous performance or their qualifications or what they look like on paper, but actually looking for their potential. And [00:24:00] then everything we do around development is based off the same baseline as well. So someone's like innate potential and what energizes them.

To bring their best self to work and be, and contribute the best that they can to the workplace. It's not just about individuals, it's about the effect that then has on the workplace and on the organization. Tell me about inmate potential. Isn't that strengths? I don't know, I think there's an interesting debate there.

Like the way that we frame strengths are around like their pre existing. Like all of the work that Alex Lindley did at the beginning. So Alex Lindley is the CEO of Capfinity and he was originally an academic who was working in the area of strengths and was doing all of the research on it. His definition is strengths are preexisting.

So they are innate to us, they are authentic, they feel like us, and so they, they are just like naturally within us. And then, so we naturally have this potential to do them well, [00:25:00] and we find them energising and motivating. And you put them in the category of, like, so from the Strix profile perspective, there's obviously those four different categories that are profiled, and they would be the realised, They would be strengths.

Realized would be also you get to use them often. Unrealized is you're good at them. You're energized by them, but you don't get to use them often. So there's that like slight differentiation, but they're both strengths. We wouldn't call them strengths. We'd call them learned behaviors. We could go on about this also for hours, which we can't.

This is the common thread between all of us, right? Yes. This, this focus on strength psychology. As opposed, or positive psychology, as opposed to traditional psychology, which may be, it might be worthwhile just clarifying the difference there. Like, instead of a deficit approach. Exactly, yes. The, the original reason why positive psychology became [00:26:00] a new term in Seligman's reign at, I can't remember if it was SIOP or the APA.

APA. In 2000, or from 2000, so the original way of looking at psychology and people's kind of mental health was from a perspective of is there something wrong with this person? Are they below the line? Are they floundering? Are they depressed? Are they anxious? How do we get them back to normal functioning?

And once you're functioning, it was kind of like, oh, tick, the job is done. And Seligman said, surely there must be more than just normal functioning. There's a huge variation in how much people are enjoying their lives, how much they're thriving and flourishing. So how do we apply this same research so that we can find ways that we can apply systematically to enable people to flourish and thrive more in their lives and take them further above that line?

You know what I [00:27:00] quite like? Seligman was like inspired by his daughter. Who, by the way, is called Nicky, who basically challenged him on the fact that he was just like always grumpy. Oh yeah. Have you heard this story? Well, yeah, because it started with learned helplessness. Yes. Oh, of course. In the seventies, all of his work on land helplessness.

Depression, something about depression, um, and what happens to our minds when we are in a state of depression. We stop thinking creatively, we narrow ourselves into a fake mental box and we can't think a way out. Yeah. The way that I think about it is traditional psychology tends to look at what's wrong with us.

Positive psychology looks at what's right with us. And so it's just a different focus because at the crux of it, psychology is about human behavior. And for so long, traditional psychology has looked at the pathology of what's wrong with us and how we can fix ourselves, whereas, and typically dealing with [00:28:00] clinical populations, right?

Whereas positive psychology looks at what's right with us. How can we normal people and in particular in a workplace environment, I know that's really relevant to all three of us to really optimize our capabilities, our outputs in such a way that we're thriving and optimally functioning. And so. And being successful and doing all of those things, the science of success, if you will.

Yeah. And I think it was at that, at a point in time, and I think it probably is still relevant, it was good to make a distinction because of the way that funding had evolved around psychology. Yeah, that's right. It was great to make that distinction and say, you know what, there's this other side. I mean, Seligman specifically picked out a term had been used many years before.

I think. It's very hard to draw a real distinction [00:29:00] between where there's Yeah. Your restive psychology and positive psychology, where is that overlap? Because a lot of the things, and I will try not to go into all of them right now, but a lot of the things that we get excited about, actually part of the reason we get excited about them is that because they have a huge evidence base behind them, which makes them rich and applicable and you can use them in lots of different ways and have confidence in them.

And that research often started. You know, before, before positive psychology. Yeah, exactly. The world did not suddenly emerge fresh in 2000. If I think about work in workplaces, a lot of the time I'm thinking about motivation and strengths. And I'm thinking about job demands and resources and. How do I prime for flow?

Yeah. And it's a lot of these things. I've got these really long routes and I think it's, but I think the great thing is that before those were quite [00:30:00] disparate sort of areas, cool to have a thing to bring them together. Although I personally, and well, I think all of us feel quite strongly about actually bringing them into practical application in, for us in organizations is where it's at.

How much better is it to study? People who are exceptional versus people who are struggling. It's pretty much more interesting. And it's pretty much more interested in the But that's why you're in this field, right? And you're not a clinical psychologist. Each to their own. Everyone. Courses for courses.

We've obviously gone off on a tangent because that's what we do. Yeah, yeah. But we haven't talked about our favourite things from Meetup. Yeah. Okay, I'll do mine quickly. I can be very speedy. Yeah, that session was amazing, really practical, loved it. The other one that I loved doing was the communication styles one.

Oh, I loved that. It was so good. Helen was the one that [00:31:00] facilitated it. It was so fun. Okay, so we did, the reason it was great was because it was pre COVID. So everyone was in the city. So we had like about 25. 30 people. It was a lot of people. Yeah. Everyone got really involved in the session, like, there was so many, like, different activities we did.

Everyone was talking and, like, really getting involved. Yeah. And it was all around, essentially, like, understanding your own communication style and people with different styles to you. Yeah. Because there are ways that you can. segment this into like nice little neat boxes, which is obviously not really how people are, but it's enough of a heuristic that it's helpful.

So we did that and it was such a great session. And the other one that I really enjoyed was the Agile HR one that we did. Yeah. Which is about applying, applying agile concepts specifically to HR. Yeah. What would be a takeaway for you? Um, well, the reason I liked that one so much was because we had a very different, um, type of person that went to that.

We had a lot more kind of HR [00:32:00] focused practitioners at that event. We should do that again. We should. It was also during COVID. So it was all completely remote. And we had someone from the UK, the lady who was like the main person, and the other person was in Sydney, and it was all of us. Yeah, Natal Dank, she's so good.

Yeah, her work is amazing. Was that the one that we had one of our early online sessions, like we had Like over a hundred people. Yeah, that was a lot of people. And this is the beauty of, I don't know. Online stuff during COVID. People wanted connection and they wanted to be interested in something. We were able to support so many different time zones too.

That's correct. Anyway, that's mine. Go on. Oh no, those are my three. You were very speedy. Yeah, of course. You? Vicky? Your favourite one? Or ones? What would be your favourite and what would be a takeaway? My favourite was, and in fairness, I don't know if this constitutes, but it was certainly something that was organised by the three of us [00:33:00] and so I'm just going to go with that.

Last year's Last year's International Women's Day event that we did, and we've done one, we did one the year prior as well, but last year's one, I loved it, um, like, it was a very different angle that we took on the celebration of women. Tell us the angle. The angle, alright. I, I often get involved in these events every year, and they're designed by women, for women.

And then we complain that there aren't enough men in the room supporting us and it's like well, I mean, like what do we expect and I think obviously we need a lot more support in this space, but in some ways we need to take some just like some accountability in terms of how we bring in our allies and advocates, our male allies and advocates into the conversation such that they feel included because a lot of the time the default [00:34:00] Sort of assumption is that men aren't invited.

They can't be part of this international women's day conversation I was like no we need you and so in acknowledgment of Recognizing the importance of obviously empathizing with your audience and understanding their needs and speaking their language in order to bring them Engage them more effectively.

I Basically called up all of my closest male allies and was like hey So this is my thing and this is my problem with these sorts of international women's day events You do it. I need, I need my male allies to become advocates and really get behind this initiative. And we, the three of us, we did a whiteboarding session downstairs, mapped out a few different advocates that we knew would be really supportive unquestionably of this initiative.

And we ended up calling the event. Um, and [00:35:00] I was really proud to see that evening that we had probably about 40 percent men in the room, which from an international women's day perspective is like. Unheard of. You don't normally get that. Yeah, I've only been to a few. Yeah, but I loved the format too. We completely removed panelist hierarchy.

We had this fishbowl format which really invited everyone into the conversation where we were swapping panelists in to hear from the perspectives of people who were in the audience. And it was just so engaging that we literally had to kick people out at the end of the night. That's a great time. The things that for me were really incredible about, about what I learned from that session was one, [00:36:00] noticing, actually, There was a lot of debate amongst the women in the room.

So much debate. It got spicy. It got very spicy. Oh, the best way to be an advocate, which is something that, you know, when in our prep we'd, we'd sort of unpacked, that's actually one of the things that guys feel concerned about. I just don't know. I want to be supportive, but I've, I'm worried about how to do that.

So that was, that was great. great for me because it helped me to see, oh, there isn't, there just isn't a single right way. No. It's more the making sure that you are conscious and that you do something. And even if it's quite small, actually, there are a number of women who told stories about, well, I, this happened to me.

And I didn't need a guy to come and save me. Yes. But somebody speaking up and saying something completely changed the conversation. That was a real eye opener for me. And men are in [00:37:00] such a hard position sometimes in those circumstances because sometimes there's this expectation that guys should stand up for them.

But then there are some women that are like, I've got my own voice. Don't fight my battles for me. And so it's so hard. And I think the thing that we need to do as women sometimes is to stop playing referee, because what we end up doing is compromising people's psychological safety, or men's psychological safety, to to try.

To the point where it's like, oh, if I get it wrong I'm gonna be, you know, um, and so It can be a bit discouraging, and I think we just need to give a bit more of that safety to be like, look, we know that your intention was there, maybe you shouldn't just make the assumption that this or that, make the assumption that, I don't know, my boss was a man, which is something that typically happens in the workplace, but yeah, a little bit more [00:38:00] conscious of the ways in which we could potentially be ignorant and be more mindful of what that impact is.

Yeah. You can just be more inclusive, actually, of the men in the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. And vice versa. That was one of the things. Well, of course. Yeah. Of course, I'm all for women. Yeah. Yeah. But if we're talking about, we're talking about men being advocates in this particular way, women need to be inclusive of men as advocates and not shame them for saying the wrong thing.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, you have to give everyone the benefit of doubt and include them.

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So that's a really great segue for us to wrap up our first episode.

Thanks so much to my co hosts for coming along and thanks for having us starting it. Yeah. Next time we're going to talk a little bit about things that we're excited about going forward. Yes. And in a few weeks time also, we'll then have. Our first main episode with [00:39:00] Rob talking about job crafting and basically some of the bigger themes going on in workplaces.

I'm so excited. Ah. Alright. Thanks very much.

Bye. Alright.

Alright.