159: Stronger Together At Work, with Peter Turner

Real care at work isn’t about saying yes to everything. It is about designing a culture where people can struggle together and still deliver. 

We brought Pete Turner, partner and senior executive coach at 2B Limitless, to talk about how teams can be genuinely compassionate without "compassioning" themselves out of business. From the pains of fast growth pains to real-world HR dilemmas, Pete walks us through the tradeoffs leaders face and the choices that keep a company healthy enough to support people when life hits hard.

We discuss the hidden pressures managers face and why these team members are often the most stressed layer of any organization. Pete shares two practical mindset flips that change everything under pressure:

• Move from telling to coaching.
• Shift from fixing weaknesses to amplifying strengths. 

These moves build autonomy, mastery, and belonging, which strengthen resilience and performance. We also address the stubborn knowing–doing gap—why we ignore good advice even when it’s obvious—and how to close it with small, repeatable habits that survive busy seasons.

If you’re a leader trying to balance empathy and execution, or an individual seeking to build genuine resilience without burning out, this conversation offers practical tools, honest stories, and a path forward. 

Pete Turner is a keynote speaker and partner, senior executive coach and keynote speaker for 2b Limitless an executive coaching and leadership development organization. He is the head of coach training and accreditation and the author and creator of the APC, one of the ICF’s most exciting and transformative coach education and certification programs. 

He specializes in the behavioural economics of high-performing individuals, teams, and organizations. And his focus is to create 21st century learning experiences that are scientifically rigorous, inquiry-based, formally certified, interactive, and fun. 

Learn more about Peter on LinkedIn.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 1:01 Defining Compassion As Struggling Together
• 3:23 Leaders’ Hidden Pressures And Demographics
• 6:04 Balancing Empathy With Business Viability
• 9:07 Systems, Incentives, And Human Nature
• 13:31 Coach Mindset And Strengths Over Weaknesses
• 16:48 The Knowing–Doing Gap In Everyday Choices
• 19:49 Personal Responsibility And Trait Awareness
• 22:41 Reframing Friction Into Complementary Strengths
• 24:56 Closing And Where To Find Pete

Transcript

Peter Turner: 0:02

Intuitions that people have that are often unhelpful in terms of getting the best out of the people around them.

Manya Chylinski: 0:14

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. My guest today is Pete Turner. He's a speaker and a partner and senior executive coach for 2B Limitless, an executive coaching and leadership development organization. We talked about compassionate leadership and how to make sure you're not so compassionate. It puts you right out of business. We talked about the gap between what people know and how they behave. And it was just an amazing conversation that I know you're really going to enjoy. Peter, I'm so excited to have you here today. Thanks for being a guest.

Peter Turner: 0:56

The excitement is all mine. Thank you so much, Manya.

Manya Chylinski: 0:59

So, first question. All my guests need to answer this year is what is one thing that you've done in any area of your life that you never thought you would do?

Peter Turner: 1:10

Gosh, it depends on which version of me was asked that question. I if I think about the the 10-year-old version of me who had incredible ambitions, I probably disappointed the 10-year-old version of me. Because the 10-year-old version of me thought it was thought he was going to be an astronaut and um these crazy things. But then the um then if you'd asked sort of the the 20-year-old version of me when reality set in, um, I probably never thought I would run my own company. Or at least I'm I'm a partner. I have a partner that I run it with. So I probably never thought I'd be a partner running my own company.

Manya Chylinski: 1:50

Great. And here you are, leading a successful company and helping people right and left. So I think that's awesome. Well, thank you for sharing. And to get us started, you know, we're talking generally about compassion in the workplace. We've got a lot of specifics to get into, but I'm curious your thought about what does it take to make a compassionate workplace?

Peter Turner: 2:18

One of our values at 2 Be Limitless was compassion, a genuine care for others. So we actually had it written down. And then here I am talking about it and asking myself, well, how compassionate are we as a business? And do we do what we say we're trying to do? And the reality is, I actually looked up the etymology of the word compassion before we started. I don't know whether you've whether you've done that before.

Manya Chylinski: 2:43

Not recently.

Peter Turner: 2:44

The actual origin of the word compassion. Com means together, and passion actually means to struggle. So compassion literally means to struggle together. And something really clarifying about that for me when I when I thought about it. And I realized that the people that we looked to for compassion, our leaders, are also in the struggle themselves, having their own traumas, their own tribulations. And yet we're looking to them to give us compassion. And um and maybe a quick anecdote, which is really relevant for us in our business. Our business is currently going through quite an interesting phase. We're a relatively small business, and we've got three people in our team at the moment that are going through some really difficult times. And this is a chance for us to show that we're a compassionate business. But we can only be compassionate with them, providing that the business is strong enough in the first place to be able to look after them when they need it the most. So there's this tension, isn't there, between being compassionate and caring for our people, but also challenging them enough so that we've got a business that's strong enough to also look after them in the hard times. So we're all in it together, which is a bit of a cliche, but actually that is the etymology of compassion. We're all in the struggle together. And maybe that's a good starting point.

Manya Chylinski: 4:06

That's a great starting point. And I love that you brought that up. And you've talked about in some of the struggles, which is we look to our leaders to model compassion, to be compassionate while they themselves are dealing with their own struggles. It's really easy as someone who's not in a leadership position to look at those who are above you in the hierarchy and think you should be doing X. Yet, as you said, they're they can also be struggling and have to deal with that and have to deal with that from a different position in the organization and with all those expectations. But I like the thought of struggling together.

Peter Turner: 4:49

It's interesting, isn't it? We there's something that feels uncomfortable to compare our struggles and our hardships because people are going through their own stories and it's and it's not fair to compare them. Having said that, I'm potentially now going to do that. If you're a leader in an organization, there's a fairly good chance you're in an age demographic where your life has got really, really difficult. You're probably in an age demographic where you're a parent. You're probably in an age demographic where your own parents get into that elderly age where you need to care for them. You're probably in an age demographic when you've had more responsibility on your shoulders than you ever have before. You've never been under as much pressure. Yet these are the people that we're looking to to support our employees in organizations. I think that's a really interesting uh dimension to pay attention to. And even when we look at this the data around which demographic in organizations are struggling the most, it is the managers who are under the most pressure and who are most likely to be experiencing the most stress. Yet, as we said, they're the people that we're looking to to um look after everybody else.

Manya Chylinski: 6:03

Right. Well, and especially when you're talking that middle management layer, employees who are looking to the managers to help them with their careers and help them with their jobs are putting pressure. And then the executive team is putting pressure, no doubt, on productivity and you need to do X, Y, or Z with your employees. And it does seem like they're uh potentially being squeezed there. But I want to go back to something you said originally, which was about your own business balancing being compassionate and understanding with also still having to run the business. So you don't want to compassion yourselves out of being a viable business. And so, you know, if you've got several folks in your organization who are struggling, and those people are no doubt actually important to the organization, how do you balance that? And I I feel like that's one of the core questions people think. I don't want to just give people time off because we still need them. How do you just in practice, how do you think about that while still having some level of compassion for what someone's going through?

Peter Turner: 7:23

Yeah, thank you. It's it's really relevant and and topical for us at the moment because we are, we've grown a lot recently as a business. And as you grow, you start experiencing all those HR challenges, don't you? And um, one of those HR challenges was oh, do we allow people to work from home? Do we uh do we ask them to come into the office all of the time? And can they go and pick up their children halfway through the day? And can we create all of that beautiful flexibility that allows people to um feel like they're even more cared for at work? And we were really, really struggling with that as a business from a values perspective. And what kind of a business do we want to be? And we were desperate to be that kind of business that didn't even have holiday forms. If you want to take a holiday, take a holiday whenever you like. We're not counting your hours. If you want to work from somewhere else or a different country, which is really relevant for us in the UAE, a lot of people go back to their home nation for months on end, particularly during the summer. And we wanted to be the kind of business that would say, Yeah, you know what, wherever you are, absolutely fine. But then we realized, and it was particularly when key members of staff at the same time were going through genuine challenges. And that was the moment that we realized that being a compassionate business means that we are able to support people when they need it most. So when that person needs that extra kick around their medical care, we were able to sponsor them for it. When that person needed to take extra time off during their maternity because they had complications during a pregnancy, we were able to give it to them. But we would never be in that position to behave that way if we didn't look after the business in the first place. And then there we get our, don't we, between that piece of language that you use was beautiful, compassion yourself out of doing business. So it really is looking after the business in a way that enables you to be compassionate when people need it the most. And that was the real learning for us. So we're not a lifestyle business. We are in this business to make a difference and create a profit so that we then can support people when they need it the most.

Manya Chylinski: 9:34

That's so interesting. And it sounds like from what you're saying, it does take a conscious attention to this. It's not just thinking, hey, we want to be compassionate. It's really making it of core value and then testing it. And are we being compassionate? Is this the kind of company we want to be? And are we still able to be successful?

Peter Turner: 10:06

Yeah, I I don't know what your core perception of human nature is, Manya. I one way of sort of dividing the world into half that one perception is people are bad people and you need to incentivize them to be better, or the other perception is actually people are naturally really, really good people, and it's just incentives that maybe make them behave otherwise. I tend to think from the latter, I think that people are trying their best and they're under pressure, and it's within that pressure that then creates the perception that people are behaving in a way that is uncaring. And you going back to your original question, um and at the core of what we what we do as a business is to actually give people the tools to behave in the way that they would actually ideally really like to behave in. You know, they've got their values written up on the wall, but sometimes it's not as easy as just having these uh wonderful uh ideal words up on the company office walls. Um, sometimes people actually need the tools to know how to turn those values into behaviors. Not as easy to do as it is as it is to say.

Manya Chylinski: 11:19

Oh, yes. Well, as with most things, it's much easier to simply say this is how things should be. I, for the record, am someone who believes most people are just absolutely lovely and everybody's doing their best. And I tend to see when things go astray, I tend to see them through the lens of the system. So this person is responding to their environment in this particular way versus ever thinking that people are inherently bad and need incentivizing. So when I look at the world of work and I see what seems like that perception of we have to incentivize people and we have to, I'm gonna use the word force, but I don't know that people use that word, force them to behave this way. It just gets to me because that's when you see the burnout and the, you know, not feeling psychologically safe at work. Whereas in environments where we trust people and trust that they're good and try to shape, give boundaries. This is a work environment. The goal is to produce X and to make money for the owners, but just give boundaries versus give orders, I guess.

Peter Turner: 13:12

Yeah, I'd love to know whether you've seen examples of systems that have really got the best out of human nature. I completely agree with you. And it's actually one of the questions that I ask my clients. How much of the behaviors that you're seeing at the moment are a consequence of actually just systems that are pulling you apart from each other, where different functions within the organization are being incentivized in a way that is pulling them apart from each other as opposed to encouraging them to collaborate with each other. That is a genuine challenge. And there's a there's a both situation here. There's there's this system, and then of course, there's how we choose to respond to those systems. And it also depends on who we're talking to as well. Are we talking to the individuals? Are we talking to the managers? If I'm talking to the manager, we might give them the tools to help support other people, but if I'm talking about the employee, the employees underneath those managers, we're trying to encourage them to um focus on all the things that they can control and do all those things that we were taught to um ourselves.

Manya Chylinski: 14:16

Right. Well, and I am someone who very much believes in personal responsibility. I am responsible for the way I behave out in the world. And if I go off and yell and scream at someone, on some level, it doesn't really matter why. It's just I take I have responsibility for the fact that I did that. Um, now maybe I did that because I was feeling spicy in the moment. Maybe I did that for reasons I don't even understand. But I also believe that the environment that we're in has such a significant impact on us. And I just posted on LinkedIn a study that showed that something like 80% of people feel are struggling with their mental health because of work. Like the work environment is causing them to struggle with their mental health. And to me, that just screams of you know, quote unquote system is not supportive. And so as an individual, yes, there are things I can and should do and fully support that. And then what can I do with someone to actually impact the system if I'm not in charge of it?

Peter Turner: 15:30

Yeah. It's so interesting. You've got me really thinking about what I do.

Manya Chylinski: 15:34

Oh no. I'm in a good way, I hope.

Peter Turner: 15:38

Yeah, but it's a it's a paradox because um there there are occasions where I'll be working with all the managers in a room and we're talking to them about, you know, you know, the classic Gallup research. 70% of the engagement of your employees is hinging on your shoulders. These are all the things that you need to do as a leader to get the best out of your people. You know, it's all hinging on you. It's all about corporate leadership. And then when the leaders are not in the room, and then we're working with the employees who are underneath those leaders, we're putting the focus on them. It's like, well, focus on what you can control. Don't blame the people above you. You've got to advocate for yourself, you've got to focus on, you know, that other person's not in the room. What can you do to pay attention? So it kind of depends on who we're speaking to. And there's a there's a both and there's there are things that the organization can do to be better, things that the managers can do to be better. But then when they're when they're not in the room, right, what can you do to respond better to the environment that you're in? Um, because that's not in your control. Um, so yeah, we're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Manya Chylinski: 16:44

Well, I mean, I think that's true for everyone, because we can I can only do what I as an individual can do. And I'm responsible for my own behavior. And I am part of a larger organization or a larger system, and sometimes can't necessarily do the things that I might want to do or uh think are the right things to do just because of the way things are set up. How do I manage myself in that environment? So I guess what I'm saying is your work is very important. And as you said, it's both and it's individual behavior is important, and that's all I'm responsible for, is my own behavior. And how do we interact with the system and how do we help each other? So interesting, you know, you talk about talking to the managers versus talking to the employees. And I'm curious how you see that relationship, especially as we're talking about like a compassionate workplace and we're talking about the systems angle. How do you see people interacting in a way that's the most supportive?

Peter Turner: 17:52

I think managers have got, um, as we said, they're under a lot of pressure. The worst thing they can do is hit their targets because the targets are just going to get elevated for the next for the next year. There are intuitions that people have that are often unhelpful in terms of getting the best out of the people around them. And the the two intuitions that we spend a lot of our time are trying to help managers shift. Well, one intuition is moving away from telling people what to do on a day-to-day basis and shift cost to coach mindset. And then the other intuition is a focus on people's strengths to help them grow rather than their weaknesses. But I mean, I mean, that sounds lovely. And even though I'm teaching people to do that all day, every day, all of the pressures will pull me back into the old traditional approach of tell, tell, tell, weakness, weakness, weakness. But we know when you reverse engineer what we know about human nature, tell, tell, tell, focus on people's weaknesses is actually the perfect ingredient for robbing people of all the all of those psychological needs that are going to end up helping them become more resilient. Whereas ask, ask, ask and focus on strength, strength, strengths, that is so perfectly designed to giving people the best possible chance of withstanding the turbulence and the trials and the tribulations of day-to-day work. So they're the two intuitions that we spend so much of our time helping leaders um flip, moving to coaching, moving to strengths, pulling away from telling, and pulling away from weaknesses. And I don't know how familiar that is with you. I live in a part of the world where that's fairly new information. I'm talking to you over here in the States where all of this stuff was born. So it might be brand new information for you.

Manya Chylinski: 19:53

But um well, not that everyone's doing it. So it's I think it continues to need to be repeated. And you are touching on the edge of something that you and I talked about in our pre-call, which is that gap between what we know and how we actually behave. I mean, that's something that you I think something I think about, and it's something you think about from the professional aspect as well.

Peter Turner: 20:23

Oh, I'm obsessed with that. I'm absolutely obsessed with that idea. And in fact, it you just heard the shift in my energy whilst I was talking about it. Uh very, very quick anecdote. I was walking up to the gym the other day with my wife, and I was showing her ChatGPT in this beautiful new voice mode that it's got that sounds like you know a real life human put human being in your pocket, as everybody knows. And as we were walking to the gym, I was asking ChatGPT, give us a really good workout that my wife and I could use when we get to the gym. And then ChatGPT gave us the perfect workout because it obviously knows everything about exercise and physiology. And then as we got even closer to the gym, I said to ChatGPT, should we go for our cappuccino before we work out or after we work out? You know, scientifically speaking, which is the best approach? And ChatGPT came back and said, definitely have your cappuccino after you work out. Physiologically, it will be much better for you. And then we just hung the phone up, totally ignored what ChatGPT said, and we went for our cappuccino before we worked out, not after we worked out. And it's a really good example of we knew exactly what the right behaviors were. We had it on the best advice in the world from the smartest person in the palm of our hands, and we still ignored the best advice. And you go, there's that tantalizing gap between what we know and how we behave. And and um, and that's why those values of a compassionate workplace that we've written on the wall are a little bit harder to access. And anyway, we can dive down the rabbit hole of how we close that gap, but I'll leave that little anecdote hanging in the air for you. I'm not quite sure what your what your cappuccino and workout routine is.

Manya Chylinski: 22:02

I love that story because although my anecdotes do not include cappuccinos and workouts in together, I have my own examples of knowing full well what is the thing I is best for me to do in this moment and then just turning my back on it and walking in the other direction because I feel like doing something else. Um but I'd love to dig into you just talked about that gap in your own organization. How how do you address that where you have your values and you know what you want to do and what the goal is? And then are you still struggling to reach that?

Peter Turner: 22:45

Yeah, well, I'm you know, let's put the let's put the responsibility back on to the individual rather than the organization and the systems and the managers. All you have to do is look to yourself around all of those tiny little decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis that we know do not support us, that we know make us slightly psychologically weaker, slightly less resilient, slightly more fatigued in terms of what we put in our bodies, what we choose to look at on our phones, how often we sit and stare in front of our screens, all of this stuff which we know. And nobody can tell you anything that you don't already know about your screen time, about your diet, about your exercise, about your mindset. Um, yet we still choose to make those bad decisions on a day-to-day basis. So when people are turning up the next day and they are run down, they they don't have the resilience that they otherwise could have needed. And then the first place they often look to is other people and the organization and the system and their bad manager for the reasons why they might be struggling at work. So, you know, the first place to look to is yourself. There's no absence of information out there in terms of how we should behave and to get the most out of ourselves. It's all there for us. But we do have to take responsibility for our own, our own lifestyles before we start looking elsewhere. So that would be my first, my first point. And that's what we encourage everybody in our organization, you know, start with yourself. What can you do to ensure you're turning up with as as much energy as possible? The the other the other place for me that I'm really interested in is people have different personality traits, and their traits are patterns of thinking and feeling and behaving, and they and they very subtly pull us in different directions without us really knowing. And it's important, and the only way you can really notice it is over over long periods of time, where you start noticing that that pattern that keeps repeating itself. And so I'm really interested in how our behavior and how our personality traits shape our behaviors. And I think just understanding that deeply um can give you some clues as to why you keep uh pulling in certain directions. So that that that's why we love we love doing trait-based psychometrics, particularly strengths-based psychometrics, and that will give us clues as to oh, that's the reason why I keep pulling in that direction. That's the reason why I keep moving away in that direction, or that's the reason why I sometimes my fuse is a little bit shorter with that particular person in that particular situation. And then there we have a situation, don't we? Two well-meaning people falling out, and actually there was no malice involved. It was just a difference of traits pulling in different directions.

Manya Chylinski: 25:34

It's so interesting to hear you say that. I just had an experience a couple of days ago on a meeting where I said something, thought it was appropriate, still think it was appropriate, but the response was essentially that was not the right thing to say. And I felt very stung by that and continued on the meeting and did what I needed to do. And then when we got off the meeting, I had to really sit and think. And rather than emotionally respond to it, think, well, let me just take that as information. Like the fact that she said what she said the way she said, that's just information. So if I take the emotional piece out of it, what do I think she meant? And I realized instantly, I knew where she was coming from and I knew why she said what she said. And there was absolutely no malice. And it wasn't that what I said wasn't inappropriate, it just wasn't the answer to what she was looking for. And it changed my whole thing because by the time I hung up the phone, I never wanted to talk to her again. And now I realize that is such the wrong response.

Peter Turner: 26:50

Well, Manya, if I if if I can, I mean, that's just an example of you know, to blow your trumpet too much, but that's an example of exceptional levels of emotional intelligence, isn't it? The self-awareness to really notice what was really happening in that situation, the self-regulation to pause and take a moment and to open up space for that awareness to to unfold. And then, and then, of course, then your ability to communicate effectively afterwards the next time. I mean, that's incredible levels of self-awareness. And there's a and there's a tool, you know, we can teach those tools to people in organizations so that they can respond more effectively when we often say to people in in our workshops, think about a behavior. If we're a little bit cheeky, we won't just say think about a behavior, we'll say think about a person who frustrates you the most. Um, and then everybody giggles and don't say their name out loud, don't say it out loud. Um but but the safe one will be think about a behavior that frustrates you the most. And and then I look at everybody and I say, Have you got that behavior in your mind? And then I say, I will make a sportsman's bet with you that that behavior from that person is the very same behavior. That behavior that's frustrating you is the very same behavior that probably makes them successful. And that comes back to this strengths-based approach that we're so obsessed with, with what we do, is when we are paying more attention to what's right with people rather than what's wrong with them, we actually see the way they show up completely differently. That there's a there's a in our team who is could not be more different to me. So she is all about order and systems and structure and discipline. I am all creativity and chaos and innovation and wanting to do things differently every single day. And in a weakness-based world, she just frustrates me and is the source of a lot of negative emotion for me because I feel like she's a barrier to every time I want to do something differently. Yeah, I am probably total chaos for her, and I'm probably a source of a lot of negative emotion for her because I'm constantly trying to change things and do things differently and come up with that. Actually, in a strength-based world, we are incredible high performance partners with each other. I speed her up and get her to shift around new ideas. She gets me to slow down a little bit and bring a little bit more discipline into the way that I work. And actually, what would otherwise be total frustration and a whole world of negative emotion, Melanie and I are great high performance partners together. Um, but that takes a real amount of cognitive uh strain to see it differently.

Manya Chylinski: 29:31

Right, right. It takes attention to it, not just the emotions in the moment of feeling frustrated or okay, Peter, I could talk to you for many more hours, uh, but we are getting close to the end of our time. So, first of all, thank you. This has been such an amazing conversation. And I would love for you to share with our listeners a little bit more about yourself and how they can reach you and learn more about you.

Peter Turner: 29:55

Well, thank you so much, Manya. Well, I'm the executive vice chairman of TV Limitless. We're a we're a learning and development uh firm headquartered out of Dubai, but we work all over the world. And when I say all over the world, I mean 45 different countries now. And um, we're ultimately a coaching and training company, and we are absolutely obsessed with the strengths-based approach in terms of helping people grow and learn and get the best out of themselves and their people. And um, yeah, tubelimitless.com is is where you can find us online. And some people wonder whether we do anything other than spend our time on LinkedIn posting about the amazing people that we get to work with. But um, Peter Charles Turner uh is my handle on LinkedIn where I spend a lot of my time. But it's been amazing to speak with you. Thank you so much, Manya, and yeah, incredible to get the invitation to sit down and shoot the breeze with you.

Manya Chylinski: 30:48

Yes, and thank you so much. I know um we're in slightly different time zones, so I appreciate you setting aside some time this evening to talk with me. And just thank you again. This has just been such an eye opening conversation, and I really love talking with you. And thanks to our listeners for checking out this episode, and we will catch you next time.