Episode 4 - Matt Gregory - Like it's 1999

🎙️ The Coaching Lens – Episode 4: Evolving with the System – A Conversation with Matt Gregory
In this episode, we’re joined by Matt Gregory, a highly experienced coach whose journey spans decades of work across leadership, systems, and transformation. We trace Matt’s path from his early coaching influences through to the models and methods that now underpin his evolving approach.

Matt reflects on how his coaching has adapted to the shifting demands of the system around him, from organisational change to people development and how his ability to “notice” has grown as a core coaching skill. We explore the frameworks that have stuck, the ones he’s left behind, and what he believes coaching needs to be in today’s world.

A thoughtful and grounded conversation, packed with insights on staying relevant, reflective, and impactful as a coach in complex environments.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Welcome back to another Coaching Lens podcast. I'm really, really excited to have Matt Gregory with us today. I met Matt a few years ago now, introduced by my partner to him, and we sat down and basically got dragged away after about an hour chatting away with each other. Matt just lives down the road and yeah, he's been a great foil for me over the last few years. I'm not going to introduce Matt any more than that. Matt, over to you. Just a little bit of background about yourself and what you do really and who you're about?

SPEAKER_02: 0:42

Sure. I've been working in the field of personal and organization change for over 30 years now, about half of that as an employee. Latterly, I spent nine years as a senior manager at KPMG in my last employed role, so working as an internal coach, change consultant. And then in 2007, I started my own business and typically work coaching leaders, leadership teams, and designing and running leadership programs. And I typically do that with international corporates and professional service firms. I'm married, I've got four kids, one grandchild, and I'm an avid cyclist.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23

Hello, Matt. Lovely to see you. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my job to do the teacher's recap, as we have started doing. And what we've been doing in our first set of podcasts is to learn a bit about our guests, find out what makes them tick, why they came into coaching, how that career has led them to that. And then if you can kind of give us a kind of a pricey of your style, your theory, the thing that gives you your DNA as a coach, that'd be really great because I think that really says quite a lot about us.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55

Yeah, so I did a degree in business studies. I noticed with a degree in business studies is often quite useful for people that don't really know what they want to do because you start really broad and then gradually you have to start And I just naturally found myself gravitating to the strategy, change, how do you develop a culture that supports the kind of things that your organization is trying to achieve. So that's where I naturally orientated during that business studies degree, got on a graduate management training program at British Gas just after it privatized. I'll be honest, it was a really slow business, very hierarchical, and I found it extremely frustrating. The best thing, however, was going to the management training center, which had an outdoor swimming pool, and getting loads of really high quality training and coaching. And I kind of realized I actually enjoyed that more than the work I was doing. A friend of mine saw my frustration and did a really good sales job getting me to join this insurance company as a commission-only financial advisor and sold it to me on the grounds of, you think you're a hot shot? Well, there's no limits here. After about six months, I was the longest serving person in the office. I would start to do a lot of the coaching of new people. I gradually began to realize I enjoy this more than the actual job of selling. I ended up leaving that company. I joined Wesleyan Assurance in Birmingham as a training officer. Very quickly, the organization brought McKinsey in, did a big strategic review. made some massive changes. I got involved in the execution of those changes. We realized that within the business, particularly the sales side of the business, we needed a much more coaching orientated approach to help our leaders get the best out of sales people and financial advisors. We brought Sir David Emery in, who at the time was working on this new coaching model called Grow, which I'd never heard of. The book hadn't been published. We got trained by We began to see the power of this non-directive approach of helping people to think through challenges, to arrive at ways forward themselves in making progress with those challenges. And it was potent and it was exciting.

SPEAKER_01: 4:28

That sounds really interesting. What a wealth of experience you've had. I'm interested, given that you're a young granddad, a very young granddad, if you can cycle that far. this is going back a while. So what did you face in terms of barriers, the people who are being asked to change and become involved in this coaching mentality? Was there much resistance? Because it seems like back in the day, there may have been.

SPEAKER_02: 4:52

There was lots. I mean, bearing in mind, this was the late 90s and emotional intelligence hadn't really even hit the scene. I mean, Daniel Goleman's famous article, What Makes a Leader? I mean, that was published in 2004. So we would get a lot of pushback from the that had what had got them to where they were in the organisation was being strong, being directive and being needed. You've got a problem, you come to me, there's a solution. Another problem, there's a solution. And I feel great about that because everyone needs me. I'm at the centre of my universe and people can't do without me. And now suddenly you've got young people like Matt and others talking about this very different approach, which requires a lot more emotional sensitivity Delving into what might be some of emotional barriers or obstacles that people need to tackle to find their own way forward. And it was uncomfortable for a lot of people. They found it, they were having to leave behind a source of power and status. And yeah, there was a lot of pushback.

SPEAKER_01: 5:58

How did you counteract? I guess you'll coach them through it, but how did you?

SPEAKER_02: 6:03

We did give people a lot of support. I mean, having people like Sir David Emery and another of his colleagues who came from the world of elite sports performance helped because they had a credibility which meant people listened to them and they couldn't just dismiss them out of hand and we also began to change a lot of our reward and recognition systems when people were trying to get promoted through the ranks they were being measured not just against can I fix problems but can I help other people to fix their own problems so that's So that started to become a metric, a currency in the organization. We were helped as well, because at the time, the level of regulation within the financial services sector was also growing, and that brought an external requirement to be a lot more coach-like rather than just telling people what to do. So that also brought quite a strong stick into the equation. And not only that, people began to see and experience that this could be really effective. and a lot more effective than just somebody just following my orders and instructions and my ideas and starting to work up their own. And of course, they have more commitment if it's their idea about how to tackle a particular issue. And therefore, they're more resilient and more persistent.

SPEAKER_00: 7:24

I think that's really, really interesting that we've gone from a tell culture to a help support culture or listen cultural question, however you want to phrase it. And we talked a couple of weeks ago about pendulum and how we in the UK kind of go from one end of a pendulum to the other because one end's broken therefore we've got to go to the complete antithesis of that because that's what's needed and you were saying that's the late 90s that we're old enough in this room to remember those quite well you know that's 30 years and that pendulous swing is really interesting now with the Gen Z's that are coming through and the emotional intelligence that people have or don't have or the way that people are being a political bit more isolated, virtual as we're doing now as well, rather than face-to-face. Where do you think, and this is maybe a little bit of crystal ball in here, but where do you think it's going to go next? What's the next 10 years going to look like if we've come this length of travel so far?

SPEAKER_02: 8:24

I think the level of complexity that leaders in organizations are facing is growing exponentially. And where I think development is progressing next is a requirement even a necessity for leaders to be able to work systemically so to think holistically not only just about the immediate situation but the the wider context and within that the emotional context not just the facts of what is happening

SPEAKER_01: 8:57

i've read a couple of things in the last couple of weeks that it kind of worried me a little bit in in that regard there's an organization called six seconds they're an eq network and you might have heard of them and They produced a report recently, and it describes a global decline in EQ, particularly since COVID, and called it an emotional recession. Painted quite a bleak picture of how our emotional intelligence isn't really going up. And there are some groups where it's really not going up at all, maybe even going down. And then you also hear about the projected costs of Gen Z's disability claims going forward, predominantly over mental health reasons. So have you got any insight into why we're looking at that? And do you have any hope and optimism that we can buck that trend?

SPEAKER_02: 9:42

In terms of why, I think there's lots of factors, but I think one of the factors is the pressure that I see people living under is growing at alarming rates. And one of the things that I think often happens to people when they're under enormous pressure, well, lots of things happen. And it's interesting you mentioned sixseconds.org because we quote them in, we, as in me and my co-author, who published a book in 2021 and looking at how leaders can manage their energy levels. We quoted them, but I think one of the things that happens when people face growing and almost overwhelming amounts of stress is that often their self-care diminishes. I think that's often instinctive. And when your self-care diminishes, I think the level of care that you're able to give others and the amount of emotional capacity you've got for others diminishes. to that a heavy virtual working context where it is difficult easily pick up how people you're working with are doing and actually if they're not doing well that's a problem it's a problem for you because then you've got to give time potentially to attending to that it's also a problem because they potentially are not going to be reliable or as productive and that typically often comes back to you as a leader to compensate for that so it's um it can be a very toxic cocktail. Interestingly, I was running this program for a Global 100, and one of the tools we introduced them to was the JCA Feelings Wheel, which is a very simple way. Well, it's simple on one level, and it's quite nuanced and in-depth on another of answering the question, how am I feeling? I mean, that's another problem. What potentially is causing the EQ crisis that you were describing, Nick, or which Six Seconds were claiming is happening, when you were just so absorbed in brain work, which is what a lot of organizational work is. And you literally bounce from meeting to meeting to meeting. And at the end of the day, you've got to deal with all the emails and potential actions. So you're under this enormous pressure. Then somebody says, how are you doing? I know for me, often the answer is I haven't got a clue because I'm just in this imaginal world, in a thinking world, which by the way, is actually quite a nice place to be. It's very creative. It can be a calm place and it can be a very productive place. So oftentimes people don't even know how they're feeling. So have Having tools like the JCA Feelings Wheel, which can help them in a very simple way to start to articulate and understand how they might be feeling, can be useful. Introduced it on this program to a global hundred. This one person leading a big strategic project realized he had no idea how the 20 or so people in this project were doing. So he decided to introduce it into his one-to-ones with them. Gave a good context. He gave some self-disclosure first by talking about where he was at on the wheel. And then, you know, invited the other person to say where they were. He came back to this group and he said, I was staggered at what I learned. And he said, one of the things I've realized is people, you almost put a demeanor on that you know people want to see. You mask, you put a mask on. I'm coping. It's all fine. Yeah, you mask. And he realized he was misreading a lot of people quite significantly. And that information about how they were really doing helped him to support them and lead them. in a much better way. And that had a tangible effect on the project.

SPEAKER_01: 13:11

Staggering that he wouldn't know how people were feeling and how they're getting on and they're all under his own

SPEAKER_02: 13:16

wings. I don't find it staggering having worked in large corporates for quite a while and coached seniors in large corporates. I don't find it staggering at all.

SPEAKER_01: 13:27

Help me out here, Matt, and maybe Alan as well. Since I've got you here, we face sceptics. You talked about that back in the night. I still face scepticism about the fact that things do feel tougher. that psychological scarcity you talk about, that kind of overload of the cognition and that reduced bandwidth to even think about how I feel in the middle of a busy day. Sometimes I do struggle to articulate why and how it is tougher. I do see that pressure and I can think of some. Help me convince the sceptics.

SPEAKER_02: 13:56

I have no difficulty at all. No one's arguing that they are more overloaded than they were two years ago. I mean, there is so much research that is coming out about how overloaded people feel. It's showing up in sickness levels. It's showing up in amounts of sick pay and absentee rates. I mean, the last Gallup Estate of the Working World survey talked about how stressed, how burnt out people feel, the frequency with which that is increasing. So I think you've got to be almost living in a monastery not to be noticing that this is happening. I honestly don't know how you can not notice it.

SPEAKER_01: 14:39

So help me get past that culture, that opinion, that assumption that says, oh, this is very woke. This is very new. People don't have the resilience that we used to have.

SPEAKER_00: 14:50

Yeah, I've made some notes down here, how to convince sceptics. And I think people nowadays are always looking for impact, an immediate impact. How can you make immediate impact? How can you do a coaching session or a support session or a bit of CPD and be better by the end of it. And I want to know how and why you're better. And I think we're caught in a loop of short-termism, of looking at things in the now rather than how can we put things in place for the future, whether it's gratification, whether it's the top-down pressure on the person above you, and they're then pushing that down onto you as well. So yeah, I think if we can kind of almost step back and take a bigger picture look at this, I think then we can show impact. We can show, as you just said, Matt, days off are up. Well, they might be up now, but if we work with people three, four, five, 10 years down the line, they may well not be up because we're looking at that. And also you said about, it goes back to the old, put your own oxygen mask on first before you put everybody else's oxygen mask on. And I think that's part of what we have to do is planning the bigger picture and plan longer to become healthier, whether that's mental health, whether that's physical health, whether that's emotional health, in the longer term, rather than saying, right, well, we're going to bring a coach in, give you four sessions over the next eight weeks, and you better be better by the end of it.

SPEAKER_02: 16:23

To your point, Alan, and then I'll come back to your point about Nick, is this just being woke? I led a two-day program a couple of weeks ago with a global 50, with a bunch of senior level leaders, and it was a Essentially two days on understanding how your life journey has shaped you and recognising that some of that is going to be very positive, but some of it you will have carried forward dysfunctions that you may want to leave behind. But that's difficult because if we could just change it at the click of a finger, then wouldn't that be great? So you're going to have to do some work. And by the way, some of that work is emotional work of understanding the narrative that often just pops into your mind when you start start thinking about a common situation, and you might need to reflect and to have some tools to be able to change that. It was also very focused on people's levels of EQ. I did a follow-up two days ago with a group of four of them. And by the way, these people, extremely stressed, under enormous pressure, in a very high-performing, publicly quoted company, feels this enormous pressure to keep on improving performance. Unprompted, two out of the four people said, in the last two weeks, I've been sleeping loads better. That's quite a common factor because people start to become aware, but just push harder, harder, harder is unsustainable. As a leader, if I need to look after myself, I am the performance unit and my team. So I have to apply the same thinking to myself. To your question, Nick, is this just about we're being woke? For me, absolutely not. This is about growing in sensitivity to both self, others, and also the wider political context that you're operating in. And if you want to get things done more effectively, you want to get more ambitious things done, more risky things done. Without that sensitivity, I believe you will struggle. And this kind of links perhaps to the second part of my coaching journey, Nick, if I may. So I left Wesleyan Insurance, I joined KPMG, still doing a lot of coaching. I would say the predominant kind of mindset that I and we in those organizations were applying is what I would call a logical mindset approach to leading a change this is what we're trying to change this is why this is where we are now this is the gap these are the steps to bridging that gap hey presto let's kind of project manage that we'll change the culture or we'll introduce this new game changing system for the business and what I began to see was the results of that approach I became increasingly frustrated and disillusioned just because it makes sense to the people leading a change project as to why this should It often doesn't make sense to people. They've often got vested interests in keeping things the way they were. And it starts to become very complicated. And I thought to myself, I had this growing feeling within there have to be more holistic, more humane ways of leading change. And I decided the way to investigate this was to do a master's degree. So I did a lot of research and found this master's degree called Change Agent Skills and Strategies. That was also quasi group therapy for two years. One of their assumptions was you will never be able to lead change in systems unless you've confronted your own fears, your own traumas, your own inadequacies. Because what will happen is you won't be able to speak truth to power and you will end up making it about soothing those fears or compensating for them. And it will make you less effective, even ineffective. You need to have a handle, at least be aware of them and have a process for managing them and working with them, or else you'll be unable to lead organisation-wide change.

SPEAKER_00: 20:15

That's fascinating to me. Coaching has gone from an embryonic concept in the 90s in the UK. It's now, I guess, part and parcel of most people's days in one way or another. How has your style as a coach changed? Have you morphed yourself into what you now want to be as a coach? Do you think the cultures you've been involved in have morphed you into the coach you are today? Because I sit here and listen, and you've written a book, you've got a master's degree, you're working with global 50s and global 100s. You say it very, very simplistically. So how have you changed? How have you adapted to your environment, to the cultures you've been in? Are you an outcome of your environment, or are you an outcome of your change process? Both. Okay, well, that was a long question and a very short answer. Well, let

SPEAKER_02: 21:06

me... Let me add a bit to it. We used to have a phrase on this, Miles. If you want to change or influence a system, you have to be in it. And to be in it and not get spat out by it, you have to adapt to it to some degree. And I think this is a huge challenge, is how do you adapt enough to gain credibility and acceptance, but not adapt so much that you just blend in and you lose the ability to be able to see the system and even challenge the way the system is causing people to act in an unthinking way. And I would say a lot of the development work that I've done has given me a lot of tools to be able to navigate that tension. But I don't always get it right. I've been spat out by systems. You know, you're too challenging. You're not at enough value. I mean, one of the things that helped me enormously as I was finishing that master's degree, and it was very applied. Essentially, what it looked at was how do individuals change How do groups or teams change? How do organizations change? That was year one. And we applied mainly four lenses from humanistic psychology. And we had to specialize in one of them. I personally specialized in gestalt psychology. Year two, how do you facilitate change with individuals, groups, organizations? But it was all applied to us. It wasn't like theoretical. It was like, well, how do you change? How do you resist change? How is this group resisting change? One of the things that helped me enormously, and it scared the crap out of me, was at the time I was working in KPMG Corporate Finance. We had a new chief exec. He'd been there about two years. His kind of mandate was to take the business upmarket, to do bigger deals. And they'd applied that mindset that I just described, that logical, linear, you know, we'll do all the things that logically make sense to get us there. Problem was, two years in, it wasn't. And we paid an independent researcher to talk to a lot of clients that we pitched to that hadn't chosen us. And And we asked them why they hadn't chosen us and why they'd gone for a much more expensive, big investment bank. And the summarized message that came back was, they just have so much more confidence and swagger that even though they're more expensive, I'd rather use them because they give me more confidence. And the chief exec effectively turned to me and said, look, this is our biggest people organization challenge. You're ahead of learning and change. Fix it. And what I realized was they need an experience like the one on IFAD, where they get to explore and confront the issues that are causing them to play safe, to be uninspiring, to avoid taking risks, to avoid saying what they really think. I put a proposal to the board for quite an intensive 12-month development program for all partners and direct, starting with the board. And it was a very demanding program for people to go through. It was even more demanding for me to lead it with an external firm, because it meant confronting a lot of powerful people and challenging a lot of powerful people, coaching a number of powerful people. But it was a game changer for individuals and the business. So one of our metrics was number of deals with fees above three quarters of a million. And in the year we started the program, we did four. In the year we finished it, we did 17, including the largest corporate finance deal ever done by an accounting firm. That had a huge impact on the commercials of the business. And it just reiterated the to me a lot of the principles that we learnt on this Masters about how you lead organisation-wide change, which also means leading change with individuals. It was exhilarating and incredibly frightening and difficult at the same time.

SPEAKER_01: 24:52

Can I pick up on something you said there that's a useful stepping stone to something that Alan and I would like to discuss with you and get your experience on? That exploring and confronting challenges, internal challenges a lack of a growth mindset, for example, or taking a leap at something new or a change. That talks to us about, can we get people to express their vulnerability? In our chat that we had last week when we planned this, we hoped that you'd talk a bit about vertical development, which is something that Al and I aren't really that informed about, and it could be a really great way to get you, while you're here, to share some of your expertise. Because I read something online on a LinkedIn post that said that one of things about vertical development is the ability for us to open our hearts it was a really lovely way to kind of express something that's very technical but in a very humanistic way can you tell tell us a bit about vertical development theory and how you employ it in coaching and what what you think we could get out of it as coaches as well us and the listeners

SPEAKER_02: 25:56

vertical development recognizes there are phases of growth that adults go through and those phases and paths are not random, but there is a typology of what the journey looks like. And people like Bill Torbert, who've been researching this, begun to create a typology of what those phases look like. By the way, it's a lot messier. And they would acknowledge this because, I mean, we're human beings. It's not like a one-way street and you just neatly progress from one to the other. You can go back and forth. You can go back and forth in the same meeting in the same day it's influenced by factors. A bit like we were talking about earlier, if I'm absolutely exhausted, I'm very unlikely to operate as the best version of myself, i.e. the most mature version. I'm quite possibly going to be triggered back to an earlier version that is less developed, less nuanced, less sophisticated. They call these different stages, different action logics. So ways of thinking and acting in the world, ways of seeing the world. And as you mature and progress, You start to see and pay attention to different things. There's about eight of them, seven main ones, which, by the way, for any listeners that are interested, they published a summary of this work in a Harvard article called The Seven Transformations of Leadership. And effectively, it's looking at what are these seven phases and why, as a leader, would you even want to be aware of them and progress to what they call the later stages? In summary, later stage people and leaders are way more effective at leading complex change and getting complicated things done. If you are early stage, you will struggle like crazy. it takes about three years to move fully through one stage to another. So this is not fast. This is not a quick fix. Back to your point, Alan. This is not, take this pill. And at the end of this two-hour coaching, you're going to go and change the world in a way that you couldn't. It's recognizing it's hard work to kind of evolve yourself and to evolve the way that you act and think. And they talk about a number of, I suppose, components that can that can help. One, they talk about heat experiences, which is where you either deliberately or it just happens to you, you have an experience, but heat, it's uncomfortable. It pulls you out of your comfort zone. So I would argue that leading that program for KPMG Corporate Finance, even though I was employed there, for me, it was a massive heat experience. I felt really uncomfortable doing a lot of things in it. And it was tough. I Because what they also talk about is you need elevated sensemaking. So you can have these experiences and you might change, but you might not. But what helps is if you, and this is where coaching can help, where you can almost analyze and reflect on and consider what is happening and why you acted the way you did and why you feel so challenged. And what's that, you know, how does that link to your past? And is that a pattern? And what might be another way of making sense of that? And often without that elevated sensemaking, you can can't almost get the full juice and value from those heat experiences. Linked to this, and this is all overlapping, they also talk about exposure to colliding perspectives. Naturally, we will all gravitate towards people that think like us because they're great. It's great spending time with people like that. And they talk about the value of exposure to people that think completely differently, see the world very differently. It's probably going to irritate you. It's probably going to be uncomfortable, but it can be incredibly valuable. But implicit through all of that, the principle that I talk a lot about is responsible openness or responsible vulnerability. You cannot, I mean, a person can go through a heat experience and if they're unable to be real about how it's impacting them, the issues that it's potentially exposing, because this is a difficult experience that they're going through, if they're unable to be real about that or to articulate it, then that's going to massively hinder the value and the growth that they get from it. So on loads of programs that I run, I'll be talking about this as a principle. And of course, it's tricky because as a leader, they might often feel that I need to be strong. I need to appear to be in control, to have all the answers, to be vulnerable or to be real and open is risky. And that's why I use the word responsible openness, because you cannot just put it all out there and be reckless in the way you do it. By virtue of your position in the system, there's expectations and requirements of you. So finding ways to do this responsibly is really important. And that's often where I started to practice doing it in small groups. Like I mentioned this program that I'd led a couple of weeks ago and four of us, a subset of that program met for an hour and a half, two days ago. Part of that was actually getting people to talk about how they're doing in a real, and to start to practice in a safe environment being real about work and how they're really feeling about it. And as you do it in a safe place, you start to build the muscle and the discernment to be able to do it in perhaps other contexts that feel more risky.

SPEAKER_01: 31:50

I've got a lot of homework to do now, Matt. Thank you. I'm very interested in a lot of what you just said, and I'm going to be doing a bit more research into some of those strands. I think the things that resonate with me just off the cuff now, those heat experiences, when you're coaching somebody, go. or they haven't started and then they start and you coach them through that period. That's often some of the best coaching they can receive, isn't it? Because you can be so immediate with their feelings and their thoughts and they're not polluted by time or reflections they may have had from something two years ago. So I find that I wouldn't have called them heat experiences, but I can see that they're really, really valuable. The next thing is time. This work is a long time in doing and people are very time poor. Even on the shortest term, to try to get people to regularly meet for coaching sessions is a challenge for people who are the most time poor, isn't it? We have to do a lot of nudging of our clients to make sure we get them to turn up for themselves. So the two things there that really stick out to me are if we're on a coaching journey through a large, long period of time, we can build up that communication, build up that vulnerability, build up that self-awareness, rather than, as Alan said earlier, taking something as a bolt-on, just as a quick panacea that's going to quickly fix something. Well, it will just polish the edge of it rather than get to the core. They're just challenges, aren't they, that are a very complicated thing.

SPEAKER_02: 33:13

Absolutely. And I mean, one of the questions I'm often asking people is whether it's coaches or leaders on programs is why are you here? Because I want to find that motivation, that reason why they are going to turn up when there's competing pressures and to try and make sure that I'm appealing to that. I

SPEAKER_00: 33:34

think that's a really interesting point. I always find it funny when you've got two or three coaching sessions you've done a load of contracting and starting to get to know the person they give you a call I can't make this Friday I'm too busy and it's like that's exactly why you need the coaching it's almost counterintuitive that's why you need this to help that in my mind when you were going through that Matt I came back to plan do review again we have suggested this over the last few episodes of the review being the coaching cornerstone of plan do review and the most basic thing to do in coaching is have time out to reflect to press pause to internally look but also internally look of how you are with other people as well and i still think it is the most critical element that people forget about or don't do when the pressure's on people stop reflecting and stop reviewing which therefore They just go into that emotive, right? We'll do this then, we'll do that then, we'll do the other thing then. Which again, going back to EQ as well, if people give more time to reflection and reviewing, a possibility that we could get greater EQ, which leads to responsible openness. Because you can then start talking about, well, I did this and I think we did this because of this, this, this. But actually two of the five things didn't land or didn't work. work. So how do I need to redo that moving forward? And in my simplistic terms, listening to those seven phases, how can you build time into reflect? How can you build time into review? How can you build time into critically reflect but be vulnerable in that reflection? As you've really eloquently put it, coaching is the way to do that. But don't get too busy that you can't put coaching in. The doing gets too much for you to actually do that review area.

SPEAKER_01: 35:37

Can I try to draw us to an end, if possible, on an optimistic note? We started talking about vulnerability and fears around a recession of emotions internationally and increased pressures and sceptics that are trying to get in our way and getting everyone's way. My optimism, and Matt, I'd like to hear your reflections on this, is that if that is what we're facing, but younger people seem to be more connected to their feelings and more willing to be vulnerable... Is that a sign of hope?

SPEAKER_02: 36:06

Definitely. I see that a lot with people in their 20s. I mean, the research shows they demand that from their leaders, that authenticity, that realness. And where it is lacking, it's a significant reason why generation will leave organisations. I think you're right. I also think, I mean, there's a lot of research that shows that Gen Z is a lot more boundaried. I mean, they're looking at people of our generation and seeing how often unboundaried we been with our work they've seen the effects of that they've lived with parents like that and they're not willing to replicate it in fact they refuse to replicate it and that can cause frustrations with people like us who've grown up with uh you know of our generation and grew up with a mindset i stay as long as it takes to get the job done and if that makes me ill so be it so i i definitely um think there's causes for realistic optimism i also think there's lots of concerns so it's uh it's a very mixed picture i'm not a blind optimist i mean what we know is people that progress to the later stages of maturity within Bill Torbert's model of vertical development, they are generally loads better at managing their own emotions, about being sensitive to others, sensitive to the system. They generally are more compassionate, although that's not a given. I think there is loads of causes for hope and are weaving that into a lot of the performance management systems. So it's not just what you deliver, but there's this whole emphasis now on how you deliver.

SPEAKER_01: 37:39

Thank you, Matt. It's great to end on a really optimistic note like that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Al?

SPEAKER_00: 37:45

Yeah, I've been sat here fascinated for the last while, and I know we have these conversations probably two or three times a year, Matt, normally when you've cycled from your house to my house in the pouring rain, and just go deep on it. And every time I speak to you, I learn, and as Nick said, I will go away and do some research and some homework and explore those things I can only say thanks and thanks for your time and thanks for your insight thank you for your thoughts and I'm sure the people listening will have really gained a lot from the last while as well so thank you so much and as I said right at the start here we will definitely be doing a second one if not this one might even be split into two I don't know but we will do a second and a third and a fourth over the next while I just feel we've scratched the surface there one of Thank you for your time, Matt, your thoughts, your openness, and I will see you at the horseshoes in a couple of months' time.

SPEAKER_01: 38:42

Thanks,

SPEAKER_00: 38:42

Matt. Thanks, Nick. Thanks, Alan. I found it a very

SPEAKER_02: 38:45

energising conversation.