S2 Ep10: Always-On Isn’t High Performance: Harriet Minter on Fixing How Work Works

What if the way we’ve designed work is quietly undermining the performance we say we want? In this episode, Mary is joined by journalist, speaker and leadership consultant Harriet Minter—founder of The Guardian’s Women in Leadership section and partner at Leap Leadership—to explore why “always-on” has become normal, what it’s doing to our brains and culture, and how we can build workplaces that perform without burning people out.

Most organisations are still running on outdated rules: long hours, presenteeism, visibility over value, and responsiveness over reflection—now amplified by technology that makes work constant. Harriet Minter has spent over 15 years at the heart of conversations about women, work and power, and in this episode she offers a grounded, hopeful challenge: performance isn’t just about people trying harder—it’s about systems designed better.

We talk about how “nine to five” was originally built for productivity (not devotion), why the loss of boundaries has rewired the way we work, and why burnout is often what happens when an individual’s needs collide with a system that refuses to adapt. Harriet also shares how Leap Leadership is experimenting with a four-day week, and what it forces you to confront about habits, efficiency, and what really matters.

In this episode, we explore:

• Where always-on culture came from—and why it’s not a badge of honour
• Why flexibility needs to be a two-way conversation (not a one-size policy)
• Burnout as a systems-and-relationships issue, not a personal failure
• The “pendulum swing” in attitudes to women at work—and what’s resurfacing
• What gives Harriet hope we can build cultures that last

Connect with Harriet:
LinkedIn: Harriet Minter
Substack: harrietminter.substack.com

🔗 Connect with Mary: marygregory.com

📣 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marygregory

 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mary_gregory/

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 ✨ Produced by Mary Gregory Leadership Coaching

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to SheLeads Collective Podcast. I'm Mary Gregory and I'm so glad you're here. This podcast is a space for honest conversations about what it really means to lead as a woman today and how we can all show up with more courage, care and clarity. You'll hear from inspiring women, powerful allies, and bold truth tellers who are changing the game not by playing tougher but by leading smarter, softer and stronger. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the She Leads Collective Podcast. So what if the way we've designed work is quietly undermining the very performance we say that we want? Let's be honest, most organisations are still built on Victorian industrial age foundations, hierarchies, fixed hours, presenteism, command and control. These models made sense in factories, but they make far less sense in complex relational knowledge-based work. Yet we still reward visibility over value, long hours over clear outcomes, and responsiveness over reflection. And then technology amplifies it. Not just making work easier, but making it constant. So what if being always on isn't a sign of dedication, but a design flaw we've mistaken for discipline? Organizations say they want high performance, innovation, and loyalty, and yet the environment that they create often erodes well-being, fragments attention, and ultimately leads to burnout. So how do we reconcile ambition with humanity, performance with relational leadership, drive with sustainability? Well, my guest today is someone who has been at the center of these conversations for over 15 years. Harriet Minter is a journalist, speaker, and partner at Leadership Development Consultancy Leap Leadership. She founded the Women in Leadership section of The Guardian, the only national newspaper to create a dedicated platform for women and work. She's written extensively about leadership, the gender pay gap, organizational behaviour, and the future of work. She hosted the Badass Women's Hour podcast and has given two TED talks, one on making things happen and one on learning to fail. But Harriet hasn't just reported on the system, she's also chosen to build differently. She is now a co-founder of a leadership consultancy built around a four-day week, relational leadership, and a commitment to shaping new norms around performance and well-being. Today I hope that we're going to explore what needs to change and what it actually takes to change it. Harriet, thank you so much for joining me here today. I really appreciate you being here.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Mary. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

So, Harriet, you spent years writing about leadership and women at work. I really admire that you set up that section in The Guardian, that unique section. But when you founded the Women in Leadership section in The Guardian, what were you noticing that wasn't actually being talked about enough when it comes to women in leadership?

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Well, so I think the thing that wasn't being talked enough was women and women in leadership. I think the thing that I had noticed, so I was working in the media then. The thing I noticed about the media was that when the women, when the when the media spoke directly to women, it talked to them about their relationships, their body, and maybe they would have half a page on their careers. But when I went out for dinner with my girlfriends, we would spend 75% of that time talking about what was going on at work. And that wasn't being reflected. So what I thought was interesting was this idea that women were more interested in their careers than we were giving them credit for. And I saw that reflected in the wider narrative. It was around the time that Cheryl Sandberg wrote Lean In and we had the report into the number of women on boards for the government. And there was a sort of a dawning realization, if you can imagine such a thing in 2012, that perhaps we couldn't just throw women into the workplace and be like, there you are, all fine now. That maybe it wasn't going to be that simple, that actually maybe the workplace wasn't set up for women.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Okay, so great that you spotted that and you took the opportunity and created the section in The Guardian. What patterns did you notice ki kept appearing in the stories you were sharing in that section?

SPEAKER_01 4:45

So I think the patterns that we noticed, first of all, was um an underappreciation of women's ambition. So there was an assumption that if women really wanted to get to the top, they would. And if they didn't get to the top, it's because they weren't really that ambitious, were they? And actually what the women were saying was no one was really ambitious, but what I realized was I couldn't be really ambitious and have a family and work in a way that suited me and actually make a difference to the workplace in the way that I wanted to and get to the top. Those things were not allowed altogether. So I would say that things that cause women the most problem, obviously, we talk a lot about having families. That was the biggest problem for women, probably still is. The other biggest problem for women was saying, uh, that seems like a strange way of doing things. Why are we doing it like that? You know, women were troublemakers, and that was causing them problems in the workplace.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Okay. And how did you notice women wanted to do it differently?

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Well, I mean, I think partly because I knew I wanted to do it differently, partly because I was hitting um about 30 when I started that section. And I think until that point I had probably assumed that if you just worked hard enough and you just wanted it enough, you would get to the top. And if there weren't any women at the top, it's because they didn't work hard enough and they didn't want it. And then I realized that I was looking around at all my peers who are hardworking, ambitious women who were going, I can't do this. This doesn't work. This is not feasible. And that was when I started to say, Oh, this isn't, we have been told this is an us problem. We've been told this is a women problem. And it's not. This is a structural issue that nobody seems to be inclined to change.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

And what was the moment when you realized that you didn't want to just report on the change, but actually influence making it happen?

SPEAKER_01 6:33

I think I went through a period where I knew that I had a really great job. I like if you were a young journalist working in the media in the like mid-2010s, you wanted my job. Young female journalists would come up to me all the time and be like, You've got the best job in journalism, or how did you get it? I want that job. And I didn't feel like I had the best job in journalism. And I think part of that is because when you are constantly seeing the problems and when you are constantly telling people, hey, this is what the problem is, hey, this is how you can fix it, and you are not seeing any change, you start to feel a bit redundant. You start to think, really, what is what is my role here? And now I mean like a few years and I look at it a little bit differently, and I can see the role of that, but at the time I really felt like I wasn't making anything better, and that is important to me. That's a core value. I like I don't it's a very annoying trait that I have. If I see something that I think can be improved, I want to improve it. Um and so I realized that actually I was getting up every day to do a job that I enjoyed and that I loved, but wasn't really fulfilling me, and that didn't feel like a great way to be.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

It almost sounds soul destroying, actually, in the sense of you, yeah, you'd focused on something, you were making a difference by reporting on it. But because of that internal value of wanting to change things, it was actually more demotivating than motivating in that respect.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Yeah, I think that's probably really true. I think you know what I what I know now, which I didn't know at the time, is that when we don't really understand what our values are, when we don't really understand what's important to us, it's very easy to work in a way that doesn't align with them. And the more we do that, the harder we make our working lives. Um, I mean, I would say that fundamentally, if you are somebody who has a deep, deep commitment to making change, oh god, life is hard. It's much easier to go with the status quo. But but it's also much harder just to sit and be okay with things.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Yes, I think if that's your value, that you want to make a difference to the world, there's always going to be something that you're wanting to make a difference to, you know. I think I'm sitting here in my 60s experiencing that, so I can really relate to what you've just said there. Thank you, Harriet. Let's move on then and just look at this whole conundrum around the always-on culture, because it's become more and more prevalent the the more advanced technology gets, actually. So we talk a lot about high performance, and you know, my work with organisations is all they want is more and more performance. That's that that's the big thing that that is driving them. But they also want a culture where people will feel engaged and motivated to be able to perform at their best. So we rarely talk about the structures that make for sustained performance. We just talk about let's have high performance on its own. In your view, how did we end up with this always-on culture?

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Well, I think when we look at working culture, we have to go back to 1921 and Henry Ford and Ford Motorcars, and Henry Ford very smartly working out, and this was considered revolutionary at the time, that actually to get the best productivity, i.e., the best result for the hours put in, not just the most hours put in, but the best result for the hours put in, you couldn't have your workers working all day every day. Yeah. So he created nine to five five days a week because he did the maths and he worked out that was the optimum amount of time that people could work before they started making mistakes. And so we ended up with this kind of eight hours a day, five days a week culture, which you know doesn't fit perfectly, but that's roughly what we were at. And then for the last, and that worked, right? That worked for really until I would say the early noughties. And then suddenly for the last 20 years, we have been in this place of monumental change and pace, where all the stuff that we would have to, I remember when I started working, you know, if you wanted to get a message to somebody, you had to write out the message on a piece of paper, you would walk that message down four corridors and up four flights to where the one fax machine was in the building, and you would send it on the fax machine, and then you would walk back and you would wait for somebody to call you 24 hours later to say, Oh, fax has come in, and you'd walk all the way back up and you get the next fax, you walk all the way back in. So, and now we just send an email. So the speed has changed monumentally, and that has been wonderful and liberating and exciting. But what we haven't realized is that in doing that, we lost that physical boundary that we had around work. We lost the boundary that said, you are working when you're in the office, but you can't work when you're outside of it, so you have to stop. And instead, it just leaked out into all of our working lives, with the result being that very, very few of us are doing eight hours a day, five days a week now. You know, we are all doing a different version of what that looks like. And I suspect that actually, probably, probably if you added it up, most of us are not doing a hundred hours a week. Even people who say they're doing, oh, I'm doing a hundred hours a week, you it might feel like you are because you are never switching off. But what we know from the research is that actually the people who are doing 100 hours a week are not getting that much more done than the people doing 40, 50 hours a week, but they are not switching off and it's exhausting our brains. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is rewiring our brains and really impacting our brain health.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Yes, I can imagine it. Well, I think it that's why there's a rise in this in the whole science of depression, stress, burnout. That's that's the outcome, isn't it? That people are burning out as a result.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Totally, and that we don't have a concept of rest anymore. You know, like we used to talk about Sunday as the day of rest. Shops would shut. You couldn't go to the shops if you needed something. Uh, you were supposed to be with your family in the house. You wouldn't go to a sports game, you know, all these things that really forced us, whether we liked it or not, and I'm not saying that was always good, but whether we liked it or not, they forced us to be in one place in a calm, hopefully, state. And our bodies really thrived off that. Now we have 21st century technology, but we still have very, very, very old internal body wiring, and the two haven't quite aligned.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

And there's all this talk about got to get people back in the office. Um, working at home, people aren't as productive, which I actually do challenge because I think I'm far more productive working at home than I am in any office. But that also doesn't help, though, working at home, because it's more difficult to keep the boundaries when you work. So there are pros and cons to whether we work in an office or work at home, really.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

There are pros and cons. And it's also horses for courses. You know, I look now at how I used to get on a tube at 8 a.m. every morning. In fact, I probably wasn't on the tube at 8 a.m. every morning because I found it so hard. So I was running for the tube at 8.15 every morning to be in an office for nine o'clock every day and spending 45 minutes shoved into somebody's armpit because I'm quite short. And I think, God, that was mad. To then go and sit in an office where there's constant distraction, constant noise. How did I ever get anything done? That does not suit me. Doesn't work for me. But there are other people I know who to them, getting on the tube in the morning, getting on the train in the morning is the moment they go, Oh, okay, I take my home self and put them in a little cupboard, and I put my work self on, and I get to go and be somebody else for eight hours, and I get to just focus on this one work thing, and at the end of the day, I switch that off and I put my home self back on and I go home again. And it's really, they find it really helpful, and they appreciate that clear boundary around it. And so understanding what works for you as an individual, and then how do you, as an individual, work within your organization? And I think we could have sort of thought about flexibility as a kind of bottom-up request that then meets a top-down mandate, right? So we've got workers being like, I need more flexibility, I need more flexibility, and at the top you've got your HR team sitting there being like, oh my god, how do we accommodate this and also accommodate what the senior management wants and make sure that everybody's in the office when they need to be there? And so we end up with really fixed ideas of what flexible, ironically, should look like. And actually, it needs to be a two-way conversation. It needs to be from employees and staff up saying, This is what I need, and from senior management HR down, being like, This is what the business needs. How do we work for both? Can you flex towards us? Can we flex towards you? That's what we should be doing.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

So a two-way conversation and an ongoing conversation by the sound of it as well.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Yeah. And understanding that flexibility is not, unfortunately, flexibility is not defined, which makes it very difficult, right? So we need to be constantly having conversations, and a lot of those conversations are difficult, and that's where we as human beings fall down because we don't really like difficult conversations.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

So having those tricky conversations, again, becoming skilled in those conversations is going to be quick pretty or is pretty fundamental. Um, I want to return to burnout just to touch on it because burnout is on the rise, and I know people that have that have burnt out and have had to completely re-jig their whole lives to think about where they want to go and how they want to be and how they want to make their way in the world. So it's a big thing, and it really affects organisations in terms of keeping really good, talented people on board with them. So often um I hear people say that they feel like they failed when they've burnt out. So my question is from your point of view, do you think burnout is more of a systems issue than an individual one?

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Oh, I think it is an issue of what happens when an individual meets a system. And that we as individuals have individual needs that for a start, most of us are taught not to be aware of. So I have a lovely friend who is a primary school teacher, and often all my friends will go to her and be like, oh my god, is my is my child doing well enough in their exams? Are they learning enough? And she will say to them that primary school is not the place where you actually learn. She's like, most of the academic learning happens at home, right? But what primary school is is a place where kids learn it's not all about them, that they have to fit into systems, that there are rules and ways of engagement, and that part of getting along is adapting into those. So we are taught from a really, really young age, adapt your individual needs to fit into the system. And that is helpful because that's how societies work. But it also means that we're taught to ignore our individual needs and we're taught to not advocate for them and not listen to them. And the impact of that is then that when we can't fit into the system anymore, when we have adapted and adapted and adapted so much that we're kind of pushed to our edge, we feel like we are being rejected from the community. We feel like we're being pushed out of the tribe. When actually what's really happening is our body is going, oh, I need the tribe to adapt for me. And that's the bit that is interesting is that in a way we have become so obsessed with burnout that we've gone, oh, well, you've burnt out, as opposed to saying, Oh, I'm sorry, the system needs to adapt for you a bit now. How do we do that?

SPEAKER_00 17:59

I love what you're saying there because for me it's we're we're so fond of labels, aren't we? And burnout is a very useful label. Oh, you've you're burnt out, you're burning out. And that again, that stops us having the conversation, um, which we might find difficult to have. So it does come back to communications and to relational leadership, actually, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 18:18

And also to this understanding that burnout is not a full stop, right? So burnout is just your body saying, I need a break, give me a break. It's giving in, it's not giving up. And I heard there was a great article, I think it was in the New York Times this week, about is are the 2020s the era of uh burnout feminism? And essentially saying that women are deciding that's it, they're over their careers, they're done now, they're burnt out, we're all gonna go and like sit in the woods and chant. Now, as somebody who loves to sit in the woods and chant, I 100% support that. And what I know is that you can sit in the woods and chant and still be ambitious and still have desires and still have goals and still get lots of satisfaction from pursuing that ambition. So we need to explain to people that burnout is your system saying, I need a rest and I need to do things differently. It's not saying I need out of this altogether.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

And then also there's that whole element of women midlife who may have navigated burnout, may have navigated what they call talk about a collision of crises that women deal with in midlife with family, their own, you know, their own health and well-being, you know, going through the menopause, etc. And then they have have this renewed energy in midlife, which means there's just so much they can still give to the world, which often doesn't get ignored because the older women get, the more invisible they're at risk of becoming as well. So there's all sorts of conundrums going on here in in many different levels, I think.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Totally, and we're also not thinking about how long we are all working for these days, right? So I say sometimes to people, you could go from entry-level job to CEO three times over in three different careers over the course of your working life. You have enough time for that. You have enough time to go and be a doctor, train to be a doctor, get to consultant level, quit, and go and train to be a graphic designer. Create a graphic design firm, quit, can't do it, you know. We can have so many different lives, and when we kind of see what it's essentially ageism, right? When we see ageism in the workplace, which says, well, after I think it's 40 for women and 45 for men, you are less valuable. We're completely ignoring that. We're also ignoring my favourite fact, which is that post-menopause, women's hormonal levels more accurate more accurately resemble young men's hormone levels. So that's not to say we have the same hormones, but just percentage and proportions of them, which means that postmenopause women's are sometimes more ambitious. We've got more drive, more ambitious, more energy. More energy. And we've written those women off because they've been through a really difficult period where that wasn't the case. Instead of allowing, like, oh, this is the season where you rest and restore so you can come back stronger.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

So there's something again about when we get involved in organizations and building businesses and things, how fixed our thinking can become. Nothing is fixed, everything is changing all the time and emerging. And just because someone might have been low energy during a certain period in their life doesn't mean they're always going to be like that. There's going to be a time when they'll be renewed and have an awful lot more to give.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Yeah, and that we need to see that not as something that gets fixed in weeks, but something that's fixed over years, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Yes, and and having the flex and wherewithal to be supportive of that process. So, you know, you talk a lot about rewriting the rules, and I suppose we're starting to move into that quite naturally in this conversation and building businesses differently. You've co founded um your consultancy, um, Leap Leadership, with a very close. Direction that you're going to have different rules for how you conduct yourself. So tell me a bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

So to be clear, I didn't actually found it. It was founded by my two business partners, and then I joined them. And uh we always knew that we wanted to do work a bit differently. So the form of leadership development we do is what we call relational leadership, which means essentially that we're not interested in the function of how you do your job. We assume that you know how to do your job. What we are interested in is how you work with, adapt to, learn from, grow with, and support the people around you, whether those are yourself, your teammates, or your clients. And um for us that's the really important bit, right? The important bit is how do we have good relationships at work? Because we actually know that a lot of human well-being is linked to our ability to have good relationships. Um, and so that was our founding principle. It was like, we're not gonna come in and tell you how to have a better strategy. We it's not for us, we know you know how to do that. We are gonna come in and teach you how to have a really difficult conversation that you don't want to have. We are gonna come in and teach you how to listen to your body so that you don't burn out. Uh, we are gonna come in and teach you how to sit in a really difficult meeting where everyone is disagreeing and still find a way through that. Um, and that's the stuff that we are really interested in. And then what's interesting is that as you grow as a business, you come in and you're like, we want to do work differently. We were like, none, we'd all been through a version of burnout in some way, shape, or form. We're like, none of us want to be there again. We want to make sure that we have time, that we have flexibility, that we are not feeling like overworked or overwhelmed. And yeah, as you grow, all these messages that you have taken on through your working life about we need more, we need to be bigger, we need to grow, we need to uh make more money, we need to always service the client, everyone needs to be happy. You start living them again. You go, oh no, this isn't what we meant to design. And so instead, what we've done is we've started to think about okay, what's really important to us? And so actually, we're ambitious. Growth is important to us. We want to grow, we want to work with more people, we want to get into more companies, we want to make more change. That's important because that lets us live our purpose, which is fundamentally making the workplace a happier, healthier place for people to be. Um, but we also don't want to do it at our own expense. So this year we committed both to growing the business and also to working a four-day week. So we officially don't work Fridays. We understand sometimes that doesn't work, you have to flex, but we take another day and lose somewhere else. Um and the reason that we did that was because not only is our business at a different stage where there is an emphasis on growth and we want to have lots of energy to put into that, but also the people working in the business are at different stages. So uh some we've got a business partner who's been through a divorce, we've got a business partner who's just had a new baby, we've got somebody else with a small child. Uh, I am studying for a diploma in sex and relationships therapy. I like we've all got different things that we've got going on that allow us to be fulfilled, whole, energized people. And we want to make space for them. They are as if not more important than the work we are doing. So we need to make space for them so that we can do the work as well as we can.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

So tell me more then about the impact of that. Because it all sounds it sounds gorgeous, to be honest. It sounds so you know, you're really looking after the people, you're being very, you know, supporting individuals with what wherever their needs are. How is that working out in terms of achieving the outcomes you want to achieve in your business?

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Um, I mean, well, so far for our 2026, we're looking, we're looking at 2026, it's gonna be a great year. Touch wood. We're already very early into it. So touch wood. But um what it's done is it's done a couple of things. So the first thing it's done is it's forced us to look at actually how efficiently are we working. So, what could we do better? What do we do that takes up a lot of time that actually none of us enjoy doing? Are there other ways to do that? So we worked with an AI consultant to look at how can we um automate some of our working practices. We looked at our business strategy to be like, where do we really want to put our effort? We looked at our client strategy to be like, okay, where are we managing this well? Where could we do it better? So we've looked at every single element to understand what is the best way of doing this rather than just what is the workers' norm way of doing it. Um, and then the other impact is hilariously, it turned out that me, who really was pushing for a four-day week, I'm not very good at it. I am not very good at it. So it took me about, I think, the first two weeks to actually even achieve a four-day week. It's like, okay, I've stopped, I've switched off. Um, and so what we've had to learn is that actually for all of us, that four-day week looks slightly different. So um for my business partner who has a small child, for example, she's like, sometimes I want to do a play day on a Wednesday afternoon and I will just work out what needs to be done and I'll make it up some other time. Uh for me, one of the things I had to do was like, I actually have to book stuff in for my Friday so that I don't sit at my desk and start doing things. Um, for another one of my colleagues, she was like, actually, I have to really like tell my clients that I do not work Fridays, otherwise they keep asking me and I keep saying yes. So it's really for all of us shone a light on actually what is the stuff that we have been doing out of habit, what are the patterns that we have created without thinking about it that we now want to challenge? And that's a really fun experiment.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

That is it's well, yeah, and I love that you're treating it like an experiment as well, but also it is about breaking habits. Yeah. You know, and there are organizational business habits like we all work Monday to Friday, and then there are personal habits we need to break. How have your clients responded to to these changes?

SPEAKER_01 27:58

So mostly, I I would say mostly they're sort of completely unfazed by it. So some of them have sort of gone, oh, okay, okay. And you can see them thinking, well, what does that mean? I think a few people have gone, oh, I quite, you know, we have a lot of coaching clients, oh, I quite like having my coaching on a Friday. Yeah, that's okay. We can work with that. What is it about Friday that you really like? Oh, well, I'm often at home and it's quite okay. Do you want to do another day when you're at home? Is this something you can switch around? We've found ways around it. Um, I have one client that I still coach on a Friday because we do one hour a month. And I'm like, that's fine. For an hour a month, I can work with you on that. So there's finding ways around it, but I think mostly what's happened is people can't, oh, that'd be nice. Oh, well, there's been a bit of, oh, well, you can do it because you know that's what you do, or that's your business, or you run it. And I'm like, yeah, and you can do it too. You have to go through the same process. You have to look at where are we putting all our time and energy? Is that the right place? How do we find that time back? Because what we didn't want to do was, you know, say we're a four-day week company, but actually just have really long hours the other four days of the week, you know, or be working that what we had to do is find efficiencies. What we had to do was say what really matters? Where do we want to put our time and energy?

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Very good. So let's move back then. We we started off talking about your your days in uh at the Guardian. I I'm because I you know, this podcast is focused around gender and supporting women to step up in leadership. What have you learned over the years about women, work, and power? So, you know, you've got a journalistic background, you've written extensively about women and work. What I'm curious about is are the challenges you feel women face today different to the ones that they faced, say, a decade ago?

SPEAKER_01 29:50

I would say, I mean, sadly, I'm gonna say no, and I think they face even more challenges. So, what was interesting a decade ago, if we go back to 2016, if you've seen all of those social media posts about 10 years ago today, we're having a real nostalgia moment for a kind of pre-Trump pre-Brexite era. Um, you know, that actually there was a lot of momentum around women in work in 2016. There was a bit of a gull girl boss culture, it was a bit of like put your high heels on and go dominate the boardroom. But there was energy behind it, there was belief. And I think what we're seeing today is how much some of that belief has been eroded. And we know that this happens in society and cultures, right? The pendulum swings one way and it gets too scary and it swings back the other. And I think we are on the back swing when it comes to women in work right now. So we're saying, actually, well, we've got maternity policies in place, so how hard can it be? Well, actually, it is just it's a crunch economic period right now. So unfortunately, if you don't want to put the hours in, we can't keep you. We've got to think about the people who are going to be here for 10, 15, 20 years. Um, we're seeing a lot of women say, actually, I'm not sure I want to, I'm not sure I want to deal with this. It doesn't work for me. We're seeing really misogynistic language and behaviour. And we saw a lot of that come back actually over COVID when everybody went online and there was a bit of space, and people felt they could be a bit misogynistic in their supposedly private chats.

SPEAKER_00 31:15

Could I cut in there then? Because what I'm curious about is, you know, 15 years ago, I don't think I'd even heard of misogyn, I'd heard of misogyny. It wasn't so commonly used in our language as it is today. So you say you notice there's more misogynistic language than there used to be. Is that because we are more aware of it? So we're filtering much more for it than we used to be.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Uh yes and no. So I think yes, we're more aware of it, and also we're more likely to speak up about it than maybe not 10 years ago, but certainly 15 years ago, right? So 15 years ago, uh let me think of an example. I mean, 15 years ago, I was working not for the Guardian, I need to point out very clearly here, I was working for a company, and my boss used to buy me as a Christmas bonus a pair of Lou Butons. And I was delighted by this. It was great, loved it, great. 500 pound shoes at 22 or whatever I was. Great, fantastic. And now I look at it and I'm like, kind of weird. Kind of weird. And that was like a very mild version. I remember a friend of mine worked for an ad agency, and it was totally normal that when you joined the ad agency within two weeks, you would receive an email uh placing you on the Hotties chart. So where you stood in terms of how hot the women were in the office, and it's just the women, it wasn't the men, right? Just the women where you stood. And that was just considered part of the culture, of course. On Fridays, they would send porn around the office because it was Friday, yay, right? And that sort of stuff wasn't really challenged, whereas now I would hope it would be challenged. But what we then saw, because think of that pendulum again. So here we are over in our early naughts, and people are sending porn around the office and rating women on a hot scale. And then there was a swing where it was like, no, you can't do that. You cannot do that. So everybody, it you know, the culture was still there, but it went underground and everybody behaved better. And suddenly HR policies came in, and you could have a conversation where you said, actually, this person behaved really badly to me on a work night out. I'm not okay with it. And a conversation would be had. They might not have been sacked, but a conversation would be had. So it swung back and it went quiet, and it became not okay to say those things in the workplace. Now, there is a whole conversation around whether or not it is better to have a culture in which we think it's not okay, quotes, to say things, or whether it's better to have a culture where things are just said and it's all out in the open. Obviously, the ideal is to have a culture where people go, why would I say that? That's weird. But we're far away from that, so it's okay. Um, but we are now in a culture where those things are said back out in the open again. So they might we might not be back in the porn on a Friday culture, but we are definitely back in the well, is she gonna hang around after she's had a baby culture? We're definitely back in the well, men are just better leaders culture. I've heard that a lot recently, which I find horrifying. Uh, we're definitely back in the well, this is a job for men, this is a job for women culture. And that's the swing again. So we had a swing where we went, women can do everything, women are taking over the boardroom, we need more women, get women to the top. And the impact of that is people go, no, swing back again.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

I mean, I hear this, and part of me thinks this is just so bonkers. And I know a lot of it is the rhetoric that's going on in certain parts of the world politically and all that sort of stuff, but it does feel like it's completely bonkers because the evidence shows time and again that a balanced, diverse culture, uh, where people are treated fairly, where people are encouraged to all be engaged, and and you know, that's what gets the performance that organizations so want. And those organizations that have a more diverse culture are the ones that are most successful. Um, so it does seem bonkers to me to hear that it it really is has swung back that much.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

And also, I think we're having a different version of success now than we did 10 years ago. So, success 10 years ago was you've got good stock prices, you've got a solid culture, you've got high retention, you are making decent returns, you are building a long-lasting, deep-rooted business. Whereas success now is you are a unicorn within two years. And there is a company's name I'm not gonna remember in the US where their stated goal is to become a billion-dollar company, or$10 billion company, you can't remember. And they want to be a billion-dollar company and they want to do that within five years. And they say to your employees, if you come and work for us, we are a 996 company, which is nine to nine. I can't remember what the other nine sound for, six days a week. And that's the bare minimum. And if you can't do that, you're not in. And if you are not, and everyone who works there is loud, aggressive, alpha, there are some women, but there's more men, and that is the culture that they want because success for them is building really big, really fast, with no interest in the sustainability of that business.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

Gosh, and you're someone who stands for change. How do we go about keeping going? Because it is quite depressing to hear this. Yeah. Um, how do we keep going in terms of trying to make change happen and make the workplace a much more fair and equal place?

SPEAKER_01 36:30

So I think first of all, we have to say that it's okay to rest. So you have to say, I I really had to take a break in 2020. In 2020, I really stopped talking for a good few years about gender, about work. I was like, I'm just I it was too depressing for me. I was like, I can't keep doing this. And what and I thought when I took that break, excuse me, I thought when I took that break that, well, I'm never gonna do this again. And actually what happened was I took a break and I was like, okay, I can go again, let's try again. Um, so it's okay to take a break, it's okay to be depressed, it's okay to be tired about it, give yourself a break is the first thing. The second thing is to vote with your feet, you know. I think that we are in a culture right now that values big and fast, but that does not last. So go vote with your feet and go work for companies where you are appreciated and valued and where the culture meets your expectations. And maybe they don't grow at the same pace, but if they employ enough good people, they will still grow. And you will have a job in ten years' time, as opposed to maybe making some m money, but maybe not. And maybe being out of a job in five years' time with nothing to show forever. So vote with your feet. And then the final thing I would say is to understand that the loudest voices do not necessarily mean that those are the majority voices. So people being loud, saying things you don't agree with, behaving in a way you don't agree with, if you are feeling uncomfortable with that, other people in the room are feeling uncomfortable with that too. So find your allies and do it differently with them.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

Very good. Thank you for that, Harriet. What gives you hope that we can build organisations that will perform without burning people out and that will be properly inclusive and diverse?

SPEAKER_01 38:24

I think the people I meet, so I meet I work with good people all the time. You know, my fundamental belief is that human beings are good, that we want to do the right thing, that I have a deep belief in the goodness of human nature. So I think that has to come out. Also, I'm kind of optimistic that we are in for a bit of short-term pain, we're gonna have a boom and a bust, and it's all gonna go a bit weird, but that the long term of that will be that we start to reappreciate the importance of community, that we start to reappreciate the importance of depth and knowledge. Um, and that also that we start to realize that being able to create businesses and working cultures which sustain for the long term is more interesting, quite frankly, than doing something fast that doesn't last. And I think that is, you know, if we talk about that pendulum again, we're swinging on the pendulum towards how quickly can we do things, how fast can we make them happen, how big can we go? The pendulum will swing back at some point, and I'm excited for what happens when it swings back.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

That's fantastic. Thank you, Harriet. And how can people connect with you?

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Oh, uh, so you can find me online, you can find me on LinkedIn, Harriet Minter. Uh, you can find my Substack, Harrietminter.substack.com, uh, which to be honest, I don't write as frequently as I used to because I'm on a rest break from it, but it will come back at some point. Uh, and you can find me on all the various social media channels at Harrietminter.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

Thank you. It has been so great having you here. I mean, I've learnt a lot just from the conversation, so I hope my listeners are going to learn a lot from it as well. Thank you for not just reporting on what's happening out there and the future of work, but also helping us to build it as well. You've got some really fantastic insights there that you've shared with us today. Really grateful for you being here.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

Thank you very much, Mary.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

It's been a delight. Thank you so much for listening to the She Leads Collective podcast. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show or share it with a friend and leave a quick review below. Or leave us a comment. Change happens through conversation, so let's keep this one going. Listen out for the next episode and join me as we keep lifting the lid on the stories that matter. Take care and keep leading with heart.