'How To Lead When Nobody Knows What’s Coming' with Chris Hirst

What does leadership look like when nobody really knows what’s coming next?

In this episode, Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by Chris
Hirst, former global CEO and leadership advisor, to explore how leaders and
individuals make decisions in a world shaped by uncertainty and AI. Chris
challenges some familiar ideas, arguing that working hard is not enough, and
that the real differentiator is how you show up, not just what you can do.

What follows is a fascinating conversation about ownership, mindset, and
the small behaviours that compound over time, from how people actually get
hired and promoted, to why complaining and blaming quietly hold us back. This
episode offers a practical lens on what creates real value and what does not.
It is less about theory, and more about what it takes to move forward when the
rules are no longer clear.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

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LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy

The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

Transcript

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Nobody cares as much about our career as us. That is for sure, all of us in different times have found reasons to blame external factors for why things aren't going how we'd like them to go. And by the way, there may be external factors. Of course, there are external factors affecting us, but at the end of the day, nobody else is going to fix it other than us. Chris Hurst, a leadership advisor, an author and a former global CEO, posted a question on LinkedIn not long ago that surprised me. He said, Would you rather work for a bad human boss or a good AI boss? And 66% of people said they'd take the AI. That number is worth sitting with for a minute, not because of what it says about technology, but because of what it reveals about what people actually want from the humans that lead them. So Chris has worked with leaders at every level, and his observation right now is that everyone has an AI anecdote, but very few have a definitive answer for what they're actually doing about it. Jean, what are your thoughts? Yeah, what drew me into this conversation, in a major way, was this idea that aptitude gets you in the door, but it's your attitude that gets you the job, and this idea that you know we to keep ahead, we just need more skills, more technical skills in the automated world. He's challenging that. He's saying, No, the opposite, actually, it's your attitude, your mindset, that it's going to become the hallmark of what distinguishes the people of win and lose in the coming decades ahead. Well, let's get into the conversation. So I'd love to start Chris with just getting a sense, because you talk to so many people, you're out there working with leaders at all sorts of levels, from the most senior down to people at the beginning of their careers. Given the pace of change, given the complexity, the uncertainty, what's your kind of sense of what's happening right now? My sense is, I think people are finding it really difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise. I think it's very difficult. Everybody knows the change is coming, and it's probably going to be really big, and it might be really quick, but beyond that, nobody really knows, because nobody's a futurologist. And I think the problem with that is people are making either slightly knee jerk, short term decisions, particularly around let's say we were talking just before before, about graduate recruitment, for example, which is probably tougher than ever. People are pulling back on that, be not because they don't think there's value there, but because they just don't know quite what the future holds. So we're holding back also, I think people are diverting some of that money into investing in for AI, which is the obvious tsunami that's coming. But at the same time, nobody, nobody knows what the future from a work point of view, and indeed in any other regard, is going to look like. So I think there's we're sort of in this, this sort of almost paralysis situation. Everybody you talk to gives you an anecdote about an AI related challenge or problem or threat, but very few people you talk to say and this is definitively what we're doing about it. And I think that's a encapsulation of the challenge within business right now. So you start your book, opening it up with this idea that work is something we need to shape and own. So building on what you're saying with the separation of the Signal and the Noise. What is your meaning about that? How do we start to shape and own our careers? Yeah, well, I think the first thing is we have to accept that nobody cares as much about our career as us. I mean that that is for sure, and all of us at different times, have found reasons to blame external factors for why things aren't going how we'd like them to go. And by the way, there may be external factors. Of course, there are external factors affecting us, but at the end of the day, nobody else is going to fix it other than us. And I believe that we just talked about what the future will hold. We can't predict that but, but I would make a prediction to say that that people will continue to be central to the functioning of businesses, and businesses will continue to hunt for the best people to come and work for them. I mean, oh, it's obvious stuff, right? And therefore, if we're serious about our careers, we have to be clear headed about what that means for us particularly. I mean, I'm talking about if you're ambitious about your career, if you just want to go to work at nine and get away with as little as possible and go home at five. Fine. I'm not being judgmental about that. Those aren't the people I'm talking to. If you want to go and shape a career that suits and builds the kind of life that you want, you have to be clear about what employers want from you in order to do that, and I think that's also applies. The same principles apply if you choose to work for yourself, frankly, as well. I'd say one other thing, which about the world of work, which is, I think there's a kind of social media driven fetishization, let's say, about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurialness, and that in some ways, you know, you kind of cop out if you go and work for somebody else, you know that, in some ways, isn't a it's impossible to have a rewarding and fulfilling career if you go and work for somebody else. And that really is bullshit. You know that do not buy that most of the most successful people have done both or one or the other. There's no path you can look at and say, Oh, the most successful people have all followed this path. The most successful people all exhibit very similar traits, and those traits are relevant whether you work for somebody else or not. So my point is that whatever you end up doing, whether you start your own business or whether you go and work for somebody else, a career can be a very fulfilling thing in and of itself, if you do it right? I think that's really interesting. What you're saying there, because we have, we are idolising entrepreneurs as Yes, and they're such a tiny proportion of people who work, and it's really hard work. Yeah, it's bloody hard. Most businesses fail. So when we think about, you know, the advice that you would give to a young person starting off at work about being themselves as much as the else, but then translating that into something that they can take ownership of it, what advice would you give them in terms of their aptitude and and their their attitude towards what they're doing. Well, I I get shouted on social media for saying, Whatever you do, don't turn up and be yourself, as opposed to qualify that point slightly. What I mean is, turn up and you should turn up and endeavour to be as often as you can your best self. I think that's the point, really. I mean, I think this again, you see it a lot on social media, this idea of authentic leadership. And I absolutely hate that phrase. What on earth I mean genuinely? What does it mean? And very often I see people, particularly senior leaders, use the description of themselves as being an authentic leader as an excuse for behaving badly, for being a dick, right? And nobody wants that, and nobody needs that. So I think what we need to be is a curated version of ourselves. We can't show up as somebody else. We, we can't do that, frankly, not over any sustained period of time, but we need to understand what the best version of ourselves means. It's like a kind of curated version of ourselves, I think, and so so all of us, in a in a professional context, I suppose, are a mix, as you say, of aptitude and attitude. So the core skills that we've developed through our degree or through experience in work, and then the then how we show up, the attitudes we bring to that. And in really simple terms, I think of it like this. I think that aptitude gets you in the room, whether that be for a promotion, whether that be to win a new client, whether that be to get a new job, but attitude gets you the job. Gets you the promotion. Because there's always, always going to be many, many people with equivalent skills to the ones you've got. Okay, Jean, so I know we're just getting started in our conversation, but Chris just made a point that I think is worth reflecting on. He just mentioned that the term authentic leadership is something he doesn't care for because he's experienced many who've used it as an excuse for bad behaviour, and I think he's right. I've seen that, and you've seen that, and I would build on that, which is to suggest that maybe that's not authenticity. What I mean by that is when people are behaving badly at work, whether they're leaders or not, if it's bullying or shouting or blame shifting or any number of destructive behaviours that feels authentic to them, I would suggest that that is stemming from low self awareness, and the behaviour is actually not rooted in self understanding. Therefore it's not really authentic, but it. Often a disguise. It's masking a deeper defensiveness or fear or some other more vulnerable emotion that the leader doesn't want to display, and so they compensate, they display something intense, or they power up in some way, or act out in some way that's destructive, and that's not really, I think, the intent behind the idea of authentic leadership, at least not from an emotional intelligence perspective. Jean, I'd be deeply curious to know your thoughts on this. Yeah, I think I kind of agree with Chris in the sense that the word is used a lot, and it's used in the way that you're describing, which is to kind of justify defensively bad or ill considered or low awareness behaviours. But it's also used as a kind of coercive type of thing to manipulate other people, using language to kind of suggest you're being authentic when you're being anything other than that. We think about what authenticity is really about. It's about creating trust between people, that you see something that's true in somebody, and that you know you can, you can believe in it. So yeah, and I agree. I don't think we want to throw up authenticity out of the the leadership mix, but, but we also need to call it out when it's anything but yeah, thank you, Jean. Let's get back into the conversation with Chris. There's always going to be many, many businesses that can do the same thing functionally as yours. So how does a client, how does a boss? How does an employer choose? Well, they choose based on on attitudes. They choose based on what it's like to be in a room with you when things are hard, whether you whether the room warms up or cools down when you walk in, whether you're somebody who gets shit done. I mean that that for me, is the central point. The people that we want working for us are people who, who we think are gonna make us better, right? And, and who are those people? Well, they're people that bring solutions, not problems. I mean, there's stuff we know. I mean, if you just asked somebody and said, don't think about career, don't think about work, just tell just write down on a piece of paper, what are the if you had to employ three people, how would they behave? Nearly everybody would write the same things. But you've hired 1000s of people, you've led, you know, 10s of 1000s of people, and you must have promoted gazillions of people and fired some as well. But you know, and they're all smart people, because you were in a high knowledge business, those smart people didn't always get the attitude right. What were the kind of ways in which they kidded themselves that they had the right mindset? I think that's a great question. I think we all kid ourselves to an extent right. But I also think that even very senior people that that really what I consider to be a and I'm sure anybody watching or listening will consider to be a glaringly obvious point in reality, when it comes to it most not, I wouldn't say most, many people don't think about themselves in the career context, Like that people value. So I'll give you an example, particularly people towards the start or mid of their career, when I when I was a relatively junior leader, let's say, and I probably did this myself. You would have conversations with people about the next step of their career, and people would frequently say, I want to be more involved in strategy if I had a POUND DOLLAR whatever for people who said that to me, I want to be more involved in strategy, and that's because people perceive strategy to be something that clever people do, and therefore clever people are the who we all want to be, because clever people get promoted, right? Like, no, I think strategy is pretty easy. I think it's important, but I don't think it's that difficult to do. I think what's difficult is going and executing it. Most companies don't need more strategy. Most companies need people prepared to go and execute strategies they've got. Because executing stuff is really difficult. It's difficult because it's hard work. It's difficult because it's exposing because nobody gets fired over PowerPoints, but people might get fired when you go and execute something and it doesn't quite work out or, I mean, not necessarily, not necessarily fired, but can be seen to fail, right? So, so I think, I think in the context in you know, being in work is stressful and political, and all these things that we know, and I think these things can cloud our minds in terms of, what are the things that our bosses or our clients want from us, you know what? From I think people very often, and I've done this myself. You've met, you've known some of my bosses. I've done this myself. When I look back, you know, have a slightly passive, aggressive relationship with our boss. When we think about it, that's crazy. Right? Because the the most important person in our career at any given point is our boss, if we and how do we add most value to our boss? Well, we help them achieve things they wouldn't if we weren't there. And by the way, that also applies to the people who work for us. That works in both directions. And so if we are thinking about, how can we through our behaviours, through how we show up, through how careful we are about our bosses, time through how clear we are about what their number one objective is and how we help them fulfil it, etc, how it's like to just be around us, how we say, I tell you what, why don't I take that? I'll go and do that. Yeah, people that say that to you laugh, right? And so if we think about that relationship with their boss, not only will with our boss, not only will they progress more quickly. If we back ourselves to be good, which we all should, then we will progress more quickly, too. I love this conversation around the mindset of attitude and the mindset of showing up and being your best self. I want to come back to the curated piece a little bit. I'd like you to explain that a little bit further, only because what I don't think you're saying is some performative version of yourself that's completely inauthentic, where then it crumbles under the press the stress and pressure of daily life, right? So talking about tapping into something that's authentically you and bringing that forward so that it's, it's, it's seen as your best self, is what you're saying. Yeah, I think that's exactly well. On one level, I agree with everything you've said. But to be clear, I think on some level, leadership is a performance. Okay, you are playing, you are playing a role, and sometimes you have to behave in ways that you really don't feel like now, I don't think that's inauthentic, because we do that in lots of situations, right? I mean you know, lots of situations we say things that aren't necessary. You know, we tell white lies. I mean, we do it all through our lives. You know, we understand how our instinctively, how our body language and our verbal language and our written language matters. But I give you like a really obvious everyday example, you if you're if you're in charge of a team. Doesn't matter how big that team is. But you know, if I think back when I was CEO, if I walked into the office and I made a big point of of our leadership team, we would sit right in the middle of the business in an open plan office, and we would sit and be visible and next to each other. If you, as the CEO, walk into the office and sit with your head in your hands at your desk because you've just been fired by a client or or you've had a row with your partner, or whatever it is. However you feel people, people really notice. People are looking at you to see how you are behaving. Your behaviour sets the culture in the business. And I don't, you know, I think it's okay to be vulnerable. It's okay to have bad days, because you do sometimes, but you have to be conscious of the fact that how you behave and how you show up really matters in terms of how other people feel. So getting angry, we all get angry. Sometimes it's just a human all these emotions are human things. But you know what? You've really got to try not to you've really got to not be emotionally incontinent if you're in charge, you know. So rather than, you know a sign, rather than spikes like this, you know, you may be, you may be. Of course, some days are better than others. You know you can, you can show emotion, but you can't be emotionally incontinent. You can't just have no filter and just behave however you feel like. And again, that sounds really obvious, but a lot of senior leaders are unable or unwilling to do that. You're making poor leaders. You're distinguishing between emotional expression and how you feel. Yes, sorry. I mean, I'm That's why, I mean it's a performance. That's why I mean that what you show and how you behave really matters. And sometimes you might feel like going and singing the corner and sobbing, but I'm afraid it's a whole lot better if you don't. Maybe sometimes you just got to do that, but it's a whole lot better for the people around you if you don't, because, because leadership matters most when things are hard, when things are easy, it's easy. Anybody can do it. You're winning lots of clients and making lots of money. Everything's great. Anybody can do it, right? I mean, it it's more the harder and harder things are, the more and more difference in impact great leadership has. And so it those times people aren't daft, the people around you and your team and your organisation, they know things are tough as well. They'll they'll know that things are difficult or. Or whatever it is, whatever, whatever the challenges are, there's a few secrets in organisations in reality, and what you need to do is, what people want, is they want to look at you and to feel like you've got a plan and that you know where we're going, and you've at least got a starting hypothesis for how to get there. You don't have to pretend to have all the answers, but sometimes you've got to stand up and say all this stuff about leading from the back, yeah, okay, but when stuff's hard, you've got to be at the front. You've got to say, I know where we're going. This is what we're going to do. Come on, let's go do it, and I'll be at the front, at least at the front in the sense of, I'm not going to ask you to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. Just coming back to the point you were making around being useful, backing yourself, figuring out how to make your boss successful, the people around you successful, and so on. We hear a lot of you know the last decade or so on about younger generations having a sense of entitlement, which is kind of the opposite of what you're you're talking about there, yeah, and you know, part of that maybe, you know, the there's a culture around that on social media that maybe part of that is, you know, parents who've kind of, yeah, indulged quite a lot, and almost been coaches in a good way. But you know, there are consequences of that. What, what are you seeing in terms of, you know, like that, that, that trend, I'm really wary of it, yeah, because I, I first of all, don't feel like I've got I'm very wary of making broad generalisations based on the relatively, of course, compared to all the Gen Zed as there are in the world, the relatively small number that I've met, yeah, and I'm also so conscious of every generation complains about the generation that goes after them. I mean, everyone, right? And Gen Z will complain out about, you know, millennials are complaining about Gen Z, and Gen Z to whoever's after the Gen alpha, or whatever it is, and so that, I think it's they're slightly and by the way, I do think, of course, there are generational changes, but I, I'm, I'm kind of wary about making general generalisations, like, therefore that means they're, I don't know, not going to work as hard or not as prepared to, you know, do the things that maybe we once have done. But I will give you, I will give you an example. Though I was at a, I won't name the company, but I was with a leadership group of a big manufacturing business, and they were had some big challenges. And the people in the room, I was very moved by listening to the people in the room. They were deeply passionate about the business that they were involved in, and they were deeply passionate about the importance they felt that business had to the region that they were in, and they felt that in order to meet the challenges of that business, they were all going to have to start to work in a way, all of them that they had never done before. They were going to have to, in their words, just frankly, work harder than they ever had before. Was without business to succeed. And the people, the people in that room, said, and what we don't know until we try it is whether the whether people will, we don't know. We're not saying they won't, but we just don't know if, if they will. And I don't think that's I don't, I don't. I think that's a slightly different point, perhaps. But I found it quite a in some ways. It was a quite a moving and profound moment, listening to have that them have that conversation, but, but I, but I think that also one of the reasons I wrote the book, or my most recent book, is that I think there are many, many hundreds of 1000s of people, millions of people around the world who do want to have successful careers, and do want to do want to have big dreams, they want to fulfil and all those kind of things. And I think the rules, if you like, for how to achieve that haven't changed. And you're you can you know you, if you do understand those, then you increase your chances of succeeding if you choose to not follow them. Maybe there are other paths as well, but then you can't complain if people are prepared to work harder, to work, perhaps with less ego, to invest in themselves all the things we've talked about so far, you can't complain if you choose not to do those things, and the people that do are the ones that get the rewards that seems fair and how it should be to me, I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of the economic reality. That some of the younger people are experiencing. So you're talking about showing up with the right attitude, going the extra mile, all the things. And I was talking to some, you know, some folks in their 20s recently who work really, really hard, but they're feeling unincentivized Because they also have to have two roommates to pay their, you know, live, to live local, to their businesses. So, yeah, in a world where the prosperity doesn't follow as closely as it might have in our generations, right? What advice would you give to a listener who's like, Listen, I have some purpose. I want to be successful, but my but it's not, it's not materialising for me. Is there anything from a mindset perspective or attitude perspective that you would you might share for a listener? Well, I hesitate. I mean, I do have a point of view. I hesitate because you, of course, there are people in that position, I suppose that's I don't want to keep I don't want to make it all about my book. But you've asked a question that leads, leads directly to it that, in a way, is why I wanted to write what I wrote. Because I don't think working hard is enough. I actually think working hard is quite easy. From really honest, like I was, I was saying to somebody today, you know, being busy is easy. It's just getting paid for it that's hard. And so I'm not disparaging people that work hard. I'm not doing that. I'm saying that actually what we have to do is we have to make sure, I think about ROI on our time, that that I think all at the end of the day, all we have is time. Really, really successful people have no more hours in the day than anybody else they and nor do they necessarily work harder than everybody else. Sure, they work harder than some people, but as you say, there's plenty of people working really hard what they do, and this is unarguably true. The question is, how what they do is they get a better return on the investment of each of those hours than everybody else. For them personally, as much as anything, it's obviously, presumably, in some cases, there's a correlation between the business they're in and themselves, but there's a better ROI, so we have to which is why I want people to be clearer about how they are spending their time. So I'll give you an example, a lot of businesses. I'm sure you guys see this as well. A lot of businesses I go and talk to. Still, we're in 2025 now, when you talk to senior exec, CEOs off the record, you'll talk to, you know, do a keynote, and everybody will ask the usual grown up questions, and then you'll have a coffee afterwards. And on the coffee. People still talk about working patterns. People don't like people are still a bit leery about talking about it publicly, but privately. It's a real top 123, question for for senior execs, and there's this real schism in organisations between leadership, frankly, would just be basically, on average, a lot happier if everybody was at their desk and people, the employees, on the whole, are pretty happy with a more flexible way of working. And so there's this real and it's a trust gap. And I think one of the challenges that happens with working from home, and by the way, I do think people are less productive working from home on average. I mean, I'm talking, of course, everybody can pick exceptions, and that's not because they're necessarily not working hard. It's because if you work remotely, you're more likely, in my opinion, to self direct in terms of how you spend your time. So what the basic building block of an organisation is a team, not an individual. All organisations are built of blocks of teams, and teams achieve things. You know, teams are one plus one equals three, a good team, and that's because that team is really good at directing the energy and focus of the individual individuals within it against its number one priority. The more dispersed that team is in geography and time. It's not impossible, but the more difficult it is to ensure you get that team alignment, and to ensure that you aren't just a group of individuals. And I think that's one of the challenges with remote working, for example, which is it's harder to get that real alignment, and so people can sit at home all day long and feel like, well, I've been really busy today. I got this morning, I decided what I was going to do, and I spent all day doing it. But that's not, that's not the thing. And so, and I so, I think that ensure you can apply that principle to yourself as well, which is, nothing is guaranteed. There's not a silver bullet for the people that you described. But I think the clearer you are about what it is you're trying to do and the things you need to develop to get their careers are a competitive event. Every step that you get promoted somebody else. Doesn't when earlier in your career, it's less obvious, because there's big numbers, but pretty rapidly it does become obvious. And so throughout your career, whether it be for pay rises, if you get a pay rise, somebody else doesn't. If you get a promotion, somebody else doesn't. So you have to work out how you're getting competitive advantage at those points of inflection. You're listening to the mindset economy, be sure to subscribe on your favourite platform and leave us a rating and a review. So how do you get hired in the first place today? Well, so I think that's a really interesting question, because I actually think that that is changing pretty quickly. How people, how people hire? Do you mean, like, just as a graduate, you mean it's an entry line for a job? Yeah, because I think it's quite different. I think there's two, I think there's two types of hiring. Isn't this first job and then the subsequent job, and I think they're different. Or, you know, I mean, I'm thinking about getting your first job, first job, okay, so first job, right? So I think that that it's about understanding the process first of all. So to really simplify back to aptitude and attitude, there'll be a there's a long list and a short list. So nobody gets hired from a CV, nobody gets hired from a covering letter, covering lessons, and CVS might, if you're lucky, come back to that, but get you an interview. But it's, it's attitude that gets you the job. So this is why, this distinction between I need to get in the room, and then, once I'm in the room, how do I how do I make sure to convert it? Now I think that there's a sort of a big curve ball in this, which is increasing use on both sides of that fence of AI. Increasingly applicants are using AI to speed themselves through that try and speed themselves out through that process. And increasingly, employers are using AI to sniff out the and it's this kind of arms race that I don't think there's, there's a way around that, to be honest with you, I think to get an interview you have to be good at making a case for why you are the right candidate. I mean, I can't break down in more specific than that, but it certainly is also a numbers game, because there's, there's an I think there's an element, there is an element of lottery about getting interviews. So unfortunately, you have to go through that process. I would say that I I think that work experience on your application CV covering letter is increasingly valuable, because as more and more and more people go to university, by the way, that's great. The problem for employers is it's harder and harder to differentiate based on qualifications. And qualifications are just a proxy. They're just a proxy for how good an employee you're going to how good an employee you're going to be. They're not a very good proxy, but they're all an employer's got, basically in simple terms. So work experience is increasingly valuable, I believe, because it tells them something work related about you, and that's what they want. That's what so many people forget. What they want is somebody who's good at the job, not somebody who's good at university. Then I think when, when you get to interviews, I think interviews can be practised and prepared for the the the two Ps of preparation and practice, by the way, I think you can improve a whole lot of your what you achieve at work by better preparation and practising it. But I think that people that do well in interviews prepare really properly for those interviews, and they understand the attitudinal points. And actually I think I think you can practice interviews. I think you don't have to do it in an interview type situation. But what often people will do is they'll think, look on the Internet, what are five typical interview questions that I might get asked? And you think, oh, yeah, I can answer all of those. I don't know what that is. What do you want to do in five years? Or whatever? Whatever they are, doesn't matter. Ask chat GPT. It'll give you a sensible list. But, but what's important is, under pressure, you need to be able to answer eloquently. And muscle memory really counts. It's like, I play a lot of tennis, my forehands great when it doesn't count, but when it's not so good when it does. And I think it's the same in interviews. So what you need to do is you need to write down those answers and practice those answers and keep doing them. And the more you do them, the better you'll be at them. But if you just think, oh yeah, those five questions, I'll be fine at those. And you get asked them and you think, or you get to them in a slightly different form, that's great advice for showing up. I'm curious if you think there's changes that need to happen, and how companies show up to the interview, how the recruiter shows up to the interview, because obviously lots of bad hires happen every day, right? So I think there are, I'm not sure that I I think. Because we, as we talked about, there's these, there's the sort of first job interviews and subsequent interviews. I don't, I don't feel well qualified to give employers advice on how to be better at hiring people for first jobs. It's not something that I've personally been involved for quite a long time. And also, I think, yeah, I think there is an element of, I just think it's, I just think that's quite a particular area of continuing a recruitment however, I do think most for subsequent hires, once you're hiring people for their second job, their third job, right the way up to CEOs. I think one of the things that organisations forget, and I see it all the time, all the time, in fact, I think it's almost ubiquitous, is that, is that what employers forget is that they need great people more than great people need them. And you see all the time, I used to see it, I'd be like, do we said that people, people that work for me, would say, Oh, we think we found this great person. They're absolutely incredible. Here's all the things they've done, and we've met them, and I love them, and they love them all, all we got to do now is get them to go meet these other four people. What? What I mean? Why? Why are you doing that? You know, meeting more people doesn't, doesn't necessarily improve your chances of finding the right person. It might reduce it. That's exactly what I think. And so and so. When it comes to great people, you are selling as much as you're buying. And I think a lot of employers now that they, you know, all the and the bigger they become, the more process they put in, the more they incline to do that. Because you have people whose job it is to run a process for recruitment, that the process becomes the end in itself, rather than trying to find fantastic people. So I would always say, you know we need to be, I don't, I don't just hire, don't hire the wrong person. But if you find, you know, and so you need the process needs to be, as long as it needs to be, to find somebody who you're really excited by, but once you found somebody really excited by offer them the job. Because the recruitment process, whether it be at a graduate level or at any stage, is very imperfect. I you know, I would think that out of every three people that I hired, if one exceeded my expectations, one met my expectations and one didn't meet my expectations, if I achieved that, I was doing quite well. Because it's just, it's just an input. It's an imperfect process. And so that, to me, is another reason not to stretch it out indefinitely, because there's an opportunity cost for your business. As well as stretching it out, presumably, you're hiring somebody because there's a pressing need in your business. And if it takes you nine months to find a person, that's a real that's a real problem, right? So you get the job, you join a team. And as you said, you know the team is the most fundamental of economic activity, but being in a team isn't as straightforward as it used to be, because you might be in three teams or four teams, you're out and people are leaving. You know this, having norming, storming theatre and have a chance to succeed. What advice have you got about being a great member of a team, a great member of a team again, I think this is, I think it's a great question, and I think the answer is common sense, but it's common sense that people don't think about. And what I would encourage everybody to do is to write down, as I said earlier, what would your ideal colleague be? How would your ideal colleague behave? Maybe write it down under a couple of different circumstances. I'm having a really crappy, awful day, what would on a crappy, awful day, what would my ideal colleague be like? Right? And maybe we could just get some pieces of paper out. Now, let's do this, one of those games where you fold over a piece and pass it around. Yeah, and, and the answer, of course, is obvious. Be that person and so some of and, and I guarantee that most people, if you ask 10 people that question, you get 80% alignment, if not more, amongst those 10 people. And some of those would be things like, I want to work with somebody who's good at their job, right? Working with somebody who's not good at their job is a pain in the ass. So I want to work with somebody who's good at their job, but I want to work with somebody who maybe helps me be better at my job. I want to work with somebody who, if I'm having a really bad day, they maybe come up to me and say, Do you want to get your cup of tea or so? I get your coffee. You look like you're having a You look like you're having a really shit day. Okay? I want to work with somebody like that. I want to work with somebody who who looks at me and helps me and takes work off. Me. I mean, you know, if I'm struggling and drowning and work takes work off me, doesn't dump work on me, I want to work with people who are respectful of my time. I want to look at people turn up on time. You know, if they I want to work with people who, if they say they're going to do a thing, they do that thing. And if they are for whatever reason, unable to do it. They're too busy. They don't know how whatever, they're straightforward, and they're honest with me, I want to work with people I trust, and they were honest. These are the things, these are the things. These are the people we want to work with. Yeah, and we all want to work with those people. So just be that person and actually, because I wouldn't say that. I mean, of course, there are plenty of people that behave like that, but I think that people often don't consciously it's behave like that. People don't think back to the curated version of me. How do I as frequently as possible show up as that person, and that's what, you know, I think a great team, the the and even just the question you asked, how do I show up as a great team member? Is a really, is a really important question people ask themselves at all levels, because you're a member of a team throughout your career right the way through, and member of multiple teams throughout your career. How do I and I would say the first thing that I would put on that list is I would look out for my teammates. I would look out for my teammates no matter what. I've got their back and I think we there's nobody that wouldn't love working with that person. And if people love working with you, what I get us back. Yeah, is there something that organisations are getting wrong in supporting that as well? Because I've had the luxury of working and the privilege and the honour of working with team members that you've just described? Yeah? Me too, and I try to be that way, yeah, but when people's performance gets measured at the end of the year, it's all individual, like, there's, there's there's, I don't know if really an example is where the team is getting evaluated by about how they did all those things right to make sure that everybody thrives and the team thrives. It's sort of like put teams together, but then your score card scorecard is all about you individually. Well, I think they are individual behaviours, aren't they? I don't think that that is is inherently wrong. I mean, if you're if when you're looking at the team, the team is comprised of individuals. I was joking there's, there's lots of eyes in team reality, because we're all individuals, and we in the great team. I think there is a alignment between the team fulfilling its objectives, whatever those might be, and me feeling that as the team does, that I move closer to fulfilling my own as well. That, to me, is the, you know, the perfect environment for us to want to work in, and and I think it is useful to look at the you know, to give because, because we are all individuals, to look at how individuals do. I've got a slightly different moan about the situation you describe, which I actually think that most formal annual performance review processes are essentially a total waste of time because they are incredibly bureaucratic. They're often done for organisational box ticking or even ass covering reasons they and they take up huge amounts of time for, you know, if you run a team of 10 people, which isn't a huge team, and you have to do a an organised fill in multiple blah, blah, blah performance review, that for 10 people, that is a lot of work and and I'm I'm not arguing against, I'm not saying that those that that way of doing it is wrong, per se, but I am saying that very often, the way that is executed is, it is, is an end in it's sort of another of these things that becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. And you know that that bookie, I mean, you both know, but that book, The One Minute Manager, you know, which basically just says just, I mean in short terms, just give people, just talk, just talk to people regularly about how they're doing. Right? That was great. That wasn't do this, don't do that is a far more practical and useful way, I think, to develop people's skills. Now the way the one of the reasons organisations put these big things in place is because many managers don't do that and and because they don't do that, the organisation thinks to itself, well, we have to have some way of of making giving people an opportunity to to get feedback, and indeed, to give us feedback. But I think that very often, the complexity of the way those things are done, it's just so self defeating, because everybody, just by the time you get to it, was just exhausted. Just want to finish it. I've done this, you know. And of course, that's right. In a world where everybody's busy isn't great, yeah? So it's very human to bitch, moan, carp, complain, yep, I love your piece in the book around the ROI of complaining. Well, I saw this thing as a day and said, and said, If you know, don't complain, don't blame other people, and don't make excuses there. And I love that. I think if you can go through your life and think, you know, because it's, it's the, it's the sort of thing I was talking about the start, and he looked to the other end of the telescope, in a way, in the sense that nobody, nobody cares about your career as much as you nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna contribute to it more than you do, obviously. But complaining, making excuses, blaming other people are are very human things to do, but they get they just get you nowhere that you know you spend your time complaining or blaming people finding excuses. Sure you can do that, but it's it's not only does it not move you forward, I actually think it moves you backwards, because it moves the focus away from where it needs to be in your own head, which is you. Because the relative it is that for all of us, personally, professionally, whether we are thinking about ourselves, whether we're thinking about the team we run, whether we thinking about the organisation we run, the majority of factors that influence outcomes are outside our control, the vast majority, right? We can't. I mean, you know what, everything from the weather to the economy to what our competitors do, the list is almost endless of things that are outside of our control. And I suppose we could, like, be intimidated by that, but on the flip side, we could say, well, actually, what we have to do is identify the things that are in our control, and that, I think, is very liberating. It doesn't mean we ignore external factors, but what we have to do is focus on what we can control. And of course, when it comes to us, we have a vast amount of control over we can choose to we can behave. We have full control over our own behaviours. It's not easy, and nothing is easy, but we but, but we do. And so the more that we are able to understand what the positive and useful behaviours are that will get us towards our goal, perhaps, that, you know, if we can just make a five or 10% change on that, it'll make a big difference. Because most people don't. I love the idea that, though that, you know ROI, it's a nice way of CO opting. You know, that stoic philosophy into into business language, and, you know, I'm just watching some of the teams that you work with in the past. The ROI of complaining was not really, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's true everywhere. Well, absolutely, because very smart people can confuse and discussing and describing what's they don't control with some sort of critique that's useful, but what you're saying is that it really doesn't give you any value whatsoever. Well, I think, I think that you will meet people. We've all met people who consider it as a sign of intelligence to be very, very good at telling you all the things that aren't right that describing problems. And let me tell you, it's super easy. Any anybody can spot problems, anybody can look at an idea and tell you what's wrong with it. Anybody can walk into a business and tell you what the problems are. It's, it's, it's almost trivially easy. What is? What is? The opposite of trivially easy is fixing them. And if I had to summarise the difference between the people that I want on my team and the people I don't I want people on my team that are willing, and I use willing more than able, frankly, are willing to give it a go to go and fix the stuff need that needs fixing. Because finding the stuff that needs fixing is it's like obvious, and yet you'll sit in team it with very senior people and, you know, the whole big projects about finding what, identifying what the problems are. Well, I know what the problems are. In fact, I almost, I also know here's 10 ways we might theoretically go and fix them. Okay, I know that too. But you know, everything we want is on the other side of some difficult shit we don't want to do. And I think that's what leadership's about. That's why it's hard. It's not hard because it's intellectually hard. It's hard because doing you've got to do stuff that really difficult. I mean, I was talking to a senior leader yesterday, founder of a business, explained all the challenges. Business had, and the challenges of familiar challenges to anybody who runs a business. And I said, like, I, you know, I'd love to come work with you, but I'm telling you now you already know what the answers are. It's just they're really difficult to do. What I can probably help you do is, is enable you and give you some of the skills and the background, some emotional support, even to go and do those things. But I'm telling you now you probably know what they are, but and you're not doing them because they're really hard. Can you give us a taste of your bluffers guide to networking? So I deliberately called it bluffers guide because I really and not never saw myself as a particularly good or enthusiastic network. But I think the reality of it is, is that networking is a really useful and important skill for our careers at all levels. And I think it's one of the for me, it's like one of those, probably one of the two big work phobias, the other one being the sort of universal work phobias are the ones standing and speaking in front of people, right? What is that thing about? Most people would more scared of speaking in front of other people than dying or something like that, right? Well, I think that networking, you know, walking into that room of full of people you don't know, is right up there with it. I think the my, if I had to summarise it, it's not that different to my two Ps, again, my two Ps of interviewing, preparation and practice. I think I imagine it a bit like arachnophobia, okay, the way, the way they because it's kind of is a phobia. It's a sort of an irrational phobia, isn't? You walk in the room and you think, room and you think, Well, I don't know anybody here. Why would anybody want to talk to me? All those things in your head, I feel a bit shy. What if I make a fool of myself, all that stuff that we've all been there with. And the reality is, many other people in the room are all feeling the same, and, and, and I see it as bit like arachnophobia, the way they the way they cure you of arachnophobia, isn't it? Is they basically, in simple terms, put progressively bigger spiders on the back of your hand. Okay? So basically, so it's progressive exposure, they put a money spider on, then a slowly bigger one and bigger one, then you end up full tarantula, basically, right? And I think, in really simple terms, you're never going to overcome your phobia of networking, because I don't think it's about being good at it. I don't think it's it's just going and talking to people, and everybody can talk to people. It's overcoming that phobia of talking to strangers, initiating conversations, worrying that you're going to run out of things to say, worrying that, I don't know people are going to walk away from you because you're too boring or something like that, but it's you're only going to get better at it, ultimately, by exposing yourself to it. So I would, and this is what I did, essentially, is is, is, think, right i unless I actually start to put myself in those situations, I'm never it's like, of course, I'm never going to get better at it, nor am I going to build a better network. I mean, so I have to find a way of putting myself in those situations. So I'm going to go, at least initially, with a plan. I'm going to go and I'm going to talk to one person, and then next time, I'm going to talk to two people, and next time I'm going to talk to three people. And before I would go, I would write a and he is do my research. Maybe, if I could, if I can find it in advance, who's going to be there. You can research some of the people, or I can research, if there's a speaker, I can research something about them, but I can prepare some things I go and talk to people about just like basic doesn't matter again these days, it's easier than ever. Hi, chat. GPT, I'm going to network events on blah, blah, blah, give me 10 questions, just so, but it's preparation so you have something in your back pocket. Go and stand and talk to people, and progressive exposure works and and also, of course, what then happens is, because all industries are all industries, like little villages, really, aren't they? And of course, what happens in time is, if you do go to more networking events, you start to see people you sought previous ones and and, and then once you're speaking to three people and four people, it gets a bit easier, because suddenly, isn't it just a room of faces you don't recognise. You do start to recognise some some faces. But I think it's preparation and practice and progressive exposure. So as you're writing indispensable I'm just wondering whether you had flashbacks to your former self in me, kind of like a bit of a kind of autobiography. Yeah, everything's I worked with a creative director once who said everything's autobiographical, and as soon as he put that thought in my mind, I see it everywhere now. Well, I was, yeah, I was reading it from that perspective, thinking, wonder, what? Yeah, so what if you were looking at that and thinking about the advice you would give your 21 year old self, what would, what might you have loved to been able to do there? I think enjoy it more along the way. You know, I, I was. Of I certainly was, I am, but, but certainly when I was younger, was a very, very ambitious person, and, and, and, let's be honest, nobody gets big jobs by accident. I mean, you see the shite that people talk about. I mean, nobody gets to be CEO of anything by look. But what may they may get there by luck, but they may be okay. They may be lucky to get it. That's different to getting it, to getting it by accident. Okay, so you have to, you know, you have to sacrifice a lot along the way. You have to work very hard. You definitely need some luck, all these things along the way. And to an extent, you know, you have to be very ambitious to get there and and I was that person, and I think what that meant for me, and I suspect that me, I don't think this makes me that unusual. That means that I don't think I spent as I don't think I lived in the moment as much as I could have done, I think I could have enjoyed the journey more, as well as enjoying, or at least striving for the destination the next step, if you see what I mean. So I think I would, in fact, an old boss of mine once said, you know, I think you just need to smell the flowers a bit more along the way. Chris and I was like, Yeah, fine, whatever, because I knew best. Are you doing listen to that advice? Are you doing that now? What are you doing to enjoy the journey that you're in at the moment? I It doesn't come easy to me. I'm not, I'm not a natural enjoyer of journeys. You know? I'm still, I'm still am very ambitious, but, but I am, I am definitely doing it more than I was, and consciously doing it more than I was. Yes, good. You know, when you think about AI? I know this is a subject they're all getting a bit kind of tired of as well. Yeah, before it's even here really well, it's because it's so much, you know, noise and you know the that that kind of ticking, this feeling of excitement and, you know, fear and stuff that generates in lots of people. What are you thinking about? Ai? So I did a, this is tangentially related, but I'll share it with you. I did a poll on I posted a poll on LinkedIn a little while ago, and I said, Would you rather work for a bad, human boss or a good AI boss. And 66% of people said they'd rather work for a good AI boss than a bad human boss. Now, on one level, that's surprising, but on another level, it's an interesting insight into what bot into what bosses are there for for us? For us, what does that boss do for us? Well, a good boss for me means that I quite enjoy my job, and I get you were talking about people working harder and harder and not getting rewarded. I want a boss to help me get a return on the investment that I'm putting in. So if that boss is AI, lets me get a return and get promoted and get to where I want to get to, then, yeah, I prefer they were human. They could go for a pint with them after work, but, but if they're helping me move forward, rather that than some human boss who wasn't exaggerating, but anyway, it's an interesting insight. It's more about, I think what it's more about understanding what people really want from a boss, actually, than whether AI or not. I think that, I think I feel about AI like Niels Bohr said, prediction is notoriously difficult, particularly when it comes to the future and and I think that applies to AI. I can't, I can't predict how it's going to change the way we work. I'm not going to attempt to. I think for I, I think that workplaces are still going to be full of people for, you know, the rest of my life. I think those people are going to be doing very different things as a consequence of technological development, of which AI is going to be one of them. However, I think the the skills that determine whether and how we progress, which is attitude based, rather than aptitude based, are still going to apply. So those things are absolutely still relevant. But in terms of what what we're doing, I don't know. I think it's for sure that AI is going to sweep away some industries entirely in the same but in the same way. That every technological innovation has, and those that it doesn't sweep away, it's going to, it's going to change in dramatic ways, aspects of even if the fundamental, you know, I don't know the car industry, somebody's still making cars but, but I've just picked that out of the blue, but AI is clearly going to make a huge impact on manufacturing industries in all sorts of ways and every other one. But I feel like I feel unqualified to answer better than that, really, what I what I think is a more tricky and more immediate question is, if you're running a business today, what do you do? By the way, I don't have a super eloquent answer to this. Maybe you do, but if you're pretty well any business, if you're running a business today, you know AI is coming. You know a lot of your employees are using chat, GPT, and by the way, if they're not, what are they doing? I mean, they should be, in a way, whether, whether they're using it well or badly, is a separate point, but that's not really, that's not really using AI, right? So how do you, how do you think about as a leader of a business, how you implement an AI in a strategic way in your business to gain competitive advantage? Because that's what we should be doing as leaders. It's not just doing it for the Sara. Sara, sake of it. It's I want to, I want to gain competitive advantage, and how do I use AI to do that? Is it's got to be the it has to be the and this is, this is a sweeping statement, but it has to be a top three question, if not the number one question that you should be trying to answer, I think, as a leader of a business right now, and I think that the challenge is the answer to that is it's very difficult to know the answer to that question. So therefore, I think that what you need to be doing is ensuring that, because you can't see the full picture, and you can't because it's the future, don't use that as an excuse to do nothing. I think you have to find a way to be able to be doing some things. You know that building the plane in the air thing, you can't just, you can't just ignore the core of your business, whatever that might be. But you have to find ways to be, to be working out through actually doing not just working out on pieces of paper, how AI might strategically shift, as opposed to tactically, like give everybody access to chat. GPT, how you can strategically shift your business? Yeah, and you should be putting quite a bit of time and effort into that, I think. But don't just talk about it a lot and do nothing, because that must be very there must be a there's a lot of businesses doing that, talking about it a lot, and not actually doing very much. What else should we be talking about in terms of the things that you are constantly hearing from the people you're working with that you think would be valuable to share? Well, I mean, a favourite topic of mine, and I know one that we've talked about in the past, about is culture, actually, because a lot of the things that we've talked about in this conversation are related to culture, and I almost wish we had a different word for it, because it's a word that, like people were, oh god, they're going to talk about culture now I'm going to go and watch telly. I mean, it's just, it's become this, yeah, every it's, it's, it's a bullshit word and and yet, if you have a group of people to, like, putting aside AI and all this other stuff we've talked about, if you have a group of people of any size together trying to achieve a shared task, that group will have a culture. It just will. And now you might, it might have a conscious culture, as in, it has formed that culture deliberately. It might have an accidental culture that has just arisen from how they interact. It might that group might be aware of it, or it might not be. All those things are true, but it will be there and and, you know, I talk to CEO, I talk to people at all sorts of levels in organisations, and I always talk about a culture in some level, and I almost do it slightly apologetically, as I have now, because I think you get so much kind of eye rolling, and it's seen as, Oh yeah, yeah. We worry about culture. Yeah. We go and talk to HR director. How would you define culture? I think culture is the environment a leader creates in order for their team to outperform. Culture is about creating competitive advantage within a team. Is it a way of feeling or a way of thinking? Way behaving, way of behaving. It's all about behaviours, and it's essentially the behaviour of the leader. And so when I talk to senior leaders, not necessarily CEOs, but senior leaders, you know, people accept that culture is there. But even very senior people, they behave as though it's this thing that's somehow bigger than them. You can't easily see it. And people are told it takes forever to change, and it's really hard to change, so they just see it as this thing that's bigger than them. And they go, oh, you know what? I'm just going to focus on the real business stuff, like, let's show me the PnL. And yet, the reality of it is, if you run a team of people, culture isn't bigger than you. It is literally you. And so if you want, the reason cultures don't change is because people don't want to change their behaviours. That's that's exactly what it is. And so it's easier to go and pay McKinsey $3 million to go and do a year long culture thing that you can write about in the annual report, and you could put on the website, and you send everybody an email about you say, yeah, we've talked about the culture now let's move on. It's easier to do that than actually have a conversation about the behaviours you're exhibiting as a leader in a leadership team. And that applies, right? I think what's really important to everybody listening to this is that applies right the way down through an organisation. So virtually every leader has a boss. Virtually everyone you're a leader, if you've got people that work for you, and the chances are, well, I mean, the number of people that don't have a boss is vanishingly small in the greater scheme of things. And yet, and so therefore, what that means is, in an organisation of any size, there isn't a homogenous culture. There isn't one single culture that spans the whole organisation. It's actually a patchwork of cultures because each team has a different leader, and that's why you can go into an organisation, and people can have completely different experiences of that organisation, depending on where they're working, and they're having different experiences because there's a different culture, and there's a different culture because there's a different leader in that team. So leader in that team. And so when I hear people talk to me about culture and complain about culture, I say, well, what's the culture like in your team? Well, hang on, you know, what can you control? You can't. You can't control, like we said before, most of the stuff that you'll control, but actually what you can control, you can control you can control the culture in your team, because culture in your team is your behaviours. So why don't you sit down with your team and talk about what culture you'd like to have, how would people like then just say, How would people like to work? I mean, that's you need to do. And what people want is they want trust. They want autonomy, they want support. They want great communication. I mean, these are universals. I think there's basically, broadly speaking, one way to create a great culture and 1000s of ways to create broken cultures. And you know, I'm not saying that all great cultures are exactly the same, but I am saying that all great cultures have an awful lot in common, and if you just did the four things that I've talked about, we're going to have a high trust, autonomous, supportive, group that communicates effectively with each other. I mean, most teams, that would be a pretty significant improvement straight away, and then so you sit down, you have a conversation with each other about practically, what does that mean? And just the act of having that conversation with your team would improve the culture, because most people don't where we kind of, you know, whether our show and your agenda is kind of like meeting the you know, the idea that attitude will become the source of competitive advantage in the new economy that's forming. It's always been a big differentiator, but it's become increasingly more important. Can we talk? Have you got some kind of attitude hacks that, you know, we can kind of, you know, close the show on things that help you to reset your attitude when you've had a terrible day or when you've had a setback or a difficult conversation. What? What does Chris Hurst do to reset his attitude? Well, I can tell you one of the things that I would think about when I went into a new job. No, not necessarily a new job, but let's take, let's take that, because that's a good inflection point, isn't it. I would think about what I came to, what I came to, call my first five, and I call it five because it alliterates With first, so it doesn't have to be five people for that, okay, but anyway, but that for me, that's that's having a group of people around me that it's not quite the same as a team, and it's an idea that I sort of stole from a woman I met who was a head teacher at a at a school, and she kind of made her career being one of these amazing people that go into as going to fix broken schools, and she wasn't the boss. She was just part of this, the head teachers team. And I said, How do you even begin? Fixing a school. I can't imagine this. And she said, Well, what we do is we, we, we find a group of people. She didn't call it first five. She just we go in with a team of people. And those people exhibit these behaviours. They're all good practitioners. So as we were saying before, they're good at their jobs. They, they, they lead by doing. So they they actually do. They get in the classrooms and they, they create the change by by demonstrating how they want it done. We trust each other. We all fundamentally buy in, not just to what we're trying to achieve. I mean, that's easy to buy into. We go on to make this school better, but we all buy into how we're going to go about doing it, and we all can feel vulnerable with each other. And I love this as an idea, and, and, and in a way like it's what premiership football managers do, okay? No, these days, no premiership football manager or any let's, I just know, you know, I'm sure it's the same with those types of sports teams as well. But nobody goes in on their own. They haven't got time. They haven't got time to get in. They want to think, right? Well, what I gotta do is I've got to go and find five coaches for this, and five, then I've got to do a strategy, and I've got to they've got about two months before they get fired. So they go in with a preset group who know exactly what they're going to go and try and do, who trust each other, who can finish each other's sentences, who, who they, who they can. Essentially, it's like an ink dot strategy, you know, in the sense, you know, you put ink dots on a piece of blotting paper, and in time, they spread out and meet so they can each separate, but be kind of not quite clones of each other, but they all trust each other to be doing the same thing in the same sort of ways, and using the same sort of language, mind, hive mind, exactly. But you can only do that through, through knowing those people in advance to an extent. And so for me, when things were tough, and I try to make sure that I had people around me who helped me through those things as well. Because leadership is it is very lonely and it is very difficult, and it's easy, as we have here, to get, like, tied up into all sorts like proper management, speak about cultures and behaviours and all these kind of things. But actually we, we need people who can support us and help us through when stuff is tough and hard and sometimes, you know from I mean, we all, we all reset in different ways. But you know what I wanted is I wanted people I could go, You know what? I've had a really shit day. Can I go for pint? You know that that, for me, is that's just great, and people you can just sit and then you can get off your chest, or not get off your chest, doesn't matter, but you can just go and, but it's people that you feel are going through it with you. It's not just like a Yeah, we all need friends and people outside work, but it but it's that sense of people that are going through with you, so you are experiencing the same things and feeling the same things, and have the same level of emotional investment in those things that somehow that's a different sort of relationship and an important relationship to all those others that we have in our lives. And I think of us as all a bit like those counters in trivia pursuit, you know, you know, in trivia pursuit, you have the count, the what if you could, like the thing, the six, and there's a six segments. And to win a trivial pursuit, you've got to have, you've got to put a cheese in each segment, right? But they've all got to be different colours. And I think that's bit what our lives are like, you know, we we have different section segments of our life. And to be, you know, to be fulfilled and happy, we have to look after all of those segments, and they are quite discrete to an extent, and it's okay. And what it's okay to say, I have great, deep, mean, emotional and meaningful relationships in my workplace, and that's increasingly unfashionable to say, that, you know, we're told we have to have a transactional relationship with work. And I'm saying you can do that if you like, but it's going to be unpleasant and hard work if you do it's great to have deep, meaningful relationships with the people you work with. It's a great place to land it. I think, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the mindset economy. This is a brilliant conversation. So much to take away for for us, for me, for our listeners. So really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Chris makes a distinction in this conversation that I think a lot of people need to hear, especially if they're working hard and not seeing it translate into actual progress. Being busy, as he says, is easy, getting a return on that time, that's the hard part. And the people who progress aren't necessarily working more hours than everyone else. They're. Getting a better return on each one of those hours. Yeah, and I think Chris makes an uncomfortable but true point that careers are a competitive event. You are competing against other people for progress economically, and sometimes we forget that we project our ambitions back onto the organisation or into various situations, and forget that we have to take accountability for our progress, and that means starting with the delusions that may be standing in the way of those and eradicating them so that we can align our mindset with the things that we want out of life. Absolutely Well, I know we both always love talking with Chris and I trust everyone has enjoyed this conversation, and be sure to join us next time as we explore the mindset economy you.