“Why are we so fixated on the individual self? I think it was a big con. The individual self is a relatively modern invention. The idea that human psychology is about the individual self was really an analytical fiction that was devised in the 20th century.”

This is the first part of a wide-ranging discussion with Professor Alex Haslam. He talks us why our group identities are so essential to us and define who we are as adults. He quotes his mentor John Turner who said, 'Social identity is what makes group behaviour possible'. By the time you've finished with this episode I'm sure you'll agree.

Check out an utterly brilliant talk by Alex - consider this the best training you could send yourself on.

Alex mentions his partner Cath Haslam, who is also a psychologist.

Full transcript and notes are on the website - along with an Identity playlist of episodes.

Alex Haslam is Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Queensland. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on group dynamics, leadership, and identity. Over the past three decades, Alex has helped reshape our understanding of how people think, feel, and behave as members of groups, and why social identity is central to motivation, resilience, and effective teamwork.

Alex is co-author of The New Psychology of Leadership and The New Psychology of Sport and Exercise, and his work has been applied widely—from health and education to business, politics, and the military. With over 300 research articles and multiple international awards to his name, Alex is recognised as a pioneer of social identity theory in practice, showing how a sense of “us” can unlock extraordinary human potential.

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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Simon Gilbody talks loneliness at work

• The Loneliness of the American Worker - Wall Street Journal
• Make Work Better on loneliness
• More on solving loneliness
• Loneliness in teams
• Derek Thompson on elective isolation

Professor Simon Gilbody is a psychiatrist and clinical epidemiologist at the University of York. His work specialises in 'taking a population approach to mental health', trying to understand the aspects of modern life that contribute to how we feel.

I was impressed by a talk that Simon did with the Financial Times on the topic of workplace loneliness.

In our discussion Simon reflects on the toll of loneliness, how workplace loneliness can leave us with invasive thoughts, and what to do about it.

Some links we discuss:

Dr Lucy Foulkes - I really enjoy her TikToks, I think I gave a shout out to her book on adolescents a few weeks ago.

Red Cross Report on Loneliness

Thank you to Mary Howarth at University of York for helping to arrange the discussion.

Transcript on the website

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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This sponsored episode is brought to you by Deliveroo for Work

Spencer Walker is the global director of Deliveroo for Work.

The podcast has returned several times to the idea of food as a cultural trigger, something that catalyses connection and allows cohesion. We explore that idea further this week with Spencer Walker who runs Deliveroo For Work the workplace service provided by the delivery firm.

The Deliveroo Feeding Employee Engagement Report

I mention a book by Robin Dunbar and Samantha Rockey, it's this: The Social Brain - Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, Robin Dunbar. They talk about giving curry to bond teams (because the sharing plates require people to pass them around). Hear them talking about it here.

Deliveroo for Work

The Deliveroo Feeding Employee Engagement Report

More about food, rituals and culture 

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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Delighted to post this small conversation with Nick Shackleton-Jones. Nick posts brilliantly witty rants on TikTok that are just the best things I hear about work and the futility of bureaucracy.

TikTok is a fame machine and if creators drop a banger they can end up reaching a vast audience. Nick has posted some content about work, neurodiversity and philosophy that has had millions of views.

It was his take on why middle aged men wanted to return to the office that I put in the newsletter last week and made up the reason why we chatted but there’s so much more to this - not least him talking about adaptive behaviours and masking for people on the spectrum.

Great listen. If you don’t use TikTok then I’ve given a selection of his best posts below:

Nick on LinkedIn

Shackleton Consulting

Nick on TikTok - this is the good stuff

Best posts to check out:

• Middle aged men don't get on with their wives
• The original on middle aged men
• What I miss about corporate
• More of what he misses about corporate (on company values)
• Adaptive processes for neutrodivergent people
• Pedestrian bell
• Chase difference

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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If we shifted our focus from the individual to the collective how different would our results at work be?

I'm joined by Colin Fisher who explains that great teams are the most important contributors to great outcomes at work. The problem is that for many of our teams they are equal to less than the sum of the parts. Groups get bigger and bigger and stop being effective. Managers avoid having discussions about trimming teams down - and it leads to failure.

Colin's new book The Collective Edge breaks down the ingredients of forming good teams.

Colin Fisher is a professor at UCL School of Management

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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It’s been a while since I revisited a conversation on offices and how our physical workspaces are evolving. Disruption has made the property business hugely raise their games. With 20-25% of Gen Z workers self reporting having issues of neurodivergency the office is trying to prove that it's still the centre of great workplace cultures.

I chatted to Susan Carruth, a partner a 3XN, an architecture firm who is pioneering thinking about the needs of occupants and Mike Wiseman Head of Campuses at British land.

For more details on the 2FA project mentioned and British Land's campuses.

As discussed: 12% of US mortgage backed office deals are 'delinquent' right now

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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Last month the FInancial Times published an article by John Burn Murdoch in the form of an analysis of personality data, specifically looking at what are styled the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Typically these five factors are regarded as a statistically reliable way to measure personality. Unlike approaches like Myers Briggs these factors prove consistent over time and psychologists took a view that much of the variance of human personality can be understood using these factors. Interestingly these factors also prove predictive for other outcomes. Conscientiousness for example predicts academic success and job performance, neuroticism can predict mental health issues.

To discuss it I'm joined by Nick McClelland, Nick is the CEO of Byrne Dean

The original article by John Burn Murdoch (archive version)

Newsletter discussion on the data

Discussion between John Burn Murdoch and Derek Thompson

Christopher Ferguson questions the effect size

Jay Van Bavel talks about the effect size of the data

Alex Haslam points out the questions that lead to the conscientiousness scores

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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A couple of years ago, I was surrounded with so many happy Spurs fans that I bought into the euphoric buzz they were giving off.

Ange Postecoglou had brought the smile back to Tottenham supporters.

I chatted to Charlie Eccleshare from The Athletic about the cultural reinvention that the Australian manager that enacted.

Reader, the Big Ange story didn't end well as a result a lot of fans of other clubs regularly message me asking about the episode, or my opinion of Postecoglou's demise. It was while I was joking about this one time that today's guest got in touch.

Dan Jackson is a former Aussie Rules footballer who now acts as General Manager at Adelaide Football Club. He got in touch suggesting that I might be unfair backtracking on the support of Ange, challenging me to reflect on 'how the world's premier football competition has such little respect for building genuine high-performance culture?'

He said 'I'm sure you'd agree it takes time and a lot of focused effort to change and build a good culture - two things that don't appear to be given any focus in most EPL teams'.

I loved the pushback and immediately got in touch to have a conversation with him. We talk both about Postecoglou (and whether we did him dirty) but also about how he is part of a team that tries to build strong long-term culture in his team.

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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I’m often asked asked which company cultures I admire, especially as I tend to be critical of the culture inside tech firms. It’s easy to have good vibes in small firms but organisations who manage to deliver good culture at scale are the ones I’m most interested in. I often call out Nando’s or Octopus Energy.

I was delighted to get the chance to talk to the CEO of Octopus Energy Group, Greg Jackson. I’ve often reflected that the best cultures seem to be codified and made explicit, but Octopus’s culture isn’t really defined by formal values, Jackson doesn’t pin it down to three or four words. Instead the culture has a vivid feeling but is loosely articulated, a tangible mix of trust, autonomy and a shared mission.

Cultures are often defined by what they’re against as much as what they are for. Many companies give a laundry list of desirable attributes they strive for. There’s an organisation at the end of my street that has ‘excellence’ and ‘respect’ on its windows, but would any business claim to be built on mediocrity or disrespect? Aren’t they just given? Sometimes these things are called the Pillars of Character. Yes, we have integrity here, but how does that help you work here?

For businesses these pillars are useless for creating differentiation. Jackson’s approach at Octopus stands apart from that, he takes issue with common norms elsewhere. Researching for the conversation I listened to one interview where Jackson talked about the absence of back-to-back meetings in his day. He said:

After the conversation, which was recorded live on stage near Guildford, someone came up to me. ‘My son works at Octopus,’ he said. Here we go, I thought. ‘Every single word he said up there is true. He says he wishes he’d joined there years ago’.

Links:

Greg on High Performance podcast

Transcript

Make Work Better newsletter

Take a listen, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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This is the second episode this month about AI and the implications for our jobs.

Two weeks ago I went along to a huge event run by Workday down in North Greenwich. Workday, their partners and their customers took to the stage to talk about applications of AI that are coming to their platform. As part of the event I was able to run a discussion with a couple of voices from the company who are helping businesses navigate the challenges that AI presents to us. 

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More about Workday Elevate

I was joined by Jerry Ting. Jerry is the founder of Evisort and now teaches at Harvard Law School and is a senior leader at Workday. And the other contributor was Angelique de Vries Schipperijn, she's the EMEA president for Workday. The conversation was fascinating for me in a few ways, firstly we can be so daunted about what AI represents in our jobs and this seemed simple and easy to understand, but secondly because as I mentioned last week the conversations I got from the audience suggested that there’s a lot of businesses who have barely started their own journeys.

Look, here’s the challenge of the moment, I think the conversation at the event described a future that we have the agency to participate in. It seems real and like something we can connect with, but also everyone who came up to me afterwards anxiously told me that their organisations are doing nothing at all. That’s why I got so much value from this conversation. I think inverted commas “doing AI” feels scary and huge whereas incorporating it into some of the things we’re already going feels possible and easily achievable. 

 I need to declare that this is a promoted episode in the sense that Workday is a client that I was working with at this event and have worked with before, but critically it was a conversation that I’m delighted to be sharing here. 

I want to give a shout out to Hollie Benneyworth at Workday who has worked so hard to make this happen.

You can find a full transcript for this on the website.

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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.

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