Making Business Matter (MBM)

E25 – Time Management Mastery: Interview With Francis Wade from 2Time Labs

Francis Wade is the author of 2 books: Perfect Time-Based Productivity and Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure. He’s the founder of 2Time Labs which he leads from his home in Kingston, Jamaica where he’s resided since 2005. A graduate of Cornell University with a graduate degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, he uses the latest research to pioneer the ideas comprising Time Management 2.0. In his consulting work with companies, he helps leaders remove the obstacles to employee productivity and greater profitability. He also works extensively with coaches, professional organisers, trainers, and consultants to apply the best thinking available to their client engagements. Today, we discuss time management mastery in more detail.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I’m Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. My name is Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. The idea of these interviews is to be sharing great minds, great ideas and great people with you to help you be the best version of you. Today, I’ve got the pleasure of having a second, third conversation with Francis Wade, time management expert, guru, aficionado, helping to uncover some of those myths and fallacies that we come up with against our own time management.

Nathan Simmonds:

Short bio from him. He’s a columnist. He’s the founder and creator of the CaribHRForum, which is a volunteer-based professional network. He’s a consultant. He solves tough productivity problems for corporations. He’s an au

Episode 25 - Time Management Mastery: Interview With Francis Wade from 2Time Labs

Francis Wade is the author of 2 books: Perfect Time-Based Productivity and Bill's Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure. He's the founder of 2Time Labs which he leads from his home in Kingston, Jamaica where he's resided since 2005. A graduate of Cornell University with a graduate degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, he uses the latest research to pioneer the ideas comprising Time Management 2.0. In his consulting work with companies, he helps leaders remove the obstacles to employee productivity and greater profitability. He also works extensively with coaches, professional organisers, trainers, and consultants to apply the best thinking available to their client engagements. Today, we discuss time management mastery in more detail.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I'm Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. My name is Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. The idea of these interviews is to be sharing great minds, great ideas and great people with you to help you be the best version of you. Today, I've got the pleasure of having a second, third conversation with Francis Wade, time management expert, guru, aficionado, helping to uncover some of those myths and fallacies that we come up with against our own time management.

Nathan Simmonds:

Short bio from him. He's a columnist. He's the founder and creator of the CaribHRForum, which is a volunteer-based professional network. He's a consultant. He solves tough productivity problems for corporations. He's an author. He's a speaker, and he is helping those people that think they're time starved. He's helping the busiest 1% get even more efficient in their day through his skills. Francis, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for doing this interview. Really appreciate it.

Francis Wade:

Thanks, Nathan. It's great to be with you and your audience.

Nathan Simmonds:

I'm looking forward to this because we had a really large conversation previously, and that just went backwards and forwards, and we got all these different ideas and concepts. It was a really fluid, flowing dialogue, and I'm looking forward to getting some of these ideas shared with more people in this moment.

Francis Wade:

Great.

Time Management Mastery

 

Nathan Simmonds:

I'm going to dive straight into this because people... I'm not sure how much of the audience we have know you, so I want them to find out more about you, and then we'll dive into what you're good at, your areas of expertise and your zone of genius. First and foremost, why do you do what you do?

Francis Wade:

Whoa, that's a big question. I guess I've always been interested in being productive as an individual. Long story short, I lived in the United States up until 2005, when I returned to live here in Jamaica. So I'm based here in Kingston, in the hills over Kingston here in Jamaica. It was really the transition that I made back from the US to living in Jamaica that got me to this heightened level of interest. It had been a passing pastime, I guess. I had led courses. I had done training. And I imagined that moving back, changing countries from a developed country to a developing country, wouldn't be all that hard. And I was wrong.

Francis Wade:

I discovered that my productivity plummeted, and I didn't know why. So I went looking for answers. At the time, in 2005, I was Googling for things like how do you manage your time in a time of conflict, in a war zone, under stress? I tried to find, okay, when you change your environment dramatically and all of a sudden, you find yourself at wit's end because you're not getting things done that you believe that you should, where can you get help?

Francis Wade:

I couldn't find any help, so I started actually writing, blogging based on the insights I was having because I was struggling. And that was 15 years ago. That kicked off 15 years of very intense research, two books. I have a number of training programs. I have online training. I have assessments. I held the first Time Blocking Summit earlier... Actually, that was last year, yeah. No, it was this year. Sorry. Time is warping. I swear to you. The whole COVID business just has me like... That was this year. That was March. Geez.

Nathan Simmonds:

Great. In this circumstance we find ourselves in, everything is being magnified and funneled, and you're just losing track of stuff. It's been eight weeks now for us as a family in the situation. It's just gone in a blink of an eye.

Francis Wade:

It's amazing. Today is Monday, and this weekend I had the feeling like, "Uh, what day is it?" I was like, "Where did the week go?" It's this weird experience, and it comes from the changing of our behaviors and our routines. They've all gone up in the air. What we used to do and the way in which we did it has now been changed without our agreement.

Francis Wade:

So this is a little bit of what happened when I moved back to Jamaica. All of a sudden, I had to adapt these new behaviors, and I had to do it in order to be effective, and I struggled to adapt them. So I figured anyone who is going through a change like the one I went through, not necessarily from one country to the other, but someone has to move houses, for example, or change jobs, or has a dramatic increase in demands on their time, there's that period of struggle and sorting out as they have to put an extra effort in to change behaviors to deal with all the demands on their time. And it usually happens when there's an increase. So you take on a new project, or you have twins, or you go from single to married, or you buy a house. When these transitions take place, all of a sudden, the number of demands on your time increases, and you've got to find a way to cope. And that question has fueled my curiosity and my work for the last decade and a half.

Nathan Simmonds:

A phrase that I learned a few years ago was the thing that you lack is the thing that you need to give. It's a life mantra. It's that thing that actually you feel like you're lacking out on or actually it's causing you the biggest amount of friction, that's probably a clear indication that that's the thing you're meant to or need to be giving in order to bridge it for yourself as well as the local community and the people that need to hear that message as well.

Francis Wade:

Oh, yeah, definitely, we are summarizing my story. Yep.

Nathan Simmonds:

There's part of me that comes back to that stereotypical island lifestyle. So we talked a little bit before we went live about what does time mean to people? Did you find that as a transition from coming from an everyday metropolitan American lifestyle coming back to an island mentality, is that where the fiction happened, or what [crosstalk 00:07:11]?

Francis Wade:

No, I really wasn't living in a metro area. I was living in Florida.

Nathan Simmonds:

Okay.

Francis Wade:

So I wasn't going from New York City to... Although I imagine that that would have been even more severe.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yes.

Francis Wade:

It happens when people move from New York to Florida, or New York City to Florida. I believe they go through something somewhat similar. But what it was was partly because life in a developing country is so hectic and so unpredictable. So it was the move from regularity and high structure and high predictability to its opposite. So you take that all away and all of a sudden, things break, things don't work, people don't do what you think they're going to do even though they said they would. You're in an environment where your mind now has to think ahead three or four times further than it used to because you're now compensating for things that you didn't predict or didn't expect. So that causes you some cognitive load that didn't exist before.

Francis Wade:

Because the way I put it, going through working in the States was every day was the same. It was in some ways boring. Where I lived, life was never boring. This is one series of... If you're from the outside, it's exciting as all heck because every day something is disrupting what you think is going to happen that day that you didn't think would happen. Something unpredictable is going to happen.

Francis Wade:

So the unpredictability throws up more commitments for you because you have to know, say, okay, that person isn't going to show up. I need to plan to do A, B, C, D and E. So you are compensating for it, but what it works out to in the end is a heavier load. All of a sudden, you have more commitments than you ever had before, and some start falling through the cracks. Feelings of overwhelm, other things that tell you that something is not quite right. I call them unwanted symptoms, but they are signs that the methods that you're using are insufficient for the current situation.

Nathan Simmonds:

And I think there's something to be said that there's a balance of both of those things. There's that need for certainty and a certain amount of security, but if you have too much, life becomes very boring. And if you get any curve balls and you have no flexibility, you start getting serious amounts of anxiety and depression start kicking in because you can't deal with that flex.

Nathan Simmonds:

If you go too far the other way for the uncertainty, you're going to freak out because you go into a meltdown beca

Episode 24 - How to Define Values: Interview With Author, James Kerr

James Kerr is a highly experienced brand and business consultant, and advises clients, including KPMG, Raffles Group, Adidas, Heineken, and The Economist, to establish a compelling vision, values, and purpose to effect transformational organisational change. Combining how he grew up submerged in the traditions of New Zealand Maori culture alongside his studying the All Blacks, working with elite military forces, and prestigious sporting organisations you get a unique perspective of indigenous thinking, leadership philosophy, and practical action.

All of this set him apart from your run of the mill Leadership consultant and make him a highly sort after thought-leader and change maker. In this episode, we talked about all things 'Values'; How to define your values? What are great examples of values? How to use values to pull teams together? James gave key questions to help provoke leadership and also to help "get words off walls and on to floors"

Get a fresh pad and pen - James does not hold back on this and each little narrative in itself held 4-5 keys takeaways. His international bestseller book, Legacy - What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life identifies 15 fundamental leadership behaviours that create success and explores the culture of the New Zealand rugby team, the most successful sporting side in history.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I'm Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to this Sticky Interview with me, Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. Today's interview, it's difficult for me to explain because there's so many crossovers in ideas, concepts and necessary learnings from what I get from this man from his content, the crossover of indigenous wisdom of timeless leadership skills and the necessity for values in businesses and organizations.

Nathan Simmonds:

The content that is shared from James is phenomenal and worth the time to invest in the listening to the understanding and the deployment of is phenomenal. He's a highly experienced brand and business consultant. He advises clients including KPMG, Raffles Group, Adidas, Heineken and the Economist which in itself is staggering to establish compelling vision, values, purpose and positioning and to affect transformational of organizational change.

Nathan Simmonds:

Even with that on its own, when you then go and look at his literature book, Legacy, the case study that was done with the All Blacks and his 15 behaviors of leadership and other books that are coming out and the talks that he does, those two elements separate are phenomenal. You put them together and you get an incredible career to date with some phenomenal changes that have come out of the back of it.

Nathan Simmonds:

Today, I'm going to dig into some personal interests of mine into this man's mind in order to share with you. There is going to be some deep wisdom shared for sure. I'm looking forward to this conversation massively. James Kerr, welcome to Sticky Interviews. Welcome to this conversation, and thank you for being here. So, very appreciate it.

James Kerr:

Thank you very much, Nathan. It's great to be here. Great to [inaudible 00:02:27]

James Kerr- brand and business consultant

 

Nathan Simmonds:

I didn't even know of you before and I've had a deep interest in spirituality and indigenous original wisdoms and culture for a long time. All of a sudden listening to your content. I think it was the Do Lectures I first picked up and talking about some of those mindsets and approaches just blew my mind. Jaw on the floor, absolutely, for 25 minutes of content. Thank you.

James Kerr:

Thank you. Thank you for listening.

Nathan Simmonds:

The first question that I always ask, I guess, is why do you do what you do?

James Kerr:

Well, why not? Why not? I think, we talk about indigenous culture, we talk about one of the pioneers and some of the writing around that is a guy, Joseph Campbell, who is a comparative mythologist. He tries to get to the bottom of what makes cultures tick, what are the mythologies of great cultures? He comes down to one phrase, which is follow your bliss. Find that things that gives you the deepest satisfaction. In whatever you do, in whatever format you do, find the joy, find that thing that drives you because it's that passion, and that connection that will give you the resilience you need, give you the focus you need and all of that.

James Kerr:

For me, it's always been about a crossover between writing, between speaking and between working with environments, with teams with culture. On the list, you're very kind list as you introduced me, the other aspect I work with a lot of elite, high performing teams. How do the best in the world become and retain their level of excellence?

James Kerr:

There is a small spiritual dimension to this. I think it's anthropological innocence that where these things come from and the processes and the practices and the values we talked about values really of the great teams now have been the same values really have been handed down for millennia, for centuries, maybe thousands of years. Because I think we're hardwired to an extent to work together as a team and the teams that have worked together really, really well have survived and thrived and their genes have carried on.

James Kerr:

There's a certain kind of values base that I think applies to all great, certainly all great elite teams that extrapolate out with all great organizations. I think I'm really interested in those transferable principles. One of the things that one domain can teach another domain about how to operate and how to operate at optimum effectiveness. That's my sweet spot.

Nathan Simmonds:

I did not expect you to say the words Joseph Campbell right at the start of that, phenomenal. This is the thing when you get into the values and whether it's at the individual or the team or the organizational level or sports team or whatever, there is that testing of those values. There is that, these are my values, this is what I believe true. There has to be that testing in order to create a testimonial. There has to be that hero's journey. There has to be the young Luke going through the process and finding out and then breaking down and then finding out his father is Darth Vader and going through and then finding out. Okay, actually which side of the Force do I want to stand on? Which side of my values do I believe in? That galvanization that teams go through, that elite forces go through, elite sports individuals go through, that trial by fire that we have to go through that says these values are true.

James Kerr:

Yeah. I think that's... I'll come back to the hero's journey in a second. But I think in particular, right now, I don't want to get too COVID heavy here [inaudible 00:06:19] data. But right now, we're in a time of reevaluation, profound reevaluation that we've really had to as a society as organizations, we've really had to revisit what it means to be human, where our values lies, is it about the economy, is it about health. How do you get that balance between the two?

James Kerr:

A lot of us have spent a lot of time at home living a simpler life, a slower life. Do we want that corporate rat race? Do we want that commute into work? There are a huge number of questions that are very values based questions. What do we value about life? We tend to move in the directions of the things that we value. That's where we put our attention.

James Kerr:

I think for any leader now, there is a definite process for that leader themselves to reevaluate, and for organizations to reevaluate, to be looking at their deepest values. Now, if we talk about in a time of crisis, the organizations that really survive and thrive tend to be those that really have a strong values foundation.

James Kerr:

Now, it's going to be very tempting for people to take the expedient view now, rush after the next opportunity, panic and do this, but my experience and my belief is that the organizations that really, as I say, survive and thrive, it's a bit of a catch phrase, but it really encapsulates that sustained success, the ability to build something for the future, are those that are able to come back and look at their values. Then a process of reevaluation that we're going through now, to be able to come back to the values set, what do we fundamentally stand for? What is our solid human foundations is more important than it's ever been.

James Kerr:

It's also a fantastically powerful prism for leaders, particularly of large organizations that are maybe being buffeted by the winds of change, to really go, "Well, what is it that we fundamentally stand for here?" Rather than chasing after the expedient solution going, "Well, what is it that... " Because from values comes value, really. If we can establish our values, we create value from that place, that's where we are valuable for other people. If we're valuable to other people, they will give us their valuables, they will give us cash.

Nathan Simmonds:

Exactly right.

James Kerr:

Trying to integrate that through line of who we are and how we act, and what we deliver, I think is in turbulent waters is an extraordinarily important factor in sustainable success, and it's also a very easily understood framework for an organization to understand itself and w

E24 – How to Define Values: Interview With Author, James Kerr

James Kerr is a highly experienced brand and business consultant, and advises clients, including KPMG, Raffles Group, Adidas, Heineken, and The Economist, to establish a compelling vision, values, and purpose to effect transformational organisational change. Combining how he grew up submerged in the traditions of New Zealand Maori culture alongside his studying the All Blacks, working with elite military forces, and prestigious sporting organisations you get a unique perspective of indigenous thinking, leadership philosophy, and practical action. All of this set him apart from your run of the mill Leadership consultant and make him a highly sort after thought-leader and change maker. In this episode, we talked about all things ‘Values’; How to define your values? What are great examples of values? How to use values to pull teams together? James gave key questions to help provoke leadership and also to help “get words off walls and on to floors”

Get a fresh pad and pen – James does not hold back on this and each little narrative in itself held 4-5 keys takeaways. His international bestseller book, Legacy – What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life identifies 15 fundamental leadership behaviours that create success and explores the culture of the New Zealand rugby team, the most successful sporting side in history.

An image of James Kerr, in a black and white setting with a microphone before him.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I’m Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to this Sticky Interview with me, Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. Today’s interview, it’s difficult for me to explain because there’s so many crossovers in ideas, concepts and necessary learnings from what I get from this man from his content, the crossover of indigenous wisdom of timeless leadership skills and the necessity for values in businesses and organizations.

Nathan Simmonds:

The content that is shared from James is phenomenal and worth the time to invest in the listening to the understanding and the deployment of is phenomenal. He’s a highly experienced brand and business consultant. He advises clients including KPMG, Raffles Group, Adidas, Heineken and the Economist which in itself is staggering to establish compelling vision, values, purpose and positioning and to affect transformational of organizational change.

Nathan Simmonds:

Eve

Episode 23 - Interview With Crisis Negotiator, Ross Hardy

Ross Hardy spent a decade as a cliff-edge crisis negotiator at one of the world’s most notorious suicide spots. The team he founded and led there became the busiest search and rescue team in the UK and has rescued 1000’s of people to date. The leadership lessons that he learned in those years, he now teaches through Discovery Hope, a UK based leadership consultancy. His latest online course Smart Thinking For Times of Crisis is available on Udemy and teaches tools for self, team, and organisational leadership for times of crisis and high pressure.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to another Sticky Interview with MBM, Making Business Matter. It's the home of, and soft skills provider to the retail and manufacturing industry of the UK. This podcast, the whole idea about this podcast is to be sharing great thinkers, and great concepts, and great ideas with you, to help you be the best version of yourself, especially in this time that we're living in right now with the crisis that are happening.

Nathan Simmonds:

Today, sharing the interview space with Ross Hardy, someone who's got phenomenal experience in crisis situations, in crisis negotiation, in crisis communication. And I'll introduce him shortly with a little excerpt from his bio, which is astonishing reading, and it comes with astonishing experiences. Ross Hardy spent a decade as a cliff edge crisis negotiator in one of the worlds most notorious suicide spots. The team he founded and led there became the busiest search and rescue team in the UK, and has rescued thousands of people to date.

Nathan Simmonds:

Just to add a little note in there, I live just down the road from this spot, Ross and I know the areas very well, locality and geographically. And yeah, world famous. The leadership lessons that he learned in those years, he now teaches through Discovery Hope, a UK based leadership consultancy.

Nathan Simmonds:

His latest online course, Smart Thinking for Times of Crisis, is available on Udemy we'll talk a bit more about that later, and teaches tools for self, team, and organizational leaders for times of crisis and high pressure. It's not just about today, in the day and age of COVID-19, it's about the crisis that was probably on people's tables 12 weeks ago, it's all about the crisis that will be on people's tables 24 weeks from now. This may be unprecedented times, but these are not unprecedented circumstances, or ways of thinking. This is why it's vital.

Nathan Simmonds:

Ross, massive thanks for being here, really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation. Going to dive straight into this with some of the things. I want to find out why you do what you do. We've had a little bit of a conversation. I want to find out why you do what you do, and I want you to tell the world why you do what you do.

Ross Hardy:

Okay. Well firstly, as you mentioned, I spent 10 years as a crisis negotiator. I led a team of crisis negotiators on a cliff edge, dealing with people who were coming out to end their lives. Some actually from all over the world to that single spot. And in that time, I had an awful lot of experiences of people in crisis of course, learning how to manage people in crisis, throughout crisis negotiation techniques that we would use, and also learning how to lead myself, to lead a team, and to lead an organization that's dealing with crisis on a daily basis.

Ross Hardy - crisis negotiator

 

The crisis of people who were coming to Beachy Head, that's the place I was based, with the intention of ending their lives. But also, the kind of crisis that normal organizations come across, and crisis that were unique to that organization, the risks of the life of a team, the challenges in fund raising, and lots of different things that were associated around a kind of unusual workspace if you like.

Ross Hardy:

So that was my experience for 10 years. And as I stepped out of that, I realized that I'd began to realize that there were so many opportunities to share the skills, and the learning that I developed over that time with others, particularly in how we manage ourselves, our teams, and our organizations in preparation for, and during times of crisis.

Ross Hardy:

So that's primarily why I do what I do, because I'm passionate about leaders, I'm passionate about leaders ability to influence the world, to influence their world, to transform their organizations, to actually build organizations that really make a difference. And so I'm very excited to help equip leaders to be better equipped to manage themselves, their teams, and their organizations during those challenging times that we face. And obviously, at the time of we're doing this, of course, particularly challenging times with the pandemic, Coronavirus and all the lockdowns.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah. And I think the interesting crossover, you talked about that leadership of the self. So the skills that you learned going through that process, and then how you reapplied them to yourself, super important. One thing that I am a big proponent of is self-leadership first. You cannot give more to someone else than you have yourself, therefore, if you're not able to take the lead on yourself, you cannot lead a situation.

Nathan Simmonds:

And no one managed their way out of a crisis. It takes leaders, internally, externally; full-works. So it's interesting, when you're looking at, say, a suicide hotspot like that, where people don't know, and I'm aware of the sensitivity of this, they don't know what the next step is, they can't see the next future step, and they can't lead themselves out of that situation. So the only course of action they have, is to complete in that exercise.

Nathan Simmonds:

And again, scale up, you transfer that over into business. Business people making themselves redundant, or taking actions which aren't appropriate to the growth of that business in tricky situations. It's the same kind of thinking that creates that detrimental outcome, I think is the closest I can get to that.

Ross Hardy:

Yeah.

Nathan Simmonds:

Super important. So how did you become a crisis negotiator? Because I mean, it's not kind of the line of work you suddenly look for a job, "Oh, look, there's a post in the Job Center, I think I'll go and do that because it sounds interesting." There's a calling that comes with that for sure, Ross.

Ross Hardy:

Absolutely. I mean, I actually, I used to be a church leader. Led a couple of churches, spent a whole number of years leading churches. And I was actually just praying one Sunday morning, and then I got such an impression about ... I live local to this suicide spot. And I knew the situations that were going on there, and they were in the paper week in, week out, the recoveries, and so on.

Ross Hardy:

And so it was very much something I've been aware of for many years. But I just suddenly really got such an impression about the importance of reaching these people. And I had, in my mind, this picture of these two people paroling Beachy Head, reaching out to the suicidal, actually going out, and interacting with people on the cliff edge, and actually hopefully interacting with them in such a way to deescalate crisis, and get them to choose life.

Ross Hardy:

And so it really started from there. I had started actually with very little clue of how to do it. We just started putting things together. And we learnt a lot from some materials we had from the FBI crisis negotiation units in Quantico. Also, we had bits and pieces from various different sources that we brought together to start to develop a training to actually implement crisis negotiation with these people at Beachy Head.

Ross Hardy:

So it took us about a year from that moment. I think it was a year and one week before we became operational. And we started with a little team of six. So yeah, so that was back in 2003, and we began in August 2004.

Nathan Simmonds:

I've got to ask you though, there is a level of sensitivity with what you were working in at this point. And I'm aware, working in middle management groups predominantly, that there is a reticence to ask questions, there is a hesitation to get involved with people where mental health is prevalent. So whether it's an anxiety attack, PTSD, different whatever. A lot of leaders feel nervous about asking the right question, or asking any question, because they feel it may be right or wrong, it may be taken the wrong way, they have a fear it may make the situation worse.

Nathan Simmonds:

So in having that fear, they then therefore, they don't take any action at all. How do you do about ratifying your content, your questions, and your approaches before you go out there on the edge, and actually go into the ‘real’ as it were?

Ross Hardy:

Well one of the things we actually realized quite quickly as we began to assess how best to negotiate a crisis, hopefully for someone to choose life. We realized actually, we couldn't beat around the bush. We couldn't actually, we couldn't kind of side step the major questions. So we actually had to begin to face the crisis people were struggling with head on.

Ross Hardy:

Now, there were variations in this, but they would ... And it's extreme, it would be, the person that I was convinced was suicidal on a cliff edge, I would simply, one of my first questions after introducing myself would be, "So what's brought you to the point of wanting to commit suicide?" I would get directly to the point that they, of why they've come there, and what was in their mind, and then we'd talk from there.

Ross Hardy:

Then we've ... I've already said, "Actually, it's safe to talk about this stuff. You're not going to suddenly surprise me, you're not going to suddenly overwhelm me with your response." And I think that's often what can happen in our communication. We're so good at replying to,...

E23 – Interview With Crisis Negotiator, Ross Hardy

Ross Hardy spent a decade as a cliff-edge crisis negotiator at one of the world’s most notorious suicide spots. The team he founded and led there became the busiest search and rescue team in the UK and has rescued 1000’s of people to date. The leadership lessons that he learned in those years, he now teaches through Discovery Hope, a UK based leadership consultancy. His latest online course Smart Thinking For Times of Crisis is available on Udemy and teaches tools for self, team, and organisational leadership for times of crisis and high pressure.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to another Sticky Interview with MBM, Making Business Matter. It’s the home of, and soft skills provider to the retail and manufacturing industry of the UK. This podcast, the whole idea about this podcast is to be sharing great thinkers, and great concepts, and great ideas with you, to help you be the best version of yourself, especially in this time that we’re living in right now with the crisis that are happening.

Nathan Simmonds:

Today, sharing the interview space with Ross Hardy, someone who’s got phenomenal experience in crisis situations, in crisis negotiation, in crisis communication. And I’ll introduce him shortly with a little excerpt from his bio, which is astonishing reading, and it comes with astonishing experiences. Ross Hardy spent a decade as a cliff edge crisis negotiator in one of the worlds most notorious suicide spots. The team he founded and led there became the busiest search and rescue team in the UK, and has rescued thousands of people to date.

Nathan Simmonds:

Just to add a little note in there, I live just down the road from this spot, Ross and I know the areas very well, locality and geographically. And yeah, world famous. The leadership lessons that he learned in those years, he now teaches through Discovery Hope, a UK based leadership consultancy.

Nathan Simmonds:

His latest online course, Smart Thinking for Times of Crisis, is available on Udemy we’ll talk a bit more about that later, and teaches tools for self, team, and organizational leaders for times of crisis and high pressure. It’s not just about today, in the day and age of COVID-19, it’s about the crisis that was probably on people’s tables 12 weeks ago, it’s all about the crisis that will be on people’s tables 24 weeks from now. This may be unprecedented times, but these are not unprecedented circumstances, or ways of thinking. This is why it’s vital.

Nathan Simmonds:

Ross, massive thanks for being here, really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation. Going to dive straight into this with some of the things. I want to find out why you do what you do. We’ve had a little bit of a conversation. I want to find out why you do what you do, and I want you to tell the world why you do what you do.

Ross Hardy:

Okay. Well firstly, as you mentioned, I spent 10 years as a crisis negotiator. I led a team of crisis negotiators on a cliff edge, dealing with people who were coming out to end their lives. Some actually from all over the world to that single spot. And in that time, I had an awful lot of experiences of people in crisis of course, learning how to manage people in crisis, throughout crisis negotiation techniques that we would use, and also learning how to lead myself, to lead a team, and to lead an organization that’s dealing with crisis

E22 – Good Customer Service: Interview With ‘Canada’s Marketing Superstar’, Marc Gordon

Marc Gordon is an internationally recognised thought leader in the field of customer experience. With over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries, he has built a reputation for providing insightful concepts that are both innovative and effective. As an award-winning keynote speaker, Marc has spoken for some of the world’s most respected companies, including Bausch & Lomb, Hilton Hotels, and Mondelez International. Marc is the only speaker in his field to have keynoted at the World Management Forum in Tehran, Iran. Regularly featured on television and radio for his opinions, Marc has shared his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry, and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as ‘Canada’s marketing superstar’ by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Today, we discuss good customer service in more detail.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Today I have the pleasure of introducing Marc Gordon. His bio here, again, I’m overwhelmed, I’m staggered at the wonderful people that I get to have a conversation with, their resumes, what they’ve achieved, what they’ve accomplished and the areas of expertise they have. Marc Gordon is no exception to this. He is an internationally recognized thought leader and the field of customer experience, with over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries. He also has a reputation for providing insight or concepts both innovative and effective.

He’s an award winning as a keynote speaker. He’s spoken with some of the world’s most respected companies including Hilton Hotels, Bausch + Lomb, Mondelez International. He’s also the only person to have spoken in his area of expertise at the World Management Forum in Tehran in Iran, which itself is pretty staggering. His regularly featured on TV and radio for his opinions. He shares his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as Canada’s marketing superstar by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Mic drop right there.

Nathan Simmonds:

Marc, thanks very much for being here, they really appreciate it.

Marc Gordon:

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Nathan Simmonds:

I got introduced to you a few months ago, it feels like forever ago, just to talk to you about the different ways that you look at customer service, what a good customer experience is, customer expectation and how you manage these as a provider of product or service and as that dialogue opened up there was just so much good stuff in here to share from your ways of thinking and your approaches to these things that can help so many people out, and so many businesses, small, medium enterprises and leaders in their space, it would have been remiss of me not to get you on here and have this conversation that’s for certain.

Marc Gordon:

Well thank you.

Episode 22 - Good Customer Service: Interview With 'Canada’s Marketing Superstar', Marc Gordon

Marc Gordon is an internationally recognised thought leader in the field of customer experience. With over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries, he has built a reputation for providing insightful concepts that are both innovative and effective.

As an award-winning keynote speaker, Marc has spoken for some of the world’s most respected companies, including Bausch & Lomb, Hilton Hotels, and Mondelez International. Marc is the only speaker in his field to have keynoted at the World Management Forum in Tehran, Iran.

Regularly featured on television and radio for his opinions, Marc has shared his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry, and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as 'Canada’s marketing superstar' by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Today, we discuss good customer service in more detail.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Today I have the pleasure of introducing Marc Gordon. His bio here, again, I'm overwhelmed, I'm staggered at the wonderful people that I get to have a conversation with, their resumes, what they've achieved, what they've accomplished and the areas of expertise they have. Marc Gordon is no exception to this. He is an internationally recognized thought leader and the field of customer experience, with over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries. He also has a reputation for providing insight or concepts both innovative and effective.

He's an award winning as a keynote speaker. He's spoken with some of the world's most respected companies including Hilton Hotels, Bausch + Lomb, Mondelez International. He's also the only person to have spoken in his area of expertise at the World Management Forum in Tehran in Iran, which itself is pretty staggering. His regularly featured on TV and radio for his opinions. He shares his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as Canada's marketing superstar by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Mic drop right there.

Nathan Simmonds:

Marc, thanks very much for being here, they really appreciate it.

Marc Gordon:

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Marc Gordon

 

Nathan Simmonds:

I got introduced to you a few months ago, it feels like forever ago, just to talk to you about the different ways that you look at customer service, what a good customer experience is, customer expectation and how you manage these as a provider of product or service and as that dialogue opened up there was just so much good stuff in here to share from your ways of thinking and your approaches to these things that can help so many people out, and so many businesses, small, medium enterprises and leaders in their space, it would have been remiss of me not to get you on here and have this conversation that's for certain.

Marc Gordon:

Well thank you.

Nathan Simmonds:

The first question from me is always why do you do what you do?

Marc Gordon:

Wow. Boy, you start off with the serious questions right away don't you? All right. Give me a sec. If I can just open up about this I guess a little bit. So why, that's a great question.

Marc Gordon:

I guess it starts with the fact that going back as a kid in elementary school I was one of these kids that didn't quite fit in. I wasn't one of the cool kids, I wasn't one of the smart kids, I wasn't one of the athletic kids. I didn't seem to fit into any group and back then when you didn't fit in you became a target for bullying, and through much of school I was bullied relentlessly. It was a time when, unlike today, where it's taken seriously, back then parents, teachers, everyone just shrugged and said, "Kids will be kids."

Marc Gordon:

When you are growing up in that kind of environment in school you don't really fit in, you find yourself a target for aggression a lot, you spend a fair amount of time on your own, and in doing so you tend to observe other people. You're kind of on the outside looking in and this was the case for me because I found myself just watching other people. I would spend my lunch hours or recess or whatever, free time, when the other kids were playing, I would just be walking around.

Marc Gordon:

Without even realizing it I was observing what relationships were and the dynamics between them and the impact of aggression and passiveness and just the different dynamics of relationships and how people became friends and enemies and everything else. I didn't realize it at the time, but it ingrained in me certain values and certain beliefs. Then as I grew up in my teens and 20s when I started to get involved in owning businesses and starting businesses I realized that this behaviour carries through into the outer world as well and even today, whether you're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s or beyond, the fact is there is still bullying going on. It's still happening.

Marc Gordon:

So, it's happening by customers who are demanding or making unreasonable demands on businesses. It's happening with suppliers that are making unreasonable demands on their customers. It's happening with competitors who are trying to put you out of business. They may be using some form of bully tactic and it may not be open aggression towards you, but at its very core all of this is a form of aggression.

Marc Gordon:

I see it so often now and I'm sure you do as well in the marketplace, there doesn't seem to be that attitude of abundance. It seems to be a view of scarcity, that for every client you have or that you attain that means that's a client that I have to lose. So that means for me to succeed you have to fail. A lot of businesses seem to have that attitude.

Marc Gordon:

My belief has always been there's enough to go around. It might be a bit of a cliché, but the fact is my belief is if the customer isn't buying from me or doesn't want to buy from me they were never mine to begin with or if I have a customer and they choose to leave for whatever reason they were never mine. We can't control people, but a lot of businesses would like to do that.

Marc Gordon:

So over the last 10 years or so as I moved away from really being a service provider or a business owner in the way of products, I was in the auto industry for the better part of a decade, I started to get in the consulting, I really found myself focusing on the whole relationship aspect of business and how all the things that we see as human beings and the way we communicate with each other, how that translates into how we communicate with each other on a business level, on a professional level.

Marc Gordon:

It's all those things that I think I absorbed over the years of what I went through in school, but also dealing with people now much like you and I deal with, where we see the different dynamics and different personalities and different traits and how they impact each other and people's desire to want to connect with you or to step away and have nothing to do with you.

Marc Gordon:

I guess at the end of the day my why is really about wanting people to understand that in business, much like outside of business, in your personal life, it's really about relationships. That's it at the very, very core and whether you want to call it customer experience or customer service or anything else, it's about making people feel valued and appreciated and that's the core of it.

Nathan Simmonds:

Great. That's interesting. I experienced bullying as well when I was at school. Again, you and I are similar ages in that kind of development, it wasn't discussed, it wasn't talked about and as you were saying that reminded me how I spent time doing the people watching, learning how conflicts played out and watching how different conflicts played out and how certain behaviors took the lead on and controlled different elements of that.

Nathan Simmonds:

So it's interesting that you bring that to the forefront in this and looking at these things from a customer experience point of view. Again, how my thinking shifting is, is looking at those people in some sense, those people that are interacting with you on a daily basis, they are your customers in some way, shape or form and they're coming to you because they want something and whether it's schoolyard bullying, they're coming to you because they want something. Okay, well how do you deal with that?

Nathan Simmonds:

How do you manage that experience so that it's a win-win for everybody, not at the detriment because of that bullying that you end up in that feeling of lack where if you get one client that means I lose one, when actually how do you become worthy rivals? How do share the competitiveness to drive each other to be better than you were yesterday, rather than diminishing or depreciating yourself or somebody else through conflict and through that aggression.

Nathan Simmonds:

That stuff just expands and grows and evolves up into adult life, so you see these wounded leaders walking around hurting other people. Why? Because they were probably bullied or they were bullies at school and as a result of that they just carve it into their professional life, they then cascade that down to their staff, who then cascades that back out to your customers. So it's being conscious about the knock on effect of how we are managing our experience for everybody, internally and externally.

Marc Gordan:

Exactly, and it's interesting what you were saying that... I find when people grow up they obviously bring with them whatever they organically absorbed and experienced when they were kids and it's interesting, I find those who were bullied tend to take one of two routes....

E21 - How Do We Return to Work? Interview With HR Expert and Owner of Stonechat HR Consulting, Becky Neale

Becky Neale is a proven, commercially focused HR leader leading large-scale HR teams for the likes of RWE nPower, Labrokes, and Accolade Wines. Operates as part of senior leadership teams, devises and sets HR strategies aligned to the wider organisational goals, designing culture and values-based programs to support the development and evolution of operating models, associated change management and employee engagement. A hands-on operator who empowers teams and communicates in a natural, down to earth style with the ability to remove complexity in fast-paced commercial organisations. Today, we discuss how we return to work.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I'm Nathan Simmonds, Senior Leadership Coach and Trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of sticky learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturer industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to today's interview. I have the pleaser of interviewing Becky Neale today. HR Director, expert. I've got a phenomenal bio on here which is worth reading just in itself, and then we're going to get into some serious questions about high performance teams. About the return to work which is so very poignant for right now as we're recording this video, stores opening and people going back to business. But also, other businesses returning their people from home as well. And also looking at employee engagement off the back of that which is why I wanted to have this conversation with Becky and the direction that I'll get to know you went previously just expose so many challenges that are going to come up in the future.

Nathan Simmonds:

So, with a proven commercial focus, HR leader, leading large scale HR teams for the likes of RWE, Empower, Ladbrokes and [inaudible 00:01:28]. Operates as part of a Senior Leadership team, devises and sets HR strategies aligned to wide organizational goals. Big stuff. Designing culture, values based programs. Support the development and evolution of operating models, associated change mangement employee engagement. These are all big things, especially for HR Directors working in a global space.

Nathan Simmonds:

But even though it's big, global, it's also hands on. She's a hands on [inaudible 00:01:54] who empowers her team, communicate in a natural down to earth style. And the best bit about the conversations that I've had with Becky before now is that she takes that complexity and makes it easy for people to understand, especially in fast paced environments. This is why I wanted to share some of this. As I said, it's high performance team, employee engagement. And the elephant in the room, the return to work, which I think even in normal circumstances was an elephant in the room in itself, let alone now as it's environment that we work in and the ecosystem we're working in changes.

Nathan Simmonds:

So Becky, welcome to Sticky Interviews. Thanks for being here, thanks for sharing your team. First question from me which is probably the most important question, why do you do what you do?

Let's here Becky's reason

 

Becky Neale:

Hi, thank you for having me. I guess I just really enjoy working with large teams, leadership teams setting strategy and direction. Really then just drilling down from that in terms of making them operational plans, working with employees, wider groups from the management, the leadership team and where appropriate if you have a union, union in that organization. It's the variety, it's the complexity, and it's really driving them through and seeing results and taking employees on the journey that just really floats by boat, ticks my boxes if you like.

Nathan Simmonds:

I love the fact that you said in that, taking these large ideas, drilling down, linking people to unions, employee safety, psychological safety. [inaudible 00:03:35], when we use all those different elements and actually make them work together. So actually I think that's the first time you've used some of those words in a conversation with me so it's actually refreshing to hear you say them.

Becky Neale:

You can't do it on your own, you have to involve all of those groups. It's the key to success in making these change projects work.

Nathan Simmonds:

And it's exactly that. Because if you try and swing too much to one bias, it creates the bias. So if you have a large organization that has their viewpoint and their way of working, that's not going to fit to everybody in your business. And you have to have the cross sections and the different dynamics so you make sure that actually, you're giving the fairest and most reasonable approach to all the people in your care as an HR lead.

Becky Neale:

Yeah, and ultimately if you don't take your people on the journey with you, whatever change you're trying to make, whatever business goal objective you're trying to achieve, you won't do it. You will come across resistance, you will have people taking different roads and tangents. They all need to be aligned, all need to be adding value and all going in the same direction. You can only do that by involving them, engaging them, communicating and setting the right culture.

Nathan Simmonds:

There was that push pull scenario with the stubborn donkey. You're trying to get the donkey to move forward, you're trying to pull it and it's pulling backwards. Actually you might get somewhere very slowly if you're lucky, but it's going to be a painful, drawn out process.

Becky Neale:

Yeah, and I guess that's why really in changes you need to focus on your early adopters rather than your [inaudible 00:05:09] and those that don't want to join in. Because you can't gear everything to the lowest common denominator in any change that you make, but you do have to factor and consider those in.

Nathan Simmonds:

So when you're setting up that plan, or when you're setting up that change that you're going through, do you formulate a structure of what your early adopters are and then how you then incorporate your laggers, and how you cross the chasm to bring the next group of people in at the same... later on in that journey.

Becky Neale:

Yeah, I think you have to come up with a change management plan. You have to look at all the groups. How are they going to be impacted? How are they going to feel personally about these changes? And work through the different groups the different scenarios and complexities and questions and resistance factors they are all going to bring. You almost need to create the personas for each group. So Dave the bus driver and these are his concerns. Sarah the administrator, these are concerns. Jeff the cleaner, these are his concerns etc, and build out each of the characters, what they stand for, the issues that that grouping will potentially throw at you and the resistance. What they can actually bring to enable and to help. You've got to look at it from lots of different angles to be able to build the plans to take it forward.

Becky Neale:

You just do it in isolation of management team want to implement X, Y and Z and we're going at it, straight down the tracks then it won't land as well.

Nathan Simmonds:

And I haven't heard it put that way, because that's the same as doing a client avatar, doing a customer avatar.

Becky Neale:

Yeah, it is.

Nathan Simmonds:

So when you have your own business and you create your own business, okay, this is my demographic. They are of this age, of this gender. This is what's important to them. Okay, how do we make sure we get the message to that person in the language that they understand. Brilliantly as you put across here is well actually, what are they going to bring to the equation or to the situation that's going to help to move the project forward? What are their strengths? What are they going to enjoy demonstrating that's going to make it work even better, regardless of what the leadership team says they want or what they think is the best thing. How do we get everybody involved in that?

Becky Neale:

Yeah, and if you take your early adopters particularly, they can show others. It's not just that management said this was a great idea, actually it is. Look what's happened in my team, look what's happened here as a result of it. It's working, it's doing the right thing. Yes, these are the teething problems we've found, but we've listened to people, we've asked for opinions and now we're focusing on this. It's almost like jump on the train, come with us. It's actually not that bad. Have a look at what we're achieving, see what we're doing. Come and be part of it.

Becky Neale:

And that's what you hope and you rely on really with your early adopters and people who are really engaged with the changes that you're trying to make.

Nathan Simmonds:

And you build a momentum in that. [crosstalk 00:07:46] mentioned just [Jeff Burch 00:07:47] before we got into this conversation, we've just done the first of our sticky lunches with Jeff. The quote that stands out for me that he shared was, "The change inflicted is a change resisted."

Becky Neale:

Absolutely.

Nathan Simmonds:

Getting those people on board, just creating that snowball effect just so it chugs a little bit further and then goes a bit further and then more people. And you build up that pressure, the positive pressure to enable the thing to happen as a way it happens.

Becky Neale:

Yeah. This isn't just for your large scale change project. This is for any change that you want to make. The more you involve employees, the more you engage with them, the more you listen to them, their ideas,...

E21 – How Do We Return to Work? Interview With HR Expert and Owner of Stonechat HR Consulting, Becky Neale

Becky Neale is a proven, commercially focused HR leader leading large-scale HR teams for the likes of RWE nPower, Labrokes, and Accolade Wines. Operates as part of senior leadership teams, devises and sets HR strategies aligned to the wider organisational goals, designing culture and values-based programs to support the development and evolution of operating models, associated change management and employee engagement. A hands-on operator who empowers teams and communicates in a natural, down to earth style with the ability to remove complexity in fast-paced commercial organisations. Today, we discuss how we return to work.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I’m Nathan Simmonds, Senior Leadership Coach and Trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of sticky learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturer industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to today’s interview. I have the pleaser of interviewing Becky Neale today. HR Director, expert. I’ve got a phenomenal bio on here which is worth reading just in itself, and then we’re going to get into some serious questions about high performance teams. About the return to work which is so very poignant for right now as we’re recording this video, stores opening and people going back to business. But also, other businesses returning their people from home as well. And also looking at employee engagement off the back of that which is why I wanted to have this conversation with Becky and the direction that I’ll get to know you went previously just expose so many challenges that are going to come up in the future.

Nathan Simmonds:

So, with a proven commercial focus, HR leader, leading large scale HR teams for the likes of RWE, Empower, Ladbrokes and [inaudible 00:01:28]. Operates as part of a Senior Leadership team, devises and sets HR strategies aligned to wide organizational goals. Big stuff. Designing culture, values based programs. Support the development and evolution of operating models, associated change mangement employee engagement. These are all big things, especially for HR Directors working in a global space.

Nathan Simmonds:

But even though it’s big, global, it’s also hands on. She’s a hands on [inaudible 00:01:54] who empowers her team, communicate in a natural down to earth style. And the best bit about the conversations that I’ve had with Becky before now is that she takes that complexity and makes it easy for people to understand, especially in fast paced environments. This is why I wanted to share some of this. As I said, it’s high performance team, employee engagement. And the elephant in the room, the return to work, which I think even in normal circumstances was an elephant in the room in itself, let alone now as it’s environment that we work in and the ecosystem we’re working in changes.

Nathan Simmonds:

So Becky, welcome to Sticky Interviews. Thanks for being here, thanks for sharing your team. First question from me which is probably the most important question, why do you do what you do?

Becky Neale:

Hi, thank you for having me. I guess I just really enjoy working with large teams, leadership teams setting strategy and direction. Really then just drilling down from that in terms of making them operational plans, working with employees, wider groups from the management, the leadership team and