The Hard Truth About Leadership & Culture

And this is the fact that we blame this abstract concept called culture for everything. So I don't know about Australia, but in the uk, every time there's a huge corporate collapse, you know, with greed and scandal, the government convenes a public inquiry which costs, you know, many millions of pounds. And I could save them all that money, because the answer is always the same. It was the culture. Yeah, yeah. But what's interesting is when you, when you look into the academic research on culture, what you find is interesting. You find that the term organizational culture was invented in the 50s by a French Canadian management consultant. No one had ever heard of it before that the academic evidence would suggest that academics can't agree on culture. The literature has over 160 definitions of what it's supposed to be, so they can't even agree on what it is or how you could measure it. More importantly, if you look at meta analysis of all the studies that have been done on culture, there's actually no link between something called culture and organizational performance. And more hilariously, there's actually no evidence that organizations that set out to change their culture have any effect on their performance. So this becomes very interesting. And in my book, I compared culture to the 15th century obsession in England with witchcraft. So in the 15th century, everybody in England believed witches were real. And witchcraft was blamed for most things that went wrong to the extent where the UK or the English at the time, the English parliament actually passed two laws making the practice of witchcraft, incantations and chanting, punishable by death, and then went on to execute 300 women over the next several years that were accused of being witches. But culture is a bit like witchcraft because you, you know, you can't see it, you can't touch it, you can't prove it exists, but yet everybody talks about it as if it was a complete, concrete and proven concept. So this is kind of fun, right? So, and, and in the UK, there are 92, 000 people on LinkedIn with the word culture in their job titles. And, and I think if you look into, if you start to get into things like complexity theory, you conclude that if there is something called culture, which is some kind of representation of how people behave in an organization, that it's probably an emergent property, I. E. That it emerges from different things, and it's so therefore there's no way to set some kind of desired culture and work towards that. That's just a complete, you know, imaginary waste of time, essentially. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders, a podcast by Triple Goal. We Share deep transformational conversations around leadership and personal development to help you uncover the unseen facets of human growth, leadership impact. I'm your host, Michael Bunting. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders. Michael Bunting here. Today I'm interviewing Paul Sweeney. Paul's based in the uk. Paul and I had a really interesting interaction around what we think works or doesn't work and the amount of corporate BS there is on various initiatives. So I was super interested in interviewing Paul and what constitutes BS and what should leaders be careful of when they're implementing any improvements in their organization. Paul, could you just tell us what you do, where you are and a little bit of lead up background to how we got to this conversation? Sure, Michael. Thanks for inviting me to talk. Yeah. So I run a small consultancy in London called Sense Labs. And the idea behind Sense Labs is to try to cut through some of the nonsense and endemic bullshit that people have to put up with their corporate life. The idea is came from a book that I wrote in 2024. I took a year out to write a book called Magnetic Nonsense. The subtitle is A Short History of Bullshit at Work and How to Make It Go Away. The reason for the book was I think I mentioned this briefly, but I've had a really weird career. I flunked out of uni, I took a job in the lost baggage department of an airline, which turned out, by the way, to be tremendous fun. And then I worked my way through various operational jobs, middle management roles, all the layers of nonsense that you get there into general management. Then I did an mba, I worked in a startup for a while, and then I became an accidental management consultant at the age of 40, which also turned out to be good fun. I saw lots of industries, lots of sectors, and then more recently, randomly, one of my clients offered me a C suite role as chief strategy officer of a big real estate business that ended up being in the FTSE 100 while I was still there. So I've kind of worked right at the bottom of an organization all the way through the middle, seen hundreds of organizations and then, you know, also been in a C suite role in one of the biggest organizations in the, in the uk. But somewhere in that journey I became like the kid in the Sixth Sense movie, right? You know, the one that saw dead people everywhere. Yeah, I just kept on seeing the same dead ideas everywhere, zombie leadership, the same bullshit. And I got really curious about why, why, why? Why did all companies essentially look the same, right, do the same things and why did our thinking about the Evolution of how to run organizations kind of suddenly stop in 1965 or thereabouts. And we've kind of basically just done the same thing since. So I set out to write the book about that and see if I could figure out how did we get in this mess? What are all the things holding us in this mess and is there any way out of it? That was the kind of, that's what I spent a year doing. So I'm sure we could probably talk for five hours on this topic. But if I don't mind, I want to ask you more generally what the whole range of BS is like a quick sort of helicopter view of it. And I also want to ask you like our interaction was an advertisement on, I think it was LinkedIn of me talking at an event on leadership and you gave a pretty similar sentiment. I can't remember. I probably were more polite. But something around another bullshit event that changes effectively, right? So I wonder if it wouldn't matter. You choose which one you want to start with. Leadership or the overall. Well, let me go back to something a little bit earlier first. So it turns out that we have a set of interesting cognitive biases that are left over from evolution. And the ones that I'm particularly interested in. One is that we have a deep aversion to uncertainty. Human brains just do not like uncertainty. We've evolved to be pattern recognizing machines to deal with all the, you know, the plethora of data that we get and we, we like patterns. They come, they, they, they're comforting. The guys in ucl, the neuroscience laboratory here in London did a great experiment a while ago. They took people in off the street to play a video game. And in the game you had to guess whether there was a snake under a rock. And if there was a snake, you got a quite uncomfortable electric shock. You know, you really felt it. They made the game look predictable. So for a while people were able to anticipate whether they would get a shock. And then they changed the algorithm to make it really uncertain. And they kind of measured everyone's cortisol, stress levels, saliva response, you know, et cetera, a whole battery of measures. And they've discovered something really interesting. It turned out that it was much more stressful not knowing whether or not you were going to get a shock than knowing that you were going to get a shock. So I thought that was a really interesting illustration of that. The second cognitive bias we have is that we have a really inbuilt human need for sense making. And you can see this right Back to, you know, every civilization that left any documentation or any trail, they all had a creation myth that explained why humans were here, what was going on with the sun and the stars and the moon and all. You know, the fact that 40% of Americans still believe that's actually literal fact is a strange thing. But you put those two things together, a deep aversion to uncertainty and a need for sense making. And what you have is the perfect psychological conditions for being taken in by nonsense. Yeah, because that's just what appeals to our brains. We love simplistic explanations of the past that also promise to give us some control over the future. One of those simplistic explanations is that everything is about leadership. And our default operating system, mentally about organizations is in order to create great organizations, you need to find this amazing, you know, servant leader who's so self aware and they create values, you know, that, that everybody lives by and they create an amazing culture that's high performing, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And that, that's our kind of, the whole leadership industry is based on this, what I call the Disney fication of organizational thinking, right. That it's all about this glorious leader who will save us. Now, of course, the data doesn't really paint a good picture on this, right. Because we've had a hundred years of leadership research and leadership development and we have endless executive coaches. There are more executive coaches in the UK than we have doctors. You know, we have a vast industry of leadership development, all kinds of stuff. But at the macro level, the picture just would suggest that all that's useless. Right? Because employee engagement, you know, has basically flatlined for decades. Customer satisfaction has flatlined for decades and there's this epidemic of unhappiness, mental health problems. You know, most, most organizations are extremely dysfunctional. A huge amount of people that work in our organizations are extremely unhappy. You know, if leadership development was the answer, you know, why hasn't that all been fixed by now? We've had a hundred years, so that's one. And then the other thing we think about leaders, of course, is that we, we somehow believe, and you know, shareholders are guilty of this too. We believe that leaders can predict and control the future when that's clearly not the case. And much of, much of what's in leadership development and actually leadership education, even in MBAs in particular, it's all rational and it all assumes cause, effect that, you know, if you get the right leaders, then you get the success. But a huge amount of success in business is purely random, right? It's Serendipity, it's unexpected events. It's, you know, accidental discoveries. One of my favorite is Viagra, you know, that, that turned out to be the world's best selling drug. That was a, that was a failed angina drug where during the clinical trials the researchers noticed that it had a certain side effect. Right. And they went, oh, wow, this is interesting. It was never, it was never meant to be a drug for erectile dysfunction. Yeah. You know, post it notes. You know, the guy that made the glue on post it notes was trying to create a glue strong enough to hold aircraft parts together and he ended up with this super weak glue by accident. And everybody went, what the hell is that? You know, and it sat, it sat, it sat in the back of the lab for eight years before somebody else figured out what to do with it. And, you know, and turned into 3M's best selling product in, you know, in history. Nothing to do with strategy or leadership. You know, it's a, you know, the world is more messy than we think. Daniel Kahneman, I liked his quote in it. He said, the illusion that we have understood the past feeds the further illusion that we can predict and control the future. And he said that most business books are based on this comforting illusion. Got it. So I'm curious to understand. It sounds a little bit like the Shakespearean story around, I don't know if you remember, I think it was Othello. The young generation thought they had some choice and the old generation was all, the fate of the stars. Are we taking, Are we taking a. Well, there's nothing really we can do because it's all fate and it's all just in terms of luck. You know, what can we do? And behavior of bosses doesn't matter because it doesn't really affect anything. So this is an interesting question. Right? So this comes onto one of the other misconceptions, I think, that's endemic about cultural life or about organizational life. And this is the fact that we blame this abstract concept called culture for everything. So I don't know about Australia, but in the uk, every time there's a huge corporate collapse, you know, with greed and scandal, the government convenes a public inquiry which costs, you know, many millions of pounds. And I could save them all that money because the answer is always the same. It was the culture. Yeah, yeah. But what's interesting is when you, when you look into the academic research on culture, what you find is interesting. You find that the term organizational culture was invented in the 50s by a French Canadian management consultant. No one had ever heard of it before that the academic evidence would suggest that academics can't agree on culture. The literature has over 160 definitions of what it's supposed to be, so they can't even agree on what it is or how you could measure it. More importantly, if you look at meta analysis of all the studies that have been done on culture, there's actually no link between something called culture and organizational performance. And more hilariously, there's actually no evidence that organizations that set out to change their culture have any effect on their performance. So this becomes very interesting. And in my book, I compared culture to the 15th century obsession in England with witchcraft. So in the 15th century, everybody in England believed witches were real. And witchcraft was blamed for most things that went wrong to the extent where the UK or the English at the time, the English parliament actually passed two laws making the practice of witchcraft, incantations and chanting, punishable by death, and then went on to execute 300 women over the next several years that were accused of being witches. But culture is a bit like witchcraft because you, you know, you can't see it, you can't touch it, you can't prove it exists, but yet everybody talks about it as if it was a complete, concrete and proven concept. So this is kind of fun, right? So, and, and in the UK there are 92,000 people on LinkedIn with the word culture in their job titles. And, and I think if you look into, if you start to get into things like complexity theory, you would conclude that if there is something called culture, which is some kind of representation of how people behave in an organization, that it's probably an emergent property, I. E. That it emerges from different things and it's. So therefore there's no way to set some kind of desired culture and work towards that. That's just a complete, you know, imaginary waste of time, essentially. Yeah. So I'll stop and pause there because that might really rise to some questions. I am, I have a very, very practical way of thinking and I try and apply it to. Because the way you're talking about, it's incredibly high level, right. It's big statistics, big pictures. So, and we can go back there, but I want to come back to the macro, right? So I'll give you, I'll give you an example. A day in my life, right? A chairman of a company tells me that a CEO is losing a female leader, losing her best people. And it's behavioral is the version of the CEO. And this is what's being complained about. And we're asked to come in and help that person change their behavior so that they stop losing people is the simplest way of saying it. Now we do measure that and we've done that many times successfully where we've changed. People say people's career, people have gone, you've gone from the best boss to the worst boss to the best boss. I'm just, I don't want to go big picture. I'm just talking about that minimal thing. Yeah. What's your pragmatic suggestion? If leadership. I'm going to just be, I'm just going to try and just play with it. Right. If all these are bullshit and it doesn't work. Right. What, what's, and this, this chairman seeing their CEO behaving in ways and going, I have to change this person out because it's not working, or maybe help them change. Should she be going? Well, Paul's saying it's all bullshit anyway. Might as well just fire her. What's the practical. Yeah, and this, and this is a really great question because it comes to the heart of lots of things that I think about, which is, is it this system or is it the individual? Right, right. This is, this is a really interesting question. And following on from the topic of culture, so let's assume that culture doesn't exist for a moment. Yeah. And then you say, right, if there's, if we don't have this thing called culture that's causing all this bad behavior that we see repeatedly time after time, what is it? Right. What is causing the endemic sort of bad leadership behavior we see? And that's where the research gets really fascinating because it turns out that the research on power and hierarchy entirely predicts most of those bad behaviors and is really fascinating. So there's a guy called Paul Piff. Piff. Who runs a lab at the University of California, Irvine, which looks at morality values and some other social stuff. But he, he's done a huge amount of research in the last 25 years about what happens to people when you put them in positions of power like that CEO. And, and it's really interesting. The research suggests that even if they were pretty well balanced going into that role, I described it in my book as, you know, there's, there's a reasonable chance of you becoming a bit of an asshole, you know, through no fault of your own. And it's all to do with the dynamics of power. So people in those high power positions, the research says they become more detached from reality over time. They spend, you know, 70, 80% of their time with shareholders Investors, senior managers, they lose touch with the workers, they start to lose empathy with the common people. They start to think that they're smarter than everybody else and they start to make decisions that favor their own bonuses and remuneration. And actually, over time, they're more likely to condone unethical behavior. And these are the patterns we see in corporate scandal after corporate scandal after corporate scandal. Right, but the research actually predicts those. But we blame it on Contour instead, so we never actually start looking at the reality. He did some really fun experiments. My favorites were he got strangers in pairs in off the street to play a game of Monopoly. And the game was clearly rigged. Everyone could see that. So one person got twice as much money at the start. They got to roll the dice twice on every go. And within, literally within minutes, the power dynamic shifted so that the person that was given the advantage was now like doing classic sort of power language. They ate more of the snacks that were in the middle of the table between the players. They were banging on the table. But the interesting thing was after they of course won the game because it was rigged, in the interviews afterwards, they were asked, so why do you think you were, you know, you won the game. Guess what? They said, I'm smarter or something like that. I'm. I was just a better player. Yeah. Not one of them mentioned the fact that they'd been given all these advantages. Yeah. And the. And in the other experiment, he. He sent his team out to a pedestrian crossing in California and their job was to try to cross the street and log the types of cars that were coming the other way. So Type one was like the cheapest, you know, old bangers, like, you know, obviously quite, quite poor people driving those cars. Type 5 at the top end was your executive, you know, very expensive Range Rovers and, you know, Mercedes and stuff. In the experiment, none of the cheap cars tried to run them over or pretend they weren't there. 45% of the most expensive cars just drove straight through the pedestrian crossing and pretended that they weren't there. So there's this really interesting whole set of research about the behaviors that power drives predictably that actually I would argue are much more at the root of what you are called in to correct probably than culture or actually maybe even than individual personalities. So a couple of comments. Firstly, I would say, whilst we do a lot of research, I've never actually researched this particular statement I'm about to make. So I want to just make it intuitively. I would say in probably, I would say at the moment it's probably a 60, 40 split with leaders too soft, too nice in power position, too accommodating of people, too politically correct. I'd say about 60%. Certainly culturally, to use that dirty word. That's what's normally happening. There's a lot of work behavior, there's a lot of avoidance, there's a lot of victim mentality in the organizations and it's hurting the organization's outcomes. And then you get the exact flip side. In fact, that client I mentioned, the one that was being aggressive, there's a couple of different CEOs, and this is a big multinational. The very next CEO was the opposite. Not in fact, his team said to him, we're losing trust in you because you're always so kind. And when you're never giving us any difficult. I'm not seeing that, I'm not seeing that assertion anecdotally. But nonetheless, yeah, for me, you know, if I'm the person in the problem, the practical question is what do I do? That's the real important. Yeah, yeah. And it example of this leader, do I change? Does your suggestion change power structure? What's your suggestion for the person who's behaving badly? So here's the. Before we just get onto that, here's the other interesting thing about power which I think is more disturbing. So if you, if you take power away from people, which typically happens at the bottom of organizations where restructures are done to you, you're on minimum wages, you have no real control about how you do your job, it turns out that that's incredibly bad for your health. And if you then subject people to continued periods of job insecurity, which is relatively common these days, some research suggests that that's more predictive of early death than smoking. So there's this whole. And actually being in a position of low power, activate something called the behavioral inhibition system, which makes people very risk averse, very unlikely to be creative or innovative. And then we wonder why we complain that the people we encounter in service industries are, you know, are not giving us a good service. Yeah, we've created the conditions for that. But so I would say what the research points to is that devolving some power, increasing people's autonomy actually is an underused tool in this behavioral box. Right. So if you can give the people below a leader much more autonomy, if you can persuade a leader to support autonomy, you may be surprised about what you get back from that because it may be that it reduces the downsides of too much power concentrated in that Individual, but it also potentially has a lot of upsides in better mental health, better performance. So you're making, you're now making the case for leadership development. You're now saying, let's help this leader change their behavior. Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying that leadership development is all wrong. I'm just saying that it's really, the problems are more systemic than problems of individual leadership. Yeah, we've got all these systemic problems to do with power and hierarchy and how we think about organizations. And my, my general point is that individually intervening with leaders, you know, may have some effect, but actually I think, you know, the system will eat that effect over time. And that's why it seems that despite all these leadership interventions, all these 100 years of leadership development and training and coaching, we're still where we are now. Which is the fact, which is, you know, not most organizations are very dysfunctional and you know, we still don't seem to be making progress. And my, my belief, my belief is because we're, we're hoping that, or we constantly believe that individual interventions will help when we're actually dealing with systemic problems. Another brilliant example of this is the vast waste of money on wellbeing. And it's the same story, right? So companies this year Globally will spend $100 billion on individual well being interventions for their employees. Mindfulness training, stress and resilience training, mental first aiders, you know, a whole range of the typical stuff, different apps, different external services. There's a landmark study that was released three years ago by Oxford University who have a center for well being research. They looked at the effect of these interventions across a population of about 40,000 employees in the UK that they tracked for a year. And it turned out that, and this was the exact words of the lead researcher, he said, we can find no evidence that any of these interventions made any difference to anybody. Yeah, but listen, but, but here was the point though. And he went on to say that all the, all the research on well being would indicate that the problems are not, you know, at an individual level, they're systemic problems to do with lack of autonomy, work design, you know, poor conditions. And therefore the idea that you can try to, you know, alleviate the effects of an awful workplace with some lunchtime yoga, you know, it's just nonsense. Of course. I agree with that. I totally agree with that. So if I look at, I just want to hear your view on how we see things again. Just ever the pragmatic, I'm really interested in, okay, how can I help that organization? Our name of our company is triple goal. And we think of it like this. There's three things that matter to organizations and should matter to organizations. One is results. I mean, if you don't get results, you die. So whatever you're attempting to achieve, whether it's a nonprofit, governmental organizations are for profit. Your results matter. They sustain people's salaries, et cetera. They provide a service and a well being, number one. So results. Number two is the ability to learn and innovate and disrupt yourself. That's a big deal because if you don't do that, you don't get the results for very long. So you got to consistently sustain, do that. And the third one we think that's crucial is what we, we used to call it joy at work. Nowadays we call it the great workplace. Right. So yeah, yeah. We think of it as a net positive on mental health. In other words, if my mental health without working at that company, which is a weird way of saying was 7 out of 10 because I work at that company, it's 8 out of 10 or it's 5 out of 10 depending on the workplace environment. Yeah. And then what? We, like you, we agree, or the research agrees that the idea of adding a wellbeing program to the fundamental system is outrageous. It's. Yeah. Ridiculous. Because it's not changing the system at all. No, no. So when we think of system change, what we've tried to do is codify what does. We've got this really simple way because we are in the realm of behavior, right? So that's our job. Our job is not AI or structures or systems. Our job is behavior and how the organization or the leaders are behaving. So what we say is, okay, there's outcomes. We're trying to achieve those three things. What portion of those outcomes is behavior responsible for? So if we have a collective, let's say, aversion to conversations in our culture or our organization, that's not going to serve those three things. Trust is lost, et cetera, and learning is lost and performance is lost. So then we ask the question, okay, why is that behavior there? That's the key question we tend to ask. It's like, oh, we didn't get enough wellbeing programs or whatever. But we think is there's two fundamental drivers of a person. There's the external and the internal. Internal. So the internal is my child conditioning. So if my. To give you a simple example, we had a client who used to have to win every argument, no matter what. He had to win every argument even if people walked out his door crying. And eventually we discovered that he had a childhood where losing an argument was quite literally life threatening in an abusive way. So he was playing out conditioning in the office. It had nothing to do with his systems or the process. That was his own internal baggage that was determining a lot of our behavior. I have a long history in psychology. We know that like you can have two people next door, one marriage throwers, one doesn't. They're living in the same system, pretty much broader systems. And then we look at the external and we go out. Our working theory is trying to simplify things is what's determining the behavior, what systems are pushing behavior. So if I'm, if I, and I give a funny example of one of my corporate clients used to do a lot of walk talk meetings, it's a very simple example, but I would never do walk talk meetings. But that's the way they did things. Before you know it, I was getting much better steps in a day. It was good for me because I was doing, I was being influenced, my behavior was being influenced by the system, clearly because it was a collective norm. And then so we think of it like, okay, what does. So firstly, role modeling from power has a very significant impact on. So you know, I watch what's going on above me. I'm trying to work out how do you get ahead? Maybe I need to behave like that person. I start mimicking and so forth, or I go compliant, whatever. Role modeling with power. The second one is ritual. The organization's rituals we think are very significant and the way they conduct those rituals. And then the reward systems, the reward and accountability systems are what we think of as the big ticket systems. And to your point, what we've seen is if you don't change the rituals or the reward systems, you're dead in the water and trying to change the behavior. You've got no chance. Because the reward is more of a bottom line. Yeah. I mean, humans are very good at gaming reward systems, right? Yes. So what you tend to get, if you incentivize people financially in a simplistic way or in a, you know, you don't see the consequences. I'll give you a good example. I worked in a bank a few years ago as a consultant and in a commercial bank relationship, managers had a target for the year of, you know, the business that they had to do, the target was tracking really nicely. And then they started to outperform their targets. So by the time they hit November, they'd hit the year's target. So guess what happened yeah, they manipulated the numbers to spread it out. Well, what happened was that every small business that was looking for a loan for, to help them through Christmas, they just put them all in a drawer and stopped answering the phone. And then all of a sudden, on January 1, there was a massive spike in lending when they signed off all the, all the loans. Right. Yeah. You know, it just drives all the wrong behavior. Yeah, we, we've seen, we've seen that in another funny way where people wanted more collaboration in their organization, so they decided to appear to be a reward system and a credit insanity. There was no more disagreement. Too many people in meetings. Everyone was trying to please everyone. But why, why, Michael, do we think. And this comes back again to your point. You know, the point you just made about, you know, you think role modeling is really important. But why do we, why do we treat people like children in organizations? You know, we want you to play nicely together, so we're going to give you three lollipops if you, if you do. You know, don't you ever think that a lot of it really infantilizes people? And the, the same with employee engagement. This is hilarious. I think, you know, the. Well, there's so many problems with. Firstly, employee engagement is actually a complete waste of time in this current form because it's. The entire industry that was created by Gallup and others rests on the premise that if you increase engagement, you increase the performance of the company. Right. But there's actually no research that supports that. What you have is correlation. Higher performing companies have higher engagement. You don't have causation. And a lot of academics in that space now have come to the conclusion that the causation is the other way around, that going to work for already successful companies is more engaging. And why wouldn't that be the case? Right. Because they're doing well. You've got nicer offices, you've got good perks. Of course you're going to be happier. And so there's. But the big problem I have with employee engagement as a concept is it's like it treats people like children. It assumes that the company is entirely responsible for whether or not you are engaged. There's no responsibility for the individual to engage. No, no, no. They're all children. We have to keep the children happy. Let's ask the children how they're doing. And if they're not happy, we'll get, we'll give them some more toys. It's just nuts. I'm curious because that's not that I understand that concept and it's probably implemented a lot like that. It's just not. That's not congruent though with my experience because my experience is there's obviously, I think what the thing, one thing we haven't said yet is that I think the entire corporate system, if you take corporate systems, deeply flawed. I have a child doing his PhD in sustainability at Cambridge University. He taught me the other day. I'll never, ever, ever, ever join a corporation. Ever, dad. Because I don't blame them. They are fundamentally eating the planet. And yeah, our system itself is, is somewhat psychopathic. I've seen that in top companies. I understand that the whole corporation system is a problem. It's a challenge because. Yeah, often when we say, oh, we really care about you, but really, do we? Yeah, but also why, why do. Why do employers think that they are entirely responsible for someone's mental health, for example? No, but I don't. Yeah, I don't. That's certainly not my. The customers we work with, they don't think of it like that at all. But I bet they still do engagement surveys though, right? And do a whole lot of actions off the back of. They don't process it like that. Because we have this very simple way of looking at it. We go some, we have just a very. It's a, it's. It's a totally non research discussion starter. We talk about the golden torture chamber versus the country club and we go, what? Where do you think your organization is? People are working insane hours, long hours, people are struggling. Your performance is pretty good, but it just feels like everyone's burning out. Are you there or are you where? Man, you've got a great culture. You're winning the great place to work awards, Engagement scores are stellar. But everybody is cruising in the country club. And I agree with you, by the way. We had the assumption that engagement equal performance for many years as a consultancy. And based on looking at the research, we were like, that's not true. And then as soon as you see the lens, you go, what is an organization? Primarily it's about delivering its service and it's about delivering it at the right cost in the right way. By the way, all of the best places to work badges are all complete nonsense as well. If you look into the methodology, it's a complete waste of time. So yeah, so that's fine. I just do think that we tend to think of it as 50, 50. We think that the individual's responsible. That's why I agree with the wellbeing programs. It's like if a Person can't buy a $50 app for themselves and not why do they think if the corporation buys them a $50 app they will use it? Outrageous. I agree with that. The question I'm asking, I think the really pragmatic question I'm asking, and if I'm a listener to this, and go, okay, Paul, how do I improve the performance of my business? How do I improve the well being of my employees in my business? Because I think there's the human case in the business case. I don't think anyone wants to run a business or an organization that is hurting people, genuinely hurting people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I, I agree. And in the book it was interesting trying to figure out how to end the book, but the book ends with an open letter to the CEO which is basically saying, I'm not claiming that I have the answers, but based on the research I've done, here's a bunch of things that you might want to think about, testing and thinking about. Okay. And I would say if you were to ask me, Michael, what's the single biggest problem that we have in organizations today? I would say it is a lack of critical thinking in the leadership space. Because companies, they are like sheep, they literally all do the same things. And the research that I've done for the book is quite, is quite fascinating. So it turns out for example, that not only is well being self pointless corporate values which everybody has, actually have no effect on people's behavior and they do not reduce the chances of misconduct happening in your company. So that's interesting. Performance management is not a good way to increase performance. Results are mixed. Except for a third of studies indicated that it actually made performance worse. Employee engagement, again as I've said, it's a, it's a complete waste of time. It's basically the whole concept is incredibly flawed. Diversity. Thanks to McKinsey, we created an industry around McKinsey's so called research that racial and ethnic diversity of leadership teams and boards improved your performance. That research has been thoroughly slammed by proper academics who are unable to find any correlation between that and performance. And organizations defaulted to that lazy tick boxing of racial and ethnic diversity when actually what they should have been looking for was diversity of thinking styles, cognitive styles, and because that's the thing that produces better results. So you think there's this huge and vast, you know, activity of stuff that goes on which soaks up a huge amount of time of leadership focus, creates industries of nonsense throughout the organization. These are the things that are killing performance. If you were able to Unravel all of this nonsense that companies do. Think of how much more time you would have to focus on delivering for the customer. And it's. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. Add that to the autonomy piece where you go, right, if you could really empower your people more, give them more autonomy, you could potentially strip out multiple layers of hierarchy in the middle that actually don't really add any value to anybody. And the default behavior in the middle, by the way, is self promotion and survival. Nothing to do with actually helping the customer or deliver the work. Yeah. Then. Then you start to see how companies could, over time, address their performance. So we've. And I'll just take my own personal experience. Every time I've tried to do that, I've tried to give people more autonomy. Yeah. I mean, what. Because I often. Because I. I'm a leadership academic at some level as well. We do a lot of research. Yeah, yeah. And we go, well, what does empowerment actually mean? And one thing we know it doesn't mean is it doesn't mean abandonment. It doesn't mean hands off the steering, off you go. Yeah. And it also doesn't mean, you know, micromanaging. So somewhere in between, there's a thing called empowerment. And it's quite difficult to do. It's not that easy. It's very difficult. And the reason it's very difficult is because. Well, a number of reasons. But we. People that are working in positions of less power right now have become really conditioned to be in that situation. I don't know if you ever. If you've come across the work of a very obscure American academic called Barry Oshrey. He wrote, he did these fascinating experiments in the 60s where he put. He would lock 20 strangers in a compound and create a virtual organization. Some of them would be the leaders, some of the middle manager management, some workers and some customers. And he would run these kind of simulations and all kinds of crazy stuff happened. But in the end, he noticed that it didn't matter who he put into the simulation. The behaviors were always the same that came out, and that was always to do with the hierarchy. One of the things he found was that the. The people at the bottom of the hierarchy were. Their default experience was of being oppressed. You know, stuff got done to them all the time. But strangely, there was a. There was. There was a certain level of unity and camaraderie at that level. And he. And he figured out that the reason was because when you don't have any power, the most comforting thing you have is being Able to blame them for everything. Yeah. So that some people don't want to let go of that. And he, he also suggested the same. He said that it's very hard to break that because if people have to actually take on accountability and responsibility for solving things, they suddenly go, oh, oh, this seems much harder now. Right. And they, you know, there's nobody here except me now. And the. I don't know if you've come across. Can I just pause you there? But we are saying. Because sometimes, you know, I sometimes think of a 10 person business and you know these massive academic studies on. And I'm like, hold on a second, Nick. I just, I just want to. Yeah, yeah. I just want to run my, my team. But better, better. So what we are. And we know from Daniel Pink's work as well, we know we need to give people autonomy. Right? They want autonomy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're also saying they have to have accountability with autonomy because if there's autonomy without accountability, I mean since we're using the word shit in this. Yeah, it's a shit. If that happens, you can't do. Totally. If there's no accountability, holding people to account, expecting standards, them being accountable, then autonomy is a disaster. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I'm in. We. I also like this is a non research viewpoint but you know, there was a, there's a lot of. One of our clients tried to do an experiment was almost like we don't want to have any bosses. Yeah. So. So, so this is interesting. Leadership. This for instance, all human history has been the leader of a group. No, there hasn't. And this is another myth. Right. And I debunk this quite nicely in my book because if you read about the history of civilizations, what you will find is that for 90% of human history we lived in egalitarian societies, a bit like the Hasda people in Tanzania still do, with no sense of hierarchy, where leaders were mainly ceremonial but actually had no real authority to tell people what to do. Decisions were made collectively. And it's only, arguably it's only after we invented agriculture, stopped being nomadic that this kind of happened. So, so suddenly you had this concept of land ownership, meaning wealth and power. You needed slaves to work your land. And that, that's when our, that's when we fell in love with leadership. But it's for 90% of our existence it wasn't like that. And that's, that is. I'm not, I'm not. I mean if that's Yuval Harari's work as well for 90% of history, we weren't monogamous. So let's all suddenly become, you know, non monogamous. But so used to monogamous. 50% of us aren't monogamous now. Right. So I'm not sure that that's a thing. But the idea, the idea of like I'm gonna interrupt, you know what, I don't know how long agriculture has been, what, thousand years? No, well, listen, listen, here's, here's the important thing, right? So you said, you know, we need leaders, right? And so I, after I wrote the book, I spent some time researching organizations doing things very differently. I came across an organization in the Netherlands called Corporate rebels. And the two guys who run that have spent 10 years flying around the world trying to find organizations that are radically different and then trying to figure out what made them so different. And there's a common theme and it is all about autonomy and lack of hierarchy. The most extreme one is a company called Bourzorg in the Netherlands. And it was set up by a guy called Jos, who was a nurse, he was a community nurse. And he got fed up with the Dutch healthcare system's approach to management. You know, it was all about efficiency. He'd had consultants coming in telling him what to do. He would drive to an old lady's house and his handheld device would say, you have two minutes to change your bandage and then you gotta get back in your car, go to the next patient. And he just said, look, this is all bullshit, you know, this should be about the patient outcomes, not the inputs. And if I have to take that lady shopping and call her son and you know, go, go and get the neighbor to make her a cup of tea, you know, I don't care, this is what she needs. So he set up a team of about 10 nurses. They got a contract from the local authority. They decided from the outset that they would have no management structure. They would be a self organizing team. It was difficult, right? It took them a long time to work it out. They then got into the press and got nurses from all over the Netherlands contacted Jos and said, we want this, you know, we're fed up with it all. And he would say, right, get 10 of you together, get a contract, call me and I'll onboard you. Now that company has got 15,000 nurses and they operate in a thousand self organizing teams. And there is no middle management in the entire organization. Nothing at all. They have 20 coaches that the teams can call on if they have conflict or performance issues that they can't resolve by themselves, but the coach can't tell them what to do. They can only offer advice that they don't have and they don't have to follow it. And it's often voted the best place to work, cited as it's actually saved the Dutch healthcare system 40% versus the way they used to do it before. And the patient outcomes are through the roof. Patient satisfaction is through the roof. So it can be done, but it's not easy. And arguably it was easier to do it because you did it from the start. Right. You know, trying to reverse that into an organization is pretty tough. But what the corporate rebels guys are doing now is they are. They've set up a fund and they're going to buy. They've started buying smaller organizations, maybe, you know, 50, 100, 200 people, where the founder and owner wants to do this and they will only do it, they say, which I think is interesting. They'll only do it if they go along and they have a vote with the entire workforce. And if they don't get 85% of the workforce voting for it, they just go, no, we're not doing it. It's going to be too hard. They also say to the owner, you have to sign a document that says, we're going to do this. It's going to be a two year journey and if you get in the way, we have the right to remove you. You know, so this is. And they found that it does take 18 months to two years. And they have to do a lot of development work with people. They have to do a lot of emotional intelligence stuff. They have to do a lot of how do you manage conflict? How do you take accountability? But it's not easy because we've all been conditioned to work in the same system. Right. Yeah, that sounds great. And it still sounds like, it still nonetheless sounds like behavior matters, even in those organizations. No, no, no, of course it does. Of course it does. I've never said behavior doesn't matter. What I've said is the idea that we can fix behavior with individual interventions when systemic forces are so strong, I think has got limitations. Right. Yeah. I'm not saying that it's we shouldn't do it, but I don't think it's the whole answer. Got it. And so if practically speaking you were working, let's say you're working with a corporation. Yeah. Let's take the example I gave. What would you do with the, with the people are leaving, they're not happy with this leader. There's another Leader in a similar organization who people love but is not driving opposite problems in many ways. What, you know, if I was that company, I said if I worked with Paul, what he would help me do is what, what would you help them do? So I think, yeah, it's a good question. And it's gotta be context specific. Right. There's no single solution that's gonna work for every organization. I would advise just starting with simply boosting the critical thinking capability of the leadership team. So then if you can get them to start thinking, why are we doing this stuff? Why do we think, for example, that these incentives will actually improve the performance of the business? Where's, where's the evidence for this? Why do we think that doing something on culture change is going to help us? Where's the evidence? Why do we think that having going on about corporate values is going to make any difference to how people actually behave? Yeah, so, so it's, for me it's like that starting point as well. You know, if you keep doing what you're doing, you're just going to get the same answers, even if you try to intervene with people. Yeah, but I think, I'm not saying there isn't a place for, for then working with that individual leader or leaders on their own behaviors. Sure, why not? I mean, that's got to be part of the puzzle. But I, you know, I would say my first, my first instinct is to say it's the system, not the individuals. Right. The system is drive, driving the behavior. There may be an individual component to some of it. Sure, sure there is. Yeah. But actually, unless you fix the systemic things, you're just going to end up changing into another leader in another two years time. But actually when you look back after 10 years, you will see that you're just going around in a loop. Right? Yes. Now that makes a lot of sense to me. I had a three year period, Paul, where I basically couldn't pick, to use a literal phrase, kind of metaphoric phrase. I couldn't pick up a thing to work because I watched what I thought was a really good human being become a CEO of a global multinational. And that watched so rapidly that it broke, it completely broke my spirits. It was like the power of this system is just beyond our own individuals. You have to have a Gandhi or a Mandela or something to stand so strong in their principles, to shape the system around them. But that's not the average person. It's not. The fascinating thing is that. Back to Barry Oshri's work, which I'll send you A link to his book, but he had a lovely way to describe it. He said that we're all in the dance, and he calls it the dance of the blind reflex. He said everyone's in the dance, but nobody ever sees it. Yeah, we're all blind to it. And I really like that idea that we're blind to this dance of power and all the downsides it creates. Yes. Yeah. It's funny because we do teach, our work is heavily emphasis on adult development, which is all about critical thinking. Adult development, the ability to witness what you are currently not. You were blind to. That's its core thing. The more you mature, the more you witness objectively. Hold on a second. What's going on here? What's this behavior about? What's the thinking about? What example? With values, we often say, my favorite question to clients is, just tell me how your behaviors influence daily behavior. Like when you guys sit in a meeting, does anyone talk about the values? How do the values operate in this business? And it's usually they don't. Right. Well, that's a good thing because actually their meanings. Yeah. And actually there's. I could make a really tongue in cheek and slightly ironic statement which would be backed by more evidence to say that once you start having values, your organization will behave in exactly the opposite way. Now, I don't believe that's true either. But the evidence supports that more than the statement. Yeah. You know, so for example, Boeing, great example. Boeing's values, Safety, quality and integrity. $3 billion in fines for hiding critical safety flaws that led to the deaths of nearly 400 people. But nonetheless, even in the following example, at least what I read, I didn't study it in detail, but what I read is also it became a financially oriented organization. The CFO became the CEO. It was all about the numbers. They lost contact with the original values of the organization. So now the values were there, but they were meaningless. They were not operators. They were not. Yeah, but they. The fact that. But yeah, I mean, the research is quite clear though, at a, at a macro level. And oh, by the way, here's something that's interesting and I, I've just recently, I'm about to issue this. But this is where I think AI can help. Bizarrely, not in making. Of course it can help in making your organization more efficient. Right. We, you know, all the conversations about that. But actually AI, what it is really useful for is, is to be a critical thinking partner. Yeah. And so I'm just about to release a document which I'll send you or maybe I sent it, I can't remember, called the Siren Songs of hr. And this is looking at things like values and culture and wellbeing and performance management. And it's basically saying, look, you're being seduced by this belief. Here's who's singing the song, here's why it's dangerous. And actually here is a prompt that you can copy and paste into an AI that will go and get the actual research for you. And the prompt will say something like, go and find the research that reviews whether performance management increases performance. And then I've specifically said, ignore any management consulting nonsense dressed up as research. Look for proper peer reviewed academic research and be rigorous. Right. And the research, when you run that one for values, it comes back and it goes, okay, Paul, here's the research summary. Corporate values have no effect on behavior. None whatsoever. There's no research to suggest that that's true. So there's just something about if you could get leadership teams to just really challenge. Other interesting bit of research I read was only something like 14 of senior leaders that were surveyed in a poll across the UK and the Netherlands. Less than 14% of them had ever read a peer reviewed academic paper. Yeah. And they're relying on their, you know, their assumptions, their previous experience and the fact that everybody else does this thing. Yeah, yeah. So that, that would be a great place to start, I think. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and if again, it's a whole nother field and I want to make this really brief because it's, it's a, its own huge body of study and work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you familiar with anything around adult development? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Okay. So if, you know, if we know an adult development theory that at the socialized mind, which is Keegan's model I'm referring to, because there's multiple models. Keegan's model says at the socialized mind level, the driving. What's driving that person's behavior, fundamentally their worldview is how do I get included and belong and accepted and how do I say financially. Right. Particularly that's financially not. Well. So my fundamental drivers are how to be approved of and how do I feel financially safe. And the moment of value, like integrity as an example, comes into conflict with those two. It's abandoned, fully abandoned. What typically happens in cultural contests or in organizations, they publish these values, which are quite noble values. You use the growing ones, but the expectation is that they're going to interrupt a whole level of adult development, which they don't. Yeah, yeah. All right. I've Described it, I described it in the book as the equivalent, the corporate of equivalent of a baby on board sticker that new parents put in the windshield in the hope that it will somehow change the behavior of other drivers. Yeah, totally agree. Then crucially and crucially again, role modeling of power. If your senior leaders are at that same developmental level, they themselves are in the same delusion. There is no shifting. And then you get the outrageous pattern where they ask the rest of the organization to change. And these values, well, it's evidently role modeled, the opposite. But what we found, if you look at Keegan's work and even our own work, it's an incredible step to shift. And it explains the Mandelas and the gunnies, because why did those people put values, genuinely put values above their lives, even above their lives? How can a guy walk out of prison. I can't remember the number of years Mandela was in prison. 27 years, I think. How can a guy walk out of prison? 27 years by the oppressed. Right. And not, not be blaming like the people you talked about, the lower employees, blaming them. Not in the blame game, in the forgiveness game, in the nobility game. Those people come along and we, we are. I still, I still must confess I'm a romantic in that regard, is I still think that those people can, I think it's worth, as a worthy pursuit to help develop kinds of people. I don't, I don't disagree. But those people are very rare. Right. And actually there's another point I make in the book around the, you know, certainly in recent years, the overwhelming kind of stereotype of a CEO is a very rational, very numbers driven, often being a cfo, obsessed with efficiency and rationality. Yes. And actually it's a real shame because it's. What it's done is it's killed a lot of human joy and creativity in organizations. Yeah. I have a chapter in my book talking about the dark side of efficiency, which is disappearing joy, you know, so. And my conclusion was that, you know, making something efficient can make it worse for everybody, but making something, making something more magical is rarely bad for anybody. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. It's, it's how sort of in our own evolution of looking at this, how we came to the triple goal. It's exactly how we came to. We go, you know, like the moment, and we often ask the question, if you put efficiency, profit, results above innovation, growth, learning above people's workplace experience, above joy, you get a particular result that no one really wants to be in anyway. So you've produced A highly efficient monster. But equally, if you don't pay attention. So if you put the ping pong's table and it's all Kumbaya, happy days, that doesn't work either. But it's a step. It's such a difficult paradox. Everything is a tension in the end, right. And it's all about, I think, balancing the tensions, you know. Yes, that's right. And so Barry Austria talks about this at length and his work is very, very fascinating. He talks about the power of the middle of the organization, actually. So he says your default experience as a middle manager is that you're, you're torn in many directions, right? You've got stuff raining down on you from above, you've got demands from below. Some stuff you try to implement, some stuff you try to protect your people from because it's just stupid. You've got customers pulling you in one direction, suppliers pulling you in another direction. And often you end up just burning out because you try to fix everything and you don't fix and you can't fix it all. Yeah, but he talks about the real power in that layer is if you integrated a little bit with your peers, you could actually get together to solve the problems of the organization without waiting to be told what to do. And he said you should integrate, then disperse, and then integrate and then disperse. But no one ever does that. They're too busy trying to survive. And I've had some success in organizations trying to get that layer to take on that accountability and be together more often to solve problems that they know how to solve, actually. Yeah, it's interesting. So Paul, I want to just bring us to a close and I just want to give you a couple of pieces of what I've understood you've said today and then and get your final view on them. One of them, which I deeply appreciate and I feel deeply deep kinship with that view is that it sounds like you're encouraging corporate leaders to really critically think and look more in a more close examined, critical way at are these things actually working? Like what are we trying to achieve here and is this thing actually working or are we doing it because we've just done it before? It's the way corporates do things. That's what everybody does. And we're just doing that and really questioned put the spotlight on a very pragmatic way. That's one thing I've heard really, really clearly today. The second thing I've really heard clearly is that the individual hero story that the leader will fix everything is silliness. It's complete silliness because the system is, at least in most cases, far more powerful than any individual leader. Yeah, yeah. At the same time, yes, leadership behavior matters, but you need to also look at the system. If you're going to help change behavior, you need to look at the system because the system's often driving much of that behavior. I've also heard you say that, you know, the old research, affirming that power. What's that? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And then there's a sense of narcissism that could happen at senior leaders where they think they're God and no one's giving them feedback anymore and it becomes a shit show. Those are some core things I've heard you say. And when I asked you the question, how do we help organizations that are struggling aside from re engineer them like the nurses completely, is we get them to start asking those tough questions in a more systematic way and putting those things to the test and testing other things maybe to go, does that really work? That's the primary mechanism. What have I missed? Yeah, I think that's a really good summary and I think just, just reinforcing that last point. One thing that's very curious to me is that organizations talk all the time about innovation and being agile and testing new products, but they never test new ways to organize themselves. Yeah. You know, we've been organizing organizations with the spans and layers of hierarchy, you know, since the early part of the last century. And so I would encourage leaders to say, do things like, well, you know, take a branch or a store or a region or a country even, and just test something different in how you organize yourselves. Yeah. You know, it might not work, but you might learn a hell of a lot from it and it could be fun. And I want to bring you, finally, the very final thing is bring you full circle to the comment on LinkedIn around these events, these leadership events, where you go and hear the latest speaker on something. Just tell me a little bit more. The last part, just a short. Like, do you think it's because they're reinforcing the message of the idolized you, the leader, the one person, the hero can change at all. What was the paradigm you were coming from when you were calling it out? So that's certainly one part of it, is that they, they reinforce the myth that leadership is the answer to everything. Individual leadership. Right. The second thing they do is they often rely on, and this is quite hilarious, sometimes they often rely on like sort of retired football managers or ex Athletes to kind of, you know, everybody. And that normally lasts for between a half a day to a day, and then everyone just forgets about it. And then the third thing they do is what business schools do, which was invented by Harvard, is they use a case study, right, where they describe how this amazing intervention worked in this company over here. And what we learned was all you need to do is these 10. These 10 things, right? And that, you know, goes straight into the kind of nonsense susceptibility that we have to. Because in reality, organizations are actually very complex things, especially big ones. And there is just no evidence to suggest that you can take an approach that might have worked in one context and drop it on another context, and that's all you need to do. So actually, it creates false expectation that you come away with some kind of answer to your problem, whereas, actually, that's just not true, I'm afraid. So, yeah. There's a whole bunch of things I think that it reinforces that I don't think are helpful. Michael, I really appreciate you being open to this conversation, and I think it says something about you. And actually, I've only met a few people like you who've actually reached out to me. Like, there was a lady who wrote a whole book about how important values were, and she reached out to me and she said, you've said everything that I believe in is nonsense. I want to meet with you to understand why. And actually, I wish there was more of that. People actually having a good discussion and agreeing to disagree on some stuff, but that's quite rare. So thank you for that. Thank you. I really appreciate you being. I love your research approach as well. So I really appreciate it. Paul, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm hoping the listeners found this really interesting, and it challenged them to think more critically, to question things more deeply. I think it's a wonderful attribute to have. I hope so. Or they might just think I'm just a crazy, you know, guy in the corner shouting like a lunatic. That is also a possibility. There's no doubt there'll be all of the above. You're a genie. All right, Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Michael. The secret life of great leaders is brought to you by Triple Goal, where good coaches become great and leaders grow their impact where it matters most. Discover more@triplegoal.com make sure to search for the secret life of great leaders in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or anything anywhere else podcasts are found. Click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Triple Goal, thanks for listening.