Dr Russell Thackeray - Q&A Session January 8 2024

Hi, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And first of all, can I wish everybody a Happy New Year? This is going out early in 2024. Hooray. And it's been a fascinating year so far. And this time we've decided to do the podcast different way. We've had quite a lot of questions in sent to us over the last period of time. I think lots of podcasts are doing questions, so my colleague in crime, Paula, has just joined me to sort some of them out and sit through things. So first of all, welcome to the podcast, Paula.

Hi. Hello, Russell.

And lots of people will know your name, won't they? Because lots of people who book our guests, who do our admin, who follow up on our social media, talk to you all the time, they very rarely hear your voice. You're hidden away behind the scenes. Normally.

Yes. That's the way I like it.

I think actually there's a song like that. That's the way I like it.

That's a very old song.

It is. Well, I am a very old person, but I mean, it's time to spring into the spotlight and let's have a look at some of these questions. I think we'll do three or four of them, just see how we get on and what time takes.

Yeah, there's quite a variety of things that have come in from different people. So, if we kick off with something which actually is quite current at the moment. There is a lot of stuff around toxic resilience and, in actual fact, this is something that one of our listeners in Boston was asking about, James, and he really wanted to know, is there really such a thing as toxic resilience?

That's a brilliant question. Thank you, James. Right. Well, the first thing I'd say is, I wonder what people mean by toxic resilience. I think what people are thinking is that organisations expect people just to sort of use the phrase man up, to get strong, to stay strong, to almost become quite rigid or lose their flexibility, because all we want you to do is to be there and do your job and stop moaning. And actually, we're going to buy you resilience training so you know how to do that. And of course, I think what people are saying when they say toxic resilience is actually what they're talking about is toxic leadership, because actually, resilience is a competence that you develop as a human being that allows you to have the energy to need to do the job in hand.

And there are two things about resilience. It gets consumed during the day through the amount of work you do and the number of setbacks you have and the amount of grit and energy and determination you need to use. And then when you run out, you do what you call bouncing back, which has an element of learning within it. So, the whole process of resilience is actually about learning and thriving and growing and maximising your potential. So, it can't be toxic. So, the thing which is toxic is the expectation, and this is the problem, isn't it? Because often we confuse pressure as being an external thing, but actually what leaders do is they put external pressure on people, and toxic resilience becomes part of their expectation. They expect people just to be able to cope and thrive all the time.

The trouble with coping and thriving all the time with a poor leader is that your ability to constantly regenerate that energy you need to do the job in hand sort of dissipates over time, or especially if you have even a half decent leader and you're working in a really bad system where the work you have is relentless in front of you. You can't replace or regenerate that energy fast enough, and so the energy disappears. And I think a lot of leaders talk about toxic resilience because people, they expect people to work without expressing emotion or something or expressing an opinion. And I think what you get there is literally toxic leadership. So, for me, there is no such thing as toxic resilience. I just think what you have is toxic leadership.

And what we know about toxic leadership is it generates what we call burnout. Burnout is a workplace condition defined by the WHO. And it is about losing as being completely overwhelmed, completely overburdened, which is a leadership problem. And it's about actually being so overwhelmed that you lose your ability to care. And actually, you feel stretched and drained because you're tired. And that is the classic symptom of not having the energy you need to do the job you need to do. So, you can see how the two things come together, and you can see how a leader would think, let's have more investment and resilience so we can stop burnout. And, of course, we have that problem where all these terms start to swirl together, and people lose their meaning. So, for me, no such thing as toxic resilience, but there is toxic leadership.

And sometimes you have decent leadership, but within a toxic system or a toxic culture, and I think that's a different thing altogether. Resilience is great. It has no downside, and it's simply a competence. How about that, James? Ok. Would you disagree or agree from all the work we've done together. What do you think?

Well, I tend to agree with what you're saying. I mean, toxic resilience is just a term that just seems to have popped up fairly recently, following on from things like toxic positivity. And obviously there's a great crossover between the two, I think.

Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it, how people come up with these? It's almost like someone's written a book somewhere, haven't they? And it coined the term, and the term is quite new and novel and it's stuck. And it's a bit like resilience has already gone down that semantic degradation path, that stress went down, and mental health went down, which it ends up meaning nothing if we're not careful. It doesn't help that resilience is actually defined as two things already. So now it becomes just a load of old swag used to sell a bunch of books which are not about resilience. We've had guests on this podcast who've talked about the fact that resilience isn't a good thing to have, and they don't like the definition.

And then they talk about a different word which means resilience and how they think it's great because it's in their book. I mean, call me old fashioned, but maybe I'm being a bit cynical.

Paula 05:48 Paula

On that cynical note, as you were talking about leadership, somebody else has actually asked us about leadership. Again, it’s really a wide ranging area, isn't it? But we've got a chap called Gary who's based up in Edinburgh, and he's asking about what is the best type of leadership. I mean, there's masses of different types. You've just touched on the toxic type. What would you think from all the different styles would actually be the best way of leading people?

It's really challenging. I always think what you have to do is you have to adjust the style to the person that sits in front of you. So, what a leader has to figure out is how they work to get the best out of the people around them. And that's what a leader does. And actually, there's a combination of leadership, which is setting a vision and a sense of where we want to go with a bunch of management stuff, which is how we get there and what the plan is and how we manage performance on a day to day basis. And we talk about leadership all the time, forgetting management, which is really the bit that makes it happen. So, there's a lot of old baloney about leadership. But for me, leadership is about giving something people to follow in terms of toolkits.

I mean, I learned situational leadership many years ago. I've never found anything better, which is you've got someone sitting in front of you who needs to do a job. Do they have the competence, the confidence and the willingness to do that job? And you adapt what you have to say to that person based on those things. For me, again, that works, and it allows you to be a really adult leader.

And in our own book, or the book I'm writing or we're writing, really, when I take all the glory while you still want to work, we talk about this idea of fluidic leadership, this ability to change, to be able to know where you are rock solid in your view, know where you could be a bit more liquidic or fluidic or fluid and know when you can sort of be sort of airy, fairy and sort of free and all over the place type of thing. And what matters there is what do you need to do to get the job done in that moment in time?

And it's how you have professional conversations with people where I think you just deal with people as adults in front of you're going to have disagreements because that's the nature of business, because there's no one or right way to do it. So, for me, it's about having professional conversations. What I hate is this business in leadership where we actually start in people like treating people like their children. So, I always tell this coaching story about how I sat in a room once and listened to a coach taking a call from a child who he was telling to grow up and be a man. And there were eleven. And the coaching subject was about how he wouldn't tell their 40-year-old number two a problem with their performance because it might hurt their feelings.

And it's like some people treat their kids like adults and their adults. And that's the bit for me. You need to be working in the adult all the time and had a more fluid approach for me.

So what we're basically talking about is leadership has to be a very adaptable process.

Yeah, it's driven around the needs of each of the party and the situation at got. It's that classic thing, isn't Japan Airlines thing came down the other day, had either airport. I mean, you don't sit there having a conversation and a discussion voting on whether you should get off. Someone takes the leaves and shouts and screams. You don't worry about hurting people's feelings you get and do it because it's always a combination of the task in hands, the resources you have available and the time, which includes the time and the level of risk or severity. I know it's a stupid example, but it's the point, isn't it? I mean, if someone's getting off and saying you've offended me and shouting at me to get off the airplane, I don't think anyone's going to have much of much truck with it. No.

And I think that's the thing, isn't it? We forget as leaders and managers when we've got time, and we do faux consultation. So, we ask people what they think and I'm not really interested in their view. How many 360-degree feedback sessions have we run, facilitated, talked through, seen the results of where actually the leaders, the ball, the lead is the issue and they just say, well actually we're doing this to persuade everybody else that we're wrong and we've consulted. It's just hopeless. Figure out what you want, figure out the person in front of you, figure out the situation in hand and make it work.

Yeah, I know. I've certainly read some stats fairly recently about the issues that people have with their leaders, and it certainly is a growing problem amongst a lot of workforces. The issue is not the job or the workplace it's actually their leader that's the bugbear, that's what's causing the issues.

I think that's really interesting, isn't it? I think people tend to leave jobs, sorry, people tend to leave people rather than companies. So, you can work for a great company, a terrible company, I mean, but you've got a great boss and so you stay and vice versa. And we know that because you'll see people who leave a company, and they'll take the team with them. Yes, that's happened time after time again. Also, what you also see in our world is that we have people who run organisations and they have a constant stream like a conveyor belt of people. And HR very rarely look at the leader and say the leader is the problem.

What they all say is, oh, it's a fault of HR because we have recruited badly or we've not done the performance management system or we're trying to dress the thing up. No one sits down with the leader and says it's time you were moved on. And the trouble is with a lot of small organizations is sometimes the leader is the biggest shareholder.

Yeah.

And that's where people like me come in to go into organisations and say you're affecting the ability of your own company to thrive because you, as a leader are poor at what you do. .

Well, hopefully that's just a rant, wasn't it? Sorry?

Well, it might help Gary, in a way. Let's hope so. Okay, let's have a look. What else have we been asked recently? Okay, what do you think is the difference between resilience and adaptability? Do you think there is a difference between resilience and adaptability?

That is a really good question. And again, we'll come back onto semantics and terms, don't we? Adaptability is your ability to change, weave, and literally adapt in the moment, which I think is a mindset thing. Resilience, for me, is having the stamina to weather the storm when things are going wrong, which also. So, for me, adaptability is a subset of resilience. So, if you're resilient, you'll tend to be good at adapting because you're good at learning. And years ago, I think it was David Curtin. K-I-R-T-O-N-I don't know if it was David. Certainly. Curtin, Gustav. Never mind. My memory of names is always terrible. He talked about the difference between innovating and adapting and adaptability is this idea of saying, let's do this differently. Let's just do this differently.

And that's mindset, because if you sit there going, oh, I can't do it, then you're sort of lost. So, for me, adaptability is about how you change in the moment, how you experiment and do things differently. And resilience is that it sits within the resilience bucket of how you actually weather the storm and have the energy you need to have to be able to manage the task at hand. So being able to adapt and think differently and move ahead and change your perception of things is part of your adaptability, which is part of how you generate energy.

Okay? Right.

Clear as mud.

Say again?

Clear as mud.

Okay. Just to tie things up for today, just one more question, which actually is really from me, I guess, 2024. How do you see it going? Do you have any particular expectations of what's going to happen or what you want to achieve, or just generally in the world of work?

Is this you thinking about pay rise time again?

Well, now you mention it.

Well, okay. What do I think? Well, I think one of the most exciting things at the moment is AI. And I think people who encompass it, jump onto it will realise, actually, it's a lot less than people are banging on about. So, what we've got is a big fear of deep fake issues, which is one. It's a bit like having a gun and a bullet, isn't it? A gun doesn't have to be terrible. It doesn't have to kill people. A gun can just be something to keep your door open with. And the thing with AI could be a massive tool and I think a massive advantage. And I think AI's best use will be how people use AI, rather than AI using us people. I think we're away from that yet. So I'm very excited about that. I think that's great.

I think it gives us a whole new paradigm to think about the world. The other thing is, we've got a lot of elections this year.

Yeah.

I think in the whole world, we've got the largest number of elections of all time.

Yeah. I was listening to something the other day and I can't remember what the numbers were, but it's absolutely huge. We've already had a couple, haven't we? I think.

And we've got this tension between populism and liberalism in the world, which I think is fascinating. And there's going to be a UK. What's the word? Election. It doesn't really matter what the result is. In a funny sort of way, I think sometimes change is good. I mean, I have my own political views, which are neither here nor there, this. But I do think whatever happens, that will be the opportunity to vent and to have a sort of cathartic period of change, whichever party it is. I mean, the current Tory party have already changed three times in the last two years, haven't they? They talked about how terrible things were in the past and their own government, and then brought those people back. I mean, who thought he's being sounded out for a job again.

So I think my capacity to look at the world of politics is absolute. And I think as I get older, I find politics more and more fascinating. And you see the ironies in it, I think, and you see how things have changed. I was watching a very old Yes, Prime Minister, or Yes Minister the other day, and it is just the same now. All the corruption, connivance, carry on - three c's. It was meant to be funny then. And then you look at the thick of it and it's all now happening for real. It's a bit like in Star Trek, and the idea of the walking phone and the transporter and all that sort of stuff. It's almost like these comedy programs have set the template for what's going to happen. That's a really interesting thing.

I think Malcolm Gladwell talked about this idea that the reason that Americans disrespect the police is the way that police dramas are, the way that police are presented in popular culture on police, you know, are either seen as idiots because that's why investigators have to come in and do the job, or they're seen as corrupt, or they're seen as too strict. And it's almost like the police have become the representation of what the media said they were. And it's almost like in our country that politicians have become the representation of the most extreme things. That black mirror, think of it. Yes, Prime Minister had to say. I mean, I'm surprised they're not all singing the chicken song together.

Yes, I can remember that.

So I always look forward to the app because actually I think what you do is you go through extracted enjoyments of the year, whatever you're doing. And as you know, I'm in holiday in two weeks, so that's all I'm thinking about. That's my holiday. I shall be heading off and doing very little except having a bucket with my brain fogged in it for two weeks.

But you're not going for a couple of weeks.

No. So. Well, thank you very much for that. What about you, Paula? What about 2024 for you? Anything exciting on the horizon?

I tend to avoid resolutions and/or revolutions of any sort, so no, I don't tend to go down that route. But yeah, I'm looking forward to it being quite an interesting year. Certainly, coming back to you talking about elections and politics, what's going on in this country and obviously in the States and whatever is going to be really fascinating.

Well, look, thank you for all you've done for me. I've enjoyed this episode. Perhaps we'll do another one of these again soon.

Yeah. If anybody has got any questions, then feel free to fire them in. Then we can obviously pick them up at a later date.

Yeah, and you can send us to info@qedod.com okay, see you on the next one.