The Happy at Work Podcast

Practical Well-Being Strategies with Dr. Fiona Crichton, Health Psychology Scientist

The Happy at Work Podcast Season 6 Episode 7

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In this episode, Michael and Laura learn from Dr. Fiona Crichton, who shares her fascinating career journey and insights into improving individual and organizational well-being. 

Fiona began her career as a litigator in Auckland, New Zealand, in the 1990s. While she enjoyed the work, the legal field at that time lacked a focus on work-life balance. Fiona stepped away from litigation to spend more time with her young children. In her new role, she began reading reports on criminal cases and was impacted by the traumatic content. This experience made her realize how one's work can deeply affect their well-being. 

Fiona went on to study health psychology, which focuses on resilience and motivating healthy behaviors despite complex personal factors. Fiona gained a deep understanding of human motivation and behavior through this work. 

Currently, Fiona helps leaders and individuals create personalized well-being plans by identifying values, strengths, and interests. When integrated into team meetings, this modeling of healthy behaviors can increase psychological safety and foster authentic connections. Fiona's insights provide practical guidance for cultivating well-being at both the individual and organizational levels.

To stay connected and continue the conversation, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.

If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!

Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!

Laura Hamill:

Welcome back for another episode of the happy at work podcast, with Laura, Tessa and Michael.

Tessa Misiaszek:

Each week we have thoughtful conversations with leaders, founders and authors about happiness at work. Tune

Michael McCarthy:

in each Thursday for a new conversation. Enjoy the show

Laura Hamill:

Welcome to the happy at work podcast. We are so excited to have Dr. Fiona Crighton. Here with us today. Welcome Fiona.

Fiona C.:

Oh, thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to it. Us

Laura Hamill:

to us too. So what we'd love to start with is just to learn a little bit more about you. So if you could, would you start with telling us about your career journey, and how you landed where you are now?

Unknown:

Well, I'm a kiwi. So I'm I'm beaming in from Auckland, New Zealand. Laura, Michael, I started off actually, as a lawyer, I started off a long time ago, we're now talking about the 1990s here. So I started as a litigator, a commercial litigator. So I was in court, I loved my work. But in the 1990s, I don't know that we were very good at work life balance. So my my job was basically we worked hard, we played hard, all of those kinds of things that you say, and I probably wasn't really looking after myself a lot. But I enjoyed myself. One of the things that I did note was that it wasn't sustainable once I had small children. And the law in the 1990s wasn't very forgiving. So what I did do was I stepped out of litigation, and I ended up working, doing more kind of desk work for the governing body in New Zealand, which is the Law Society. Now the Law Society, what it does is it's a regulatory body, but it also looks at things like precedent, which is the kind of the law that that that cases tell you, the law should be interpreted as. And it felt kind of innocuous. I was like 24 hours, 30 hours rest of the time with my small children. But unfortunately for me, or fortunately, I did learn some things because the content of the work that I was doing was criminal. I wasn't a criminal lawyer, but the content was a lot of things like violent crime sentencing reports, a lot of looking at offenders holistically to see where they'd come from. And it was kind of brutal, the content of the work actually had a huge impact on my wellbeing. And that was the first time I realized the impact of work on life. I didn't have a real idea that that's what was going on. But my children was small. i Everything was going right in my world. But I was really flat. I wasn't myself, I'm pretty optimistic. And it took me a while to realize the content of the work that I was doing was impacting how I felt when I went back to them to my work, and I said, I did three things wrong. I used to work 24, I used to work 12 hour days in a small and dark room in the High Court. So that's not great for your well being. So I wasn't getting a lot of sun. And the content was pretty dramatic. I wasn't taking breaks, I was kind of powering through it. And I had no idea that what I was reading because I wasn't frontline wasn't talking, I think if I'd been a frontline worker, I might have worked out. But what I found was reading the stuff all day, every day had a huge impact on how I felt outside of work. And then I learned about vicarious trauma, the idea that you can be traumatized from the content of your work. It's like a It's a now a recognized psychosocial risk that we know about. So I did some work on how I would be able to manage my work life and do the content because I really liked the work. But I didn't manage it very well. So that was my first kind of foray into the idea of what work design, how it might impact. And from there, my initial thing was I was going to be a clinical psychologist because I was also fairly disillusioned with the criminal justice system. It felt like every sentencing report that I read, was really clear that this was not about bad people. It was about lack of support in the community. So that was my aspiration. I went and studied psychology. And along the way what happened was my one of my closest friends, their young son got cancer and over two years died. And that pushed me into health psychology. So I ended up with it's kind of weird, I kept going with with with law went into health psychology. And health psychology is a really interesting one because health psychology is really about resilience. It's about not about people being mentally unwell. It's about people being well, and dealing with just the rough stuff that comes so Going into health psychology was an amazing thing for me, I learned so much about human beings, it's really about the idea as humans, we know what we should do sometimes, but we don't do it. So understanding what motivates people. So there's a lot of stuff around motivation. There's a lot of stuff around, how do we get people to do the things we need to do? Because when you're unwell, what happens often is, you'll get a rehabilitation plan, or a doctor will tell you, you should do X, Y, and Zed. And what we were seeing from the dad was people don't. So it's understanding why, why they might not do the things that are actually good for them. We definitely saw it and COVID didn't weigh the idea that somehow there were reasons why people didn't take necessarily, some people didn't get vaccinated. Some people didn't believe in social distancing, all of the things that as health practitioners, we might have thought were obvious. People didn't necessarily do the things that we would say in our world, is necessary for their health. Because really, humans are complicated. And so health psychology is really about understanding humans as people, and giving them the story and the things that they need to to move towards the behavior that we know will be helpful for them. And things like worldview, things like how we grew up, things like our family, things, like what we're reading at the time have a huge impact on our, on, on our, the way that we interact and how we are. And then that brought me into the world of self management. So I worked in with a with organizations who were trying to build programs for people who had diabetes, who had mental ill health to get them to do the things they needed to do around their well being. And one of the things that I was looking at was, what are the what are the perceptions that human beings have that stop them doing the things we know that they need to do, one of the things that we see is, for instance, if someone has a heart attack, and a heart attack is a big wake up call, right? It tells you, maybe I need to do things a bit differently, particularly if you're in a situation with a massive heart attack, you might have died. But what we're seeing from the data is people would walk away from hospitals and not necessarily do the things that they needed to do. And when you start talking to people and unpacking why they might not change their diet, they might not look at doing some exercise, they might not take it easy at work, take some time off a whole thing, a whole lot of things come into play, it can be I don't believe the heart attack, heart attack was inevitable. It's just I'm genetically programmed to have a heart attack. So therefore, anything you tell me to do, there's no point. Sometimes people believe that the diet isn't really related to heart, they don't see the link, they haven't made that jump. Others might go exercise actually puts pressure on my heart. So I'm definitely not exercising, because I might then have another heart attack. And what we've learned is if you understand how, what human beings think, then you can start to help them do the stuff that they need to do. And the biggest predictor of adherence and good outcomes and health is the relationship that you have with your primary health provider, with your relationship with your doctor, the relationship, whether you like your doctor, do you have a good relationship with a nurse that's dealing with you has a bigger impact on outcomes, then the medication and all of the other things that go on, and that actually can be translated into the working environment.

Michael McCarthy:

Wow, that is so interesting. I love this journey. It's like this cool little windy road, you end up in this really cool spot. So futur Can you tell us now what is groove? And what is a what's the kind of work that you're doing there now.

Unknown:

So growth is a workplace Well, being a workplace science organization, we started with wellbeing. And what we realized is that it's more than that. If you start with wellbeing, often people will think well being is that there's a lot of misperceptions. And Michael, you probably are really aware of it. That idea that well being is this thing where people take responsibility for their own health. And it's very much about the individual. And there's a lot of misperception about workplace well being. So what we've moved and Laura will be able to also speak to this as go well actually what we're talking about is individuals and teams and whole organization. So our organization is what we call workplace science based. And the idea behind groove was effectively to make a big difference to how people were interacting and their health at work and New Zealand and Australia and we're now going out across the world, because there was a big need. We saw high rates of burnout in New Zealand. We saw that people were not happy as much as they should be. We also saw some mental ill health statistics that were alarming. And so really started out the founder of Our startup was a mental health advocate, and someone who'd had a mental health journey. And so they brought me in as a consultant because they could see that I was working kind of parallel types of organizations. And his vision really was to turn around the mental ill health statistics in New Zealand. So we started by going well, actually, where can we get them buy in from people, workplaces, because a lot of people are at work. Work has a big impact on wellbeing. So we thought, Well, maybe if we want to change mental ill health statistics, workplaces, that's a good place to start. But also, if we want to change mental ill health, actually, we need to get to be the ambulance at the top of the cliff, not the bottom of the cliff. So we started there saying actually, and from my point of view, I'm not about mental ill health, I'm really about wellbeing. So I my kind of take on it was if we want to change mental ill health, we actually want to make people healthier, mentally healthier. So that actually they don't ever get to the point of crisis. If we can do things that put up a stopgap that might be really helpful. And so that was kind of the ethos of going okay, great. We're going to be in workplaces, because that's where people are, we are going to think about mental well being rather than mental ill health because that feels pretty preventative. And then like, what are we going to look like? How are we going to do that? So now it was about six years ago, I guess. So it was at the time apps were out. So we thought well, maybe an app would be really helpful. Maybe we'd think about gamification, because I've done some work with gamification and, and app development when it comes to things like HIV or adherence. So we thought, yeah, okay, it sounds like a good place to start. So let's start to go around and talk to organizations about why people don't look after their well being at work. And really, interestingly, or probably very predictably, what we saw were three things when you ask someone at work, and I go into workplaces where there were a lot of stress, people be crying at their desk, it was a real eye opener for me. I I mean, obviously, I understood that work has a huge impact on your well being. But when you start to interview people in the workplace, you realize it has a huge impact on how you feel of what's going well, you're feeling good, that's probably going to translate to home. So going around workplaces, and some of them were in high distress, they were going through restructures. And they weren't handling it very well. And when you interviewed people and said, you know, why don't you look at your well being at work or, you know, what, what does wellbeing even mean? And what would you need to look after your well being at work, three themes came up, one, never see my leaders look after their well being. So therefore, I don't really think my organization cares about my well being. So wellbeing is not a priority in this organization, because I can't see it modeled. The second reason people said, like, I'm not looking after my well being because whatever in a sector work, we don't do that at work. We have no time. Are you joking, there is no time in a workday for us to be doing anything around our, our mental well being a joking. So it's not modeled and there is no time. And I don't really know what it is. So those three things were where we started was. Okay, so if we got leaders to model it, workplaces say they want it. And we know from the science, there's a lot of reasons why well being baked into your workday helps productivity. So there's a good narrative for workplaces as to why they might want to do it. If we start with leaders, and it's modeled, we might overcome a barrier there to get people to maybe do it, whatever it is. And we realize and whatever it is, can't take much time. Because people will a big barrier as there's no time. And the Thirdly is that there's the thirdly, the third thing is education around what it is and what this isn't for me, because most people would say, Oh, I'm not mentally unwell, why would I need to do anything differently? I'm fine. This isn't for me. Because we know that a lot of mental well being or wellbeing programs at work. The barrier is it's not for me, I'm not unwell, or wait till I'm unwell to do it. So we started there by looking at the barriers in thinking, how can we then implement a program in workplaces that leaders do? That doesn't take much time and people understand it's for them. So that's where we started.

Laura Hamill:

And that's, I mean, you do such amazing work in this space. She didn't even say anything about that, Michael, but she does really amazing work with companies to do that. It's so impressive. She feels that you have so many layers and so it's hard to like pick which one to like dig in a little bit deeper to but let's talk a little bit about your work as a health psychology specialist. So you do some work around expectations. And I just happen to know this. I've had a little bit of preview and so I know you do some really interesting work or you have done some really interesting work in the So would you tell us a little bit more about your work around expectations? Yeah.

Unknown:

So when I was doing my PhD, you know, and you too will know this very well with your students. And when you are going through this journey, it's like, what am I going to do this research? And what am I really interested in? And because I was a lawyer, I'd been asked to look at some affidavits and some affidavits around people who were objecting to wind farms on the basis that people were getting sick around wind farms. And when I looked at the affidavits, it was very clear to me that what could be going on was something called an no SIBO effect. And now I know SIBO effect is when you get given some information about symptoms that you might expect to experience, and then you experience them. Now, most people will say, Yeah, okay. But you know, that wouldn't be me, I'm not, I'm not influenced by expectations in terms of my physical health health. It's literally why I got ethics approval is because the ethics board, for the experiments I'm going to explain the ethics board went, well, this isn't going to happen. So we don't really have to worry too much about whether or not you're gonna be able to make people sick, by giving them a narrative. So what I did was I went into, I allied with some acoustic research specialists, because the narrative around windfarms is that there's, there's sound below the threshold of hearing that is causing illness. And it's about slow oscillations of the air, when you have slow oscillations of the air, there's a thing called infrasound. And it sounds a bit spooky, because you can't hear it. The truth is Infrasound is in the environment. Right now we've got air conditioning, there's infrasound, if you buy a beach, there's room for sound. So we know it's just a normal part of experience of the world. But most people have never heard of it. So what I thought was, I could test out whether or not people reading the information about wind farms, which there was quite a bit there was a there was a book written and 2007 around wind, fine wind farm syndrome, they call it, there were documentaries in Australia about how some wind farms were causing whole communities to abandon farms. So there was a lot of very emotional rhetoric around there all about the fact that this low frequency sound was causing illness. And so what I did was tested it, I got people to come into a lab and and listen to just I didn't even have to make anything up. I just played them some videos about infrasound. And wind farms that were out there, if you would, doing a little Google search, because it was a wind farm coming to a community near you, you'd find this information. And then I went into the lab and I did this thing, we call it a sham controlled study, because it's below the sound of hearing, you can do this thing where half of the time you're exposed to nothing, and half of the time you're exposed to infrasound. So it's a really nice controlled study. And what I did was half of the people in my first experiment, were exposed to information on the internet around what would happen if you listen to infrasound. And the other half, listen to information about what Infrasound is, you know, it's normal, you go to the beach, it's now you know, you're exposed to it because of air conditioning. And then I just did this thing where you have the time you were exposed to no sound and have to infer sound, but I, I swapped the order, because sometimes you can have order effects. And what what I saw was really amazing. And the ethics board luckily never found out was I the people that were exposed to that information. Not everybody because of course is an individual differences. But a significant number of people got very unwell. To the point where I had, it was my first experiment was with students, as we know, that's very often what happens. I had a dad ring me he found the participant information sheet and rang me, because we couldn't really debrief at the time, we debriefed very quickly. You know, it didn't say, because we wanted to protect the idea that people wouldn't know this was an expectation effect. So that was my first real, real clear See, seeing really clear understanding that the information we're given has a profound impact on how we feel to the point where kids, I did have someone for much, because of course fear there are two reasons why one is that we have got symptoms all the time. So if you wake up, you might have a slight headache, you know, you've probably if you're under under stress, you're a bit tense. You eat something doesn't agree with you. But normally these things go past a nauseous really, or you just kind of might go up but I've got a bit of a headache in two hours you don't. But if you're given us a kind of schema for what those symptoms represent, suddenly you can miss attribute normal symptoms to something nefarious like infrasound. And the other thing is when you're terrified, and this is quite scary, the idea that you're being exposed to something that might make you sick, you've got symptoms of anxiety, so there's a reason that's the no SIBO effect in in practice, and then I reversed it by giving people go got information about him for sound because there's also some information out there, there was an app on Apple that you could buy that was exposure to infrasound will create peace throughout the body. You'll feel calm, it alleviates pain. It's amazing. And so I gave people that information as well. And what we saw with people that were given that schema, well, they loved it. They wanted to buy it. They're like, Where can I get this amazing infrasound. So that was an I did various experiments about things like how we would protect and windfarm communities against misinformation that causes symptoms, because it's about anxiety. But really, it's such good knowledge that how we react in the world is so dependent on what we believe what we what we've heard, in terms of our mood, and in terms of our physical health. And I think that we also see this in the workplace a lot, you know, those people that they're having a bad day, and it's all about the stories that they tell each other, we can see it when we have. And there's definitely a kind of cascade effect. We know that if you've got someone in the workplace who's worried about something, and they start talking about the stuff they're worried about, someone might not have been worried about, but suddenly, they're like, I'm quite worried about that. And in workplaces, they're a bit like wind farm communities, the idea of the information that we tell each other has a huge impact on both our physical and our mental well being. So it's been something that I'm aware of, and trying to take that into the way that I live my life and the way that I talk to leaders about how stories are important what you say matters, people will hear, they also pick up little bits, because they might have preconceived ideas. Because it wasn't everybody who responded in this way in the lab, are people often who were already highly anxious, you know, we did some negative effects, whether you're already wired to be a bit anxious, people who are more negatively wired to the negative information. But interestingly, what we did see is people who are wired for the negative information got a really high placebo effect as well. So there are some people who are just very aware of the information that they're getting. So that was what I did. I mean, obviously, not so related to workplace well being. But definitely there's a layer around story that I find interesting.

Michael McCarthy:

I love your stories. It's really interesting. And I'm curious about some of your favorite interventions that you've seen really work to help people have more well being at work. I love interventions, I love doing experiments and measuring them. And I'm curious what, what some of your favorite ones are.

Unknown:

So what we thought was what if we looked at individual well being that I know that individual well being is not going to answer all of the issues around organizational factors that can lead to poor outcomes at work. But so our initial work was an if we got workplace well being integrated into the workday and Laura's working on some of that with us. What what I did was, initially, I'd go into workplaces, and we'd take leaders, and we'd start with explaining what well being is, you know, that jewel continuum model of wellbeing from languishing to flourishing, we're not on the mental health continuum. So there's a bit of education around this. And that science tells us if we if we do things every day to stand down our amygdala because we're constantly in fight or flight, particularly leaders, we know from the neuroscience that when you open an email, the amygdala fires and the amygdala is, of course, the part of the brain in the limbic system that's responsible for fight or flight. That actually, every time there's a little bit of change in the workplace, that the limbic system is basically an overdrive, that emotional part of the brain. And the science tells us that if we actually take breaks during the day, get outside, look out into the into the distance, or take some time to drop, drop the breath to the belly, or take a two minute break between meetings, rather than back to back meetings. Because what we see from the sciences, people aren't encoding information, even during a two hour meeting, you get mentally exhausted, if you have strategies in your day. And we talk a little bit about, you know, the the, the, the amygdala being the lookout in the brain, and it's constantly on. One of the things that I did my initial search sessions, and this was pre COVID. As we put balloons in a room, everyone would come in because we do these things in person, and they blow up a balloon. And then we put the balloons at the back of the room, and they just blown up the balloons, right? And they've sitting down at it. And then we'd start speaking, I would walk around to the back of the room and I'd pop the balloons, and everyone would just leap out of their seat like well, not everyone again, some people were like, ah, but you know, I can then say, you know that you all knew what that was. You just blown up that balloon. And now you've I've popped it and you've had a fright, and it's because the fight or flight response is so automatic Take, it's not about your conscious brain, you won't be aware. And it's so fast, because you know, and after people jump, they're all a bit embarrassed. And it's like, no, it's automatic. So I try very quickly to explain that kind of automatic response in a way that makes sense. However, I couldn't do the balloon thing virtually. So now I talk about driving along the road and how a car can come up in front of you and your foots on the brake. And people really get that. And then I say, Look, when you when you open an email that's happening. So you need these things integrated into your day. As leaders, you need to be protecting your, your basically sustaining your energy throughout the day. And then I talked to them about the idea of the brain, new neural pathways over the course of your life, that challenges are really good. We're not trying to get rid of stress, because that's a leadership thing, right? People are going, Oh, we don't want everyone sitting around being so relaxed at work, they never get anything done. So there's a bit of an education piece around, okay, so this is what you need to be doing some breaks in the day, here's some things that you need to be doing challenging, good. But you know, what's better, challenging and celebrating, because you can't stay motivated. If you don't notice the small, incremental improvements. I work with, particularly sales groups who are very bad at celebrating until the end of the year when their tech sales targets are out here. So there's a bit of education around the idea that you can't set up targets that are six months, nine months, 12 months away, you have to be able to, for human beings, both you as a leader and your team need to be looking at how you're tracking and celebrating it. and linking it to the brain is really effective. I think for leadership, we know that people need to be connected. And I also tell the story of the law firm that I was in and we went about inputs and outputs, because it was six minute increments. And we were never encouraged to really talk to each other and share things. But we know that when you talk about issues at work, you're starting to solve them because when you speak about emotion, you speak about problems. It moves it from the limbic system into the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex to the part of the brain that's responsible for processing emotion and coming to solutions. So actually having a workmate is a good thing in the workday to either unload on just say, ah, had this terrible interaction. And then you can move past it or to process emotions. I mean, sorry to process things that are going on at work. So you're setting the scene around these things, we know that people need to be able to calm the amygdala, they need to be challenged, but they need to be celebrating, they need to be moving in the work day that are moving as the other one, we're sitting too long. So you need to be getting up. You need to be connecting, and you need to be celebrating. And when I say celebrating, and this is the one that I think we we find difficult, particularly in my part of the world, is the idea of noticing that you're doing a good job. Because we can see leaders who are so full of I should have been doing more or not doing a good job. And I speak to leaders all the time who have this narrative, they just feel like they're not good enough. So it's a bit about get rid of those shirts. What are you celebrating? Are you noticing the good things along with all the stuff that you've got to solve? Because there's a lot of science around that? And finally, what are you are you having a laugh in the day, because laughter is endorphins. So there's a lot of science around what we say. But what I try to do is get people to link, they come up with some action plans. For them, every individual is different. Because the first is a it's a me going in for an hour with them. And linking those things. What am I going to do to stand on my amygdala, it's going to be matched to your values, your strengths and your interests. So what matters to you, and almost everyone will say, because they have to choose three things. And they tell me and it's very interactive, they'll say almost invariably, my relationships, my family, that's actually what really matters to me. Often, it'll be physical health, or it could be social justice. Sometimes it's work. And we know from science, you're more likely to do stuff. And whatever it is that you are going to plan to do is linked to things that matter to you, it furthers your goals. So if you're going to, for instance, take some breaks in the day and work as your real, you know, work high performer, it's like this will get you there. If you do these small things, it will actually feed the values that you have. And choosing those small actions need to be matched to things you want to do what you're good at what you're interested in, because otherwise you're not going to do them because that's what humans do go I'm don't even want to do that. So it's really setting people up for a plan of doing two or three things in the day, consistently. That matches values, strengths and interests. And the interesting thing is that that's your that's you i the i part of it, but then we get them to bring it into the workday into their teams. So that they attack What are you going to do as a team to have this either breaks built into the day, knowing your people so that you can celebrate in the way that works for them? Because we know the do pillar is very much about having goals and setting expectations so you can celebrate. And you know, that's one of the biggest motivations for people at work is I need clarity, if we don't have clarity on what we're headed for, we can't celebrate so much. And it feels chaotic. And it's a risk for burnout. So it's taking those knowledge, the knowledge around your individual well being, then bring it into your teams so that your teams can start functioning. Now this all feel it feels very, like a nice to have. But what is really cool is that when individuals start looking at it, their own well being and they start modeling it, leaders and start to do the things because they know why science tells them that they should connect today or have a laugh, whatever. And it's integrated into the ways of working before they have a team meeting. And they might just check in with each other. Laura and I and our team will go one, two, how are you on a one to five, and we talk about why we're one to five and our ELT meetings, we know that what happens is this is the COVID is when we measure individual wellbeing. And then we also measure organizational wellbeing is that without even tackling psychological safety, or conflict at work, or communication, and my team that improves without doing anything else. And the reason, and this is what I'd love to kind of tease out as to why but this is what I hypothesize is the moment that you start having those conversations at work, psychological safety increases, my my boss has been taught how to know me as a human, because he's having conversations with me, I now feel able to speak up and away and be my authentic self, or I'm getting them without us doing a psychological safety course. We're started to it's integrated into our day. The other thing that moves is my work my workloads and feel more acceptable. Now that we haven't changed the workload, but you've opened up the door to conversations in this kind of way that's authentic. It's not really about we're trying to improve communication and conflict and psychological safety. It's no, we're just trying to know each other as a team, and looking after each other so that we can do this in a sustainable way. Because work is important. And we should be looking after ourselves and each other. And so it has this flow on impact. And it doesn't mean that everything is solved. No, no, no, you have to then start to go right, we now need to focus on psychological safety, we now need to look at some things around diversity and inclusion. But if you start here, it's a way and that people get and it helps them not just at work, but also in life outside of work.

Laura Hamill:

Awesome. So much richness, there's so many things that you just said in that. There's so many really cool, important points. This is so awesome, Fiona, so we're running low on time. So maybe what we can do, there's so much to talk about here, maybe what we can do is if you could just, like close us off with a final kind of idea or thought or words of wisdom, maybe even just something practical that our listeners could take from from our conversation today.

Unknown:

I'm 58. So I've been around a long time. And what I would say as leaders, I've led teams, I've been in teams, I've been a lawyer, I've been an academic, I've been working for myself as a consultant, I've, I've worked in factories when I was young, what I would say is as leaders, and Laura, Laura, I think you even know what I'm going to say is we lead people as though they are us, we make assumptions about the humans that are before us. And that's the same with health practitioners. That's the same of CEOs. That's the same with a new manager is we have this cognitive shortcut which thinks that people before us or like us, the things that we think is success, we think we can help them be what we would want in that situation. And the truth is, if we really want to create thriving teams, we need to lead the people before us, we employ them for a reason they have skills for a reason. What often happens is we've employed them because they're incredible at coding, but then we try and make them do something else. Literally the coding for a while and let's make sure to work on your people management skills. Without going does this coder ever want to be a people manager, you might have wanted to be a people manager, but is that the pathway this person wants, understanding the human in front of you what they care about what keeps them going, promoting the things that they want to do. And listening to them is probably the biggest key across anything I've ever done as a leader, if you know who the person is, try to take yourself out of the equation and be curious and go Oh, that's interesting. I probably would have wanted something different in that situation. But it's okay. Because you're you. And that's probably my key takeaway at the moment.

Laura Hamill:

It's such a simple idea. And you say it's like of course, but you see over and over again that that happens, right? Where leaders put their own values, their own things that they think are important on to the people who work for them, or work with them. So I know I see that over and over. That's such a good one. Oh Fiona, you're you've got such a great storytelling, skill and also so many amazing experiences. So I'm just so grateful that you joined us here today. Thank you so much.

Michael McCarthy:

Thank you, Fiona.

Unknown:

Thank you for having me. And I know I talk a lot, so well done.

Michael McCarthy:

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Tessa Misiaszek:

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Laura Hamill:

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