This month Jo Taylor from Let’s Talk Talent spoke with David Liversage people and development consultant and an associate of Let’s Talk Talent about the meaning of Leading With the Heart in the work environment.
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Transcript of the Leading with the heart with David Liversage
Jo Taylor
Hi, and welcome to the Let’s Talk Talent podcast. We’re going to be sharing, over a series of episodes, tips and techniques, bringing our friends and family to share their stories, their experience of working life today, because together we can create simply irresistible organisations. Happy listening!
Jo Taylor
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Let’s Talk Talent’s podcast, episode 15. I’m Jo Taylor. I’m really excited because we have one of our family members with us today, the wonderful David Liversage, who is a people and development consultant. He is an associate of Let’s Talk Talent, but he also runs his own consultancy. David and I have known each other, god, David, probably about 10 years?
David Liversage
It might be 12, Jo, actually.
Jo Taylor
That’s making me feel old, my love. Especially on a Thursday after an Easter weekend. But I’m really delighted that you’re agreeing to talk to us today. One of our passions at Let’s Talk Talent is about ‘kind people are our kind of people,’ and knowing you for all of that length of time, that is core of who you are. What I thought we could talk about today is leading with the heart, because we know that leaders and managers have had their work cut out for them. A lot of the time people are talking about care, empathy, really supporting people. But I don’t really understand and I’d love you to explain what leading with the heart actually means in the environment of work. Could you unblock it a little bit for me and our listeners?
David Liversage
Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to. And thank you for inviting me on today, Jo, lovely to be with you. Yeah, leading from the heart. It’s kind of what gets me out of bed in the morning a little bit really. I look at the Gallup figures across the world and see active disengagement on average only running at 15%. And that worries me that we’ve got this big tranche in the middle of a slightly…going through the motions, but they’re not really active, engaged and driven. Obviously, that will vary. But let’s start to launch inquiry into that. What’s that about? And obviously, we’ve had huge changes in the last couple of years. I think a lot of it comes back down to our humanity. What we’ve just gone through with the pandemic, we’ve been forced into a very unusual situation of working from home where our own lives, our personal lives, if you like, have met our work lives. We’re in each other’s living rooms, we’re dealing with some really challenging circumstances and people’s mental health has been taking a battering. I think what we were starting to see is this shift towards more authentic leadership before the pandemic, but it’s kind of been fast tracked now. So for me having heart is core of what makes us human, right?
Jo Taylor
Absolutely.
David Liversage
It’s showing we care, and it’s about connecting on a deeper level. I’ve coached so many people over the last few years from CEO to team member level. I just see time and time again, when people are really cheesed off it comes down to not feeling cared about, feeling like people don’t matter. Though the best way to connect with people is through the hearts. If we define heart-centred leadership as having wisdom, courage, and compassion to lead others with authenticity, transparency, humility, and service. But to me that’s really captured in the ‘show we care.’ Not on a cognitive level, but on a deeper level, really. And I’ve seen lots of examples of that happening well and happening badly. So I think it’s pertinent to the times we live in.
Jo Taylor
When you boil it down – and I may be being really glib, so forgive me – isn’t this just about being kind?
David Liversage
Well, it certainly is about being kind. And I know it’s a value important to Let’s Talk Talent and how we go about working with our clients and each other. Yes, I mean, a great example of the opposite of that, when we saw the CEO from P&O Ferries, and the way that message was delivered. Both the medium and the message, and the tone was anything but with heart. There was not an ounce of empathy within that. So empathy is massively important. And the big thing with that is it’s about deep listening. We need to listen more as leaders. It’s not surprising we don’t because we’re so frantic sometimes. You know, it’s nobody’s fault. We live in a very fast-paced digital world, but actually training ourselves to really listen to our team members, to our employees, and listen with empathy and care.
Jo Taylor
Can you teach it though? Because some would say that inherently you’re either empathetic, you’re emotionally intelligent, or you’re not. And we see, we do a lot of leadership programmes. You’ve done a lot of leadership programmes. There’s a lot of coaching around that sort of authentic leadership, inclusive leadership. But I’d be really interested to unpick that with you. Can you teach someone to be more kind, leading with the heart, or actually, if you don’t have it, are you flogging a dead horse?
David Liversage
That’s a really interesting area, actually, Jo, because I think some people are natural empaths. For me, I find it quite easy, because it’s kind of in my DNA. I’m highly sensitive. So I’m very tuned in. Some people are wired in a different way. But we all have empathy, just to different levels. And also, what’s interesting, I think, in the workplace is about psychological safety, because we’ve come from this world of…a very cognitive based world where for the last five, ten years we’ve talked about performance, haven’t we? We’ve talked about very left brain sort of… And really engaging our right brain and the heart, which is where our empathy lies, is becoming increasingly important. And I do think you can coach people, kind of coach it out of them. I’m not going to come in with a toolbox and go, “Right, here’s the kindness gene that you need.” I think it’s about making people feel safe to be able to have the conversations. And interestingly, if you talk about masculine and feminine energy, so not male or female, or gender, but actually, we tend to associate the more female energy with things like empathy. I’m oversimplifying here, so forgive me, but I was running a workshop the other day, and it was all about conscious leadership. And it was all women on the…it was a voluntary course, mixed organisations, all women on the course. And we had the conversation about why is that? And of course there’s some great leaders and some men with empathy as well. But we’ve got to create that safety for everybody, really. That way you feel that you can talk about these things, that we don’t have to leave our emotions at the door. We’ve talked for a while, haven’t we, about ‘bringing your whole self to work,’ was the buzz phrase, wasn’t it?
Jo Taylor
Yeah, I think it’s enabling yourself. You’re right about psychological safety, being able to be yourself and bring your whole self to work. But it’s easier said than done, isn’t it? At Let’s Talk Talent we talk about the heart and the head. But we also talk about the hands. So I think it’s sometimes the logic, emotion, but actually, it’s about the doing. So are there any tips that in your experience are examples of people that have, you know, that have the head, that have the heart, but also they’re kind of driving that motivation, that energy, in terms of getting people to do something with their hands, ultimately?
David Liversage
Yeah, I’d like to share with you one client example, if I may. An organisation I worked with about four or five years ago. I was asked to run an away couple of days, for a team that was growing, quite a few new people on board. It was in facilities management, so a very operational, doing, hands-on approach. And the leader of it, she was fabulous, very, very efficient, very effective as a leader from a ‘getting things done’ perspective. From talking to her I also saw kindness within that when we were talking about my briefing. She really did care about the team. But because she was so focused on a lot of the doing, because the company was growing, some big things to deal with, office move etc., she didn’t always come across that way. And I think some of the team were really nervous of her, actually, because she was almost…and I’m trying not to sound insulting here, but almost machine-like, she was so good in how she showed up for work. What I suggested at the beginning of the two days is that we all had or brought in something that just showed something about our lives. That could be a swimming certificate, it could be a picture of your dog, whatever it was that meant something to you. And she did. She brought in a photograph of a baby and a cot with a woollen mobile over the top of it. And she said, “This is very important to me. It was the baby that took me a long while to have and he was born two weeks before my mother sadly passed. And my mother knitted him this little mobile, so it’s a very precious picture because she got to see the baby.” As she said that, Jo, she welled up and a little tear came down her cheek, and the whole energy in the room just shifted.
David Liversage
So powerful, hugely. I mean, it’s giving me goosebumps you actually explaining. It’s just so powerful, isn’t it, in terms of someone being so real? And that is, as you say, leading with the heart.
David Liversage
It is. And I reflected that back to her. We had a debate about…because you know, sometimes you really need your head, tough decisions need to be made. But then it’s the ‘how.’ If you’re making tough decisions about the company, engaging your heart as well. You might have to make a very mathematical financial decision, going back to the P&O example, but how you deliver that message, how you engage with your people is just so important. And another very quick example, I saw Arianna Huffington speak a few years back in San Francisco, at Wisdom 2.0, which is all about bringing greater wisdom into the workplace. So for listeners, definitely check them out online because you can get out there, it’s brilliant. Anyway, she stood on stage, very fashionable lady, she brought a Prada handbag up, she just stood there and talked to 2000 people as I’m talking to you now. She said she found herself back in, I think it was 2009-10, on her office floor, and she’d hit her head. She was bleeding, she’d fainted, because she’d had a coughing fit, because she had pneumonia, because she’d been working so hard. She got herself into this work addiction almost, of being in her head, disconnected from her body, so much so it was fighting back. And it gave her a huge wake-up call. She changed her organisation and she still sits as a Non-Exec Chair for The Huffington Post. But she set up Thrive, which is all about wisdom, wellbeing, and wonder, which is all heart-based stuff.
David Liversage
So David, one thing that’s sort of noodling in my brain is how do you convince CEOs that this is really important? That leading with the heart ultimately drives ROI? And what I mean by that is, when you think about the reason why organisations exist, it’s not just about the money. It’s about how they get great people and keep great people. It’s why we exist as a business. But leading with the heart can feel to a CEO, fluffy, can’t it? When actually it goes to the psychological safety, the care, the motivation, the energy. So how do you convince CEOs that this is important, and something to invest in rather than just a ‘nice to have’?
David Liversage
Well, it goes back to how I started the conversation, really, about the whole psychological safety piece. What sorts of environments are we creating? And our people. It’s an old saying, but our people are our best asset. The people expectation has changed a lot, I think, in the last couple of years, in terms of wanting more flexibility. We’re moving to a hybrid model as well. We’re having to build trust at speed. So there’s all these things going on. The world has changed hugely in the last five, and then two years, really. If we’re not meeting the needs of the people, if we’re not creating environments in which they can thrive – and the opposite of that, burning out – that affects so many things. People go off sick, cost us money, people leave, ultimately, because they’ve got a manager who’s stuck in their head trying to macro-manage, control them. These things don’t initially look like a cost, but it’s an enormous cost. You’ve got cost of recruitment, of retraining, of driving the rest of the team nuts while they’ve got several people missing because they burnt out. And I’m seeing that. I have tears three or four times a week, Jo, at the moment, of people just feeling they’re over… Stretch is a good thing. But I think we’re squeezing sometimes. You’ve said yourself as well about growing your business, that you’re perfectly happy to slow that growth if it’s becoming too much for people. Because you recognise it’s not just about the finances, and actually it’s a false economy just to keep squeezing more, squeezing more, and ignoring.
Jo Taylor
Something breaks, doesn’t it? Whether it’s the psychological contract, whether it’s trust. What it feels to me is that leading with the heart is about building trust, ultimately. You are trusted as a leader, and you trust your people, so you don’t micromanage, you motivate, you empower. That’s what’s coming across to me. Does that feel right to you?
David Liversage
100%. So if I can share another little story – I was working with a large media company, with the sales and marketing division, which had its own MD. I was brought in by the Head to say, “Look, I think we’ve got a problem with motivation and engagement at the moment. People seem miserable and performance is down. What are they doing wrong? I want you to come in and do some magic, David, bring your toolkit in, bit of jazz hands, sort them out.” And I said, “Well, let’s find out what the problem is, first of all.” So lots of one-on-one in-depth interviews and focus groups, extracting things without finger-pointing at the individuals. But it became very, very clear to me that the team felt they weren’t trusted, and also didn’t trust their leader. And what had happened – it was a really tiny thing that had kicked this off – about a year previously, somebody had been seen by the CEO coming back from lunch at quarter to three in the lift. And so the CEO got onto the MD and said, “Totally unacceptable. We should have everybody back in the office by two o’clock.” Now, that person could have been working in sales for 25 years, it could have been a 5 million pound deal with Unilever. But the way the MD responded was to send out an email saying, “Lunch is between one and two, you all need to be back in the office.” Big message: we don’t trust you. We’re going to treat you like children. Some of these people in their 40s and 50s, you know, when you’re in your 20s it’s the same principle. “All right, if you’re going to treat us like that, you’re not going to get the best out of us.” They start to feel ‘we’re not trusted.’ So motivation massively dips. It affected sales. Back to your bottom line, they were seeing a dip in income. And so I coached him, and I said, “Would you like me to share the feedback? I can dance around and give you the politically correct version. Or would you like me to be really honest?” And he was very direct. So I gave him the honest feedback and said, “It’s the leadership styles that are coming through this organisation, which is really creating a culture of fear and mistrust. So trust me.” And are you a fan of Brené Brown at all?
Jo Taylor
Yes, absolutely.
David Liversage
She’s got a great new book out, actually, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Now, she has been a champion of trust and vulnerability in leadership for years. She’s a researcher by nature. So she’s the number cruncher as well, but it’s only when she went through her own journey of opening up her heart that she started to realise how important it was. I definitely recommend to your listeners to check her out on TED, buy her book Dare to Lead, or Atlas of the Heart. Let us know what they think.
Jo Taylor
I’ve got one final question for you before I let you go to get on with your day. What’s the one thing you would like our listeners to take away and action?
David Liversage
I’d say it’s to start the conversation somewhere. Start asking some of these questions. One simple question: how much heart does this organisation have? It’s a great question. There’s a really progressive media company who’ve changed the title of the HR director to Chief Heart Officer.
Jo Taylor
Oh, wow. I love that. I love it. It’s amazing how job titles are so empowering, but they can also send such a strong message.
David Liversage
Totally. Get to the heart of the heart of the organisation. Start by asking that question.
Jo Taylor
Brilliant. David, you’ve been a superstar, as always, leading by example, and leading with the heart with who you are. I’ve really valued having this conversation with you. And I hope that our listeners have too. As always, get in contact and let us know your thoughts. We’ll see you on the next podcast. Thank you so much.
David Liversage
Thanks, Jo.
Jo Taylor
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