Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast brings together amazing leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts to share the successes, challenges, and secrets to living and leading as a VIBRANT Leader.
Tune-in each week as Nicole Greer interviews a new Vibrant Leader.
Email her at nicole@vibrantculture.com
Jimmy Burroughes Ep 173. - Made with Clipchamp
===
[00:00:00] Nicole Greer: Welcome everybody to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and they call me the Vibrant Coach and I have another amazing, vibrant guest on the show today. His name is Jimmy Burroughes. He is an ex British Army officer and former corporate high achiever. Jimmy Burroughes is now a sought after leadership expert and advisor to businesses worldwide.
His mission is to help organizations achieve significantly improved business outcomes without exhausting their workforce. It's possible people through helping them, uh, be high potential managers and become high, performing leaders. So please welcome to the show, Jimmy Burroughes. I'm so glad you're here.
[00:00:40] Jimmy Burroughes: Thanks, Nicole. Thank you so much for the invitation and the kind intro.
[00:00:43] Nicole Greer: Yeah, yeah, we're glad to have you. And, um, you are the author of a book or two, um, I, and you had this real fancy thing where you could pop it right up, uh, on your screen. So pop that up. And the folks that watch this on YouTube. Oh, there they are.
Okay. So give us an overview of your two books. But what we're going to do is we're going to go into the Beat Burnout book a little bit deeper. I've got a copy. I'm going to put it right in front of my face right here. So it'll show up. Uh, and we're going to go through that and talk about it today, but tell us about both your books.
I bet you we can use them both.
[00:01:15] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah. I mean, I, I, I call them playbooks, but essentially it's like a recipe book. You know, if you want to build a chocolate cake or make a chocolate cake, you need to know what ingredients you need. You need to know the steps to follow. And it's really useful to have a picture of what good looks like at the end.
So you get the best possible chocolate cake. Otherwise you don't know what you're aiming for. And so both of the books are designed to be really, really practical, down to earth playbooks. For building a culture or for stopping multitasking. And I guess, you know, if we will summarize that the multitasking one, and then we'll go more into the, into the Beat Burnout, but the multitasking one was really when we were talking to leaders in the client organizations that we work with, which tend to be kind of, you know, 5, 000 plus people organizations.
So they're very complex. They're very busy, very high pressure. We found that all of our managers and leaders were running around spinning plates and juggling balls and their hair was on fire and it was just really difficult. And we, we contrasted for them the concept of monotasking, do one thing well at a time and finish it and then move on to the next one.
Versus multitasking, which has a few different variations. And so the Escape the Multi-Tasking Trap is actually on my website. It's a free ebook. You can just go there and download it. And the concept was really, how do we paint this picture of, Oh my God, this thing I thought I was really good at that I thought was making me really effective might be actually holding me back.
And what can I do about that? Uh, and so here's a really practical step by step guide, which walks through, um, from the perspective of the CEO that we worked with. How he felt he was super effective being a multitasker and how he unwound those behaviors, first for himself, then for his leadership team, and then cascading through the organization.
His name is Michael. He gave us the blessing to write the book. And so I popped that together earlier on this year and we released it and it's been super, super successful. I'm really proud that it's gone to many, many homes. Uh, or many iPads, but I think probably more importantly.
[00:03:16] Nicole Greer: Yeah. Yeah. So tell us the website.
Cause we want to go do it right now. These people.
[00:03:20] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah, JimmyBurroughes. com and just JimmyBurroughes. com as my name is spelled. And then at the top of the page, you'll see books or there's even a little yellow banner to point you in the right direction. And it's a free download and you can just grab it for any, any digital device.
[00:03:34] Nicole Greer: Okay, that is fantastic. I love it. Okay. So there's your 1st gift. You're welcome. Everybody. All right. And so our 2nd gift is going to be a conversation about Beat Burnout: Ignite Performance. So tell me why Beat Burnout? What are you seeing out there that led you to write this book?
[00:03:52] Jimmy Burroughes: Well, you know, it's, it's a combination of factors really.
But if I, if I rewind the clock to 2016, 2017, I was that corporate GM in a, an organization who was under the pump. So I was running an eight figure business. I had a team of 40, 50 people. I was traveling all the time. I was in meetings all the time. Um, constantly changing Factors in my day to day work, executive team members leaving, priorities shifting, organization going through transformation.
You can, you can, you can imagine the picture. And I remember, it does for many people, right. Um, restructure after restructure, budget cuts, find some more money. And I think the, the sort of final nail in the coffin for me was, uh, the government of New Zealand where I was working at the time made a legislative change, which took 20 million off my bottom line overnight.
I was called in by the CEO the following morning and told, Jimmy, you need to find a way of fixing this. Uh, which was massive, massive pressure on my shoulders. And I went home, thought about it, woke up the next morning, having had maybe one too many wines, sat on the edge of my bed. And I said to myself, Jimmy.
This job's either going to kill you or send you crazy. It's time to stop. And from that point forward, my life shifted. And that shift really led to a journey of discovery. First of all, discovering what happened to me, then starting to talk to other people as I was traveling through Latin America. I was part of a remote working organization.
That supports digital nomads talking to a lot of people who were in that program and discovering that they had gone through something very, very similar. And then finally being asked to come into organizations and consult and teach and train to start preventing burnout happening. And what we discovered was kind of three big things happening.
Number one.
[00:05:43] Nicole Greer: Let's hear about them.
[00:05:44] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah. Number one was, Really, what we've seen over the last generation, the last 20, 25 years is a significant under investment in leadership development and team development. And if you think about it from an HR perspective, the first thing that gets cut in a budget cut is training and development.
And then you get rid of the HR people.
[00:06:02] Nicole Greer: It slays all of us.
[00:06:04] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah. And get rid of HR, get rid of marketing, get rid of all the sort of fluffy stuff and, and just focus on making money. Uh, so people get pushed harder, KPIs go up, revenue targets go up and so on and so on. And we don't have skilled enough leaders to be able to bridge that gap really effectively.
Secondly, all the easy stuff has been done in the last 25 years. What do I mean by that? We've had Six Sigma, we've had Lean, we've had Operational Improvement, we've had Theory of Constraints, we've had Agile, and nearly all of those things are focused on fixing processes and technology. So all of the easy wins have been had.
And I don't necessarily mean easy to do, but easy to gain versus the gains with people are a lot more complex and people tend to be more volatile and more unpredictable. So doing large scale behavior or cultural change is way more difficult than putting in a new IT system or sacking a load of people to save some money, which is what we've seen.
And then we've seen these layers of management be stripped out by those processes. That mean now that you've got people in very senior roles, leading organizations who haven't necessarily had the support and training and resources from their bosses when they were coming up, we've had the gaps between roles expand massively.
And all of, because the layers of management have been stripped out and all of these things have contributed to a really overstretched workforce. Now people think it's based on COVID. COVID caused all this burnout thing. If you look at the engagement statistics from people like Gallup, in the run into COVID, so we're thinking late 2019, early 2020, Disengagement or unengaged people.
So these people who were just turning up to work, earning their money and going home, not really putting in any effort, and those people who are consciously disliking their organization and consciously not working to their best ability were sitting around the 70 percent mark. Since COVID it's sitting around 74%.
So I don't believe this 4 percent is the critical, critical tipping point. What I actually think is that, um, the phrase we use is it's only when the tide goes out that people swimming naked get found out. It's that there were all of these systemic issues bubbling away in the background, but COVID. really exposed them.
You know, it's like when you put people who've got marriage problems in a concentration camp, that the cracks are going to show. Well, the cracks are showing now in organizations for overstretched managers who are trying to achieve too much. They've had this added layer of hybrid work or remote work, stretching them a little bit more.
And all of a sudden we've got this burnout scourge. So that was what I kind of discovered as I was traveling the world and listening and learning from the people around me. That seems to be a consistent pattern in a lot of organizations.
[00:08:48] Nicole Greer: Yeah. Yeah. So you say a high performance culture is a team sport and I'm reading directly out of Beat Burnout, the book by Jimmy Burroughes, who is on the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast.
He says a high performance culture is a team sport, not an individual endeavor. I underlined that and highlighted it because I want the leaders that are listening, the HR people that are listening to understand that, um, you're not going to do this alone. This is not a single leadership activity. So talk a little bit about it being a team sport.
[00:09:18] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah. You know, I think there's, there's many ways of looking at how you lead. Um, we use, a metaphor, which is a, a water tower. And if you were to stand by a water tower and look down from a satellite, every time you went round the steps on the outside and got to the next layer up, you'd still be geographically in the same place according to the satellite.
But you as a leader. As you go up floor by floor by floor, your perspective changes. You could see further, you can see wider and you can see the layers below you and see what they're all up to. The challenge being that most leaders only get to a certain level and that level is, I'm the expert. I have all the answers.
I can solve all the problems. They become the bottleneck in the team, and that actually stops high performance cultures being formed because it's almost like, um, when everybody's drowning, the lead is the one like, no, no, I'll save everybody. I'll save everybody. And they can only save so many people at once.
They can only solve so many problems at once. And what we actually see from the research is managers and leaders are the ones who are burning out the most right now because they are stuck in this save everybody, solve everything solution mindset. Where we start to see real high performance cultures emerge.
Is where the leader steps back from being the expert, from being the bottleneck, from being the problem solver and says, okay, yes, I know how to do this, but who else knows how to do this? And what ideas have we got? And let's start to facilitate versus dictate. Um, one of the, one of the best things I heard recently was, uh, managers have all the answers.
Leaders have all the questions. And so what we see in a real high performance culture is our managers start to step back from the front line, solving all the problems and they engage with their team. They start to harness the capability of their team, often unseen or unknown capability. They, they uncover those things and they create this collective energy.
And what Beat Burnout does is essentially says, how do you do this? And it starts very, very simply, which is let's get everybody on the same page and let's start to make sure we're all working for the same thing. And that's one of the most common issues I see in, in teams that we go into organizations and work with is you've got a leader that says like, right, I know what the plan is.
I know where we're going. And you go and ask all of their team and you get a combination of, oh yeah, I'm absolutely certain what the plan is. It's this. Which is not this, like it's, we're kind of diametrically opposite in what we think the plan is, or even worse, I have no idea what the plan is, I just turn up and do my job every day.
Uh, so those, those are some of the things that we, we say, this is a collective sport, not an individual endeavor, is the manager needs to use and engage their team, and so we show you how to do that.
[00:12:02] Nicole Greer: Yeah, and so the very first chapter, um, you give everybody their first kind of like directive, which is start with purpose.
And you ask a very powerful question. Um, stop and think about the concept of doing something on purpose. Talk to us a little bit about purpose.
[00:12:19] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah, you know, purpose is, we split it into four layers, we call it the purpose pyramid, but essentially purpose is the big why. I was in the military and one of the, one of the hardest things you do in the military are these kind of long marches and sleep deprivation and getting up at silly o'clock in the morning to go and fight in a battle or whatever it might be.
And you need a why to do those things. You need to understand why am I doing this and what are we trying to achieve here. And am I on the same page as all the other people who are doing this with me? Because if I'm not If I don't have those things, it's really hard to get up. You know, it's like the person who says, I'm going to run a marathon, and they don't have a why, or if they don't have a why, then when it's snowing, or it's a bit cold, or there's a bit of drizzle outside, they're like, I'll just stay in bed today, because they don't have a why to get out of bed.
And so really what we try and create in chapter one of the book is, is breaking down those four layers of purpose. So we get this beautiful line of sight through why am I on this planet? What am I here to try and achieve? What is the purpose of my job? And why does my job exist? And how do I contribute?
Because making a difference is really important to people. And those two things tend to be where we can really clarify people's identity as well. So when they know why they're here and what their job is doing. People tend to revolve around their job title is a very, very strong factor in their identity.
So we get those very clear first. Then we say, so how does my job contribute to the team and what's the team here for? And what's my organization all about? What's the purpose of my organization? And again, when we clarify those two things, team purpose and organizational purpose, then we start to talk about impact.
What difference are we making in the world? Because people want to make a difference. So purpose is really very clear. The other piece that is very important, this is where it for all the managers and HR professionals listening, you need to get people on the same page. So the, the metaphor we use here is imagine everybody in a rowing boat in your team.
And you're like, right, we need to go win a race, go. And because that's what most managers do, right? There's the target, go get it. And you've got people who've never rowed a boat before. So they don't even know how to pick up an oar. You've got people who think they know how to row. So they start going as hard as they can.
Okay. You've got people out of time, you've got people maybe pulling harder on one side of the boat than the other side of the boat, and what happens? The boat doesn't go very fast or it goes in circles. This is, this is the situation in nearly every team we encounter. By the way, I'm 100 percent certain on the purpose of our team.
I'm 100 percent certain on the purpose of my role. Uh, I'll just get on with it. Whereas if you actually just sit down and have a conversation, and we do this literally in a room, and we tell you how to do this in the book, and say to everybody, on a post it note, write down why your role exists. On a post it note, write down why this team exists.
Let's compare our answers and then let's have a discussion about that. And I guarantee if you do that activity, your team will walk out of that room with a better understanding of why each of our roles exists and how we contribute to the team, and a better understanding of what our team is all about.
What benefit does that have? Imagine for, for a moment that you've got a team of sales professionals, and this is a team we worked with and this we said to the same, we said the same question. What's the purpose of this team? These are sales professionals. So we had answers like. Uh, to drive revenue, to make profit, to build relationships, to make sure the warehouse is empty so the product can come through, uh, to, to build our brand in the marketplace.
None of those are incorrect. And all of those people thought they were correct. But when we have that level of misalignment, which I say exists in nearly every team, you've got different priority decisions being made. You've got different, uh, resource decisions being made. You've got people conflicting each other because I'm really all about profit and, and you're all about keeping, keeping the customer happy.
So we're now in tension. And these are, these are the real, the realities of, of operating in, in a team. Which is exactly like that rowing boat analogy. You've got people pulling hard in one direction. I'm all about profit. And people pulling really hard in the other direction. I'm all about relationships.
They're in the same team. They're working with the same clients trying to do the same thing. But the client is now confused. How can that be a high performance culture? So building purpose is all about let's get everybody on the same page. Let's get everybody aligned. And let's make sure that we're all going for the same thing.
[00:16:48] Nicole Greer: Yeah, okay, so the purpose pyramid, I'm going to repeat back what I heard you say, but you correct me if I get it wrong. So I'm going to figure out my personal purpose, my team purpose, my organizational purpose, and then the impact we have on the world. Did I get the pyramid? Correct?
[00:17:04] Jimmy Burroughes: Three out of four. That's pretty good.
[00:17:05] Nicole Greer: Okay. All right.
[00:17:06] Jimmy Burroughes: Personal purpose. Why am I on this planet? What am I here to achieve? What am I, what difference am I trying to make? Then is role purpose. What, what's the purpose of my role? Why am I here? What difference am I trying to make? Purpose of the team. Why do we exist? What difference are we trying to make?
And then the organization, why does the organization exist? What difference are we trying to make? And how do I align all of those things? Because one of the things you see quite frequently is somebody will say, I'm really aligned with my team purpose, but I'm not aligned with the purpose of this organization.
And maybe they, an organization that does something that goes against my values or. I can't cope with that. I'm potentially going to set myself up for burnout if I'm living in that contrast. And to give you a specific example, we worked with an organization of hospitality professionals and the organizational purpose was all about great customer experiences.
Of course, they, you know, they wanted to make them as rewarding and enjoyable as possible for the guests, but they did that at the expense of the staff. And so a lot of the staff in the organization were burning out because they were like, I'm giving everything I have. I'm giving absolutely everything I have.
And that just doesn't work for me. Like I'm giving up family time. I'm missing all my kids events. I don't see my wife, you know, we're passing ships in the night because we both work on shifts. And it just became really counterproductive for a lot of individuals in that organization. So they had to adjust the organizational purpose to helping our staff to achieve wonderful customer experiences.
And that little shift in organizational purpose shifted the burnout levels of that organization.
[00:18:34] Nicole Greer: I love that story. All right. So one more time, personal. Purpose right role purpose, uh, team purpose, organizational purpose and the impact we're having. All right. I love it. Okay. So there's your thing and don't miss what Jimmy said.
He said that you can buy the book and the book is Beat Burnout: Ignite Performance. The leaders playbook for building a high performance team culture it's got all the directions to get you to do that. The other thing I love about the book, everybody is that on page 28 and 29 and at the end of all the chapters are action tips.
So I think a lot of times people read books and like, this is a really good idea. How do I do it? Right? So he's got in here, uh, actual tips and tricks to get everything done. Right? So I love that. Okay. So people figure out. Their purpose and then we need to go to chapter 2 and you talk about looking at abundance.
So will you talk a little bit about abundance? Let's say we've done all the hard work of chapter 1 now We want to move on. What do we do now, Jimmy?
[00:19:34] Jimmy Burroughes: I think this is probably the most complicated chapter for people to get their heads around and, all right, the, the, all of the, imagine the book like a Russian doll.
So you need to start with purpose first. Um, if you've got purpose really clear, then you can start working on people's head space and the way that they're turning up to work and the way they're feeling. And let me paint the picture of most organizations, which is, um, fear of restructure, fear of redundancy, cutting budgets.
Um, lots of targets, lots of pressure, lots of meetings, lots of deadlines. And what that does is it triggers this caveman response in the back of our minds of fight or flight or fear. And so you immediately suppress about 50 percent of your staff's capability by putting them into this fight or flight state because they're always worrying about something.
You know, Oh my God, I haven't done this and I need to worry about this. And I've got this thing to do. And so what we talk about in, in chapter two is how do we shift that away from what we call a scarcity mindset. There's not enough to go around. We're going to get fired. We're going to lose our money.
We're going to lose our budget. We're going to lose staff. So everything's going to be okay. It's going to be all right. We know we're going to get through this. We're now very aligned because we're very clear on our purpose. So we've got immediately more horsepower focusing on winning this race. So I, as the leader got to get my own head straight first, but then how do I support my team to also get their head straight?
There's always going to be the realities of business. You know, there's always going to be priorities and KPIs and budget cuts and whatever. That's okay. What we've got to focus on is getting the job done and doing it as well as we can. And so chapter two really walks you through how to do all of those pieces and how to start moving headspace from fear to abundance.
And that's, that's really the shift. The other piece that we, we tackle in there is a little section on imposter syndrome. So, and this is something that affects a lot of managers, and a lot of people in your team will also be affected by this. And for those who haven't come across imposter syndrome, it's really the fear of being found out or caught out for not being quite up to the job, which is mostly in your head.
And tends to affect high performing, highly engaged, um, highly driven people who are really trying to prove themselves, but they've got a little devil on their shoulder going, they're going to get you, they're going to find out, they're going to know. And so you burn people out because they're always constantly trying to prove themselves and you may even burn yourself out because you're constantly trying to prove yourself.
So also in chapter two, it talks about how do you just dial that down a little bit? Because if people are spending all of their energy and time overworking and trying to prove themselves. Are they actually putting their best effort into the job or they've got part of the horsepower going somewhere else?
[00:22:19] Nicole Greer: Yeah. And I want to tell you, um, I do tons of coaching and this imposter syndrome has really taken hold in people. They, they think they've got it, believe me. Um, and so you've got some action tips on that. This is on page 71 in the book and you say, start by understanding the real reasons for your success, talent coordination with others, communication skills, et cetera.
Act like a lawyer and write down 10 pieces of evidence where you've delivered exceptional value or results. I love that tip. You have another one. Ask others for input to gather a list of 10 more points reflect on the themes and these pieces of evidence. And then you say, shift your thinking away from worrying about personal failure and towards focusing your energy on helping others around you to feel trusted, supported and be more abundant.
So there's also more tips in here, everybody about how to kind of overcome. The imposter syndrome and so, if that's been something that's been in your mind, you know, that maybe you have this, or that you need to battle this, uh, Jimmy Burroughes, the author of Beat Burnout: Ignite Performance. The leaders playbook for building a high performance team culture can help you.
Alright, so that's chapter 2. so we have really looked at our purpose. Um, we have stopped and we have thought about shifting from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset and now we're in chapter three and we want to do a ton of connection. So, uh, I have, I think I have an idea of what this is about and, uh, I'd like you to share.
What do you mean by connection?
[00:23:51] Jimmy Burroughes: I mean, let, let me ask you, Nicole, um, do you feel more comfortable when you are in a club or a gang or a tribe, or do you feel more comfortable when you are alone? And the circumstance I'm going to paint for you is you're out hunting for wild beasts, or you are trying to conquer a new land, you know, where would you feel more comfortable?
Surrounded by a group of people who, you know, got your back? Or with a group of strangers or alone, which would you be your preference, A, B or C?
[00:24:20] Nicole Greer: Oh, I'd like to have all my besties with me. I'd like to have my family with me. Yeah.
[00:24:25] Jimmy Burroughes: And, and it sounds like a flippant, um, example, but the reality is again, our little caveman brains, which are now 2000 years down the track of corporate development, but essentially are basically caveman brains, love to be part of a gang or a tribe.
We're wired, we're hardwired. To be tribal, we're hardwired to seek safety in the comfort of others in the company of others. Sorry. And so when we want to create a high performance culture, if we have a group of individuals. They're never going to be as effective as a group of connected people in a team.
And so chapter three really talks about three core areas. And each of the, each of the chapters is kind of broken down into sections. The first one is let's connect with people first. So how do I find. The commonalities, the threads that string our people together. Hopefully we're going to have uncovered some great stuff in our purpose session.
Hopefully we're going to have uncovered some wonderful information about maybe the things we're worried about in our abundance sessions. And so we're going to start to have a really good picture and start to know our people a lot better, but we want them to start connecting and talking and dealing with each other really effectively.
This also applies to how do we onboard people really effectively. And I've done a lot of work with organizations in their onboarding strategies. Which tend to be really overblown HR strategies that last about a year. And then because they're so resource intensive and there's another restructure just die.
So we've gone down the track of, well, how do we make onboarding really impactful with one page guides? You know, very simple stuff that you can go, here's, here's a manager. Here's why you need to do it. Here's what to do. And here's how to do it. Well, this is about onboarding people into your tribe, making them feel like Welcome, making them understand and get aligned with the team, helping them understand where their career might go and really bringing them to become part of your little tribe so they can fight alongside you.
The next piece is let's get everybody connected with the plan. Again, you go into many organizations and you say to a member of the team, uh, what's the, what's the strategy for this team? Or what are you going for this quarter? Or, you know, what's the priority this week? And they don't know, they're just turning up and doing their job and they're doing it as well as they can, but they're not connected with the plan.
How can you go for purpose, you know, that big why, if you don't know what the plan is, how can you push through adversity when it gets a little bit hard, if you don't know what the plan is, and how can you make good calls and good decisions if you don't know what the plan is, so you need to get everybody connected with the plan.
And then the final piece is connecting people with development. So this is really. Uh, in a high performance culture, if we think about Dan Pink's research, Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery, this is really helping people to grow and learn through your team. So one of two outcomes happens. Number one, the best outcome for you is that they get better at doing their job because they've got new skills, new capabilities, they're smarter, they can solve more problems.
That's wonderful. If you have people who are developing and growing in your team, number two is they grow, develop and grow so much that somebody else headhunts them. And you suddenly start to emerge as a bit of a talent farmer. You're a, you're the fertilization ground for incredible people that reflect really, really well on you as a leader, as a manager in the organization, far more than if you keep those people to yourself.
Because what tends to happen is those great people go off and they'll either move into your somewhere else in your organization, say, I work with larger organizations, there's lots of internal promotion opportunities, but that culture that you've created starts to permeate through the organization because you've created great people and you've shown them great examples.
So really important to connect people, first of all, with the team, then connect them with the plan and then connect them with development. So they start to learn and grow through your business.
[00:28:28] Nicole Greer: I love all 3 of those things and I couldn't agree more. You've got to connect the people. Um, so, uh, he's got action tips again.
Let me give you a couple of those people. It's like, how do I do that? Exactly. So, 1 of the examples he gives is dedicate the 1st, 2 to 5 minutes of any and every meeting to human connection. Don't just jump right into business, right? The best leaders are all about people. So before you get down to business, get to know the people first.
He also talks about creating specific moments to connect with your team members one on one and discuss where they feel they need to boost their network or what they need to learn and develop. And then thirdly, he says, be like a bridge for brokering relationships with others and let those relationships thrive around you.
Connect your team with someone in your network to help them learn and grow. And there's, at least five more action tips. That's on page 82 in his book.
[00:29:20] Jimmy Burroughes: I think we tried to put like 20 into each section or something. I don't think there was a target for that. And I'm not sure I achieved it for everyone, but we nearly got there.
[00:29:28] Nicole Greer: I think a lot of times, um, you know, these business books that we read, they, they have, they're full of great ideas, but I really need a granular. How to actually pull this off and so I think that's 1 of the beautiful things about Jimmy's book. Alright, so let's go to the final chapter or to chapter 4, excuse me, which is exploration.
Okay, so kind of regroup for us. We've done purpose. We've done abundance. We've done connection and now we're going to exploration. Will you explain to us what you mean by that?
[00:29:57] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah, absolutely. So we, we know why we're here. We know what we're trying to achieve. We're in a good headspace now. Um, we're starting to think and operate as a team, but if you want to be a truly high performing culture, you can't keep doing what you've always done.
It doesn't work. The world is changing. You know, we live in this extremely VUCA context, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous context, which means that doing the way we've always done it is not necessarily the best way to get it done. So what we encourage in, in this chapter is start to explore new ideas, new ways, and if you've got a group of people in your team now who are starting to think and talk and work together, ideas start to come bubbling up.
And so we really want to be more curious. One of the biggest transitions I often coach leaders to do is move from being critical. Oh, that won't work because Or why did you do that? To being curious, what led you to think about that? Or I wonder if we might achieve this or how might we and how might we is one of our favorite phrases to start using when you start to be more curious, how might we boost productivity 10% How might we increase our profits?
20%. How might we stop our customers leaving and just facilitate the conversation around the table? Be curious. Now, there's a, there's a fine line here. You can't be curious about everything. And we talk in the first section of the book, of the chapter about the curiosity curve, and it kind of paints four different personas of leaders.
The first one is the, the, the need to be absolutely certain before they do anything different. Like a hundred percent. We need all the data. We need all the analysis. Yeah. And so on. Real rigor. And we're not going to make a decision to do anything different until we've got that. Well, good luck. As you say, um, unfortunately in the world that we live in now, it's going to take too long and you're going to miss the boat.
So we want to move away from that. That's the doing it the way we've always done it until the ocean parts and we, we see the fire on the, on the Hill that we have to go. The next one is probably where most leaders sit, which is the cautious leader. They're the ones that will go, we'll just dip a toe in the water, but we're not really going to commit to this.
Or, you know, you go off and do that and we'll keep doing this. Works to a point, but the reality is unless you go boots and all, you know, burn the boats with a discreet piece of, exploration, then you're probably not going to get the maximum outcome. What do I mean by that? If you're overly cautious, then you're probably not going to commit the resource.
You might not commit your best people. You might not put the rigor into the change. And so it's going to be what we call a bit of a half assed effort, and it's probably going to fall over. So the sweet spot is where we get curious and we say, do you know what, you're my two best people. I want you to go and explore increasing productivity.
I want you to go and explore this new market. I want you to go and explore how we can improve development conversations in our business. Go do what you need to do. Come back to me in a week's time with some ideas and let's make this happen and back your people and give them the freedom to do great work.
There's some great examples of this in the industry. The Google 24 hours is probably the one that springs to mind for most people, you know, go off and do something for 24 hours and let's see what you've got at the end of it. And they allow them to do that every single month. It's where Google maps came from.
It's where Gmail came from. It's where all these amazing platforms came from because somebody was given the freedom to explore. And what we see is if they know what we're trying to achieve as a team is this, and I'm not going to get fired if I make a mistake because I'm abundant and I've got these amazing people around me to help.
All of a sudden I feel open. My, my mind opens up and I'm able to create cool things. And so we want to create that, but you can go too far. And there's a, there's an example in the book of a business called JC Penney, which if you were listening in America, you probably know about JC Penney. The challenge they had was they went into the chaos zone, which is they tried to explore everything all at the same time, all at once.
And that's too much. Your team can only cope with so much exploration. So as I say, discreet, high impact examples are far better to explore than let's change our branding and let's change our, um, office floor plan and let's get new values and let's roll out development planning and, uh, or let's do a new profitability matrix and let's change the website as well.
That's too many things going on at once and you'll burn people out by doing too much. So that sweet spot on the curiosity curve is be curious, not critical. The, the next place is, is encouraging people to learn and grow. Again, purpose on autonomy mastery. You want to be making sure that you're having conversations with your people that encourages them to grow.
This means you need to up your coaching skills. It means you need to improve your own ability as a leader. You need to grow as a leader to be able to lead better. And this is where a lot of people join our leadership programs because they say, Oh, I've read that bit of the book and I need something. Can I get some help?
And then the, the final piece is really understanding your own style, I guess, as a leader, uh, around the idea of overwork. So we're starting to talk about, are we exploring too much? Are we doing too much? Have we got too much on our plates? Or are we creating those environments for the people that work with and for us?
Because that's, that's a really dangerous, uh, space to be is it start to explore self discovery, self awareness and really look at your own leadership style. So this is going back to that water tower analogy, working out where you are. And working out how to get to the next level, which is beyond the expert bottleneck, um, problem solver and start to move into more of a facilitator role, but you need to know where you're where you're starting from.
[00:35:31] Nicole Greer: Fantastic. All right. Well, he again, here's some action tips to navigate this part of exploration. So I love the, um, curve, I think that's great. And everybody loves a good visual, right? And so plot where you sit on the curiosity curve and maybe take into account your team. The next thing he says, here's an action tip reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of the position you're in and then, uh, think about this powerful question.
What if nothing changes in the next space of time, what's going to happen to us, right? So, uh, I think that he's got wonderful action tips in each one of these. And I love this idea of exploration, but doing it with the right amount, right? Not putting your people into burnout. So that's fantastic. All right.
[00:36:17] Jimmy Burroughes: And so listen to what chapter five is called downtime. You get downtime people. This is how you, you know, Beat Burnout. So talk a lot about beating, uh, burnout with downtime.
You know, and there's a, there's a reason this is the last chapter, um, the, because You can't yoga your way out of burnout. You can't vacation your way out of burnout.
[00:36:40] Nicole Greer: Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Jimmy. I'm a big yoga person. It does a lot of good. I just got certified. That's the only reason I'm stopping you. I just got certified in my yoga. It will help people. That's what you do in your downtime. Okay. That's enough, Jimmy. I just want to make sure you knew that yoga was so important.
[00:36:58] Jimmy Burroughes: So I don't disagree. The, the reality is most organizations that have a very high pressure culture, believe that getting some, getting some yoga lessons at lunchtime, putting some pizzas on every now and again, uh, maybe morning teas, uh, that's going to solve things. And the analogy we use is if you were standing outside in a thunderstorm and you go inside and you dry off and you put some fresh clothes on and then you go back outside.
And it's still raining, you're going to get wet. And that's the equivalent of what most organizations do when they're trying to cope with people who are struggling, people who are burning out. You know, it's like, Hey, we'll sign you off for two weeks, or I'll go on vacation and I'll recover. Or I'll just take, you know, or maybe if I just sleep all weekend, or if I just drink a bottle of red wine, that'll, that'll solve things.
It'll calm my brain down. And the reality is those things don't work. That's the equivalent of going and drying off and coming straight back into the same rainstorm. Because unless you've solved purpose, abundance, connection, and exploration in your team, people are just going to get wet again, and they're going to keep burning out.
So what we need to do is think of a different way of doing it. And there's lots of pieces of advice on the internet, you know, make sure you close your laptop at five o'clock, or try and make sure you put time in for the gym. I don't know about you, but I remember when I was a busy GM and there, there was no way that I was closing my laptop at five o'clock.
And if I did, it was only to beat the rush hour traffic and then turn it back on again at six o'clock when I got home. So we've got to come up with some stuff that's smart. And so really what we did. was trying to help people understand what actually works. And so we use a couple of ideas here.
First one is what we call preparation to perform. Now, if, I don't know if you know who Eliud Kipchoge is. He was the guy who ran the sub two hour marathon. Um, I think he's, I think he was the first person to run a sub two hour marathon. So he's like a super athlete. And what most of our leaders are doing is they're trying to run a sub two hour marathon every single day, all day.
But the guy who did it doesn't do that. He runs a race and then he takes some recovery time and then he spends time with his family. And then he goes and sees his dietitian. Uh, then maybe he does some cooking and preparing his food for the week and he'll do some training runs. And then when there's a competition coming up, he starts to ramp up the training, ready to be peak performance.
And this is how you achieve high performance. You don't go at sprint pace. All the time. You're not trying to win an Olympic gold medal every day, but in our organizations we are trying to do that. So let's be realistic. You can't afford to just take a day off because there's stuff to be done. You can't just close your laptop at 5 because there's stuff to be done.
So what we're trying to do is understand what makes the big difference. And one of the things we know makes a big difference is understanding how your brain works and being okay with not being in what we call the executive functioning mode all the time. So let's explore two concepts. First one is the preparation to perform, which is I need to take some downtime to make sure I can perform better when I need to perform.
So what does that look like for me? It could be a micro break. We know six minutes walking increases energy levels, increases perception, increases creativity, increases innovation. So six minutes, could you book a six minute break between two meetings and walk around the building to get some downtime for your brain without your phone, not checking your emails, but actually just walking and enjoying nature?
Could you do six minutes? That makes a big difference. We know every 40 minutes after you've worked six hours, your performance drops about 10%. So after six hours, can you build in a break for yourself? How does that, what does that look like? Is it a commute? Is it changing state, moving from the office to a cafe, for example, just changing your state can really help.
Um, and can you find a way of stopping work for a period of time. Now, this is the probably the most important one in, in your brain. There's like two TV channels. Um, I won't go into the, the complex science of it, but imagine there's, there's a TV channel that's called your executive functioning TV channel, and there's a TV channel that's called your Downtime Channel.
And you can only watch one channel at once. We haven't got a fancy TV in our heads. There's no picture in picture or dual screens. It's just one channel or the other channel. It's like the old days in the eighties. The interesting thing in your brain is when you're watching the executive function channel, all of the downtime benefits are turned off because you're not watching that channel.
There's no access to it. When you are watching the downtime channel, all of the executive functioning benefits keep going behind the scenes, and you start to do amazing things like join the dots, solve problems, have ideas, be creative. So you're preparing to perform even more effectively by taking downtime.
Now what does that look like in reality? Have you, Nicole, question for you. Have you ever had like a genius moment while you're doing some cooking or while you're in the shower or while you're out walking the dog or whatever it might be?
[00:42:15] Nicole Greer: Absolutely.
[00:42:16] Jimmy Burroughes: Yeah, so that's when we've switched into our downtime channel.
And that downtime channel is absolutely magic and we don't use it enough because we're addicted to our devices. We're addicted to checking emails and if we're not checking emails, we're checking Instagram or TikTok. And if we're not doing that, then we're in a meeting or on a phone call. And if we're not doing that, we're dealing with the kids or the wife or the husband or whatever it might be.
We never get downtime. So you as a leader, and this comes down to choices now, you have to find a way to choose downtime. And probably the biggest single piece of research that we've discovered that's emerged since we wrote the book was that nearly all the people who are burning out are actually choosing to burn out.
They're choosing to keep working a little bit longer. They're choosing to give up their weekends. They're choosing to not see their friends, not do their hobbies. Grab a takeaway versus cooking at home. They're choosing those things, which is like starting to get into a whirlpool that you can't get out of.
So you need to start when we talk about downtime, start choosing preparation to perform, start choosing those six minute breaks, the 10 minute walk, the leaving your phone for the evening. So you can actually let your downtime channel kick in. And your brain can start recharging its batteries, but also it can start doing that amazing assimilation work that it does behind the scenes that you won't even know is happening until something is solved.
What we see with the leaders who do that is they significantly outperform those leaders who were just at it at the grindstone constantly because they're the ones that are eroding their performance by 10 percent every 40 minutes.
[00:43:51] Nicole Greer: I don't know how many times I have talked to people and they're like, I have back to back to backs today and I'm like, okay, you guys are totally choosing that, you know, it does not need, and it's almost like a, I think sometimes ego driven, like, let me see how much I can do or something, you know,
[00:44:08] Jimmy Burroughes: Oh yeah, the busyness, busy work.
[00:44:11] Nicole Greer: That's right. I'm addicted to it. Yeah. And so in his in his book, everybody, we're talking about Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance, the leaders playbook for building a high performance team culture. He's got in Chapter 5. He talks about downtime. Uh, here's a couple of tips. He's got be honest. Be honest about what you are doing and whether it is a 100 percent the purpose of your job, which takes you right back to chapter 1.
I love that. Um, often we can find something that could be delegated or provide an incredible exploration chapter for development opportunity for a more junior number of your team to free up some capacity. I love that. Then he says, consciously use your commute, which you mentioned a minute ago, or your personal time more constructively, instead of being on your phone, daydream, journal, try to allow some space to activate your DMN.
So tell us what a DMN is.
[00:45:06] Jimmy Burroughes: So DMN is the default mode network. That's the downtime channel in your brain. Uh, the contrasting is the task processing network. That's the executive channel.
[00:45:15] Nicole Greer: Okay. Yeah. All right. Very good.
[00:45:18] Jimmy Burroughes: The other thing that's probably worth just touching on, um, is, is the difference between what we call creative and consumptive downtime.
And for many people who are burning out, they indulge in what we call consumptive downtime. What does that look like? Consuming Netflix, consuming beer, consuming wine, consuming drugs, uh, consuming takeaways.
These are not going to help you to recharge the battery, to get the energy levels back to the right place and to restore your brain. You know, I remember when I used to drink far too much red wine every night just to calm my brain down, but it meant every morning I needed a bit more caffeine and a bit more sugar and a couple of Paracetamol to get going.
Or what do you call it? Um, Tylenol, a couple of Tylenol to get going. Um, was I going to perform at my best that day? Probably not, but I needed it by the end of the day. So that's a consumptive downtime habit, which is not going to serve you. What we find is creative habits are really restorative. So this could be creating art, doing some cross stitch, cooking is a really great creative habit.
So actually gardening, painting, dancing, anything, anything that involves Um, you kind of making something, unless you're a person who makes something for a living, it uses a very, very different part of your brain versus the executive functioning channel that most people who are our kind of clients tend to be in.
And so that creative habit switches you into your downtime channel, which allows the executive functioning channel to keep working effectively.
[00:46:56] Nicole Greer: I love it. I love it. Well, we have gone through the entire book, but there's more details. So you got I have to go out and get the book. I'm gonna put it right in front of my face Beat Burnout.
Ignite Performance, the leaders playbook for building a high performance team culture by Jimmy Burroughes. It is fantastic. He's popped it up on the screen. If you're watching on YouTube and don't forget, you can go to his website, Jimmy Burroughes dot com and you can get the Escape the Multitasking Trap, which.
You know, obviously, these 2 books to go together, like peanut butter and jelly. Uh, so you gotta stop multitasking and you gotta, you gotta go through the Beat Burnout book, take action steps all along the way that he provides for you. So, not only it is, is it a book about what to do? It is how to do it, which I think is so fantastic.
I so appreciate you being on the Build a vibrant Culture Podcast, will you tell everybody, uh, where you are out there on social media so that we can find you?
[00:47:50] Jimmy Burroughes: Absolutely. Yeah. So I thought where I was in the world, then I was thinking, oh, that's a nice question. Um, so
[00:47:57] Nicole Greer: You can also tell us. I heard you say you're in Mexico.
Is that where you are today?
[00:48:00] Jimmy Burroughes: We live in Los Cabos. In, in Mexico, which is the home of many American vacations. Um, so the, uh, the, the best places to find me, JimmyBurroughes. com on the internet, uh, you can also find me, I'm a very active LinkedIn user, uh, and I'm also on Instagram, but not so active there. So really the, the web and, and LinkedIn are the two best places.
One other thing I'd love to offer up to your, your listeners, Nicole, is if you go to my website and you go to the Beat Burnout page. We actually have a little tiny survey, which is, uh, basically what's your biggest challenge right now. And when you click on the survey and answer the question, uh, we'll send you a free action tips sheet just so you can see kind of what is it all about.
And is this, does this work for me? Uh, so those are available for free. Uh, you can just, you can just go to the website, go to the Beat Burnout page and it will be available for you.
[00:48:56] Nicole Greer: Oh, that's fantastic. All right. You guys are way richer than when you started listening to this podcast. Thank you so much, Jimmy, for investing in our listeners.
We're so grateful. Everybody go to Jimmy Burroughes dot com. And until the next time, let's build a vibrant culture. Thanks, Jimmy.
[00:49:12] Jimmy Burroughes: Thank you so much.