Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Unlocking Leadership, previously Leadership 2020, is a podcast helping leadership lead in a world that is changing ever quickly. Join us as we interview even more inspiring people who provide information and skills on how to tackle the big questions affecting today’s leaders.
We blend real-life leadership experiences of our guests with the latest management theory to provide practical, relevant tips for anyone in a leadership position.
Unlocking Leadership asks the big questions about being a better leader in the modern workplace. Hosted by Clare Carpenter.
[00:00:00] Clare Carpenter: Welcome to Unlocking Leadership, a podcast about leading in a changing world, brought to you by Corndel, your strategic skills partner. I'm your host, Clare Carpenter.
I'm joined today by Dr. Sam Mather. Sam is the Head of Leadership and Talent at Thames Water. She's also a Business Lecturer at the University of Oregon, she's previously lectured at Level 6 and Level 7 at Henley Business School, can't wait to talk to you this afternoon! Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome.
[00:00:39] Dr Sam Mather: Thank you.
[00:00:40] Clare Carpenter: Where shall we start, Sam? How would you like to arrive with us today? What's your story so far?
[00:00:48] Dr Sam Mather: I guess where the road that has brought me to look into psychological safety has been a long one, but it started, I've always been in the field of developing talent in one form or another and I've worked all over the world in mainly blue chip organisations and I started to notice that when people join organisations, they're very bright and beany and committed and positive and then about 18 months, two years into it, the shine kind of goes off and the honeymoon period disappears and attitudes change and it came to a head in an organisation I was working for that went through a change, a major organisational shift and I'd started to look at what was going on with people from a neuroscience perspective, from the brain and the more I learned about the brain, the more I began to recognise that organisations aren't actually built in a very brain friendly way and what happens from a brain's perspective is that often unwittingly the brain perceives the organisational environment as unsafe and that was the thread that led me to start to investigate what do organisations need to do to allow employees brains to feel safe and therefore for employees to perform better? And I was so passionate about it, I did a PhD.
[00:02:30] Clare Carpenter: Yeah, and there's a passion right there!
[00:02:33] Dr Sam Mather: Yeah, yes.
[00:02:34] Clare Carpenter: I'm really interested to find out more from you around what happened as you started to, dive into this world of neuroscience and the way that organisations impact on the perceived safety or otherwise of an individual's brain at work?
[00:02:53] Dr Sam Mather: Mm hmm.
[00:02:54] Clare Carpenter: It's not necessarily something that you would find leaders in organisations discussing every day, perhaps.
[00:03:00] Dr Sam Mather: Agreed. So as I started to learn about the brain, certainly limbic system has been very popular in recent press. Dr. Steve Peters with his Chimp Paradox made the limbic system very popular. But the bit that really interested me as part of that limbic system was the, what we call the anterior cingular cortex, which is part of the limbic system, but that is essentially an extremely sensitive and finely tuned error detection mechanism.
It kicks in when for example, you're walking down a dark alley at night and you get a feeling, you get this, something doesn't quite feel right. That's your error detection going, hello, this is a problem, you might want to pay attention to this and that is the piece that will send a message to say, something's not right, something is potentially threatening to you.
But the things that the brain perceives as threatening haven't really changed in 10,000 years because it does such a great job of protecting us. We're still alive as a species and so it hasn't changed. So I looked into what were the key things that the brain needs to think it's safe and there were five key elements that our brain needs, all everybody's brain needs and if they're satisfied, then we're safe and then our cortisol and adrenaline goes down, and that, like a see saw, as cortisol and adrenaline goes down, dopamine and serotonin, which makes us smart, goes up and conversely when we're stressed, the cortisol and adrenaline goes up, and the smart bit, the dopamine and serotonin goes down. So, I start to explore these five key areas that are, we are hard wired to recognise as without this, there's a problem, there's an error, and we need to get this fixed.
[00:05:00] Clare Carpenter: Tell us more about those five areas.
[00:05:03] Dr Sam Mather: So there are five areas, they all begin with C. So I call them the five C's that we all have. The first one is competency. So, if you think about it, when we were living in caves, we needed to be competent at hunting or gathering in order to survive. So competency is really important and often you can spot what your limbic system is doing and how it responds around competency. If I said to you, can I just give you some feedback? What's your limbic system doing? And I know mine is telling me, look out, there's income incoming. You know, you need to fight or run away on this one, so competency is the first one. The second one is connectedness. So we were always safe in a tribe, that was where the safety in numbers came in and if at any point you're ostracised from that tribe you lose your connectedness, that's a threat and in fact, the brain rewards us for really good connections. You get a little boost of oxytocin when you have a really good relationship and a really good connection with you and that's the brain going, that's great, that's safe, keep that connection going. So at any time we think our connectedness is being threatened, then the limbic system will wake up. An example of that in the workplace is when I explore why leaders are reticent to give constructive or developmental feedback to other people, if you dig down, often it's because I don't want them not to like me. So some people have got quite high need for connectedness. Control is the third one, so control, at the age of two, we see ourselves as separate entities to our parents and therefore, we start to try and take control at the age of two and we want to go off and do our own things, and thus we get terrible two tantrums as they go off and do their own thing and it doesn't get any better as we get older, we just manage it better. So at any point that the brain perceives it's out of control, that's a potential threat. Consistency, it is a smart move to assume that anything out of the ordinary, anything inconsistent, is a threat because you don't know, so err on the side of caution. So anything that's inconsistent the brain will perceive as a threat and the example I often give, it's Friday afternoon, you get a ping and your boss has sent you a mail going, can I just see you in my office on Monday morning, nine o'clock? Now, I don't know about you, but my limbic system's going, well, what have I done wrong? And will probably spend my whole weekend cogitating over what I could have done wrong, we assume there's an error. And the last one, C, is cause. Why are we doing something? We need to understand this, because we have a finite amount of physical, emotional, and cognitive resources and you know this because you get tired, you get snippy, you lose your concentration, so we have finite resources.
So if you want me to invest them in doing something, I need to know why I'm doing it. But if we look, so if you take those five things and think for example change, change in organisations. Change possibly triggers all five of those things. So, I'm going through change at work, and I'm worried about my competency because they're asking me to do a new job or learn a new system. I don't feel in control because the change is being done to me. I've had no say in this. I don't know if the cause is being triggered because I don't know why we're doing it. There's inconsistency because one minute we're changing this way and then we're changing that way and it may threaten my connectedness because I'm going to have a new boss or a new team or whatever. So change in organisations is a huge threat to the limbic system and to the brain and so when we manage change, we need to be doing that from the perspective of how do we manage change in a way that keeps the limbic system as quiet as possible and we get people being smart and innovative and solving problems rather than focusing on protecting themselves and change is not a project plan, it's a psychological process. that is, what I try to teach leaders in terms of getting people engaged, getting them smart, getting them working at their best. They need to feel safe, the brain needs to perceive safety, and the way to do that is to hit all of those five C's.
[00:09:34] Clare Carpenter: It's fascinating, isn't it, because I'm thinking about the environment that we are experiencing now, and indeed have done, you know, probably for the last, I mean actually probably for the last couple of decades, through very significant periods of change, but also, In particular, through the pandemic and the changes of hybrid working being completely removed and disconnected, uncertain, out of control, all of the things that you're saying, all five of them probably triggered all at the same time and coming out of that a sense of whatever the new environment is that we find ourselves experiencing also again, that state of a uncertainty that is surrounding that we still don't really know what's next do we, in terms of our working, environment, the challenge for me as I'm listening to you is that many leaders are experiencing that as powerfully or more powerfully than the people that they're leading, aren't they?
[00:10:32] Dr Sam Mather: Absolutely and certainly if you have a leader whose limbic system is being triggered and is experiencing stress, so their adrenaline, the cortisol that is going up, then they're likely to be more defensive, they're likely to respond and therefore that creates a culture of you know, I don't want to approach him because he's really stressed, he's quite snippy or and she's a bit, she's a bit all over the place and that sets the tone. So the key message that I do give is a message from the airlines actually, which is put your own oxygen mask on first before helping anybody else and certainly during COVID, I was doing a lot of sessions around the five C's and the things that you can do as an individual to put your own mask on and it does start with self awareness, as with all leadership. It starts with understanding and calibrating you when you feel good and listening to the signs, because the brain is sending you messages all the time, we ignore them and then we continue to ignore them, and we continue to ignore them until our mental health suffers and our physical health suffers and sure enough, you're right, we're in a VUCA environment. They use the term VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, that's not going to get better. It's really challenging, and certainly we've seen an increase in mental health challenges. So it's very much about start with yourself, look after yourself, get yourself in a position whereby you're not only physically fit, but brain fit and then once your brain is fit, then you are better able to manage the impact you have on others.
[00:12:12] Clare Carpenter: Thinking about what you have just said around more instances of mental health challenges. now than ever before and I wonder if that's true. I wonder if what's different is our capacity to speak about them now, whereas perhaps in the past we didn't.
[00:12:34] Dr Sam Mather: I mean, that's a fair comment because ironically, people didn't speak about it because they didn't feel psychologically safe to do so.
[00:12:41] Clare Carpenter: Exactly that.
[00:12:42] Dr Sam Mather: Whereas now, it is a much more accepted norm to be able to articulate that in a safe space. Having said that, there are organisations that are still very psychologically unsafe around that and so yeah, I guess we'll never know whether it was the same before, but certainly it's more acceptable and safer to articulate it and deal with it, and that we should be thankful for that.
[00:13:10] Clare Carpenter: I think that's so interesting to think about the impact of a broader discussion around the world of psychology as well as psychological safety and wonder about some of the language that's widely used in, you know, social media threads and, you know, podcasts, not this one obviously, but other discussion forums around words like triggers and self diagnosis and diagnosis of others with syndromes here, there and everywhere. I think that people's experiences are real for them at the time that they're having them for sure and all of us are different and none of us can really know what's going on in another one person's brain. But how do we as leaders then approach those conversations in a way that doesn't feel like we're sort of barstool psychologists, if you like, that is really creating a space where people can safely and confidently or unconfidently say what they're experiencing.
[00:14:06] Dr Sam Mather: Absolutely. So the first step is about self awareness as a leader. So there is a hierarchy of behavior, if you like. Behavior, if you imagine an iceberg, what's above the water is our behavior. People see it, that is what creates the waves and the ripples. But beneath that, beneath behavior are attitudes, and beneath attitudes are values and beliefs, and beneath values and beliefs are fears. What that means is that behaviors are a manifestation of our own values and beliefs and fears. Some people go through their whole lives as leaders and the triggers you're talking about, they are, there's something about, something that they believe, something that they are afraid of that results in their behavior.
An example being, a leader may have a fear of being called out because they're frightened deep down that they're not competent. So therefore, when you challenge them, the behavior that manifests is either put the person down, or they don't ask for feedback, or they ignore it, or they create a climate whereby they don't get feedback because it's a self preservation mechanism and I encourage leaders to start to understand what drives your behaviors. If you think about how you lead, what are the values and beliefs that sit underneath that? An example being, leading my team is like leading a bunch of kids. That's a belief. I'm not saying it's a correct belief, but it is a belief. But that will then drive how they then lead. So we look at that belief and then say, well, is this true? Are they really a bunch of kids? What's allowing them to do that? And then trying to enable the leader to understand, by having that belief, that means you get this behavior, which causes that wave. Change that belief, that will change that behavior, and make the wave different. So, number one, starts with self awareness, having some reflection, good reflection, and introspection, and maybe a coach if needed. In terms of how the leader then works with other people, I would say take a coaching approach. The beauty of coaching is that it enables the employee to be aware of what needs to change, to come up with their own solutions so they feel in control, they have a sense of competence, they will understand why they're doing it because it will be tied to a bigger picture and it will build a really great connectedness between the leader and the employee, allowing the employee to take accountability and being okay to go, I gave it a go, didn't necessarily work, I'm going to try again, something different. So coaching enables that adult to adult conversation, which creates a much safer environment and command and control.
[00:17:12] Clare Carpenter: Yeah, I'm really hearing that and what you're saying. I wonder if there are some more tips around creating this psychologically safe workplace that you'd like to share, because I get the idea sometimes that some leaders believe psychological safety is akin to sort of wrapping someone in cotton wool and not giving them fierce feedback and that's not it, is it?
[00:17:42] Dr Sam Mather: Not at all. So it is very much about, I mean, the true definition, so Amy Edmondson was the queen of psychological safety. The challenge I have with Amy, her work's amazing and she inspired me, but the challenge she has is she's positioned psychological safety as a team construct. In other words, it is a consequence of your manager and your team. Totally agree with that. Where I've positioned my research is around, but even if you had the perfect manager and the perfect team, does that guarantee you will feel psychologically safe? And the answer is no, because we have beliefs about ourselves that may impact how safe we feel. So the research that I looked at was to say, are there any intrinsic resources that the individual needs to bring to the party? So it's not all leader and team, the individual has a responsibility for their psychological safety. Particularly in a time, I mean, Amy Edmondson did her studies in the 90s. We've come a long way from the 90s, you know, people have more than one boss, they have more than one team, and then that changes on a regular basis and, so it does behoove us to take accountability for our own psychological safety. The research that I did identified that 60 percent of your psychological safety comes from your team and your manager, 40 percent is your own internal resources. So what are those resources? Well, there were four key internal intrinsic resources that we can have within ourselves that contribute to psychological safety and although they are our own, our leaders can help us with them as well. So for example, hope and optimism, two resources that we need and how are they different? Well, optimism is believing that there will be a positive outcome in the end. So this plays very much to having the cause and means that leaders need to be really good at storytelling and creating a vision in a meaningful way for that person so they get the cause piece.
Hope, on the other hand, is being able to see how to get there. So for example, I may be very optimistic that I'm going to marry a millionaire, but I have no hope of doing so, or conversely, it might be the other way. I have, I'm doing all the right things, but I'm not optimistic that I'm actually going to get down the aisle with my millionaire. Okay, so hope and optimism. So what does that mean for managers around the hope? Well, managers need to be able to give employees clear guidance and accountability. This is what we need you to do, be very clear on the goal, the spans of control, and the accountability. It gives a sense of safety. So, hope and optimism.
The other piece was self efficacy. In other words, self efficacy defined as the belief you have about your own capability. So what does that mean for managers? That means that we need to be enabling people to flourish, to learn, to stretch just a little bit outside the comfort zone and that requires, to do that learning and to flourish, that requires feedback, that requires putting people on the right direction if needed and that will help with the competency piece.
Finally, the piece that also contributes to psychological safety was what's termed, attentional control and this is very much about where are you choosing to invest your limited resources? How effective is the employee on going and looking at the things that replenish their own resources rather than deplete them? So do you sit there and have a pity party and moan about it and say how rubbish the management is? Or do you go, you know what, I have to believe that people are doing the best they can? So, what that means for managers is that they need to be able to articulate what's happening in the organisation in a way that boosts individuals safety rather than undermines it and I'm not saying be Pollyanna, I'm not saying be all, everything is roses, and we will never get rid of the limbic system, and nor do we want to, it keeps us alive, but giving them an opportunity to say, you know what, this is the silver lining, this is what we can learn from it, this is how we can grow from it. So a growth mindset is really, really important.
[00:22:33] Clare Carpenter: I'm really hearing that echoes of the growth mindset as you speak, and also lots of much older psychological concepts that sort of feed into how these things play out, I'm definitely hearing lots of positive psychology in the way that you describe that, this intentional focus on flourishing rather than fixing. A sense of the Pygmalion effect if you, if you will, around working for somebody who believes in you and believes you can do more and has that sense of feeding your notion perhaps of self efficacy. There's a sense that says it's a nurturing of that maybe if you're working for a leader who believes that, you know, the impossible can in fact become possible when you're working together. What experience do you have of that?
[00:23:20] Dr Sam Mather: So, I run an exercise on many of the programs we're talking, often an opening exercise I run is I get people to introduce themselves and I say, tell me about a leader that's inspired you in the past. It could be a work person, it can be a teacher, it can be anything, I don't mind, famous, not famous and I go around the room and I write up all the adjectives and then when we're done, we look back at the adjectives and the adjectives that are coming out were how that leader made them feel. Nobody puts, they were a really, really good structural engineer. Nobody puts that, yeah, they put, he believed in me. She pushed me beyond what I thought I could achieve, they gave me feedback and helped me grow and even now, if your listeners think back to the teacher or the leader that inspired you, it's not who they knew, or their position, or their technical knowledge, the inspiring leaders are the ones that you remember because of the way they made you feel about yourself and that goes again back to the limbic system, which is part of our emotional control. Emotions are far stronger and far more lasting than any logic and so this comes back to making people feel valued and you're right, it's all, none of this is new stuff, other than the fact that we now have a brain, a scientific approach to say, you know what, this is why coaching works, because it allows the five C's. This is why positive psychology works. In Luthens and his crowd were where I started with my research. This is why it works. This is the science behind the soft and fluffy, the hugger tree, it's not, it's scientific and it plays to the brain and okay, so in the 40s and 50s and 60s when we came up with these models, we might not have known what we know about the brain, but we do now and we can now demonstrate it.
[00:25:31] Clare Carpenter: Yeah, and we're learning things about the brain all the time, aren't we? Every time we think we know something, we don't know it anymore the next month, the next year, the next week and there's some fascinating developments in that space. It's not that we were wrong before, but we learn new things and we leave those things behind and learn new things, don't we?
What's important do you think, I mean, the neuroscientists are working hard in all of that. Experts like you working really hard in that field of psychological safety to develop ways of bringing that into the real world for leaders in organisations. How does this space, this knowledge of this relatively unexplored, unknown, notion of the brain, how does that play into what we're constantly hearing now discussed in organisations around building a culture of resilience and we need to be an employer that can bounce back and bounce forward and we need to adapt and we need to change and we need to grow and we need to be different or we're going to fade away, what's that about?
[00:26:37] Dr Sam Mather: You're absolutely right, this is exactly what organisations need, they need to be resilient and to coin a phrase, there are a lot of unknown unknowns out there, and we're coming across things we've never had to deal with before, so what do we need to be able to deal with that? We need smart people, we need people who can solve problems, be creative, be innovative, be agile in their thinking, people who can turn on a penny and have enough resources to be able to do that. But to be able to do that, they need to feel safe, because what happens with the thinking, smart thinking is compromised by fear, because fear increases your cortisol and adrenaline and what happens then, non essential functions are taken offline.
So the bigger the fear, the more the non essential functions, like digestion for example, which is why we get nervous, ultimately you get ulcers, all of those things, the body changes. But one of the things, the limbic system deprioritises is the smart part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, because you don't need to be smart to fight or run away and it becomes more about your own preserving yourself and you'll see people who are under threat will literally narrow their focus, and look at well, what does this mean for me? How does this affect me? But if you want people to be able to think big, think agile, think longer term, think beyond the here and now, their limbic system needs to be quiet. So, in terms of creating a resilient organisation, you need resilient people, you need smart people and therefore, lead in a way that enables them to be smart and to learn, and make mistakes, and be innovative, and be creative.
[00:28:24] Clare Carpenter: And we're not talking about. a place where there's no stress, are we? We're not saying pressure and stress are always bad, because actually, they're not, are they?
[00:28:34] Dr Sam Mather: Not at all, not at all, stress is good actually. Let's clarify pressure and stress. So, stress is our response to pressure and if you think about it as when I'm face to face, I have a glass and I fill it with loads of smarties right to the top and I go, each of those smarties are one of your resources, it's an emotional resource, it's a smart resource, all of the resources we've got to work every day. Think about what takes those smarties out. So for example, you might be worried about your kids, take a handful out. You might be worried about your job, take a handful out, take a huge handful out for change at work. Whatever it might be, personal and otherwise. What you've got left is what you have to handle any additional pressure. So in terms of being resilient, it's about having enough of those resources to deal with the pressures and if your resources are depleted, your capability of managing those pressures is less and there's no such thing as work life balance. You use the same brain at work than you do at home. So when things in or out of work are occupying a lot of your resources, your capacity, your resources you have available to manage the pressures, changes and then sometimes you have a lot of resources and you can deal with a lot of pressure, other times you can't, it depends. You have to, again, it's about calibrating and looking after yourself so that the times where you need additional support because your resources are low, it's there.
[00:30:16] Clare Carpenter: And I guess it's often at that time that our imposter thoughts rear their heads, don't they? That sense of, I need some extra support, there are things going on, I don't have the capacity or the resources to manage effectively or hold everything right this moment, I need some extra support, but if I ask for it, it will serve me very badly.
[00:30:43] Dr Sam Mather: Yes. So my research at the moment is looking in to imposter syndrome and burnout from a neuroscience perspective. So firstly, I don't like the phrase imposter syndrome.
[00:30:56] Clare Carpenter: Me neither!
[00:30:57] Dr Sam Mather: It's, no, it's not a syndrome, let me assure you there's nothing wrong with you, your brain is working perfectly and indeed Clans and Imes who came up with the term have said they wish they'd never called it syndrome, so it's imposter thoughts and what I noticed was that, in my research on resilience, if you look at, burnout, there are sort of three stages of burnout and the highest stage or the worst stage, the symptoms of that are the same as imposter thoughts and this is where the resilience piece kind of plays in. So, if you took at the three levels of burnout, the first level, the brain is sending you a message. I'm running short of resources and it sends you a message by making you tired, you know, you might get colds, you might be a little bit run down, you're starting to feel a bit stressed, so quite physical manifestations. But we ignore them because we're troopers and we carry on. So the brain gets a bit louder and what happens is it says, listen mate, you're really under stress, you really need to take time out. So what it does is narrow your thinking. The second level is an interpersonal level, whereby suddenly your empathy for other people starts to drop, your tolerance for other people starts to drop. Your ability to adapt and change lessens, because you don't have the resources, you're still going, you're going and going and you're on depleted resources, but we carry on and then we get to the third and final level of burnout and this is what sounds like imposter thoughts. That's intrapersonal, whereby you start to lose your self esteem, your self worth, your confidence. You start asking yourself questions like, is this really what I want? Is what's this all about? Having self doubt, feeling guilt, all of those things could be an imposter thought, they could also be burnout and all that's doing is the brain keeps talking to you and giving you messages and saying, you need to slow down, you just like, you've just ignored it and so it's got to that real point where your resources are so depleted you can't even boil your own thoughts up, you can't manage your own thoughts and you need to take time out and that's why I say if you're tired, sleep, if you're hungry, eat, look after yourself physically, that's the first and fundamental starting place.
[00:33:32] Clare Carpenter: And we're back to that, putting your own oxygen mask on first, aren't we, from the point of view of if we bring this full circle through to the leadership space.
[00:33:40] Dr Sam Mather: So if you have a leader at the third level of burnout, where they have self doubt, their self esteem is low, their confidence is low, then think about all the C's, go right back to their ultimate fears, they're losing their sense of competency, they're losing a sense of control, they're not connected because they've got no empathy with people, remember that went earlier, they're looking after themselves, so suddenly, how can they possibly create an environment that enables that? They can't do it for themselves.
[00:34:10] Clare Carpenter: And I guess the final thought perhaps on some of this from me before we start to move towards a conclusion of our conversation would also be, there's probably a whole nother podcast episode in discussing the implications of everything we've been talking about on the community of neurodiversity that we now know more about than before, but still very, very, very little, because lots of the impacts that we're talking about are entirely different for those of us with differently wired brains.
[00:34:40] Dr Sam Mather: Often it's the manifestation of that. So, in the sense that there are still the needs. They still need to feel competent. Neurodiverse people still need to feel that they've got a sense of control, whatever. Often it's the articulation of that and the manifest, how does that manifest in the behaviour, that is different. But you're right, it's still new, we're still learning about that and I think there'll be a lot more focus on that in the future.
[00:35:07] Clare Carpenter: In conclusion, I wonder what would be some highlights for you for us to take away as reflective points or some work that we can do on ourselves as a result of all of the depth of experience and research that you have in this world of psychological safety and resilience development, what advice would you give to leaders working in organisations today who are facing those challenges for themself and for others?
[00:35:36] Dr Sam Mather: So start with yourself. So that means all the stuff your parents told you about, like, sleep well, and yes we do need eight hours, sleep well, exercise, eat your vegetables, all of the boring stuff, start with the fundamentals, okay? Think about being clear about your purpose, why you're there, have a bigger purpose around it, because that creates a lot more buy in and positivity.
Really check yourself in terms of your attention, where are you focusing your attention on? Go back to the old locus of control. Don't waste resources on things that you can do nothing about. So look after yourself from that perspective, and understand your values and beliefs because they manifest into behavior that may have an impact on other people's brains. So what are your belief systems? Really learn to reflect on those, become really self aware to make sure that when you're interacting with your teams, you do so in a way that makes them feel competent, connected, in control, have a consistent experience, and they understand the reasons why with their cause as well and in doing that, you're not only looking after yourself, but creating an environment of psychological safety and enabling your employees to create their own psychological safety.
[00:36:58] Clare Carpenter: Yeah, and keep learning, I guess, as well, hey? Keep thinking about it, keep learning, keep reading and keep thinking and, you know, keep learning.
[00:37:08] Dr Sam Mather: We're never finished, we are always a project on the go and I think accepting that is a really good approach around reflecting, because how did that go? It didn't quite have the impact I wanted it to have. How can I do that differently? And constantly polishing our leadership practice as we go.
[00:37:34] Clare Carpenter: Glorious, I love that, we're never done and that's a good thing.
[00:37:37] Dr Sam Mather: It is.
[00:37:38] Clare Carpenter: Thank you, Dr. Sam Mather. Thank you so much for your time today, your thoughts and your own reflection and your openness in sharing all of that, really lovely to talk to you. Thank you.
[00:37:49] Dr Sam Mather: Thank you so much. Thank you.
[00:37:51] Clare Carpenter: Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode of Unlocking Leadership, you can subscribe through all the regular podcast channels, and please do leave us a rating and review there. We'd also love you to share any episodes you found interesting so that others can join the conversation and share their experiences.
This podcast was made in association with Corndel. It was produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four.