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At some point in our lives we all get scared – of making the wrong decision, of not being a good parent, or that everyone will figure out we’re just making it up as we go.
I’ve spent years helping leaders work through fear, stress, and uncertainty. Now I’m making a podcast about how they face their fears and come out stronger.
It’s for founders, leaders, and business owners who feel like they’re constantly fighting uphill and not finding the balance they need to be effective at work and present at home.
00:00:00 Sally-Anne:
Kindness is less about who we are and more about what we do.
00:00:05 Sally-Anne:
Tiny acts of kindness can transform a difficult situation.
00:00:09 Sally-Anne:
They may not look like the thing that made the difference, yet they're often what made the difference possible.
00:00:14 Sally-Anne:
So how can we cultivate more kindness in the workplace?
00:00:18 Sally-Anne:
I'm Sally Anne Ary and welcome to Fearless Forward, the podcast that asks leaders how they face their fears.
00:00:27 Sally-Anne:
Today I'm in conversation with a productivity expert who helps busy people gain control of their time and attention and achieve real work-life balance.
00:00:36 Sally-Anne:
Graham Alcott is the founder of Think Productive, an international productivity training company.
00:00:42 Sally-Anne:
He's also a speaker, podcaster, and author of six books.
00:00:46 Sally-Anne:
For more than 15 years, Graham's been on a mission to revolutionize the way we work.
00:00:51 Sally-Anne:
His central message is deceptively simple.
00:00:54 Sally-Anne:
Productivity isn't about doing more, it's about doing what matters.
00:00:59 Sally-Anne:
And in his latest work, captured in his award-winning book, Kind, he takes this a step further, arguing that kindness is the rocket fuel that drives sustainable success.
00:01:11 Sally-Anne:
This is the book he wants to be remembered for.
00:01:14 Sally-Anne:
In our conversation, we explore why.
00:01:21 Sally-Anne:
So Graham, tell us,
00:01:23 Sally-Anne:
What does kindness have to do with productivity?
00:01:27 Graham:
It's a good question.
00:01:28 Graham:
It kind of often gets thrown at me with this accusation that they're two complete opposites.
00:01:32 Graham:
So productivity is this kind of heads down.
00:01:35 Graham:
ignore the rest of the world, get on with your stuff kind of thing.
00:01:38 Graham:
And then kindness is much more scanning the horizons, looking out for other people.
00:01:43 Graham:
I think that there are two sides of the same coin in one way.
00:01:46 Graham:
Probably the best route in to talk about this is to talk about my own company, Think Productive.
00:01:51 Graham:
So for many years, we've had one of our corporate values as trust and kindness are rocket fuel.
00:01:58 Graham:
And that's really been about just recognizing that when you get empathy and trust and psychological safety in your culture,
00:02:06 Graham:
then it's a shortcut to people saying, well, I feel trusted, I'm able to just take action, I'm able to move forward.
00:02:11 Graham:
And it just becomes this huge shortcut to lots of good things happening.
00:02:16 Graham:
So I do think that cultures that are more focused on empathy and on trust and on kindness are more productive.
00:02:25 Graham:
But I do think it's also, to me, it's what I wanted to do with this book was to really start asking a bigger question, which is not how does one person get stuff done, but how do we as teams
00:02:35 Graham:
as cultures think about work in a much bigger way than with Productivity Ninja, my first book, it was like, these are the rules, here's how you follow the rules.
00:02:44 Graham:
And with this, it's like, let's think about what the questions are and the bigger picture, and then the rules will kind of look after themselves.
00:02:54 Sally-Anne:
So a sense of expanding that initial idea into more of a concept.
00:02:59 Sally-Anne:
It's not just a concept, is it?
00:03:01 Sally-Anne:
Because as you have experienced, I think you used the word think, but you
00:03:05 Sally-Anne:
have direct evidence for this, don't you?
00:03:07 Sally-Anne:
That empathy, trust and psychological safety develop cultures that perform better, that are more productive, that get more stuff done, engage people better and so on.
00:03:17 Sally-Anne:
I mean, you don't just think it, you know it, don't you?
00:03:19 Graham:
Yes, so when I wrote Kind, the first half of Kind was specifically written with the audience being the cynics.
00:03:28 Graham:
So the idea was, in the same way that the people who bought
00:03:32 Graham:
Quiet by Susan Cain were not extroverts who wanted to be a bit more introverted, but it was introverts wanting to give the book to their bosses and say, can we do a bit more like this?
00:03:42 Graham:
I thought the same thing would happen with Kind, and that has proven to be the case over the last kind of year and a half.
00:03:46 Graham:
It's like people who already feel like they're on Team Kind, they buy that book to then give to their bosses and say, hey, here's some ways that we can think about the way we do things here.
00:03:57 Graham:
So I wrote the first half of the book with the cynics in mind, and I just did loads of research.
00:04:02 Graham:
And what I uncovered with the research was these links between kindness and empathy, first of all.
00:04:08 Graham:
So you've got this lovely virtuous circle between the two where if you give people the challenge of being kind and say, yeah, you've got to do three kind things a day, what that produces in their brains is more empathy.
00:04:21 Graham:
Empathy is also a neuroplastic trait, which means that we can all learn to be more empathetic.
00:04:25 Graham:
And if you're naturally more empathetic, you're also naturally more kind.
00:04:29 Graham:
So you have this lovely like virtuous circle.
00:04:31 Graham:
Once you have kindness and empathy in place, that builds trust between people.
00:04:35 Graham:
And once you start to have trust between people, you start to develop psychological safety.
00:04:40 Graham:
And what it finds is that organizations and cultures that have psychological safety, they have higher levels of productivity, they have higher levels of innovation because people are starting to be more connected to each other and people are
00:04:53 Graham:
starting to think about ideas in a different way.
00:04:56 Graham:
They have higher levels of retention, people want to hang around longer.
00:04:59 Graham:
They have high levels of engagement, which means people jump in and solve each other's problems, not just their own.
00:05:04 Graham:
And just all of this stuff develops off the back of psychological safety, and that really comes from kindness.
00:05:11 Graham:
So it was lovely to do that research and realize that when Think Productive wrote, trust and kindness are a rocket fuel many years ago, and we've been sort of operating that way since,
00:05:22 Graham:
So there was a scientific basis to it.
00:05:24 Graham:
I mean, we didn't know it at the time, but it was always coming from that place.
00:05:28 Graham:
There's a lovely study just to pick out one from the book, which was a study they did at Google.
00:05:33 Graham:
And Google was growing rapidly and they were asking themselves, how do we build teams?
00:05:38 Graham:
And this was a particularly trendy thing to talk about.
00:05:41 Graham:
think back to like Steve Jobs autobiography where the whole thing was, you don't have a team that has too many members that you can't feed them all with two pizzas.
00:05:49 Graham:
And he has all these rules around the number of people you have on teams and stuff.
00:05:53 Graham:
So Google were just asking this question like, we're going to build all these different teams for all these different things.
00:05:58 Graham:
How do we build the team?
00:05:59 Graham:
And they looked at all the different variables.
00:06:01 Graham:
So the variables are
00:06:02 Graham:
the talent that you can have on the team, the budget you give them, the time scales you give them, the way that they work.
00:06:08 Graham:
And what they found was that the single biggest success factor in whether a team at Google was successful was psychological safety, which when you compare against all those other metrics, right, like we spent so much time thinking about budgets and people and recruitment and all these other things.
00:06:24 Graham:
And actually, if you just put smart people in a room, but then give them the psychological safety to figure stuff out together, that's where you get successful teams.
00:06:34 Sally-Anne:
And don't we just know it?
00:06:35 Sally-Anne:
I just wonder though, I think it's unlikely that any of our listeners won't have at least come across the term psychological safety because it is bandied about so much, for good reason.
00:06:46 Sally-Anne:
Could you just give us your definition?
00:06:48 Sally-Anne:
What do you mean by it?
00:06:50 Graham:
This isn't my definition so much as Amy Edmondson's, who's the Harvard academic who's done a lot of work on this, but she has this lovely definition of it, which is that it's the belief that you're able to take an interpersonal risk.
00:07:03 Graham:
That's boiling it down to a single sentence is a slightly wider one, but this idea of interpersonal risks is really important.
00:07:09 Graham:
So I'm sitting in a group of people,
00:07:12 Graham:
They're all nodding along and saying, yes, we should do X.
00:07:15 Graham:
And in my head, I'm thinking, I don't think X is going to work.
00:07:18 Graham:
How about Y?
00:07:20 Graham:
But do I feel brave enough to go against the flow, to stand up and say something that's contradictory, to perhaps challenge the person who's in charge?
00:07:29 Graham:
So that takes a level of interpersonal risk to do that.
00:07:33 Graham:
And so you need to feel psychologically safe in order to do that.
00:07:37 Graham:
A really simple way
00:07:39 Graham:
Anyone listening to this, I'm sure will have seen psychological safety be built, is when you're doing some kind of brainstorming session and there's a flip chart and the person facilitating just says the phrase,
00:07:50 Graham:
Any ideas, no idea is a bad idea.
00:07:52 Graham:
it's like really simple little setup and it becomes almost a cliche thing.
00:07:56 Graham:
I think there's probably a bit in the office with David Brent where they use that same kind of terminology because it's so cliche.
00:08:01 Graham:
But the reason it's there is so that when someone goes, I've got an idea in my head, it might be a bit of a harebrained idea or it might be genius.
00:08:10 Graham:
I don't know yet.
00:08:11 Graham:
Do I feel brave enough to take that interpersonal risk?
00:08:14 Graham:
So it matters when you're trying to think critically and close down bad ideas, but it also matters when you're trying to be creative and bring good ideas to the fore.
00:08:23 Graham:
And often, the weirdest idea that you first put on the flip chart for a brainstorm ends up being the most compelling one.
00:08:29 Graham:
It's often when you get away from being
00:08:31 Graham:
so obvious that you end up somewhere good.
00:08:34 Graham:
And I think those are just really simple examples of psychological safety.
00:08:38 Graham:
But where it really matters more is where you've got someone who's perhaps really stressed out, perhaps having a difficult time and the people around them feel able to take that little risk in reaching out, you know, and just saying, hey, you don't.
00:08:50 Graham:
kind of look right, like something doesn't feel right.
00:08:52 Graham:
What's going on?
00:08:53 Graham:
Is there something happening?
00:08:54 Graham:
And to sort of connect on that level can sometimes actually be quite a brave thing to do.
00:08:59 Graham:
So I think that's a really important way to think about it as well.
00:09:02 Sally-Anne:
That's really helpful, Graham.
00:09:03 Sally-Anne:
And yes, the work of Amy Edmondson is critical to this field, isn't it, and to our understanding of it.
00:09:10 Sally-Anne:
And I suppose what I was getting at was your experience of it.
00:09:13 Sally-Anne:
And from that experience, what it means to you, how have you seen it playing out?
00:09:17 Sally-Anne:
So I'm thinking you referred earlier
00:09:19 Sally-Anne:
to the work around introversion, the book Quiet was seminal in that, wasn't it?
00:09:24 Sally-Anne:
So let's say a leader is in a room, virtual or real, with quite probably a mix of extroverted and introverted people.
00:09:34 Sally-Anne:
possibly the extroverted ones are more likely to volunteer their thoughts, not necessarily, but probably more likely to.
00:09:41 Graham:
But often, yeah.
00:09:42 Sally-Anne:
Whereas the quiet, more introverted individuals might find that more difficult.
00:09:47 Sally-Anne:
So how does a leader use kindness to encourage everyone to share their voice in a way that doesn't undermine or diminish or anything else, anybody in the room?
00:09:59 Graham:
I just want to add two other things to your question which might be helpful.
00:10:03 Graham:
So one is, yeah, you've got introvert versus extrovert as a dynamic there.
00:10:09 Graham:
But you've also presumably got levels of experience and levels of seniority, whether the title or just implied.
00:10:17 Graham:
And then you've also got a thing which I experienced quite a lot within Think Productive is
00:10:23 Graham:
So my friend Tom Nixon has a book called Source, which is really about when somebody starts some kind of endeavor.
00:10:31 Graham:
There's always a kind of spiritual source of the thing.
00:10:34 Graham:
And with Think Productive, that's me.
00:10:37 Graham:
So I'm the founder of it.
00:10:39 Graham:
We've got an MD, Elena, who you also know well.
00:10:42 Graham:
And I always want to defer decisions when we're in
00:10:47 Graham:
a big group in a room together or on a Zoom or a Teams call together to Elena because she's the MD.
00:10:52 Graham:
But often, because I'm the source and the founder, I'm just really conscious that people are looking at me.
00:10:58 Graham:
So in all of those different scenarios, whether it's about introversion and extroversion, whether it's about seniority or whether it's about whose thing is this anyway, I think it's kind of down to two things to tease that out.
00:11:09 Graham:
One is having built psychological safety already.
00:11:13 Graham:
And then the second one is good facilitation.
00:11:15 Graham:
I feel like in my career I've been really lucky to work with just really brilliant facilitators, actually, just really good chairs, really good facilitators, people who are able to really create very.
00:11:28 Graham:
participatory spaces that support those people who might otherwise be the ones who are slightly quieter or less confident in coming forward.
00:11:36 Graham:
I'm thinking of people like Martin Farrell, who was very heavily involved in the kind of founding of Think Productive with me.
00:11:42 Graham:
And I ended up working with him as a facilitator for many years.
00:11:45 Graham:
And we'd go into groups in the UN or in these various different climate summits and all these places and just be the person who's tasked with getting the group from where they are at the beginning to some kind
00:11:58 Graham:
kind of productive output at the end.
00:12:00 Graham:
And then also people like Fiona Door, who I talk about in Kind, who is a sort of licensed facilitator of Nancy Klein's work.
00:12:09 Graham:
So Nancy Klein, who wrote Time to Think, another very big influential book for me.
00:12:13 Graham:
And those people as facilitators are just magical to watch because they do all kinds of little things.
00:12:20 Graham:
Martin would do really incredible things where if he felt like there was some kind of
00:12:26 Graham:
period of stasis or even if he felt like there was just people who were really dominating the room, he would just very quickly pivot to doing some kind of group work thing which put all those people together and they could just blah, blah, blah, blah, just like amongst themselves.
00:12:40 Graham:
But it allowed everybody else the space to come out of their shells and say the thing.
00:12:44 Graham:
Or he would do that very deliberately
00:12:47 Graham:
If it was a bit behind schedule, he'd say, right, there's 12 of us.
00:12:50 Graham:
We're a bit behind schedule.
00:12:52 Graham:
Three of you are going to need to work over lunch.
00:12:54 Graham:
Can we have some volunteers?
00:12:56 Graham:
And then he'd find the people who he felt would have really important contributions, but maybe they wouldn't say it in the room and just make sure they were part of that group.
00:13:03 Graham:
And then over lunch, they'd put the stuff on the flip chart and you'd come back after lunch.
00:13:06 Graham:
It's like, oh, we're actually way further ahead than we thought we were supposed to be.
00:13:09 Graham:
And so there's all these different ways.
00:13:11 Graham:
And Fiona
00:13:12 Graham:
when she would chair meetings, they would always start with a Nancy Klein opening round.
00:13:18 Graham:
And that's lovely for setting the tone of a meeting.
00:13:20 Graham:
So basically everyone just goes around and says their name and how they're feeling and one thing that's going well.
00:13:25 Graham:
But what's really important about it is that when you then have an idea to contribute that might be a vaguely difficult thing, or it might need a little bit of confidence, you've already spoken, you know, and you're already warmed up and you're ready to go.
00:13:37 Graham:
Whereas if you just arrive in the room and then the thing starts and then suddenly you've got this important thing to say, but
00:13:42 Graham:
you haven't heard your voice yet and no one else has, then you're just more inhibited and less able to start.
00:13:48 Graham:
So there's just all these like simple little things that you can do like that.
00:13:51 Graham:
We have this really nice one at Think Productive as well, which Elena started, which is actually staring at me as I talk to you.
00:13:57 Graham:
Just above my window here is blue tacked to the wall is a little plastic giraffe and like a zoo, children's zoo kit animal.
00:14:05 Graham:
And Elena brought like a whole bag of these
00:14:08 Graham:
to one of our away days a couple of years ago.
00:14:10 Graham:
And she just put them all in the middle of the table.
00:14:13 Graham:
And then she's like, right, the giraffes are here.
00:14:15 Graham:
The game is you just award someone a giraffe a moment where you think they've stuck their neck out.
00:14:21 Sally-Anne:
Very good.
00:14:22 Graham:
And it was just this really beautiful little bit of symbolism and they just stayed in this bowl in the middle of the table.
00:14:29 Graham:
But there were moments where someone very gently would just pick up one giraffe and just, you know, almost like little round of applause.
00:14:34 Graham:
Thank you for saying that.
00:14:35 Graham:
And there were a couple of moments where there'd be three or four of us picking up handfuls
00:14:38 Graham:
of the things and throwing them and just stuff like that.
00:14:41 Sally-Anne:
I was going to say it could work both ways, yeah.
00:14:43 Graham:
I know, but it just becomes a very visual symbol of permission.
00:14:48 Graham:
There's whole books written on this in terms of the different ways of doing it, but those are just a few of the things that I've seen and really sort of valued in kind of meetings and sort of leadership situations I've been in.
00:14:58 Sally-Anne:
Fantastic.
00:14:59 Sally-Anne:
And I'd love to take a moment looking at the example of the two excellent facilitators you just described and the kinds of things they would do.
00:15:07 Sally-Anne:
I'd love to map those against the tenets of kind.
00:15:12 Sally-Anne:
What I'm trying to do here, Graham, obviously, is bring kind to life.
00:15:17 Sally-Anne:
So where you see, because there's so many different aspects to it, aren't there?
00:15:21 Sally-Anne:
And where you have seen, personally seen kindness happening, where one wouldn't immediately say, oh, that's kind.
00:15:30 Sally-Anne:
because at times it might feel even a little cruel, but it actually is kind because it's speaking to something larger, isn't it?
00:15:38 Sally-Anne:
I'd love to explore that a little bit through those examples.
00:15:42 Graham:
Do you want me to talk about those two particular people?
00:15:44 Sally-Anne:
I was thinking of where you described what they would do and how and why those actions were kind.
00:15:53 Graham:
So within the book there are these eight principles and there are definitely principles that would stand out very clearly
00:16:00 Graham:
in terms of those two people and how they would work.
00:16:03 Graham:
So the first principle, which is easily the most uncomfortable one for most people, is the idea that kindness starts with you.
00:16:12 Graham:
So there's 8 principles in the book.
00:16:13 Graham:
The first one is kindness starts with you.
00:16:15 Graham:
The 8th one is kindness doesn't end with you.
00:16:18 Graham:
But kindness starts with you is all about saying we live in a world where
00:16:23 Graham:
Prevailing narrative in our heads is a narrative of scarcity.
00:16:26 Graham:
And what that leads us to is busyness and ultimately unkindness.
00:16:32 Graham:
And we have to flip that into a narrative of abundance.
00:16:35 Graham:
And that's about making a very different decision.
00:16:38 Graham:
when you're faced with an opportunity to be kind and you get to decide which of those mindsets you're bringing to it.
00:16:45 Graham:
So let's say you're at work and someone needs some help for 20 minutes or something and you have in this moment this choice that you can make.
00:16:55 Graham:
So in that moment you can be in scarcity, which is there isn't enough time, I've got loads of things to do, I'm not enough, there isn't enough, I'm going to head down, I'm not going to do the kind thing.
00:17:07 Graham:
And that's all scarcity.
00:17:08 Graham:
Or you can be in this mindset of abundance which says, well, there is enough time and I am enough and there is enough and let's work with this person and figure this out.
00:17:18 Graham:
And I saw that so often with those two people in the sense that they would always be very clear that they were putting themselves and their own kindness first.
00:17:30 Graham:
They were both people who would really look after themselves.
00:17:32 Graham:
They'd really role model that.
00:17:33 Graham:
Self-kindness came very easily
00:17:36 Graham:
to them, or at least they talked about it enough that it appeared that way, or it might have just been that they found it as hard as the rest of us, but that was their struggle.
00:17:43 Graham:
But I think that's so important because if you don't come at the world with a sort of lens of abundance, then you'll often in those fork in the road moments choose scarcity, and then because of that you're too busy and you choose unkindness.
00:17:56 Graham:
So I think that's a really important component to it.
00:18:00 Sally-Anne:
What I'm hearing there is in those moments,
00:18:04 Sally-Anne:
where you see something difficult, you realize that something difficult is unfolding and it involves a lot of other people in the room.
00:18:11 Sally-Anne:
I wonder if it's something like, what is being asked of me here?
00:18:16 Sally-Anne:
I'm imagining that might be a conscious or unconscious question.
00:18:20 Sally-Anne:
What is being asked of me here?
00:18:23 Sally-Anne:
If you have a scarcity mindset, then I guess what might happen is your mind might contract.
00:18:29 Sally-Anne:
to one single solution that may not be the best one.
00:18:32 Sally-Anne:
Whereas if we feel abundant, we feel that we can answer that question.
00:18:36 Sally-Anne:
What is being asked of me here?
00:18:38 Sally-Anne:
Then you'd have options, wouldn't you?
00:18:40 Graham:
I think fear also comes into it.
00:18:42 Graham:
So I think the mindset of scarcity is really built on fear.
00:18:48 Graham:
I notice this a lot.
00:18:49 Graham:
If you scroll Instagram,
00:18:52 Graham:
everything on there is fear, right?
00:18:54 Graham:
Everything is you need to buy this and you need to lose weight and you need to do this and like the world's ending and like everything on there is fear and everything on there is telling you that you're not enough.
00:19:06 Graham:
Whereas abundance, I think, whilst it feels very heart-centered, is actually really logical to me because
00:19:15 Graham:
The maths of do we have enough resource on this planet to feed and clothe and house everybody is really simple.
00:19:24 Graham:
Like there's enough there, right?
00:19:25 Graham:
So you can take abundance as this kind of slightly hippie heart-centered thing, but actually the logic of abundance is there.
00:19:32 Graham:
But there is this massive illusion that is painted to us in society.
00:19:37 Graham:
I saw a really interesting little exchange the other week, which was a guy called Ollie Dugmore, who is from Politics Joe on YouTube, and he was on Question Time and he was talking about university tuition fees.
00:19:50 Graham:
And he said, the tuition fees things are a massive mess.
00:19:54 Graham:
And for those who don't know, in the UK, there are people now graduating, working the 1st 10 years of their career in very high earning jobs.
00:20:01 Graham:
And the interest that they have stacked up on their student loans is more than what they originally had, despite the fact that they're paying tax every month against it.
00:20:10 Graham:
And it's just this crazy system.
00:20:11 Graham:
And Olly Dugmore on Question Time said, well, I think tuition fees should be free.
00:20:17 Graham:
Let's just start there.
00:20:19 Graham:
And
00:20:20 Graham:
There was a journalist on there, I can't remember her name, but she said, well, how are we going to pay for that?
00:20:25 Graham:
And it's just the most knee-jerk fear-based response.
00:20:30 Graham:
And Ollie Dugmore just really calmly just sat there and went, well, how did we pay for yours?
00:20:35 Graham:
Because she'd gone to university 20 years ago when it was free.
00:20:39 Graham:
I mean, that's just an undeniable thing, right?
00:20:41 Graham:
That we've shifted how we think about that issue.
00:20:45 Graham:
into a more fear-based stance, whereas the stance 20 or 30 years ago when she went to university was, there's this set of institutions and we're going to pay you to contribute to the collective knowledge that goes into these institutions.
00:20:59 Graham:
That to me sounds like a very much more generous way of doing things, but it's also, it's super smart, you know?
00:21:06 Graham:
And so often I think there's a real logic that comes with abundance and a real fear that comes with scarcity.
00:21:13 Sally-Anne:
Well, I suppose if mathematicians would argue that everything comes down to figures and logic in the end, the universe is built around mathematical equations, isn't it?
00:21:22 Sally-Anne:
So indeed, when one can break it out in that way, it does take it out of the sort of fluffy heart-centered into something deeply practical and needed.
00:21:32 Sally-Anne:
And coming back to my first question, it's making me think that the very
00:21:37 Sally-Anne:
logical progression probably of your work from what you called kind of or alluded to as rules-based productivity to a bigger, more expansive conceptual idea of kindness.
00:21:51 Sally-Anne:
Logical really, isn't it?
00:21:53 Sally-Anne:
That your work would have developed in that way if you allow it to, you know, with an abundant mindset, with a desire to evolve and grow.
00:22:01 Sally-Anne:
It sort of had to go that way.
00:22:04 Sally-Anne:
So coming, if I may, turning this a little bit
00:22:07 Sally-Anne:
around to you personally, Graham, and why this matters to you.
00:22:12 Sally-Anne:
wouldn't be doing it if it didn't matter.
00:22:14 Sally-Anne:
You've put a lot of time and effort and devoted.
00:22:17 Sally-Anne:
attention to this.
00:22:19 Sally-Anne:
So why does it matter to you?
00:22:21 Graham:
There was an easier path, right?
00:22:23 Graham:
So you mentioned there, assuming that growth and progression matters.
00:22:28 Graham:
The more logical thing that I could have done as a choice is to double down on productivity and start YouTube channels and get into that whole world of selling productivity stuff.
00:22:40 Graham:
And there's a whole industry out there around it.
00:22:42 Graham:
And it's probably a lot more profitable than what I'm doing now.
00:22:46 Graham:
So yeah, it is very much a conscious thing.
00:22:48 Graham:
I think what it probably also speaks to, the work on kind and sort of where I've gradually been going over the last five or six years is, so my university degree was sociology.
00:23:00 Graham:
And so productivity being a very kind of almost like an individualistic pursuit always felt a bit lacking for me in terms of that
00:23:09 Graham:
being able to see the bigger picture.
00:23:10 Graham:
And so I think I always think in that slightly bigger sense.
00:23:15 Graham:
So it's important for that reason that my work gives me the space to be able to do that.
00:23:21 Graham:
And I also think there's, just to sort of be personal about it, I do think there's a slightly personal and political crossover thing for me.
00:23:30 Graham:
when it comes to kindness, which is about challenging some of these fear-based assumptions.
00:23:35 Graham:
And they're kind of everywhere in our politics at the moment.
00:23:37 Graham:
You think about the way people are set up against each other.
00:23:41 Graham:
And we're taught to fear the tiny number of people who happen to be trans.
00:23:46 Graham:
We're taught to fear people who arrive on dinghies having travelled halfway across the world from war-torn countries.
00:23:53 Graham:
and then are not allowed to work.
00:23:54 Graham:
there's all these things that fear is playing a very big role in.
00:23:58 Graham:
So there's a kind of political part to that.
00:24:00 Graham:
One thing that might be worth throwing into that mix just very personally, and it's also at the start of the book, is my son Roscoe.
00:24:09 Graham:
He has a unique chromosomal disorder, so he's literally unique.
00:24:12 Graham:
There's no one else in the world that they found with his chromosomes.
00:24:15 Graham:
They haven't mapped everyone yet, but I only got mapped because I was his dad and they wanted to see if I had his chromosomes I didn't.
00:24:22 Graham:
So not everyone's been maps, but they've not found anyone with his chromosomes.
00:24:25 Graham:
But the thing about having him is that he goes to a special school.
00:24:30 Graham:
He's had 10 surgeries in his life, including seven major spinal surgeries.
00:24:34 Graham:
And I'm in this situation where being his dad requires me to be on the receiving end of kindness as much as I'm on the giving end of kindness.
00:24:48 Graham:
So
00:24:48 Graham:
That's been a really important thing and a real gift actually in the last 10 years.
00:24:52 Graham:
You can kind of look at that as I probably did in the very early days.
00:24:56 Graham:
We found out when he was very, very little that he had this chromosomal disorder and you can kind of look at it as this kind of woe is me thing.
00:25:03 Graham:
But very quickly I realized the gift it was in terms of putting me in situations where I got to witness kindness all the time.
00:25:11 Graham:
And the biggest thing that taught me, which
00:25:15 Graham:
overlays really neatly actually in terms of how I built my business and also just how I see good culture and good teams at work is that it prioritizes and it sort of acknowledges interdependence as a much higher form of being than independence.
00:25:30 Graham:
And again, I think coming back to social media and the way that we are set up as a society, we're often told that the highest thing we can do is to be completely independent and to be competing and we're providing for our families, but that's it.
00:25:45 Graham:
And all this kind of mindset that we have, it's a really shallow way to live.
00:25:49 Graham:
And I think interdependence, where you recognize that truly great societies are about how you play to everybody's strengths, is just a much higher value to me.
00:25:57 Graham:
And I think
00:25:59 Graham:
Kindness is in some ways, in both a work sense and a personal sense, it's a really good vehicle to be able to talk about some of that stuff and to bring some of that stuff to the fore.
00:26:09 Graham:
So yeah, it's a very personal thing and there is a sort of politics with a small P element to it, but it's also something that over the last couple of years I've really loved doing.
00:26:17 Graham:
When I first started bringing the book out there and talking about it, felt like a very different space to be in to talking about people's emails.
00:26:26 Graham:
But as time's gone on, I've really loved being in that space.
00:26:30 Sally-Anne:
Interdependence as opposed to independence.
00:26:34 Sally-Anne:
And I wonder if it would be the fear, wouldn't it?
00:26:37 Sally-Anne:
What would stop us being interdependent?
00:26:41 Sally-Anne:
Because when you look at it again, applying logic, you know, we're in this world together.
00:26:45 Sally-Anne:
The world is made-up of people.
00:26:47 Sally-Anne:
Why wouldn't we rely on each other?
00:26:49 Sally-Anne:
Why wouldn't we be interdependent?
00:26:51 Sally-Anne:
Why wouldn't we want to do that?
00:26:54 Sally-Anne:
Why would we want to separate ourselves?
00:26:57 Sally-Anne:
And yet we do.
00:26:58 Sally-Anne:
So it's almost anti-logic to separate ourselves.
00:27:01 Sally-Anne:
So it must, I suppose, what drives us apart from each other must be fear, fear of an unknown quantity or quality.
00:27:10 Sally-Anne:
And we see it playing out, there's nothing new in this, we see it playing out in all of the isms that ever were, are fear-based, aren't they?
00:27:17 Sally-Anne:
So how can kindness help us with our own very human frailties?
00:27:24 Sally-Anne:
our own fear.
00:27:26 Sally-Anne:
We all have it, even if we rail against it, we all have it in some way.
00:27:31 Sally-Anne:
How can kindness help us with that?
00:27:34 Graham:
Let's start with the last time as a society we really had that spotlight shone on us in terms of the fact that we are interdependent was probably COVID, right?
00:27:47 Graham:
So if you think about the early stages of COVID when that hit,
00:27:52 Graham:
Certainly the thing in the UK, and I'm sure there were versions of this that played out all over the world, but the thing in the UK was everyone acted out of fear for 10 minutes.
00:28:00 Graham:
And the first thing they did was fight each other in the supermarket for toilet rolls.
00:28:05 Graham:
I don't know if you had the same thing, but it was like, everyone ran out of toilet rolls and toilet rolls became the thing, right?
00:28:11 Graham:
And I think there was a brief thing about flour because everyone wanted to bake cakes or something.
00:28:15 Graham:
But then we got over the fear part and then spent the next few months looking out for each other.
00:28:21 Graham:
people set up neighborhoods, WhatsApp groups at absolutely astonishing rates and people were banging the pots and pans for the NHS and looking out for key workers and all this kind of stuff happened.
00:28:32 Graham:
And I think that probably is a really good indicator that in the early stages of that, because there was so much fear, then competition was winning out.
00:28:42 Graham:
But we had to learn very quickly
00:28:45 Graham:
that, hey, if we're all going to get through this, like we need, we can have all the toilet rolls, but the person working in the NHS who gets home from their 20 hour shift, they're going to need to wipe their bum before they get back in.
00:28:56 Graham:
So like, you know, we're only fine if we're all fine, right?
00:29:00 Graham:
And I think you start to then see things in a slightly different way.
00:29:03 Graham:
And I think kindness is just a massive shortcut to that.
00:29:07 Graham:
And I think that happened a lot during COVID as you did hear
00:29:10 Graham:
the word kind and kindness and be kind, that stuff came to the fore much more readily, I think, in that time period.
00:29:17 Graham:
And I think there's other reasons for that too.
00:29:19 Graham:
I think partly the other reason for that is that the world slowed down.
00:29:22 Graham:
I think kindness really relies on slowing down and just taking stock.
00:29:27 Graham:
It's very difficult to be kind when you're 100 miles an hour busy.
00:29:31 Graham:
And I say this in the book, the biggest source of accidental unkindness is busyness.
00:29:36 Graham:
But I think when you start to recognize, hang on, interdependence is really important here, then the next question becomes, okay, so what do I need to contribute?
00:29:45 Graham:
How do I be kind?
00:29:46 Graham:
And I think there are problems with the use of kindness online and the hashtag be kind and various things.
00:29:53 Graham:
But I think if we can avoid getting fatigued by it becoming a cliche, then there's just nothing more satisfying, I think, than
00:30:04 Graham:
either being on one end of an act of kindness or witnessing that as it happens.
00:30:09 Graham:
And I think that's the stuff that honestly makes life worthwhile, I think.
00:30:13 Sally-Anne:
Kindness, I suppose, is, if nothing else, it's an experience, isn't it?
00:30:17 Sally-Anne:
Which is why I suppose I've been so curious as the author of Kind to ask you what your experience is of it.
00:30:24 Sally-Anne:
Because as you say, you know, there is a risk that it'll become a cliche and that would be a great shame.
00:30:28 Graham:
Yeah.
00:30:29 Sally-Anne:
You mentioned busyness as
00:30:31 Sally-Anne:
perhaps the antidote, or at least the thing that gets in the way of being kind.
00:30:35 Sally-Anne:
And it does make me wonder, is therefore kindness something that we need to consciously cultivate?
00:30:41 Sally-Anne:
Because it's not necessarily the first go-to in our busy lives.
00:30:47 Sally-Anne:
So we need to consciously cultivate kindness.
00:30:51 Sally-Anne:
Would you agree with that?
00:30:52 Graham:
I would agree with that.
00:30:54 Graham:
I mean,
00:30:55 Graham:
The science says that when we think about empathy, there are people who are naturally more empathetic than others, but also that empathy can be developed and learned.
00:31:05 Graham:
And therefore, for me, kindness is a practice.
00:31:08 Graham:
So I don't think there's such a thing as a kind person or an unkind person.
00:31:13 Graham:
I think they were just kind acts.
00:31:15 Graham:
And I think that's good news and bad news for all of us.
00:31:19 Graham:
It's bad news for anyone sitting, listening to this and saying, well, I'm off the hook because I do kind things.
00:31:25 Graham:
It's like, but what about the time where you didn't do something kind?
00:31:29 Graham:
And I sometimes say, I spent the 1st 15 years of my career with Productivity Ninja and Think Productive making this giant rod for my own back, which was I have to be at every meeting on time, have to reply to every e-mail punctually.
00:31:43 Graham:
And as Sally Ann, you'll testify, you sent me an e-mail a week ago about this and I didn't reply to you on it.
00:31:49 Graham:
So I don't always stick to my own rules.
00:31:53 Graham:
And then I've spent the last two or three years with kind creating another rod for my own back, which is, oh God, he's the kind guy and he was unkind.
00:32:01 Graham:
So it's, I mean, what a beautiful rod to have for your own back if you're going to have one.
00:32:06 Graham:
And, you know, they're both pretty good.
00:32:08 Graham:
But I do think when we see kindness as a practice, it really helps with this idea of identity and sort of taking us away from the idea of, well, I'm a kind person or I'm not really a kind person.
00:32:18 Graham:
I just don't think that matters.
00:32:19 Graham:
I think it's much more about seeing it as a practice.
00:32:22 Graham:
And crucially, as with a lot of practices, it's about how do you reflect on it too.
00:32:27 Graham:
So trying to do something kind regularly, trying to have that in your mind.
00:32:31 Graham:
So I use this word in the book, kindfulness, which is a neat little amalgamation of kind and mindful.
00:32:38 Graham:
But really the idea of that is to say there's different kinds of things that you can do around kindness.
00:32:44 Graham:
So you can act with kindness, but also kind fondness is about saying, how can I encourage other people to act with kindness too?
00:32:52 Graham:
So things like, for example, if you're the person who sets up the idea of a bake sale,
00:32:59 Graham:
then everybody else jumps into that kindness.
00:33:01 Graham:
They jump into the vessel, they go and create the cakes and whatever, you pull it all together, and then what you have is this army of people doing kind things.
00:33:09 Graham:
If you're the person who sets up a thank you card for someone who's done a good job with something, then what happens is everybody writes something in the thank you card way more gushing than they would ever say to that person's face, right?
00:33:21 Graham:
But they do it because you made it easy.
00:33:24 Graham:
And there's hundreds of ways that you can do that, sponsored things and the 1st 2 minutes of a meeting, there's all kinds of different places you can create the vessels.
00:33:34 Graham:
But I think there's something really exciting and important for me around building that into the culture by.
00:33:40 Graham:
just saying to people, don't just go about your day being kind, of course do that, but also create the vessels for kindness as well.
00:33:47 Graham:
And I think that is something that I've just been really obsessed with over the last couple of years.
00:33:52 Graham:
And I think that's the bit that I tried to practice.
00:33:55 Graham:
It's like, yeah, I want to do kind things, but also how can I create those vessels as well?
00:34:00 Sally-Anne:
Somebody said love is an act.
00:34:03 Sally-Anne:
I suppose same applies to kindness or anything for that matter, but in this context, kindness, from what you're describing, is an act, right?
00:34:11 Sally-Anne:
Picking one act per day would be a good start, right?
00:34:14 Graham:
For sure.
00:34:15 Sally-Anne:
So Graham, given the name of this podcast, Fearless Forward, and I'll ask you about that in a moment, when you look back over your, the word illustrious comes to mind, but I think it's accurate, you know, your illustrious career, you've done a brilliant job.
00:34:30 Graham:
That's very kind of you to say.
00:34:32 Sally-Anne:
I know.
00:34:33 Graham:
I wouldn't use that word myself.
00:34:36 Sally-Anne:
You've done awfully well with what would have been initially an idea, right?
00:34:41 Sally-Anne:
You've built a whole industry around the idea.
00:34:45 Sally-Anne:
Can you identify on that journey moments where you were really quite scared?
00:34:50 Graham:
Oh yes.
00:34:53 Sally-Anne:
Can you name a couple?
00:34:54 Graham:
Yeah, plenty.
00:34:56 Graham:
I was asked this question a few years ago.
00:34:57 Graham:
What's been your biggest fear?
00:35:00 Graham:
And there are lots of operational fears, but I think that the sort of the deep one in my psyche, and at the beginning you said, can we go deep?
00:35:10 Graham:
I was like, hell yeah, why not?
00:35:11 Graham:
The deep one for me in my psyche has been fears around money, which come from childhood.
00:35:18 Graham:
So yeah, I grew up without a lot of money, free school meals, kids, all that kind of thing.
00:35:23 Graham:
And honestly, it's been one of those things that if I had a pound for every time it's come up in therapy,
00:35:29 Graham:
I'd be a lot richer than I am now.
00:35:32 Sally-Anne:
How ironic, yeah.
00:35:33 Graham:
Ironic.
00:35:34 Graham:
But I'm very aware that fear is like built into bits of me, both mentally and physically.
00:35:42 Graham:
And I'm a big believer in the body keeps the score, traumas in the body kind of way of thinking about stuff.
00:35:48 Graham:
So I'm better at noticing now where particular fears around money sort of cloud my judgment when I'm running my business, which does happen.
00:35:58 Graham:
But that's a really deep one.
00:35:59 Graham:
And I think there's all that work around money stories you can do.
00:36:03 Graham:
So basically most people have a story about money that comes from an early childhood experience.
00:36:09 Graham:
So mine is around money is security.
00:36:12 Graham:
And if I don't have enough money, I'm somehow insecure.
00:36:17 Graham:
Because I remember conversations that I had with my mum when I was very young where it was like, we might lose the house, you know?
00:36:22 Graham:
So that stuff is still present in me.
00:36:24 Graham:
I'm still kind of working through that stuff.
00:36:26 Graham:
But other people have other narratives around it.
00:36:28 Graham:
So money is dirty.
00:36:30 Graham:
And I dated someone for a while whose thing was, if money comes in, I want to get it out as quickly as possible because it's horrible.
00:36:36 Graham:
It's dirty.
00:36:37 Graham:
It's like, get it away.
00:36:38 Graham:
You know, it's like that.
00:36:39 Graham:
Other people who have other narratives can be like, money is freedom.
00:36:43 Graham:
You know, there's all these different.
00:36:44 Graham:
narratives around it.
00:36:45 Graham:
I think that in itself is a really useful thing to explore.
00:36:49 Graham:
And just the starting point for that is just write down the words money is dot dot dot and then write down the next word that comes into your head.
00:36:55 Graham:
So there's that.
00:36:57 Graham:
And then I think with the business and sort of my career, I mean, I remember before I started Think Productive, I ran a charity and I had this really fear-based
00:37:08 Graham:
six months, I guess, where basically all the funding got cut.
00:37:12 Graham:
And it was a really difficult charity to fundraise for, and there was kind of nothing that we could do.
00:37:17 Graham:
And we ended up merging with another charity, but for three or four months, it just felt like the world was going to end every day.
00:37:22 Graham:
And I remember that being a really difficult period.
00:37:25 Graham:
But I think what I learned from that was, and what's really interesting was bringing this full circle, Martin Farrell, who I talked about at the beginning, one of those facilitators,
00:37:33 Graham:
He spent a lot of time with me during that period where I was just very young and in charge of this big thing and scared out of my wits.
00:37:41 Graham:
And I don't really remember the advice that he gave me, but I do remember how he made me feel.
00:37:47 Graham:
Because that Mayor Angelou quote, people will forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel.
00:37:54 Graham:
I think that was really powerful for me and really informative in the rest of my career because what that experience taught me is
00:38:03 Graham:
Yeah, you can have moments where you're really scared.
00:38:05 Graham:
And yeah, you can have moments where it feels like the world's caving in and you can live through that and you can get through it to somewhere better.
00:38:14 Graham:
And there will be a solution on the other side of it.
00:38:16 Graham:
And you can't see that right now, but you'll get there in the end.
00:38:19 Graham:
And so yeah, we've had various over the years with Think Productive 2.
00:38:22 Graham:
COVID probably being the biggest major one where most of our work before COVID was face to face in offices.
00:38:30 Graham:
And within weeks, we had to completely
00:38:32 Graham:
pivot and remodel the business and change everything.
00:38:35 Graham:
And we got through that with just a lot of hard graft by a lot of people.
00:38:40 Graham:
But that was a pretty scary time.
00:38:42 Graham:
But I remember there being moments in that, even in that experience, where we would still do the sort of opening round in meetings.
00:38:51 Graham:
And I remember this one time doing it where
00:38:54 Graham:
Elena, who was chairing the meeting, said, right, we'll do our opening round.
00:38:57 Graham:
Like, let's just say one thing that's going well right now.
00:39:00 Graham:
And in my head, I was just going, are you kidding?
00:39:03 Graham:
Things are going well right now.
00:39:04 Graham:
Like, F off, you know, like in my head, that's what I was saying.
00:39:08 Graham:
And actually, I still remember that one meeting was the moment where, because, and I do believe this is like directly because, everybody started that meeting by, in the Nancy Klein sense, beginning with a positive reality,
00:39:22 Graham:
We all started the meeting with the belief that positive realities were possible.
00:39:27 Graham:
And in that meeting, it was like, right, so all our work's getting postponed and some of it's getting cancelled.
00:39:34 Graham:
But in that meeting was the moment where somebody in that meeting, I can't remember who it was, but someone said, but we've been working from home for years.
00:39:41 Graham:
We have what people need.
00:39:43 Graham:
Like we just need to develop a thing around that and do it online.
00:39:46 Graham:
And that literally saved our business.
00:39:49 Graham:
In many ways, that came from a very tiny act of kindness by Elena, which is like at the start of the meeting, let's do a little check in, let's do something positive and start with some kindness rather than starting with the world's all blowing up and going to smithereens.
00:40:04 Graham:
And yeah, so even in those moments, there's lessons that I think are really congruent to a lot of the stuff that's in kind, yeah.
00:40:11 Sally-Anne:
Absolutely.
00:40:12 Sally-Anne:
And as you said, abundance versus scarcity.
00:40:17 Sally-Anne:
Remembering that even in our most difficult moments, there is something.
00:40:21 Sally-Anne:
There's always something if we look for it, right.
00:40:24 Graham:
Yeah.
00:40:24 Graham:
And when we change the view too as well, I think that's often the thing that we can forget to do, particularly when we're in crisis moments, is changing the view either by looking at it from a different perspective or pulling back or just trying to see the bigger picture.
00:40:38 Graham:
I think sometimes that
00:40:40 Graham:
And anyone listening to this, if there's something you're struggling with, how can you change the view is a really good question.
00:40:46 Sally-Anne:
Indeed.
00:40:48 Sally-Anne:
So Graham, everything you've achieved and looking at where you are now, when you look to the future, what does fearless forward mean to you?
00:40:59 Graham:
When I look to the future.
00:41:00 Graham:
I mean, it's such a lovely, I was thinking about this, obviously because it's the title of your podcast, like that phrase.
00:41:06 Graham:
I was actually thinking, I bet Sally-Anne has spent
00:41:09 Graham:
hours and hours, sort of coming up with the best 2 words that really encapsulate leadership.
00:41:14 Graham:
And I think you've done a stunning job with it because it's like this so multifaceted that phrase.
00:41:19 Graham:
And the thing that struck me about it was that as a leader, there may be fearless leaders, but I don't think that's the norm and I don't think it's common.
00:41:29 Graham:
I think most leaders are leading with some fear and it's that classic feel the fear and do it anyway thing.
00:41:35 Graham:
Like you've got to
00:41:37 Graham:
be aware of those fears.
00:41:38 Graham:
And actually, I think it probably makes you a worse leader if you're not aware of those fears too.
00:41:42 Graham:
So I think as leaders, fearlessness is something that you strive towards by going through the fear.
00:41:50 Graham:
But what makes it a really interesting phrase is that if you're in the group and you're being led, you kind of want to look at each other and go, we have no fear.
00:41:58 Graham:
So it's like,
00:42:00 Graham:
So you have to create the conditions for it.
00:42:02 Graham:
So that's probably where I get to with my own future because I sort of think of my future as much as how do I want to be led as much as how do I want to lead.
00:42:12 Graham:
For me, like being able to really kind of step into abundance, which for me in this case really means doing the work that I think is really important and doing it in a way that I think it's really able to add the most value.
00:42:28 Graham:
But being able to do that without worrying about how it's perceived or without worrying about whether there's enough money or any other question, I think is a really important thing.
00:42:39 Graham:
Just being able to move forward without that fear, I think is a really important thing.
00:42:43 Graham:
So I don't know if that fully answers the question, but I just think it's such an interesting phrase how leaders need to acknowledge those fears, but probably not too much publicly.
00:42:53 Graham:
but then followers really need to feel feel as they move forward.
00:42:57 Graham:
So it's a lovely contradiction built into that phrase, which I really like.
00:43:01 Sally-Anne:
Thank you, Graham.
00:43:01 Sally-Anne:
It's been a great joy to talk to you.
00:43:04 Graham:
Thank you.
00:43:07 Sally-Anne:
As Graham reminds us, kindness is like an inner muscle, and like any other muscle, it needs to be exercised.
00:43:14 Sally-Anne:
And the small acts of kindness we do every day are more enduring than occasional grand gestures.
00:43:21 Sally-Anne:
But when we're feeling mentally, physically, or emotionally depleted, or when time and money are scarce, it's far harder to be kind or to remember that kindness fuels trust and collaboration and interdependence and all the things that can actually make our lives easier.
00:43:40 Sally-Anne:
Kindness is needed now more than ever.
00:43:43 Sally-Anne:
Let's take it to heart, consciously build it into our everyday behaviors, and, as leaders and parents, encourage it in others.
00:43:53 Sally-Anne:
When we do, it might just stop being a vague ideal and start being a part of how good things happen.
00:44:03 Sally-Anne:
Thank you for listening.
00:44:04 Sally-Anne:
Fearless Forward is edited and produced by Rob Lawrence.
00:44:08 Sally-Anne:
I'll be back with you in two weeks for our next conversation about how leaders have faced their fears.
00:44:13 Sally-Anne:
To be sure of catching it, go to fearlessforward.org or subscribe to my weekly bulletin at skillfulleaders.com.