Trevor Hudson, the visionary in leadership development, acclaimed author of Neverland and Trainer & Consultant at Tuff Leadership Training joins us to redefine what it means to lead and manage in the modern workplace. With his rich background in the tech industry, Trevor unravels the process of transforming the employee experience. His methods, signal a revolution in creating empowering organizational cultures. Get ready to chart a course through the complexities of flatter structures and evolving management behaviours that hold the key to the future of the workplace
We tackle the fine line between empowering your workforce and maintaining the integrity of your business's core framework, all while ensuring consistent quality and compliance. Learn how to tailor your approach to fit your organizational structure
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Register for the Produtivity Forum 2024
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Trevor Hudson, the visionary in leadership development, acclaimed author of Neverland and Trainer & Consultant at Tuff Leadership Training joins us to redefine what it means to lead and manage in the modern workplace. With his rich background in the tech industry, Trevor unravels the process of transforming the employee experience. His methods, signal a revolution in creating empowering organizational cultures. Get ready to chart a course through the complexities of flatter structures and evolving management behaviours that hold the key to the future of the workplace
We tackle the fine line between empowering your workforce and maintaining the integrity of your business's core framework, all while ensuring consistent quality and compliance. Learn how to tailor your approach to fit your organizational structure
#theproductivityexperts
Register for the Produtivity Forum 2024
Follow us on Twitter @Rethinkp
Connect to Simon on LinkedIn
Follow ReThink on LinkedIn
Welcome to the productivity podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Trevor Hudson, author of the book Neverland and trainer and consultant for tough Leadership development. Hi, trevor, how you doing.
Speaker 2:Nice, simon, I'm good, thank you.
Speaker 1:Good, good now, I know you're struggling with it, a cold, as we just said, off air. So we'll, we'll, we'll take your bunged up nose and the odd cough as part of just the general conversation. That's fine.
Speaker 2:Very kind of you, thank you.
Speaker 1:So, trevor, just tell us a bit about yourself first, and then we'll touch on the book and the bits You're doing today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so I have been working in the leadership space primarily for we're getting on now for 20 years which is horrible to say because obviously that makes me feel a lot older than I actually am and and, yeah, I've been working with leaders and managers and Pretty much in that time, a kind of guiding light for me over that entire period has been how do we sort of rethink how we do leadership management? And I've had a number of roles in learning and Heading up, training teams and working within HR and helping to rethink how Employees work, and most of my work, if I'm honest, has been in tech. But sort of every version of tech you know how these days this sort of FinTech and ensure tech and everything comes with a tech after it. So I've worked primarily in those kind of fields really.
Speaker 1:Excellent and written a book which is no mean feat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, kind of like a side gig. So. So I Was working with a community called the Hello Monday Club, and it was all about how we change the employee experience and how we rethink how work is done to Make work fundamentally more enjoyable, and I'd written about half a dozen blog posts, and they were always sort of too long really for what a blog post should be, and I was always cutting content out and the reception they got was really warm. So then I thought, well, actually the next step is probably to compile the longer forms of these into full chapters and add a little bit more research and sort of top and tail it, and a book was born.
Speaker 1:Perfect, yeah, we've. We've launched our book last year as well, so I would say I feel your pain, but I didn't do much of it. The writing suited so Kind of stole the title on the front, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's amazing how much the sort of, as they say, that the last five yards, the pain that's involved pieces of the book where you have to actually press, send to a publisher and Kind of decide that you're happy with it. I don't think I'll ever decide I'm happy with it, but that was the most painful bit good and we'll put a link on there.
Speaker 1:The next show notes of people can find the book if they're interested. And and tough leadership talk. Talk to us a bit about what you do there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I am a trainer and a consultant. It's a really interesting organization because it is self-managed, so we're all some version of independent, but there's no line management and there's, you know, decision-making is something that's agreed upon and it's been in existence for about 20 years Now, and it originated in Sweden and now we're global, but particularly in Europe and the UK, and we specialize in creating more empowered cultures, primarily through leadership development, but by various other ways in which we can support organizations, and we work with a lot of organizations in the third sector and a lot of organizations that are Looking to become more self-managed. So we're sort of Working with companies that are really interested becoming as progressive as they can be really.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So that kind of leads us into the, the real crux of our conversation today around Employee experience, what, what it could look like in the future, and you, you talked about self-managed then. So as a Biggest statement, I think the world we see at the moment is, if we think of retail let's take it as an example in the next five to ten years, because of the cost of paying people national living wage, lots of organizations are gonna have a flatter structure and there's probably gonna be less leaders and even less colleagues around, and that probably plays true across all types of organizations. So what, or where's your head Kind of starting to turn to look what's coming over the horizon for this kind of future of employee experience?
Speaker 2:Yes, so we we're in a really fortunate position. I think that what most organizations are trying out now has been done somewhere else. So it's not that they're doing something that's necessarily brand new, but they're trying to be as progressive as they can, and there are lots of other organizations that have tried things out. So if we think about what most organizations do, which is that they look to change the structure so your example of well, we know that there's a lot of overhead in management, so you want to reduce management layers and we want to maybe have less leaders involved. Organisations have tried that to varying degrees of success and what we see is that that can be really effective and it often creates changing itself because it pushes responsibility down within the organization, pushes Decision making responsibility to be more distributed, but the challenges that often the behaviors on changed in line with that. So you have a philosophy, perhaps, of control or you have a philosophy of People wanting to stay leaders, in particular managers, wanting to constantly stand the loop and be updated, to be fully informed and take a position of power, and if you do that and remove layers, then you tend to create stress everywhere in your organization because you end up with individuals who get sort of Still be micromanaged, but they might come in less frequently.
Speaker 2:So they're sort of guessing what it is that they should be done and maybe they're not getting genuine direction. And then you end up with leaders who are constantly trying to stay abreast of everything that's going on beneath them, but now they're spanned. Accountability is far too wide. So a lot of the work that we do whether we work directly, whether we're just helping people to notice this stuff as they make these kind of changes Is to ensure that the leaders that you've got are able to have a completely different kind of conversation and relate to leadership in a completely different way, and that is one that creates empowerment in the organization and creates a culture based on trust, and so people then step up and take responsibility in a way that's completely different way. It becomes a much more adult, adult culture rather than parent child culture, which is what, historically, those hierarchies have been based on. Essentially, the kind of the golden ticket is Don't just change structure, change culture at the same time.
Speaker 1:And that that's easier said than done, I assume. Changing structure, you can have all the signs behind it. You can draw it on a board With no science behind it, which is which is always a risk. But changing a culture is a completely different animal to tackle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but completely, and that's the reason why people often choose structure, because it feels more tangible and it's something that you can deliver. So you know if you're being charged with Quote unquote sorting out the organization. So it's fit for purpose. You can describe your structural change and you can probably do it with very clearly defined deadlines and milestones and outcomes and you can prove that you've delivered on the thing you said you can deliver on.
Speaker 2:Only a crazy person, I think, would sign up and say we're not doing anything with those tangible things, I just want to change culture. But nonetheless, those crazy people are the ones that are really creating organizations that they they thrive and they are empowered and they're able to be a lot leaner and more efficient, sometimes even without structure changes. Because what's that culture in place? It sort of superimpose itself over whatever structure is there, and so is the harder task. I think you're right. It's less tangible, it requires more effort, it requires more sustained effort, it requires quite a lot of buying from significant people in your organization. It's often the thing that eventually pays the most dividends.
Speaker 1:And is that whole ethos then around putting the employees first? What was the? The seismic shift?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think One thing that a lot of people look for is they look for a sort of a golden bullet or a way to do this in a really neat way, and the reality is that it's messy and frustrating. So the reason that we call ourselves tough leadership is because the training which is often the backbone of these kind of changes training your managers and leaders, because they sort of, at least to some degree, hold the power in most organizations' current state the training that we put them through is incredibly tough. So it's not the case that we sort of go, oh, we've got another magic formula really. It's more the case that we say, well, there sort of isn't a magic formula, it's just hard work, and the sort of guidance that we give is that this is more about a shift in paradigm than it is about acquiring new skills.
Speaker 2:And one metaphor that's a little bit mechanistic but sometimes helps people to understand this is the idea of both apps and operating systems. So you can add lots of new apps onto your phone and you can try different ways of doing things, but what we are saying is that unless you upgrade the operating system which is another way of saying you upgrade your way of being how you show up, how you relate to your employees, how you think about work, how you the mindset that you have when you shop. If you can't upgrade those things, then not very much changes. Conversely, if you can upgrade those things, then all the apps that you have been using tend to work better and you get access to a whole load of new apps. A lot of them are related to how you really push responsibility down the organization and encourage people to take a lot more accountability than they might otherwise.
Speaker 1:So that kind of then drives more productivity as the outcome rather than the kind of input.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you get. What starts to happen is you, because it's a lot of trust based and because you're empowering your teams a lot more then what leaders tend to do. It very much depends on the context is to start setting the challenges and outcome. So we're looking to achieve this kind of customer interaction. We're looking to achieve this kind of sentiment for our organization. We're looking to drive this goal. We're looking to hit these numbers and then trusting the teams that they're going to be able to get there. So it tends to become a lot more outcome focused.
Speaker 2:Of course, there are some times where that's not possible and you do need to be more prescriptive and there does need to be a bit more of a kind of rule of law, but for the most part, that is the general shift we see and you're getting several benefits by doing that. If productivity is your goal, one is that people require less intervention in order to be able to drive towards the things that you've decided are important your KPIs or whatever outcomes you're looking for. Also, people tend to do it in a more natural way. So when we think about employee engagement, for example, which has been a hot topic for many, many years and yet doesn't seem to shift. We would argue that this is one of the reasons it doesn't shift is because it's all engagement seems to be something that's done to people rather than something that's unleashed. You can set an outcome and people will naturally be more productive towards it they want to achieve.
Speaker 2:People generally want to do good work. There'll be more engagement, how they get there and you get a lot of these ancillary benefits. So you get Generally great employee retention because people are driving their own mastery and driving their own autonomy, and you also get more interactions and more communication and people are able to show up in a way that brings all of their talents, not just the ones you predetermined, the ones that necessary to get to the outcome. So you know, to hit on a bit of the theme of the book, for example, you get people who are showing up in a more sort of whole human way, which is slightly different from people bringing all of themselves to work, which is a great thing to say. In reality, you don't need everything that everyone brings, but if, when they do show up, they're able to sharpen a really genuine and human way, they're not showing up sort of pretending to be a role, and that goes for employees and managers. You typically have a happier and more successful workplace.
Speaker 1:So I suppose might be a naive question, but I'll ask anyway, because that's the point of these things. If we're pushing, if colleagues are more empowered, we're working in a more self-managed way, how does that them play with what most businesses want, which is consistency? So how do you still keep a framework that people operate in and some business principles if locally people are taking more empowerment over decisions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really good example and it's a question that sort of comes from that previous paradigm. To be honest, now, there are obviously sometimes where consistency is going to be important, but it's true also that for a long time, almost the definition of organizations has been the creation of something that is very consistent, and this has gone almost to an absurd level where, as I mentioned before, you deal with employee engagement and then the solution to employee engagement and the solution to a lot of people issues in organizations is to come up with the one consistent thing that will solve it for everyone, and of course, that doesn't work, because when it comes to people, consistent solutions are exactly the same for everyone, often end up short changing every single person by at least a little bit, and this advancing some people more than others. So if we then categorize almost every business problem as being a people problem, it sort of puts consistency at the right level of priority, which is that there's a few things you really need consistency for you really consistency for Externally imposed rules like health and safety. You really need consistency for compliance reasons. You really need consistency for Kind of your core customer standards. So the things that you absolutely have to me and there's no negotiation that you need to be consistent, but even then you're pretty much being consistent in terms of outcome and some organizations.
Speaker 2:Underneath that consistency, I've got all sorts of people kind of getting there in all sorts of different ways. That vision has been set for that external or output consistency should be, and then people find their own way to get there. So it's been clear where you need to be consistent and really challenging yourself. On main, consistency is important, rather than the sort of old paradigm way of doing it, which is that consistency is the be all and end all and that's the end goal in all cases, was actually what we would say is that each individual finding a way to choose to show up and choose to be there and choose to and to be a really effective and successful employee, and finding their way of doing it is more important than being prescriptive in their way of working every single day.
Speaker 1:Got it, got it. No, mate, make sense to me and kind of final bit before we wrap up. Then there must be and again it's not, I don't want to generalise too much because there'll be some great businesses that trust and empower their employees now and others that are on that journey. There must also be some businesses that are relatively hierarchical and autocratic. All that trust and empowering colleagues to that degree is a real stretch for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know I don't want to say that they're sort of having a very highly empowered culture is the right thing to do and then having something that's more prescriptive is the wrong thing to do. And even within more progressive organisations you'll find occasions where being more controlling or being more hierarchical is appropriate. So it's not really about that. It's more about creating an organisation where the organisation and the individuals within it are making a genuinely informed choice about how they want it to be. So if you look at your organisation and let's say your organisation needs to be very, very responsive and maybe safety is of the utmost.
Speaker 2:So, like emergency services and things like that, there's going to be a lot that they have to do that's very hierarchical and very linked to rank, and that some decisions need to be taken centrally. And there will be some things where you really want to be as responsive as you possibly can, be employees who are close to the issues and close to problems to be making those decisions, and so what we'd say to organisations like that is you just need to kind of become more choiceful rather than sort of protecting the fact that what you do is incredibly important and the way in which you see protecting that, being highly controlling at every level and in every interaction. Instead, choose the things that are really important and stick to being sort of more controlling for those things and then recognise that you can sort of unleash people and unleash trust and unleash empowerment outside of that.
Speaker 1:Perfect, that's brilliant. And, trevor, if people want to find out more, kind of further this conversation dipping in and out, where's the best place for them to find you?
Speaker 2:Yes, so LinkedIn, as always, is a really easy place to find me and there aren't lots of Trevor Hudson's about, so that's super easy, and of course we can put a link in the show notes as well, and of course they can come to tough leadership development and engage with us that way, if this is a journey that they want to go on and they would like some support.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. It's been a pleasure chatting, always interested to find out kind of different ways, different models, where there's opportunities for people to do things differently, especially where there's a productivity angle. So I know you're busy and I know you're kind of full of cold, so I appreciate you taking the time out for today.
Speaker 2:No worries at all. Thank you, simon, it's been good to chat.
Speaker 1:Thanks, trevor.