Concious Leadership with Natasha Wallace

Natasha Wallace is author of The Conscious Effect: 50 Lessons in Organisational Wellbeing. In this episode we discuss how a breakdown led her to rethink how leaders should connect with themselves and their organisations. 

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Transcript

Toby Brown: Hello and welcome to Interaction’s Thrivalism. I'm Toby Brown Interaction’s, Head of Marketing, and this week I'm talking to Natasha Wallace. 

Natasha is the author of The Conscious Effect and she's a CEO at the Conscious Leadership Company and we discuss how to improve wellbeing and personal and organisational performance through being more conscious. It's really interesting, wide-ranging chat with lots of personal takeaways. 

 Natasha, Welcome to Thrivalism. We've not spoken before, but I have had you recommended from Simone Fenton-Jarvis, on a previous episode and she mentioned your book, The Conscious Effect, specifically stuff about conscious leadership in there. So really keen to get you on. Really glad to have you here. Thanks for your time. What led you into writing The Conscious Effect? What are the things that built up to that?

Natasha Wallace: Well about a year before leaving paid employment, I was travelling back on a train from London. Googling symptoms of nervous breakdowns because I felt really bad and I just didn't know why. The symptoms of a nervous breakdown weren't what I was experiencing according to Google, but I was feeling really terrible. I felt exhausted. I felt wired. I was worried about everything. I didn't seem I didn't feel like I could focus. And I just felt awful. I didn't feel like I was recovering. I think previously I'd bounced back from anything really that I'd experienced. But I hit this point in time where I just wasn't recovering and I didn't really know. I'd have periods of time where I actually felt fine. But then I would have these periods where I felt terrible and I could remember, you know, another situation where I had spent weeks and months working on the people strategy, the new people strategy. I was an HR director at the time. I'd be waking up in the middle of the night, three or 4:00 in the morning, working on it through the night. You know, I was you can imagine how wired I was. I was so, so worried about getting it right and, you know, making sure that it actually made a difference. And I can remember being at the board meeting and talking them through the people strategy. And everybody in the room is like tumbleweed.

Toby Brown: Which is exactly what you want in those situations.

Natasha Wallace: Silence. Exactly. I mean, part of it was my own fault because I had sort of siloed myself. I think I was so stressed, I had disconnected from the people around me. So actually, you know, whereas I should have been sitting in a room saying to them, Right, what are we doing? How are we going to do this? I think I'd gotten to a point in my time as an HR director where I felt like I was flying solo a little bit. There were many, many different reasons for that, some to do with me, some to do with the people around me. And so, yeah, I mean, I can now look back and think, Oh yeah, I can sort of see why there might have been some tumbleweed, not quite as much as I received. And then I basically sat on the living room floor the following morning, crying my eyes out. I mean, I was a mess. I was a total mess.

Toby Brown: And was it the case of not being able to necessarily pinpoint what was right? Because you can look around at things ago, Family life is sort of okay. Work is sort of okay, I'm busy, but you're sort of burnout underneath or was there anything acute there or was it just a sense of things building up?

Natasha Wallace: And I had no clue what was wrong with me, if I'm honest. I can remember going to the doctor and I'd started to have panic attacks when I was driving home from work. So I had about an hour's drive to work and back every day. These panic attacks were really awful because, you know, everything would close in on me. I would start to hyperventilate and you're on a motorway travelling at 70, 90, 70 miles an hour.

Toby Brown: So a clue there what led to panic?

Natasha Wallace: Yeah, it was 70 miles an hour. It's petrifying, you know, It's really scary. And I can remember going to the doctor saying, you know, there's something happening to me. I didn't label it as panic attacks at the time. I don't know why. It's almost like I was I wouldn't allow myself to believe that I was actually suffering, probably with what was quite severe anxiety. My doctor said, You're stressed. I was like, No, I'm not. I don't know why I'd be stressed. Like everything's fine because there was nothing really bad happening, you know, I didn't understand it. And I remember walking away from the doctors thinking, I'm not stressed. They don't know what they're talking about. But now I look back and say, Of course I was stressed. I had put myself under so much pressure and the way I was thinking wasn't useful to me. You know, I was catastrophizing things. I felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I felt a huge burden of responsibility to be good at my job and to make a difference in the workplace, to, you know, the strapline for our People strategy at the time was creating the best place to work. And I took it so seriously that in the end, I took it too seriously because actually I wasn't going to be able to achieve that aim on my own. And I think going back to your point about what was really going on, what was really going on, it was a combination of me working way, way too many hours.

I mean, I was just exhausted most of the time. And of course, I was I had young children. So, you know, you know what that's like. That's tiring in itself because you're never off duty. But really and I absolutely hands on heart believe that it wasn't the working hours that sent me over the edge. In the end, it was the fact that me and my leadership team probably weren't aligned. We didn't have the same vision. I probably, towards the end, felt as though my values and the values of the people around me weren't aligned. And actually, that sort of leads to death by a thousand cuts. And this is this is not saying they were wrong and I was right. I think it's important to reinforce that point. It's about I had probably outstayed my welcome in that job. I'd been there for ten years. I probably should have left maybe three years earlier because I was as happy as Larry. I mean, I really was. It was only towards the end that things started to get tough. In the end, it started eroding who I was, it being in any relationship that doesn't make you a better version of yourself is not the right thing to do as far as I'm concerned. I would say that's probably a newfound belief of mine as I have become more conscious of my journey. And I was in relationship with a culture that didn't bring out the best in me.

Toby Brown: So you probably sort of felt really comfortable, even though actually it wasn't so comfortable.

Natasha Wallace: I mean, I was I would say I grieved for a good couple of years after I left that job. It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

Toby Brown: And how do you feel about it now?

Natasha Wallace: I mean, you know, sort of the making of me, I now feel as though I can be myself. I've got different types of pressures. I've now got my own business and we've got a start-up and it's still pressure, but I'm in control of that pressure and I fit where I am because I have created this environment where I'm doing what I love. I'm working with other people who buy into what we do. So that just makes such a massive difference to your day to day working life. And I'm so, so glad I had the courage to leave and to do what I do now. But I mean, it took me an awful long time to get over it. I mean, my confidence was pretty destroyed by the time I'd left, and I felt a huge sense of failure.

Toby Brown: Yeah. And that that is very hard to rebuild organically, isn't it, without putting in a lot of effort and without life helping you with it, with circumstance and finding new opportunities. Let's bounce onto the next stage in that journey then, because obviously in between then and now, you've written a book, you've done a lot of thought about wellbeing in the workplace, what creates brilliant workplace cultures, that sort of stuff. So what were the first seeds of the book and how did you get started on writing it and what were your thoughts when you're putting it together?

Natasha Wallace: So really very quickly after I'd left my job, I had this dawning realisation that I hadn't been conscious that that was the thing that had led me to where I ended up. And in my mind, what I meant by that was that I hadn't been awake and aware to what I needed as an individual to thrive. You know how to be my best. I don't think I had ever, ever had that thought before, which was How do I stay at my best? I don't think I'd actually even ever thought that thought, if I'm honest. I just went to work and tried to do a good job and try to deliver and hit the targets that.

Toby Brown: Because that thought sounds like opening up the doors to a lot of effort. That’s hard work.

Natasha Wallace: Exactly. It ends up not being a huge amount of effort once you have, I guess, shifted your mindset into a place where being your best self is actually about taking care of yourself and understanding yourself and being able to create an environment where other people are happy, too. I mean, that’s an important part of consciousness. It's about being awake and aware of, of yourself, but also being much more aware [00:10:00] and intentionally aware of what is going on around you so that you can respond to it. 

You know, as leaders, we can become incredibly arrogant. We can love the sound of our own voice. We can assume that we have to come up with all of the answers because we are leaders. And, you know, the term “empower” does to some extent mean giving away some of your power. And I think for leaders that can be incredibly hard. So, you know, in answer to your question about what led me to write the book, once, it had sort of dawned on me that I hadn't been conscious, but apart from, you know, I went through then a few weeks of totally beating myself up for not being conscious and therefore, you know, not.

Toby Brown: Did you beat yourself unconscious?

Natasha Wallace: Thankfully, I just about managed to get away with that, to go that far. I really gave some serious thought to what leadership in this sort of modern age should look like. And that's what led me quite quickly to come up with a conscious leadership model. I mean, I felt very strongly about why the other leaders shouldn't experience the same fate as me. What was an interesting parallel sort of situation that I was going through at the time is that because I felt as though my views and values didn't align with my peer group, I actually ended up feeling excluded. Now, I would say that they would absolutely disagree, that they excluded me, that they didn't actively try to push me out of the group, But because we didn't agree with each other, I lost my sense of belonging. I lost my group. That was incredibly hard. I mean, you know, I've read about it since, and rejection actually causes physical pain. It's like being physically hurt. And it felt incredibly painful to experience that sense of exclusion.

Toby Brown: How acute was that exclusion? Because you said the other parties in that wouldn't have seen it the same way that you did. Maybe So was it an abstract disagreement on concepts or was it more vociferous arguments in the boardroom?

Natasha Wallace: I'm sure they're listening to this. They won't like the fact that I'm just about to share some of this. But I mean, there weren't many boardroom arguments, but there were a couple. I certainly had an argument on the day that I left because I was just exasperated. I mean, I got to the point where I was very frustrated. We just couldn't agree on certain points. We were working on a project together. Basically baseline was, I believe that we needed to change our behaviour as leaders. And I saw myself being part of that problem because I was one of the leaders and we were the system. So I believed that we needed to change our behaviours as leaders and they believed that we just needed to change the processes. And I mean now I can talk about that very rationally and calmly, but at the time I almost lost my mind having that particular argument because of course for me to do my job properly, for me to actually execute on my deliverables as the HR Director and create this best place to work, you know, of course there was some behavioural stuff in there, like we needed to show up in a way that was going to enable the teams around us. And I just fundamentally didn't believe that if we just changed the processes that that would happen. And I think to some extent they, they did believe that.

Toby Brown: And I think from conversations that I have in the market, I think that is a very, very common source of discontent and a very common blocker in organisational change, isn't it? But it lets us probably get into a few of the more granular points about conscious leadership and what that means. 

So when, when we're talking about switching from that traditional hierarchical top down leadership to a more conscious form of leadership, what are some of the signs of that and what should leaders try to be doing to be a bit more conscious?

Natasha Wallace: Well, I guess the first thing is listening. You know, I think it can be difficult to hear the opinions of the people around you, especially if they're counter to yours. And if you're in the driving seat, you know, if you've got all the power because you're the leader, well, actually, you don't have to listen to anybody, really. That's the reality of the situation. But, if you don't listen to anybody, you disempower and disengage the people around you. And I mean, I saw this throughout my career. I saw this happen a few times where we would go out to the workforce and try and garner opinion from them, but we'd either not agree with them or we wouldn't do anything about their opinion. And then actually you just drove this massive apathy and disengagement in the workforce because before employees become disengaged, an apathetic, they're normally motivated. That's my experience. You don't employ people, they come into the job and they think, Oh, I'm already bored, this is already rubbish, this is already frustrating, or there's too many back lockers or there's too many barriers. Now, of course they do. Of course they do. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't exceptions to that. There are. Sometimes people are having really difficult problems at home, which means they can't engage in the way that you'd want them to. Sometimes they're in the wrong job, so they can't do the job that you would want them to. But largely speaking, people come to work to do a great job. So I think that the ability to listen is so, so integral to the role of the leader. And actually, you know, it's a skill that a lot of leaders have to develop because they've done incredibly know most leaders have gotten to where they have because they've done incredibly well in their career.

Natasha Wallace: They've made some really good quality decisions or they've been very good at their profession and therefore they've been promoted. And then they almost need to say, Right, well, I'm not going to make all the decisions anymore or I'm not going to be the subject matter expert all of the time. I'm going to let other people have space. And it means a shift. They've got to shift, they've got to listen. So I guess that's the first thing. I think the second thing is they need to see people. So we did a piece of research a couple of years ago called Project Bright Spot. I'd read a book. Code Switch by Dan and Chip Heath. And they talked about the fact that often in organisations we focus on not what's not working and we try and build from that. So you sort of build from a deficit, whereas the idea of this book was about building from the bright spots because that's where the energy is. And the same way as neuroscience now showed us, shows us that if we build on our strengths, the neural pathways in our brain become much, much stronger than if you try to build on a weakness, in which case the neural pathways will never become a strong. So this idea is if you look at where something is working and then you actually try and sort of decode that and then you build that out across the business. And that's what we wanted to do in this piece of research.

Natasha Wallace: So we interviewed a lot of people about what their best experience of leaders was, so where they'd had either a life changing or a really, really positive experience of a leader, what was the behaviour that was driving that? And apart from being heard. So the listening point and a second point was about being seen and what they described that as was about them being seen for who they were as an individual, the leader actually understanding who they were, understanding what they needed. And although that that didn't necessarily mean that the leader was there all of the time with them, they were there when it mattered. So they were present when it mattered. And when they were going through a tough time, they were there to have that difficult conversation with them or when they needed to remove a blocker to get their job done. They were there to help them to fix that, but they absolutely saw them. And we talk a lot about organisations are talking a lot about DNI these days and, and the need for inclusion and creating inclusive environments. And what we're now starting to see is that inclusion training, you know, it might, it might have some impact, but it's not changing things. You know, inclusive environments are not being created because some managers have been on some training. And I think it's partly because they still don't see people, they still don't really see who they are and they don't listen to them. They're not able to connect with them on a very, very real and human level. That's what leads to inclusion.

Toby Brown: You've got some interesting stuff in the book about trying to understand your own avoidance tactics when it comes to dealing with people who you might not necessarily connect with instantly or engage with instantly as a leader, which I read and I'm sorry. Oh, that's an interesting I've not really thought about that because you see it in other people, but it's much more difficult to identify in yourself, isn't it? So can you just talk us through that a bit?

Natasha Wallace: We obviously naturally gravitate towards the people that we feel comfortable with, who we understand who are more like us. You know, we tend to like people who are like us or who we want to be like that. That tends to be what drives the relationships that we have. And therefore it's going to be a whole pile of people who we don't connect with and they're going to be in your team. And most of us as leaders don't have the luxury of being able to build our teams from the ground up. We're often moving into a team where we're inheriting people, and even if we were building our teams from the ground up, it would be absolutely the wrong thing to do to build a team of people that look like you. I mean, it happens all of the time, but from a diversity perspective, and I don't just mean because you need to stamp the diversity box and say that you've got a diverse team. I mean, because diversity of opinion is is an absolutely integral to innovation and creativity and achieving great results.

Toby Brown: You won't get that without a conscious effort to build it into your organisation. One thing that I've taken from that is I'm going to put an hour in my diary once a week to speak to people I don't like. I think that's genius. I mean, I can't sell it every week, but it's a good idea. I like.

Natasha Wallace: It. Maybe you need to shift the narrative. Maybe you need to shift the mindset to not being about talking to the people you don't like, but talking about talking to the people who aren't like you. Yeah, [00:20:00] yeah, yeah, exactly.

Toby Brown: That's what that is. And there's another really interesting bit about holding difficult conversations and reframing that as real talk instead, which the phrase real talk is quite interesting one, I think. But can you talk us through how to shift that perspective?

Natasha Wallace: Yeah, well, I think that often you make an assumption or you have an underlying belief that being honest with people, especially in a work context, is is horrible or not nice or not fair or not reasonable. But actually I think what I've concluded in my 44th year is that it's actually the fair thing to do. And I talk a lot about the parent adult child relationship. So if anybody's interested in it, transactional analysis is a very interesting area of psychotherapy. But basically often we turn up at work either in parent or child mode. So if we were in parent mode, we're telling people what to do, we're criticising them or we're nurturing them. I mean, generally they're the sort of states and if we're in child mode, we're being placating and being sort of subservient to the people around us or we're being belligerent and we're getting really annoyed with them.

Toby Brown: Yeah. Or waiting to be told what to do.

Natasha Wallace: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Learned helplessness where we sort of sit and wait. And actually on that point, there's quite a few leaders talking to me at the moment about the fact that they're really experiencing that more than ever and that teams that they're asking for feedback or they're asking for input from their teams and they're getting basically like, you know, stonewalls, there's nothing coming back.

Toby Brown: What's driving that?

Natasha Wallace: There's normally a couple of reasons. So learned helplessness comes out of positive psychology, which is also another interesting area of psychology. Learned helplessness often comes from experiencing leadership, which comes up with all of the answers. So if you work with very strong or opinionated leaders who tend to have the answers for everything or tend to always be in solution mode rather than listening mode, then actually people become so used to the leaders coming up with the answers that they don't bother or they might not bother because they haven't been heard. You know, they've tried to come up with ideas in the past and nobody's really listened and so they don't try anymore. But the other reason is that they just don't feel safe to raise their opinion. And that is another real issue in organisations at the moment, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic, actually, because where most of us were in the office together most of the time pre-pandemic, and most of us work in a hybrid way. Now that disconnection seems to have driven, it's broken down trust, and also leaders have been under a lot of stress. So actually there's probably been some behaviour that employees have seen where if they do speak honestly, they may not have gotten a great response and so they just keep their head down.

Toby Brown: If that is a breakdown of trust through hybrid working and not being together and present so much. Are there any ways you think that companies can build that back up? What's the strategy to create some trust that's gone missing in an organisation?

Natasha Wallace: Well, I think you need to intentionally get together. I think you're going to have to bring people back together. I don't necessarily mean everybody having to work back in the office five days a week, but I think that there is this view that working from home is the best thing for us or the thing that we want as employees. And don't get me wrong, I love it, but actually it's causing a lot of problems. Too much disconnection is causing problems. Now, don't get me wrong. I mean, there's some recent research that's come out which does indicate that it's not about being together that creates safety and trust. It's about the conversations you have. It's about making space in those Zoom meetings to have general chit chat or whatever, having a laugh, messing around so that it's not all about execution. Whereas Zoom or teams or whatever platform you use almost drives this execution sort of entirely transactional. Yeah, like just get the work done. We're on a call, get the work done. Whereas of course that was never the way it was when we were together. So I think that you need to create space for that. There's a really interesting piece of research called Project Aristotle, where Google looked at 180 of their highest performing teams to try and identify what was driving that high performance. And, whereas, you know, historically, we may have said that things like intellect, sector experience, time and roll might have contributed to trust and high performance. It actually ended up being the extent to which people could trust each other and the extent to which they could speak up and take interpersonal risk. I mean, Amy Edmondson is the authority on this. She's a US academic. And what that basically means is I can speak up and tell the truth and tell my colleagues what I really think, obviously in a constructive way and nothing bad happens. But there was also this other finding that it was about conversational turn taking. So it was about having as much time to input into a conversation as anybody else does. So that not necessarily in one meeting, but across the know during the course of time of us working together as a team, everybody gets the chance to speak up and everybody's heard. But then some of the other findings were it wasn't the teams that had the most intelligent people in them that form the highest it was. It could be sort of the mid-level in terms of intelligence. But they had a laugh and they you know, they weren't always focussed on getting work done. And I think that's really interesting because I think the pandemic has driven this behaviour which is largely about getting work done.

Toby Brown: And it's even when you're on Teams and Zoom calls sometimes and there is space to have a bit of a chat and a bit of more social stuff. It feels like that is an agenda point and a box ticking item and it's like 5 minutes of banter about the weather and a bit of chat about the shelf behind you so even that feels really false. Isn't it really hard to try and make that feel organic and natural and actually fun?

Natasha Wallace: I think you need to talk about it as a team. I think you need to figure it out. We're constantly trying to figure out in our own team and of course, sometimes we overcorrect. So, you know, like I turned up to our management team this week and said, We need to get straight into it, guys, that we've got a lot to do. Sorry, we call it Fiery Red. So I'm showing my fiery red characteristics here, but we're just going to have to get straight into it knowing that we've got an off site next Monday and Tuesday. We'll have loads of time to chat and but I was very explicit about that, recognising that if we take all of the chat and banter out of all of our meetings, you know, things are going to dry up a bit. So I'm really mindful of that.

Toby Brown: It's really tricky to get the balance right and I think I probably go too far the other way sometimes. I think one of the other things that comes off of that and some of the leadership styles you talked about earlier, I've heard referred to as servant leadership and leading from the front and those sort of things too. And part of that is about vulnerability. And vulnerability is often perceived as obviously negative and has got lots of negative connotations. But you talk a bit about the positive sides of showing vulnerability as a leader sometimes. So what are some of those positives you might get out of that?

Natasha Wallace: Well, so I think one of the things that we use a psychometric tool are conscious leader psychometric and one of the things I speak to a lot of leaders about who have got really high resilience levels. So that's one of our five dimensions of conscious leadership is that by always showing that you're strong and almost untouchable and a lot of leaders are because that's why they're leaders, you do create a very, very high bar for others to deliver against. And actually there is a huge downside to that because people don't bring their true selves to work. So you do not want to get into a situation with your team where they're suffering in silence and sometimes a side effect of being a very strong leader who doesn't show any vulnerability at all, almost sort of looks like they never suffer, they're never challenged, they never feel bad, they never have a down day is that the rest of the team may feel as though they can't have a down day or they certainly can't be honest about having a down day. And once again, if you've got somebody sitting at home or forever, they are suffering and not talking about it, you don't want that's going to impact performance, You know, you'd rather have or I would hope the leaders would rather have a situation where somebody comes and says, I'm not actually able to do my job properly at the moment because of X, Y, and Z or this particular relationship at work is really causing me some issues and it's really impacting me.I feel pretty rubbish as a consequence of it. I'd rather as a leader, my team come to me and have that conversation with me so we can solve it together. Then performance is not because they're staying silent. So that's one area in which vulnerability is important. But also, I mean, how do you connect with somebody? How do you build trust? Unless you show some level of vulnerability, you have to let them in. Now, I'm not saying that leaders need to turn up and say I'm having a really difficult time at home at the moment. My marriage is on the rocks. I cried myself to sleep last night. You know, that's not the expectation. But to have a leader when somebody is. Experiencing a challenging time who turns around and says, I totally get it. Absolutely get it because I've been there before myself. And what happened for me is this. And this was the outcome. Yeah. I mean, God, you know, I think you build more loyalty and commitment and trust and all of the things you need for high performance in teams if you can be that leader.

Toby Brown: And I think the the other angle, which isn't really well being related, but is when leaders admit they don't [00:30:00] know the answer to things, their team can watch them figure it out and their team can suddenly see how the leaders grow and how they develop and how they have a growth mentality and find the answers to questions and then can mimic that behaviour as opposed to a leader to go, Yeah, I know that we're going to do this. This is the way to do it. It's very different culture, isn't it? That touches on the growth mindset stuff a bit, I guess, which you mentioned in the book quite a lot too, and I think that's probably conclude on. But can you just give me an outline of what a growth mindset is for an organisation and what some of the signs are that one has adopted it? And then if you're an organisation and you think I haven't got growth mindset, but we need to start thinking that way, what are some of the things you can do to start heading down that path?

Natasha Wallace: Okay, so growth mindset for anybody that wants to read around it is is an idea that was popularised by Carol Dweck, who is another US academic and it's quite prevalent in schools, but it's this and there has also been some criticism actually, of growth mindset from an academic perspective. But I mean, I hand on heart say that if I see a team that's got growth mindset, they will absolutely be performing better than a team that hasn't got it. So what does it look like? It is this idea that we're constantly learning and evolving, leaders included, that we won't have all of the answers. Sometimes we need to change our mindset, sometimes we need to unlearn. We don't actually unlearn anything because it's all up there. We just make new ideas and thoughts and ways of doing things stronger than the old ways. So it's about learning new ways to do things. And also as a leader, you know, you don't get into a leadership role and you're like, Right, I'm sort of now I'm done. I've learnt everything that I wanted to learn or that I need to learn to be successful in this role. It's everybody else that needs to learn. You've got to master leadership. It's a very difficult job to do well. And actually when you get leaders turning around and say, you know, it's not me, it's them, I would argue that a lot of the time that's not actually true. It could be both of you, but it's certainly you as a leader. You certainly have a part to play in it.

Natasha Wallace: And unless you recognise that, unless you recognise that you are a sort of work in progress, that you have to evolve as an individual, I think you'll often draw their own conclusions. So I think that I often speak to leaders who say, you know, they aren't doing what I want them to do or what I need them to do, and it's frustrating me. And I was one of those leaders and I would say, well, you know, what are you doing? What are you doing that's driving the behaviour that you're seeing? Because most of the time the leader plays quite a key role in that. So unless you're willing to put your hands up and go, Oh, you're actually I'm not doing it right, or I need to do it differently, or I need to do it better, or I need to change, or I need to learn or I need to grow, then I just don't think that you are going to optimise your performance as a leader. You know, a lot of leaders closed themselves off ego. You know, ego is the is the driver a lot of the time. And I mean, I was this leader. I mean I'm speaking from a position of experience. I probably at times was a bit arrogant and didn't feel as though it was me that needed to change. You know, I just I just think that you can lose a lot of opportunity to grow an amazing team and lead in a better way. Unless you recognise that you're just a work in progress.