Podcast transcript: Creating a culture journey with Shane Hatton

Shelley Johnson: Welcome to AHRI’s podcast, Let’s Take This Offline: conversations for those who dare to do HR differently. My name is Shelley Johnson. I’m the founder of HR consultancy Boldside. And I’m a proud AHRI remember. And I’ve spent over a decade leading HR teams and helping to create positive work cultures. We’re talking all things culture today with author, coach and Leadership and Culture expert, Shane Hatton. Shane works with organisations to develop remarkable people leaders, he helps them spend less time fighting fires and dealing with transactional problems, so they can spend more time moving important pieces of work forward, such as an organisation’s cultural agenda. Shane Hatton. Welcome to the podcast.

Shane Hatton: I have been waiting all day for this. I’ve just been sitting in front of my computer just waiting for this moment.

Shelley Johnson: Well, I’m glad it’s arrived. Because where you are right now, what time is it?

Shane Hatton: Look, it’s about 10:45 at night, and I’m just starting to hit my stride. And so it’s the perfect time for a conversation – for me, it’s a late night conversation, yours an early morning. So I feel like we’re up for a really good combo.

Shelley Johnson: You are coming to us all the way from London. So we appreciate you staying up late for this conversation. We’d like to start every interview on this podcast with this same question. And I’m going to hit you with it. And I can’t wait to see what you say. If you could get HR professionals to change one thing about the way they operate right now, what would you change? And why?

Shane Hatton: Oh, absolutely nothing. HR professionals are perfect. And if they’re listening, I want you to know that I think you’re the most perfect human being on the planet and just don’t change a thing. That’s my first answer. So don’t change a thing. If I had to say one thing, this is the thing I’ve been thinking about lately, which is that I think HR professionals need to take care of themselves better. And I’ll say it as quickly and succinctly as that. If you look at what the world has been through in the last few years, and what HR professionals are having to lead people through, I just want to check in on all my friends and ask how are you doing? I was having a conversation with someone recently, and they were talking about this metaphor, this parable, they call it the starving baker. And it’s this idea of this. It’s kind of like an old folk tale kind of story about the baker who is consistently baking bread for everybody else, but not eating bread themselves. And they call them the starving baker. And one of my biggest concerns for HR right now is that people are baking bread for everybody else, and not doing enough to take care of themselves. So that’s probably the first thing that comes to mind.

Shelley Johnson: So beautifully said and and you’re so right. We’ve had some really tough couple of years in terms of COVID navigating some big structural and economic changes. What would you say people can do in those HR roles to take care of themselves? Is there anything that you’ve seen? That can help? That’s practical?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, I mean, you know, what’s interesting, there was a WhatsApp group that I’m part of, and someone had posted an excerpt from the AHRI conference recently. And I think it was James Comey, who was speaking, who was the former director of the FBI, and not sure if anyone’s mentioned this on the podcast before, but it was such a good quote. And the quote was something to the effect of people in HR are called upon to deal with the same human behaviour as police, priests and mental health nurses. The only difference is that you don’t have handcuffs, blessings, or mood altering drugs to assist you. And I was thinking about such a good quote, and I was like, Oh, my gosh, when you think about some of the issues that people have to deal with every single day, they’re really big issues. And I think there is a tendency to want to, because you can’t necessarily just take that home and dump those kinds of emotional weights on friends or family or spouses, there’s a tendency to hold them and push it down deep and don’t think about it. And so one of the things that I think is really important is to intentionally put yourself in environments with people who understand your context. You know, I think about professional associations like art as a place where people who you can talk to understand your context, and when they understand your context, they can understand the conversation a whole lot easier. And so I think the simplest solution is to have a conversation with somebody.

Shelley Johnson: It’s got me thinking about psychologists and how psychologists have a space for supervision, because what they’re dealing with is confidential, and it’s so emotionally taxing, they have this space for supervision where they can discuss what’s happening in their work and how they deal with it. I don’t know if HR have that or need something like that. I’ve certainly worked with some amazing managers who’ve just done that by default and being the sort of person that before I go home knowing that the confidential stuff you’re dealing with, you can’t Don’t take home or debrief it with anyone. So I had these places where I could talk with my manager in a really deep way about some of those challenges. But I don’t know if everyone would get that. What’s your thoughts on this? How do we have safe spaces for HR to debrief and discuss what’s happening, while still maintaining the confidentiality that’s needed in the role?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, great question. We’re not when I did my counselling degree, one of the kinds of things that I had to do was my placement. And when I was doing my placement for every one hour of contact time with the client, sorry, for every four hours of contact time with a client, I had to have an hour of supervision. So imagine, as a HR professional or as a leader, for every one on ones that you did with somebody, you had to have a supervision conversation around that. That’s I mean, that’s, that’s a high level of contact when it comes to supervision. But I think they understood that when you’re dealing with high emotional, weighted, and emotionally charged conversations, you carry a lot of the weight around that. And so they recognise the importance of it, I don’t know that you can have that directly replicated into most organisations. But what I would say is that if you don’t have anything, at the moment, it’s probably a bit of a red flag that it’s time to find some level of supervision. And I think there’s really good quality people out there who’ve been in the industry for a long time that if you just reached out on LinkedIn, and said, Hey, how would you feel about maybe catching up with me once a month or every couple of months just to talk through some of the big heavy things that I’m dealing with, and you don’t have to go into the details around names or any other kind of breach of privacy, but you can have honest conversations about what you could do, or strategies of how you could approach certain contexts and situations. So I think that just has to be intentional.

Shelley Johnson: It reminds me of the value of our network of finding people because I think about a lot of HR, especially in smaller organisations, so for SMEs, they might be reporting to the CFO, or they might be reporting to the managing director as the head of people. And they don’t have someone that they can report to that directly understands the nature of the role. So finding someone in that network that can help you in a mentoring capacity that understands the complexity of HR can be such a life-giving re-energising tool, and it can help sustain you in your career for the long term. So I think it is so important that we prioritise this, as HR professionals, anyone listening, we’ll have some stuff in the show notes to the networks that you can connect with. And I just think that is so important. It kind of brings us as a segue to this conversation around culture, which I know is your zone as a culture expert, speaker, author, and I, I still have your book on my bedside table. I know I’ve told you that before. It just is like the most practical book. But I think culture challenges in organisations are some of those heavy ones. Because they’re behavioural, they tend to be complex, messy. And there’s a lot of weirdness when it comes to people and culture. Like we just have to acknowledge and call it out. Like sometimes weird stuff happens. I think, if we look at culture and say, how do we influence culture? And I know you’ve talked about this, Shane, about the difference between a compliance based culture versus a culture that people really buy into and live out. Can you talk to us about that?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, I think if we’re going to have a conversation about the distinctions between potentially compliance versus culture, I think compliance makes sense compliances and adherence to a set of rules so that people can avoid getting in trouble. So we kind of know what compliance is, I reckon the sticking point is most people don’t understand what culture is. And I’ll be really honest, I’ve spoken to a lot of HR professionals, who are the people who have people and culture written in that title. And I’ll ask the question, what is culture? And I get so many different responses for it. So I think, just quickly, we have to have the conversation about what the heck is culture. We did a research project a couple of years ago. And it was part of the research for my book, Let’s Talk Culture. And we studied 1000 Australian managers. And we asked them the question, well, we asked them a few questions. The first question we asked was, do you think culture is important? 99% told us culture is critical to the overall success of an organisation. So there’s no arguing we know, culture matters. The second question was, Do you know what culture is? 97%? said they did. And then the next question we asked was, well, what’s your definition of culture? How do you define it? And only one in 10 people could give us a consistent answer. And there were advances. They were things like it’s the vibe, it’s the, you know, the heart and soul of our organisation. It’s the practices, it’s the behaviours there were all these different variations. The most consistent response was organisational culture is the set of values, beliefs and practices that guide and form the actions of all team members and shall it was such a good response consistently from about one in 10 people and when I probed deeper behind And that answer. I was like, what would I do if I said yes that I knew what culture was. And then in the next breath was asked the question, what is culture? And I had to try and define it. And I just quickly Googled define organisational culture. And the number one answer that comes up on Google is that question. One of the things we learned about culture is that culture is really easy to describe. If I asked you to describe your culture, you could do it quite easily. But if I ask you to define what culture is, it’s really challenging. And I think the reason it’s so challenging right now is because as it stands, there is no universal definition or understanding of culture. And so what we know about culture and what our research has found, and what it taught us is that there are four key elements that we know make up culture. And when we know those, we can understand culture better, therefore, we can have a whole lot more productive conversations. And probably in this conversation, we’ll be much more productive if we understand what we’re talking about when we talk about culture. And so really quickly, the four things are number one, culture always refers to something which is collective, which means you have to have the buy in of everybody, for it to be culture, it has to be a collective norm, which means that if you already have a team, you already have a culture. So for people who are saying, we’re trying to build our culture, I’m like, we’re not trying to build it, you’re trying to change it, because your culture already exists. The second is that culture is made up of both seen and unseen elements, meaning that the unseen elements are things like your beliefs, your values, your meanings, your assumptions, all those things that you know, influence culture that you can’t see or touch, and that they’re reflected in observable, same thing. So behaviour systems, practices, policies. So it’s the collective element that shows up in the unseen and the sen. And then it’s learned from one another. So if we think about culture, what is culture culture is me showing up to a team, looking at the behaviours, the systems, the practices, and the policies and things that I can see. Trying to make sense of what I can’t see the values, beliefs, meanings and assumptions, to know, how do I change my behaviours so that I can belong within this company culture? So I think once we understand that, that’s probably a starting point for us to talk about how we now contrast compliance versus culture? 

Shelley Johnson: I love your statement. That snot we’re trying to create culture, we have a culture, we’re trying to change it, that to me is like a mind blown moment because you already have a culture, it just might be that it’s not the right one. Or it might be that the values on the wall that are out, here’s our spouse, culture is not lived out internally. And so we’ve got this, the intended culture and the actual culture. And I think that’s where we get these pain points within organisations. And then I think sometimes, as HR, we come in and go, Okay, well, we have to force the change. And that’s where I think the compliance stuff comes in. Because we start mandating things. And I know, I’ve done this so many times where I’m like, I can see and I look back on my some of my earlier stage in my career, where I’ve done things, and I think I was just trying to rush people to the outcome, rather than inviting them on the journey of culture. So talk to us about what the difference between the compliance based culture is versus what you define as culture.

Shane Hatton: Yeah, I love that kind of frame of reference there. Because you think to yourself, Okay, well, how do I change the culture, if I don’t like the culture that I want? I know what I’ll do, I’ll implement a policy that forces people to behave in a particular way, which is ultimately compliance. And I think compliance. Like I said before, compliance is an adherence to a set of rules, because people want to avoid getting in trouble. Whereas culture is a commitment to a set of behaviours that help us to pursue a common value or a common goal. And so if you think about compliance, compliance is about behaviours that are rooted in consequences, right? So think about compliance, which is how you behave. And if you don’t do the behaviour, there’s consequences. So the fear is if you don’t then blank, and that’s ultimately what compliance leads to, which means people will do the behaviour but don’t want to, they don’t want to do the behaviour. It’s like if I said to you, hey, Shelly, I want you to wear this hat. And you go, I don’t want to wear the hat you like, if you don’t wear the hat, you’re in big trouble and you will lose your job. And so you put the hat on, and you walk around, everyone goes, Hey, Shelly, what’s with the hat? You’re like, Ah, don’t ask like, I don’t care about it. I hate the hat. It’s stupid. It’s not culture, its compliance. But if we flip the perspective on culture, culture is rooted in belief and value. And that’s the culture that says, if we do this, then we can achieve this aspirational goal, which is me sitting down and going, Hey, we’ve got a set of hats here and there’s five or six hats shelf, and we think this is the tip of the hat that’s going to best suit us and where we’re going, that’s going to help like it’s going to be stylish. It’s going to be functional. And you go I love that hat. Okay, maybe it’s not the hat that I would choose. But hey, I’m on board. Let’s wear the hat. And then you put the hat on your walk around the gate and it goes, Shelley, what’s with the hat? You’re like, Hey, this is we’re on this is our team hat. Do you love it? I love it. And you can see the difference between something which is compliance based if you don’t versus a culture base, which is if we do we can

Shelley Johnson: Oh my goodness, that is so good. If we do we can do You’ve just got such a way with words. But I want to ask you, because I’m just thinking about that example of getting the buy in. And one of the things that I’ve seen work really well, is when we invite people to shape it. So we co design the culture we want to create. And we get our employees’ voices into the mix. And I think sometimes what happens is, your ELT goes a little off site, and they design the culture without hearing from our employees about what they want, what matters, because our employees are the ones that see Culture Day in day out. And one of the CEOs I worked for Shane said this amazing thing, he said, the higher up in the ladder you go, the further you get from the reality of culture and employee experience. And I think that is so true that if we create cultural behaviours, or values in a bubble, without hearing what the genuine experience, challenges and pain points are for our employees, we miss something. And we miss something deep in that change process. I’ve heard you describe this as the expectations conversation, and how we have these expectation conversations and really start to unpack what matters when it comes to culture, and some of the unspoken things that happen within organisations that we need to bring to the surface. How would you do that conversation? or facilitate that kind of culture work with teams?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, I think this is why the understanding of culture is really important. Because if we know what culture is, we know what levers to pull in order to be able to make that happen. So you said before, how do we involve people in the conversation? Well, culture by its kind of definition, understanding is it’s a collective experience, which means you can’t create culture unless you have a collective buy in. Which means if you’re going to take your executive team and go away and build your cultural aspirations for the business, and come back and say, Hey, everyone, this is our culture. Now, you don’t have a collective experience, you have a collective aspiration. And I talk regularly about this idea that culture is average and not aspirations. But culture can be aspirational. And what I mean by that is that culture ultimately is going to be the sum average of your organization’s behaviours. So if you say if you’ve got 100 people in your organisation, and 70, or 80 of them are empowering, and empathetic and understanding, you’ve got an empowering and an empathetic and understanding culture. If you’ve got 70% of your people who are micromanaging in detail, then you have a micromanaging disempowering culture. So if you need to change culture, you need to involve everybody in that conversation or not necessarily have everybody write the script for what your culture is going to be. But you have to allow everyone to feel as though that they’ve contributed to the conversation. So you don’t need to have 100 people in the room, but you need to have an opportunity to feel like people to feel like they’ve contributed to that conversation. So expectations are always the first place to start. And what I would suggest is that most of your frustrations and disappointments and tensions in your workplace come down to a misalignment of expectations, which is I wanted something from you, you didn’t deliver, you wanted something from me, I wasn’t able to deliver. So the expectation conversation is designed to get the right voices into the room. And for us to surface what is unspoken. And it’s the unseen elements of culture to surface, our values, our beliefs, our expectations, our experiences, and contribute to that to the room and then ask the question, what do we have in common here? What are we looking to pursue what unites us? What are the things that we’re really passionate about? And from those common themes, we can then start to define the behaviours that we want to see represented in our organisations?

Shelley Johnson: What have you seen work in terms of getting people together to do that? Is it a survey? Is it focus groups? Are there small group workshops?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, all the above, I think it’s gonna look very different for different organisations. What I would suggest is that if you’re going to run things like surveys, you need to look at the culture surveys that have existed before you ran that survey. So I’ve been with organisations who have tried to implement a survey saying we really want to know what you think about this. But you’ve had five years of previous engagement surveys that you’ve done nothing with the information on. And therefore people go, Well, why bother contributing, so your participation rate is low. And your honesty is that people are very hesitant to be honest, because they don’t believe anything’s going to happen as a result of it. So I think you have to first take stock of what are the channels that we’ve used and what’s been most effective for our business. But I think focus groups get people in the room and ask those questions, creating the psychological safety that allows people to share openly and honestly about what’s working and what’s not working. But probably most important is regardless of the channel that you use to have that conversation. The conversation has to go both ways, which means that once people have shared with you, you have to share back and tell them what you’ve done, what you’ve learned, what you’ve listened to, what you’ve heard, and sometimes that means telling them the really hard, ugly parts of the data. I mean, surely You’ve probably seen it before, I’ve seen it all the time where an organisation will do an engagement survey or they’ll invite, you know, a cultural study. And they go, Hey, everyone, thanks for your input, here’s the three things that, you know, we found were doing really well. And there were nine things that they’re doing really poorly. My wife will often say this, and she’s got a long history in HR. And she says, There’s no such thing as a bad score. The only bad score is one that’s not acted on. And so if you if you recognise that, then regardless of your score feels bad, as long as you can feed back saying, Hey, this is what we’ve noticed, this is what we’ve recognised, here’s what we’re going to do as a result of that, then the score is actually a really good thing for you

Shelley Johnson: the vulnerability in saying to your organisation, look, this is the area we’re not doing well in. And we know, and we’re not happy with this either. And we’re going to do something about it. And here’s the three things we’re going to do over the next 12 months. Yeah, that is so validating to your employees. And I know so many HR team members out there will be nodding their heads as they’re listening to this in their car driving to work going, yes, we need to do this. But sometimes the block can come from CEOs who may not feel like that’s a safe thing to do. Or they may not, they might actually feel that that will detract from culture, what would you say to them to influence them to build that vulnerability and openness about where the culture is?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, you’re a master at helping people deliver feedback, right? This is your kind of wheelhouse. And let’s take for a moment, let’s ignore the organisational perspective of this at the moment and bring it back to you as a human being. If you and I had a conflict, I mean, we would never have conflict because we get along so well. But if you and I had conflict and you came to me, and you said, you know, I’ve plucked up the courage to say, Shane, you said this, and or you did this, and I really didn’t like that. My response to you was, thanks so much for the feedback, leave it with me. And then you didn’t hear anything for 12 months. And then I came to you a year later, and we hadn’t spoken to you. And I said, Hey, Shel, is there anything I could be doing better? Or different? You’d be like, What do you mean? Like, I haven’t spoken to you for a year. And now, the last piece of feedback I gave you did nothing weird. So that’s the first response. The second response is you come to me and say, Shane, I didn’t like the way you did this. And I go, Hey, thanks. Hey, thanks so much. I really appreciate that feedback. Hey, Shelley, I want to tell you the three things that I feel like I’m doing really well in our relationship in response to that, and you don’t address the problem. The third option is you come to me and say hi, Shannon, like the way you did that. And you say, Shelley, I’m so sorry. I really appreciate that feedback. And here’s the three things that I’m gonna do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. Which of those three responses is actually going to help repair that relationship or strengthen that relationship?

Shelley Johnson: Definitely not.

Shane Hatton: And yet, we see that all the time engagement surveys go out, a year goes by, we’ve heard nothing. And then we come back and ask people what we can do better engagement surveys come out. And then we give them the best of the results and the reports. And I think the best response to it is, hey, this is what we know we’re doing well, we’re going to keep doing those things. Here’s the things where we know we need to improve and we value that feedback. And here’s the actions we’re going to take and the practical results that we’re going to achieve thanks to your feedback.

Shelley Johnson: That is so incredibly powerful that moment in an organisation and I had seen a case study actually from I can’t remember the organisation, but their marketing internally for the culture survey, their internal comms strategy was you said we did. And so what they took from the concerns was, okay, you said that our leadership needs to take on more feedback. And you said that we need to have more career progression. Here’s what we did. And here’s what we’re going to do. And I think that message of you said, we heard that expression, we heard you, we heard the pain points. And here’s what we did. And here’s what we will do. It’s really compelling to find that way to take action on the pain points when it comes to culture is absolutely key. I want to know, from your perspective, and you’ve worked with some really large organisations, Optus and Sixten, some really big businesses all around Australia. And I want to know, what have you seen these organisations do when they’ve gone on this cultural transformation journey? What steps have they taken to practically make changes? 

Shane Hatton: Yeah, great question. So one of the things I talk about in terms of cultural transformation is I look at it as five conversations. And if you’re looking for a framework, this is the framework I take every business and organisation through. We touched on the first one, which is an expectation conversation. So pulling people together and having a really honest conversation about what do we expect of one another on this team? As you start to do that, if you share as you hear from your employees as you hear from your team, what I’ve found is in every single circumstance, people will say something to this effect, they will say, Oh, we can None of all want the same thing, don’t we? Are there a lot of commonalities here? And that’s what we start to realise is that we have expectations, some of them are realistic, some of them are very unrealistic. But most of our Core expectations about how we show up at work are very consistent, we want the same things, we want to be treated with respect, we want it to be in an engaging and fun and optimistic environment. We want to feel empowered, there’s all these things that are common. So once we’ve had that expectation, we can identify our core aspirations for our culture. So maybe it’s that we want to have an innovative culture, maybe it’s that we want to have a flexible culture or an optimistic culture, we can identify aspirations, the second conversation to have is a clarification conversation, which is now being able to take those aspirations and clearly define what good looks like in that cultural context, which is, what are the behaviours that will help us to get there? And if as an organisation, we were to commit to the behaviours that would actually make the biggest impact and move the needle closer towards those cultural aspirations? What would those be? And what would they look like? Once that’s done, we can then communicate that, which is how do we now take it from something which is very, you know, values on a wall to language in a hallway? How do we take something that feels like it can be embedded into our everyday conversations? And then the final two conversations around now, how do we celebrate the good when we see it in our culture? And how do we challenge the bad when we’re not living up to the aspirations that we set for ourselves. And so those are the five conversations that we walked through. And maybe what I can do is, if I did a great journey with six, you mentioned them, the car hire company, in Australia, I think they’re some of the most incredible human beings I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. And I can walk you through what we did with them as a team. And I feel like they were doing some things, which were just really kind of pushing the boundaries a little bit challenging the way things would typically be being done. And so that journey started. Last year, we were working together, and we brought the team together. And we actually had some of these conversations around expectations, we identified some of their aspirations in their culture. And then we started to really try and define what those behaviours look like. And I reckon what they did, which was something I haven’t seen quite a lot of, is they went really intentional about how they want to communicate the language of this culture to their team. And what we did is we actually worked together to craft what they call their open road manifesto. So they’re a car hire company, and they’ve got this kind of ambition. And their ambition is ultimately to be the customer’s number one choice for mobility, they want to help people be the first point of reference, when they think about wanting to get from A to B. And that’s what they wanted to do. And because they’re a car height company, they use the metaphor of a road trip as a way to articulate some of their cultural aspirations. And I mean, I’ve got a couple of paragraphs of their manifest, I won’t give you the whole thing, because it’s like, it’s really well written, but it’s, it’s quite long. But let me give you kind of the opening lines. And this is what it says, In life’s road, trip six has a grand ambition to be the customer’s number one choice for mobility. We’re not just renting cars here. We’re a group of Journey enablers, road companions, and customer champions, we make it our goal to exceed expectations of our customers. And we apply that same standard of excellence in the way that we work together as a team. The customers are our keys, just like keys, ignite the engines of our cars, our customers ignite the spirit of our business. They’re the beginning and the destination of all of our work, we make sure to hear their voices in every conversation and decision. It’s like they’re riding shotgun with us all the way. And so like that little part of the manifesto, the customers are our keys was one of their cultural pieces of language. And they’ve got this next one here, which is we’re pros and his road trip business, and we understand how important it is to make time to check under the hood. Just like a thorough CAR Check isn’t only about nuts and bolts, our way of working isn’t only about the tasks and deadlines, it’s about people thoughts and ideas, we take time to get to the heart of things and really get to know each other embracing our differences and making sure the quieter voices don’t get lost in the mix. Everyone’s got value to share. And we’re here to hear it. So like these really like it felt so aspirational. But it was the language that was most relevant to their context. And I just loved it. And so they’ve got this manifesto now that they can start to embed their onboarding into their conversations with their teams. But I’ll give you one example that I loved about that, and the cultural kind of mantra or meme that we created was this check under the hood. And the way that they launched this, they launched this with the kind of key team and the key leadership team on the Gold Coast that are like a mini conference. And when we were together, they kind of talked about each of these pillars, and they shared personal stories about what they meant to them as an individual. And one person shared this story about in the lead up to the conference, they were pulling together all the logistics for it. And one of the directors called and said, hey, you know how we said, we’ve got this kind of cultural language, you want to check under the hood and just make sure things are okay. And she was like, yeah, he’s like, this is me checking under the hood. Because everything is okay, how are you? And she said it was like, for the first time what was written on a wall started to be lived out in a hallway. And I think stuff like that is just a really good example of bringing culture to life through language and behaviour.

Shelley Johnson: I can see how easily that would catch on it because I’m thinking about, one of the funny things I’m saying with the clients that we work with, in my business is, is moving them from your kind of old school values of integrity, respect, communication and excellence, which by the way, were Enron’s values. And moving. So like, you know, moving them from these static terms that are so broad, and so almost so generic that it loses its power, to what you’re saying is something that becomes part of your conversation. So one of the organisations I worked with used that we created a value for them, which is learn, grow, repeat. And they say that, and when you hear that, like under the hood, they suck, I’m just gonna have an under the hood conversation. Are you okay? Or, Hey, I reckon this is one of those fails, where we learn, we grow, and we repeat, and you start to incorporate it, whereas no one’s coming in saying, we need to have an integrity conversation. Like, no one’s saying that says that, because if they did, you’d be like, Oh, my god.

Shane Hatton: I almost want to start saying it now just to, I feel like it’s a great, great conversation starter.

Shelley Johnson: So I love the process that you went through with six too. And I know there were multiple workshops that you ran with multiple teams to get these ideas out there and clarify them, and then move it towards creating this manifesto. I can imagine how practical that would be in onboarding. Like I think onboarding is the key moment for this culture conversation where we bring people in. We show them in the onboarding handbook in the onboarding process, how important this stuff is, and what it looks like you said the words what good looks like, and the stories that examples of how it happens, like the examples of customer of exceeding customer expectations, I imagine they would have so many of those that they could tell.

Shane Hatton: Yeah, and so I think the key in this is it’s creating language. So in our research, we asked people what were the key ingredients of healthy culture. less than a third said, like some kind of shared organisational language is a key contributor for that. I think it’s one of the most overlooked opportunities for teams to help create culture, which is to create what I call team memes, which are small mantras and phrases that you can use that are both meaningful and memorable, to help communicate and talk about your culture. So when we looked at this road trip manifesto, there were phrases like eyes on the road, there were phrases like check under the hood, one of my favourite ones that they use were windows down music app, which is for them, like, that’s our, that’s our vibe, that’s our culture. That’s who we are. And if this if people are looking for examples of this, go to Spotify website and go to the Spotify band manifesto, that was a really inspiring part of the work together, they they’ve created this manifesto, which is like, we don’t do divas here, no divas, because in their context is about music. And so don’t just create values, like people, people want to create values, but I think create language for people to talk about your culture. And the second part of that, which I think is probably just as green, is crucial, which is making sure that your behaviours in your organisation are reflective of those languages, which means that the language is meaningful. It’s not just writing on a wall, it’s not writing on a website, not just words on a page. Really good example is that I’ve just joined the WeWork community in London at the moment. I’ve got an office set up here. I’m expanding my work across the UK to the US, I’m still working in Australia, but I’m just expanding here at the moment. And in the WeWork cafe, one of their cultural aspirations is to do the right thing, be human and be kind. Now, I have not necessarily based on my, you know, experience ever associated, we work with that. I’ve always looked at the documentaries we work and assume that they’re a bit cultish and, you know, whatever that vibe is, but when I walked into this venue, they’ve got a cafe set up there. And the cafe is operated by people who are part of the deaf community, and they’ve got a TV at the front of the cafe. And it shows you how to order your coffee in British Sign Language. And they could have done anything in their building. When it comes to putting up a cafe and they could have made their own money, they could have hired anyone, but one of their cultural aspirations was to be human and kind of do the right thing. And their behaviours and their practices are reflective of the culture that they’re aspiring to create. So I think we have to mention that if you’re going to create culture, it can’t just be creating a clever manifesto or setting it, creating a set of really cool, edgy team memes or values on an onboarding document needs to be reflected in the behaviours of the organisation as well. And the decision making as an executive team is a leadership team that lives out those values and demonstrates them.

Shelley Johnson: And that is the real challenge, right? If we think about culture being what we’re promising an organisation but then what happens in practice can be very different. And I think when there’s that gap between what we promise from a cultural perspective and what we practice, that’s when we have issues and I will. We’ll take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to ask you about you talk about this conflict. I think this is really important, where we need to work out how we address culture, when there’s problems? How do we deal with these moments where there’s issues and we’re not living it out. So let’s take a break, we’ll come back in a sec. Want to learn more about how to create an effective hybrid culture, our short course will teach you how your organisation can offer flexible working arrangements in a way that has a positive impact for both the organisation and the employee. Check out the link in the show notes for details. So Shane, talk us through what happens when things go wrong with culture. I’ve got so many examples. So one of the common ones I say is around talented jerks, where we tolerate bad behaviour because of good results. So I kind of think that Shane is like shooter McGavin. Do you remember shooter McGavin from? Yeah. So like shooter McGavin is the ultimate talented jag and sorry, to the Gen zeds, who are listening, what is Happy Gilmore. This idea of someone who’s really good at the technical parts of their role, but their behaviour is out of alignment with our culture, they don’t contribute to the culture in the way that we would want. So let’s say one of those values you mentioned from SIXT exceeds the customer expectations. And maybe this person is technically really strong, but they struggle in that aspect. How do we address it because I think that’s where the rubber hits the road with this stuff, if we tolerate behaviour that isn’t aligned with who we want to be and how and what we want to be known for.

Shane Hatton: So there’s a really good quote by Todd Whitaker and Steve Gruenert. And the quote goes, something to the effect of the culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour that the leader is willing to tolerate, sums it up perfectly. It’s a bit like if you’ve got a barrel of fruit, and you’ve got a rotten apple in there, that one rotten apple has the capacity to ruin everything else in that experience for people. But there’s two kinds of ways that I would answer this question, the first way is to think through the most challenging conversations that need to happen in culture. The reason they’re so challenging is because we’ve never set an expectation at the start. And therefore, when we have to have that challenging conversation, it’s a surprise to the person who’s receiving it. So if you’ve never set a good example, I was with a group of CEOs who were working in hospitality and we were meeting together. And I asked the question, if you would like your team to be known for just one thing, what would that one thing be? And once he put his hand up in the middle of the room and said, I want it to be optimistic. It’s like, Oh, interesting, interesting response. Like I said, unpack that a bit more. He said, I just want to attend and see the pot, the best possibilities. I was like, great, there were about 40 CEOs in the room. I looked at the rest of the room and said, Who else would say that? And not one single hand went up? And I asked her well, what’s the word that you would use? And there were all these different words. And it was optimistic. It was kind, it was, you know, innovative, all these kinds of words they wanted. And the second question I asked was, when was the last time you told the team that? And everyone just kind of had this moment, they were like, I don’t think I’ve ever told my team that. And I was like, Well, how does your team know that that’s what they’re working towards. And they go well, when they do it, I get happy. And when they don’t do it, I get angry. And so what ends up happening is you sit there and go, Okay, I need to challenge this person on their behaviour, but they don’t even know that behaviour is wrong, because they’ve maybe lived out that behaviour in a different organisation or different contexts or, or even just for 20 years, they’ve been doing the same thing. And no one’s ever had that conversation. So as a starting point, I think you have to have the expectation conversation, which is okay, what do we expect of one another here. And now that we’ve, we’ve made that clear. Now, when I challenge myself, I’m challenging a misalignment with a culture that we committed to, rather than challenging a preference, which is, again, my way of doing things or how I would like to happen. Maybe one last example of that, I think, I was working with a nonprofit who had a group of people who were on their team from a different culture, we’re talking not organisational culture, but a different geographic culture. And in their culture, when you show up on time, it’s a loose show up on time, like when I say tan, it’s tannish. Right? You know, there’s lots of cultures where that’s the case, and nothing about that decision is disrespectful in their culture. However, when I asked the team, what does respect look like for you on this team, people said, it’s showing up to meetings on time. And so in that moment, they went, hang on, hang on, hang on a minute. That’s not disrespectful to us. I mean, that’s, you know, that’s just part of the culture, the way we’ve always done things. And in that moment, they had this sudden realisation we all were very different people. And I don’t think it’s about right and wrong culture. I think it’s about the way we want to do things here as a team and what we decide to do, which means that if we as a team decide we’re going to show up to meetings on time then that is what we commit to as a team. And ultimate? Yeah, I think we just need to be mindful of that.

Shelley Johnson: And once you do that expectations, conversation, you clarify that, then those difficult moments where you see someone, you know, they’re doing something they T, that’s weird. Or Gee, I don’t think that’s who we are. And we go, yeah, no, we all decided we were going to show up and behave in this way. So it makes it so much easier. You don’t have any of those surprise moments, or what I would kind of call the feedback bomb where we want someone with feedback. And we like, just expect them to think how we think you think there’s, it’s a massive assumption to make to go. We think everyone will come at this from the same perspective. And we just know, for a fact that’s not true when we have a really diverse workforce. I mean, it’s so funny, because it does so much to go back to that first step you mentioned. And then the whole process becomes easier. I think the big thing that I see is how do we do those difficult conversations? Well, because let’s say we’ve defined them really well. We’ve done an awesome job. We’ve got our culture manifesto, we have released that out to the organisation, everyone’s on board. And then naturally, we have a few dilemmas or problems come up. What do we do? And how do you do it because this is a challenge for HR. HR can see the problems. But sometimes we’re trying to influence managers to get them to have the chat, we can see it we’ve got red flags, waving. If this person is causing problems, you need to have the conversation. And then that leader or manager is like, yeah, yeah, then it’s hard and they don’t want to and so what would you say to a HR person listening? Now he’s like, I need to help my managers do this.

Shane Hatton: Yeah, that’s the key. I don’t know what the answer is in the question, what you just said is I need to help my managers do this. So when in our research, we asked people who’s responsible for culture, and it basically cascades from the top down in terms of the responsibility of culture, but in different ways. So we asked who’s responsible for setting the culture, and pretty much everyone agreed, it’s the leader of the organisation, you’re responsible for setting the culture. Then we asked who’s responsible for leading the culture, and it was the C suite, the executive team. But then the next part was, who’s responsible for communicating it, living it out every day, and addressing all the cultural inconsistencies? And the answer to that was your middle managers. So when it comes to the cultural inconsistencies, the people who are actually shaping that every single day, are your middle managers, they’re the people who have the most contact points with the breadth of the organisation. So the key is how do we empower our middle managers to be having these hard conversations. And I would suggest it’s two parts. The first is trying to have them addressed before they become a crucial conversation. So most people are implementing Crucial Conversations training. And the reason why they do that is because things build up over time, and to the point where they have to have these really big heavy conversations. But if you can teach people to have small course correction conversations, so that they don’t become crucial conversations, it changes that entirely. And the way that you do that is you have to give them something to point to in that challenging conversation. So when cultures are clear, challenging, conversations are easy, they’re not easy in the sense that they don’t cause you to be nervous or feel a little uncomfortable. They’re easy in the sense that you’ve got some reference point to point to. So I always say to people, if you remember nothing else, teach people how to do these three things. Number one, make an observation number two, state and impact. Number three, ask for input. If you just do those three things, you’ll have a very, very helpful conversation. Number one, make an observation. How do you make an observation? Well, you have to observe behaviour. And we’re: How do you know if that behaviour is good or bad? It comes back to the behaviour conversation that we’ve had earlier. We’ve talked about expectations, and we’ve defined what good looks like, therefore, every single person on our team knows what good looks like. So when I make an observation, my observation is, hey, I noticed the way that you did that. And that was different to what we said that we wanted to do. So observation is done. The second part is impact, which is what was the impact of that behaviour on the culture that we said we wanted to aspire to, which is, hey, I know that I noticed this behaviour. And, you know, as a team, we said, we wanted to do things more like this. All of a sudden, now we’ve linked it to a cultural aspiration, which is a common commitment. And the third thing is, what do you think about that? What are your thoughts? What’s your input, and it allows them to be able to share more perspectives which could take the conversation in a completely different direction, if it’s something that maybe you’ve missed. So I think when we talk about that, we can go back and go, Well, why do we need to have these explicit culture conversations? Well, it’s because when you want to challenge behaviours, you need a reference point, which is what did we say we wanted to do? What’s the misalignment of behaviours Toria. Leto is a American psychologist and she said that she said, what isn’t communicated as felt what’s fair As interpreted, and what’s interpreted as often inaccurate, which means if you haven’t articulated what good looks like, if you haven’t said this is the culture we’re aspiring to, it means that most of it is interpreted. And when we’re interpreting, we’re inaccurate, which means most of our conversations are dysfunctional.

Shelley Johnson: The part that I love so much shown is the impact part of the conversation. Because I think what I say, in organisations we do typically, when it comes to tough conversations about culture, we start with this is what I see, this is my observation. This is what I need you to change, what do you think we miss the impact step and the impact step is, in my opinion, the most important component, because people need to know the impact of their behaviours having. So for example, if someone doesn’t have their eyes on the road, and they’re distracted, the impact of that is that work might overflow to other team members, deadlines might be missed, and ultimately, the client has a worse experience or the customer has a worse experience. If we don’t unpack that, for the person receiving that feedback, they don’t know the impact, or we can’t, I don’t think we can expect them to draw those distinctions or draw those parallels. I think that is the part that gets missed, in my opinion, would you say that in the organisations you work with?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, well, I think if you don’t state the impact of what you get as an apology, without real change, and, and people will go, I’m dealing with the same problem over and over and over again. But it’s the same problem showing up in different ways. If a person doesn’t understand the impact of their decision, then what they will do is they’ll hear the feedback and go, sorry. And they apologise and you go great, it’s dealt with. And they come back because they haven’t realised the impact of so many good examples, you got somebody in a meeting, we said, as a team, we want to create a culture where everyone’s contributing in meetings, where everybody feels like their voice is heard, and we go great. And then you’re in a meeting and someone’s sitting there on their laptop the entire time. Gosh, that’s an easy behavioural conversation to have. And what you would do is you’d say, hey, you need to not be on your laptop so often during meetings, because of this, this and this, and don’t do it again. And everyone’s like, okay, whereas the observation impact input is, hey, I noticed that we were in this conversation, and it looked like you were kind of just engaged on your laptop for the whole time. And we didn’t hear much from you in the conversation. And what that meant was, we didn’t get to hear much of your contribution. And you know, when we got together as a team, we said, we wanted to have this collaborative space. And we wanted to make sure everyone felt like their voice was heard. And I don’t feel like we got that from you today. And I’d love to know what your thoughts are on that. All of a sudden, now they know the behaviour, they know the impact that their behaviour had on our culture. And now I’ve got space to be able to share and there’s responses, one of two things it might be, I’m so sorry, I’ve just been really busy. And you go, Hey, here’s what we’re gonna do moving forward, or the person says, Our Look, I’m sorry, I’ve had some family issues going on. And all of a sudden, a conversation, which was a confronting conversation turns into a how do I support and now it’s a completely different conversation.

Shelley Johnson: Shane, I could talk to you all day, but apparently, I don’t have all day. So I’ve got three more questions. So let’s just  keep going, you know, 24 hour podcast, we’re just just keep rolling on through, it would definitely get silly, the longer this podcast goes on. I want to ask you three more questions. And the first one, which is such a banger. Let’s talk about forced fun. Sometimes, sometimes culture can go into this place where I don’t know. It’s like the ping pong tables and the foosball tables and the pizza parties. And I kind of think of that as like, forced fun. That looks like culture, but it doesn’t have the depth. Talk to us about your view of how you can have that authenticity, we have fun, but we also have depth in our culture.

Shane Hatton: Oh my gosh, I love this response, the amount of memes that you see going around, and they’re like, What do you really want? They’re like a pay rise. And they’re like, yeah, just tell us what you really want, a pay rise and a good culture. They’re like, yeah, here’s a pizza party in response, or we’re doing Friday night drinks or something like that. And I think we laugh about it. But there is this. I don’t know what it is. It is a kind of forced fun. I think it’s a good language for it. Because I think that the heart is in the right place. I think when you’re an HR leader, or even like a CEO, or any kind of leader and you go, we want to create a space just for people to have fun here. And we want to create moments of authentic connection, we set out with really good intention. Unfortunately, just the methods don’t always reflect that. And so I think there’s a few things that come to mind. And I’ll give you a good example. And I want to use 60 again, because I think I think I think the world of them as a client and I really loved what you did but one of the things we did at Our conference together is we we ran this activity and I said to the CEO, Matt, I said, What’s your goal here? He said, Honestly, Shane, I just want people to have fun. And I want them to connect with one another. And I was like, Okay, well, how do we craft an experience that does that without feeling gimmicky or feeling forced. And I recommend three elements to it. The first one is it had to have intention, meaning that the purpose of the activity was linked to the goals and objectives of the conference or the event or the meeting. So what we did is we basically created an experience where they had to design their ideal road trip, we had these giant signs printed, and it had like six or seven questions on it. The question is, like, what snacks would you bring? What music would you be playing? Who would be in the car, you’ve got five seats to fill? Where would you be going? Like all these road trips, they had to design their ideal road trip kind of checklist. And it was basically tables of, you know, six or seven people, small groups small enough for people to be able to connect. But the whole purpose of that is it was intentionally designed to set up the concept of where we were going during the conference. So there was intentionality behind it, which I think is the first thing. So when we come into zoom meetings, people feel the first two or three minutes with small talk. And they’re like, Oh, it’s a moment of connection, it’s like synonymous with connection, it’s you awkwardly filling the space. But if you go into the first two or three minutes, I’m going to intentionally go after a meaningful connection by asking good questions. It has intention. So it feels purposeful. So the first thing is intention. The second thing is it had investment in the lead up to it, meaning that before we got in the room, managers were already having those, what we call deposits in the bank with their team, so that when they got in the room, people already felt like they had some degree of connection. I think what a lot of organisations tried to do in these forced fun moments is they try to bring people together and make a huge withdrawal of their energy and their commitment and their vulnerability without having placed deposits in the bank in the lead up to that. And so it’s like, Hey, everyone, we’re here, just chuck you right in the deep end and expect authenticity and vulnerability. But you actually have to work your way up to that. And the last thing I think is, it had an invitation rather than kind of a forced expectation. And what it meant by that is, when we got the groups together, they had to do the road trip checklist. And then they had to stand up on the stage. And they had to pitch it like a shark tank style pitch to the judges. And we let them use music, we let them use theatre, we let them use songs, all these kinds of things. But what I loved about it was that every single person could participate, but to the degree in which they felt safe, so some people got on a microphone and sang karaoke. Other people held the sign. Do you know what I mean? And it needs to be okay, that the person holding the sign is just as valid as the person who’s singing karaoke. And so let’s take that as a context and apply it to a Zoom meeting. You go, does it have intention? Well, the first three minutes of the call, we’re intentionally going after questions that help take the conversation beyond work into non-workspaces. Well, how we’re going to do that is we’re going to ask personal but non intrusive questions, ask questions like, Hey, I’d love to know, for you what’s what’s a characteristic and others that you admire? And in your mind, you’re thinking the answer to that is going to help us work better with you in the future. So it has intention. The second is investment, which we’re going to do regularly. We’re not just going to do it as a one off sporadic thing. And the third thing is invitation, which is allowing people to answer that equate the question to the psychological safety that they feel and being okay with that. I think if you do those three things over again, it’s less forced fun. And I think it’s a more intentional, authentic connection.

Shelley Johnson: Beautiful. Often shame when we talk about culture, we focus on white collar industries. But what have you seen done well, in blue collar workforces?

Shane Hatton: Yeah, it’s a good question, I think one of the things we need to consider with this kind of work is that the principles are the same, but the practices need to look different. So if we think about cultural transformation in potentially, you know, more executive industries, or roles versus potentially blue collar roles, or I think, with the cultural transformation processes, the same involve people in the conversation, get clear on your expectations, define those behaviours, communicate it in a way that’s relevant to them, celebrate the good and challenge the bad. However, the practices and how that’s delivered, these look different. And I’ll give you good examples working with a counsellor in Sydney. And we were talking about how they, because they’ve got a lot of people who are out on the roads, they’re their maintenance teams, they’re servicing, you know, areas. And so they’re like, Well, we’re going to do a town hall, and everyone’s going to jump online on their computers. And like, most of these people don’t even have a laptop, they’re on their phone all day, at best, but most of the time, they’re hands on in the gardens. So what they started doing with these toolbox sessions, where they pull people together, and like just before they started the day, everyone sat in a circle, you know, and they actually had conversations and delivered the messaging rather than relying on the email going out. So the message was the same, the principles the same, but the practice of how that’s delivered looks different. So yeah, I think again, take the concepts, take the ideas, but just ask ask you People I think, again, if we’re to boil all this down shall the simplest answer to some of our most complex challenges in business is just to have a conversation with people and go, Hey, what do you need from us? How do we best help you? What would be most valuable for us? From us right now? So yeah, simple things. .

Shelley Johnson: You’ve given us so much good insight on this conversation. We like to finish every podcast episode with a made-up scenario for our guests to respond to, and this one is probably playing out in some organisation right now. And I want to hit you with that. Are you ready?

Shane Hatton: No, but let’s go. Let’s go for it anyway.

Shelley Johnson: Nice. You work in HR for a company that has maintained its hybrid model, since they were forced to work remotely during the pandemic. During the first few years, it worked really well, people were pulling their weight and productivity levels were skyrocketing. But in the last year, things have changed. Engagement and productivity is dripping for remote workers, and their sentiment from leadership that remote workers are slacking off. How do you respond? And what solution do you suggest?

Shane Hatton: You know, what I love? You know, it’s so like, this is a fictional scenario that just made up right now. But it’s literally the biggest dilemma that HR professionals and organisations are dealing with right now. So let me just solve everybody’s problems right now. Gosh, the truth issue, I don’t think I can solve this because I don’t think there’s a one approach that fits all. But I think there’s some principles and some ideas that maybe we can ask some questions that I think would be helpful. Sometimes, when I’m thinking through, it’s not about just having the best answer. Sometimes it’s about asking better questions. And so the questions that I would be asked in this scenario is, number one is what are our expectations of people? We’ve talked about that a lot in this podcast? I think it’s the number one point for every interest that, I think is the entry point for every conversation, which is what are our expectations of one another? And I think there’s kind of three components to this. The first is around clarity. And I think with clarity, the question that we’ll be asking is, what are people meant to be doing? And has this changed from when we first began, so when we were in COVID, and everyone was kind of testing out hybrid working, we mobilised our workforce, and then we set an expectation, we said, hey, this is what it’s going to look like to work from home, then what we did is we brought everyone kind of back out of COVID out of their homes. And we didn’t reset the expectation, but the world of work has changed. And therefore, the question I would ask is, well, what are people actually meant to be doing? Has something changed from when we first began? is probably one the first question, the second question to ask around getting clarity, which is, have we really understood the reasons why potentially, if productivity is dipping? For example, we might say, Well, the answer is bringing everyone back into the office, but we haven’t really understood the reasons. So if you think about the world of work, right now, we’ve got interest rates, which have gone through the roof, people have additional stress around their homes and around their families. If that’s an underlying cause, than bringing people back into the office, where we say, hey, it’s going to be more expensive, you got more of a commute time is actually going to exacerbate the problem, rather than solve the problem, so the answer isn’t just bringing people back to the office, it’s actually understanding the reasons. And if we understand the reasons we can potentially solve the problem, and maybe that is bringing people back into the office. So it’s number one clarity about what people are meant to be doing? And have we made that expectation clear? Number two, are we understanding the real reasons and the real challenges to why potentially productivity engagement has dropped? And then once we’ve got that, the second thing is around visibility, which is, do people have measures around our productivity and our outputs that we’re expecting of them? Is it measurable and can people see it regularly? So one of the challenges about being at home is that the visibility has decreased. And so we don’t have as much visibility around people’s output. But I think if we can get really clear on outcomes that people are working towards and have very clearly defined outcomes, then we don’t need to get hung up on the visit on the visibility of their outputs, because we can measure their results. And so once you’ve got a measure around their results, and you have a measure around what they’re supposed to achieve, that the manager can see it, and the team member can see it, then the third part, I think, is then to empower middle managers to have those conversations around what’s working well, what’s not working well. So if they, for example, go hey, these are our expectations of your outcomes. And this is the visibility we both have over those, the expectations are clear, but you’re not delivering on those outcomes. Now I need to step in and have that conversation. Netflix, call it high freedom, high responsibility, meaning that if you’re delivering on the outcomes of your role, you have high freedom. But if you’re not delivering on the outcomes of your role, there’s gonna be some responsibility you need to take. And so we need to have some stronger accountability around that. So my thing is, number one, start with expectations. Make sure they’re clear. Get clarity around what people are meant to be doing? And if they’re not doing it, do you actually understand the reasons why They’re not doing it? And then thirdly, it makes sure it’s visible for everybody’s expectations, can they see it? Can they measure it? What gets measured gets done? So can you measure it? And then can you make that visible for other people to see.

Shelley Johnson: It’s not really an oversimplification, Shane. But for me when I think about this hybrid dilemma that we’re all in, and we’re all facing, I think ultimately, it comes down to leadership capability. If we develop the capability of our leaders, to do what you described, of understanding the performance, measuring the right things, having these conversations, the issues, I think, become a lot more obvious. And we don’t have a blanket approach to, well, we’ve got some underperformance over here. So let’s get everyone back to the office. Because that’s gonna start what it’s like, no, let’s develop leaders who can spot the concerns, you can identify coach development, they’re people who can say, You know what this person might need to come back to the office. That doesn’t mean the whole team does, yeah. But we need to have that capability in our leadership in our middle managers to be able to spot those things and work out what does this person need? And how can I help them? And I just think it solves so much of the complexity here. But I think a one size fits all blanket approach is going to be not just a hard sell. But it’s going to cause other big problems and potentially bigger problems and what we’re dealing with right now. And so I think what you’ve described, how do we have conversations about expectation, clarity, and then we have those conflict conversations, but we do it really well? It is just so powerful, and anyone listening that wants to learn more? Your book is such a practical resource for this. So I just think everyone should jump on to get that. We’ll put it in the show notes.

Shane Hatton: Thank you. Appreciate that. Shall I just quickly, I think you’ve touched on it. I reckon there’s one piece that we didn’t touch on today, that’s very quick to address, which is recognition, because we talk a lot about having those hard conversations. And one of the ones that I think is really important is that if we were just as intentional about celebrating the good in the people in our organisations and our teams, as we were criticising the bad or challenging the bad, we would see an increase in people’s responses. Because I think what gets rewarded gets repeated. And so if we’re intentional about rewarding the behaviours that actually shape the culture that we want, I think it goes a long way.

Shelley Johnson: What a great way to close out this conversation you’re spot on. So right, thank you so much, Shane, for joining us on the show today. It’s just been such a good conversation.

Shane Hatton: Shel, thank you so much for having me and to all the HR professionals that are listening who are constantly in the process of rewarding and recognising and shouting out other people a shout out to all of you, and thank you for the work that you do. You’re our people and we’re really, really grateful for you.

Shelley Johnson: Thanks for listening. We’ve included heaps of helpful info and guides to help you put these insights into action in the show notes, so make sure you check it out. If you’re an RA member, and you’d like to continue the conversation with your HR peers, join the RA LinkedIn lounge and start a discussion thread. We’d love to hear from you. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode of Let’s take this offline, don’t forget to follow so you never miss an episode. And while you’re at it, give us a five star rating and review wherever you listen. Thanks for tuning in and I look forward to bringing you another conversation for those who dare to do HR differently.

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