July 16, 2024Heather Beach shares three takeaways from last month’s event, including effective communication.
Sometimes I realise that I can be as much a victim of fixed mindset as the next person.
I’m only human, and like all human brains, mine has the same cognitive biases – favouring information that confirms its preexisting beliefs. It is also subject to the vagaries of a stress response system which activates when my expertise is threatened – plus I am sure the fear of failure is doubled for a recovering perfectionist!
I want to share three lightbulb moments that I took from the conference.
I have spent a career being frustrated by health and safety professionals who are deeply committed to protecting life, but some of whom cannot communicate their message briefly and in a compelling way.
Before I activate your amygdala (!) let me clarify that, rarely these days, do I find myself subjected to a lecture from an H&S professional which I am not sure what to do with (as was so frequent an occurrence in the past).
However, I had not put myself in the same bucket as these unfortunates, and it dawned on me this week, that indeed, on occasion I am.
An exceptional workshop from Sarah Brumitt on how to talk to the board, gave me a few moments of clarity, which, like all messages of this ilk, I felt had been lurking somewhere in my brain already but just not present (and now I feel stupid).
Sarah articulated very powerfully what we all know – everyone, not only the senior team, is time poor these days and suffering from information overload and conflicting priorities. So how do we make our message land and have people act on it?
Tell them what immediate action you would like them to take. And make that explicit. Put it up front if you want to. Make this communication clear and simple.
I instantly altered my prospect presentation for a meeting in the afternoon, asking myself what I would like to come away with from the appointment; and, for a presentation I was giving at a conference the following day, I aimed to tell the delegates that, “I want you to go back to your businesses and establish what you are aiming to achieve with your wellbeing strategies.”
If you are interested in the results of these two communication experiments, the meeting with the prospect was done and dusted and successful within 30 minutes of the hour allocated, and at the conference, what usually takes me an hour to articulate was distilled into 30 minutes of (I can’t blow my own trumpet can I?). Suffice to say, it was much better than usual.
You have three seconds to make an impact. But how? A question, a core fact. Something which hooks them so they pay attention to the rest of what you have to say.
Don’t waffle on to illustrate your expertise. The more we try to demonstrate our expertise, putting technical words in and multiple facts and figures, the more we are simply distracting them. Sarah in fact threw sweets at us to illustrate the impact this has.
They probably believe our expertise, or we wouldn’t be standing there in the first place. Let’s face it, blinding the audience with science, just comes from a place of insecurity.
There was an awful lot more brilliant advice around communication, but I have only put these three into practice so far and I need to get on to learning number two…
Not surprising that a recovering perfectionist needs to keep learning this lesson in different guises, but the debate I ran, featuring James Pomeroy at Arup (for the house) and Kate Field, from the BSI (against the house) positioned that ‘organisational wellbeing isn’t working.’
James put it perfectly (and could have been speaking for me too) when he said he had been guilty iof being a know-it-all purist. “We know ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’ doesn’t work, so why are we still doing it?” he questioned. Mental Health First Aid is a perfect example of this. Every research report says that while it is appreciated by the people who do the course it doesn’t make a difference to overall mental health in the workplace.
For this very reason, while we offer a tailored version of a mental health first aid course we developed with Highfield, I have found the obsession in the UK with the course as a lynchpin of wellbeing strategy to be frustrating.
However, I am currently working with a global client where our international mental health first aid and awareness course is a first step to starting the conversation and communication internally. Often, for a distributed workplace it is a way of creating a certain standard for launching a programme. The course has generated conversations which would never have taken place without it.
James also pointed out the importance of symbolism to culture and that having mental health first aiders may, in turn, be a powerful cultural symbol. Brad Pettman of RWE likened it to having handrails you can reach out to for support and Marie-Louise Chandler of QinetiQ shared with me that the peer-to-peer support course (not MHFA but some of the same principles) they developed in her last workplace became integral to their organisational stress risk assessment.
As the three of us (Kate, James and I) are aligned, we did occasionally sacrifice entertainment value for nuance and came together more or less on Kate’s side of the fence at the end. As she beautifully articulated. “We must start somewhere, and we are at the start of a maturity curve.”
My third learning I have had to carefully pick as there were so many – and while there are some who may be more relevant to me as a wellbeing business owner than to you as a health and safety professional, this final one landed like a blow to the solar plexus!
It was a shame that Jerry from the Simon Sinek organisation, could not attend in person but was able to appear virtually, and took us through The Infinite Game workbook and did some incremental exercises. Lesson Four, Prepare for existential flexibility, was particularly interesting.
In this lesson, you were invited to consider what, if you were restarting your organisation tomorrow, you would offer to better serve your customer and advance your cause. My cause is dual fold: That organisations create environments where people can truly thrive and that individuals are inspired to take responsibility for their lives to do so.
I was somewhat shocked to see my pen flow over with the things I had to date dismissed as utterly inauthentic, for show, and frankly, beneath me.
The truth is, if I were to start again, I would look at:
I had dismissed many of these things because workplace wellbeing is multi-faceted and requires cultural change; it can be nuanced and complex and on occasion I have struggled to simplify.
Just telling someone about the benefits of a growth mindset makes some difference of course, but for me, giving people cognitive understanding of a concept can be like watering soil which will never bear fruit. The soil itself needs to change.
The last year or so have represented tremendous personal growth for me – facilitated by understanding my shadow self, coming to terms with my perfectionism, being constantly required to learn new things. I feel I have been rebooted and had a new operating system installed multiple times.
These changes within myself have led to greater self-compassion, the need to always know what I am doing has diminished, leading to a capacity to learn from others in the same field as I am in (I have never had a problem using for technical help, but help in my core skill set of communication for example, I would have struggled with).
I think as a profession, we can get very wedded to our own expertise, to the school of thought we have adopted, to our hobby horse. The discussions within the community on BBS, HOP, SD, wellbeing (should it be in or out of role) can get very black and white very quickly. Egos are challenged, amygdalas are hijacked and curiosity dies.
