the issue around here isn't that we're not resilient enough the issue is that we're in a toxic culture and what you've attempted to do there you've attempted to to I I guess to appropriate a term from from dating you've attempted to Gaslight the people there you've attempted to tell them that something that is right in front of their eyes isn't actually happening hello and welcome to the truth lies and work Place culture podcast brought to you by the HubSpot podcast Network the audio destination
for business professionals my name is Leanne I'm a business psychologist my name is Al I'm a business owner we are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace coaches we are we're also here to feel very sorry for ourselves we um you might noticed this pod is a little bit late um it's because we both came out down with something last week and we think it was Co MH we've been what we've been clean for four years we've never had it we've never had it um and uh and
it finally caught up with us and it is a bastard isn't it really is I'm sure if you're listening to this you probably have had it multiple times you're going shut up Alan lean get on with it but no it just knocked us on our Collective asses but like a decent pain of Guinness all good things come to those who wait today we have an amazing guest who's also a personal hero of both of ours yes we have got the incredible the amazing Bruce daisley on the podcast very very excited Bruce now if you have
n't heard of Bruce Bruce is one of the UK's most influential voices on fixing work he has been published in the Washington Post Harvard Business Review W Street Journal and the guardian his first book The Joy of work was a Sunday Times number one best seller and is now translated into 18 International editions his second book 4 AUD was described as the best business book of 2022 by the financial times as impressively previously Bruce spent over a decade running Twitter and YouTube for Europe lea
ving Twitter as its most senior leader outside of the US yes Leanne interviewed Bruce um a couple of weeks ago and the original interview was almost an hour long so it's been kind of tough to cut it down and fit it to this episode but Leanne and Bruce talked about resilience and how as a concept we might be getting quite a bit of it wrong now rather than the answer to well-being at work being resilient Bruce and lean discussed how the emphasis on building individual resilience could be considere
d as gaslighting they also talked about how the changes in the workplace have highlighted the importance of resilience why are we're happier when we're in teams whether we should be laughing at work and why a receptionist dressed a pringle tube saved a company's culture yes we will yes we will oh that's not true yes we did and you'll also learn what the world's leading culture doctor does when she's called into companies like uber to fix a workplace culture shall we go and meet our guest hi I'm
Bruce daisley for a long time I did technology jobs I worked at companies like Google at Twitter when it was Twitter and uh I worked at a place like that along the way I developed a fascination with how teams work and and just how to have fun at work how how to create good culture and I started doing the podcasts on those things that has led to me publishing a couple of books that have become bestsellers one called The Joy of work and one called fortitude and so now I spend my time helping compa
nies think about themes of workplace culture and how to make work more enjoyable Bruce and I spoke at length about resilience a word we hear a lot a lot about especially in relation to workplace culture and well-being in fact maybe it's being used a little bit too frequently so let's start at the beginning with a definition the American Psychological Association defines resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity trauma tragedy threats or even significant sources of stres
s well that all sounds a lot sciency to me um can you tell me what you actually mean yes in the words and I'll put it in terms you'll understand really really well Al chumba WBA oh yeah in the words of shumba wber I get knocked down but I get up again you ain't never going to keep me down give me a lger drink give me a whiskey drink give me drink there's going to be a whole generation of of people listening to this who go I have no idea what you're talking about what is a chumba WBA Google it so
unds rude actually it does I gave her a chumba wber not sure you can do that in this day and age she'll get canell but yes resilience it's it's our ability to bounce back when things go wrong there's loads of of research psychological research suggests that the resources and skills associated with resilience can be cultivated and practice think back to our episodes with Dr Audrey and Shan tolm on managing stress but the issue is in terms of workplace psychology resilience has firmly been deemed
the responsibility of the individual if work is tough toughen up the tougher you are the more successful you are right well Bruce wasn't so sure and his book fortitude is all about dispelling the myths around resilience and revealing the truth about building inner strength and this is where the conversation started because if we asked Bruce what's your beef with resilience I I've got huge issues with it and and for for a number of reasons really firstly I think at its heart the idea of resilienc
e is superficially really appealing but the expectation of it is actually something close to victim blaming and so the the expectation of resilience and you know you witness this all the time you witness my friend works in a hospital in North London she said in the middle of the pandemic you know overwhelming we we stood and cheered for these people and then denied them a pay increase but the um the these people were working Relentless hours and someone pinned a notice uh on the notice board say
ing resilience webinar on Thursday and she was like the issue around here isn't that we're not resilient enough the issue is that we're in a toxic culture and what you've attempted to do there you've attempted to to I I guess to appropriate a term from from dating you've attempted to Gaslight the people there you've attempted to tell them that something that is right in front of their eyes isn't actually happening and so you know the concept of resilience is already a cautious one so when firms
say you know when they say we need to introduce some resilience training the first thing you might wonder is why do you need resilience training what have you overseen why is your culture so toxic that you've got people who need resilience training okay question number one second thing is um resilience is a bit like sort of um anti-aging creams in the sense that the demand for anti-aging creams is Limitless and yet there's no single cream that ever stops people aging there isn't one there isn't
a single cream where people don't look a year older or they don't look a little bit older um so there but there's no shortage of them you know you you find yourself wandering around beauticians or or you know the parts of stores that sell these things there's no shortage of them and resilien is a bit like that there's no shortage of people who will sell you resilience courses and look the fascinating thing about that is that okay let's see if they work because you know the biggest customer of re
silience courses in the world is the US Army spent somewhere close to a billion dollars training combat soldiers to be resilient the great thing about something like like that when you spent that amount of money is that other people come along and say oh look well if you've done all the work and you've done all the in uh sort of investment let's Implement that let's let's measure that and they've come along and said oh that resilience course that the US military has spent a million a billion dol
lars implementing has had zero impact soldiers are not any more resilient right okay so you've got this interesting thing the very idea of it is to some extent victim blaming but look it's desirable the ability to bounce back to to re-energize is desirable we all want to do it but you know qu question the expectation of it so what we're saying is that resilience training is just a complete waste of time we look for resilience in the wrong place we've looked for resilience is this individual trai
t this almost like this switch that some of us have or some of us don't have some of this um a capacity that we've got to to re-energize on demand and in truth when we witness this resilience it actually has the characteristics of something Collective rather than individual you know I I mentioned combat soldiers and these are real conundrum at the heart of the situation of combat soldiers in the sense that combat soldiers who are in service often report feeling um supported emboldened strengthen
ed by the people around them and actually the thing that really decimates their their well-being is the fact that they're sep at from their tribe resilience is the strength we draw from each other what you what you witness combat soldiers are a perfect example of it combat soldiers often describe it's the moment where they don't have people who understand them they don't have people who have gone through the same when when they find themselves trying to relate to people who've never had to witne
ss the things that they've W witnessed that's when their resilience suffers you know so I think whether we witness situation like Ukraine where people have demonstrated this am incredible capacity to deal with just horrible hardship um res resilience is the strength we draw from each other you don't see examples where some people in Ukraine say I can't cope with this and others say oh yeah I'm I'm living my best life actually it's the capacity for us to draw strength from the community around us
that seems to be the defining aspect of resilience and and I think you know for me that's the most intriguing Enigma about the whole thing that we it's it's so heavily desired but we often look for it in the wrong place the key difference between the workplace in 2024 and the workplace say in 1984 is that we're much more likely to be connected to work outside of working hours it is difficult to ignore an email from an important client outside of work hours when a notification pops up on your ph
one managers can and do abuse the always are messaging platforms like slack to get instant answers whereas 20 years ago they'd have to wait until Monday the opportunity to rest and recover from work is a really important factor in building resilience and this might be one of the reasons why resilience is at an alltime low and burnout is at an alltime high as Bruce explains it's not as easy as saying oh the kids just can't cope these days anyone who can't recognize that the world of work has fund
amentally changed in the last 20 years then this um really Stark data to prove that the average working day has gone up by more than two hours a day in the last 15 years in fact the evidence suggests that um that the the availability we give to our job the sort of the the cognitive availability we give to our job has gone up to around 65 70 hours a week in most jobs which just means that we're thinking about work we're we're effectively in a work mindset for far more than we ever were before it'
s no wonder then that yes if we compare there didn't used to be resilience training courses well of course there didn't used to be the system systematic burnout that we're witnessing now that we were're witnessing uh three out of every four people in the UK say that say they've experienced the episode of burnout in the last 12 months now if we were to rewind the clock maybe to the Millennium or whenever this uh Glory era of work was uh almost certainly people didn't have the demands of work that
we're witnessing now so of course no doubt um there's uh been a massive increase in the amount of resilience training and the amount of demand for these things a massive increase in the amount of burnout that were witnessing but the world is fundamentally a different place now than it was 20 30 40 years ago I think a lot of senior leaders we're talking to seem to think that if we could only get back to how things were preand pandemic everything is going to be okay which is probably the drive to
bring people back to the office to get things back to normality but Bruce points out that this is not actually the case and it won't work sometimes that we find ourselves in a situation where people think well we need to get back to when work was functioning again there was a survey that came out in October this year by KPMG that said that two-thirds of Chief execs believe that by 2028 we'll be back at a five-day office that we'll be working in the office five days a week two-thirds of Chief ex
ex believe that why because they believe in that version that the time before the pandemic was when work was working well I guarantee if you and I were sitting and having this discussion in 2019 we were talking about burnout we were talking about how people were overloaded how people couldn't cope with work so you know the idea that we get we we Rose tint what 2019 2018 looked like is an unfortunate consequence of where we're in right now where people end up thinking about the good old days and
we we all do it in all manner of our life um I think the the most critical thing is that with those discussions of burnout there discussions about resilience why can't the kids COPE in my day we could cope of course comparing two different scenarios especially the moment of work we're in right now we we've got this interesting conundrum where you need to believe two things at once you can um you need to recognize that 90% of people believe that flexible working is a good thing and they don't wan
t to go back to the way they were working before and that two-thirds of Chief exec believe that we should be back in the office right okay two things at once you've got these bosses wanting people together and you know I guess to some extent part of the finding of the book is the resilience and strength is collective and so from that you might say well okay yeah that's it that's the mandate to get back to the office but I think you know you need to bear in mind that that desire to preserve the b
enefits of now so I think the lesson from leaders is thinking how do I create a sense of cohesion a sense of strength that will be the basis of our team resilience how do I create that in a different way and so you know I've seen really lovely things from people saying the job of leaders right now is to be entrepreneurial about building connection about trying to make a way for for teams to feel connected to each other and that's the job of a leader right now and uh I think it's a really interes
ting Challenge and I think really at the heart of it even though the book's about resilience really it's it speaks to Team Dynamics and and groups and making us all feel more connected and as Bruce alluded to earlier in the NHS there's a mass mive problem with the label resilient if the general public think of a group of people as resilient it almost gives them permission to not have to be concerned about them kind of like that happy chirpy fell at work you know he takes everything in his stride
right nobody worries about that guy when he takes a week off they'll assume he's resilient he's cool he's fine they don't think to check up on him but the stats sure that this is exactly the kind of person we should be most worried about my partner's Lebanese and they uh um I adore Lebanon I adore the Lebanese people really lovely people and uh but you know the one thing that's often directed at them is that they have a lot of bad luck lot of Misfortune and you know I was in Beirut where there
was this there was this Almighty explosion biggest explosion in peace time in any city in the world if if anyone sort of if you ever put it into YouTube uh Beirut I think the first thing that comes up as autocorrect is explosion and it's mamame Mia it's like a a sight to behold the whole City's enveloped in this sort of um this fast expanding mushroom cloud it's uh it's terrifying to look at and but when we were there all the new news coverage when the explosion happened was well you know the Le
banese people will be all right because they're really resilient that well if we know anything Lebanese people are resilient let me tell you on the ground they weren't thinking that that they were seeing resilient as this label that other people people were giving them kind of so they didn't have to help you know it was it was a bit like well you're resilient you'll pick yourself up I'll see you later good luck with that I saw a tweet and someone said resilience the you the word resilience is a
demand for silence right that's really interesting right because what you're saying is be resilient like it's a bit like there there there you'll be all right and effectively you're telling someone to demonstrate that they can bounce back from something rather than reaching out and offering them support you know rather than sort of trying to share their discomfort from them so I I found it really interesting more than anything you know the sort of what you might consider then a distraction of of
the criticism of the word I I felt it was a bit overused we were using it for everything you know if you put on the the morning radio if you listen to news radio you'll hear resilience four times every hour and so I was just intrigued because I was like like okay so you've got all these people doing resilience courses schools around the world do resilience programs and the really interesting thing about that is it's based really on the same psychology as the army stuff and when people have said
oh these resilience programs were putting kids through have they working uh no they have no impact whatsoever so we've got this really interesting thing we're spending loads of time trying to train this really desirable trait this really desirable property it's not working I was like okay well let's go back to First principles is there anything that we can do that really tries to understand our capacity to bounce back and is there any way that we can achieve that listen to any commentator speak
ing on any sport and you'll likely hear the word resilience every 10 minutes and the Temptation is to think of this resilience as a kind of muscle that we've trained but Bruce's research uncovered that this is more likely to be a scar tissue than muscle when there are big resilience stories we often reach for sport sports stars or or famous people because they're just the the people whose Story the people whose biography we get to hear and sports stars uh their stories are replete with examples
of people who overcome adversity and it often goes to serve resilience narratives so you know mo Farah might bring to mind right now you know D won the double double he won two gold medals medals at two successive Olympic Games and you know what you might say is oh wow look at Mo Farah's story he actually was a refugee in fact you know what we discovered that uh mofar was actually a victim of human trafficking so he story has this trauma at the heart of it and I became fixated with that because
what you discover is that um actually it's a it's characteristic a lot of Olympians have got um a history of trauma and what you discover is that it serves sort of via um via destroying their own identity really the the way way that we experience trauma is we experience it as shame quite often which is heartbreaking because you know something bad has happened to you and the way that we internalize it is we often feel like it's about us it's about we've got a sort of a um a sort of damaged identi
ty from it it's heartbreaking but that's the the way that broadly trauma is experience anyway one of the things that I was really interested to discover is that not only is there High instance of trauma among athletes and what you often discover is they effectively trauma is normally correlated with addiction and with um self-adapted Behavior so it's more likely to be comminate associated with drinking it's more likely to be associated with drug taking um you know you're four times more likely t
o uh to have alcohol and addiction problems if you've experienced high levels of trauma um almost without exception uh uh addiction is has an episode of trauma that has has spawned but what I was really struck by was the um I ched to someone who looked at performance enhancing drugs so people who took performance-enhancing drugs and he said to me um people who take performance-enhancing drugs have got um if they've got about a nine times higher likelihood to take performance-enhancing drugs if t
hey've been um if they've had episode of sexual abuse and uh if they've had physical abuse it's about uh it's about eight times higher but those are multiplicative um meaning that if you've had both then multiply that likelihood anyway so you end up with these situations where I think sometimes we can find ourselves when we hear the story of ashamed athlete thinking why would anyone take performance enhancing drugs and what you often discover is right at the heart of it is an episode of of someo
ne destroying their sense of identity someone someone who is broken and their sporting performance was is their Redemption Arc so look you know I've I cak of taken you on there but I I was really Blown Away by that the the guy who told me that I was like um like wow for the first time you could understand that when you see these people who've done these episodes of cheating they've done it from a perspective that they have a really so low selfworth they they broken people really and for the firs
t time you actually can empathize his you know Lance Armstrong famous cyclist had episodes of of of abuse in his childhood um I think episodes of Shame um there was also uh there was also another to of France cyclist who was abused as a child there's there's lots of these biographies that it's only in Hind sight you can see wow this is why they did these things so this brings back the age-old question without adversity do we see greatness most super entrepreneurs have had traumatic childhoods mo
st super musicians have had horrible experiences and as Bruce discovered most high performing Sports people have built their resilience because they had trauma and there is a psychological principle called post-traumatic growth it was researched by a psychologist called ritel tesi the basic premise is that negative experiences can spur positive change including personal strengths improved relationships or a greater appreciation for life it is a cliche anecdote but you know it's true that we hear
people who have experienced a near death experience or even a job loss will often site this trauma as the turning point of a transformation in their lives the trouble is this view can romanticize trauma especially when we start to view trauma through the lens of these super performers or super Elite athletes this this isn't the norm this super performance these super athletes are outliers and by only acknowledging post traumatic growth we're not acknowledging the adverse effects of trauma that
even these people can experience it can include things like a normous enormous personal sacrifices to live that life and to to have that success an almost pathological need to win and huge challenges with their identity and retirement we've spoken before about the significant Mental Health challenges that people in the sports industry can experience when their sporting career ends this narrow and hugely simplified Viewpoint also excludes the experiences of the majority trauma is much more likely
to result in maladaptive coping mechanisms there is a mountain of research that links traumatic experience in childhood with addictive behaviors in adulthood as Bruce explains in his book trauma and setback are not simple triggers for achievement now Al I know what your next question is going to be what's the differentiating factor what turns trauma into success rather than addiction well the answer isn't simple I'm sorry I know it's that psychologist answer but it really does depend it depends
on the nature and prevailance of the trauma it depends on the age at which the person was when they experienced that trauma it can depend on personality how optimistic or pessimistic we are it can depend on our perceived locus of of control that's how much we believe that we have control over our lives compared to external forces or events and as Bruce explains it can also depend on the relationships we have in our lives it can depend on the communities we belong to the the notion that we we dr
aw strength from groups is you know even though it's really well known um we don't really explore for it and you know in the medical community for example if you're hospitalized for anything from depression to Heart illness to whatever it is the best predictor of how you will be in two years and five years is how many social groups you report feeling part of why on Earth is that relevant well from doctors and Physicians point of view it's it's kind of not so they don't ask about it they don't sa
y are you part of a social group do you do any group activities do you have any activities you feel part of they don't ask it and yet it's far more predictive of how you be you'll be than if you drink if you exercise if you smoke in fact you know if you if you have friends that you see every day it on average increases your lifespan by 15 years it's like this remarkable extraordinary impact on longevity um and so I guess you know at the heart of it we we kind of overlooked these things and they
they really go to the heart of strong organizations as well you know normally I I heard this brilliant thing I attended a session where different companies talking about culture and a big retail store that you know probably one of the most famous retail stores in the UK and uh someone who worked there she said we did some analysis and we found an interesting correlation the the stores that used all of their their staff entertaining budgets had much better culture than the ones who didn't I mean
it's like such a silly self-evident thing but the ones who arranged um staff baseball in the softball in the park or the the ones who arranged a sort of a staff quiz night or the who the ones who did those things had much better culture than the ones who didn't and what you broadly discover is that good culture generally has socialization It generally has social connection at the heart of it now the interesting lesson for all of us right now is that you know the world has changed a bit a lot of
people have since covid have got much longer commutes they've moved out they staying on a going to the pub after work you know actually typically only half of the office have ever enjoyed that and they kind of didn't go but we didn't notice them everyone else who was having so much fun there didn't notice that you know the ones with care responsibilities weren't there the ones with long commute the ones who didn't drink weren't there um so so I guess the challenge increasingly for leaders is is
recognizing socialization plays a big part of stronger culture stronger culture generally translates into better results better performance but we maybe don't want to do all of those things in outside of work hours and so the interesting challeng for lead disase okay how do we create social connection inside work hours now that might be team lunches it might be you know team bake sales where everyone brings something in cost zero money people bring things in you'll sit and eat something together
or I've seen companies that do Team food Mar um world food events and everyone from different countries brings the food their grandmother used to make them or everyone brings you know the food that they they most love cooking at home and so you've got like this polish food you've got this Indian food You' got these these like Nigerian dishes like and you've just got this incredible collection of of people doing think does this mean you have to spend all your time with your colleagues or does it
mean that face to face in office working with the is the secret to resilience well of course not in fact Bruce has found there's a specific percentage of time with colleagues that is actually The Sweet Spot the one thing we know is that there's huge communities that never meet each other online whether they are music fandoms or or fandoms of TV shows or you know huge communities they never meet each other or they might meet each other once every two years at a gig or a comic conference and and
so you know we don't need to be with each other every day to to forge connection I think the um the thing that we might think though is we might think how do we sustain those things people who've looked into this have said in terms of the office spending between 25% and 50% of our time to together seems to have an impact on making culture more cohesive so you know any more than that it doesn't necessarily have a huge impact the other thing that's of Interest as well is that um what you often fin
d is that people get really frustrated if they've made a journey in I was with one organization a couple of months ago and they said the average commute in our team is two hours each way people have moved to Southampton they've moved to York they've moved to you know there commuting into London and they'll do it one day a week happily two days a week fine but you know it's a long commute they don't want to be doing that every day now you can force them in but if they come all the way in and they
spend the day on Zoom calls they will not forgive you if they come in and they spend all day on teams with people who are at home they'll think what was the point of that you know like I'm being I ched someone yesterday and he said a member of his team 23 year old he's a average commute when he comes in is75 and his his peak time commute is 75 his off peak commute is 22 or something so he's like I I love coming in I love being in the office if there's any chance I can do it off peak it makes my
life just so much less impoverished you know like if I'm getting 75 pound train I've got to feel like that extra hour in the office was worth it and you know actually if you're getting in and people are just chatting having a coffee it's like please don't punish me for being late when it's got a 50 pound difference to me and I think you know understanding those things are really critical for where we are in work right now and the second part of work socialization is to have fun Bruce has a grea
t story about a receptionist who had enough of the culture and did something about it I I've always been relatively fortunate that most of the jobs I had I enjoyed um and so you know I would always say to myself it had been a good day if I'd laughed 10 times that day and you know it' been a and so that's it if I went home that day and I was like man that was a funny day that was that was the defining thing if I was like getting on the public transport home saying to myself that was a funny day t
oday that was that was all that matter to me really int interesting I was like does that correlate with good culture though he's like you know to some extent I had one someone once tell me um don't be seen laughing around here you know we weren't doing very well as a business if the big boss walks past don't be see him laughing it's like really you know how to laugh when things are bad it's interesting because if you chat to people who do really bad jobs like firefighters or soldiers they laugh
all the time but um the you know was like okay so like this really interesting that people will help diagnose what good culture looks like anyway I was just really intrigued with that what does good culture look like if people laugh more is that better for culture will we get better results if people laugh more or is is my own Instinct a bad one and I just became obsessed with that and you know actually I tell you I don't know uh the the sort of jobs you've done but I've done a lot of bar jobs a
nd restaurant jobs and these the something when you start a new shift at a bar and you get a bit of a Vibe when you turn up and you ask if they've got any jobs and then you find out then you start that when you start a new shift a job a job you know within the first shift whether this is going to be a horrible place to work or whether this and you're still look in you get Caren lock in or whether this might be a good place okay you go home at the end of the first shift that was good actually I l
ike those people it's really intriguing well obviously that's got to have an impact on customer service if everyone in a place hates each other or hates the bus of course you know it's gonna have an impact on whether you're good to customers and so you know for me I was just like really interested in those Dynamics in interested in the dynamic of whether uh how those things work together so yeah I've always just had a as a participant in teams I've just always had a curiosity of how we can make
teams better I spoke to one organization they said the reception has changed the culture here I was like okay I'm intrigued tell me more they said the receptionist was a one of those actors who sort of worked for a bit then came back and then did some acting then came back did a season of pantomim came back and she said this is the worst place I've ever worked like I guess you can say that when you're the temp and uh and she said no one talks to each other there's no connection don't no one even
seems to like each other really anyway she took it into her own hand she went out she bought some bags of kettle chips and Pringles she laid them all out on paper plates and she said back to the point I made before she said uh ladies and gentlemen it's the best time of the week 4:30 on Thursday it's crisp Thursday and you know people came up and they had like a little stack of Pringles and they stood around going what's this next week she did it again next week she did it again she was dressed
up on the third week she was D dressed up as a Pringles tube and uh anyway it became like a little ritual people would say let's not have a meeting you're going to be at crisp Thursday I've just got two things to ask you you know oh like occasionally someone turned up with cake someone turned up with prco anyway it became the in work moment where they all stopped doing stuff for 15 minutes to connect with for half an hour to connect with each other and I guess the spirit of that the spirit of th
at crisp Thursday is how leaders need to be a bit more entrepreneurial with connection it's realizing that generally you know we're engaged with our job when we've got a friend at work and it's one of the fundamental details about work culture that we often forget so the more that we can make build connections we make people feel like we're all in it together that you know we can draw strength from each other all of these things seem to be in service of better culture really they say that laught
er is the best medicine Bruce has experienced firsthand that laughing joking and banter in the workplace is good for culture so long as you're not laughing at somebody else's expense if the sort of gags you are making are at the expense of someone's identity I suspect it was never as funny as you thought it was in the first place you know if you would need to challenge who someone is and what they're about to get a laugh I don't think that was probably ever as funny as you think it was um and as
ide from that I think there's a billion things that we can laugh about and joke about so you know to to my mind if someone's gender or ethnicity or sexuality is the thing that you thought was banter you know probably time has has moved on for that but apart from that still a billion things you can laugh about the great thing is there's a wonderful book I'd recommend by uh two women who teach at Stanford a book called humor seriously and and one of the things they wrote was like you know we much
prefer managers who laugh we much prefer being in environment which filled with laughter and here's how you laugh more you try and laugh more you find moments in meetings where is five minutes the end of a meeting where you make a you know you share funny things that have happened this week you you share funny things that have happened and and you just set yourself up for opportunities to laugh more in fact you know the one things that the only thing I'll say is that my only strength in life is
that I'm quite generous with my laughter I love laughing at stuff um and what you find is that when you laugh at stuff other people also enjoy laughing you know generally we only laugh with people we like which is an interesting um element of psychology so I wouldn't say that I wouldn't say if you're openhearted I wouldn't say that there's any reason to believe that there's less opportunity for laughter what I will say is we do laugh Less on zoom and so you know we got to rebuild the times that
we are around each other rebuild those relationships make sure we spend our face t- face time laughing so we've covered so much more than resilience here we've talked about how resilience can often be a way to move blame from Bad management how groups of people are more resilient than individuals how the changing workplace is massively affecting res Ians yeah we've talked about how socialization at work is a good thing and how creating connections and having fun is one of the fundamentals of res
ilience and great coaches but I asked Bruce if there was just one thing that companies should be doing what might it be he describes a woman called Francis who's a person company's call when they have a culture problem and what she does when she first walks through the door and she goes into those companies when you hear like Uber's got a culture problem problem or Wei Works got a culture problem or um there's another one called Riot games that had a really bad sort of sexism and B bullying and
she was she's the person they call so I was like man what what' you do you walk in they've called you you know wouldn't like the fear be running through you he's like oh my God what am I gonna do because they're gonna they w't answers here I can't not do anything and so I've ched to her twice and I'm always like what do you do what's the first thing you do number one thing she does train managers that's what she does she trains managers that's really interesting like you know of course these qui
ck fixes you know we change that policy we change that that's maybe not a well advice then she trains managers wow okay that's so interesting if you do one thing I know I've said it before but how cool is it to hear somebody who's probably got a lot more credibility than me say it it's good it yeah sorry you're talking to me yeah I I thought you're talking to the audience yes I'm talking to them too yes it is yeah I mean honestly when this Penny drops out we're going to be millionaires our manag
er training sales are going to go through the roof through the roof I'm clearly not I'm not prepared for this back and forth I've got a wealth full of water yes we will be millionaires yes you are right you're always right all hell all all hell great lean carry on no we joking aside it is it is really important great management links to every aspect of organizational life including resilience Bruce's book shows that resilience or rather fortitude is built by feeling in close synchrony to those a
round us the sense of community is extraordinarily influential for how well we can recover from challenges and setbacks and who has the biggest impact on this sense of community in the workplace the manager you know um you know My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the dad goes give me a word any word and I will show the the origin of that word is Greek will give me an organizational problem any any organizational problem and I will show you that the origin of that problem is the manager yep I believe
that I do believe that it's quite simple train your managers grow your business save the world oh fabulous fabulous fabulous I love that so if you want to find out a bit more about Bruce here's where you can go I've got website Bruce daisy.com or eats slew workk repeat.com has got a lot of the stuff for the podcast on it and you can take a look my newsletter and everything is on there so Bruce has well and truly schooled us on the idea of resilience it's not some fluffy BOS word and neither is i
t just a halfday course on the training calendar exactly Bruce explained that leaders fall in the Trap sometimes of thinking resilien is down to the individual and therefore they are the ones to blame but an actual fact by creating meaningful work allowing for flexible working and encouraging collaboration and socialization will enable you to build the foundations of an organization where resilience levels are increasing and like Le I know always says when people have a very clear reason for why
they're doing their job a clear idea of what their exact role is in the organization and the resources they need to do it you're most of the way there when you add on some great relationships like Bruce has been talking about un frequent recognition of your efforts you've absolutely nailed it incidentally and there's a reason why I put the emphasis on all those all those words beginning with our this is the main part of our proprietary mod model called the RX7 which is the seven foundations of
an amazing workplace culture and they all start with the letter R hence R * 7 RX7 did you get it maybe not I get it you can find out more about the RX7 in the show notes as we've said a few times it is currently in private for private clients only but if you qualify then we'll be very happy to talk to you about using it so before we do say goodbye let's just find out a bit more about Bruce's amazing podcast eat sleep work repeat and why you should be adding it to your queue today the the podcast
was formed by my own desire to make work better it was you know um I mentioned I worked at Twitter and Tech FM culture isn't always the best and there was certainly a time we'd been forced to do a round of job Cuts uh we I think we've done another round of job cuts and the the culture which had been this magical thing it really sort of had been adored by the people there and people said this is the best place I've ever worked and then the culture just didn't bounce back and so I I was like okay
well what can I do to fix this and just I started doing a podcast which was kind of my own self-education it was like it was like I'd see a fascinating article i' contact the person that wrote it I'd interview them um about six years ago now so like bit sort of pre any sort of Boom in podcasts along the way it became number one business podcast so it way exceeded my expectations and as a result of that it sort of allowed me to go on and do a couple of books and I do a newsletter about workplace
culture that's that came from it yeah so it's it's really for anyone who is ignited with the question of how do I make work better and you know that might be for their team it might be for their whole organization it might be just you know a really for their Department whatever it is someone who's thinking how can they use the research that's out there to make the the job of me and my team better thank you to Bruce for being an incredible guest it really was one of my most favorite conversation
s definitely pick up his book fortitude we will leave a link in the show notes I actually listen to the audio book version because I love Bruce's voice in his podcast um and it's brilliant so yeah if you're if you're looking for another medium to to consume your content highly recommend um the audio book of fortitude it's very very good yep all the links are in the show notes definitely go and go and tell Bruce that you enjoyed listening to him on our pod because I think it'll make Akers day he'
s such a down toe and really really nice guy um so look out for the next couple of weeks we've got well we've got amazing guests for the rest of the year and the rest of time obviously the rest of time we have got some amazing people coming up I think last week I mocked up because I said it was going to be uh Dr CLA Hughes from mind this week when actual fact it was Bruce so it's gonna be Dr CLA Hughes from mind next week and then I think we have uh John amichi Rory Sutherland we've got Isabelle
Beric uh we've got uh the angry Professor he's going to be amazing the anger Professor anger Professor very slight difference very different meaning different people with a very different look outlook on life and and work um and so many other guests coming up for you so if you haven't clicked that subscribe button then smash that subscribe button that's what they say don't they all these kids online smash this no I don't know what they say ring that Bell we're going to go now bye bye-bye if you
do one thing if you do one thing if you do one thing at this point I'm like I know I ask my mother what would I be was it that one then be pretty will I be resilient this is what Bruce said to me k s s you have a beautiful voice it's not what you said in the previous I think you call him musically challenge the last time you heard me singing to be fair you have a very unique tone just rewind that bit get it well K kids get that joke what rewind rewind probably not I'm so redundant
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