328. Leading Through Change with Huw Thomas

Most change initiatives don’t fail because the plan is flawed. They fail because leaders confuse communication with conversation and then wonder why people feel anxious, resistant, or checked out. We sit down with returning guest Huw Thomas, author of Change Anything, to move beyond individual psychology and get practical about organizational change management that actually sticks.

We dig into why “overcommunicate” often backfires, how one-way announcements create confusion, and what it looks like to replace broadcasting with dialogue. Resistance gets a full reframe: it’s frequently a rational response to perceived loss of certainty, control, competence, identity, or status. We also talk about the real-world consequences of poorly led change, including psychosocial risk, and what care and dignity look like in high-stakes moments like reorganizations and redundancies.

From there, we get tactical about building agency. When people feel coerced, they push back even if they agree with the logic. When they’re invited to help shape the “how” within clear guardrails, they bring better ideas and real ownership. We also tackle change fatigue and change overload, focusing on change governance, sequencing, and why doing a few priorities exceptionally well beats running dozens of initiatives into gridlock. Finally, we land on the deeper truth behind transformation: it’s habit change, not system change, and adoption improves when leaders design around real “day in the life” workflows and build a learning habit across teams.

If this helps you lead with more clarity and humanity, subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review. What’s one change you’ll turn into a conversation this week?

🌐 Connect with Huw:
• Website: https://huwthomas.com.au/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomashuw/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/huwthomas.au/

📚 You can purchase Huw's free playbook on this link:
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Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Have you ever wondered why so many change initiatives fail, even when the logic behind them makes perfect sense? Have you ever announced a change, explained the reason, shared the plan, and still found yourself facing resistance, confusion, or frustration? And have you ever considered that people may not be resisting the change itself, they may be resisting the loss of certainty, control, competence, identity, or status that comes with it. In today's episode, I'm rejoined by Huw Thomas. Huw joined us before to explore the psychology of change at an individual level. What happens inside us when we step into uncertainty? How fear shows up and why change can feel so threatening, even when we know it may be necessary. This time we take the conversation to the organizational level, because change doesn't happen through announcements, does not happen when we send an email, hold to town hall, or publish a beautiful slide deck. Change happens through conversations. In this conversation, Huw and I explore why communication is not the same as conversation, why leaders often misread resistance, and how poorly led change can create real psychological and emotional harm. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. We have a special treat for you today. We have a return guest, Huw Thomas, the author of Change Anything. When he was last on the show, we spoke deeply about change at an individual level. Why we resist change. We spoke about loss aversion, about the fact that change threatens us in terms of certainty, in terms of threatening our competence. We feel like we're losing control and comfort, or it might even threaten our identity and status. And Huw gave us some reframes on how we can look at change individually, about developing new identities, and about looking at the benefits we might get, and challenging our thinking. You know, asking ourselves deep questions like, do I know this to be true when, when we pull back from change. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I do encourage you to do so later, but you'll be able to listen to today's episode first, and then go back and look more deeply at that individual level change. Today we're going to shift gears, and we're going to talk about change now at the team and organizational level. Now you're going to have a room full of people that have their own fears and their own threatened identity, and all of these things that we spoke about at an individual level. How do you do that at the meta level for an organization? So, Huw, welcome back. Without any further ado, let's get into this. How do we shift from all of those great discussions we had about individual change. How do we shift that into an organizational level change?

Huw Thomas: 3:07

Big question to start, Mick. As you always do, I think one of the big things in organizations is that we've got to shift from just a bombardment of information to start thinking more carefully about influence and what influences people. And stepping into the shoes of our people, who mostly today are significantly overloaded, confused about changes, which are coming, unclear on strategy, and trying to balance their business as usual activities, what they do day to day, week to week, and their obligations there with these things. Which sort of pop up and kind of need to be demystified and understood and have time spent on if they're going to successfully adopt them. So I think we need to move away from this chaotic way of doing change to a more structured, measured, and thoughtful approach, which is centered around the people we need to actually get to change.

Mick Spiers: 4:04

Yeah, interesting. So, you've already challenged one thing of in my thinking that I tend to look at this type of stuff and say that we need to communicate more, but you're saying that if that communication is too much and if it's too chaotic, it might actually increase the resistance to change. So, tell me, how do I shift that? Then, so what? What do I need to do differently?

Huw Thomas: 4:28

Yeah, it's interesting. I hear often on transformation programs, as this principle you'll often hear project leaders or transformation leaders say it's absolutely important. We need to over communicate, over communicate, over communicate, and that's going to be the success, and you hear that term sometimes, and I'm, I always, it always makes me cringe a bit. I think we need to communicate the right thing in the right way at the right time, and so, yes, you do need plenty of communication, but sort of the way you're communicating is important, and actually. What you're communicating, and too often we tend to slip into this one-way monolog. I call it like the character in the movie or a play who's standing on stage just talking to the audience and not talking to another person, back and forth, and we're just, again, it comes back to that distributing information and assuming people will understand it. Dialog is far more powerful. Changes managed or changes happen through conversations, not through announcements. More, you just announce stuff. Sometimes people get more confused, and they don't have a chance to actually ask a question or clarify things or talk it through with someone. It's far easier to understand a change if you're in a dialog, so the more conversations you're having, the better. And again, because we're so overloaded and we're busy, we shy away from that, but we're really just underestimating the time it takes to make change happen, and we think we can kind of squeeze it in on top of everything else, or we can, we think we can manage it by email. And then force people to turn up to a piece of training, and that they're going to miraculously transform their habits, buy into it, and fully commit. And have all their fears and concerns just vanish as a result of that one or two emails and some training, and it doesn't happen, so it takes time to understand it, and we need that kind of effective two-way communication.

Mick Spiers: 6:22

Okay. All right, so there's three things jumping into my head when I hear you speak, Huw. So the first one is we're going to turn the volume down, and I'm going to use volume in two dimensions here. Volume is volumetric, how much? And then I'm going to, I'm going to say I've got a picture of a dial that screaming it doesn't make it better, like screaming the same message over and over again doesn't make it better. So turn the volume dial down away from number 11 on the dial and and bring it back a little bit. The second part is now we're going to move from communication being one directional and making it a dialog. I love that term. I was going to use the word bi-directional, but when you said dialog, that was perfect for me. And then when you brought up fear again, the only thing I could think you is that if someone is concerned, if they do have fears, telling someone 27 times there's nothing to worry about here. It's not going to work unless you have a dialog, which is where I'm going with this. But if you say to someone, don't panic or don't worry, one of their reactions is always going to be, well, I wasn't worried. Should I? Should I be worried? Like it's telling someone not to worry, or telling something, telling someone one directionally not to panic, it's never going to work unless you get into a dialog. How does that sit with you?

Huw Thomas: 7:51

Yeah, I think you, I think you're right on the money there. To your point about the volume, I think that's a great kind of analogy, I'd say to build on that. Yeah, no one likes being yelled at, particularly when we're busy and overloaded already, and if we keep the volume up too long, we might blow an eardrum out. So just build on your metaphor there. Yeah, look, I think the issue with your touching on in that last point there is that people experience change in many different ways. Some people have built into their personality, kind of like in their DNA, is an openness to experience, so they're kind of like, "Yeah I'm always want to have an adventure." Our novel experiences are great, you know, and they want that. Others are not so much like that. As we get older, I think people on average tend to get more entrenched habits. I know it's a cliche or a stereotype, but it just happens to be true. And a lot of psychological research shows this. The more we repeat a particular activity or stay in a particular role in a company that we tend to get, it's harder for us to be super adaptable, and so people who have this personality makeup or who have more entrenched habits than others. Often the fresh person who's only been in the job or in the company six months is going to be open to just about anything, and they're going to lean into it a bit more. They're all going to have different experiences of the change, plus it depends on the nature of the change and how they're experiencing it. Yesterday I spent the day with the top 30 senior leaders in a large organization who are going through a reorganization, and a couple of 100 people are going to be having their roles made redundant. And there's a couple of people in the room who just found out their role had been made redundant. So in their senior leadership team who turned up anyway, and wanted to help, which was great, but just we talked about the different experiences people are having, and some people in that leadership group alone were really concerned. Because certain people they were going to have to have tough conversations with people that they were had become friends with, and they're going to say you no longer. A role you can maybe apply for this role, but I can't guarantee you're going to have a job here in two months time, and they're nervous about having those conversations. That leader themselves is going to have one experience, that the people they've got to talk to is having another experience, whereas other people in that team and other teams weren't so impacted, their role is safe, but in the new operating model, they're going to have to deal with different people, their roles, and the way they collaborate, and ways of working is significantly shifting. So different people are going to have different experiences, and some people in that circumstance are worried about, you know. The insecurity of the economy at the moment, and going on to the unemployment market, it's going to be tough, and it's going to affect them financially, and it's going to affect their family. So there's a ton of fear for them, and so if we were to not have lots of conversations with that person, you could, there's actually some serious risks in that kind of change, in particular, where if you botch it as a leadership organization, there's actually laws around this. Around the psychosocial impact of poorly executed change in organizations, can have legal ramifications for the responsible executives and board members, and so you could end up in a fair work commission, and you could end up with a hefty bill, and you could more morally and ethically damaging and hurting some of the people who are involved in it, so you better manage those kinds of changes carefully. I suppose what I'm getting at, back to you, your question, or your point, Mick, is there's a, the more we kind of personalize it, the more the person is going to be able to navigate themselves through it. And even if you think of, like, say a technology example, you know people are going to have questions, people are going to use the technology in different ways, and as I said. The different sort of personal makeup of the individual, their degree of tech savviness, how long they've been in the company affects their habits, whether they feel they're going to be replaced by the tech at some point, maybe have an irrational fear around that, which may or may not be true. If they don't have a chance to talk about that, then that emotional intensity can build up, and there's tons of research, and we may have spoken about this last time. I can't remember where, if you have a chance to label an emotion, it reduces the emotional intensity of it, the Neuro Leadership Institute did this study studying people's brains. When you just label it, it actually reduces it. So, if you have a chance to talk about a problem with someone, and you know we've probably all had that experience, I'm sure you have, Mick, where you're concerned about something, and you maybe go have a coffee with someone, you have a casual chat in the office hallway, or you talk to your partner at home about something, and you just feel better from talking about it. You haven't actually even addressed the problem in a rational sense. You haven't taken any specific action. All you've had is a conversation, and that can change your whole perspective on the situation. I do a lot of executive coaching one on one, and that's exactly what that is, a lot of the time, is framing a situation which changes people's beliefs about that situation, and it changes the way that they show up the next day, and it can have a transformational impact on people. So conversations are valuable, but then the challenge arises, you know, and I hear this all the time, leaders will say, well, we don't have time for that. We just got to do this change as quickly as possible. We don't have time to spend on all those conversations. It sounds really nice, and we don't have time. And then I, my response is generally, well, you're probably putting the whole change at risk, and you may be wasting millions of dollars, and that's kind of the harsh truth we have to face sometimes. So, and sometimes the answer to that is we just need to change less, change the most critical things, and just do it thoroughly and properly, and make sure we get everyone involved and get the benefits from it.

Mick Spiers: 13:51

There's so many things to unpack in what you just said here. I'll just reflect back on two of them, and then I think the others are going to come back in other parts of our conversation. So the first one, when you say we don't have time, not to every time I hear that sentence, I transform that to yeah, but you don't have time not to. Yeah, if someone says I don't have time to do this, reframe it. Well, you don't have time not to, or or I'm going to go a slightly different one. Well, you seem to have time to deal with the consequences of not doing it, so why don't you invest the time of doing it properly in the first place. Whenever I hear that statement, so it's at your peril. If you go around going, we don't have time to, you're going to deal with the consequences of not doing it properly. I want to go into the redundancy a little bit deeper. It's never fun to be clear. I've been through a number of these ones, kind of challenge you a little bit here. I think this is going to be a challenging question for me. Sometimes it always feels like damned if you do, damned if you don't, and that there is no right way of doing it. And I've been through ones where it was communicated really thoroughly, and fairness and. Equity was involved and treating every single person with respect, and then had the feedback from people going, you made everyone anxious for no reason. There was, you know, there was only a certain number of roles at risk. Why did you, why did you put everyone on eggshells for a week, and then if you do it the other way, where you do it, okay? The unfortunate people that are impacted, you're doing it very quietly on the side. Then everyone goes, you blindsided us, right? So I'm going to ask the direct question, is there a right way? Is there a right way?

Huw Thomas: 15:34

I don't think there's a perfect way. There are certainly some wrong ways, I think, and I've read about some of those shockers, where there's these classic examples from many years ago. Where people turn up to work and their past to get in the building doesn't work, and they're wondering what's what's going on. And then they find out later in the day that they don't have a job or, or there's a box of their things from their desk is left outside the building. And they're not even allowed in, and you know they defend that by saying it's about, you know, protecting the IP, because they're worried people are going to steal financial models, or what have you, and you hear about these. These kind of scary ones, and you know, even some of those really horror stories, you, the more you dig into them, you sort of start to think "Oh, maybe there was a reason they had to do it that way, and I'm not defending those." Kinds of like that example I just gave of locking people out, but there's no quick and simple and easy way to deal with it, and there are always going to be these emotional reactions and sensitivities, which are unavoidable, and you know, having this conversation was about a week after. You know, Atlassian made a big announcement, large Australian tech company listed in America. 1600 people announced, and I think that was essentially there's an announcement from the CEO, Mick. And then certain people, I think 20 minutes later, got an email letting them know that they didn't have a job anymore, and it wasn't done through conversation. That was such a large scale effort, though. It's, it's, you know, and I don't know all the details exactly how it went, went down. But some people were complaining about that, and other people, and I've got a, you know, I know people at that company who kind of said, well, there's not really another way to do it. Given the scale and the distribution of where people are, they're scattered all over the world, so that was challenging, you know. In the company I was, organization was talked to yesterday. We're going to email the people who are to let them know your job is impacted. That was going to be from the CEO, and then it was going to be followed up by their immediate people leader. As soon as that email went out, to have calls with them to say, "Hey, this is what's happening. You're going to have a few options. We're going to talk about it on this day in a couple of days time." So and then there's a whole process to follow, and you know, won't bore everyone with the tactical details of these different processes, but if I bring it back to less of the tactical actions, more about the kind of principles. It's really just a lot of it is showing care for people through that process, if it's done in a really cold way, as in, well, you're just going to have to accept that we have to do it, of companies going under, you know. And we kind of ignore those emotions, that's when I think people feel pretty bad about it, and it's not just the people leaving, it's often the what's sometimes called the survivors. You know, they're the ones left to run the organization after a big redundancy round, so you got to care for them as well, and you, the dignity and respect you show to exiting employees leaves an impact on everyone else who remains in the organization. So it looks like a cultural statement, if you like, to say how much we care about our employees, and if it's done in an empathetic way, where we're showing that this is really difficult, we're not, we didn't want to do this. This is a challenging environment, it's tricky. We empathize, we're just listening, and we're showing up and being really, really present with people. That's going to have a more positive impact on the people leaving and the people staying, so I think it's just generally that kind of care, the tone of it, and the degree of presence of leaders. It's one of the principles I told these leaders yesterday, is one of the big things is you need to help people get to a level of acceptance. So it's a kind of change where you know some changes you want people to be right on board in a big transformation program, we all need to be sort of singing and waving the pom poms and getting everyone happy and dedicated to it. And maybe you can get to that for some changes, for a reorganization, which is resulting in redundancies or downsizing the organization, you're not going to get that. But you do need to get people to acceptance, and acceptance is the point where they're not in a totally emotional state about it. They're not totally rejecting it, they're not in denial that it's happening, they're not trying to destabilize it, and they're not, they're sort of going along with the process and accepting whatever the outcome is for them and their peers, and that's a good thing, not just for. The organization, but it's for the person, and just as if you go through a really, say, a traumatic experience or a period of grieving personally, you don't get to a happy place permanently. You might actually just be sad about that particular thing for the rest of your life, but the intensity will reduce over time, hopefully, and you get to this point of acceptance, and that's kind of the best you can hope for. So if we can help people get to that, that's the most positive sort of outcome, I think, but to get to that, you again, you do need to have these conversations. You need to show support, and there needs to be multiple channels for them to talk about it, whether it's through their manager or through an EAP program, or encouraging them to talk to their peers and support each other. Having HR programs in place that support them without placement, all sorts of different things like that, and then people start to see an option, a path for themselves outside the organization, potentially, and some opportunities which come from that, and that's when you get that acceptance.

Mick Spiers: 20:57

Yeah, thanks, Huw, that is definitely helpful. I'm going to play back what I'm hearing, and say that there is no perfect way, but there is a wrong way. And I'm going to say at the heart of the wrong way is to, we've got to remember that we're talking about human beings here, so if we look at through a lens of humanity and how, how you would want to be treated, and what's a, what's a fair and reasonable way to treat people. But then I'm hearing two, even two things of that, is that the people that are impacted, humanity lies at the bottom of dialog, is what I'm, what I'm hearing, but then there's also the survivor guilt, so for the people that are sticking around, they can feel guilty. First of all, and secondly, they've got to, they've got to pick up their bundle and lean into whatever the next challenge is of the business. So you want to get through to that acceptance here that you're talking about with humanity, but and compassion, but also as quickly as possible with almost like a mindset of this too shall pass. And you know we'll be stronger at the end of this team, and, but it's, it doesn't make it easy, it's, it's easy for me to say these words, but yeah, if we, if we do it with a lens of humanity. I think that we can do a better, a better job, not a perfect job, a better job, and not some of these horrible ones where you hear, you know, performative kind of leadership from CEOs that you know just leaves everyone feeling sick at the end of it, right?

Huw Thomas: 22:27

Yeah, absolutely. I did help. I did have one media organization just quickly merge two divisions and they rationalize their workforce, and so some people had to leave, and and they'd done it really badly in the past, and I sort of helped them with a lot of these principles. And it was I remember hearing one person who was exiting the organization stood up and said it in a kind of big group setting. He said,"You know, this is the third time I've been made redundant in my career." And he said "I've never seen the process done as well as this." And he said that to like 100 people in the room, and it was this great sort of moment where it was acknowledging the kind of respect and dignity and so forth. And it left a mark on a lot of the people there, so that was probably one of the best examples where I've seen it's it's done well, and there was some positive result at the end of it, like that.

Mick Spiers: 23:15

All right, thanks. Here, all right, now I'm going to take redundancies off the table on purpose now, because I want to get back to, let's say, normal change. I can't believe I just said that word, but change is a normal part of business now, and the world is changing at an ever rapidly increasing speed. Let's get back to two things that we spoke about before, and we were talking about dialog. You use the word, it can be an adventure, and people like adventure, that was interesting, and we still have this element of fear there, but I want to talk about that word, adventure, for a moment. In season one of this show, and we're now in season six, so it's a long time ago, we had Jake Jacobs on the show, and one of his statements was this. Is that it's not necessarily that people don't like change, it's that they don't like being changed when the change is just fast upon them. And then I heard you use this word, adventure. Is this part of the secret is to when you're having that dialog that you say that we're on this journey together, help us co-create this, help us co-architect this, because often the people on the shop floor are going to have the best ideas on what we can do better. How does this concept sit with you?

Huw Thomas: 24:35

Yeah, exactly. I think that's this is one of the most fundamental things that a good change program weaves into it, and a bad one ignores it, and it's this concept of agency, and one of the things humans rap bad to is being coerced and forced to do anything. And it's, it's again, it's follows from our DNA, and we've been built this way in a. Ancient times and primitive times, if we were to be, say, locked up in a room, or you know, had, you know, taken prisoner by a rival tribe, or someone reduced our ability and our freedoms, physically or otherwise, it would limit our ability to survive. So it would limit our options to go and hunt and feed ourselves, or feed our family or to survive and procreate and do all those different things. So any, anytime our freedom was restricted, that was a major threat to our life, and our brains are the same these days, it's a different environment around us, obviously. But we still have that same sense, humans value freedom and autonomy more than anything else, and that's why we often pursue wealth and pursue lots of different things. We want the freedom and ability to do the things we want and the things we need to do during change. Yeah, you're right, like when we offer this sense of agency, even to some degree, it makes a big difference in how people engage in it. So Jonah Berger, who wrote this great book, "The Catalyst". He talks about this, and he's quoting some earlier research on this concept of reactance, which is how we respond to being coerced. We'll often reject it, even if we know it's the right thing to do, and it's more the way it's being pitched to us. But he says what we can do is give guard rails, like we can say to people during change, we have to do this change, but we need your help with it, and there's lots of different ways we can do it, and there's a bunch of different options. What do you think we should do? And just pitching it to people like that, and giving them an option to say, "Oh, we have some responsibility here, and we can sort of choose our own adventure within certain guard rails." We know it has to happen, and you know that's the part we don't have a choice in, but we have lots of choices about how we go about doing this. People will lean into that, and they're sort of showing they're seeing that their executives or the senior leaders are actually trusting them and wants to hear from them and knows that they can bring a lot of expertise to the table. So I'm far more likely to reciprocate that empowerment that I'm being given by sort of showing up and taking responsibility for it. Then, if those leaders coming out and saying, you know, this is how it's going to be, we know what we're doing, you're going to do it the way we do it, and we know everything about this change, because people are going to go,'"No, you don't." You're sitting up there in your ivory tower and the HQ, and you don't know what it's like down here in the front lines, and so, yeah, it makes a big, big difference. And then, again, just back to the earlier point of capacity and managing that, that does take a bit of time. We need to pull people away from what they're doing day to day. We need to find ways to engage them, and it's not just an email, right? It's not just training either. It's engagement with people, and it's bringing them on that journey, and letting them shape the journey to some extent. I think one of the big things, which influences that, is giving managers, not just your senior executives, but your managers, who are close to lots of people across the business, the skills to be able to do that. A lot of them aren't taught that. I have training programs where I teach people that those kinds of skills managers across the business, and it unlocks a big difference, right? And it helps those managers to take responsibilities, like, oh, I need to get my people on board with this. I need to lead the change with my people, and collaborate really effectively with them, so that they sort of lean into it. Yeah, a big part of it is agency, that's really the big word that you're talking about, there, Mick.

Mick Spiers: 28:23

Yeah, really good here. So it really makes me think of William Glasser work around choice theory, and he talks about Five Fundamental Human Needs. Very similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but he does it in a different way, and, and right up there with survival and love and belonging. He has freedom right up there as a fundamental human need, and he describes it as freedom of choice and freedom from oppression. And when someone feels like they're being told what to do, like you said, even if they think actually that probably is the right thing to do, but I'm not going to do it because you told me to do it, yeah, they're just going to dig their heels in, and the resistance is going to get even bigger. But through dialog and asking questions, well, what would you like to see us do differently? All of a sudden, they're part of the change, they build agency, they take ownership, and resistance becomes ownership and responsibility and agency. I think there's definitely something there.

Huw Thomas: 29:22

Absolutely, Self-determination Theory is the other one. Self-determination Theory, and that, and that's come up a lot. And the way organizations have evolved in the last 20-30 years, all often driven by, you know, HR, modern people, and culture practices, which comes from a lot of this research. It shows this stuff that, you know, authoritative organizations, they kind of miss a lot of things, they don't leverage the skills of their people and the knowledge and capabilities enough, and that's changed organizations. Organizations have been flatter, the less top down generally that happens, but I think during change, often these, even those kinds of organizations, go back to this bad habit of telling, just tell, tell, tell, and put. Push, push, the harder you push, the more that they resist. So it's got to be more of an invitation into the change and allow people to make a decision and take some choices.

Mick Spiers: 30:10

Excellent. All right, now the second part of the dialog that I was picking up from our conversation before was then addressing the fears, and I'll just just throw something to you here, Huw, that in this change we can't just address the why, we have to address the why not. Why do people think this won't work? Because if you don't have an adult conversation about the resistance to the change, or their feelings like it'll, it won't work. Now, subtly, you might be dealing with their fears at the same time, but you need someone at the table to openly say, oh, this will never work, because, and when they have that conversation, now you can address it, you can address the because they don't say it, if they don't say it out loud, if you didn't invite the dialog, that because it's still there, and you didn't get the didn't get the chance to address it, so through this dialog we're going to bring them into the change and build that agency, but we can also address why they think it won't work.

Huw Thomas: 31:09

Absolutely, yeah, and often the people, you know, those kind of people, they're the people who are impacted by the change, the people we're talking about engaging with are the ones that need to change, it's not the project team. It's not the executive team, they're the ones going to forcing it upon people, and so, like, they know how to do their jobs right better than anyone, and so often. So often I see this on, say, for example, a tech project, you know, they come up with an idea, say, "Well, actually, here's how we actually do things." That formal process that we have isn't quite exactly how we do things in the job, you know. We have to be really flexible. The process is good, but often we do it like this, and you know, it'd be great if in the system you put in a piece of scope, or if it could do this, can we do that? And the project team will be like,"That's actually a great idea, let's do that, let's add it to the scope, and we improve the solution". And we make it more tailored, and that enables even more value for the organization and the people using it, or they point out some thing about it, which is not productive, or goes counter to the business case, and it's like, okay, let's take that out, let's not do that, let's trim it down, or whatever the case may be. So they have great ideas, and that's shaping the solution, and you can involve certain subject matter experts in doing that. If you do that effectively, you're going to have a really well-tailored solution. But, yeah, like you say, the other human side of that is having that conversation and going consulting and engaging people just gives them a chance to address concerns, and the answer you give them might make them think, okay, no, that's fine, I get it now. So, it's a sense making conversations like I don't understand this one of the main points of resistance I think. Which is we haven't talked about is cognitive resistance or cognitive distortions, which have, and it's really a case of if you think yourself about a particular change that you've experienced the first time you hear about it, you don't fully understand all the details. That takes time. You hear about it this kind of conceptual level, and you're like, I think I know what's going on. Yep, sure. And then you can kind of ignore it for a while, but then it gets more and more real. The more you start to lean into it, the more you get a presentation about it, or you turn up to training and you're like, oh, wow, this is changing all these different parts, and now I'm getting it. So, allowing people the time to cognitively process and understand the changes is valuable. Again, that's not best done by email, it's best done through conversation and understanding, and sort of more in-depth learning.

Mick Spiers: 33:38

Yeah, yeah, really, really good. And if we're not having those conversations, those nagging thoughts that they've got are still there. It's just you didn't have the chance to have an open dialog about them. It's, it's really interesting.

Huw Thomas: 33:53

I think, I think the thing I just last point I'd make on that, Mick, is sometimes when I talk about this, people go, "I just sounds like so many conversations, it's so much effort." And the one thing I'd say, in addition to that, is how well you manage the conversations is a big factor. So I've seen, and I've taught leaders how to do this, how to have really effective conversations, so it doesn't take hours and days and days and days of conversations, it's just you teach each manager across the business. Here's how you engage your people, here's how you have effective change conversations, here's how you lean into resistance with asking the right kinds of questions. And when every manager across the business knows how to do that effectively, that means you can do it quite efficiently, and doesn't have to take too much time.

Mick Spiers: 34:38

Okay, it sounds like a muscle that needs to be built, though it's not something you can just, you're going to have to lean into this and practice it before you can get into an effective way of doing it. Yeah, interesting. All right, one that we danced around before you was change overload and change weariness, like there is. So much change going on, and you were used some words about 20 minutes ago, Huw. You said,"Well, I'll try and paraphrase." You were basically saying,"Narrow it down to what, what are the real things that need to change, or the priority things to change? How do we, how do we deal with this thought?" You know, we're about to do a new change initiative in the organization, and let's say, if it's like many organizations, the last nine change efforts were ineffective or didn't work as well as we thought they would, and here comes the 10th one. How do we deal with this change overload and change weariness and get our people to trust that now we're going to do this one a bit differently, and we're going to make this one work. Yes, the night last nine weren't great, but this one's going to be better. How do we deal with that here?

Huw Thomas: 35:48

Yeah, I think a lot of high performing achievement-oriented people have a bad habit of doing too many things, like we equate that to higher performance, like the more we do the better. And at an executive level we don't always see how much effort is, I mentioned this concept, I came up with this concept, I call it the butterfly wings of the boardroom, where you know decisions. Some small conversation you have in the executive team, you make a decision like, "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, let's do that. And quick conversation, right. We reviewed a bunch of priorities, and then we start it, and it turns into this triggers this, you know, cyclone of activity for months to come for people around the organization. You know, if you think about the butterfly wings effect, was, you know, the concept that a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and it causes a tornado somewhere in America, that was the original theory, because of the flow on impacts. and it's similar in organizations, and I think executives aren't always cognizant of that, and you know, people like even Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, I think they understood this and cracked the code with it. Steve Jobs had this policy of just centering strategy all around one product at a time, and just focus heavily on innovating, and you know. R and D goes into that one thing, and that's going to be the center of the strategy. It's not 10 different products, it's not trying to dominate different markets, it's strategic focus. Warren Buffett had this similar thing, and he talked about, you know, Berkshire Hathaway would buy significant states in these big American companies, he'd get a board role, and the way he guided the CEOs to do their strategic planning would be, he said, "Okay, here's the things you got to do. Write down the 25 things you want to do in the next 12 months, the high priority things. Okay, now separate that into two lists, the five most important things and the other 20 things, and then I want you to throw out the 20 things and just do the five, and once you've done those five important things, repeat this process." And what he knew that we have this tendency, right, to try and want to do the 25 things, but really just doing the five and getting that focus is so important. I think the other thing I'd say is, in a change sense, is you know people aren't great at forecasting that effort, perhaps because they're not experienced with transformation programs or the particular organization they're working in. And I always say it's good to think like a CFO. Finance people are great at this. They do it every year. It's an expectation organization, which is budgeting and forecasting. So each year they go around to the whole business and say, how much money you're going to spend, how much money you're going to make. Let's put a budget together and let's try and stick to that. And there's a lot of guesstimation in it. They don't really know, but it helps to guide investment decisions and spending, and all these different restraints to keep the organization on track. And there's some assumptions around the degree of growth, perhaps, as well. In change, what we can do is a similar process where we look at that all the changes that we want to do as an organization and go, okay, say there's five or 10 big things, and we want to say, "Okay, when are we going to do that, and how much impact is it going to have on the business." So we're thinking of it rather than spending and making money like a budget finance person, we're thinking of how much change and how much capacity do we have, and that's your kind of P and L, and so we want to think about a particular, say, "It's a software project, we go, when are we going to do that, when's it going to be implemented, and how much time and effort is it going to take. And let's sort of forecast that out, and then do that, do that for five to 10 projects, or however many big ones you want to do." And you might see, well, it looks like we're going to probably be putting a lot on people in that particular part of the year, and maybe we need to delay some of those, let's not start that this quarter. Let's do it in one or two quarters time, and so you can do a lot if over a longer period of time, so you might think instead of just starting all these projects in year one, maybe we delay a couple to year two, And we have some good sequencing, so all this requires what I call good change governance, whereas as a leadership team you're looking at all of this stuff and you're controlling how much is in the portfolio of change and you're really thinking about capacity. And you're sequencing it in the right way, so that it's a digestible plan over one to three years, perhaps, and it's not, we're just going to do everything. And we have to do everything, and we want to do everything, because it's going to feel, do feel great about the more we do. But what happens is you tend to get gridlock, you get a traffic jam, there's too many cars on the road, so I think there's a lot to be said about just this laser-like focus. Where we say if we can just do these top three things in the next 12 months, and we do them comprehensively, we're not cutting corners, we're not shifting to change by email. We're doing the right conversations, we're being respectful of our people, we're not disrupting the operations of the business, so it's going to hurt our sales and service too much. And we're doing the right amount of change, so that we can actually get like 100% success rate. Often I talk to organizations when the first conversation I have with executive teams, and they want to improve how they do change. I'll say, How many of you change programs succeeded in the last 12 months? Often I'll get blank stares. We don't even know, because we don't track whether they were successful or not in any way, which is another problem, but some will say, you know, I think maybe half of them didn't go so well, and I said,"Okay, imagine this year if you did half as many programs, but they all succeeded, and they were a raving success, right?" You didn't waste time and money on the half that failed, you didn't waste all that effort and capacity and disruption on the business, and you just had a great successful year doing the right amount. Wouldn't that be great? And that can be a good way to rethink it.

Mick Spiers: 41:31

Yeah, really good. All right, so we're shifting from trying to do 25 things at once and doing it badly to the idea that we might do three things at once and do them exceptionally well. The second stanza of that is making sure it's the right three things, that it's the most impactful things that we're going to invest more dedicated time into, instead of time splitting ourselves across 25 things and doing it, doing it badly. So it's got to be the right three. Then I'm hearing from you, Huw, that that doesn't mean that the other 22 things that didn't make the cut, that doesn't mean that you'll never do them, they might be in next year's push for change. But the funny thing that will happen there, I'll just add something here, the funny thing will happen is a lot changes in a year, so you don't. I would, I would say that you don't go into autopilot and go. Okay, what was next on the list? You better relook at the list before you decide what the next three years, because you know circumstances might have changed in that time. All right. Really good.

Huw Thomas: 42:32

Yeah, I think quarterly, sometimes even monthly, like, but at least quarterly, you want to be looking at that, and I always recommend that. And the change governance approach, I recommend, and I train executive teams and boards in this. Is you want to be re-looking at that, re-baseline it, getting inputs from the projects that you're working on, so that you can kind of have a seat, a visual of it. Sometimes we go down to a really data-led level, where I've actually gone around and asked each project or change manager on a bunch of initiatives. How many hours of impact are you going to have on the different workforces at different months, and we aggregate that up, and we even add bar charts. And you can see the literal volume month by month over the course of a year, and we use that for decision making at an executive level. So that can be a good way to do that, but you're exactly right, right, projects are moving, changing, getting delayed, and we need to keep our eye on that. It's like a kind of air traffic control system.

Mick Spiers: 43:26

Yeah, good. Okay. On this one, then this is another one around giving it time. How do we make the right decisions, and the measurement might be the answer here, that if we give up on the change effort after three months, it might have worked if we, if we stayed the course for six months, nine months. So bear with me for a second. Alternatively, we also don't want to just do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result if we keep on trying it for three years and it hasn't worked. Eventually, you got to pull the plug. How do you make that decision on a change effort to make sure you get it, given enough time that it's got a fighting chance to work, but not be so belligerent that you're not ignoring the fact that, okay, no, this one's not going to work. How do we make those decisions here?

Huw Thomas: 44:18

Yeah, that's a tough one. I think, I think it requires a lot of judgment, case by case, to see what's going on, but we've got to be really attentive to the issues. And I think we've got to be also attentive, attentive to our biases, like there's the big one, I think, is the sunk cost fallacy, or I forget the other one, but it's, it's the concept is we've spent so much time and effort on this project, we just have to finish it, you know. We've come this far, we've got to keep going, and everyone else knows, or everyone, including ourselves, we kind of know it's not going to work, but we've been taught our whole lives, right, since we're little kids, when if you start something, you better finish it. You know, you got to be committed. But sometimes the best way to commit, you know, we don't want to commit to falling off a cliff or just keep running, even when we're running out of room, and so we've got to be aware of those kinds of biases, particularly also politics. I've seen in a lot of organizations, particularly in the transformation field, project change managers, and I don't mean any disrespect to those people, amazing great people in the field. But there's a lot of contractors in that field, and a lot of consultants, and often it's not uncommon for more than half of your workforce in that particular area to be a contractor workforce, so their jobs are at stake, right? They have a stake in it continuing, so they're often their advice that they're giving to senior people is a little bit biased, like I want this project to continue, because if I don't, I'm going to have no job. And so we have to be mindful of that when we're making those kinds of capacity decisions. We have to be mindful of, yeah, the sunk cost fallacy and our tendency to want to finish things, even when we can see it's it should be aborted. It's going to just waste people's time, or when we just need to take a different tack, maybe we need to scale it back, scope it down. Maybe we need to pause it and bring it back at a later time, because there's other bigger priorities which are more likely to succeed. So, I think there's a few different factors we just got to bring into the conversation, and not just be centered around, hey, we just need to finish this thing and put it behind us.

Mick Spiers: 46:20

Yeah, really good. Yeah, all right. That leads me to the final one I want to cover today. Is you spoke before when you're on the show last time, and it came up again earlier in today's discussion. And sorry, this is going to sound ages for a second, but I'm guilty as charged on this one. As we get older, we get more resistance to change because we've got ingrained habits, like, so we're very habitual, habitual creatures. What I want to put to you and unpack is that when we're doing this change, we're now building a new habit. How do we make sure in our change management efforts that we're recognizing that the new change is bringing in a new habit that might be displacing an old habit. How does the habitual change element, rather than any organizational change that we've spoken about, you know, structural changes, etc. How does the habitual change come into this?

Huw Thomas: 47:19

Yeah, it's a part which I think is very commonly ignored, particularly on projects I think probably on just about any kind of project, particularly on system implementation software. But also even in reorganizations and things like that, because we're focused on, say, for example, in a reorg, we're focused on getting people in the right, the right boxes, right names in the right boxes in the org chart, and then we go, okay, we're going to make the organization look like that, and then we get it to look like that, and then everyone's like, okay, how the hell do we work together now? No one's thought about that. We were so focused on just moving people around, and the same with software programs, where we're changing from this system to this system, and that's the change, but that's not the chang. But the real change is actually what people are doing with this system on a day-to-day basis, and how they're using it week to week in their operating rhythm, and often we leave that to chance. We sort of leave that to people to figure out, and then what do you get? You get thousands of people doing it all different ways, some are putting this data in that field, some are doing it this way, some have forgotten the training, some are maybe not doing integrating it into their daily rhythm, or how they talk to customers in the right way. So one of the ways effective changes are designed is we, we do kind of more human-centered design practices, so we think about the personas of the people impacted by the change, and go, what's it? Okay, Mick is going to be adopting this system. What's a day in the life for Mick in this particular area? I say he's a salesperson, he's got to adopt this new Saturday. I go and talk to Mick and go, okay, how do you use the currency? How do you use the contacts, the deals, the reports? How do you do all this sort of stuff today? And I try to really put myself in your shoes, and then I go, "Okay, now look at our system. What we're trying to implement for Mick. How's he going to use it?" And I'm trying to envision that it's like a creative exercise where we've got to really map out what's a day in the life for Mick from and to. So, what's he currently doing? The current system in the future, he's going to be doing this, and some of it's in the system, and some of it's outside the system, and this is why, with these kinds of changes. I always say it's not about the system, it's about what people do with this system, and that's what makes it successful, and that's where the value comes. If you just replace one system for another, and the people don't actually change their habits, the new system offers all these new tools and reporting and data and great stuff like that, but people aren't using them. Then you're not getting any value from it. You've just wasted a ton of money on changing systems for no change in the people and the behavior and the business outcomes come from that. So really, we've got to stop thinking about the solution, either the system or the process or the org chart we're implementing as the change itself. It's not that's really just an enabler of the change, and so we've got to design it around the people as much as possible. Now, there's only so much you can do on that. Again, it's not always going to be perfect, and some needs to be left up to the individual as well. But the more we sort of step into people's shoes and think about it in terms of those habits, the better. And I often say, I think habits is such a great way to think about change, is changes in some once-off thing. We're actually trying to permanently change the habits of hundreds or thousands of people across an organization. If you start seeing it that way, and you go, okay, that's the job to be done, and yeah, it's going to be enabled by this new system and this new process. But the job to be done is changing the habits of all these people, then it changes the way you think about it, and the way you engage and design the change for people.

Mick Spiers: 50:47

Yeah, I think this is where true transformation sits, and I say this time and again in technology projects here, and I'm sure you do as well. I'll use a silly metaphor, like, you know, someone brings in an EV car, so a completely electric car, not up, not a hybrid, just a completely electric car. The way we treat change in an organization like this, it makes me think that, you know, the person is going to say, "Okay, yeah, where's the fuel tank? It doesn't have a fuel tank, yeah, yeah, okay, but where do I put the fuel? You don't need to put the fuel, but I got the fuel. Where do I.. if we're not truly changing the habits, why bother doing the technology change in the first place? But then what I'm taking from this.. that that was very flippant of me. What I'm taking from this, if you don't treat it like a habitual change, it will be at your peril. The old habits will stick, and the new habits will not stick if you don't treat it like a habit change.

Huw Thomas: 51:44

Exactly, yeah, and if you buy an EV, right, you're probably going to think about all that sort of stuff, either during the buying process or afterwards. You're going to think, okay, if I have an EV, you know, I don't need to go to the petrol station anymore, I can charge it at home mostly, or if I'm planning a trip, I need to think about where's the EV station on the way, because I'm, I can't just fill out. But every other petrol station, there's not many, not enough EV stations at the moment, so you know you're thinking about how it's going to integrate into your life, right? And often when we do change for ourselves like that, or we're thinking about moving house, or relocating, or some major change like this, or having a baby. All these big life changes, you really plan for it, and you're thinking about how's this going to work, and nothing fully prepares you. Sometimes you got to work it out on the fly once you do it, but yeah, I think in organizations we don't do it. We need to do as much of that thinking for our people as possible to make it easier for them, so it's not so chaotic.

Mick Spiers: 52:38

Yeah, cool. All right. Excellent. This has been another wonderful conversation. You've taken our thinking to a whole new level when it comes to organizational change, really building on what you taught us in the first time you're on the show, around individual change and the fears and the loss aversion, and now bringing that to the meta level. If I was able to summarize some of the key things that we've spoken about, and this was a big reframe for me. I have to say, the communication, the old adage of communicate more is no, turn the volume down, and to communicate with clarity. Communicate with clarity, and then shift from one way communication to a dialog, and in that dialog, you, you're doing multiple things, you're building agency, you're bringing them on the journey of change, so that they don't feel like the change is being forced upon them. They're actually part of the change, and guess what, not only are they going to build agency and an ownership of the change, they're going to bring better ideas, so damn well listen to them when they say,"Oh, if that's what we're trying to do, why don't we do it this way?" Well, now they're part of the change journey. In that dialog, you're also able to have that adult conversation about their fears and why they think it won't work, so that you can discuss it openly and go, "Oh, okay, that's an interesting barrier. How might we overcome that barrier?" And now they're building even more ownership, and you're not missing the elephant in the room about the reason why they think the change won't work. We spoke about change overload, and thinking about if you've got 25 things that you want to do, you've got to reduce that down to three. You want to do 25 things badly, or you want to do three things exceptionally well, but it's got to be the right three things. And then next season, whatever that season is for you, whether it's a quarter or a year, you might introduce a new one, but, but just do just do three at a time, and not to forget the how all of this stuff that Huw just spoke about that. This is a habitual change. They're ditching old habits and they're bringing in new habits. Don't just treat it like a structural change, or or the what and the why. You got to deal with the so, how is this going to work? How is it going to be different to what we do today? And then you go. To be on your way to smoothing out the resistance to change. All right, Huw, now you've been on the on the show before, so you've already answered our four questions we ask all of our guests. So I'm going to switch to a different question, which is, what's changed in your life since you were last with us?

Huw Thomas: 55:17

That's good. I mean, the one that comes to mind is I started playing tennis again on a more regular basis.

Mick Spiers: 55:24

Nice.

Huw Thomas: 55:25

And the reason I raised that is, I suppose it talks to some of the things we've talked about, I think. And for me, it's I learned to play tennis as a kid, and I played a couple tournaments, and, and had lessons in summer, and so forth, when I was in primary school. And then I played mostly recreationally in high school. I didn't play at any particular competitive level, and played with friends, and my whole family played. And then 20s, probably played a little bit, not that much. And then had a friend who was a good player, and we were really evenly matched for a while, and we'd have some great sort of showdowns on the court. And then he moved over to Singapore, and so the last few years I hadn't had a good partner or anyone to play with to have a good match with, so I joined this sort of local tennis club and started having weekly lessons, group lessons, and it was great. It was really, I do it Monday mornings, it's a great way to start the week, instead of doing my most important things, which most people do on a Monday, I do my most enjoyable thing, and getting out and doing some exercise, and, and I love it. And the thing I've sort of taken away from it, from a change perspective, is, is that it's the learning side of it. And it's not like to master something, you don't do it through a training session, it's an ongoing month process over many months to master something, and so in these training sessions I play tennis. I get feedback on my form with my forehand, back and serving, and it's often just and applying it immediately, like on the court, right? You're doing it, you're getting some feedback from a great coach and applying it, and it's amazing how quickly you improve when you do that, and over the time it's only been sort of I've probably been 10 times since last year, but my game has just exponentially improved. I'm so much more confident in the ball, and I've probably sort of moved more up to the advanced level, and it's just sort of reenacted a lot of stuff I knew and I'd forgotten, but I'd also, it's also sharpened up small parts of my game, and so I think the takeaway from a change perspective is if you're trying to change something about yourself, it's a process that happens over a long period of time, and to install like a learning habit, where for me it was I'm not just playing tennis every week. I'm learning tennis every week and playing right, and it's this kind of duality of those things, where I think in anything you're trying to master and get better at. Don't just keep doing the same thing, do it and continually learn and get better at it, even just small things, and you sort of stack that sort of learning habit up and suddenly get to this new level of mastery, so that's fun thing for me, and, like, I say,"Yeah, it's very fun." It's been really enjoyable. It's changed my sort of mindset and how I start my week, and I've got a lot better at tennis, I think. So that's the one thing.

Mick Spiers: 58:11

Nice one. All right, thanks, Huw. I'm going to transpose what I'm hearing and think about that from an organizational change point of view as well. So this this learning habit that you speak of, what I was thinking of when you were talking was, let's say that you're a team leader and you've decided that we're going to. We're going to change the way we do our team meetings, they've been ineffective for a long time, and it's about time we, we mixed it up a little bit and changed. So you, you introduce the change, but reserve what I'm thinking is reserve time at the end of that meeting, the last 10 minutes to ask everyone. Okay, we just tried our new agenda, we just tried our new approach to this meeting. What worked? What didn't work? What should we do differently next time? And it becomes a learning habit for even for an organizational change. How does that sit with you?

Huw Thomas: 59:01

Yeah, I love that. I think we don't do that enough. We don't integrate learning into our regular weekly operating rhythm. So, if you can do that with anything significant, or whatever your priorities at the moment, whether it's improving your weekly team meeting, improving how you do sales, I think that's a big one. Sales people tend to talk about this a lot more than other parts of the business. I think there's always this sort of energy in sales, like we need to have continually be doing better at it, and the KPIs are always stretched. So they're always, they tend to think about this more than others. But yeah, just thinking about what's the thing I'm doing to learn and get up to mastery, because often we think, oh, I know how to do this thing. But I'm not, you're not at the mastery level, so there's always a bit of room to grow. And I think if we just constantly learn each week, it's not like a monthly or once a year thing, learning it's not just some training session you turn up to, it's got to be a learning habit.

Mick Spiers: 59:52

Yeah, nice one here. All right. Thank you once again. You've given us again the gift of your time, but also the gift of. Your, your wisdom and experience, and you've taken our change management and our understanding of change to a whole new level with our conversation today. So, thank you so much.

Huw Thomas: 1:00:11

Thank you, Mick. Always a pleasure.

Mick Spiers: 1:00:15

Wow, what a powerful conversation there with Huw Thomas. I always enjoy speaking with you, because you bring such clarity and humanity to the way we think about change. There were several lessons that really stood out for me. First, communication is not the same as conversation. As leaders, we often convince ourselves that because we have explained the change, people should now understand it, accept it, and move forward, but real change requires meaning making. People need space to ask questions, voice concerns, process emotions, and understand what the change means for them personally. Second, resistance is not irrational. When people resist change, they are often protecting something that

matters to them: 1:01:04

certainty, control, competence, comfort, identity, or status. If we dismiss resistance as negativity, we miss the opportunity to understand the human need sitting underneath it. Third, change can create genuine harm when it's poorly led. This is not just about inconvenience or frustration. When people feel powerless, unheard, or constantly destabilized, change can become a psychosocial risk. That means leaders have a responsibility to lead change with care, empathy, and intentionality. And finally, leaders need to move from broadcasting to connecting. The question is not, have we communicated the change? Better question is, have we created the conversations people need to make sense of the change, so let me leave you with a few questions to reflect on. Where might you be relying too heavily on communication and are not enough on conversation? Who in your team may be experiencing a loss of certainty, control, competence, identity, or status right now? And what conversation could you create this week to help someone feel more seen, heard, and supported through the change this week. I encourage you to choose one change that is happening in your workplace and ask the team a simple question, What does this change mean for you? And then listen, do not defend, do not correct, do not rush to reassure, just listen to the human experience underneath the words. Thank you for joining us today on The Leadership Project. Over the past month, we've explored three deeply connected dimensions of leadership with Mike Krupit, we explored the need to adapt. With Graeme Cowan, we explored the need to care. And today, with Huw Thomas, we explored the need to connect. In this month's solo cast, I'll bring these threads together and explore why leadership is not a formula, not a title, or a set of mechanical steps, leadership is a human practice. It requires us to adapt to the moment, care for the people, and create the conversations that help others move forward. Until next time, keep leading with purpose, keep creating environments where people feel seen, heard, and valued, and remember, change does not happen because we announce it. Change happens when people feel connected enough, supported enough, and safe enough to step into what comes next. You've been listening to The Leadership Project. If today sparked an insight. Don't keep it to yourself. Share it with one other person who would benefit from listening to the show. A huge thank you to Gerald Calibo for his tireless work editing every episode, and to my amazing wife Sei, who does all the heavy lifting in the background to make this show possible. None of this happens without them. Around here we believe leadership is a practice, not a position that people should feel seen, heard, valued, and that they matter. That the best leaders trade ego for empathy, certainty for curiosity, and control for trust. If that resonates with you, please subscribe on YouTube and on your favorite podcast app, and if you want more, follow me on LinkedIn, and explore our archives for conversations that move you from knowing to doing. Until next time, lead with curiosity, courage, and care.