The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 7 - Connections Before Content: Mike Hohnen’s Leadership Advice for Managing Managers
Wed, 31 Jul 2024
We explore the balance between a manager’s tasks vs their relationships. We discuss the bias towards productivity that often overshadows the need for genuine interpersonal connections. Our guest Mike Hohnen, with extensive experience in management roles highlights how to manage emotional engagement for effective leadership, and tips to foster true employee engagement. Listeners will gain insights into creating a more balanced and engaging work environment that values both productivity and strong relationships.
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.
We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast with myself, Matt Best, and my colleague and partner in crime, Johnny Adams.
Great to see you, Johnny, as always.
Hey, guys. Lovely to see you. Thanks so much, Matt.
So today we're joined by Mike Conan, who is an exec coach and a successful executive working in the hospitality sector with a focus on supporting services businesses to drive the right culture and focus on client service. So Mike, it's fantastic to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Johnny and I today.
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to see you again.
So I guess as is customary on our podcast, we like to kick things off with a bit of something interesting that's happened in your past week. So Mike, maybe I'll come to you first. What's been going on in your week that you could share with our audience, maybe provide a bit of inspiration?
Well, I have an impression that I'm going to be the odd fish out here, but that's fine. Why is that?
Why do you feel like you might be the odd one out?
Well, I'll tell you. I'll try and illustrate this for you with a little anecdote, which would get us going in that sense. A couple of weeks ago, I got a... a request for a Zoom meeting over my calendar system, somebody who'd found me on LinkedIn. And then I sort of, as we all do, went down and checked out. So who is this person? I wonder why they want to talk to me.
And it turned out to be the CEO of a rather large software development company with a very sort of high profile background and top management team, high profile background. And so I was thinking, well, why on earth have they found out to me? It's a world I don't understand.
I took the meeting, of course, and I wanted to be polite, but I prepared a sort of little speech, you know, it's very kind of you to contact me. Thank you very much. I don't want to waste your time. Once I got going on that, he stopped me and said, you know, I've researched you and I understand what it is you're doing. Do you realize that I'm a humanist?
I'm not actually madly interested in the business side of things. It's the people side. I'm a people side person. And that's the only thing that really drives me. The rest, I don't give a toss. He says, I want you to come and talk to our people. And so I explained that there is another perspective on the world, which is not the one that we sort of generally normally have.
And you have a different perspective on the world. And I'd really like you to elaborate on that. So I ended up spending an afternoon with them over in Nice. And that was great fun. We had a really good time.
We do tend to talk a lot about, obviously, about the business side and it all comes back to sort of growth. But I think, Mike, what you just shared there is exactly the point of this, right? There's the people side of things and how important that is. I mean, that's great, Mike.
That's quite a high level of maturity in terms of from a leadership perspective that a leader is willing to say, look, that's exactly what I need. I know I'm not sort of going to step out of the numbers for a minute and go back to the roof of my business that might be the people. So, yeah. Absolutely looking forward to digging into that with you a little bit more today.
I mean, Johnny, how do you follow that?
I feel that it's actually going to possibly align to what Mike knows loads about and is clearly an expert. So I was in Porto in Portugal for a few days recently. It was an amazing trip. If you've ever been, great. If not, then as long as you can drink wine, then you're completely qualified to go. We stayed at a five-star hotel and it was pretty special. We overlooked Porto City.
I'm reflecting on what Mike said, something that struck me. We all said, would you pay for this hotel if you knew it was the star rating it was? Because the point being is actually the quality of service wasn't up to the level. It was actually below par. And I said to my wife, I perceive this as a four star hotel.
And in fact, you know, limited urgency and really different types of services that we were getting provided during breakfast time. Just simple stuff like how attentive a staff member should be, possibly a five star hotel when you kind of get it, a four star hotel or a three star hotel. But this was a five star hotel. So I think it looked like the hotel was living off the back of the view.
Over Porto versus actually training and supporting their people. And the sad thing is that when we were checking out that this other couple were pretty much berating and challenging the staff member at the reception because the quality of service wasn't up to standard. And my colleague also who traveled with us said, I'm very keen to write a review. So it was just two people independently.
So there was something going wrong there, Mike, that I'm looking forward to unpacking. Because if they got it right, I actually think the experience would have gone up by a huge amount. And we would have left with us feeling like, wow. So I don't know. I just thought I'd throw that out there. That's what I've been up to.
Mike, I can see you're sort of chomping at the bit.
No, it's just a classic story. I mean, there are so many examples like that out there in the world. It's unbelievable. What really gets me is, you know, it's not rocket science. We know exactly what it takes. It's not a big mystery. It's a lot of hard work, but there is a way to solve that, you know?
And I think the question was, we all said, you know, how much would you pay for this? We wouldn't have paid as much as when we went on to Booking.com and looked at the cost and all of us went... was that really the cost of the... Like, wow. So yeah, it wasn't aligned. The value was not aligned to the investment. Matt, what's been going up in your world?
I often share some experiences with family and that I've had with family and I was lucky enough to have my parents over visiting recently. So I think something that I've really taken away in the last couple of weeks probably is just that we will talk about sort of work life balance and how important it is.
But actually, outside of all of those discussions, it was just reconnecting with family and reconnecting with people that you love and then trying to find that. They're trying to find that balance. But I think the most interesting thing is how that's provided motivation in other areas. So, for example, I went on a little jog on the weekend, which has been a long time since I have.
And it was just sort of I felt like it had been inspired by just sort of reconnecting with other parts of my life. And it's given me more drive than in a sort of in a work environment. and a business growth context. So just being able to be conscious of how these things all intertwine and connect with one another, I think is really, really important. So that's my reflection.
But Mike, I think that example that you gave is just demonstration of your sort of credibility in this space and what people really look for when they want to embark on a conversation with you or they hire you to provide services. I mean, tell us just a little bit about your journey so far. How have you come to be where you are today?
Yeah, as you can see with my gray hairs, it's a long story. We'll try and keep it short. I just want to inject something there, because it gets me every time I hear it. How is it we've come to get to this spot where we talk about work-life balance? I mean, it's rubbish. From my perspective, it's rubbish, because it implies that work is not life. And for...
I don't think any of us three would sign up for that. I think we all three probably work bloody hard and we love what we do. And it's a very important part of our life. It's a different kind of balance. And it's a funny way of reinforcing something that I think is completely skewed in this thing. And we all do. I know that. I hear it the whole time. Every time I hear it, I try and shoot it down.
But what's the answer then, Mike? I know we're sort of moving on, but that's an interesting perspective. So is there something that we can do about the language that we use? Or is there something that we can do from a corporate perspective? Have you got an idea?
Well, you know, I mean, everything is a question of how we use words and how we frame things at the end. That's the first step. And so when we frame it that way, we've already sort of built a an image around it is. But what we're looking at is polarity between work and leisure. And what constitutes a really nice life is to maximize both. That's a good life if you see what I mean.
It's not doing more of one and less of the other. It's maximizing both. If we can maximize both of those two, then we actually thrive. And so we have to find out what that is for us and in what way we do it. But it's not like that work-life balance for me. That's the short version.
Here's something you said there. We've got to work out what works for us. And it's this sort of concept that it's individual and everybody's is going to be slightly different and is going to look ever so slightly different. And I think it's sort of corporate culture. Sometimes it's, well, this is what the business defines as good work-life balance. I'm going to use that term again, but
does that apply to everybody absolutely not it can't possibly apply to everybody so it's understanding individual situations and providing that sort of autonomy maybe control like but it's just even that mindful being mindful about it as an individual and having conversations about it with your organization or your business and sort of working out how how that works best for you and actually i'm fascinated in how that works and coming from um having started my career in
in support and we're going to talk about service today actually sometimes that's really hard to find in a situation where the reality is somebody needs to be standing behind a desk for a period of time somebody needs to be on the other end of the phone to speak to a customer for a period of time a shift or whatever that looks like so how does that work and coming from the hospitality space you know
Like you said, I mean, that industry works incredibly hard, sometimes some very long shifts, sometimes a very antisocial hours, as a lot of other sort of jobs, careers and industries do. How do you find that sweet spot in an environment like that?
That's a hopeless question in a sense, Matt, because that is exactly what you started out saying. It becomes a very individual choice. It's finding one's own sweet, as you said, your own sweet spot. What is it that actually stimulates me? And I think the three of us would probably... not enjoy not working or having a completely, we wouldn't thrive with that.
And so each of us has to find out that. But with all polarities, the polarities are fascinating subject, but all polarities have this thing. They're always driven. There's something we want to achieve. We want to achieve the good life, which is trying to balance this polarity. But there's always a fear of something going wrong that will drive us to overemphasize one polarity over the other.
So before we get down there, but the other classic polarity is leadership versus management. And so we have this fear that we're not in control, that we're not going to be successful, that we're not going to manage the business, that we're not going to all the rest of it.
And so we push our foot down on the pedal called management and we push it hard because we think that as long as I keep pushing that pedal, then I'm sure to be doing right. And the reality is that it comes at the cost of the leadership aspect. And then that deteriorates. And then you get the downside of both polarities. And it's a little bit the same thing.
So in consulting businesses and what we do, we all wake up in the morning and think, oh, when are we going to get the next client? And are we being successful enough? Are we working hard enough? And so we push the bloody pedal, which is called work. And we forget to balance it the other pedal, which is the leisure part.
And in that sense, we do ourselves a disfavor because that means at the end of the day that we're not at our best anymore. So one has to find out. So one has to try and identify and actually be really conscious of the fact that you said the running. So what are the things that I could actually see on a to-do list or put in my calendar or say, when I do these things, I'm on the other polarity.
I'm actually reinforcing that polarity and not working on the other one. And then you need to sort of think a little bit about what are the warning signs? When do I know that I'm actually only focused on my work side? My wife doesn't speak to me anymore.
Oh, my gosh. I love that. I love this point because in our world, business development and when you're, as you alluded to earlier, you took a call because you're a good guy and you wanted to basically let that person down gently and professionally. But in fact, actually, you supported them. So a bit of business development there. We typically see a boom and bust or a feast and famine approach.
And what we see is, you know, lots of work. loads of work, loads of activity. And then all of a sudden, you know, this rollercoaster motion where, oh no, and then you hit the bottom trough and you go, ah, I need to do it. That's fine. But what about, I recall episodes in my own life over the last 10 years where I haven't been able to see what's going to approach.
And I think about a bit about mental health. And I think about the polarities between leisure and work and when I've worked too much and I haven't done enough I actually got to a point of being so compressed that I wasn't feeling great, but I couldn't see it coming.
So to your point, I love the idea around writing something down or observing, but sometimes you're so in it and being driven so hard by management that you just get to a point and it all breaks apart. I don't know. Any thoughts on that there, Mike, at all?
You said the word mental health. I think this is something we don't like to talk about. It's a little bit taboo. It's incredibly important. Years ago, I was also working like crazy, and I was actually really enjoying myself, but I was on an airplane three times a week going somewhere, and it just went on and on and on in that sense. And one morning, I was preparing to walk into a client workshop,
and my brain shut off i can't really explain what happened everything just went fuzzy and wobbly and i was disoriented and i it was it was i wouldn't wish that on anybody and the short story is i spent a year trying to getting out of that because once you've you've done that you and that's just so let this be a warning to anybody when you start And I started, it took me a year to get out of it.
And during that first period, it was so bad, I couldn't cross the street on my own because my brain was not capable of calculating, you know, the cars coming or not. Are they faster? Is there a space? That's actually a piece of complicated arithmetic our brain performs. And mine just wouldn't do it. It was just, can't do that. And so one really has to, and that was the lesson for me.
What are the warning signs? What was it that, you know, that started telling you, body pains or headaches or whatever, that you were pressing this pedal a little bit hard, too hard. And I think that is so important because once it hits you, then it's no joke anymore. I mean, anybody who's been there will know what I'm talking about. I don't wish that for anybody. It's really, really tough.
I resonate you know and you had your own episodes and you know I had to turn around to my dad and say is this what it's like and you know I just want to clarify like where I'm at and I remember laying on the sofa not being able to move which felt like for three weeks because I couldn't cook I didn't know how to do that anymore and But now the ownership actually comes back to me and my friends.
Like Matt, you're a massive friend in this circumstances and support my family. But knowing those signs now is really vital. And Matt, I know we've sort of deviated away from topic.
I think this is a really important conversation, though, isn't it, around that culture?
And actually, just picking up on that point that you and the term or the word polarity, and I think it's being able to see both those sides, as you said, and Johnny, you just said there, being able to identify what's going on in each of those different worlds and using basic tools such as to-do lists just to keep ourselves honest, because it's really... really hard.
And again, it goes back to, we talked about at the top that everyone's circumstance is different. Everyone's polarity is different. So everybody's perspective, everyone's to-do list will look different. One thing you mentioned, Mike, as you were talking about that was this sort of role of leadership and leadership versus management.
And if we think about that in the context of employees and supporting your employees, I'm curious, is that where you were heading with that comment around leadership versus management? Or were you approaching that from a different perspective?
This is where I become a broken record player, you know, because Johnny described a hotel visit that wasn't extremely successful. So coming back to the sort of overall framework here, everybody wants customer loyalty. Everybody drives for the, is super interested in their NPS score and all of this good stuff. But few people actually really take the time to reflect on the fact.
So in the services industry, I don't know anything about production, but in the services industries, what is the primary driver of NPS? It's employee engagement. Employee engagement drives your NPS because there is no loyalty in basic satisfaction. Just delivering the right product at the right specification at the right price exactly as on spec and all the rest of it, that gives you 3.5%.
It's on a scale of 1 to 5. It's a 3.5. It's okay. And there's no loyalty in that. So we tend to over-focus on this product specification and improving the product. But we forget that in order to get from basic satisfaction to fantastic loyalty and enthusiasm, it requires...
employee engagement and then we need to ask us and when we look at the engagement figures we all know them from gallup and all the rest of them we know them from all the companies it's a huge headache across the board in general terms most places and engagement levels are very low so i think you can can sardines in portugal and not be particularly engaged in your job but in the services industry
From the customer perspective, there is a world of difference between being served by somebody who has a job and somebody who is actually engaged. It's just two different worlds. There's no comparison. So we don't spend enough time asking ourselves, so what is it? How do we actually get to that point? What is it that drives that engagement? How do we get to there?
And then we get back to my story about the polarities because if you think about it, there is a polarity which we could call tasks versus relationships. The to-do list, all the things we want to do versus spending time building relationships with people, connecting, all of that stuff. And if we lift that polarity 500 feet up, essentially that polarity is also called management versus leadership.
The key problem that we face out there is that the system has a bias towards task orientation. The whole system that we all sort of subscribe to in the sense that We all live in these pyramids. There's somebody on top of us and somebody below us.
And whoever's on top of us, whatever level we are on, has a certain tendency to exercise a pressure on us, downward towards us, which is, you could wrap it up in all sorts of fancy paper, but it's called more productivity. We want to see more output for less input. Please turn it up. which is basically a task orientation. And then there's a pressure from below us.
The people who are below us, they have a different pressure. They are exercising a pressure towards us for a better relationship. They want more attention. They want to be seen. They want us to be involved. They want an emotional connection with us one way or the other. And they try and drive that. The problem is that when we then look at our calendar and all the stuff on the to-do list
What do we give the priority? Well, because the guy upstairs, you know, he has he can be nasty or she. So we keep on then value picking the task versus the relationship problem or the relationship thing that we could be doing. Having that conversation with that person, going for a walk with somebody who we know is in trouble with whatever they're doing.
In that sense, it's built in in the way we think about what do we value in work? What do I as a manager value in the next level below me? I level somebody who gets their stuff done, who delivers on time and all of that stuff. And so in that sense, it has this lopsidedness. And the other thing that's built into that cake is that when we recruit, who do we recruit?
What is the kind of personality that we prefer? Well, in my world, the hospitality world, who is the young, bright waiter who gets promoted to assistant shift manager or something, team leader or whatever? Well, it's that waiter who's really well organized and who gets his stuff done and who ticks off the boxes and clears up in the evening. It was very, very... who's in fact really task-oriented.
And who gets promoted assistant manager? Well, it's the team leader who's really task, yeah, okay? And so suddenly you see that there is a trace all the way through the system where everybody who gets promoted to the next level gets promoted primarily because of their task capabilities. They are really good at getting things done.
And I go crazy in the hospitality business when I see this because it's supposed to be a people business. And somehow we get lost in that. But it gets worse because if you then think about it, when we are pressured, when we are under stress, when the heat is turned up, then we all have a tendency to gravitate towards what we feel comfortable doing.
And so if you've structured your system with people who are most comfortable doing tasks, then the more the heat gets turned up, the more they will take refuge in the tasks instead of getting out of their bloody office and facing the problem, which is having that conversation with that person, helping that person grow through the next level or whatever it is.
This is it though, Mike. This is exactly it. And Johnny, you and I talk about this a lot about, and actually we talk about it through the lens of like middle managers who often get stuck in this. You talk about that pyramid structure. some of the most susceptible to this challenge. I mean, if you're a middle manager listening to this, you might be kind of nodding along as we are.
What do you say to those individuals? How can they help themselves in this situation? Because we can't all go to our bosses, bosses, bosses, boss and say, you're running your business completely wrong. You need to focus on this. So how can a middle manager listening to this podcast help themselves?
So first of all, you have to break the waterfall, as I call it. Even if your boss does this, you have to stop doing it. That's a fundamental mentality. You need to make up your mind that you want to do that. And then when I coach people around this, then they always present this to me as a problem. This is a problem. How do I solve this?
Because my boss is pressurizing me and this is what they want. And I know I should be paying more attention to taking care of the people. But I mean, I still have to deliver. So I have to say to them, it's not a problem. It's a polarity. You need to get better at managing that polarity. And you have to see it as a polarity and not as a problem. Because as a problem, it's not solvable.
You're always, this is good. This is going to, this is, it's there every bloody day, day in and day out. You're faced with this.
and so it's not a problem to be solved it's a polarity to be managed understanding when do you do what when do you put your foot down and resist and when do you insist on taking time to do something else or whatever it is but you need to do that and if you do that you will also see how much more successful you end up being because you get a completely different output from the next level below you so they support you but you have to have the guts to actually believe that
Mic drop. Johnny, I can see you've got so much.
Mike, what you shared there is something that we could all resonate with. And we all have the ability to, I can see the pictures being formed as you're describing them. So thank you for doing that. And as we spoke about earlier, the importance of that. And Matt, I really enjoyed your question there. I was doing a lot of nodding and smiling because it's just so, so relatable.
I guess the question for me is just going a bit back towards what you said about NPS versus, you know, employee satisfaction as well. If you're looking at a business and you're leading a team, what are some of the three things that you could deploy that would drive employee satisfaction up?
Knowing that you're probably measured off MPS, but actually you know the input is good employee satisfaction. So what are three things that you know of that could work? Again, in the service industry, it's not a problem because they could be transferable to other industries, but any off the top of your head that you could deploy as a manager? Will Barron
The first thing is, I don't ever think in employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is not an interesting concept in this context, because I can easily have people who are satisfied with their jobs, but not being particularly engaged. That doesn't help me. So I can provide really nice jobs or decent salaries, work conditions. I can do all of that stuff.
And I can tick off all the little boxes over on the management side and see I'm doing that really well. And I will get employee satisfaction. But I don't get any engagement. And so if we go back to the first thing, the NPS, if we try and analyze, so what is it that drives, what is it that moves the needle in NPS from being reasonably satisfied to being
a key promoter in that sense it's not the product it's not the basic spec because we're already we've already established if you deliver on spec you get a 3.5 so what is it that needs to be added to your delivery your way of doing it in order to move the needle it's an emotional component
It's an emotional component in the sense that there's somebody in that team, that service team, that manages to connect with you in some way that touches you, that makes you feel seen, that makes you valued as a customer, solves the problem for your little dog. Whatever it is that they do, they do something that triggers something in you.
It's a feeling they trigger in you where you feel, oh, that was really sweet. Okay? So what does it take? to move the needle from basic employee satisfaction to engagement. It's exactly the same mechanism. I can get decent, reasonable employee satisfaction if I tick off all the boxes, I deliver on spec, I do what I'm supposed to do.
But if I want to move the needle, I have to make sure that that employee feels an emotional connection with this job and with me. And the tons of research to support this, that relationship that we're talking about is with your immediate boss. We join companies and we leave managers. It's the relationship with your immediate supervisor, which determines 90% of your mental health of the work.
And so it's that relationship and it's a relationship. It's not a to-do list thing. It's a relationship. So you need to start thinking about, so what is it that constitutes a relationship? When does something become a relationship? When do I start thinking, This Matt guy that contacted me, he's actually an interesting and fun guy. Well, he starts taking an interest in me. He asks me questions.
So what do you do, Mike? And tell me a little bit more. And John said you were doing something. And so when we take an interest in somebody else, it becomes the first step in a relationship. Think of anybody that has become a decent relationship. It starts off with a conversation where that other person actually shows an interest in you. We're pretty primitive.
Yeah, yeah. I think this is so helpful just to try and get some of these amazing tips out. And I can hear already a few that I'm thinking of is when you structure a business, you need to think about what type of person you're going to be recruiting, you know, task oriented versus relationship oriented.
I'm thinking actually to your point, you know, what do you wrap around that to keep people and retain people, you know, that relationship opportunity to create space for people to build relationships. Is there anything else that you would say for when, well, not managers, but when anyone is building relationships from the tier to a tier, is there anything that they should be doing?
Any ideas, you know, meetings, how they should structure meetings one-to-one, how they should structure that? Anything like that, Mike, would be helpful.
You just need to learn one thing. They need to say to themselves every time they go into a meeting or a group or whatever it is they're going. Connection before content. That's the mantra. Connection before content. Don't barge into a meeting and say, this is what we need to do and this is how we're going to do it. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Whether it's with a group or whether it's one-to-one or whatever it is, take the time to connect. I see managers who get it and I see managers who don't get it. And the managers that get it, they follow this base. I don't know if you've come across it, but there's something called the Team High Performance Model, which is a lovely Drexler-Sibit model. It's a lovely model of it.
Which basically states that, you know, you start off with why, who, what, and then you get to how. And then you start building the action plan and all the rest of it. But the foundational piece that needs to be put into place in all these situations is the why, the who, and the what. When we do something, when we, engagement, when we do something, we want to understand why we're doing it.
It's a key driver. I mean, even Nietzsche talked about this. You can resist, you know, whatever was it he said, you can bear any pain as long as you know why. And so taking the time to make that clear, what is the purpose of whatever it is we're trying to do? And then... What I think is completely neglected the whole way around is this concept of social contracting.
So whenever we get together with other people, we need to, as managers, we need to scan this room and say, these people here in the room today, do they know each other already? Okay, well, then that's one thing. No, there's Joe over here. He's actually new to the crowd. Okay, that means it's going to take us 10 minutes later, but we now need to make sure we bring Joe into this conversation and
bringing up today introducing so we spend some time massaging that and if i sometimes i've been working with a top management team for a hotel and we're planning an opening whether they come together as a new group and then i can spend a whole weekend
on that because i get them to do what i call life maps i get them to share where they're coming from what they're doing and what their experiences and all of that and once i've got that in place then the rest of the work just goes it just flies because there's no resistance no guardedness no all of that's gone there's a sense of camaraderie and trust and an openness
It reminds me of a conversation, Johnny, we had with a recent guest on the podcast who talked about an experience when they had with their peer group of leaders and their direct leader, right? It's a very senior team. And they'd spent that weekend together and they'd spent that quality time together. And they weren't talking about work. They were just engaging with each other.
They were building rapport. They were building relationships. And the energy that she felt she got from that experience was just incredible. was just so big, the drive and the motivation that that created for her. And then as the expert leader that she is, she's translating that into how does she create that same experience for her own team and her own direct reports.
And the why is such an interesting point to start because it sounds so obvious. We've all had experiences of businesses where it's just, oh, no, no, no, we're going to keep that just inside our jacket. We're not going to tell them exactly what we need to do because they don't need to know that.
Or they don't know it. The leaders don't know it themselves. And they're just running around doing things without any vision, purpose, mission together that's tying them all into one direction. I think we were listening to someone else, Matt, recently. It's like, why do armies march? That's a great question. And even someone who was in the army didn't know the answer.
But it shows conformity, right? It shows that you're all in one direction, that you're all marching in that direction in unity.
And I think, Johnny, I want to follow up on something that you were asking. So what does one do? And I think the other thing that we don't really understand enough in depth is how important the sense of belonging is to our engagement. Feeling that you are part of the team, feeling that you belong, feeling that you are accepted by the others is such a strong driver in our own engagement.
And it's really interesting. The scientists say that when you scan people's brain and you see what happens to their brain, if they experience physical pain, then one part of the brain lights up. And it's the same part of the brain that lights up when people feel they don't belong. It's bloody painful to not belong. But we take shortcuts like that the whole time and don't ensure that.
We talk about diversity. Visually, it's diverse, but actually, are we encouraging the discussion? For me, this leadership aspect is this thing of trying to keep together what is by nature inclined to separate those and split up and separate those. There's a constant piece of work that needs to be done. And it never stops. You have to do it every day. You have to keep it together.
As a group, keep this sense of we are something together. Sort of the conclusion for me after having been in this game for many, many years. I spent the first 20 years actively running hospitality stuff in all sorts of shapes and forms and as a top manager. And then the last, since 2001, I've been doing what I do now, this consulting. And I can just see that the more and more
that I work on this, the more and more my business tends to gravitate towards this relationship stuff, trying to help people understand how they do that. And also, I think, very important, we have this sort of, we have a fatalistic approach to work relationships. You know, oh, It's a bad team. It's an irritating guy. I wasn't lucky. Thank God I can work a little bit more with the other group. No.
Take responsibility for your relationships. Ask yourself, what is my role in this relationship actually not being ideal? What could I change? Is there a different approach from me that would give a different response from them? Because it's not helpful not to have those strong relationships.
People talk about families and businesses and whatever, businesses and family, whatever about all of that, right? Because some of that is just smoke and mirrors and frankly garbage. Some of that is actually meaningful. But I think what you've just shared there is about your own perception. It's like, okay, you can't change your family.
So you can't change your family, you could change your friends, but you still need to get on with your fat. Well, some people might argue you don't. You still need to get on. So you've got to work at that relationship. So it's exactly that. It's take responsibility. Don't just throw it away because you can't be bothered.
The importance of having to work at it and see it as something that you need to work on, but then see the output that working on it will drive for you and for your business. I think that's such an important thing that I'm sure a lot of people on this podcast might be thinking or not thinking.
But Matt, it's not on my Outlook to-do list, that part. I can't see it anywhere.
There we go. And that is it, right? That's the final statement, but it's not on my Outlook to-do list. I can't see it anywhere. So if there is a lesson to, I mean, there's a lot of lessons in this, Mike, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Johnny and I today. Some really fantastic insight. And really, really appreciate you sharing.
I know our audience will love having listened to this podcast. So thank you for joining us. And I look forward to seeing more of your videos online or maybe in the not too distant future, maybe seeing you stand up in front of a live audience. So thanks again, Mike.
Thank you both. I've had fun and I really appreciate you accepting my rants.
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