Interview on the Biz Bytes Podcast
Recently, I’ve been invited to guest on the Biz Bytes Podcast and I wanted to share the interview here. In this podcast episode, I talked about:
✅ How to develop leaders in having those ‘hard’ conversations with their team?
✅ How to support leaders in leading their flex workers effectively?
✅ How to help leaders balance performance and wellbeing?
James
Welcome to Biz Bytes, brought to you by Comm Together. Helping businesses like yours build their brand through telling amazing stories to engage and grow audiences on multiple platforms. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of biz bites. I have an interesting guest with me here today that I'm going to get him to introduce himself, but we're having a bit of a laugh before we started the program because Cris meant to fill in a form to give me some information. And I thought it was really an intriguing answer that he'd given to a question that I'd asked and thought it was a dot, dot, dot. And it turns out now it was just a didn't quite get to finish the answer and accidentally hit send. But Cris, great to have you as part of the program. And as I do with all of my guests, ask you to formally introduce yourself and what you do.
Cris Popp
Hi, I'm Cris Popp. I specialize in organisations that have got hybrid workplaces and help them deal with this whole new world of flex work. How do you manage people that you can't see? How do you manage without micromanaging? How do you keep people enthused and excited? And a part of that is getting people to balance performance and wellbeing. How do I both help my team to perform, but look after the wellbeing at the same time? And I guess in that, a little bit about being authentic, because I think it's part of wellbeing. So yes, I did muck up the form.
James
Well, that's an authentic way to start, right? We know that it was actually you doing it. It's interesting, though. Personally, I've been using the word authentic for quite a number of years. It's become, I guess, trendier. I hate that term, but it's been used quite a bit in recent times. But I think it's always been particularly true for me because it's about uncovering the real people and really understanding them and allowing them to have a voice. What does what's authenticity mean to you in the context of what you do?
Cris Popp
You're much more generous than I am around authenticity. You've come to it from a really good way. The reason I like authenticity is because it actually takes resources to not be authentic. You got to pretend to be something you are or you aren't, and that takes up resources. I'm all about efficiency and productivity. I came to it from that, and it has got a bit exhausting. But it's a good topic at the moment because you might have seen all the states in Australia dealing with something called psychosocial hazards. All the states, and I know Victoria has just come out. New South Wales has come out, or about to. They're all the states are doing it. It's a national agreement where employers must ensure psychosocial safety in their workplace. Now, I can't remember the formal definition, but it means a workplace where it's safe for the whole person to turn up and where they can expect to go be themselves and go back to work without being demeaned or being sarcastic or anything like that. So the authentic piece means you can actually come and be who you really are, awards and all.
James
And it's so different, isn't it? I remember back when I was young and starting out, that the idea of anyone showing tattoos body art was just a complete no, no. These days, of course, it's become much more commonplace. I personally don't have any, but you see it happen all the time. I actually remember where that changed a little bit in the workplace. There's one person who worked as a supplier for my business, still does, and this was going back a long time, even before Comcast Together was established, and always saw him with long sleeves, never thought anything more about it. Most men wear long sleeves as a general rule to work throughout the year, so no big deal. There was an occasion where I saw him in short sleeves for the first time and realized that he had tattoos up his arm and everything, which is totally fine. But I remember thinking, I know how strategic it was for him to actually hide those in the workplace because when I first met him, I was working in a very corporate environment. And so that corporate environment, there's no way that would have been... Tolerated would be the wrong word, but it would have been frowned upon. And embracing our own individuality is such an important thing these days.
Cris Popp
Yeah, and not to have to be guarded about that piece of it. Look, the other way it might have started to creep in is that I did my thesis on innovation. I interviewed a bunch of venture capitalists about how do they choose good ventures? And the short answer is very badly. But just to cut a long story short, so one of the things that turns out, I did go to these organizations and they wanted to become more innovative. I used to run these surveys, and the surveys would ask the lower levels and the leaders, what's the main barrier to innovation? And the line staff would always say, My boss doesn't listen. The line staff, the leaders would always say, My line staff don't have any good ideas. But how does it come back into this? I can see what the problem is. How it comes back into this is that the part of being innovative is you want to be able to try experiments out and they'll go wrong. In fact, most of the time they go wrong and sometimes they'll succeed. And if it's not okay to do that, then you're not going to get much innovation.
And so you can see as organizations have tried to compete more, they they have wanted to be more innovative. And a part of being more innovative is letting people turn up and do and say things that may not be... I was going to say stupid things, but sometimes I can seem like, That's a strange way to do that, but give it a try. So I think that's probably some of the background to some of the organizational reasons why people may want to allow more authenticity. But all the reasons I gave before, it actually takes... It's a great bit of research that's done some years ago, and they were looking about empathetic and authentic leaders, and they found that when a leader hides something, you don't know what it is, but you feel slightly ill at ease. You feel slightly ill at ease, don't know what they're hiding. How it happens is, what they say won't be completely congruent with their body language. They'll say something like, Everything's okay, and Listeners, you can't see this, you're smiling. But what people will pick up unconsciously is that the corners of their eyes are a bit tight. They then see this incongruence, and they then pick that up, and they feel unsafe themselves.
They don't bring their health cells to work. You spend a bit of your time actually not thinking about the work, but other things. Can I give you a really good example of a bit of research that I've done about that?
The question you ask is, and some people are going to get offended, does being poor reduce your IQ? That's the question. Cris, you can't say things like that. Here's an experiment that was done. They set up a research station at a shopping mall. And as people came in, they said, Would you mind? We'd like to give you some cognitive puzzles to do, and you can have a crack at them. So they gave them, I don't know, math puzzles or other sorts of shape puzzles and things. They before they came, they had two different groups. So they said to each group before they started, Before you start, though, imagine that on the way here, you got a fine. It is a $1,000 fine. Now, please go ahead and do these puzzles. So they went ahead and did that. Then afterwards, they got the results. They found that people from a lower socioeconomic background did less well. Let me repeat that. If you were poor and you were told it's got a $1,000 fine, here, can you solve this problem? You couldn't solve it as well as others because a part of their brain is now worrying about the bill they've got to pay.
You got a part of their brain is doing that. So you can bring this back to insecure work and all sorts of things. You can fix back to how much a leader should share about the state of the business. But you can think about the authentic piece. If I have to wear a long sleeve shirt and hide that, then that's a bit of my brain thinking about, am I hiding this well enough? And that part of your creative activity, your thinking isn't available to do the work. And I think that's the heart of authenticity, that's part of why it actually is really useful in a business sense.
James
Yeah, I know we touched on in a previous episode of a podcast with another guest about how the previous practice has been basically to leave, and I can't remember the exact percentage, it's something like 80 plus % of you at the door that the old idea of when you come to work, you discard who you are normally and outside of life and you just focus on work. But in fact, that decreases our productivity. And I think it's really interesting because we've all been through phases in our lives where we're distracted by something that's happening in our personal life. And that can be good and bad things, but we've all had that at various times. I know last year, for example, I was selling my house. And as much as I try to prevent that from interfering with what I was doing at work because they are completely unrelated, the truth is they overlapped. And the truth is it was hugely distracting. The refer, so that's a really interesting example of how those sorts of things can have an impact on you. But you can also turn that around, right? And I think it's a matter of, as you say, I love the idea of making people feel at ease in the workplace.
One of the things that I've noticed, and my team hopefully will listen to this and back this up, is that we've done some things in our team meetings whereby we've spent some time talking about things that are happening in our personal life and usually things about dogs and learning to drive as a couple of my team members have been learning to do in recent times. And I should hasten to add, one much later in life, he's got kids and I think he hasn't driven for a long time and is now learning again. And so all of these things disarm a little bit and bring you back into the normalcy of saying, well, it's not just... We've not just got this fake relationship that's built on work only. There is something more to it.
Cris Popp
These are the things I try to talk to about people in the workplace when I do my sessions. And I guess in a way, it's normalizing psychology and workplaces. That thing you talked about, by the way, the being distracted by the house or some shock. I want to make two points about that. One was Gallup did some pretty interesting research around weekly check ins. I love formulas, right? I'm not a smart guy. I like to follow a formula. The formula for the weekly check in with your staff should be inquire about something about them as a person, whatever it happens to be, and then see if you can help them accomplish some work. But that comes first. I remember I was teaching a resilience this program, Victoria Police, and it was the Ethical Standards Division. These are the police, the report on police, part of the unpopular. You can imagine they lead it a lot of resilience. Anyway, as I went into the program, and I'm Melbourne AFL down here, and I don't watch a lot of footy, but I happened to watch the Richmond game. As I walked in, I said to this guy, There's a good Richmond game on Saturday night, and it was his team.
He he went from being fairly stiff, ethical standards, we're here to talk about resilience, and a whole lot of serious topics. We spent this five minute conversation talking about that, and then the whole rest of the session went much more easily. Because we'd had this this is lucky that I watched that game. And the rest of the conversation just flowed. Built trust and relationships. So people want to be seen as people.
James
Relatability is such an important element in how we manage the relationships. I know I look back on, for example, a client that I won several years ago now, and they had contacted me via the web. It was pretty much a cold contact. I did the usual thing that you might do and try and research who it is that you're going to be meeting with. I went on to LinkedIn and one particular person had, I think, the only real significant mutual contact that we had was someone that I actually knew very well as a friend. I rang him up and I said, How do you know such and such? He said, We worked together for 12 years and this and that and whatever else. Great. I said, I'm catching up with him. Is it okay if I say hi? He said, Yeah, sure. I walked in the door to this meeting not knowing these people and said to the person, I've got greetings from an old work colleague of yours. I was talking to him on the weekend and mentioned that I was catching up with you. How are you? Rapp it on like that. I was in from that moment.
It was fortunate that they've been long standing clients, in fact, interestingly enough, even that's transferred across long after he left that organization because he was employed there, not an owner. But I wanted to, before we delve into this a little bit more, what I would love to understand is what got you into this in the first place? Because where did this begin for you when you were, I guess, back in university days? What was the dream of wanting to study? And what was the journey that got you to where you are today?
Cris Popp
Well, before university days, which is when I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a cat burglar or a nuclear scientist.
James
Well, they're close really closely related, I can see that.
Cris Popp
I think there had been some crime in Europe where the claim was that the burglar had come into the bedroom of these people and taken the ring off their finger. And I just thought, Wow, in imagine being able to be that sneaky. And of course, being a boy back then, I loved the idea of blowing things up. Nuclear power. So that was where it started.
James
They're both power related, aren't they? One's just more obvious than the other, isn't it?
Cris Popp
Yeah. I worked as an ABC journalist. I was one of the first journalists into Vietnam after it in 1990, after it became more liberal. Then I wrote a novel, and then I did a writing course. I worked for one of the first internet directories in the world, which was called Look Smart. It happened to be based in Burke Street in Melbourne. I was lucky to get a job with them, which introduced me to this whole... That was in 1997 or '8. For the first time, I remember leaving the office one evening and looking around, and all these people were talking and talking, typing. I went, What are they doing? I said, Are they chatting to people on the other side of the world? I went, That's such a ridiculous idea. Why would you do that? From that, I went on to build the first tenders website for the Victorian government. But how I got into what I do now was, I did my innovation thesis, and one day I was running an innovation workshop, and I was standing at the front of the room, and we were trying to come up with a new name for something, and everyone was laughing, and I thought, This is great.
This is what I want to do. I was unlike a lot of you listeners, I was already 40 by then. I won't say the exact year. I just really liked that. It could be my unmet need as a child to get more attention, but that started this whole journey into facilitation which I love to run group sessions. It's probably one of my forte s. Then I finished off working at the department, and I was trying to start out as a facilitator. I had no idea about business, nothing much was happening. I was tutoring a bit. But I was also single. I read this article that said that people who smile or laugh more are considered more attractive. I thought, I know, I need to learn how to laugh more. I googled laughter as I do. At that moment, the founder of the world laughter movement, Madana Khetaria, was coming to Australia the following week, and he had this one day workshop at Melbourne Town Hall. I rocked up and did this workshop and thought, This is a bit of fun. This is all right. I got the training and I started a laughter club. It was a Saturday morning at 11.30. This is while I was still trying to build up the facilitation.
One day somebody rang me up and they said, Can you run a laughter session at our Christmas function? We'll pay you and give you lunch. I'm like, Yeah, I'm going to get to go along and laugh and get paid in a free lunch. I was a bit broke at the time. I did it. I've always been a bit of a self improvement junky. I started to do them and I started to talk about what makes people happy. I found that people were pretty interested in that topic. Then I started to talk about resilience, and then I started to talk about emotional agility and emotional intelligence. Then I got picked up by Melbourne Business School. I went from nothing to the number one provider of executive education in the Asia Pacific, as we proudly said. That's how I end up in the leadership space. But it was really from wanting to get a date and facilitating a room for people and everyone having a good time.
James
I love that. They can say there's no such thing as coincidences. There's a pre ordained plan for everything. But what a great story, too, of how it began. The single status has changed, I gather, since those days.
Cris Popp
But what I always say is it doesn't matter. I'm just not as happy about it. No, it has changed. So I would say, So you want to know if I got a date? I said, No, I didn't, but it didn't matter.
James
So you were happy either way, right?
Cris Popp
Yeah, happier.
James
It's interesting. I love the... For myself, having worked in the media for a lot of years before I got into what I'm doing. That would have been a fascinating time going into Vietnam and seeing the people that were there. I wonder as well on the happiness scale, how they rated at that time because there would have been a huge sense of relief with things opening up and changing in the country?
Cris Popp
I don't know. I always thought that... I'll just be careful of my comments. Let me just relate the story, perhaps. When we went, we had to have it. We had a government minor that drove us from the airport to the hotel. We went to the middle of Dun Ang, and it was where the big battles were. When the Vietnamese almost took back the country, I think it was in '68. Forget what it's called. What's the New Year's thing called in Vietnam? The Tet Offensive, right? Yeah. So the Tet Offensive started there. Anyway, one day we escaped the mine, and we went to play, we had a look, and we decided not to catch the train back. We decided to catch the back of a truck. So we jumped on the back of this truck, and the truck pulled up at a service station to fill up. A driver got out, he filled up, and then he gave some money. The woman who served him looked like a grandmother. She looked like she was 78 or 80, and she had the hat on and all clothes. He jumped back into the bus really quickly into the truck after he'd given her the money.
Quick as a flash, she pulled this knife out of his sleeve, which was about 10 inches long. Then he laughed and gave her the rest of the money. That was my ... They were certainly very sharp and onto what happened. But again, I found people in the countryside really just very friendly and lovely and something to talk French. But I think really my experience of some of the Vietnamese migrants that have come here, that came in '75, tremendously hard workers, and totally on the ball. The second generation migrants that are always so focused on... And I've got a friend of mine, where her family's come since '75, it's amazing. I don't know, happy, but certainly ambitious and hard working.
James
I know we talk about no such thing as coincidences, but I didn't obviously know your history of having gone into Vietnam before we started this. This morning, completely randomly, I was with my daughter, and she's got Google in her room. I thought just as a joke, I said, Hey Google, completely randomly play Good Morning Vietnam by Robin Williams. Of course, it started with the, and I won't try and do it, the Good Morning Vietnam and the bit about denying me as well. And so it's just so, it's spooky because I really have not watched or paid attention to Good Morning Vietnam for the longest time. No idea why it popped into my head this morning. It did play that little 30 second bit, and here we are talking about it. So the universe works in strange and marvelous ways at times, doesn't it?
Cris Popp
You're prescient. You saw the future.
James
Yeah, maybe. And I wanted to much on as well, innovation. And you spoke about it earlier on, the difference between people's perception as a worker and boss's perception in that space and having that freedom to try things out. Like you, I facilitated a few sessions around the idea of innovation, particularly in the communications and marketing space. And it's interesting how many times I've watched bosses shut down what actually are good ideas. Often it's because it's not their idea. I'm wondering about that with you because I know you joked about the fact that the bosses will say that they weren't good ideas. But the truth is often that if it's not their idea, often they can feel that their ego gets in the way. They'll never admit it, but the ego gets in the way of actually accepting the fact that this could actually be worth pursuing.
Cris Popp
What's happening often is they're moving, or it could be also that that's unfeasible, or we tried that, or this is going to be too expensive, our customers won't like it. They're moving from the ideation stage, idea creation, to the evaluation stage. We tend to jump straight into that. You've actually got to sit for a while with these ideas that might be uncomfortable because the idea that someone's thrown up may not be the right one, but maybe something else will. And so it is ego. It's going to be, Was it my idea? It could be getting out of control. But there's a bigger concept which maybe brings us back to the thread of this whole discussion around leadership is, as a leader, do you see yourself as the coach and the grower of your people, in which your role is to come along and help them to thrive? Or do you see yourself as the maker and the doer and they help you? So if you see yourself as the coach, the grower, the person who's creating this rich bed for ideas, then it's going to be okay for people to go off because on these tangent, because part of what you're doing is giving them the opportunity to be more creative, to be themselves.
If you're seeing yourself as, I must keep this under control, and you are in charge of the outcomes, but I've always got to decide how they're achieved, then it's going to be uncomfortable when people go off the thread like that. I did a workshop once, and it was an innovation workshop. I had about five or six people, and the EA, to the big honcho, wanted to come along to it. So that was fine, they came along. The other people are getting into it, did some playful acting around it, and we relaxed and we started to come up with these ideas. I used a lot of Edward De Bono techniques around it. Your viewers can't see this, but if you're at home listening, just now screw up your nose like you've got a bad smell, right? Just scrub your nose. Anthony can see what I'm doing. That's all they had to do. People started to shut up and clam up, and he's got, Oh, that's stupid. It just completely shut the thing down. As a participant, not in that one, once said to me, you might have to cut this word out. She said, No one wants to be the poo in the pool.
You know how we all run from that? So no one wants to be the poo in the pool. So I'm not going to throw up an idea if you're going to single me out and really kill my idea. Again, we're coming back to concepts and psychological safety and things like that, aren't we?
James
And there's nothing worse than the eye roll as well, where people are doing that and thinking, Oh, they're saying, Oh, we're not saying anything. We didn't say anything wrong. But you can see the eyes rolling and you think, Well, they've really shut this down without even saying a word. I think having that freedom, and I know certainly as I've done things in workplaces is saying, going in with an attitude that we're going to adopt one or two ideas unless they're absolutely horrific. We're going to adopt one or two ideas and give them a crack and give them a crack for a concerted period of time. Because it's also, if something doesn't deliver results in 24 hours, you don't shut it down. But there's nothing worse than, and again, I've been privy to some of these sessions in the past where you've been in a workplace whereby the ideas are shut down before they've even begun and you're sitting there thinking, Why am I even here? It's going in with an openness and a shared sense of ownership. And that's often difficult to do in a business. Nonprofit profits can do it a little bit easier because there's a shared sense of ownership of the organization.
But even then, I've been in environments where CEOs have shut things down and not realized it. It's a difficult thing to do. And credit to you for being able to pull those things off. I wanted to ask you one final question before we have to, unfortunately, end the discussion. What do you see as being the hah moment that people have when they can't start coming to work with you? And in many respects, that's that moment that you would love people to get beforehand. So they're lining up to go and say, We need to talk to Chris.
Cris Popp
So one of the things that people hate most, even more than death? Everyone is public speaking, right? So let's move down from people in general to leaders. I think the most hated task, and there's some research around this, of a leaders is having hard conversations, having performance conversations. And what people find really difficult is to give accurate and warm feedback that is still strong. So there's a great model in HPR around that leaders should show both warmth and strength. And you need to show the warmth first and the strength afterwards. And you're really not helping anybody by not giving them great feedback, focusing on what they do well most of the time, but also when they get things wrong and talking and there's particular ways you should give the feedback, but that's not the aha moment. So what happens is leaders don't have those conversations. This is particularly the case in hybrid environments and with flex workplaces. So it's harder to see people. You can't give quick feedback the whole way along. So I call these the Rumble strips. You can't give little check ins to make sure people are on course. A Rumble strip is that strip you hit on the side of the highway when you're driving, and your car starts to veer off.
Now, in an office environment, you can just go, Hang on, Sarah, you're still working on that. Look, I'd imagine it for that to take half an hour. I can see it's taking longer. You're just probably doing it a bit better than I need you to do it. You can't do that because they're working remotely, so you can't do that. So you can't give those little bits of feedback. And leaders found it difficult enough to give feedback in the real environment, but in the virtual environment, it becomes even harder. So they don't do it. And then the problem gets balanced up to HR. They go, Sam comes along and goes, My team, they don't do this, they don't do that. What did I hear the other day? I can't get my team to come to a meeting and drill down to it a bit. Why not? This person is a leader, we're trying to get them all along, and she finally got a time on Wednesday at 2 30, and one of the team members said, I'm getting the fridge delivered. Now, back in the day, you would get the fridge delivered in the morning, the afternoon.
So she needed to have a hard conversation around, You can have flex work, but when there's a team meeting, you need to come. So it gets balanced up and HR gets then swamped with all of the stuff. And the aha moment is when I teach their people a script to use for the feedback. It's a script that is non judgmental. It's clear, it's accurate, it's digestible. And the other part of the script is a lot of training like that says, I need to make my leaders more confident around having these hard conversations. To which I say, Bollocks. Confidence comes after you've done the thing. You don't need to be more confident. And if you wait to be more confident, it's going to take a really long time. Here's the script. Whether you're confident or not, just go in, have the conversation, follow the script. And the first time a couple of the leaders that the managing do this and come back and they've had the challenging conversation, the HR manager is like, Ah, now I can get back to doing my real work instead of putting out all these fires. So the AHA conversation is when people take on those conversations and have those courageous conversations.
James
I love that. And you've hit on so many different aspects of what I think is a common thing these days. And the need to have hard conversations, but dealing in remote environments as well as those where they're in person, it's a more difficult landscape these days than what we've had in the past. And people like you making a huge impact on changing that making life easier for, as you say, for HR people, but also for people in general and leaders. Chris, you've been an amazing guest. I really appreciate the time that you've given us. Thank you so much. Thank us on quite a journey.
Cris Popp
You're very welcome, Matthew. I was going to say, if any of our listeners are out there and they get in touch, I'll happily share the brief script with them and they can try it out themselves. But yeah, it's been great to talk to you.
James
Fantastic. And yes, we do, as with all of our shows, we do have some show notes that will come, particularly on the website, everyone. So if you are listening to us on the standard platform, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, and Google, then please also go through and check out the website where we've got dedicated pages on each of our guests and links to how to get in touch with them, including some of the special offers that they bring. So we will be sure to include those details of how to get in contact with Chris there. Thank you so much again, Chris, for being a great guest on the program, and we will look forward, everyone, to having you company on the next episode of biz bites. Biz bites is brought to you by Comm together for all your marketing needs. So you can build your brand, engage audiences on multiple platforms. Go to commtogether. Com. Au. Follow the links to book an appointment for a free consultation.
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