In this throwback episode of the Made For More Podcast, Ally Nitschke sits down with communication and leadership expert Mel Kettle to explore why the fundamentals of communication remain just as important today as they have always been.

While technology continues to change the way we communicate, the principles of effective leadership communication remain remarkably consistent: delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, in the right way.

Together, Ally and Mel unpack the growing challenge of connection in hybrid workplaces, the importance of self-awareness, and why strong relationships remain one of the most valuable assets any leader can build.

If you're leading people, influencing stakeholders, or trying to create stronger workplace cultures, this conversation offers practical insights that are as relevant today as ever.

Timestamps

[00:02:32] Connection and communication in leadership.

[00:06:01] Communication skills in diverse settings.

[00:09:15] Communication fundamentals in leadership.

[00:11:10] Communication challenges in modern times.

[00:16:17] Self-awareness through reflection.

[00:19:03] Disconnection and craving connection.

[00:22:13] Compelling reasons to meet.

[00:26:11] New leader tips for success.

[00:28:20] Communicating with conviction.

Connect with Ally Nitschke

Madeformore.com.au

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Connect with me on Instagram and Facebook.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Connect with Mel Kettle

melkettle.com

Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Connect with her on Instagram.

Hello and welcome to today's episode of

the Made for More podcast. Our guest

today is an internationally recognized expert at Fully Connected

Leadership and Communication. She's a trusted mentor

to executives and leaders and a highly sought after speaker

and trainer. Her clients include associations, non-profits

and governments, as well as iconic brands such as Blue Scope,

Westpac, Toll and Microsoft. You may have seen

her featured in Smart Company, This Working Life, The Saturday Paper,

Blue Sky News, ABC Radio and CEO World

Magazine. Known for helping leaders and teams achieve

real connection and sustained engagement, she is also

passionate about encouraging organisations to talk about menopause

in the workplace. Mel has twice in

2022 and 2023 been recognised by

Leaders Hum as one of the top 200 biggest voices

in leadership globally, one of only seven Australians

on the list. She's also the host of the podcast Disconnected Life

and author of two books, the best-selling Fully Connected and

Social Association. I'm very excited to

welcome Mel Kettle. Welcome to the Made For

More podcast. I'll

be sharing my experiences along with some actionable advice to

take your leadership to the next level. Introducing your host. It's

me, Ali Nitchke. I'm a leadership and courageous conversations expert

and a teller lover, a mother of four young boys, a wife and

a dance floor junkie. I'm here to give you the motivation you need to

level up, lead yourself, lead your team and your business. Let's

go. Hello,

and welcome to today's episode of the Made For More podcast.

I'm very excited to be joined by our special guest

Oh, thanks so much, Ali. It's great to see you and to have this chance

It has been ages. I'm very excited to have you on the show. We're going to

be talking about some of both of our passion projects and

favorite topics all around connection, communication, and

of course, the very hot topic right now of boundaries.

But before we get into all of that, can you give a

Where did I come from? That's a really interesting question. I

grew up on the New South Wales central coast near Gosford, lived

in a lot of different places before moving there when I was eight. I

won't bore you with all the details. These days I live in

Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast and I work as a leadership communications

specialist. helping teams, leaders and teams communicate so

they create real connection and sustained engagement. And I

guess I started off in that with an interesting connection

and engagement when I was in high school, and I really wanted to be

a Rotary Exchange student. And I was very shy, very

introverted, and so my application was rejected the

first time around. Fortunately, they had a dropout, love

this guy forever, and I got a second chance, and I

had been warned that if I didn't show

more of my personality and talk to more people, then I wouldn't get accepted.

And so that was when I realized that you had to sometimes push

yourself out of your comfort zone and, you know,

really make an effort with getting to know people if you wanted to

So I went to Canada. I went to a little town called Brandon, Manitoba, which

is smack bang in the middle of the country, 100 kilometers north

of the US border. And the day that I arrived, it

was a balmy minus 11 and it was 35 degrees

the day that I left Gosford. And about a week later, it was minus

40 and it stayed at minus 40 for quite a while. So it was definitely a

No, thank you. I hate being cold. So that was your little foray into

understanding about communication. But you and I've had a

conversation about this over dinner. Tell me a little bit more about your eclectic background

So my first job when I was in my

first year of uni, I might have even been in high school. Anyway, my first job

was helping out at my dad's company. He worked for a

traffic management consultancy and as a town planner, and

they were doing some traffic management studies and snowy mountains in

New South Wales. And so I was hired to go down and stay

in this amazing house in Jindabyne for 10 days and stand

at the gate to the ski patrol or the ski tube

with a clicker and count how many people got onto the ski tube. And

then somebody else was counting how many cars there were. And

the good thing about this whole thing is the weather was absolutely atrocious.

And so they called off the study. I think we did two days

between all of us. And so I spent 10 days

in this amazing house with a spa and a sauna and

And you thought, like, this is living. I've made it from a career

So good. So how do you think then did you get into talking

about, you know, some of your topics around connection and communication, working

Very early in my career after my traffic management clicking, I

was a conference organizer and that really

taught me the benefit and the value in having solid relationships

and being able to communicate with influence and with impact.

And watching some of these amazing speakers and

some very mediocre speakers get paid a lot of money made me

realize that there was just so much opportunity

in this space. From that job, I went and worked, I

moved to Queensland. I was the marketing manager of the Brisbane Festival where

I worked with massive number of stakeholders. And again,

a whole range of different communication skills from performing artists

through to the guys that loaded the soundstage. And

from there, I went into work with government. I worked for the Office of Fair

Trading for quite a few years. And when I first joined

the office, we had a hundred pieces of legislation that we

had to communicate. to business and consumers in

Queensland. And not only did we have 100 pieces of legislation,

but every legislation was related to a completely different

stakeholder group. And so I learned really quickly that

if I couldn't communicate either verbally or in

writing or through body language or

through other means, then we weren't going to get our messages across.

And particularly because we had a really tiny budget to do this. And

so we had to be clever and we had to be creative. And so it

It's amazing, isn't it? So I often will speak to leaders around communication

agility. So their ability to flex depending on the audience. And

it sounds like you did that a lot with the verbal communication, written

communication, you said you had a tiny budget and had to be creative. What's

your favorite creative way that you helped push

The main thing that we did was we used our stakeholders. So

we used the industry associations that represented the stakeholder group

that had the most to gain and lose from the

legislation not being correctly interpreted. And so we

use them. So when we developed a communication strategy

around the revamp of the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act,

we worked really closely with the RACQ and with the Real Estate

Industry Association of Queensland and with other

government departments because they had mailing lists that we did. And,

you know, this was also in my

event management days were in the 90s and my time in

Queensland government was in the early 2000s. And so the

internet was very fledgling and social media didn't

exist. So in quite a few of those good old days. Yeah. So

in quite a few of those jobs, we, I had to develop the first website for

these organizations and for these projects. And so I also got

really, really good at telling people why we needed this

website, this newfangled thing, um, and why we

needed email, which was never going to last by the way, little missy

email won't last is what one of my clients told me. I

would love to go back to him now and say, when was the last time you went to

So it was just understanding people's pain

points and then working out how do you address them in a way that

makes them believe that they had the idea. I'm

That's fantastic. And so tell me a little bit around how that transitions now

to the leaders that you work with. Obviously, social media has

become its own communication mode and model in its own right.

If we talk about some of the Gen Z that are now entering the workforce, they

don't know a world without social media. In fact, that's probably their

main form of communication. How does what you learned back

So I really think that while the tools that we use

to communicate have changed and evolved, the

fundamentals of communication have not. If you aren't communicating the

right message to the right person at the right time and

in the right way, using the right platform, then they're never going to

get that message. And so communication hasn't actually occurred. You've

just been broadcasting. And so the number one thing I teach my

clients is to work out who do they need to

engage with and who do they need to influence? And what is it

they know about those people or those groups of people? And

in terms of where do they go to get information? What platforms are

the first places they go for the kind of

information that you're imparting? And sometimes it's

social media and sometimes it's billboards and sometimes it's

having a conversation and picking up the phone. And

then what are the platforms and the ways that you communicate so that

you have the biggest impact? And it's really different for

a CEO who's new in an organization to

say a CEO who's been promoted from within. They've got

different kinds of ways to communicate to get their message out

because one of them's new to the organization and one of them might've been there

for 20 years. And so then you look at what

are the kinds of relationships you want to have and how

do you develop those relationships as quickly as

Absolutely. And I think you've hit the nail on the head there when it comes to going, how

do we get the right message out to the right people? And also what's the perspective that

they're coming from, i.e. your CEOs, but also what's the perspective of

it's going to be delivered. What do you think are some of the biggest stumbling blocks when it

comes to communication these days? I mean, you and I have both

built our businesses and our profession around helping leaders

Everybody thinks they're a communicator is probably the first reason.

And everybody can speak and everybody can have a voice. But

just because you can speak and have a voice doesn't mean you're actually communicating

your message, because communicating is not

the giving of the message. It's the receiving of the message and the action that

comes after. And that's what most people forget. And

the number of times I've had clients say to me, and I'm sure you have as well,

Allie, but I've emailed them, but I've communicated because

Yeah. Did they read it? Did they read it and interpret it in

Let alone, did they open it or did they just ignore it because they,

like most people, get hundreds of emails a day. And

what about, you know, My husband works for a

supermarket in, um, driving a truck. And

so he doesn't even have a work email account. And so he's actually,

he might, but I don't know if he knows what it is. Um, so

somebody saying to him, I emailed you just like, well, I've been

in the truck for the last eight hours. So when do you expect me

to log in and look not while I'm driving, surely.

Yeah, safety, safety first. Do not, do not recheck your emails while you're driving

people. Um, but yeah, and, and again, I think that really comes back

to being like aware of the audience and what they're sort of doing and audience, whether

it's audiences, your team or audience who are your customers, or whether

it's audience for sort of a broader network and going, okay, well, how

are people actually going to receive this? And maybe it's not one

platform or one way it's going, how do we, how do we do a capture role

and make sure everyone is getting that? But more importantly, how do we know that they know?

Yeah. And I think the other thing just to back to your original question is

often how are you perceived by other people? So

if you're trying to build relationships with people, do they perceive

you in the same way that you believe you

are being perceived? So, and that comes back to how self-aware are

you? Do you have a level of self-awareness that

matches what other people think of you or do you not?

And while most people would say they have a high level of

Yes. Have you got any tips? I know we're going to get to tips later, but have you got

any, cause that's a big piece of it, right? Going the people that think they're

self-aware often are not, and then they're blindsided or there's a

sort of a surprise event that happens. They're like, Oh, I had no idea. Have

you got any, how do you think people become self-aware or

how do they measure their self-awareness? If they're going, Oh, I don't know which camp

Becoming more self-aware is really hard because

it can be really confronting to do the evaluation

and the reflection and to give yourself permission to have difficult

thoughts about your behaviour. One of the ways that

you can, if you do want to become more self-aware or if you want

to evaluate how self-aware you might

be, then you need to think about how do you ask

more questions and have more curiosity. And some

of those questions might be asking people how they see

you, asking people for two or three words that they might use

to describe you and see whether those words fit in with how you

would describe yourself. But also being curious around

your own thoughts and actions or behaviours. And if somebody is

surprised or offended by something that you say, or if

you have a really intense reaction, positive or

negative, to something that happens to you or that somebody says

to you, then show some curiosity and ask yourself, why am

I feeling this way? And then the second thing is listen,

listen to other people and listen to yourself. And I know there's

been a lot of times where I've said something and then just gone,

oh my God, how did those words come out of my mouth? And when

you do that, that's a good opportunity for you to look back later and

go, why did I say that? Did I mean it or was it just not

thinking? And if it wasn't thinking, how often do I do that? And

what's the impact of that? And how would that change

or impact on the other person's perception of who I

am? Do they now think I'm an idiot or do they think, oh, she's just

I've not heard anyone else say that. I say that as well. Whoops, had a brain fart. Oh,

I love it. I love it.

And I think, you know, introspection is so difficult and we often don't

do it until it comes to, in the corporate world specifically, until it comes to

you know, 360 degree feedback or reviews. And we go, Oh, that

was unexpected. Yes. Or if we have some kind of, you

know, sort of life crisis, we'll really have to dig deep. And I was speaking to

someone yesterday and they're like, do some navel gazing and I was like, do

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm not sure about you for your own practices, but

a big part of my sort of weekly cadence is reflection

on going to how to How did things go? What happened? How am I feeling? How

did I respond? Was that the best possible way or what can we do better? Do

you have a practice for your own, I guess, continual development around

I do. And I do exactly what you've just articulated, but

I also do a lot of, like, I read a lot of business books. and

I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies and I read a lot of

novels and I look at the characterisation that

comes through in all of these books and I think,

what did I learn from that? And particularly when I'm

reading a novel, I think, why do I have this sense of discomfort? Because

that character did that thing. Oh, wow. And

some books I've just like, oh, I'm not, I don't have the brain space

to sit in this discomfort. I'm just going to ditch that book and return

it. It's not for me. But sometimes I'm like, oh,

I think I've got that discomfort because I found myself in that situation or

I'd hate to be in that situation or I've, you know, or I can imagine myself

and I don't think I'd react that way. But deep down, maybe I really would.

And so that can be really giving,

that can be another helpful way of just working out what

Yeah. Which comes back to the third thing that you can do to

become more self-aware. So you can ask questions, you can listen and

you can observe. And so observe behaviors and

actions of other people, but also observe your own. And

so observe, you know, when things don't

quite go right, if you get, for example, if the

hairs on your neck suddenly stand up because of something and you've

observed that, it's hard not to, or your spidey senses start

tingling, then why? What is it that has

caused that to happen to you? You've observed this feeling. Now start

asking some questions around why is this happening? Because it

always happens for a reason. And good leaders know how to

interpret those feelings. It's like the gut instinct. It's

that third thing. You've got your heart, you've got your head and you've got your gut. And

Yeah. I think we're conditioned right to make sensible decisions.

logical decisions, whereas in actual fact sometimes we

need to make less sensible or less logical

decisions and go with what actually feels right in this instance as

well. You've mentioned a few times around building relationships,

whether it was with your stakeholders from that government project or

whether it's around helping leaders build that about that relationship,

and I'm assuming by relationship, you're meaning connection. How do you think

the importance and understanding of connection has sort of become a

little bit more front of mind, particularly over the last couple of years, I've

noticed it. You and I have talked about this before, but what do you think, what

are you seeing now when it comes to connection and placing the importance on

I'm seeing actually I'm seeing a lot of disconnection and

disengagement. And I think one of the reasons for that is because we spend so

much time on our phones and staring at a screen that we forget

to actually pick up the phone and make a telephone call to

talk to people. And as much as I love hybrid

work and working remotely, there's nothing, you don't get

the same impact when you're having a conversation with somebody through a screen

as you do when you're in the same room, particularly because

you can only see a part of them. So, you know, we're looking at each other through

Zoom at the moment and we can really only see each other sort of from the

shoulders up. And so there's a lot of things that you can learn

from somebody about what makes them comfortable or uncomfortable,

for example, when you're in the same room as them, because you

can see how close do they stand to you? What is their body language?

Are they twitching? Are they a leg, a foot tapper? Do

they bite their nails? All of those things show you

something about somebody's personality and behavior that can be

really insightful when it comes to building

Yeah, I love that. And why do you think there's

a bit more of an emphasis on it now? Because I agree. I think there's

a lot of disconnection. I think there's sort of, we've got to a point now where

we can literally be checked out and there is hybrid work and

there's teams that are working remotely around the world and

have been for a number of years. What I'm seeing, and you tell me if you

either agree or disagree, is that people are almost craving connection now.

I fingers crossed, hope at some stage there's going to be some kind of social media blackout

and we all have to, you know, leave, leave the house or leave the office and actually

go and interact. It's like

there's new, new social platforms coming out every day. But I do

wonder where, where this craving for connection has

come from. For me, it seems like it's sort of popped up this year where

we're talking, oh yeah, you know, we know that we get more things done in a

room. We know the power of bringing people together for

meetings or for conferences or conventions and that type of thing. but

Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I look at, I

look, but however, having said that, I think the people who seek it

out are the people who realise that's what was missing. So I

went to, I'm a member of the Caloundra Chamber of Commerce, and

once a month they do a coffee morning on a Friday morning, and

it's very informal. And the last, I don't know, eight

or nine have been sold out. So when I first joined, they

never sold out. You could just rock up and get a spot on

the day. But probably all of the ones this year and

the last couple of last year, they were so oversubscribed because

people are realizing that it's a good opportunity to get out and meet

people. in a very non-threatening environment. And

even this morning, I got home and they

go from eight to nine. I got home at quarter past 10 this morning because I

was just having these great conversations with people and none of

us needed to leave. And so we didn't. And I'm

seeing that with conferences that I'm going to, with other events that I'm

attending, there's just so many people turning up. However,

I'm not so much seeing it in terms of people going back

into the office for my client. And some

of the conversations I'm having with my clients is how can they be encouraging

people to come back in. And they have to, if

you really want your people to come in on a regular basis, you need

to give them a reason to. And if they're going in and

they're just going to spend the whole day on Zoom meetings, that is not a reason because

they can do that at home. So you need to have a reason to bring people together.

Last week, one of my clients, I ran a workshop in Brisbane in

person for a client, and one of the women who came,

was on annual leave because she'd moved house the day before. And

she said, I was determined to be there because I was determined to

be in the same room as my team, who I only get to see all

of them once or twice a year because they're all around up

and down the east coast of Australia. And I thought, yeah, that's what

organizations need to do. They need to give people a compelling

reason so that they can't say no. They don't

want to say no because they'll have too much FOMO if they do.

Yes, or bit kicking a bit of foam I always think

i'm a bit of peer pressures good. yeah. It is. It

is a bit of peer pressure gently and kindly, of course, but for all the right

reasons, but yeah I love that so what's the compelling reason

Yeah. And it might be, you know, maybe you have to put on a lunch once

a month or once a week and get a good chef

in or get, you know, good catering. The money is

worth it because you'll get, you know, ideas and

and, you know, encourage people to have conversations and

to meet different people. One of my clients, however, they

do a lot of work with new graduates and they're finding

it really difficult to persuade new graduates to go into

the office. particularly the ones

who have done all of their university and some of their schooling online

because of COVID. And so they don't see the point because they've managed to

get through the last three years without having to leave their house or out of

get out of their pajamas in some cases, I'm sure. And

so they are really struggling and they they're

trying to work out how do we attract the right people and

at the same in a competitive market and at the same time tell

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for some of them, and I think even if we

talk about social interaction and your ability to have conversations,

I know I'm an extrovert. I love talking to people. I love

meeting people. I'm someone who enjoys conversing and talk

about, talk about talking and talk about communication. Um, for

a living, but I know certainly when I came back from Matt leaves, so having sort

of like a year. Isolated with a tiny person. And whilst

it was very, very fulfilling and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to

do that. I noticed certainly returning to the office back in my corporate days,

I could not string a sentence together. I couldn't make eye contact. with

people and I had lost my ability to converse and I

had to really actively try to re-engage myself to

be able to have those conversations. And I can only imagine for particularly new graduates

who don't even have a baseline to go, Oh, here's how it used to be versus now

and learning a whole new skill that is in some instances quite vulnerable.

And also realizing that so much of when

you start a new job, so much of the way that you learn is through

osmosis and through being in the office and through asking,

listening and observing. And you can still ask and listen through a

screen, but you can't observe how somebody does their job. And

you can't, and you even, you're hindered because you don't get to listen

in on all of the phone conversations or all of the conversations, the

From people walking past your desk or when you go to the loo or when you go

to the tea room or when you go to the cafe downstairs to get a coffee. Yeah.

It's all of these things that provide opportunity

that if you've never experienced it, how would you know that?

And so as employers, how do they encourage

people to come in and share that that's the

experience that they get when they're in a workplace that

I mean, let's get into the culture. No, we'll save that for another, we'll save that for

episode point two. So

just on the topic of, I guess, some of those new grads coming in,

what would be your tips that you either wish you knew when

you were a new leader or that you potentially pass on to pave

Oh, look, my top five, my number one, and we haven't even talked

Know what's going on in your body and your mind. And, you

know, if you haven't had a doctor's appointment in a year, then maybe go

and have one. If you haven't had all the usual bits checked out,

you know, your hearing, your sight, your skin checks, your

cholesterol check, your blood test, you know, mammograms, prostate, all those

fun things, depending on, you know, your age and your gender, get

it looked at. because a little thing going wrong can derail a

career really quickly. Especially if it's not caught in

time. The second thing I think is don't burn bridges. When

you leave an organization, leave on the best terms possible.

Even if you hate every second of working there, be gracious in

departure because the world is a very small place and

you never know when an opportunity will come from

somebody who you have previously worked with. Um, the third thing

I think is have really clear boundaries in place, know

your values, know your priorities and know when you're prepared

to open the gate for a boundary to be, you know,

tweaked slightly. Um, and off the back of that, remember

that the way that you start a new job is the way that

people will expect you to continue. And so if you start a

new job and you work late every night, they will expect that you will do that

forever. But if you start a new job and you leave on time every

So I tried to learn that in my first job. Is that three? I think

So you've got to look after your health, don't burn bridges, have

really clear boundaries and start as you continue, start as

And then the last one is learn how to communicate with conviction so

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Absolutely. Brilliant. Thank you so

much, Mel, for sharing this, we could probably go on for hours. So we'll

talk. We'll talk about next topics and we will stop and

just continue this offline. But for those people that want

So you can find out more about me through my website, melkettle.com. And

I spend quite a bit of time on LinkedIn, Instagram, and

I've just joined Threads. So we'll see how

that compares to Twitter. I do love Twitter. So yeah, any

of those places, or you're welcome to just shoot me an email, hello at

Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks

for sharing your expertise on our series of Leadership Your

Way. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Ellie. All right. Thank you so much for

joining me today. If you enjoyed this episode on the Made For More

podcast, please make sure you subscribe to receive future

episodes. And of course, five-star reviews are always

welcome on the Apple podcast. If you'd like a copy of

the show notes or any of the links mentioned today, check out

madeformore.com.au forward

slash podcast. And of course, if we aren't connected already,

you can find me in all the usual places. Ali Nitschke on

LinkedIn, ali.madeformore on Facebook

and Instagram. I hope you have an awesome week and