In this reflective and practical episode of the Big Careers, Small Children podcast, Leaders Plus Interim COO Helen Fraser speaks with Rupert Brown, author of Lost in Transformation and Leaders Plus Senior Leader Mentor.

Rupert has spent much of his career leading people change in multinational organisations, including international assignments in Switzerland, Singapore, Denmark and Dubai, while raising two children abroad. He shares what he has learned about making big career decisions when family needs change, leading transformation with more humanity, and staying honest with yourself in the middle of corporate upheaval.

Drawing on his experience working with people and culture, he shares the moment his teenagers asked why the family was “doing lockdown in the desert,” the family’s return to the UK, and how the sudden death of his father and his employer’s response reshaped his view of leadership and empathy.

Together, they explore

✔️ How Rupert and his family navigated multiple international moves, and why their teenagers’ voices were central to the decision to come back to the UK for more stability.

✔️ What really happens to family life and career confidence when work and location decisions stop being “just” the parents’ choices.

✔️ Why he believes many corporate change programmes ignore basic psychology and the lived experience of the people affected, and what drew him to write Lost in Transformation.

✔️ Rupert’s PIE model: performance, image and exposure, and why hard work alone is rarely enough for progression, especially for working parents with limited time.

✔️ What the death of his father taught him about principle based policies, bereavement leave, and the quiet power of simple, human responses from leaders in moments of grief.

What you’ll learn in this episode

🔹 Ways to think through big career and location choices when your children start expressing their own clear preferences.

🔹 Practical ideas for building “spacious” relationships at work that help you stay resourceful and honest under pressure.

🔹 How leaders can respond to loss and difficulty with empathy rather than hiding behind rigid policies or avoiding uncomfortable conversations.

🔹 Questions to ask yourself if you are involved in leading change, so that you do change with people rather than doing change to them.

Show Notes:

• Connect with Rupert Brown on LinkedIn
• Find Rupert Brown’s book Lost in Transformation on Amazon
• Learn more about the Leaders Plus: Big Careers, Small Children podcast and explore additional resources at leadersplus.org.
• Follow Leaders Plus on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Bluesky.
• Connect with Helen Fraser on LinkedIn.
• Connect with our CEO, Verena Hefti MBE on LinkedIn.
• Find out more about the work of Leaders Plus by signing up to our Newsletter.

Our multi-award-winning Leaders Plus Fellowships support parents committed to career growth while enjoying family life. Expertly designed to keep parents on the leadership path, our programme tackles gender pay gap issues and empowers parents to thrive. Learn more here: Leaders Plus Fellowship.

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Episode 212: [Future Of Work] Dominic Holmes – How Flexible Working Will Redefine Success and Efficiency at Work

Welcome to the Big Careers Small Children Podcast. My name is Verena Hefti. I believe that no one should have to choose between becoming a CEO and enjoying their young children for much too long.

Amazing people like I'm sure you listening right now have found themselves stuck on the career ladder when they have children. And that leads to gender inequality in senior leadership because those people don't progress to senior leadership.

And the same stale, often male, middle class people leading our organizations. We must change this together.

And I hope that many of you listening right now will progress to the most senior leadership roles that you like, where you can make the decisions that make our world a better place. Outside of the podcast. I am the CEO and founder of the social enterprise Leaders Plus.

We exist to help working parents progress their careers to senior leadership in a way that works for you and for your families.

We have free events and resources on leadersplus.org where you can download helpful toolkits such as on returning from maternity leave, share parental leave, securing a promotion, dealing with workload challenges, or managing as a dual career couple.

We also have an award winning fellowship community which is global for working parents who have big dreams for their careers but don't want to sacrifice their family. You'll join an absolutely wonderful group of people, a very tight knit, supportive group of parents who have your back together.

You'll explore what your career aspirations are and you'll get advice from senior leaders who are also working parents about how to achieve those aspirations. You'll get new ideas to combine your hopes for your careers with your hope for your family.

And you are supported by people who are experiencing what you're experiencing yourself.

I'm really delighted that a larger majority of our fellows have made tangible changes following the program, be that becoming more senior in their roles, working shorter hours, having better flexible working arrangement, they always impress me so much with the courage that they instill in each other to do what is right for them without apologizing for having a family or apologizing for wanting that top job. Details are on leadersplus.org/Fellowship.

Hello everyone. My name's Helen Fraser and I'm currently the Interim COO at Leaders plus, covering for Verina while she is on maternity leave.

And today I've stepped into the role of podcast host for the Big Careers Small Children podcast. And I'm really delighted to be joined by one of our brilliant senior leader mentors, Rupert Brown.

Rupert, would you like to introduce yourself and let me know who you are, what you do and who is in your family?

Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me on the podcast.

I'm a big fan of what you do at Leaders plus and I think it's because I too have had the pleasure of balancing an interesting career with a beautiful family. And so where we stand today then? I have married to Helen who is also in the human resources field like myself.

We have my eldest son Oliver, who is in the first year at university so we are just getting to grips with him being not in his bedroom wondering what he's doing. And my youngest child, Lottie, she is in first year of A levels.

And then we have a two year old cocker spaniel called Mabel who is like a little baby so she makes the family feel complete again. Even though we're coming to terms with the idea that people are leaving the nest and then I'm sure that they will return.

And in the career context really has been about a career in human resource management in lots of different sort of multinationals.

Fifteen years of my career has been outside of the uk so six international assignments including Switzerland, Singapore, twice actually Denmark and Dubai.

And decided to come back with teenagers in Covid and sort of put down some routes for the benefit of the children really because we've been dragging them from pillar to post the quest of my career.

And yeah, I'm still in the human resources field sort of doing a change management people change advisory work, whether that's interim or inside large organizations. Organizations.

Amazing. And I had the privilege of meeting your daughter at the book launch for Lost in Transformation.

And you and Helen have clearly done a brilliant parenting job with her.

And I am interested in thinking about like is there, as you said, you've had quite a varied career, you've lived abroad in terms of where you've been based. Is there something you know now about combining that career with raising a family that you didn't know then in the early years?

Yes. I mean the most. Thank you. Met Lottie and she's so inspired to meet so many amazing women. She said, dad, how do you know all these incredible women?

It's like. Blessed to work with some great people and I think it's lovely to see show her to some some role models as she's wondering what to do after school.

I mean there must be lots of things I know now I didn't know that.

I think something that is front of mind when you're balancing career and a young family, especially when there is a travel dimension to it, is in the back of your mind you're wondering what damage you're doing to Your children. There is that sort of constant guilt of, are we getting away with this? Why does he have a funny accent? Why can't he do maths? Whatever it might be?

It's because he's been growing up in different cultures, different education systems. Every three years you take him to a different country and I suppose you're always sort of keeping score, aren't you, as a parent?

It's like, how are we doing? Are we inflicting more damage than we are? Sort of like upside.

I think one of the reflections is the upside to having this international life is that the family became very tight.

We were each other's sort of nucleus and it was very much, I think in a way their adaptability stems from the fact that there was, at least when we moved around, we were tight and we were common to one another. And I was also, in hindsight pleased. We sort of called it a day when we did.

And often a lot of the times when you're doing the right thing for the family, it still hurts, right? You're in my case, it's like they had this amazing international career.

We're in lockdown in the desert in Dubai and Ollie and Lottie becoming teenagers and they're becoming much more self-aware and they can say things that they haven't said before. And when they said, dad, what are you doing? Why are we doing lockdown in the desert? I mean, surely there are smarter things to do than this.

Children start questioning your career choices. And up until that point it had simply been a case of pack the kids little suitcase, trundle them through the airport.

They don't need to know really where they're going, they just need to stick with mum and dad. And then all of a sudden the realization is, yeah, it's probably time to put them first. And putting them first, of course there's a price.

As a consequence, it means putting career second. And probably I've been in that sort of luxury, selfish position for so long of always thinking career first to an extent.

I mean, there's always has to be to interesting places that are safe and sort of of value safety for the children. But that was always the lead cause.

And five was that five, six years later, after sort of coming home and unpacking the bags and taking a lot fewer airplanes. It was the right thing to do. It absolutely was the right thing to do. Because now I think the kids have a bit of a best of both worlds.

You know, they grew up internationally, but they're doing their sort of important teenage years with stability and they're making those friends for life. But if you'd have asked me, when I was in the desert during lockdown during COVID I felt torn, but I felt really torn.

And I didn't know what the right answer was.

How did you come to that decision then? Because it's something I think that a lot of parents facing similar decisions might find interesting. What turned the dial?

What kind of made you decide?

It's when the conversation with the children is not so much a just sort of do what I say kind of conversation. It's a sort of a more grown up conversation between two adults really. And you realize it's not working. You know, it wasn't working for him.

It wasn't really working for me. But the thought was, well, we just keep going, don't we? That's what we've always done.

And I think it's a different conversation when you've got other people to please. When the family becomes older. I suppose that's the case, isn't it? There's lots of different people to please.

Up until that point, really, the guilt axis had been between Helen and myself and our parents. It's kind of like, can we stay away from mum and dad this long, given their health, given this, that and the other? And you can sort of wrestle that.

But when it's also the people in your family, I mean, you're just waiting for the dog to speak up, aren't you? And just like, I'm not happy either. So it's just, okay, guys, we've got to meet in the middle.

And that's a bit of a career compromise moment, I think.

Yeah, definitely. And I think everybody will face those at some point. And it's interesting what you say about. Once the children become more like adults, really.

And I'm similar to a bit younger than yours, but 13 and 16. And it is a different conversation I think, that you can have, and I know you probably want to speak, speak on their behalf.

But in terms of, do you get a sense from them of. Of those younger years? Because I think they are more adaptable in those younger years to kind of do that moving.

And do they ever talk about how they've enjoyed that or if they really hated it?

So there was different assignments or different periods. So they were both born in Singapore and they spent their early childhood there.

I mean, Lottie, who you met, her first preschool was bilingual English and Mandarin. So she grew up. Her friends were little Chinese kids who was eating kanji for lunch.

She was singing Mandarin, you know, but she had no idea whether that was normal or not.

We had the sense of sort of beaming pride that it was very cool and sophisticated, and surely this will only bring, you know, expanded horizons in the future. But you don't know, do you? I mean, as a parent, you don't know any better.

And now when we talk about it with the kids, they often do refer to the fact that, for example, they, you know, Lottie has very diverse food interests, travel interests, is well read and so forth. And I think some of that does come from there. But there was also one assignment in particular.

So we went from Singapore to Denmark, which was strange, going from the heat to the cold and the dark. And a lot of people said, that will be hard for the family.

And it turned out to be really easy for the family because you were going to a very tight, inclusive sort of community there. So they absolutely loved it. We then went from there to Dubai when they were a little bit older.

So Ollie was just in first year of secondary school, and all of us, that was really hard because they'd gone from sort of big fish in a small pond to this very competitive, very sort of alpha world in the Middle east, where it's about sort of wealth and success and so forth. And they sort of all of a sudden felt like much lower down the pecking order and a bit exposed.

And I don't think they ever would say that they loved being in that environment. And then, of course, with the COVID factor, it was just, okay, it's probably time to do something different.

But then I think it has broadened their horizons in some respect. They certainly talk about it in a positive way. We had to get ourselves out of a tight situation there, I think, and we did.

And we're the better for it.

Yeah, brilliant. And thank you for sharing those reflections. So I suppose one of the things that happened when you did make that move.

I know not immediately, but you did then decide to write a book. So do you want to tell us a bit about that? And why. Why did you decide to write a book?

Yeah, but you make it sound like I just woke up one morning and just started writing. It's like I have a joke.

It's like the time from what was somebody with a military background, they talk about flash to bang, which is this idea of flash is when you have the idea. Bang is when it materializes. And it's a little bit like when you decide to leave your employer. Flash is when you say, I've got to go.

Bang is when you actually go.

And I can Think of one company where it was two years before I left, because it takes that long to, to either summon the courage or figure out how on earth to do that, where do I go to, who's going to take me, et cetera, et cetera. And I think writing the book was probably quite similar in that I had realized that I was doing a lot of corporate change and transformation work.

My background is in people and psychology, and that's where my interest is. And it was slowly dawning on me that we were sort of ignoring everything we knew about psychology when we do corporate change.

And we weren't considering the human aspects, what's going on for the whole person when they go to work. And there's a million little things that are changing there too.

So we call it change management, but really we're totally ignorant to the human in that.

And I remember the moment where I thought there might be a book here was when I was at an off site meeting in Barcelona and I just come out, I was working on a very big digital transformation program with some of the, probably some of the smartest people I've ever worked with.

And I remember we had got ourselves stuck into this us and them dynamic between us being the brilliant surgeons with the scalpel who were going to fix the company, and the company being the idiots that have been mismanaging it for years.

And there was zero appreciation for what it means to do change well, or to experience change, or really, really zero appreciation of anything other than just sort of proving to everyone that we were smarter than they were. And I remember coming out of that meeting thinking, this just can't go on, this is ridiculous.

The company's put considerable money and talent into this program and it's going to get nothing but civil war. And that's what we had. We had a civil war. And I remember thinking, there's something to be written here. But then of course, I'm an HR practitioner.

Many of us who are probably listening to this, you're juggling a million things, you might have an idea, but when do you actually do something with the idea? And then it was a period where I finished an assignment and I knew it was going to take a few months before the next assignment arrived.

And I thought, I'm just going to start writing this up. And I sort of realized then, actually there was a bit of a research thesis emerging. It's like.

And I wanted to do a bit of research, I wanted to do a lot of writing, but ultimately I wanted to reflect on what I'd experienced as A person doing all this international stuff and raising a family, and as a professional doing all this really intense change stuff, merges, acquisitions, divestitures, all that stuff. And that's really where the idea for the book came from. But it was, you know, it was a couple of years from epiphany to publication.

Hard work as well. But you just touched on something there as well. And I think I spoke of it on email before recording today, and you sort of said, oh, am I honest?

Because I said to you, I think you're really honest in this book, and you seem to surprise you. But I think even what you just said then it is those honest reflections about things that.

That often have been ignored or haven't been taken into consideration. So I guess did you set out with that in mind, or did that just come from, I guess, who you are anyway?

No, it took a little bit of prompting, actually. So I probably approached the book a little bit like I would have approached doing a thesis at university.

Hypothesis, research, questions, subjects, go interview, do your literature review, pull it all together. I remember when I was getting some friends, read an early draft, and somebody said, this is great, but I want to know what you think.

You know, less journalism, more you. And I thought, wow, what a challenge. All of a sudden, it's like I was sort of hiding behind the book.

I was interviewing people to see what their thoughts were and change. But it's like, Rupert, you've done more change than these people you're interviewing. Why aren't you interviewing yourself?

And then when I started to ask people the harder questions, like, tell me about times when it went wrong. Tell me about the times when it went really sideways at work and maybe you were actually to blame.

And all of a sudden, people don't want to go on the record with that stuff.

So I thought, well, I'm going to have to go first, I'm going to have to lead, I'm going to have to dig deep and ask myself all those questions, then it was really a process of.

I didn't realize at that point how far back I was going to go in the memory banks, because I'd assumed I'd be writing from the vantage point of my most recent, most sort of senior jobs, the really big, complex stuff. And I realized actually that what had shaped me as a leader and what I believe could change to be actually happened in my 20s.

So now you're going back 20 years. I'm nearly 50 now. So you're going back a while.

And that was very, very powerful to sort of do the self discovery and do the inner work as I describe it and to talk it through with coaches, with therapists, with other people who are really skilled in this area. And I think my stance of writing the book, I'm sort of writing it from a mid career angle.

So maybe I'm pivoting from corporate life to self employed consulting coaching, but I'm still mid career and I want to know how I can sort of be more effective in the second of my career than I was in my first. So I'm very empathetic towards leadership to leaders and change.

It's not like some people want to throw tomatoes at both those things that leaders are bad and please stop changing stuff, just leave us alone. And I'm more pragmatic than that's impossible. But how could we be better next time?

And I started remembering situations where I felt this dissonance, you know, where you're projecting one image and you're saying one thing, you're feeling another and it's just impossible to connect the two things. And it was in a merger situation where we'd just been acquired. We were three years post sort of merger integration.

I was the leader for the integration and my job was to make sure that people didn't leave, get them to assimilate to the new culture, be successful in the new environment and don't leave. That was sort of my key metric, keep the business growing.

And I remember sort of delivering workshops where I was at the front of the classroom teaching them about sort of the psychology of change and very much being told to hurry up, don't lower the tone, don't get people upset, don't stir up bad feelings. It dawned on me that do you know what I'm talking about?

This combined organization, like I believe it and I don't want to be here myself and I haven't done this work for myself.

And the very fact that we can't talk about emotions during change because it's almost like admitting that your defeat, if you admit that change is hard for you, it's a little bit like saying I'm not really on the bus, I'm not the right guy for the job, I'm not making the progress you'd hoped for. You feel like you've let somebody down. I sort of realized all of that is just impossible, impossible to contain.

And of course it impacts your ability to lead and to enjoy what you do, impacts everything home as well. And that feeling very much stays with me. And again, actually with that company, it was two years from flash to bang.

It was two years from realizing I have to get out of here to getting out of here. And part of that was because I had a one year old and a three year old.

We were living in Singapore in what most people would say is very sort of fortunate circumstances. And if dad's getting a little bit nostalgic for the past is not a great thing to bring up at home when you're changing nappies, you know.

Not the right timing, it's like, just suck it up, just swallow it down and we'll book a holiday. You can think about it then. But increasingly, leadership's really hard and doing that with family is really difficult.

So where do you find the space to do the inner work without having to sort of like, book yourself into rehab? I mean, I'm trying to do it in the course of work, not having to do it because you've succumbed to something unfortunate.

But we just need to get better at this.

And what do you think you've. In your research and writing the book, have you got clear ideas on how you might do that now?

Yes, yes and no. It's not as simple as just saying, follow these eight steps.

But I'm much more aware and sensitive to that component of what's not being said, what needs to be said. Because we're all very much sort of task focused and frustrated with progress, which is getting in the way.

So you start to realize there's a lot of, you know, you start to sort of find your tribe and other people who believe things that you believe, whether they be sort of coaches or psychologists or philosophy people.

And there's a danger that your echo chamber, especially on social media, if you're connected with 100 people that agree with you, that tends to be all you read. So you can walk around thinking, oh, everyone's good, everybody gets this. Well, it was common sense. There's no need to do that research.

Everybody understands empathy is important in leadership, for example. And then you bump into a client and you go, oh, my word. You'Re not in my echo chamber, are you? And actually, I understand why. I can totally see why.

What you're on that bandwagon of getting stuff done so you don't let people down. Now's not the right time to own up to how I'm feeling. It's like, yeah, been there, and I know exactly how that feels.

So how can I be helpful so that we can get what needs to be done in a way that more people sort of come on the journey together, sort of put our head in the sand and pretending we're not feeling it is not the way forward.

Yeah. And I think you have to be brave. Right. I think it is different to share how you're feeling as a leader in certainly in some organizations.

So I think there's an element of courage and I think you're quite pretty courageous to write the book as well in terms of really addressing that.

And I know exactly what you mean about echo chambers because, you know, I'm really lucky to work with lots of senior leaders like yourself and our fellows. And there kind of is this, oh, yeah, I think it is all going to be okay. And then you may have one meeting or one interaction.

You're like, oh no, there's still so much work to do. So it's very much in that way you talk in the book about the.

I suppose it's linked to this is that those personal blind spots and emotional avoidance blind spots when you're in the kind of change period. And how do you think leaders can create a space where those two blind spots can be viewed, can be seen, and can be taken into consideration?

So the blind spot idea is also comes from a model called Johari's Window, which is this idea that there are things that are known to us, there are things that are known to others, and there's also things that are not known to anyone. But how can we get some of those things that are in our blind spots? How can we shine the torch on those to raise self awareness?

And I suppose really it's all in service of self awareness.

And then a lot of the sort of the common mistakes I kept, the patterns I kept seeing during corporate change sort of fell into making poor decisions under haste without consideration to people. But that became the blind spot idea. And on the flip side to that, there's also this idea of spaciousness.

But there are some people with whom we can actually achieve great things under difficult circumstances. And what is it about those relationships that's different and that can be maintained?

So if you think facts and actually sometimes under pressure, great friendships are formed and it's because they do something. It's not. I don't think it's because it's not maybe only because there's. It's somebody you can confide in and tell the truth to.

Because often that becomes what an old boss used to call pity Island. We go and tell we don't like the boss, so we go and talk about the boss in private. And actually that just makes you feel worse.

That takes you on a downward spiral.

But actually sometimes you have a relationship where you can find great resourcefulness and find a way to actually think creatively without having to sort of run a mile, run away from the stress. And I had one particular relationship in a role. It was the work from Megan Wright. It's Megan and John.

And they were doing research on this idea, these spacious relationships.

And they interviewed myself and my colleague to see what was it about our relationship that we felt allowed us to do great stuff under very hostile conditions. We realized it was this idea that we would communicate in a spacious way.

So a good example was we would take a lot of our phone calls whilst walking out in the park. And so we didn't feel sort of like stuck looking at a little screen on the screen.

But we were able to sort of consider the big picture, ask ourselves what if it was very felt like a safe space to experiment and acknowledge the stress, the fear, the anxiety of the situation as well. What the researcher, what John Higgins, who's the researcher said.

He said, rupert, what's strikes me about your relationship between the two of you is that you just have this talked about a guy called Martin Buber, who's a philosopher, who has this idea of unconditional positive regard. And he would say some people have an I it relationship, so we're just task focused, you know.

And some people have an I thou approach which is I'm here for you. Whatever that it is, it doesn't matter. And it's like, oh my God, you're absolutely right. It was a relationship, first relationship.

And I realized I was working with a lot of people in the corporate change world who were just there to get the job done and didn't care about me. Even if I cared about them, it wasn't going to be reciprocated.

And I think I realized actually there's something really powerful about sort of recognizing your preferences here.

It's about understanding your philosophy a little bit, but your preferences for relationship building and then keeping those or fostering those relationships when you need them the most.

And I think we need them the most when we're trying to balance careers, family, drive, change, experience, we're experiencing what the world throws at us.

Do we have enough people to talk to that don't just take us to this pity island place, but that actually allow us to think creatively and resourcefully and do amazing things. This is such an interesting, like, it was like the epiphany inside the epiphany.

It was like, you know, I was interested in his work, he was interviewing me and he was sharing his observations and our relationship. It's like. Well, I feel like I'm inside the book now. This is really interesting.

Yeah, definitely. I really love that. I love that idea of spaciousness and finding people that you can have those conversations with because they can.

It's almost like an element of like sort of self care and self compassion to have those spaces where the difference between, you know, what your old boss called Pity island is not productive. I mean, you might feel better for what, a minute or two while you're getting something off your chest.

But actually the difference between that and then that spacious relationship where you're actually also thinking of solutions and moving things forward is just such, such a more positive place to be. And I suppose you don't need to have those relationships with everybody.

It might not be feasible to have that, but actually if you have one or two, that can maybe be the difference.

That's it. I think that that's the advice if you like to self and others is you definitely won't have that with everybody.

But can you try and make sure you have that with somebody? And if they're not inside the system, then you're keeping that conversation alive.

But you've got to be deliberate and intentional about that because they're not gonna just appear in your calendar. So you've got to go find the time to have these conversations. And.

And a lot what happens when we just get busy is we sort of go to the lowest common denominator, don't we? It's like attend the meetings you definitely can't miss, do this stuff. You've got to pick your kid up from school.

We do the non negotiables and we've done sort of nothing really that that took us forward or made us feel any better.

It, yeah, really important. And then being, you know, aware of it is the first step to them being able to like do something about it. Right.

Yeah.

Brilliant. So something sort of a little bit different, but it did come from the book for me and it was your.

I hope you don't mind me talking about this and I'm really sorry that, you know, you lost your dad. And it was, you know, very unexpected.

But I've been doing some work at the moment around this kind of flex fluency model that we're working on at Leaders Plus. And one of the kind of pillars of that is this responding. Right.

And there was just such a brilliant example in the book where you said about the organization you were working for at the time, responded not with policy, but with principle. And by telling you to take all the time you need rather than saying take 10 days.

And I just wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that and how that kind of made you feel and if it influenced how you lead.

Yeah. So it's funny you should say you're thinking about that as well because I also had a similar conversation just this morning about this.

And there's two dimensions. There's the how people relate to each other during sort of times of grief and then there's how organizations sort of set themselves up to respond.

And this organization had a principle based decision making approach, which is actually very hard to maintain because everybody wants to know, is it eight days or is it 10 days? What do I give them? And it's like no. And then they kept saying no, not going to answer the question, you decide.

And it's like, actually principle based is very hard. And a lot of companies don't do it. They end up doing best practice or legally minimum required. But this company, it was part of their purpose.

That's how they responded. And I found that very interesting. It also puts the leadership on, so the onus on leaders to think right and to relate and that's really powerful.

So maybe we should encourage that a little bit more often, especially if you're in the sort of the policy space or the HR space, you tend to want to sort of like write, write everything down and makes everything crystal clear. But you do people a disservice, I think, of relating to one another.

And who's to decide whether grandma is closer or further away to you emotionally than mum or dad. I mean, it's like you just can't make those sort of decisions when you're writing policies. Really the other one is a human aspect.

And the conversation this morning was this idea that someone was sharing that when they lost a loved one and returned to work, their boss and their boss's boss avoided them because they didn't know what to say and they felt awkward. And the only people who approached them and offered some sort of comfort, condolence were others who had lost people recently too.

So sort of recent sort of experience of grief. And the realization here is, this is about wisdom, isn't it? It's about life, experience, wisdom, confidence, courage to show up in a human way.

And you don't need to do anything when you offer condolence. You don't even need to say anything. You just need to. I think your face says it all. And I hadn't realized that when I had that experience at work.

My manager at the time had lost his father a few years before, and I didn't know that actually until about a month ago. A month ago now. So we're talking. So this is quite interesting.

So 18 years later, I realized that my boss was empathetic because he'd had a similar experience that he'd never told me about.

Interesting.

So there's gotta be something there about it almost feeds that argument of mine, which is, we need to lead with more empathy and humanity. And you get that from experience, right? So you don't get it from a course or an MBA or a book.

You get it from thinking about, what have you experienced and how might you put that back into how you lead and live your life?

Yeah, and I think there's an interesting element to that as well. But. But in. Also, like, how can you make sure you do that even if you don't have that experience? Like, how do you. How do you.

I know you can never truly understand, but it almost shouldn't come down to if your line managers experience something, if they can be empathetic about it. And it's like turning that into, how can you lead in a way that is empathetic? And.

And I guess it is that sort of responding, right, that human response rather than that task response or that kind of, oh, what are we going to do about it? But just responding in a.

In a human way sometimes, like, irrelevant of whether you can actually understand what that person is going through, which, yeah, is a place would be, I think, would be brilliant to get to.

It's very hard, though, isn't it? Because you often in hr, you get asked questions that are very. You're surprised you've been asked the question in the first place.

I remember being asked a question by a colleague, said, I'm going to a work colleague's funeral. Is it okay if I cry? And it's like, at first I was like, I was never expecting to ever be asked that question.

And then you start asking, what's the question behind the question? And of course, the question was, well, this is a very macho environment. Leaders are supposed to look composed and together.

I'm feeling really upset by what's going on. I'm probably going to lose it when I'm there. Is that okay? Do I have permission to be myself?

And it's like, oh, my gosh, this is such a deeper conversation. And in some ways you'd sort of hoped it was never necessary, but aren't you glad you're having it rather than not at all?

Because this stuff is going through People's minds, you know, they don't know how to show up if they're supposed. If they're allowed to show up in a certain way. And I do think there's probably a lot of leaders who just don't think that that's their job.

You know, it's like tears and sympathy. You go to HR here. We do widgets, you know, so people, some people do try and sort of like separate their. That their lives in that way.

Yeah, I think it can be, you know, we talked about this earlier about, you know, as a leader, how do you show up as your kind of full self? And that I think is also a really helpful way for them people to feel that they can show up as their fault full selves.

But I know it's not easy for everybody to do that.

And I think I probably, as you are such a HR experienced leader, I'm just wondering if I can kind of slightly pivot a little bit now and ask you something a bit more general in terms of, you know, people that listen to this podcast very much about combining their very busy family life as you've got experience with, but also really their careers still mean something and they, and they really want to be ambitious as well.

So what have you seen in your experience working for parents, you know, who are active caregivers and, you know, want to be present with their families and to continue to progress their career?

Yes, yes, I suppose it's the perennial question, isn't it? It's a little bit like, you know, whenever we go to Leaders plus event, this comes up.

I can't recall if I, if I've said this at the last time we got together, then I apologize.

Or maybe that's because I just truly believe it, but I spent a lot of time sort of in the talent management world, you know, helping corporate careers sort of grow and succeed and move around. And I would say within that, within that world, there's a lot of lies we tell.

There's a whole facade that goes on at work about, you know, if I want to show up and be ready for the next level, I need to look a certain way. I need to it all together and have capacity for more and be mobile.

And, you know, we say, we say a lot of things that might not be true just so in the hope that we get the job. And that's, that's fine. That's fine. We all have to sort of play the game.

But there's one lesson that I like to sort of give to students and, and to people who are coming through the business, which is this fallacy of the meritocracy and the belief that hard work alone will get you seen and get you there.

And when you get busy, I think because you have to make choices when you're busy, when you have a young family, you're more inclined to think, I just focus on doing the work well, and then that'll be enough. And I don't think the model changes just because you've got caregiving responsibilities.

So the model, if you think about it, and if I draw it on the board, would be a Venn diagram of three circles that overlap. And I call it the pie model. Pie. And it stands for performance, image and exposure. And the sweet spot is when they overlap.

So the fallacy of meritocracy is to believe that performance alone will get you seen.

It's Image and exposure are critical. And I would think about those two things even when you're. If you like, your window for work is getting contracted.

But image is this idea of, what do people know about you? What's your rep? What are they saying about you, you know, behind your back, almost.

If the only thing they're saying about you behind your back is your contracted work week, then there's an opportunity to change the story. You know, it's like, what do you do when you are at work? You know, what do you like? Are you any good? Are you. What do you stand for?

So I think make sure your image is more than just. More than just caregiver. It's all the other things that you are. And the third one is exposure. So who are you actually talking to?

And getting in front of this becomes even harder when you are, you know, you've got less time to do.

People often say, but, Rupert, I don't have time to go networking or, you know, I have to be at home certain number of days a week, so I can't show up in person to that meeting. It's like, okay. But you can be very intentional and deliberate. And when you can.

And I think it's making sure you get a few sort, sort of exposure points when you can get the.

Get the points, because they're more important to you than anyone when you're, you know, you've got flexible requirements, you need to be at different places. So, you know, and some people are brilliant at, like, working the room.

Some people, you know, when they're there, even if they're not there very long, you know, they're there, they just have that ability to be seen, to be heard, to leave an impression. And I guess the question is if you can keep the performance, the image and the exposure sort of going.

It doesn't really matter if you're working 75%, 60%, 50% now, that's not the point. But don't think that. Never think that performance alone will get you your career weight where it needs to go.

Yeah, it's such a.

Such an important message, I think, and definitely something that we explore in a lot of detail on the Fellowship is like you say, there is this kind of perceived idea that if you're good at your job and you do it well, then that's kind of the key to progression. But those other elements are also so important. And so when you are so stretched for time, don't just focus on one of them.

Try and make sure you've got the balance of all three of those, I think is really, really clear. So thank you so much for sharing that. And do you think having, like, written the book, what's changed in you? What do you think?

Because I know you are still contracting, you're still doing change work. Did you kind of, I guess, learn from the experience of writing your own book that you'll be taking forward into your leadership?

It's given me a sort of profound appreciation for writing, for research. I think it's grown my network in a different way. So, you know, my echo chamber has changed for sure.

I'm conscious as well that that sort of the awareness that comes from the epiphany fades and you quickly back into the, you know, throw of life, back into writing PowerPoints and going to meetings and getting stuff done and not letting down the boss or the client. I mean, that's fine.

So you've got to try and find the way to keep remind, jolting yourself back to that awareness because you've had it, you've got to keep that going.

And I'm sort of exploring now different ways of consulting with greater impact and being more deliberate based on what I've been writing about, but also exploring more teaching, speaking, coaching, mentoring, sort of, I suppose, a slightly different sort of career model, one that's a little bit more portfolio than just trying to work as much as you can as fast as you can, which is often the recipe for success when you are trying to rise through the ranks. But that's probably exactly the reason why leaders don't have that sort of space to think and question whether or not they can do things better.

So, yeah, I'm so I'm trying to keep that in focus, but I also know that the irony is you get busy doing the new stuff, right? So actually having a book that needs to be marketed and do webinars and podcasts and conferences, that's a whole new line of work.

So I'm still working long hours even if I'm working on something different?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And thinking practically now, what do you say again, sort of from writing the book would be your kind of practical tips that leaders that are trying to drive change in an organization should think about doing.

Maybe some of the big lessons then from the book and ask yourself whether or not you're guilty of these things. The paradigm of doing change to others is what sort of needs to be challenged.

This can be really profound when you're hired to do a job, you know, if you're brought in as a change agent to make something happen, then you definitely feel the pressure to do stuff to other people. This is the heart of the problem, that change exists on the side.

And the leader typically has a transformation expert or a change management sort of team that meets in silence.

I describe these guys as the usual suspects who do the change management, the planning, the plotting, and you sort of think that it operates outside of the business that you're in and you wonder why. Then when you sort of do the town hall and you announce the big tada, if you're going to change xyz, you wonder why this.

There's either a tumbleweed moment that lasts, that can last years, or there's this outright sort of civil war dynamic because you haven't actually done the change with others. You haven't done it in the open. It's been inside of your own head. So I think there's something about.

By the way, I'm not saying that the answer is the exact opposite. So there are some theories of change that talk about sort of the large system change idea of sort of taking everybody through every step together.

I don't think that's pragmatic possible.

There are scenarios, though, where there's some ingredient of that that you include and you sort of just have a slightly more open and reflexive sort of way of leading change. Because it's very easy. I think we get defensive as leaders.

We feel we have to know the answers, we have to have the vision, we have to sort of have all the answers to all the bits that we can't possibly know. We try and fill the gap. And when you do that, you're not inviting other people into that story or finding answers or figuring out for themselves.

I just think we can all do that. With a lot more sort of awareness and more effectiveness.

And if you think about, you know, and at the moment, I think there's lots of organizations undergoing, you know, quite big changes.

And if you're somebody who is not in the, you know, the leadership team, kind of responsible for driving that change, do you have any, like, practical advice for the people that it affects in terms of how they can, I guess, maybe make their voices heard or influence that change that's being made?

Absolutely. And my point in the book, I suppose, is that it affects everybody and it's affecting the leader too, even though they're sort of pretending they're.

They're driving it on others. There are some dynamics of organizations, especially large organizations, that need to be kept in mind.

And one is this idea that the senior team are almost in a different time zone to the rest of the organisation because of this idea that they're thinking ahead, they're thinking about change and impact and so forth. So the disconnect between where they're at and where the organization is at is a really dangerous disconnect.

And good leaders have good relationships with people at all levels who can tell them how people are really feeling, what's really going on, what's working, what's not working, what do they think of that last change effort that you thought you'd implemented two years ago, but everybody knows, never really got implemented at all. That system you bought, no one's used it. They're not going to tell you that.

But you need to know this stuff as a leader, you need to have a good sense for what's going on. And.

And if you're in the middle of that organization and there's a middle sort of manager who has the hardest job of anybody, because you're trying to do the right thing by your people and your management probably aren't giving you any answers, so you're having to improvise and that takes a toll. Or your frontline employee.

Your version of truth is gold to leaders, and I think sometimes we think they don't want to know, or it's inconvenient truth. Actually, it's really powerful.

If you can find a way to be constructive but realistic, then you actually are the eyes and ears that every leader wishes they had. You can be the best friend, you can be the best advisor and navigator of change.

Because I think what leaders are trying to figure out is, is this a good idea? Is now the right time?

Is there a way that we can actually, you know, be in a better place to pull this off and if you, the two of you don't connect, they'll never know.

No, that's great. Thank you for sharing that.

I think sometimes, like, people might feel like they want to do that, but it's great to hear from you that actually that is what leaders will want you to do. If you find a way to do it, then, you know, helpful for, I guess, helping people feel maybe a little bit less afraid to do that.

And also, like, they do have a voice and their voice is important when you're kind of in these, you know, often quite difficult situations. Thank you so much. I'm aware that we're vastly running out of time. Where can people find out more about you, Rupert, and get hold of the book?

Easiest place to get the book is probably on Amazon. Easiest place to find me is probably on LinkedIn. Yeah, I mean, I know, you know, hopefully I'll see some people at Leaders plus events as well.

Yeah.

And yeah, I look, I look forward to having conversations with people I know. This story evokes a lot of interest in others who either feel, oh, yeah, I've got some similar ideas or I'm struggling with something.

It would be great to talk. So it would be lovely to make some connections and talk it through.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time and for kind of talking through some of those really interesting parts of the book.

But also it's great to find out a bit more about you and your story. Thanks for being here.

Thank you, Helen.

I really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much and I always love to hear from our listeners.

If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just go to Verina Hefti and I'd be delighted to hear your feedback and your suggestions or just have you say hi.

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