Welcome to the Big Careers, Small Children podcast.My name is Farina 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. the same stale, often male, middle-class people leading our organisations.
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, shared 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 programme, be that becoming more senior in their roles, working shorter hours, having a better flexible working arrangement.
They always impress me so much with the courage that they instil in each other to do what is right for them without apologising for having a family or apologising for wanting that top job. Details are on lidusplus.org forward slash fellowship.
I'm delighted to introduce a conversation with Tom Shaw today.
Tom has had an absolutely illustrious career in a variety of sectors as talent leader, including, for example, as talent director at Virgin Media, as global head of talent and development at Experian, and so on.
And he's now changed sectors again and is working at The Economist Group. He has written the book Counterbalance, how to build a career without ruining your life, which really speaks to me.And he's also a senior leader mentor for Leaders Plus.
Tom's values and approach to life really resonated with what I personally believe is important for my life.And I really enjoyed the conversation.I hope you will too.
I've spent the last 20 or 30 years working in different organisations, both in the UK but also globally, supporting activities like talent, performance, learning, leadership, culture, employee value proposition, those kind of things, the very human side of work fundamentally.
outside of work.I'm very happily married to Haley, who's been my wife for 14 years.I'm also a very proud father to Noah and Darcy.Noah has just turned 11 a couple of weeks ago.He is very unique.He has special educational needs.He's
autistic, but also he's got ADHD and speech and language disorder.He attends a specialist school in London and that brings challenges, but lots of opportunities.He's wonderful.And then Darcy is neurotypical.
She's nearly nine, nine this month, as she keeps reminding me.She goes to the local primary school in Rygate in Surrey, which is where we live.
Wonderful.And we should say, so you obviously have written a book recently, which I thought was really interesting because in your, I mean, you've undersold yourself a little bit in terms of the level of seniority that you got.
So you were making decisions about other people's work life in your day-to-day work.And I think it's really interesting how you're thinking about the counterbalance topic.And before we get into that, I'm interested, what have you changed your
mind on in terms of combining a big career with young children?Is there something that you used to believe that you don't believe anymore today?
Yeah, it's a great question.Genuinely, I don't think I have.I think that this is what I talk about in the book.My father nailed counterbalance.
He passed away 21 years ago, and when the vicar came to our house to write the eulogy about his life, she asked each of us, my siblings, my brother and sister, and my mum, what it was that came to life when we thought about our dad.
I said then, in 2003, that it was that he got the balance right in his life.He had a career, He was a brilliant dad, great husband.He was very altruistic, did a lot of charitable work.
He gave a lot of his time to other people, but also he had time to have fun.He was very interested in Mount Everest.He was a big Leicester Tigers rugby fan.He found time for everything, and he got that balance right.
Now what's changed in the last 21 years, especially in the last five years, is that exponential technology advancement has meant that we all carry a mobile phone with us.
We generally take our laptop home with us in the evening to do work if we spend time in an office. And we have much more opportunity to run our lives through that technology.
The other thing that's happened, obviously, is COVID-19 pandemic, which really threw all the cards in the air in terms of how you balance your work and your life.Ways of working changed hugely, a generational shift in the space of a year.
And that has meant that coming back off the other side of that, things are very challenging.So I always thought that leaving the pandemic behind It was going for organizations and individuals.
It was all going to be about how you can balance productivity with well-being.And that's not a very easy balance to make because so much has changed in the world, and we're still trying to make sense of that.
But I do still absolutely believe that you can create an equilibrium in your life, provided you're prepared to make
tough choices and actually base the decisions you make on your purpose and what you actually would like to get out of life and what you would like to give to life.
So my view hasn't really changed on that, but I think it's significantly more challenging than it was when my father was alive 20 plus years ago.
And in a way, that's quite freeing to think about because it means that if we are struggling to combine it all, it doesn't mean we are rubbish.
It just means it's got a little bit harder because everything is so integrated and flexible and we can do emails from our bed and we can do podcasts from sitting on our guest bed, which I'm doing at the moment.
But I'm not in the bed, just to clarify that.But the thing that interests me is what was the moment that crystallized you wanting to write this book?Why did you think, I actually need to write this down and share my thoughts with people?
So my daughter, as I said, is nearly nine.My son is different.He's a very different individual and his view of the world is very different.And I've learned a lot because his view of the world is so different.He's taught me so much.
But as my children are getting older, I'm very conscious that they didn't meet their grandfather, my father. And they didn't have the opportunity to have that role model in their life.
And a lot of those lessons were potentially going to get lost and not handed down to them if it wasn't recorded in some way.
So the reason I wrote Counterbalance is that I really wanted to share my perspective on the world, but also honor the principles by which my father lived his life in a very happy, meaningful way.
So being conscious of that is probably one of the things that really drove me to do it.Also that point about really recognizing working within organizations.
I don't think we're necessarily quite there yet in terms of getting that balance between making sure we're looking after the humans who work within the organization, but also making sure that the organization makes its contribution to its shareholders or its stakeholders.
It felt like there was a bit of a zeitgeist, that the spirit of the times were that this is a question that many people would be asking themselves. Also, circumstances in my own life provided me with an opportunity to do just that.
So I was made redundant in December last year.And instead of looking for another job, having worked solidly for 20 years, I thought this is my opportunity to use some of the money I'd been given to leave that organization and
actually spend some time reflecting and thinking about my own life, what I'd like to do in the next 10, 15, 20 years of it, by looking back at where I've come from.
But then also the thing I'm really passionate about, my purpose in life, which is right in the heart of the book, my purpose absolutely is maximizing potential.
So maximize my own potential, that of my wife and children, family, friends, but also my colleagues and the organizations in which I work. So that's the work I enjoy doing.
So I felt like there was an opportunity to share some of my lessons that I've shared in the past in a professional environment by actually recording it on paper, putting it into the public domain.
I bet it would have been a really crystallizing exercise to do, to write it down.And I love that you now have that for your children to read when they're grown-ups.It'll be interesting to see what they make of it.
Hopefully they'll be your best, friendliest critics.I'm interested, you call it counterbalance.Why that?
Yeah, so I absolutely believe that the work-life balance paradigm doesn't exist anymore.If I look at when my dad was alive, it absolutely did.
He left home at 7.45 in the morning in a car, took two colleagues carpool to work, and then he walked back in through the door at 5.45 every evening.You could literally set your watch by it.
Then after 5.45, there were no mobile phones, there were no telephone calls, there was no computer at home to do the work on. It was literally, I focus on my work and I balance it with my life.
So with the advent in particular, I think of mobile telephones, where you can run your whole life and you can work on the move constantly.It means that it's not as simple as just balancing your work and your life.
It's about looking at all the individual elements of your life and thinking about how can I make sure that I get the richness of a career
The richness of giving back the richness of the relationships and having fun there lots of elements of your life but making sure you're doing them in balance with each other so the concept of counterbalance is if you make a decision that you're gonna go for a big promotion at work.
Maybe you need to counterbalance that by reducing the amount of DIY you're doing at home or going on a lavish holiday for three week period because it's not going to work against when you count about it against going for the big promotion one of the things i talk about in the book.
is when I went to, I volunteered for a year, it lasted about 15 months to mentor a child in London from a disadvantaged background.
And going along to the very first session to introduce this activity, they said to us, if you're going to go for a big promotion at work right now, don't do this this year, because this is going to take a lot of time.
And in the end, there were 70 sessions, 52 with a child, 12 supervision sessions, plus training, interviews, graduation, etc.Huge commitment.
The year I did that, I was in a steady job, and I knew that I could, not that I was cruising, but that it wasn't a new role.It was an organization I knew.
I didn't have children at that time, so I was able to counterbalance putting that additional activity and effort and endeavor into something really meaningful, which I loved.
against that particular time in my life and i think that was a very useful lesson for me there's a very famous michelle obama quote which is that whole you think you can have everything nope not at the same time and i absolutely agree with that i don't think you can you can't
renovate a house, have a career, have children, run a marathon, all at the same time.You can do those things in your life, but you probably can't do all of them at exactly the same point in your life.
So it's about making really proactive decisions about where you want to put your energy at that moment.
Agreed.And how do you then combine... I mean, obviously, you're a talent development expert.One of our job titles says Director of Talent Development, Virgin Media. clearly know your thing about how to excel and progress your career.
How do you combine that desire to excel with the need to counterbalance and say no?
Yeah, so one of the things I write about in the book is that Aristotle wrote over 2000 years ago about ambition.He talks about things being a deficiency or an excess. So you could have too much ambition, or you can have too little ambition.
The key is to have that healthy ambition that absolutely sits in the middle.Now, 2,500 years later, that absolutely is truer than ever.So you need to have a healthy ambition.So I want to be successful in my career.I think I have been successful.
I'm proud of what I have achieved in my career.
but it hasn't been at the detriment of all the other aspects of my life so i was fifty in october last year and i gave a speech at the birthday party i hosted and i talked about five things that i was very proud of in my life one of those things was my career and the education that supported it the other four were completely different activities so circumnavigating the globe overland or
I'm making a contribution to 50 charities during my life.I've got equal value out of all of those elements.So 20% of it was about the career.So healthy ambition. but making sure that I'm achieving something in that space was very worthwhile.
That number, the 20%, will change at any given point in life.If you're going for a big promotion, you see an opportunity, maybe an overseas move, or you work for a completely new company in a new sector, new market, it's going to be more challenging.
At that moment in time, maybe more of your identity, more of your effort, and more of the things you're proud of are going to be about your career.
But for me, I don't think that should be the case every single moment of your life as you work your way through it.
I think it sounds like you have skills that I wish I had with setting boundaries and saying no.
So if you are someone who really will always give 120% and who will try to do everything in every aspect of life, I'm just interested, is there something that you've learned about setting those boundaries or is it something that you've always naturally been good at?
Yeah, so for me, it's easy for me to sit here at age 50, 25 to 30 years into my career and say, oh, I'm some kind of guru who always gets this right.That's absolutely not the case.
At this moment in time, I feel like I've got counterbalance in relatively good control.But there are things going on in my life that need to be measured at this particular moment in time and managed.
So for example, I'm in a job that I've only been in for four and a half months.I want to add value.I want to prove my worth. I've just published a book.We're trying to get our child with special needs into a specialist school.
It's very, very challenging to do that, to find the right school and for them to want him to go there, and then to get the funding secured for it to happen.My wife works, she's a counsellor, person-centred counsellor who supports vulnerable people.
And obviously we've got two children, so there are lots of things happening in your life.Recently, we had an opportunity to maybe move house.
And we've actually made the decision to pull back from that decision and not move house now because the timing isn't right.
The priority for us is to sort out Noah's school and for me to prove myself at work and for me to get the value out of having put all this effort into writing a book.So those are my priorities right now.
The house will still be there in a year's time or two years time when we can potentially revisit it when our priorities are different.I should really make it clear that there have been four times I write about this very openly in the book.
There are four times in my career where I have, if you imagine a continuum of the person, the employee giving, and the employer taking all the way across to the employee taking and the employer giving.
There have been four times in my life where I've gone with the former.I've literally put everything, all my endeavors, all my effort into pushing my career forward, into doing a great job for an organization at a point in time.
The first time I ended up with a camera down my throat and showing that I had sort of extreme heartburn, stress.Second time I got shingles from pushing myself too hard.The third time, I experienced overwhelm.
And the fourth time, I started suffering from migraines.So those are four physiological things that happened in a 15-year period where I pushed myself too hard by not counterbalancing effectively with the other areas of my life.
So now I'm very conscious of my well-being.I drink a lot of water.I've just literally just given up coffee.I don't drink very much alcohol.I enjoy eating healthy food.I do my 10,000 steps a day.
I really believe in looking after my well-being and making sure that I'm resilient enough to be able to cope much more effectively with challenges when they come.
But the best form of resilience is to counterbalance proactively so that you don't have to lean on that overplayed strength of being resilient all the time.
Make good decisions, be proactive in those decisions, and all being well, you should be able to avoid many of the worst things that can happen when you do get that balance wrong.
That's really interesting.And thank you for being so open about the moments where that was wrong.Can you give other practical things that you do now that you read about in the book that are helping you to have that counterbalance?
You mentioned the decision with the house, which I'm sure it must have been a hard one because we all get excited with a new house, new garden, etc.
Yeah.For me, in the book, I define counterbalance, what I think the definition of counterbalance is.I think it's a three-stage process.Stage one, seek out opportunities that align with your purpose.
Number two, and I mean professional and personal opportunities.Number two, focus energy on a realistic number of priorities based on your context.The key point there is realistic.
And number three, counterbalance those priorities with the other elements of growing, living, and giving.So those elements are things like learning, well-being, having fun, relationships, giving back.
So the key thing is that, I can't emphasize it enough, if you make good quality decisions in your life, they should be based on your purpose.So when I look at myself, I think maximizing potential.
So if I'm gonna take my daughter, tomorrow morning, it's a Saturday, I'll be taking my daughter Swimming in the morning, I'll be taking her to a maths tutor at lunchtime.I'll be taking my son swimming in the afternoon.
Those are all things that are going to maximize their potential.So I'm passionate about spending my time doing those things.Whenever you are within any environment, the context will change.
So another thing I talk a lot about in the book is that if you can understand your self-awareness, so who are you, what gives you pleasure, what gives you pain,
what do you enjoy doing how do you enjoy spending your time and that self-awareness is then built on top of your purpose and you know what you're trying to achieve in life you will put yourself in context where you will have an opportunity to deploy that purpose so for example i work as a talent development organizational effectiveness performance person learning and development because that's what i enjoy doing
And I put myself in a context in the economist group currently or spending my time in the afternoons or evenings giving back to other people volunteering. I've put myself in context that will allow me to get the most out of my life.
Within those contexts and those opportunities, lots of priorities will come across your desk, your virtual desk, your metaphorical desk.For me, it's all about being clear and being proactive about the decisions that you're prepared to make.
Where are you going to put your energy? What are you going to do?So what's your to-do list?And we also hear at The Economist talk about your to-don't list.What are the things you're not going to do?And you're going to be clear on that.
And once you've made those decisions, you can park those things and put your energy where it needs to be.I think a lot of the challenges for people, and probably for myself in the past as well, and I've seen this with friends and colleagues,
where people get that balance wrong, and they don't counterbalance effectively, it does have a really big material impact on the quality of their life.
So they will experience burnout, they will experience mental health challenges, they will experience physical health challenges, it will put pressure on relationships, it's kind of inevitable.
So it's much better to be more discretionary, and more discriminatory in the types of decisions you're making upfront, so that you can have a better quality of life and a more fulfilling life and a healthier career in the longer term.
Thank you so much to those of you who've been in touch recently to connect with me on LinkedIn and say hi and say that you're listening to the podcast.These sort of things really make me happy and it's lovely to hear from you.
I also always enjoy having listeners from the podcast on our fellowship programs.
I think some of you have applied to the Leaders Plus Fellowship, especially applying if you are a manager or a leader or the future Leaders Plus program, if you don't have responsibility for leadership yet.
As we discussed plenty of times, even today, only nine in 100 FTSE 100 CEOs are women, and most sectors look quite similar.And it's such a massive issue that women's careers are plateauing when they have children.
So if you do also share that belief, and if you want to do something about it for your own career, then do definitely consider joining us.
You'll be part of a group of parents who feel the same, who are passionate about their career progression, but also passionate about their families.You'll have space to think about what you want to do.
You'll be supported to do the things that you want to do.
And you get these practical tools, the network, the support and mentorship to set your boundaries, apply for this next big job and find a way that you can be present with your child or children in a way that works for you.
I am releasing this in September, October, November. And the deadline for the next cohort for the fellowship program, if you have already got management or leadership responsibility, is the 12th of November.
So if you are a senior manager or director, do apply by then.We also have a deadline later on in November if you haven't got leadership responsibility yet, but would like to get some for our future Leaders Plus program.
Either way, I would love to hear from you and be in touch with you.And if you want to join any of those programs, get in touch.There are also scholarship opportunities available.Thanks for your interest. That's all very thought-provoking.
I'm interested in what happens when life doesn't go to plan.
And so if you are in a career where you want to shine, you want to give your best, you want to progress, and especially a lot of women are listening who I think should progress because they're still underrepresented in senior roles, and a lot of fathers who are working part-time and are often overlooked if they do so for promotions, we need to change that.
So I really would encourage listeners to continue.
But I think it's always these moments when you have perhaps a new diagnosis for your child, and that suddenly comes with tons of administrative work and tons of appointments with lots of experts, if you're lucky to get those appointments, or chasing them up and so on.
So I'm just interested, what you're learning about living that counterbalance in those situations when the unexpected occurs?
Yeah, so there are 14 chapters in the book.One is an introduction, one's a next steps, and then the 12 in the middle are all about the attributes that I think you need to build your career, but also build a meaningful life alongside.
The point I make in the book is that change is the only constant. inevitably, your context will change.In each of the chapters of Counterbalance, I share a personal example.
The personal example in the chapter on context is when Noah was diagnosed as having autism, when he was just prior to his fourth birthday.At that moment,
Our life changed completely because all of a sudden you've got a child who has a disability and is not going to be going to the local mainstream school and you're going to have to work very very hard as you inferred to get the support that's going to allow him to live his best life.
So at that particular moment in time, everything changed.We call ourselves the Sure Four.So myself, Hayley, my wife, Noah, and Darcy.So the four of us, the Sure Four.
And we try to look at decisions and make decisions that are going to be beneficial for all four of us. regardless of how our context is changing at that particular moment in time.
So it means that hopefully all four of us will get something out of the context.So when we go on holiday, we generally self-cater because people don't welcome families like ours necessarily in.
in restaurants, and we generally drive on holiday because it just means there's less time spent on public transport with other people.It doesn't mean shying away completely.
Of course, we do travel with other people, and we do stay with other people and in hotels, but it's rarer.It's the decision we make.So I just feel that
when your context changes, be very open about it, be very clear in your thinking about it, talk about it with those people around you who've got an influence, could potentially be a mentor, boss, friend, partner, and actually make conscious choices about what you're going to do differently.
If we'd made, when our context changed with Noah's diagnosis, if we had said, ah, no, we're going to carry on, we're going to live our life as if nothing has changed, I genuinely feel that would have been disastrous.
And I look at us seven years after that and feel like every day is challenging.There are significant challenges bringing up a child with such complex needs.He's genuinely in the 1% of the 1%.He's in a specialist school, but he's not in the classroom.
And yet, I wouldn't change any of it.But I'm glad that we're still doing our best to live our best life as a four, to make sure all of us get something.
But we've actually just been very honest and very open about the challenges we've experienced and how our context has changed.
And I imagine for other people listening on here, there will be things that are happening in their life, caring for elderly parents or being somebody who has experienced a redundancy recently.Lots of challenging things that happen.
I really believe that being positive, seeing those challenges as opportunities, being committed to what your purpose is and what your values are, and controlling the controllables.
At the end of the day, that self-control of things that you can really do something about is probably the thing that you should put your energy into.
What you're saying resonates a lot.We're also always visiting.It sounds like possibly not quite as many professionals as new, but with our children, we have a number of professionals that we need support with.
I think the question that sticks with me is We do have structures we have organizations with expectations with some very flexible some less flexible but there are always structures that we operate.
Within what have you learned about creating that counterbalance.Successfully in dealing with the constraints that a job title a flexible working agreement and so on brings.
Yeah, so I work for The Economist Group, and one of the things I really appreciate about the organization, I love the brand.I've always loved the brand.I've read the newspaper for 30 years.
So the other thing I really like about this organization is the flexibility that it offers.But it offers clarity of flexibility. and she might well listen to this, but I like my boss a lot because there is a lot of clarity.
Is this part of you making good impression in the first four and a half months?
Well, we'll find out, won't we, in due course.The thing I really like about my boss is that she is very clear. Her expectations of performance are clear.Her expectations of when you need to be in the office are clear.
And she lives the values of the business, one of which is inclusivity.And I really appreciate that.
The thing also I like about working here is that there is a, in inverted commas, a rule, an expectation that you will work two days a week in a physical environment with your colleagues.
So this week I worked here on Monday and I'm working here on Friday.Last week it was Tuesday and Wednesday so there was discretion for me to choose which days.
So I could incorporate thinking about, well, actually, it's my turn to do the brownies run in the evening.Actually, I promised to do the school run.I need to take Noah to the doctor.So I'm going to be able to follow through on those.
But I've got freedom within a framework to make those flexible choices.And I think that the points I would make are, and probably reflecting on this question, work for good bosses.
So look for the opportunity to work for people who have got similar principles, values, purpose to yourself.
And we know that it's empirically proven that 70% of the quality of your experience at work will be dictated on the quality of your relationship with your boss.So find somebody you enjoy working for and be prepared to provide upwards feedback.
Look for opportunities where you can get flexibility.
So if you're going to work for an organization that says on the way in that we're expecting you to be here five days a week, and you can't commit to that, don't make the mistake of thinking, I'll get in and then I'll change it.
It's not going to work very well.So be very open, be very upfront on the way into organizations or on the way into roles about what you feel is going to allow you to do your best work.And look for clarity.
And you can provide clarity to others, but you can also look for environments where clarity has been provided to you.And for me, although careers and organizations do still have a very structured way of working,
I think that one of the advantages of the way we work now is I think there is more autonomy and there is more empowerment for people to shape things within their organizations and in their own life, in their career.I attended a conference yesterday.
It was at the St.George's Park, the football association's training venue in the Midlands, in the UK.There was a retired army colonel talking to us, and he shared
the way that the military now work is not so much this kind of command and control all the way through the organization it's about sharing a vision.
With people or sharing an expectation and then giving people the opportunity to deliver on that expectation.Based on the context that they sit with them i thought wow if even the military is thinking in that way not empowered way.
Surely for any of us working in the private sector or public sector or third sector role, there must be an opportunity for us to have some flexibility, provided we have our eyes open and we're prepared to be very honest with people we're working alongside.
Your point about choosing the right leader to work for is super important.In our research, it appeared that one of the biggest reasons why working parents don't apply for promotion is because they are unsure about how that boss is like.
which is slightly easier if you're working within an organization, you can find out what people think of that person you want to work for.Can I ask, and we can cut this out if you don't want to answer it, but I'm interested.
You've changed industry quite significantly, I think.How did you know that your boss at The Economist would be so supportive, or did you just know somebody within The Economist before, or did you have a structured approach to checking it all out?
The thing I'm most proud of in my career is I've worked in lots of different types of organizations, lots of different models of organizations.I currently work for an organization that's broadly privately owned.
The last organization was a private equity-based organization.The one before that was a merger with international shareholders, but only in the UK. The one before that was a public limited company you could buy shares in.
The one before that was a special purpose vehicle.The one before that was partially funded by the home office, partially funded by the train operating company.So lots of different types of organization.I've really enjoyed that.
This is the first organization I've ever worked in where the product sits separate to the commercial part of the business, and commercial can't influence the product.The product is the product, the editorial tone of voice of The Economist newspaper.
And that's what I really enjoyed.I've loved that opportunity to work in lots of different types of businesses and types of organizations, charities, universities, private sector businesses, public sector businesses and organizations.
The thing is, you can do more due diligence than you've ever been able to do it before. before.So if you're connected with 3,000 people on LinkedIn, you're second connected with about a million people, if not more.
So it's quite easy to get data on different individuals who you might potentially be going in to work for.And that wasn't the case in the past.But I do think you have to have an open mind about it.
So when I joined Experian, I was recommended into the organization by somebody.And he gave me a download on the two people who are doing the job share who I was going to be working for.And that was very helpful.
I ended up being there for over five years.
But you're not always going to get it right you absolutely do have to have an open mind and you can't take absolutely everyone's perspective because everybody's perspective will be different about how individuals manifest at work but when i met my current boss you know i met her virtually and then i met her face to face it just felt like there was a connection.
Hopefully she feels the same way.It felt like we were aligned in many of the things that we could do.And at the end of the interview, she said to me, I think you and I could achieve a great deal together.
Now that was something that was like, right, I get it.Yeah, this is a good person to work for.When I went to work for somebody at Experian, she wrote to me in advance of joining and it said, we want you to feel great about joining Experian.
And I did feel great. It's those little things that you can detect that will maybe showcase a little bit of what that person is going to be like and what their purpose is going to be like.
It's not an exact science, but using your environmental radar and using that antenna will help.
I mean, that is an awesome outcome of an interview, if they say at the end, give you that sort of feedback.
Do you remember, and you might not, but do you remember exactly what you said about, and when you said it, about your boundaries, your requirements, your counterbalance?
Yeah, so hopefully you've picked up in the 30 minutes or so that we've been having a conversation today that I'm very open.I mean, some people have criticized me in the past and given me feedback and said, you're probably too open.
But I find that openness gives me a lot of strength.So if I'm prepared to share with people my own perspective and how I see the world and how you're going to get the best out of me,
there's a much better opportunity for that to actually manifest and for that to actually come to pass.
Interestingly, when I came to the Economist Group for my interview, finished the interview, the comment was made about, I think we can achieve a lot together.
I went down in the elevator, we're on the fourth floor, but the third floor is the ground floor in effect, which is a bit confusing.
I went down the elevator, and my now boss chased me downstairs and caught up with me in the lobby and said, I forgot to mention, Are you OK working two days a week where our expectation is two days a week here?What would your commute be like?
And we had that conversation in the lobby before I left the building.
So and then subsequent to that, I had another conversation with the person who looks after talent acquisition about absolute expectations and what the package would look like for coming to do the role.
So it felt like there was a lot of clarity up front before joining the organization. My view 100% is honesty is the best policy.And the more open, the more honest you are from the get-go, the easier it is to arrive at consensus more quickly.
And can I ask, did you agree to the two days in the office or did you push back?You did.
Two days.I was very happy. Yeah, sorry.Yeah, I was very happy with two days.I mean, I think it's incredibly flexible to say two days, and also you get to choose your two days.But I would advocate for this in other organizations.
Obviously, I'm, you know, I, my accountability here is organizational effectiveness.So I'm expected to have a view on these things.And I feel like in this organization, two days a week in the office is a good blend.
I think that like any business or any organization, we can still do more to make sure that people get the value out of those two days that they spend together.We're not there yet for sure.
And also working in a hybrid fashion with some people online and some people in the room, we've still got work to do in that space as well.But I think it's already the new normal, but I think it's becoming normalized as well.
And I think we are getting into a better cadence and a better way of working in that space. So yeah, I'm very happy with two days.I'd be happy to work with three.
I think if somebody said to me four in the office now, I would probably put a question mark against that role and wonder why it needs to be four.Because one of the things I'm very passionate about is performance.
And the key thing that sits behind performance is empowerment and accountability.
And if you want to create that empowerment and accountability in people, I think you should be allowing them to discretion to work somewhere else, provided you know what goals they are looking to make a contribution towards achieving.
Agreed.Writing a book is always a really good opportunity to reflect and think about what you've learned.And I'm interested, as you wrote the book, was there anything that you realized and that you wish you already knew five years ago?
I mean, I'll be very honest.If anybody's listening to this and they think, I wonder if I should write a book or not.I have loved it and learned an absolute shed load during the course of it.I've lent on friends and colleagues and family to read it.
So I had 10 people who read the book alongside me whilst I was doing it. But I also lent on the professionals.
So I had a copyright lawyer and a copy editor and a proofreader and a cover designer and a typesetter who could do their jobs so much better than I can.
And I was prepared to invest in that because I knew how much I was going to learn from the experience of actually doing it in the first place.
I think in terms of learning from the topic area, the thing that I'll take away from the experience is how it really crystallized my thinking around what counterbalancing actually is.I knew what my dad had done well.
I knew what some of the challenges were. Obviously, I volunteered for Leaders Plus, I've worked for other organizations not dissimilar.
And I've worked in senior roles in organizations where I've had a lot of engagement with people who are looking to build their career and be successful, but not looking to break themselves and looking to get the most out of life.
So I've had all those experiences.But this was the first chance to really put a sort of cold flannel on my head, sit back and think, what exactly is the essence of this?And then sharing
what I think is the art of counterbalance, which I talked about a little bit earlier, is probably the thing that I will walk away from.
I really understand how I think you can achieve it and how I have managed to be successful in doing it using the principles that I share.If you'd asked me a year ago, could I write those down
by clicking your fingers, I would not have been able to do that.I would have been able to feel it, but I wouldn't have been able to articulate it.And I think that's the thing that I'm proud that I've managed to deliver on.
And you mentioned earlier that your wife also is working and is working in a career that is very, you can't check emails while you're a counselor.It's quite an intense job.
And I'm interested in what you've learned from your work on the book about how to create counterbalance in a dual career family.
I made the point before that we see ourselves as the four, in effect.One of the things I mentioned in the book is that my favourite poem is...I like poetry, but my favourite poem is probably by Muhammad Ali, the boxer.His poem was, Me, We.That's it.
He shared it with some students at Harvard, and it was in the film When We Were Kings. I really believe that I shifted from being a team of one into being the leader of a team of one to being an equal partner in a team of four.
We've looked at our life in that way. What do we need financially for us to achieve some of our goals and to provide for our children and to make sure we get the best out of things?
But what do we also need from a kind of pastoral support for each other?And we made a very conscious decision that Haley wouldn't work full-time whilst in this phase of our lives.She's self-employed as a counsellor.
She currently supports people who are autistic or have ADHD or their carers or their teachers, family members.In a way, it's a busman's holiday for her and it's very intense because of the types of people that she's talking to.
And we're really comfortable that she generally has five clients each week and does a supervision session and she has to prep for those clients.So she probably does 15 hours work a week, something along those lines.
But she also, the rest of her time is spent providing support for Noah because there is a significant number of appointments and specialists and support networks that she needs to engage in to make sure that he gets the best outcome for himself.
The point that Hayley and I have made to each other is our success as a family now is the biggest thing in the rest of our lives is going to be getting Noah into the right specialist provision for his secondary school, which will be in September next year.
So almost everything else, buying a house, it's peripheral.And our focus is, provided I'm earning money, Hayley's making a contribution in the way that she's been making it with her counselling.
Darcy is in school, and we are looking after Noah's next step.Collectively, we are living our best life and getting the best out of it.I recognise the point about dual careers within families.I think the key thing is prioritisation and clarity.
and going back to your purpose and having lots and lots of communication about it.Because I imagine there will be a point in the future where Hayley and I, when we met, we were both working.
I imagine there'll be a point in the future where we're both working five days a week again, but we've made a conscious choice now and we're clear on it, that it's the right decision for us for this probably 10 year period in our life.
And our decisions and our priorities fit our context.
And this is another personal question, and you can tell me to do it out, but I'd be interested in the pressure of being the person who brings in the most money.
I'm making an assumption here, but it sounds like you're working more, probably bringing in more money than Haley.
And that must be quite tough, because you do need to make sure that you don't lose your income generation, especially if your children are dependent on that. Has there ever been a conflict around that money income generation and counterbalance?
Full disclosure, I've been made redundant three times, different circumstances, three times in the last three years.I write about it a lot in the book.
I hadn't been made redundant in the past, and then all of a sudden, they were all three completely different circumstances. The first one felt very painful, the two subsequent ones far less so.That question, are you a spender or a saver?I'm a saver.
I'm the person who will always try to keep some money back to put into a pension or to invest in something that is going to provide us with some air cover if we get to a point where I'm no longer able to earn money.
And I think that that's, you know, it's completely separate conversation.But one thing I did really benefit from at the end of last year, I actually, for the first time in my life spent time with a financial advisor.
And I got a lot from the activity, because it taught me over the next 30 years, when do I need to have money?And how much money do I need to have?And all of Haley's income and all of Haley's money is in there as well.
So it's for us as a family, the children's education is in there.And we can look at it collectively and think,
how much money do i need to earn in the next ten years or next fifteen years or whatever it might be in order to provide the lifestyle that we would like to have and i think that that provided a huge amount of clarity i was very cynical about it on the way and very cynical and distrusting but actually it was something that has really helped provide clarity to myself and hailey on what we actually can afford to do what we can't afford to do and where we want to invest our money we said it's about home
education for the children, pension, and lifestyle holidays fundamentally.It's about investing in those four things iteratively at any moment in time so that you can get the best out of things.
I think that's probably another element of counterbalance that I've learned in the last 18 months.
Thank you for sharing.And if someone's listening to this would like to reduce the chance of burnout and increase their counterbalance and they don't know where to start, what would be one or two things they can experiment with this week?
Yeah, so I write about this in the book.I experienced overwhelm when I was 37.I was working the best job, my favorite job.
I was working for a large construction organization, and a lot of senior members of the HR team left in a very short period of time.It was a quarter or half year.
And I was left holding on to lots of live projects as one of the few people who remained in the organization.
And at the time, I was advised to go and speak to one of the shareholders' family members, who is in a very senior position in the organization, and flag my concerns.
I'd never met this individual, and I was very reticent, and I was very concerned that this was going to not reflect very well on me because I was going to be seen as weak I went to see her and I articulated the challenges.
I think I had 18 live projects.I think ordinarily, a professional may well be working on three.I think I had 18.I went to speak to her and I was very open.
She said to me, go away this weekend, write down, reflect on it, come back Monday, write down which of these projects you think we should carry on with, which of them we can give to somebody else, which of them we should park, and which of them we should stop.
And I did that activity, provided her with a paper.She read the paper and agreed with everything I'd said based on my professional opinion and said to me, yep, go and make that happen now.Within months, I've been promoted at work.
And the lesson I learned was that it's not a weakness to flag when you're struggling or when you've got challenges, it's a strength.
If you share and you find that the person who's receiving that feedback is not supportive, you're probably working in the wrong organization for the wrong individual.
And you might need to have a conversation and think about whether that is serving you. to your best interests and maybe there's a different decision that needs to be made.
So I do feel that the big lesson for me was that honesty with yourself and honesty with those around you would be at all times, but especially if you feel like you're close to burnout,
overwhelm prioritize so you know i've made the point you know i was asked to prioritize by that senior person and i did that and it's definitely one of the things that i've learned don't feel you can do everything what are the things that can add most value to you and to others and then be prepared to share don't sit on things and hide things away
I talk about two or three other instances in the book where I felt like I could deal with everything by just leaning on my resilience and pushing through.
Fortunately, I had one or two people who were prepared to sit me down, take me for a coffee and say, look, what you're doing at the moment is not in service of yourself or other people.
Maybe take this as an opportunity to reflect and do something differently.
Now, as you probably heard on this call, I'm much more open and I'm prepared to share, and hopefully people will be prepared to support me as and when you have that unpleasant eventuality.
Thank you so much.It's very inspiring to hear you share that so openly.If people want to read the book or find out more about you, where should they go?And can you just remind listeners of the title of the book as well?
Yeah, so the book's called Counterbalance, how to build your career without ruining your life.It's been published and distributed by an organization I'd never heard of called IngramSpark.
And Ingram is a huge, I think it's the largest book distributor in the world rather than publisher.And you can buy it anywhere across the globe.
So it's available on Amazon or Book to Peer or Barnes and Noble or Waterstones because you order the book and it's printed on demand.So there's no waste, but it just means that you probably need to wait for seven or ten days for the book to arrive.
But hopefully you'll enjoy it as and when it does arrive.
Wonderful.Thank you so much, Tom.
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 Ferina Hefti and I'd be delighted to hear your feedback and your suggestions or just have you say hi.
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