Pushing the grain: Risk-taking for change-making
“I think we’re at our least efficient when someone else is driving everything that we’re doing. And that’s a situation you can wind up in when you don’t have the confidence to say, yes, I can actually do this.”
Brendan Donoghue
In this episode you’ll hear about
- Building influence as a design leader: The four things you must have in your tool kit to establish influence within an organisation that may otherwise undervalue your role
- Actively practicing risk-taking: Increasing your willingness to do things differently in order to stand out and have your voice heard
- Misalignment in organisations: Dealing with differing perceptions of direction & how to engage in ‘courageous conversations’ with leadership to navigate differences
- Relationship building for success: Knowing how, when and with whom to establish yourself relationally within a workplace
- Driving lasting change: How to make change within big organisations through a strategy of small, but powerful steps
Key links
The Art of Innovation – Tim Brown
About our guest
Brendan Donoghue is a Digital Executive, CX Thought Leader, Transformation Agent and ‘eternal optimist’. Brendan has worked at some of Australia’s biggest and most exciting organisations, with experience gained in telecommunications, superannuation and banking.
He has built and led some of the largest design teams and transformational digital programs in the country, including at the likes of Telstra, NAB and currently UniSuper, as Head of Digital & Customer Experience, delivering complex and innovative customer-centred experiences across the board.
About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.
Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.
Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.
Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.
Transcript
Chris Hudson: Hello everyone and welcome to the Company Road Podcast. When we think of intrapreneurship, it conjures up different images to different people.
Some of aspiring leaders, I think some of established leaders, seasoned or starting out, sometimes we think of enormous, unprecedented accomplishments. But often it’s the quiet successes that go largely unnoticed. It could be the plucky underdog who’s chipping away at something magic in the background.
But I want to introduce you to Brendan here, Brendan Donoghue, who’s someone I’m sure is no stranger to those feelings or experiences. Brendan, you’re a bit of a figurehead in the world of design and customer experience and I’ve seen you talk at many a conference and do a podcast or two along the way as well.
So you’re seasoned at this stuff. You’re a head of digital customer experience at UniSuper currently, where you’ve been for a few years. In your past, you’ve been at NAB head of digital design, also Telstra as a GM in the area of advocacy and engagement. So you’re in a strong leadership position.
I’m really looking forward to the conversation that we have today for the fact that you’re a leader in design now, but also you’ve enjoyed huge successes along the way. But maybe we’ll get into some of the other side of it as well in, you know, what happened around the background of those successes to make those things possible.
But let’s get to know you a bit better to begin with.
[00:01:12] Brendan Donoghue: Good morning, Chris, and thank you very much for the introduction. It’s been a really wonderful career, but think one of the things that I always loved was early on in my career was the opportunities that people took to give me guidance. And so I love coming along and speaking at conferences, being a part of these things, because I think it’s an opportunity to give back.
I think it’s something really special and unique about the design community that I love being a part of.
[00:01:32] Chris Hudson: Yeah, brilliant. Thanks, Brendan. And let’s start us what characterises you. I’ve heard you talk about this in various ways, but I’d love to hear your answer on that today. Maybe it’s shifted on, maybe it hasn’t, let’s hear about what characterises you.
[00:01:43] Brendan Donoghue: What characterises me, I think if you ask me what’s my approach in a single word? I’d go back to, we were doing a piece of work at NAB Labs many years ago, and we were trying to work out what was the unique characteristic that set aside a successful designer within a complex organisation, above all others.
And is it craft excellence? Is it skill? Is it communication? Which was quite popular. But ultimately where I landed was, I think it is relentlessness. And what that means is inside really complex organisations, especially corporate institutions, you are dealing with very stayed and fixed ways of working, people that have built careers around doing things in a particular way.
And as designers, we are confronting and challenging for those individuals and those processes. So if you’re coming into these organisations and you say, hey, there’s actually a different way that we could be doing this, you have to have this sense of resilience and to be able to push through. So this is where I think about the thing that sets me apart or the thing that I think I champion the most is this relentless pursuit of doing things in a better way.
And it’s not just resilience, but it’s the ability to keep pushing through those roadblocks. It doesn’t mean pushing into things where you’re not wanted. You’ve got to read the room. You’ve got to look for your opportunities, but it just means don’t give up. Always keep pushing forward and always keep looking for those changes because sometimes it’s about, having the answer when the question’s asked.
So when the opportunity comes up, you can jump in and you can look after it. But if you’re not constantly pushing, maybe the opportunity passes you by when you’re not ready for it.
[00:03:12] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I’m wondering that because relentlessness brings with it some degree of baggage in that it isn’t always expected that your resilience, that your push is going to continue. Some people within your organisation are going to fight against that. So how do you get around that resistance and that friction and that, that pain in the backside that, could be, it could be construed or taken the wrong way, but you’re just trying to push for the same outcome.
How do you manage some of those things?
[00:03:35] Brendan Donoghue: I think it comes down to influence. So I’ve often thought about, early on in my career, I’d been fascinated by this idea of, design thinking and the human centred approach. It enabled us to understand what the member was thinking, what the user was thinking and so it was all about, we found this secret key to tell us that we were right, and all I had to do was explain to the business, at da, look, I’ve got the thing, here’s the thing, and- And in my career, I’ve delivered really big pieces of work and some transformative change, and then I’ve been made redundant, I struggled with that early on in my career.
I was like, hang on a second. How did we do this at Telstra? delivered massive change, we’d fixed mobile billing, removed proration, the number one pain point for new members, massive dropping calls, dropping credits, big rise in NPS. And I was made redundant within a few months. How did that happen?
How did these two things happen? I was made redundant. Basically, what I’d done was I’d been too focused on being right and not focused on actually taking people on the journey. I’d managed to alienate my leadership because I hadn’t listened to what they wanted. And they actually had ideas. They had suggestions on what to do.
But instead of listening to that and translating it back into things that made sense for them, I was too fixated on no, listen, I’ve got this is the answer. This is the answer. And I pushed forward. So really fixate on, what’s the thing that you need to do if you want to transform an organisation or change an organisation?
Don’t focus on being right. Being right is almost irrelevant. You’ve got to build influence and to build influence as a creative and a creative leader, you’ve got to really understand how does the organisation think and feel like. What is your boss’s KRAs? What’s your boss’s KRAs? What are the company scorecard items?
As a designer, you have to be able to translate the value of your work into those outcomes. So as a designer, a design leader, I don’t tend to talk about things in relation to member experience and how members are feeling, except for when they translate into, it’ll increase sales, it’ll reduce churn.
Sometimes as designers, I think that we tell ourselves the myth that we exist within, enterprises corporate institutions because they’re good corporate citizens. It’s just not true. People care about customers because there is a financial outcome. Increase in sales, decrease in cost to serve, decrease in churn.
Design, design, thinking human centred design are tools that enable us to actually get to those outcomes. So there’s an opportunity for us to actually translate that value. So when I’m thinking about building influence, it’s always about being able to talk about our work in a way that makes sense for the organisation.
[00:06:05] Chris Hudson: What are some of the, I guess the big differences, it could be in language or a situation where that hasn’t worked out. It’s like you’re pressing all the buttons and nothing’s happening. Does that happen from time to time?
[00:06:14] Brendan Donoghue: Look, in my career I’ve been fascinated by this idea of where are the design leaders? So, John Cole co-wrote Design Thinking’s Time Has Arrived or The Time of Design Thinking is Here or something in about 2015 and it was published in the Harvard Business Review and I remember reading it at the time and thinking this is it!
Our moment’s here, chief design officers are around the corner, everyone’s going to come to us and they’re going to listen to what we’re thinking. And we waited and we waited. And here we are in 2023 and they’re not here. The chief design officer role, it’s been given to a couple of individuals, but they’re not c-suite executives like CTOs and CIOs, they’re within organisational structures.
Someone had said to me once, if a chief design officer is real, could they become CEO? If you can’t take that next step to CEO, then it’s probably not a chief role. It’s more window dressing. So how do we actually build influence within these organisations? I became fixated on the idea, and I really looked into this.
I even did it as part of my masters. So I’ve come up with an idea that basically what you’ve got to be doing is if you want to be an influential design leader, you’ve got to have four things within your toolkit. You’ve got to have craft excellence. To be really good at the thing that you’re doing because that’s the foundation for the work that you’re doing.
You’ve got to be an excellent design leader. You’ve got to be a good design leader if you want to bring people with you, there’s no point doing the work if people aren’t following you. Three, and we talked about this a little bit just before, have a really strong business acumen. So be able to understand and translate your work into or the value of your work into the value that the organisation understands.
But here’s the last one. It’s the most important one. You’ve got to take risk. If you’re not embracing risk and engaging in what I termed entrepreneurial behaviours, but I think you might term being an intrapreneur, you’re going to miss the opportunity. So I’ve run into scenarios throughout my career where we were doing all the right stuff, but I had product owners who wouldn’t listen to me.
And I’ll give you a really good one. So I was working at a bank. I won’t name, but we were working at a big bank and we really had a way to improve the online experience that we were giving to our members. But I had a product owner that just wasn’t listening to us. And we knew that we had a GM who would take a meeting each Tuesday and they would come up the lift and they’d walk from the meeting at 11 o’clock and they’d walk across to their desk.
So what we did was we went and did the design work, we printed it out, we put it on big A3 pieces of paper and we put it in the kitchen, which sat between the lift and the desk. So when they came out of the lift, they walked through and we said, oh g’day, how are you? And she said, oh Brendan, what are you doing here?
And we said, oh we just needed some space. So we’ve actually put all of these designs out on the table here and having a look. Can I take a look? Sure. She has a look. And she said, these look fantastic. Like this is amazing. What do you need here? And we said, oh we’re just taking a crack at how we could improve the online experience.
How much money do you need to do this work? This is how much we need. I’ll fund it straight away. Let’s get going. So it’s that even when you’ve got the right idea and even when you can translate the value, sometimes you’ve got to do something a little bit different so that people will listen to you.
[00:09:03] Chris Hudson: Do you think there’s a training ground for that? I mean, where do you learn how to do this? I don’t know if it’s an ambush, but it’s kind of like sometimes you need to use a bit of that guerrilla behaviour to get the point made and cut across some of the usual flow of business in a day to day environment.
What’s been good in helping advise what’s safe and what’s unsafe?
[00:09:20] Brendan Donoghue: It’s a really good question. I think you’ve got to just start small and you’ve got to find what works. I think for me, I’ve got all of these different stories of me pushing against the grain, but the thing that’s worked for me is I did it in an authentic way. I did it in my way. I think if someone else tried exactly the same things, it might come off a little bit differently.
So I would suggest if you’re moving into the space, start small, start agitating around small things. But I often talk to my team about the back pocket design. You know, on the back pocket designers, the design we carry around in our back pocket. So when someone says, oh I wonder if we could do this differently, you whip it out.
You say here, we’ve already thought about this. So it’s about sharpening what you’re doing by constantly looking for things that we could improve and pushing into those areas, maybe before you’ve got permission to do it. And really agitate them for that change. And all you have to do is show how to do one thing better.
And then the business is more likely to come to you again and again. I think sometimes as designers, we fall into this trap of thinking, and particularly in corporates where I’ve crafted my career. Not everywhere is an agency. And so not everywhere needs to stand still and wait for the brief.
But when you’re a part of that big unit, actually look for the opportunities to drive forward push the organisation in a proactive sense as opposed to waiting to find out what we should be doing.
[00:10:31] Chris Hudson: There’s definitely a permission culture that sits around corporate structure and you’ve worked in very complex organisations. And I’m wondering how you go about getting to know that structure, and them getting to know you to the extent that they would trust you if you pulled the design out of the back pocket, or if you interrupted them after the lift exit on the way back from a coffee.
How does that relational aspect evolve into something that is much more founded on trust and it’s accepting of you as a leader or as somebody with a point of view at that moment?
[00:10:59] Brendan Donoghue: You have to start with relationships. Every organisation that I’ve gone to, I really eat my own cake in relation to design. So every time I arrive at a new organisation, the very first thing I’m doing is sitting down. I’m doing lots of interviews, meets and greets however you want to frame it when you’re setting the outlook teams invite up, but lots of conversations.
You’re understanding who are the people within the organisation that support you, who don’t support you. Understand the opportunity that you’ve got to drive change the space that you should be in, and then work out, what is the organisation really need you to be doing? Because there’s always a difference between what those hiring you think need to be done sometimes what really needs to be done because there’s all these hidden elements.
There’s personal bias. There’s unknowns and actually coming in and doing that design, especially when you’re building a new team. At UniSuper, I came into the organisation and I built that CX team and really followed that approach. Whenever I’ve come a cropper in my career, it is when I haven’t followed that approach and I’ve come in and just assumed I can move forward at pace.
And that’s when you end up leaving people behind because you haven’t taken the time to understand, A) What’s the space you’ve got to play in and what’s the opportunity you can be going after, but also, building those relationships, the relationships sit at the core. Like I said, being right isn’t enough, it’s actually about how do you deliver the change and how do you bring the people on side?
Yeah. And I think like you said, you bring your own personal brand to that mix and all of a sudden people remember you for that, the engagement with you as opposed to anybody else becomes something that is more memorable through a conversation or through any of the stunts that you’ve tried. Are there any other big stories you want to tell around that before we move on, just around, a stunt or something that you felt really helped build a relationship in an unexpected way.
Oh, look at, I mean, it’s funny you call them stunts because for me they’re just, it’s an organic way of working. I’ve come through a number of teams that were made redundant after delivering great value, and you really have to think about what was going wrong in those teams.
So, I’ve come to the opinion that design has to be tied to delivery. And that’s the way in which the organisation sees the value of design. So when I started at UniSuper, I immediately went to the guy at the time who was the head of digital. And I said, I need to come and sit on your floor because you and I have to be joined at the hip.
And he laughed at me and said, aw Brendan, if you want to come and sit on this floor, you’d literally have to bring your own desk, there’s no room for you here. And on a Friday night, I then loaded two desks into the goods lift and brought them up and come Monday morning. Here I am sitting on the floor with the only UX designer that I’d hired to that point.
And we’re like, g’day welcome. We’re here. We’ve wired everything up. And it disrupted, and it caused a lot of angst, but it was one of these things that once we’d done it, they couldn’t undo it. And so it went from being a sense of mirth and maybe annoyance at the start to within a couple of weeks, we were just embedded.
We were part of the conversations. It was a lot easier to include us in, form design or login or flow or whatever, because we were right there. So I think the thing about, stunts or disruptions is you’ve got to push into these hard spaces if you want to be taken seriously. Otherwise, we could have sat down on a completely different floor and spent six months wondering why we weren’t being listened to.
[00:13:58] Chris Hudson: Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, that’s just a genius way of getting the message across. In the spatial environment that can make a big difference. It reminds me of that scene in the twits in the book by Roald Dahl, where they come back and all the furnitures on the ceiling.
And, it’s not quite that, but it’s that kind of
[00:14:11] Brendan Donoghue: I think I have that book in my bookcase back here.
[00:14:14] Chris Hudson: Yeah, got to sit up and pay attention. Something’s different about the world of what I can’t figure out what it is. Oh, yeah, I can see Brendan and his team were sitting in the corner there
now.
That’s brilliant.
There’s something to be said for some of those public, and very open, interactions, I won’t use the word stunts anymore but more about the interactions and the things that you can label through that. But when we’ve spoken in the past, there’s a lot also to be said for the things that happen behind the scenes that you’re somehow tinkering your way at.
And just in terms of what you make public and what you keep back and what you work on in your version of a corporate shed somewhere back there. What’s worked for you there? And how have you known when to bring things to the fore and bring them out into the public domain?
[00:14:52] Brendan Donoghue: It’s a really good question. When I was at we had a challenge that we wanted to be solving around business banking and the business banking experience was not where we wanted it to be. So we desperately wanted to improve it. And, I’d been part of a group that were asking for additional funding and it kept getting knocked back because rightly so, funding had been allocated.
And we should have worked out how to do it. But instead of just sitting there and saying, well, you know what, we had a crack and we can’t improve it. Let’s go away. I came up with a way- my friend and co collaborator the head of tech at the time. We built a little group of individuals who sat in this tiny little corner office on one of those floors and we spent about 10 weeks doing 100 rounds of customer interviews and 10 rounds, 11 rounds of iterative design and came up with a clickable prototype that showed what the future of business banking could be.
And not a radical departure, but really just what if we got in and we updated the interactions, the patterns, the styles, and actually created an experience that was much more focused on the member and leaned into some aspects of kind of emotional design as opposed to the standard business banking experience you get today.
And what we had at the end was a really engaging clickable prototype. We had a bunch of vox pops that we’d captured on video of customers saying things like oh if I saw this, I’d move over from the CommBank and aw this finally feels like my bank instead of someone else’s, this is amazing.
And we popped up at that point. We had no permission to do this. It was pretty questionable whether or not we wouldn’t have gotten into trouble if it hadn’t worked out, but we had no permission to do this. Went away and did this work and we popped up at the end with this clickable prototype and we were funded within about 48 hours, because what happened was as soon as we started to show this to senior stakeholders, the question shifted from, can we get some money to go and do something to this is what we want to build?
Can we please go and build this? And it shifted radically because what happened was senior stakeholders in the organisation understood what we wanted to do, understood what the end state could be and were clamouring to get involved because they knew, hey this is exactly what our CEO is talking about and building the bank of the future.
I want to be on this. So we went from working in the shadows and being very quiet about what we were doing to within about two weeks, the CEO was asking for weekly updates on the work that we were doing. So I think the question there about, when do you pop up and show what you’re doing is number one, you’ve got to be comfortable to go and take the risk and do the work that maybe you don’t have the permission to do. So within your leadership of the team, find time to go and work on those things that maybe aren’t being the priority from the business or understand what the overall priorities are and find the time to do those.
And then number two, work out how to communicate them back to the business. For us, clickable prototypes are worth their weight in gold. Because, up to that point, I could talk about things until the cows come home, but as soon as I can get a stakeholder who can click around something, it feels real for them.
I almost have this thing, if I prototype it, the chance of it getting built is so much higher than if I’ve just got even screens on a piece of paper. Because it starts to make things real for stakeholders and they can get behind the idea or alternatively they can tell you why it won’t work and why they’d like to go in a different direction but now you’ve got them engaged in the process.
[00:18:06] Chris Hudson: The conversations that happen obviously around, whether something should be stood up as a work stream are very different to those where you’ve got actually something to show, you see this in the startup world all the time where actually it’s not just the fact that you’ve got a great idea and you’ve been able to put an excellent pitch deck together, but if you can show that people are actually interacting with it, buying it, you’ve got the numbers, the data to show, I guess the more you can show the more convincing the argument really.
And the easier it is talking to motivation and ease, the easier it is for somebody to actually come on board and say, okay well, if all you need is money, then we’ll take it to the next stage. But I think it’s also an interesting point in its origination of, the seed of an idea in whichever way that is planted and whichever way it comes about has to start with somebody.
And somebody through a team structure or individually has to either make a conscious decision to take their time away from something that, somebody else that’s probably at a quite senior level is already expecting them to do and go sideways, left and right, and then somehow come up with this new set of thinking.
So I’m wondering how that, process works for you in teams that you’ve seen and how it works well, because is it somebody in your team coming to you one day and saying, I need your approval to do this? Are they just going off and doing it? What’s the best way of getting some of that traction really happening?
[00:19:21] Brendan Donoghue: I think it really comes down to the environment that you’re in. I’m really influenced by- don’t think you’ve ever seen the book Trojan Horse and Dark Matter by Dan Hill, but a really amazing concept of talking about how you can really change big organisations through small changes and to paraphrase and probably paraphrase quite badly, they wanted to build a wooden building a few stories high within a European country and all the regulations at the time said you couldn’t possibly do it.
But from a sustainability standpoint from a building structure standpoint, quality of material, this was an excellent idea. So instead of doing the old idea, which is coming in and making this big case to change the rules so that they could build the thing, they just said, could we actually just get permission to do this very small thing?
And people said, yeah, of course you can do that small thing, that’s not a problem. And then they delivered the small thing, and then all of a sudden, everyone else was saying, well look at this, this is an excellent example of something working well, let’s build more, let’s change the regulations. So then the argument is being made outside of that team.
The argument’s being made by the people in the public square.
So when I think about creating that space for design to exist, do small things exceptionally well, and that creates the opportunity then for you to be doing more and more. If you start by just doing the work that’s asked of you and not pushing it and doing something else, don’t start by swinging for the bleachers, right?
Start with something really small. Start with something that’s just taking a few days and popping up. We had a great one we’d done at NAB, which was sharing receipts. So when you’d finished a transaction, did you wish to share the receipt with someone? Yeah, I wish to share the receipt.
So we’d gone and done that work. We had that there. We knew what the design was looking like. And then one day, one of the team said, look, we’ve run out of story points before the sprint’s over. Is there anything we should do? Here’s an idea. This is a great idea. And it ended up being one of the best features that had come out in that kind of quarter. So it’s about starting small. And the more and more you do it, the more the business accepts that’s what you do, and you can create the space then to continue to do that. So my counsel would be you’ve got to create it by just, warming the frog up, right, or boiling the frog.
There’s not a PC term for that, I wish I could think of one, but, one degree at a time, so that it doesn’t shock the business, but it actually just gets them used to the idea of, you’ll always take this time to be looking at things that could be improving.
[00:21:26] Chris Hudson: I mean, that’s a great point. I think around, it’s a parallel point and maybe a stretch into the discussion that we could have around risk and in terms of what makes risk comfortable because risk is an inevitability within everyday business. So, we’re always having, I guess, quite combative discussions, heated discussions with certain key members and leadership members who just don’t see a way to accept the idea without the interrogation that goes with it.
So you’re always coming up against the barriers that you have to overcome. So, keeping it small, obviously minimises that, but do you have any other points of view around risk and how to best manage that?
[00:22:00] Brendan Donoghue: Oh, I think as a design leader, you have to embrace risk. You’ve got to be really comfortable with it. I watched it at Telstra, Optus before that and the National Australia Bank, really good design ideas or really good design processes get passed over and confident product owners listened to in the alternative.
And the reason for that is because often as designers, what we do is we turn up and someone will say, we want to grow the business by X percent. And we say, right, what we need is six months and we’ll go and do, this piece of research, then we’ll do this iteration and then we’ll do something. And then when we get to the end, maybe we’ll have an answer.
And that’s very uncomfortable for those leaders within the business. A product owner will turn up and say, I’ll do it. Give me the money.
But if you actually take that view and you say, look, I will deliver this element of growth, and then you really focus on that outcome during your design process, you are more likely to get to that than you are not. Like, If you don’t believe in design, why should the rest of the business? So when I talk about risk, it’s that idea of saying, commit to the outcome, focus on the outcome as you’re doing the design, and then actually drive to that outcome throughout all of your process and use it as a measure, use it as the guideline to stay on track for what you’re doing.
I think as designers, sometimes we can focus on the process and get process orientated outcomes, which is, well, we’ll get to the end and what we get is what we get, as opposed to saying what we need to get at the end is this, how are we measuring every step along the way to make sure that’s where we’re going.
[00:23:25] Chris Hudson: Yeah it’s a great point around the process versus the outcome. I often think that the process, particularly when, like you say, when there is uncertainty, it’s the bit that gets wheeled out because everyone understands that this is how the process goes, and you’ve got double diamond, and people jump in, they understand, okay, the team’s going to be involved in these exercises through your discovery, but actually, the underlying thread that is often omitted from that discussion is around value that you’re really aiming to extract from that process.
And actually, if it was more orientated around the outcome and selling the outcome rather than the process, then the outcome would justify the investment and much more, I’m sure, the
[00:24:03] Brendan Donoghue: Yeah.
[00:24:04] Chris Hudson: the acceptance, the apathy you’d get over that as well, you know, it just feels like it would be an easier conversation, but actually framing the outcome for a lot of people is terrifying.
I think, putting yourself on the line and saying, like you were saying about the products only just then. I’ll come and do it. Give me the money. Not everyone feels comfortable doing that. What would be your advice in that space?
[00:24:23] Brendan Donoghue: It’s a really difficult one. And this is where I think sometimes as a design leader within the community, I’m somewhat of a heretic, because I’m actually saying that, if I reflect on that earlier point about where are the design leaders? Part of the reason that I think we haven’t had greater success is because we thought that the entire business world was going to change around us.
And actually, what’s needed to happen is we have to change around it. So this idea that you can always focus on just the process and trust me, I’ll get to the outcome. It doesn’t work for those who are used to making decisions in a particular way, having confidence around the outcomes that they’ll get from the investments that they’ll make, the business case process, the return on investment, all of these measures that organisations use to guide investment.
We’ve got to actually make those work for us. So leaning into and taking that risk, I think that’s something we have to just get more comfortable with. And here’s the thing, if you actually… lean into those and you’re in control of the work that you’re doing. You have to be able to back yourself at least at some level to get to that outcome.
I think we’re at our least efficient when someone else is driving everything that we’re doing. And that’s a situation you can wind up in when, you don’t have the confidence to say, yes, I can actually do this and get entrusted to deliver the work, but someone else does, and then all of a sudden you’ve got a non designer running the design activities.
So I think as design leaders, it’s something, and once again, it starts small. Start small, build up that confidence, and then lean into it. But once you get going, you’ll be able to actually understand where your project’s going off track, or where your work’s going off track and where it’s not, and how you can bring it in and still deliver on those outcomes.
[00:26:01] Chris Hudson: Yeah, and I think that often the value of the design is almost judged for the design that is created, that level could be aesthetic. It could be from a, experience design point of view. What is the utility that you’re driving? It can be some of that, I guess, more subjective interpretive realm of, okay, well, I like the thing you’ve done there because it looks, we can put it on the poster and it can sit outside the lift.
And yeah, we can talk about it for a little while but actually, what sits beneath. What does it achieve not only for it being in itself, but also for the business, for the team that you’ve worked with, for the individuals that have worked with that, I think you can start to extract stories around value from lots of different places.
Do you find that you draw from a really broad set of, access points, when you’re thinking about what you can use to leverage what’s being done and turn that into a story that can be played back to business and leadership and really, do you feel like you’re sweating the assets in that sense and really kind of merchandising what’s going on at deeper levels as well?
[00:26:56] Brendan Donoghue: Absolutely, to answer the question, one thing that I tell a lot of junior designers is, as you’re coming into the industry, the ability to tell your story and quantify the value of your work is critical. But really early on, it’s going to be very hard to do because a lot of times you’ll say, listen, I think there’s more value in doing this than this.
And it’s very easy for a senior stakeholder then and say, oh look, you’ve been in this role for five minutes. What do you really know? So I often talk about, anecdotes, the shortcut to wisdom, and it’s essentially really early on in your career. Soak yourself in the stories of other people. Understand how did Instagram do something, how did Facebook do something, what was Apple’s approach, what were the early frog designers doing when they were creating Apple’s original design language, like get into all of this stuff and understand the rich history of where we’ve come from. So when you’re faced with a difficult problem, and I had one of these a couple of years ago. We had a problem with a page taking too long to load the content on submit.
And I said, oh you know what Instagram actually did many years ago, basically when you’d load an image, you wanted to upload the photo and you add your tags and you would add your text and then you’d click on submit and it would take ages to actually upload into the cloud. People would drop out. It was a horrible experience.
So they started, as you were creating the post, they started to upload the photo in the background. And then as it was uploading in the background, and you’re doing your hashtags, and then your comments, and you’re clicking on submit, it’s instant. You think, my gosh, this app is so fast. I used that as a story when I was trying to explain to people on how we could approach something differently and it was no longer Brendan’s idea.
It was actually, hey this is how a billion dollar organisation has actually approached this problem. What do you think? I guess what people then will line up behind that because aw okay, well, if they’ve done it, it’s a really good idea. We should do it too. So you end up getting the outcome and bringing the stakeholder on the journey, even though you might not personally have a lot of experience to back that up, but you know how others have approached that problem.
[00:28:45] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I think it also stems from an understanding of innovation and what you can leverage at any given time, because if you’re playing more in the incremental space then that feels a little bit safer. Sometimes it’s more radical, obviously. And then you’re needing to bring out the justification, and it’s entourage and it’s brass band that goes with it.
And I think, some of the case studies that you mentioned are really helpful. Finding a parallel industry, a use case, something that can really substantiate the direction of your thought. I’m also just thinking about other realms. I went to a talk. There was a strategy director that came over.
He was working with Nike, Wieden+Kennedy. The agency that was doing a ton of really, the highly creative campaigns couple decades or more. He was telling people about what was inspiring him and how to actually keep things fresh and just that relentless origination of new and diverse thinking that was manifested in the ads that were created.
And he was talking a lot to the outside influence, the things that you reach for that are just totally unrelated. I mean, a lot of people bring in military analogies and things that they’ve read about in fiction. There’s obviously art and other cultural references that come in, but I think that there’s something also to be said for the connection to other unrelated, things, I personally in my, in the strategy where I do, I get a lot from knowing a bit about music and how that’s all put together how to compose, how to write music, how people get inspiration from that and what structures and frameworks sit around it and rather than bringing that into design, but other people find that their muse comes from other areas too.
Do you have something like that, that works for you?
[00:30:11] Brendan Donoghue: Ah I’m absolutely obsessed with those stories of success and leadership from outside of the realm of design. I love sporting analogies. I’m a bit of a tragic Geelong supporter and we’ll often reference, the 2007 Geelong Cats as a kind of this classic example of a team at the start of the season, very fits and starts.
A couple of losses, a couple of wins. The season before questioned whether or not they should sack their coach. I think it’s about round five or round six. The team gets together and makes the collective decision that they want to find out what it’s like to be premiership players. That they’re sick of being the bridesmaid and never the bride.
And they’re going to go for it. And they then progress through one of the greatest seasons from that point. that the AFL has ever seen. And when you think about nothing changed in relation to the rules, nothing changed in relation to the competition, the ball’s still the same shape, ground’s still the same shape.
What changed was the culture and the kind of leadership that existed within that group. And so whenever I’m looking like it’s often coming into these teams, how can you be unlocking that latent potential? How can you be turning the group that you’ve got into absolute champions? And so I’m fascinated by that because I think sometimes as design leaders, our job is to shape, mould, to grow, but sometimes our job is just to get out of the way.
Like a great piece of design, make it a focus of the experience they’re having as opposed to the thing that they’re using. So, for me, sporting analogies, business analogies but even, even things outside of that and always looking for opportunities to inspire, to build greater stories from across every realm of art and culture I think are appropriate.
Can I just add, it’s actually something that we lean quite into at my work. Whenever I’m building a design team, something that I like to do is really lean into creative inspiration.
I’m quite inspired by I think it’s Tim Brown’s book, The Art of Innovation, you know, and that you don’t become innovative by doing the same thing again and again. You’ve actually got to be looking for inspiration outside of that realm.
And so they often talked about whenever they were at and they wanted to be creating something, they would bring in a lot of physical things and play with them. They were designing a new tap at one point, so they went and bought every shower head and every tap they could possibly use and brought them all in and played with them for a couple of days before they actually got into their exercise.
So one of the things we do, and I still do today, is I do these things called creative afternoons. And so once a quarter, we’ll take every single team member out, and we’ll go and do something different within the city. So we’ve been off to the National Gallery, a couple of their free exhibitions We’ve walked through the city and looked at some of the famous architecture that makes up the city and one recently, we actually did a whole bunch of different retail experiences.
So everything from Aesop to Uniqlo and in between, the teams were going in to understand, what was the way in which the shop induced a kind of positive retail experience. What did it do? Well, what didn’t it do? Well, who’s the target market? Why is the text on every Aesop bottle so small, but the text on other stuff is so big, what does it inspire?
And so we’re really then looking for those opportunities to see leaders within other spaces and bring that work back to what we’re doing. Cause if you think about say finance and banking where I work they’re very commoditised products. And so how do you stand apart and how do you find something that really makes you seem like the premium product and the one that people want to be engaging with, whereas everyone else is the one off in say, to use the Aesop example, you’re the Aesop and everyone else is in Chemist Warehouse.
So how do you get to that point? And so we bring a lot of that approach into the work that we do, because we always want to be looking for inspiration elsewhere.
[00:33:40] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Oh, I love it. And yeah, it sounds like having some fun there as well. I don’t know how many dollars were spent in the Emporium as you’re wandering around Uniqlo. Thankfully it’s a cheaper shop anyway, but it’s a good thing to do.
[00:33:52] Brendan Donoghue: We once had a very junior designer. We set him for a shopping experience at Burberry to try and understand what the the high-end retail
[00:33:59] Chris Hudson: What’s it, what’s all the fuss about?
[00:34:00] Brendan Donoghue: back the next morning and we said, how was it? And he said it was frightfully expensive because he’d gone with his partner and they’d both then decided to buy something.
[00:34:07] Chris Hudson: wow.
[00:34:07] Brendan Donoghue: he’d spent about half of his pay packet before he knew what he was doing.
[00:34:10] Chris Hudson: All right, well that’s a motivation to turn up to work I guess if you need to pay for a new habit that’s been forged. But that’s brilliant. I love, yeah, I love the reference to Tim Brown. When I started out in innovation in London, it was one of the first books that was handed to me as well.
There’s some really interesting YouTube clips that are now feeling and looking very old now. But, the shopping trolley experiments that they were running, and then bringing all this kind of external stimulus. Like, what would happen if we made it out of this material?
And in just the, you know, in pursuit of exploration, just curiosity adventuring around where the thing might take you with a few random people with white hair and beards and all the things that went with it in a lab environment, just to see what would happen.
The stories are all there. I think there’s a whole treasure trove of reference points both in the current context, like you’re saying, you can go into the shopping mall, you can find these points of reference, you can talk to people around you, you can observe them, in a non-creepy fashion, you can think about how they’re interacting with some of these products and services today and actually learn a lot from that.
One of the things that I personally struggled with in my earlier parts of the career was almost looking at what’s happening out there in the world and then forging the link between that and what the problem is that I was trying to solve for in the current state.
This is a classic because I teach in some of these areas too. They’re thinking, well, if all of that’s happening, and it’s physical environment stuff, they’re building real products where it’s a new shower head or it’s a new stairlift or whatever it is. And I’m making this, digital app and it’s a banking app or it’s for Superfund.
They can’t draw the parallels and actually a lot of what we have to teach in a way, which is the part that’s probably the most, or the least actually, the least teachable, is how to make the links between that thing and this thing and that thing and actually bring it into something and actually stripping away, not the idea and how it was used over here, but what is the underlying model, the mechanic.
What is it about the language, the sensory nature of it, the feeling of it, what is it that you can take from that and actually apply to something else? So do you work in any of those areas and what do you find tends to work?
[00:36:05] Brendan Donoghue: It’s a fascinating one. You mentioned app, I love this because it comes up where people are like, oh, I need an app for that, and love people that use Uber. Uber is a great app. Uber is an amazing service experience. The genius of Uber was to understand that the experience we were having with taxis was atrocious
And it needed to be better, and how could we find out that a car was actually going to come?
Now their service levels have dropped off the map at the moment, but let’s go back a couple of years, at least. How could we understand when a car was going to arrive? How could we give feedback? How could we actually have a better payments experience? And then, you know, even that idea of, how could we also participate potentially as drivers and this service experience is knitted together then within the app. And so whenever I’m thinking about what we’re doing from a digital standpoint, it’s always trying to understand what is the member trying to do and how do we enable that? There are really strong parallels between the design for a physical space and the design for a digital space.
It’s enabling people to do something, to either get from A to B to interact, to get help, to understand a product. One of the things that we used to do when you would join the team is, we would get people to do a design activity. It didn’t have to be a big thing, and it was never ever related to our work, I think it’s really important that if you’re ever asked to do a design activity, it shouldn’t be related to the company you’re joining, because you don’t want to give away your work for free.
But we used to ask, what would you do to change Flinders Street Station? And it’s a really open ended question, right? So all these people come through Flinders Street Station, what would you do? Because when people are trying to process information under stress, it’s an incredibly hard thing to actually take in new information because they’re under extreme stress.
So you get into Flinders Street Station as a tourist, everything bombarding you. How do you actually find where you need to go? And so we had some great ideas of people saying, well, you’ve got to get rid of all the shops because they’re in the line of sight. You’ve got to change the colours on the board.
You should be putting lines down that actually marry up with the kind of examples that you’ve seen in UK hospitals and I think airports.
And it’s a really wonderful example then into how people think. And so it was a great example for us. It was never about being right, but it was just about how did people approach the problem.
Because I think it gives you a good understanding of how will they approach digital design because digital design is so much harder. Because when you’re dealing with the screened real estate of, sort of this. And I’ll get it right like this. How do you show the affordances? How do you show what you can interact with?
It’s when you actually get into superannuation, I’ve got a product that almost every Australian has. I’ve got a product that many Australians don’t care about. Because they’ve got to have it so they don’t care. And I don’t know if you know this, but my most engaged digital members are 65 and over because they’re the ones who are logging in every single day to see what their balance is. So as we’re designing digital experiences, it is not the Snapchat and TikTok generation. It is older Australians and they’re likely to have a sight impairment or motor control. So we’ve got to be really accessible in the designs that we’re coming up with.
It’s a really challenging thing to do. And that’s where we often look at the physical as a guidance to how we would create those digital experiences.
[00:39:00] Chris Hudson: Yeah I’ve worked with, both in the built environment and in digital arena, they have similar ones where you’re basically observing, different demographic. I mean, I think this is a classic around the design team not being the people that they’re designing for and how you forge that gap and how you get the empathy going to the extent that they really feel like they can design for the 65 year old.
When you’re limited to six interviews, which seems to be the magic number and then you’re just talking to these people, you take it all away, you bring it all back to the team and then you’re designing for that and all of a sudden that pops out or a new feature, but it’s hard to have all of that thrown at you to absorb it and to really take it through into the design in a meaningful way, I think particularly when it’s not an ongoing conversation.
So the relatability of the problem solver to the design challenge, to the end user is an interesting, different, it’s an interesting pyramid to solve for in a way.
[00:39:48] Brendan Donoghue: It really is and pensions are a fascinating product because it’s the only product I think I’ve ever come across in my entire career, by its very nature, no one in the team can have one. Just to have one, you’ve got to be retired. And so it’s actually a really, it’s been a really difficult product to actually understand. The trick that we did or the approach we took was every single time we’re designing or building, we wanted to make sure that it worked for them first.
And I think some of my peers have taken the easier route and left them out. And you’ll see some of the other superannuation apps. You can’t use your pension within their app. And that wasn’t something we wanted to do because we wanted to make sure from day one, when we’re building our app, when we’re building our digital experiences, the questions that we would get were about the product and not about the why can’t I see this?
Why can’t I log into this? Well, because you’re not in this group. But I think that the key is honestly it’s research and testing. When I built the team at Unisuper, the very first two team members I had were researchers. I then hired some UX designers, but then very quickly hired a person who focused just on research and testing because if you’re not able to understand, what people are thinking about your products. It’s going to be very hard to actually go in and design them because otherwise it’s all personal bias and assumption. You then want to have a really fast feedback loop as well between the designs that you’re creating and what people think about those designs.
Because if you can test them and fix them before you test, before you’re launching, it’s a lot cheaper than launching a product that doesn’t work and then having to iterate once you’ve got committed code and it’s deployed.
[00:41:17] Chris Hudson: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the point around research and its value, obviously it’s practiced with varied levels of skill and maturity in different organisations as well, but you’re thinking about the value that’s placed on research and empirical evidence in one way or another. Within an organisation, a lot of organisations, from what I see at enterprise level, in particular government we’re thinking about you know, what exists, legacy, there’s definitely a school of thought, whether it’s said or unsaid that says that, once upon a time we did this thing and we’ve launched a new product, we tried this thing back then there’s a legacy system, there’s a lot of constraint that comes in and a bit of corner cutting, I want to say where research could come in and actually prove or disprove that point.
But actually there’s somebody with a very, decent salary and a good title that’s coming in and saying, actually, we don’t need to go down that route and just let’s just kind of carry on as we did. And, do you come up against any of that sort of stuff?
[00:42:07] Brendan Donoghue: The hippo, the highest paid person’s opinion. I remember years ago I was leading some service designers and the service designers were working within a sprint and had been told, you’ve got to go and do 10 user stories, interviews, whatever it was. And they said, well, we’ve finished seven, but we’ve got the really good idea of what we want to do.
Can we wrap up here and move on? Cause otherwise we’re going to run out of time. And I said no, no, no, no, no. You’ve got to do your own 10. And they said, well, we might not be able to finish in time. Does that impact on you? And we’re told, Oh, it doesn’t matter. We already know what we want to do, but we just need you to finish the research to prove it.
[00:42:35] Chris Hudson: Right.
[00:42:36] Brendan Donoghue: That’s not how it works. It goes the other way. I’ve been shouted at by executives who said, I’m going to present something to the executive leadership team. And I’ve written the paper. Can you just give me the data that supports it? And of course the data wasn’t there because their idea was wrong.
And to be shouted at and told, your work is rubbish because you’re not across it. Actually, maybe this idea isn’t the right idea. Maybe you should be going in a different direction, but it kind of brings back to that point of, you run into these things and you allow them to happen if you’re not actively nudging the organisation in a different direction.
So those stories were from when I was much more junior in my career, and I was sitting there and waiting to be used by the business. So I’ve got these skills and capability. I’ve got these teams. I can go and do this stuff. What do you want me to do? And then when a senior leader sees something or decides what we need is one click account opener.
We need something else. Go and do this thing. You’ve already lost control. You’ve lost control because you weren’t proactively saying, hey do you want to grow the number of accounts? What we should be doing is this. Instead, you’ve let them fixate on an outcome, and now you’re potentially worse off than doing nothing because now you’ve got to undo the bad idea, and you’ve got to introduce the new idea.
If you had been in front of them and just introduced the new idea and said, hey I know that you want to grow accounts. We’ve got these two great ideas. Which ones do you think we should progress? they feel in control and they can go. When you run into those situations though and you’ve not nudged them, I often talk about, you want to kind of judo them where you can.
So when someone runs in and says, I want to do this thing. So, I want to build pink triangle. How quick can we build pink triangles? And you know, pink triangles won’t sell, but actually what I’ll sell is something else. Instead of saying pink triangles are a terrible idea, go absolutely fantastic.
Let’s get on that. But let’s also just do some, product testing with yellow circles and see whether or not they work as well. And then you can go back and go, listen, we can build these just the way that you want, or we could actually do this slightly different thing, which we think will sell more than 10 percent more.
What do you want to do? And once again put the decision back in their patch and sometimes you’ll find executives will stick with their thing. But I think most of the time you’ll actually find people will shift and adopt new things. So it’s all about, often talk about judo-ing, which is using their energy, to shift them in a different direction.
[00:44:41] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I like it. I like it. I wasn’t sure which martial art you were going to use, or maybe there was going to be a cat analogy that came out as well after that point, but it begs an interesting question, I think for people that aren’t in a leadership role but are again, within your team or within a team, and they’re feeling like there’s a misalignment between what they feel really passionate about and the outcome that either they want to achieve or the leader wants to achieve that everything’s at odds it feels like so what would be your advice to people in that situation and maybe drawing upon some of the things we were just talking about but actually making sure that it’s not compromised you know everything can be handled at once, in my teaching with students I’m often talking about this role as a impartial and independent facilitator so you can say to people, forget the fact that my title says this.
I’m actually more interested in bringing the inputs from everybody together. And I’m interested in the diversity of perspective that’s going to come about as a result of that. And I’ll then figure out what it means. And I’ll tell you whether your idea was right or wrong after that. But have you got any tips or tricks that you think work in that space?
[00:45:43] Brendan Donoghue: I think number one, as a leader, you have to create those spaces and you have to invite those conversations. I still distinctly remember the day really early on in my career, getting an email from my boss saying, how could I be a better leader? And inviting the feedback, inviting that.
So as a leader, you’ve got to create space. Now, as a person who’s not a leader, if your leaders created the space, that makes it a lot easier, but if they haven’t, you’ve got to engage in the courageous conversation. You’ve got to actually step up and say, this is what we should be doing or giving the feedback.
I think the trick is once again, eat your own cake, use design to understand what’s the person you’re dealing with. What are their drivers? What are their needs and their wants? Do that kind of empathy map for your leader in your head and work out what are your points of leverage or your points of influence and lean into those. If your leaders particularly focused on, I’ll pick an example. If your leaders particularly focused on cutting cost as an example, and desperately wants to do that, your idea is going to blow the budget out by an extra two or 3 million. Maybe that’s not the moment, maybe it’s more about understanding where they want.
Can your idea pivot and help achieve that outcome? Can you align with where they’re going, but also even learn their rhythm? Understand where are they more best likely to actually accept feedback or accept information. Is it Monday morning? Is it Friday afternoon? Use them and actually look at what’s the best time to be able to give that feedback and then step up and lean in.
I’ve never ever regretted. in my career having the courageous conversation. What I’ve often regretted is not being bolder sooner.
[00:47:15] Chris Hudson: I mean, I could ask you about where that happened, but maybe it’s a secret.
[00:47:19] Brendan Donoghue: Oh again and again to be honest again and again. I’d shared earlier that I’d delivered work at Telstra and then been made redundant. Honestly, it was the disconnection between my leader and me But I wasn’t having those conversations and I wasn’t really understanding what they truly wanted and they were a bit frustrated because they felt I wasn’t listening and sometimes having the courageous conversation creates an opportunity for two way feedback.
Otherwise it can become a bit stilted and things can fester and problems can become worse than they need to be and all of a sudden you’re out on your ear.
[00:47:50] Chris Hudson: Yeah. The misalignment is often there, isn’t it? And it’s often unspoken about where you think you’re both great and actually it’s review time and that doesn’t seem to be the case. But anyway, I want to ask you a question that’s slightly unrelated to what we’ve just been talking about, but.
You strike me as somebody who’s really comfortable in not only these sorts of conversations where it could go anywhere. Right. But I want to just figure out whether within the time that you’ve had within these organisations, the conversations, it feels like it’s this notion of being caught out, right?
You’re always saying you’ve got your design in your back pocket. You’ve got a story to tell. What do you do in the situations where questions are being asked of you that you really don’t feel you can answer either adequately or you’re just feeling a little bit uncertain about it because it’s unexpected, just totally out of the blue.
[00:48:32] Brendan Donoghue: Oh, you’ve got to be completely honest. You have to be completely honest. I think the thing that I’ve learned over the years is that senior people get into roles and they have a waffle detector. It’s the ability to determine really quickly whether or not you know what you’re talking about or not and early in my career I thought what you had to do was you had to fill the space. So Brendan, what are you doing here? And instead of saying I actually forgot about that. I haven’t done the thing, I can do that this week because I’ve got a gap in my calendar. I would start giving excuses. Alright, so we’ve actually been looking at it and it’s more complex than we thought and they know that you’re not telling the truth And you’re not actually saving yourself.
You’re diminishing yourself And you’re diminishing the work of your team. So I really quickly will put my hand up and say, I don’t know. And then set a time frame for when I can come back. It kind of plays into this idea as well about honesty and failure. And I think this is a really important one.
I will throw my hand up very quickly if we’ve done something that hasn’t worked. And said, you know what, we actually mucked this one up. We could have gone better. We should have done this thing over here. This is definitely our learning. This is what we’ll be doing for next time because actually acknowledging fault and failure.
While we might talk a lot about it, we’re going to fail fast. I don’t think it’s something that we actually do very well. And so as a leader and as a designer, having a reputation for being truthful is, once again it’s really incredible because it means that’s your foundation. That’s the lens that people view you through.
You’ve got this wonderful opportunity to then be building on that with the work that you’re producing, the other stuff that you’re doing. It’s viewed through that lens of, well, Chris is always telling us the truth. Let’s have a listen to this, as opposed to, gosh, Chris is always waffling.
He’s always filling the space. Is this yet another one of those, or is it something that we should be listening to?
[00:50:16] Chris Hudson: I also love the waffle detector, which I think is made after you’ve- you’re the waffle maker first and then you turn into the waffle detector because you’ve, you’ve had to waffle a bit
through your time and then you could eventually, you can just spot it a mile off, but it just made me reflect on, the perception of leadership and I guess the conventional archetypes that you do see.
They still exist in the world of work today, obviously, but where there was an alpha lead, probably a white male and you’re just seeing that they’ve got to the top by being that sort of no bullshit kind of character and just telling the truth. I mean, maybe there’s something to learn from that. Now, because it’s an outdated version of leadership, but actually transparency, what’s at the heart of it is still probably good intent, even if you can puck the ego, the bravado and all the other things that probably went with it as well but actually the intent is that, we’re communicating clearly and I’m telling you exactly what you want and you’re hearing it.
And hopefully we can get to an understanding, but obviously that’s something that it’s gone about the wrong way a lot of the time as well. So just made me think of that. Okay.
[00:51:16] Brendan Donoghue: No, it’s very true. It’s very true. I think about that idea of, as a leader, the idea of leadership has definitely evolved. I had some shocking leaders early in my career who were that very authoritarian, bang the table, lots of swearing, and
I don’t have that as part of my toolkit.
I think the idea of getting angry at work is just weird. I’m much more likely to do the disappointed dad, as opposed to the the angry boss, but you should never, ever shy away from being clear with people because I think bad leadership can ruin careers because if you’re not clear with people and you’re not giving them a feedback and the opportunity to grow, you’re actually undermining them.
And you’re really not helping them learn what they need to do to get better. It doesn’t mean that you’re rude. It doesn’t mean that you’re belittling. You should never ever make people feel small, but you should always be really clear in what you’re doing. I think the other aspect of that is you’ve got to own your own behaviour.
I’ve said sorry to my teams more time than I can possibly count, where I’ll get something wrong or I’ll do something wrong or I’ll make the wrong point and then circle back and go, you know what? Chris, I did this thing. I absolutely shouldn’t have done that. I’ll do better next time. I’m sorry.
And mean it, I think that creates that opportunity as a leader where you can be trusted empowered by your team to go and do the things they need you to do.
[00:52:25] Chris Hudson: Yeah. And I mean, it’s so valuable. I think we might just need to end there because I feel like we can go to like even bigger and deeper points or we could go to something that’s maybe smaller and just a bit funny to talk about, but I feel like that, that’s a great place to end the interview and I really appreciate your time today, Brendan.
Thank you so much. And I know people that have both worked with you and, somebody that that we both know is in your team right now and, it’s interesting to hear from different points of view. And I think the sum of the parts is that you’re a really great leader in these areas and for the reasons that you’ve described in the interview today.
So it was really a privilege to hear that firsthand today. And I know that the listeners of the show will get a lot from it as well. So thank you.
[00:53:03] Brendan Donoghue: Thank you very much for the invitation today, Chris.
[00:53:05] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.
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