Leadership Resilience:
Leadership Resilience: Navigating Burnout and Driving Organisational Change, with Liz Bradford
Have you experienced burnout, or know some who has? Today's guest is the remarkable Liz Bradford, a seasoned leader with 20 years of diverse experience, currently serving as the Managing Director of Wholesale Banking at HSBC Asia in Hong Kong and the CEO of Transform Perform. Liz shares candidly about her defining moment in leadership, experiencing burnout not once, but 1.5 times, and the crucial lessons learned from those experiences.
Liz emphasizes the importance of embracing discomfort, holding tough conversations, and building resilience, both as an individual leader and within the organizational culture. Our conversation delves into the complexities of driving large-scale transformations, where Liz highlights that 80 percent of successful change is rooted in cultural shifts rather than just technological advancements.
Our discussion covers the significance of emotional intelligence, transparency, and setting a north star for organizational success. Join us as we explore the human side of leadership, learning from Liz's journey and uncovering actionable strategies for creating resilient and inclusive organizational cultures. It was an honour to hear Liz's valuable perspectives and lessons in this engaging episode.
Guest Bio - Liz Bradford
Transform.Perform https://www.transformperform.org/
Book: Life is short
Liz Bradford Linkedin
Liz Bradford has 20 years of diverse leadership experience having worked across three continents and at firms spanning HSBC, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and SWIFT. She is currently the Managing Director of Wholesale Banking at HSBC, Asia (based in Hong Kong) and the CEO of Transform Perform, a platform of coaches and workplace wellbeing and development providers to advise and support businesses building more sustainable employee propositions. Her career has ranged from product management to C-Suite roles driving operational excellence, people engagement and technology transformation across teams of 7,500+ in 14 countries, with oversight of U$bn+ P&Ls. Her passion is employee engagement wellbeing and culture, specifically nurturing healthy, inclusive cultures and tackling toxic ones.
Examples include:
- Leadership of employee resource groups representing 48,000 diverse employees across 60 markets globally
- Design and delivery of female talent development programmes across 14 markets, and
- Implementation of wellbeing challenges and programmes impacting 5,000+ a year globally.
Through Transform Perform she delivers coaching programmes and facilitation for the empowerment of employees, to develop high performing teams, and to inspire people managers to step into enterprise leadership. An ICF accredited organisational and executive coach, a qualified personal trainer and a certified wellbeing coach, Liz regularly speaks on the topics of inclusion, female leadership, wellbeing, busting burnout, stress managem
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Episode Transcript:
Liz Bradford: 0:00
If you stay silent because you are avoiding those tough conversations or you were avoiding the conflict, people feel silence with the worst possible outcome. It's just human nature, and so you create a lot of anxiety, you remove psychological security and you create an environment in which people cannot do their best work. So I think it's just very important that we train our leaders, that we support our leaders as well in being able to hold that discomfort and have those conversations.
Kate Perdon: 0:25
Welcome to the Level Up Leadership Podcast. This is the go-to podcast for chronically busy leaders and small business owners who are ready to get out of the weeds and start leading. The weekly episodes have micro leadership lessons focused on how to level up your leadership and help you to be 1% better every day. It's all about growing your leadership wisdom, building your team and being the leader people want to work for. So let's get into it.
Kate Perdon: 0:55
This podcast guest is the ever impressive, honest and open Liz Bradford. She has 20 years of diverse leadership experience, having worked across three continents and some huge firms. She's currently the managing director of wholesale banking at HSBC Asia, based in Hong Kong, as well as the CEO of Transform Perform. Her passion is employee engagement, wellbeing and culture, specifically in nurturing healthy, inclusive cultures and tackling toxic ones. One of the things I love about this conversation today with Liz is how open she is about her experience, the ups and the downs and some of the gems she's learned about leadership along the way. I'm talking about a defining moment in your leadership journey that's had a significant impact and one that's been really defining for you. I think is defining for so many people that I talk to, but it's not something we often talk about out loud. Would you mind sharing your defining moment for leadership?
Liz Bradford: 1:54
Yeah, of course, and I think it's a shame that we don't talk about it more out loud, because I think the reason it's so defining is it brings you down to the humanity of all of us, regardless of what position we're in. And, as you can probably tell from my accent, I'm British, so I was brought up in very much a kind of always stiff upper lip, don't show too much emotion, time, don't show any weakness type way. And it's a long time ago now. But to the first time I shared this story and the fact that my defining leadership moment is probably when I burn out, and then not just once, but managed to burn out 1.5 times. You're such an overachiever, liz. You had to do it twice. The 0.5 was when I became the realisation that really it was me, not the environment.
Liz Bradford: 2:33
So the first time I'd spent 10 years working in London, I was working in investment banking. It was very intense by all intents and purposes. On paper, I had a very successful career and I was absolutely going somewhere. And then I was offered a promotion and I found myself at my kitchen table in floods of tears and just realising I couldn't do this anymore. And I couldn't do it even for another two years in that new role.
Liz Bradford: 2:54
So this is before burnout was a known thing.
Liz Bradford: 2:56
Before resilience was a thing and I felt the only response was to pack up my life, pack up my husband, move to the other side of the world.
Liz Bradford: 3:04
And then, while I was travelling around Asia a little bit on my way to Australia at the time, I was lucky enough to be headhunted for a role back in banking. So, having sworn I'd never go back into banking, I did, and after about just under a year I found myself sort of at that precipice again and that's what made me realise it was such a different context. So it was in a very different culture. It was a super collegiate place to work. It was a very different kind of environment and I realised really that it was my behaviours, my lack of boundaries, my work ethic that I felt was necessary to be successful that was driving the burnout and that I not only needed to, but it was within my power to change those things in order to become a better leader and become someone that people should follow, rather than someone who was role modelling very much the sort of the negative traits of what I've been brought up with.
Kate Perdon: 3:47
I think these experiences are often the exit points people have in leadership, because they're like I'm not cut out for it. I really get taught how to do it. And your story reminds me of a tool in coaching and I know as a fellow coach it's one that you'll probably be aware of and it's the sailboat. So this is the idea that you are the sailboat and you've got a sail and you can have wind in your sails and you've got a hull, and is there a hole in your hull? And who's rowing your sailboat?
Kate Perdon: 4:13
And there's a whole wonderful metaphor about a sailboat. There's also the sailboat that's in the water, and it's the water that you're in and the waves that crash through and the ocean that you're in. And I think a lot of people will change jobs or change industries, thinking there's a problem with the ocean and the water that I'm in, and often that is the case. But sometimes it's our boat and how we're looking after it, and we can put our boat in a different ocean, which can be. You can go to a different environment and then the same stuff pops up, and I think there's a good analogy of the story that you shared, and sometimes the really confronting part is to realise that it's in our control.
Liz Bradford: 4:46
That can be the really scary part, right I mean.
Liz Bradford: 4:49
I've never heard that analogy before, but it's a perfect one, like it really does make sense, and I think obviously the more senior roles that you're taking as well as you go on through your leadership journey.
Liz Bradford: 4:58
I don't know if you can stretch the analogy this far, but you've got other people in that sailboat, so you also need to be conscious of the environment you're creating for them, because we filter that for other people and the way in which we show up is contagious. If you just chuck it all in and bail, then other people are likely to follow or think it's just too hard, whereas if you do what sometimes is the harder work of facing into the fact that a lot of it is within your control, then actually it really helps other people, and I think that brings us back to the point of it's good to be open and transparent about the challenges you're having as a leader, because it means that other people see that you don't have to be invincible all the time to do it, and that we really are all human and that it's something that we all struggle with sometimes.
Kate Perdon: 5:35
Particularly how I learnt leadership, which was in quite a masculine environment. I didn't realise there were other ways, and it was about having the right answer and it was about being tough. A lot of my understanding of what leadership was the ocean that I was in. I didn't realise that there were different oceans, but that also shaped the boat that I was. Something else that I loved about your story when you talk about burnout and how you've had to change how you lead, you also talk a bit about that transformation. We can change and transform as people, but we also have our team, our company that changes and transforms, and I think what everyone's experiencing at the moment is the environment around us changing and transforming, and I know one of your areas of expertise is all around transformation. I wonder if you could share a little bit about leadership and transformation, some of the things that you've learned that perhaps the rest of us might not have to learn the hard way because of your experiences.
Liz Bradford: 6:30
I've certainly learned some things the hard way, and I'm very, very happy to share on this.
Liz Bradford: 6:33
So yeah, as you say, like my whole job is transformation. It's driving large scale transformation programs and a lot of the work I do at the moment is around to your point. There are very key inflections at the moment around. You've got Gen Z coming into the workforce, you've got AI, you've got big programs of change in a lot of organizations where we are seeing them shift, shape and the way in which we work as well.
Liz Bradford: 6:53
I think one thing that I've learned over the last 20 years in financial services and driving transformations, which have typically been tech ones, is that actually it's much more about the people. So it's 20% the technology change, it's 80% the cultural change and if you don't focus at least 80% of your time, energy, resource, communication around that cultural change, your transformation will fail. And it's really about having the courage to sometimes face into a lot of those challenging conversations and be empathetic and hold some of that discomfort for other people that if you don't learn how to do that and if you don't build your own resilience up so that you can do that, you will really struggle to bring people along on that transformation journey with you. So I think a huge part of it is about transparency and setting a North Star that people aim towards and explaining that there is going to be ambiguity along the way and that's okay to feel very uncomfortable about that. That's what transformation feels like.
Liz Bradford: 7:48
No human likes change. Some of us claim we do, but we only really like change that we're in control of. So if you can set that North Star and say, look, some of this is going to feel very uncomfortable. What we need to be able to do is have a dialogue about it all times, and we need to be able to work through some of those challenges together. But this is where we're going.
Liz Bradford: 8:04
People will be much more likely to get behind and help with that transformation and want to be a part of it and co create what you're doing. And I see this a lot at the moment in organizations. If you stay silent because you are avoiding those tough conversations or you were avoiding the conflict, people feel silence with the worst possible outcome. It's just human nature, and so you create a lot of anxiety, you remove psychological security and you create an environment in which people cannot do their best work. So I think it's just very important that we train our leaders, that we support our leaders as well in being able to hold that discomfort and have those conversations.
Kate Perdon: 8:36
Have you got any examples around like transformation or difficult conversations, so people can get a bit of like context or feel a bit what it's like if they're not used to it?
Liz Bradford: 8:45
So maybe if I touch on one very live one at the moment which I think a lot of organizations are starting to have, and that's around augmentation with some of the technologies that are coming. So there's a lot of excitement on the one hand around things like chat, gbt and AI, and then there's a lot of fear on the other hand. And if you look at what sells movies, you've got like Mission Impossible saying that AI is the enemy, that kind of stuff. But there's a lot of stuff in the news around it'll replace 50%, 30%, 70%, depending on which day you're reading the news of all jobs. And until we get people comfortable with how we experiment with that and how we build the future of work together, people will be very resistant. It's just natural, and I think one of the conversations we're certainly having at the moment within the firm that I work for is that it isn't AI that's going to replace your job. It's the people that can use AI that will replace your job or your role. So what we're trying to do is create capacity so that they can retrain and learn those skills, but we do need them to then want to and be motivated to do that. And the minute you say, create capacity, people think cost cuts, and so it's about forming that common language with people and it's about making sure that people understand where you're going with the whole piece and the skillsets that are needed, and that you are trying to set people up to be successful in the future and to help you create the organization of future.
Liz Bradford: 9:58
Rather than they are a number and they can be replaced, but because there's so much silence about it in some firms at the moment, then you see a lot of attrition and you see a lot of concern around. Well, I'm just going to get replaced by a machine. Why have any loyalty to the organization, kind of thing. That's a very live example, I think, for a lot of firms at the moment. And then restructuring generally.
Liz Bradford: 10:15
A lot of organizations are restructuring across the whole globe at the moment and you see some very extreme examples like Twitter, slash, x, slash, whatever it's called today, and then where he's now having to backtrack. And then you see others where it's just sort of death by 1000 cuts and people are never sure and I think from very personal experience, those I have found driving too many changes at once can be a mistake. So I would always advise be very strategic about what you can land and how much change your people can absorb at any one point in time, and be very clear in your communication about why it's happening, why you are making very specific changes and what happens then to the people whose roles have been removed or anything else, so that people know that you are taking care of people as opposed to again. It can be a bit easy to hide sometimes, especially when you're feeling tired or burnt out yourself, and it doesn't help with the culture. It doesn't create an environment in which people can thrive.
Kate Perdon: 11:06
And I think it comes back to your point Any lack of information. Wherever there's a gap, people's minds go to worst case scenario and they play out that movie and whether it is the case or isn't the case it doesn't matter anymore, because they've already made that movie and therefore make decisions based on it. And your point about people don't like change unless they're in control of it People feeling unsure or uncertain of what's happening, or there's a lot of change in the company and they don't have certainty around it. One thing they can have certainty of or control of is changing a job. No doubt they're going to be in the same situation in the other company, but they feel like they had control over it. And maybe it comes back to the sailboat and the ocean. They're taking their sailboat into the new ocean, but the ocean is still full of water.
Liz Bradford: 11:45
I couldn't agree more, and there is something that feels very empowering about taking that control, but I think it's a very short lived triumph. And then, to your point, you find you're just back in a very similar ocean, same sailboat.
Kate Perdon: 11:55
Something, liz, that you do, that I would say 95% of people in leadership positions and senior roles within companies do, is overcommit. And if I'm honest, that's probably how we got to the positions that we did, because we took on more than what we probably thought was possible and just had some belief that just keep on going and the more you achieve, the more you tend to be given, and it just continues up to the point where probably you burn out. What have you learnt from your own experiences of being a serial overcommitter the good, the bad and the ugly?
Kate Perdon: 12:23
Because I can tell you my personal overcommitment has got me doing crazy things both personally and professionally that there's a small percentage of me that is so grateful that I overcommit and do more. I don't think things through enough, otherwise I wouldn't do it Half the things I do, and I love that. I've had these great experiences. But there's a point and finding that point is a challenge for me and I'm not sure if it's something that you've managed to find, but I feel like I've got a friend and you are an overcommitter.
Liz Bradford: 12:50
I'm certainly an overcommitter and I think that is very common in leaders. I think it's also very common in females, if I'm honest, not really trained to say no and don't really have that conditioning, and I'm very hypocritical on this. So when I train clients or when I'm talking to my people, I always talk about the concept of periodic training and I have a background as an endurance athlete and with periodic training you'll push yourself right up to the point where you can't go any further and then you have a rest period and then, after that rest period, you can push yourself to a new peak and a new height because you're building muscle, you're building mental agility, you're building endurance the whole time. But that rest period is super important. So the overcommitment or, to your point, taking on something that's that little bit more than you might if you really thought about that, you might do that can be a positive thing, as long as you then have the recovery so that you recuperate, your comfort zone starts to stretch and it gets wider so you can go further and further outside it.
Liz Bradford: 13:42
But if you don't have that, that's where you hit burnout and that's what I have a tendency to do, because I know I can personally just keep going and I have maybe a little bit too much of Angela Duckworth's grit.
Liz Bradford: 13:53
That's fine if it's you as an individual, because the fallout is you and maybe the closer relationships. And I don't mean it's fine as in, it's okay, but that's a limited fallout. But when you're leading teams and maybe that's 20 people, 200 people, 2000 people, 20,000 people if you are over committing on all of their behalf as well, then you will reach a tipping point very quickly whereby you start to lose people and you lose your followership. They lose their self-confidence in themselves, they lose confidence in the team and you are setting the whole team up for failure and that's really not a great outcome. So neither is a great outcome, but it's also being very conscious of the boundary between your natural ability to go yes, I'm going to do that and then see if it happens, but then doing that on behalf of the team and being able to draw boundaries on that one.
Kate Perdon: 14:34
I really like that analogy with being an endurance athlete. I'm like the 100-meter sprint at four shore. It's only because I'm in and out, I'm off and then I'm exhausted, and just also how I work, like all in sprints. So this idea, taken from endurance sport, had never occurred to me to work in seasons, like a flower doesn't season the whole year round, so you've got to have gaps in between. But I think that is a wonderful example of stretch back, stretch again.
Liz Bradford: 15:00
It's a super effective way of building strength, whether that's in the way in which you work or any other skill or any other physical strength. But you have to remember the gap, you have to remember the break, especially the last three or four years.
Liz Bradford: 15:11
We don't have breaks in the way we used to, so even when we go on leave, we take laptops or blackberries or our mobiles, and in the evenings we have a tendency to go home and then log back on after dinner and after story time and everything else, and so we're not recovering in the way that we used to, and that then becomes chronic and you get chronically stressed and then you really can't perform at the level that you used to be able to perform at.
Kate Perdon: 15:32
Absolutely true. I love that idea. I'm going to take that one on board. That's going to be my 1% from today, or maybe I shouldn't pick too quick or latency. It's definitely a short runner. If I think back, probably decades ago, it was all about the soft skills and we're learning about emotional intelligence and it kind of fell out of fashion and there's always something new. I'm curious to know, when you talked about transformation being 80% people, where does emotional intelligence and understanding of self fit into the business context and leadership context these days?
Liz Bradford: 16:04
It's absolutely fundamental to driving change, and we are all driving change all the time. Now you don't get to stay with the status quo anymore and I think that the empathy side, the EQ side, of it is absolutely critical if you want to bring people along with you. And that's the thing about leadership. There's no point saying I'm a leader if people aren't following. So, if they don't know that you are invested in them, if they don't know that they are heard, if you're not investing the time in genuinely understanding where people are coming from and taking their world view and then putting that into how you do co-create where you're going, then they can't follow. Why would they? So I do think it's absolutely fundamental.
Liz Bradford: 16:42
I do also think and I've seen this quite a lot before like IQ will get you so far. So being super smart, being very technical, will get people so far. But if you don't then learn the EQP, you will either burn yourself out, or you'll burn your credibility out, or you'll burn your people out or, a worst case, all three. So you really do need to understand that generally we are dealing with humans in what we do Like our customers are humans, our people are humans. If you take that piece out, and the term soft skills really triggers me, so I apologize if I flinched when you said it.
Kate Perdon: 17:11
I don't think I've said it in probably 10 years myself.
Liz Bradford: 17:14
But they are so hard.
Liz Bradford: 17:17
So soft skills is completely the wrong term, and the only reason they're called soft skills is they weren't mechanic skills, and this was, I think, maybe 40-50 years ago when they were defined.
Liz Bradford: 17:25
So it was an engineering term for hard skills and soft skills, but it just meant it wasn't a mechanical skill. But now we can train robots to do everything that's mechanical. So they're not soft skills, they are human skills, and they are what differentiates us, and they're very often the hardest ones to tap into, because you just want to shut down, especially if you've had a rough day or if you'd lack self-awareness or you're having a hard time. So I do think that they are absolutely fundamental to the way in which we lead, and I think, whether it's self-leadership and self-awareness or then engaging with other people, you're not going to get very far unless you can actually develop those skills, and they are skills that can be honed over time as well. So, as with anything, the more you practice, the more natural it becomes, the better you get at it, and so it's important to be quite conscious. I think about that at times.
Kate Perdon: 18:05
Is that something that you feel that you've learned along the way through certain education, through mentors? How did you learn these skills?
Liz Bradford: 18:13
So I learned them through coaching, and actually I learned them from someone coaching me, and it was the first time I'd come into contact with the coaching universe, which was when I was on my trajectory from my second burnout, and I had a fantastic coach in Australia and she taught me about three pillars at the time. So you had the physical wellbeing components so looking after yourself physically, so you could show up and invest time in your mental wellbeing and your emotional awareness and how you were engaging with others, so self awareness. And then how you're engaging and interacting with people. And then your connected wellbeing so how are you contributing? How are you interacting with wider groups? What are you giving back? How are you finding flow, that kind of thing.
Liz Bradford: 18:51
And so that's how I was introduced to the concepts and then, being a bit of a nerd, I then deep dived into some of it because the first bits worked. So then I was like let's try the rest, and that, for me, definitely set my leadership journey on a different trajectory. So up until that point I was doing very well on the IQ point. It was at a time when you brought your work person to work your work self, and then your personal self was left at home, like, god forbid, you were to share that. That's when I learned that, once you start to combine the two, when you were much more authentic with people and don't get me wrong, there are boundaries, I know that it can go too far on that front. But when you start to actually show people who you are and connect them on an individual level and get to know them, then you can go so much further, both in your own personal development but also as a team. So it's really about how do you build your personal resilience?
Liz Bradford: 19:33
but also how do you build your organizational resilience? By creating those stronger connections between people.
Kate Perdon: 19:38
And I think the fact you've had 1.5 burnouts and you're still in the industry tells me that you've been applying these skills as you've gone along.
Liz Bradford: 19:46
Yeah, I'm not sure my team would tell you that. Maybe I need to listen to myself a little bit at the moment, because it's that year-end piece. Everyone's pushing super hard and they're like when are you going to ease up? So yeah, come Christmas time, but we'll calm down.
Kate Perdon: 19:57
Do you have favorite books or podcasts or anything in the leadership space that you've found useful for you?
Liz Bradford: 20:04
I read quite a mesh. Mesh of stuff all the way between technical and I don't know if we would call itself help anymore but more around self-development than everything else. I'm a very big fan of Adam Grant's work and he's just brought out a new book. I'm a very big fan of Brene Brown's work as well, and the whole piece around vulnerability really was a game changer for me back in 2014 or wherever it was.
Liz Bradford: 20:24
Again back to that concept of like being yourself and the courage it takes to do that, and, I think, anything podcast-wise, I listen to quite a lot of stuff around. There's an Angela Duckworth podcast that was the book on grit asking you stupid questions no such thing as dumb questions. And then I really actually like a podcast called Diary of a CEO and he brings in a lot of very different sort leaders and very successful people. That talks very much about their journeys as individuals and how they've gotten to that point, and I think that's a really nice way to get very diverse perspectives around. And it very often goes into how we emotionally connect with people, how we build resilience and people who make it to the top and realize actually was this it? And then start resetting their expectations and realizing that, the material stuff. Yes, sure it's lovely, but it's not why we're here and it doesn't fulfill you. So I find that quite a good sort of level setter, and I'm hiking with the dog in the morning.
Kate Perdon: 21:15
LESLIE KENDRICK A good reminder. And I certainly was in this space as well, in the corporate world, and it's everything that you are surrounded by, it's the water that you're in and all the things that you believed success was, and the trajectory that you're on and ticking things off, and then getting to the point where you've done all the things you felt you were supposed to, whether that was career or personal or life, and then still feeling this sense of emptiness. I'm wondering have I worked all to get here?
Liz Bradford: 21:42
and I've missed the point, leslie KENDRICK, it happens so frequently and I see it a lot in clients and I see a lot in peers as well, and I think if we don't do the work and it doesn't have to be a lot of work but if we don't do the work to identify what really matters to us and our core values and really what feels like success to us, then we end up living the lives that other people design for us, whether it's wittingly or unwittingly. Leslie KENDRICK Consciously or unconsciously.
Kate Perdon: 22:06
I totally think a lot of people do it unconsciously and it's only when you reach what you thought was the finish line and you realise it isn't the moment happens, and I see it a lot with clients, and that's often when people will come to me because they're at a crossroads. Do I throw it all in? Is this what I want to do? Why am I here? And I know you wear two different hats, probably many different hats. We've heard about that over a couple of years. I've heard about it before. Can you explain a little bit about your two different hats to give a bit of context? Leslie.
Liz Bradford: 22:33
KENDRICK Sure, so my day job hat I work in financial services, I work in banking and I run a fairly large team across Asia effectively in the chief operations office. So we're the ones that do all of the work that no one else wants to do, and it's our job to make sure everything runs and stays running and runs faster and you know nicer, quicker, faster everything. So that's where some of the overcommitment comes in, because someone's like, yeah, of course we can fix that, of course we can build that, of course we can change that. So, yeah, I'm the chief operating officer for North Asia, and that hat. And I've been doing banking work or in financial services for 20 years.
Liz Bradford: 23:03
And then about seven or eight years ago, as a result of my own personal transformation, got very heavily into personal training and then into organizational development coaching and executive coaching as well. So my second hat is, as the founder of Transform Perform, based on diagnostics, I design organizational coaching programs to transform cultures. So really, looking from the leadership all the way down through organizational design principles into how do you create the culture that aligns with the values, every company has values they all are painted on the wall but how do you make that the DNA of your culture? And how do you train your leaders in EQ? How do you train them in listening as opposed to telling? And then how do you create an environment where people are very organically connected but have a lot of psychological security so that they can actually speak up and contribute and feel that they are a part of where the organization is going as well. So that's the second hat and I'm very lucky that I'm allowed to co-join the two and operate in that capacity within the bank that I work as well.
Kate Perdon: 23:57
I think this links beautifully to the comments before about authenticity and about that leadership is an 80% human Like. 20% is about strategy and like setting the goals and the plans, but it's the 80% that's human and no matter where AI takes us in the future, it will still be 80% human because it will be 80% managing AI.
Liz Bradford: 24:19
Absolutely. I know that there's a lot of scary titles out there and stuff or headlines out there, but no, that's not going anywhere. And until we learn how to fundamentally connect well as humans and look after ourselves and look after each other, then you won't have a successful culture.
Kate Perdon: 24:32
Is there anything else that you'd like to add, or feel that if you could give a little piece of wisdom about leadership, perhaps for someone who's feeling a bit uncertain at the moment.
Liz Bradford: 24:43
So it's a bit of a cliche, but I think the thing I always end up tapping back into is be the leader that you would want to follow, whatever that might look like at the moment. So, if someone's thinking of tapping out, or if someone needs something, listen to yourself. Understand what you need. It might be that you need a break, it might be that you do need to change. Whatever that may be, but listen to yourself. And then the other thing I would say and this maybe goes back to your water analogy surround yourself with the people that you aspire to be like as well. So we all have energizers and then energy vampires, and the environment in which we're in fundamentally changes the way in which we operate, think, feel, respond. So just try and shift, especially if you're feeling drained and a lot of people are at this time of year and at this point in the economic cycle and everything else. Surround yourself with the people that inspire you to be a better version of yourself.
Kate Perdon: 25:29
Let it happen by osmosis.
Liz Bradford: 25:30
Sometimes we all need a little bit of osmosis.
Kate Perdon: 25:33
Thank you very much, liz. I really loved that chat today, my pleasure.
Liz Bradford: 25:37
Thank you so much for having me.
