Episode 13: Justine Whitaker - The art of sustainable performance

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Impactful Conversations podcast with me, Dr Glen Wallace and my very good friend and co-host, Nezmi Alexander, Nezmi Hayes. So how are you? I'm very well, thank you. How are you? Yeah, very good. Thank you, really, really looking forward to today's episode, as always. But perhaps even more especially so because we've got a good friend and collaborator for the work that you and I have done with Extrents with Justine Whitaker coming to join us. Justine, it's lovely to have you on the podcast finally. I know we've tried to get you here. You're in big demand for podcasts, I know. So we're genuinely super grateful that you come along and welcome to Impactful Conversation. Thank you. That's very kind of you nice to be on this scene at the podcast, normally the one that I'm in the front row listening to your latest release. You are a great fan and super fans are welcome. So that's brilliant. Justine's had a, you know, you've had a fascinating career, which hopefully you'll you'll you'll spend a minute or two just sharing us, you know, some of the high lights. But the reason that we wanted to have you on board is not just because you are such a, you know, a friend of the work that we do, but also because when I've worked with you over the years, what's been super clear to me is with the background that you have and the experiences that you have, you're somebody as a who's been in that CPO seat that really understands building cultures, building high performance cultures, and I think where you really put clear water between yourself and others is understanding the commercial value of building really powerful cultures. And that's the topic we want to get into today is, you know, how do we build high performance cultures that are driving the kind of commercial success of the business? So this should be exciting, really, really looking forward to it. Do you want to give us a pencil sketch for sort of 30 seconds, a minute of your background? Yes. So despite the kiwi accent home now is in the UK. I academically, I'm an organisational psychologist, so I've always been very curious about why I do what I do. And I generally found myself in places I never thought I would be. So my career is traversed private equity to indigenous reconciliation, to insurance, to engineering. So every time a new challenge pops up, I'm constantly surprised that, you know, there is a space and an opportunity for me. So it really just shows, wherever you go, people are people, and that thread of understanding what makes people tick, I think has been incredibly useful to tie an otherwise very diverse career together. Yeah, well, well, let's dig into that because of course culture is nothing without the people, right? So, you know, that will be central to our conversation. Let's start with something. So we want to try and keep this practical. We want to try and keep it sort of centered on, you know, how individuals and leaders within organisations can help shape the culture or amend the culture, you know, reshape it. But before we do that, I think we need to set in some sort of context when we talk about high performance cultures, what do we mean? So that seems like, it seems like an easy question on the surface, but in many ways, it's an unanswerable. So that's why we're starting with you. That's our first question. We're setting the tone, you can tell. What's your response to that? I completely agree with you around the high performance being somewhat unattainable. And I would add another word to it, which is about sustainable high performance. So, you know, we all know it's just not a sprint. You can't work at a high rate of knots consistently and enjoy it. It's just not, it's just not possible. So I think the broader conversation piece is around sustainable human performance. And one of the things I've learned from my own school of hard knocks is that our human energy isn't infinite. You know, we do only have a finite amount of energy. There are limits today. So the clever money is on how do we think about sustainable high performance? And that means there'll be periods of sprint and then there'll be periods of recovery. And so, I think it's actually a different question less around high and more around high and sustained performance. See, I knew it was going to be one of those episodes. I agree with you 100%. I have to say, I think that there's something about, there's not much point to having very high peaks and very low troughs if you can't maintain, you know, at least progression over time. I experienced that in a, in a, like, scale-up context, the hypergrowth context where the performance was good. I think it was high performance that's how I would describe it, but it was absolutely not sustainable. You go from quarter to quarter with the expectations and the bar consistently raising and, you know, being able to sustain that over a prolonged period of time. That really is, I think, kind of attainable. So just, I'm packing that a little bit further just in. When we think about a sustainably high performance culture, what would we be looking for? How would I know if my organisation is operating as a sustainably high performance culture? So your culture would be adaptable. So, you know, I think the days of Seton Forgett, organisational cultures are over, or if they're not, they, they should be. That, you know, you need to think about our culture has been living, you know, organic, responsive. And while I'm a big fan of having a clear set of articulated values and principles and things that guide us does need to be alive, not just put on a shelf or on a wall or in a, in a desk and forgotten. So I think one of the things you do see in consistently high performing cultures is this adaptability. You know, connected to that, there's a level of resilience, whether that's in your organisational culture or in your cyber security plan, that, you know, we are all going to need to be even more resilient than we've ever had to be before. And then connecting those pieces together is, you know, there is a curiosity and a kind of a recursive learning feature to high performing cultures, which is easily said in terms of, you know, a learning culture. But I think there's a whole conversation around how we unlearn habits of a lifetime or our default positions, which can be often more difficult to do than learn the new thing. But there's definitely a bundle in there for me in organisations that are currently high performing and then organisations that will be high performing into what is likely to be an AI dominated future. And if you're not adaptable and if you're not resilient and if you're not curious enough to learn and unlearn, the harsh reality is that you will fall off the back of the peloton and you won't get the opportunity to be high performing for much longer. Yeah, that's really something that struck me as you were both talking then was, do you think that some of the changes to being sustainably high performing are the sort of quarterly business updates that shareholders need or the PE company wants, you know, a relatively short-term drive for results? And I'm wondering, so what extent the context adds challenge to being sustainably high performing? I just just thought that popped off made as you were both chatting. Any people on that? Let me give my couple of remarks and then need me. You'll have a point of view on this too. I'm sure I've seen those quarterly updates be incredibly energising in a private equity because people know how they're doing. You know, and it's an opportunity for acknowledgement and reinforcement and course correction and stopping things and starting new things, so it gives a rapid reset and real-time acknowledgement which can be really helpful to adapting. And then in an indigenous environment where for the Māori tribe that I worked for, Teirana Nō Naitahu, they had an intergenerational purpose which was Mōtato, A Mōkau Ōri, A Mūriakine, and their translation is for us and the children after us. So their horizon was multi-generational. So their opportunity to reset or reflect had a very different time span to the quarterly financial updates you might find in private equity, but nevertheless provided like an absolutely vital anchor and a perpetual question for their cultures. Are we on track to deliver what we promised we would to those we promised it to? Need me, what would you say? I mean, firstly I love that as a concept we've described, they're just seeing like for me, I think often when it comes to performance, you know, it's absolutely right. We should be thinking, you know, short-term every period of time, just tracking, you know, the near-term actions, how, because in the micro we can get clear indicators of, you know, are we going towards where we want to be going, but also to be tracking, you know, these things in the longer term too, I feel like the pressure that we just described around sort of shorter-term targets or like performance measures that commercial, typically the commercial drivers is like defining what we're doing. Are we doing what we are here intending to do? And it's like with shorter-term measures that are easier to gauge whether we're doing that or not. Culture and sustaining that performance over a longer period of time, really that comes down to the how, how are we doing it? Because we can achieve, you know, we can do the sprint over a short period of time. That's not necessarily high performance over a longer period and actually having those behaviors, those sort of factors within a culture that you describe just in of like adaptability and resilience and, you know, the capacity to sort of learn and unlearn. That's really about measuring it in the longer term, I think. There's more about like how we do what we do. Are we doing, are we exhibiting and embodying and championing the behaviors that are going to, you know, set ourselves up for success in the longer run? And I think those two, sort of the what and the how of course works in both for those horizons, but I think they're maybe they get a bit more, it's a bit more meaningful or impactful to to think about those in slightly different horizons. And there's a lovely golden thread between the two, you know, you might look at indigenous reconciliation, which is all about promoting the revitalization of lost language and culture and then private equity about value multiple return on on exit. You know, when you look at the golden thread between the two of those, it is about staying the course, it's about keeping your focus. It's about indestructibility. You know, what do you say no to? So, you know, we do get very concerned, I think, in lots of the work we do about what are we going to do? But we have far less conversations about what we are not going to allow ourselves to be distracted by. So, where does the focus go? And I'm a great fan of consistency beats intensity. You know, that notion of what we consistently do builds up over time. And there's lots of different lenses on that, but I really liked that consistent focus and this notion of we need to be adaptable in the pursuit of what we want, but quite clear on what is that focus, what is that, whether it's purpose, whether it's quarterly financials, and not to allow ourselves to be distracted from that core set of principles and goals. Your approach might change, you know, when you know better, you do better, and you know, I appreciate that, but keeping your, keeping your focus in their indestructibility, I think, is really quite core to high performing sustainable cultures. I agree with what you both said, and I think you've sort of summarised it really beautifully for me with this idea of you've got two parallel tracks going on, or at least two speeds going on, you've got the macro for the very long term, and you can't deny the short term because that's how the markets, that's how shareholders and investors were, but it's quite an art to keep a watching brief over both timescales when you've got the short term pressures of one and the long term consistency required for the other. It's a, but you know nobody said it was easy, right? It's an interesting one. One of the things you've mentioned a couple of times, just in is adaptability. And I think when you, you know, set and forget cultures long gone, or if they're not, they should be. What do you see as the role of learning in that sort of key element of having cultures that are alive and organic and adaptable? So I'll quietly hope you ask me that question because I've been thinking about this. So one of the things I think is really interesting around the role of learning in adaptability is firstly just thinking about who is the student and who is the teacher. Say a bit more about that. So for example, if you think about AI, I ask my AI to teach me. Yeah, yeah. Show me how to create a prompt for. Show me how to improve my ability to get you to write like me. So I think it's just an interesting frame as you're who's teaching who, firstly, around the question and the role that our relationship collaboration with AI has. And then if you think about learning again through the teacher and the student lens, one of my favorite CEOs had a really powerful teaching relationship through the reverse mentoring relationship she had with the fresh graduate. Absolutely fascinating. And he became the teacher and she was the student. And he taught her a whole load of things she would not have learned through any book or any executive briefing. So she became the student and he was the teacher. So I think that who is the student, who is the teacher, is a really interesting lens to just think about. It doesn't mean that if you are the teacher in one case, you can't be the student in another and move backwards and forwards. I think everything we know about the future of work, we're going to be working longer. But our skills will have shorter shelf life. So in order to keep pace, in order to be relevant, in order to find work that you love, going to need to keep perpetually learning. And that might mean you need to unlearn some things that have stood us in good stead thus far. And I think about that a lot with my own development, there are skills, there are mindsets in particular that maybe, you know, maybe it's time to just let those go. The way I think about things and begin to think about them in a learn to think in a different way. So I think this learning curiosity piece is super key in the learning and unlearning, refreshing your knowledge perpetually plus the generosity of being willing to share your knowledge with others. I think it's super, super important. I love everything that you're saying, they're just feeling, because I think it's clearly so true. We're entering into an organisation or economical phase, which is totally different to the previous month's, well, 100 and X amount of years of industry age. It feels like, right? And I don't want to get too lost in the AI hype, it's not just like an immediate overnight, you know, jobs are no longer exist. I don't think that's true. It will be an evolution, but absolutely, you know, there are the way in which skills are, you know, the shelf life around skills that you just described, how they're evolving and, you know, having AI employees or teammates or teachers or vice versa, training vice versa. And you get yourself lost in that, can't you? Quite quickly. It's exactly the point, right? That's all you're describing to a team. They're actually learning, like, for an organisation, if you can embed into the fabric of how the organisation thinks and operates, that learning happens in all directions, that it's not, you know, top down and the leaders are the ones that hold all the knowledge. Actually, there's real opportunity for an organisation to maybe operate to adapt and be more resilient by appreciating that there's opportunity for learning to flow in many directions from like AI to graduates and AI natives and to, you know, leaders, employing their expert guide, I think, or previous guest was describing, you know, the benefit of pattern recognition and, you know, having building expertise around people management, that will still continue to hold value. But actually, there's real opportunity for organisations to think about how do we, how do we really, like, open up the possibility for more of that learning to flow in all of those directions. It feels like that's a really, sort of, profound focus that I would take if I was, you know, a people leader thinking about how to embed this into my organisation. Yeah. When you start thinking about it like that, you know, it becomes much less of a nice to have and much more of a business-derisking strategy. I mean, the reality of it is if you are not learning, you will fall behind. There is no two ways about it and with that comes inherent organisational risk. So, you know, once again, enlightened will make sure that there is time, there is space, resources available to learn at an individual level, at a collective level, you know, whether it's a team or a function or organisationally and there's a whole load of ways that learning can occur. But I think it's absolutely vital for high performance cultures and for organisations that, you know, really want to make a mark through the calibre and the impact that the people bring. Yeah, yeah. I'm not a great fan of the phrase 'human capital', but in relation to learning, you can see learning as one of the very few ways of investing in the, you know, the initial capital sum, right? How do you get the kind of interest back on the capital? Well, actually, you continue to invest in its learning, I think is what I'm hearing. And that's, and I hadn't thought about it in the way that you've both helped me think about it, which leads me to a question which sounds like it's a complaint, but it's genuinely not. But if we know that investing in learning is one of the only sure-fire ways of increasing the skills within the business, which increases the value of the business, why do businesses pull a voluntary spend as soon as the going gets tough? So in effect, cut off the supply of the interest on their capital. I've never understood that. Any insights, Justine, but you've sat both sides of the fence? Yeah, so a couple of thoughts for me and then next to me, I'm going to come to you because I can see things crossing across your eyes as we're talking. So I think there's a couple of things. One is, I think it's very tempting to just think about the learning in the form of learning and development, budgets and formal resources, whereas what we really want when we're learning is time, some time to reflect, some time to be coached, some time to read, some time to go to a seminar, you know, these are not massively expensive things. They do have an opportunity cost attached to them. So, you know, I think firstly, I think it is shortsighted and unfortunate where organisations do grab that low hanging fruit, but where I've seen it work very well is it even if budgets are pulled back the time, the commitment to learning that space you need is not, which I think is is. That's a brilliant shout out to leaders who might be sitting listening to this episode and thinking, well, what can I do at my level? And we'll talk more specifically about leaders in a minute, but I think you've just given people two or three really good strategies to think, well, there may not be formal investment in formal learning come happening, but there are still so many opportunities that you can take or seek to learn and develop your skills, which to Nesmi's point from earlier on, you know, the environment that we're in will require you to do that, or be left behind potentially. Yeah, that's that's really helpful. Yeah, Nesmi, sorry, I didn't mean to cut across you, what were you going to say? No, you didn't, you didn't cut across me at all. I was, to be honest with you, I was just going to chime in behind the, behind the complaint. Which I will, I will resist the temptation to do too heavily. But it did make me think about this, so if, if, if, when times get tough and, you know, budgets get cut and it feels like there's less, I don't know, spatial priority for, for, for learning to happen. It feels like one of the sort of mitigations around that can be, you know, leadership decisions, like how you choose to, to lead, it doesn't mean that you can kind of close the pipeline off to creating, you know, more learning opportunity and growth within the team. That still, that still happens. That's, that still continues to happen, even if the budget isn't quite there for, like, learning new skills. So, like, in terms of how lead is lead, you know, role modeling growth mindset seems really important for, you know, sustaining high performing cultures. And, and I'm just thinking what other behaviors then could contribute towards, you know, leaders having that positive influence on a, on a culture that is going to perform over a sustained period of time. What, what behaviors should leaders, should leaders be exhibiting or demonstrating or prioritising, either in, you know, in what they're role modeling or what they're, you know, delivering in terms of the, the impact that they're having. What do you think about that team? Well, look, one, one of my favourite CEOs had a couple of great strategies that she used and I, I try and copy her every chance I get. So, you know, firstly, she, she asked great questions, really great questions and I wrote some down because they're really good. I've got them in a little less. So, she would, she would often say to her exact team, you know, to me, she'd just say, what do you think? What do you think? So, she would ask what I thought before she said what she thought. Now, of course, she had her own ideas, but she was clever enough to seek mine before she told and that built engagement, it facilitated great learning loop, it also built wonderful scenes of accountability. You know, she would say things like, well, how do you see it? Inviting me to bring a different perspective to the one she might have had or indeed, if she had, she had her perspective to come at it from a different angle. She, she would say, how are you and how does this make you feel? So, this time's where she was interested in what I was doing intellectually with what she had said. And there was other times where she thought is this going to cause frustration, irritation or excitement, you know, and anticipation. So, I think really good leaders ask really good thoughtful questions and they can facilitate a massive amount of learning. It doesn't cost any money, just costs some thoughtfulness and some inclination to facilitate the growth. And others end some humility just to at least start with saying, look, I'm not entirely sure, but you might have a view that I'm really interested in, you know, talk me through. So, had a very practical level with no budget, no learning hours carved out, you could start by asking, you know, a series of well thought through questions that some learning can can come from, cost enough. It was good enough for Socrates. I'm assuming it would be good enough for the rest of us, right? I've got my Socrates badge, links to that. Justine, what about stretch? Because sort of a line in some ways to grow mindset, but what about this idea of leaders knowing how this person I can stretch to, this is a stretch for them and this person, actually, they could do that with their eyes shut so I can distribute roles, distribute tasks, projects, et cetera in a way that gives people stretch to grow into. Do you see that as a cornerstone of high performance culture, or actually should we're taking that as a given anyway, or if you've seen it done well in some places and badly in others, what's your what's your take on stretch? Yeah. So, I've done some of my best work in roles or where I've been given projects. I had no clue, not a clue. So, you know, they were the ultimate stretch for me. So, maybe two quick examples, first non-indigenous person in senior HR role in the indigenous environment, I had no clue. So, I really needed to bring some humility to that role because it required a massive stretch, but what got me through was an equal measure of support and people saw in me things I didn't even see in myself. And that was why they appointed me and gave me the opportunity. So, they saw something in me that I hadn't yet realised and as they saw me growing into the role and applying myself to the very best I could, where it didn't go so well, they would rally the support, you know, they would reorientate me. A second example, when I was at IAG around their global leadership talent, diversity and culture, portfolio and was asked by the board chair to take the board to Silicon Valley. And Palo Alto, now in truth, I don't even know where Palo Alto was. I mean, I knew what happened at Silicon Valley, but I couldn't put on net in your head six weeks to create a board study to it. So, these are massive stretches, not just a little bit of potential, but these were like super deepened with your snorkel kind of. But what made them work really well was the massive amount of support. And I think that that is super, I think stretch is very critical. You know, I don't believe we know how great we are, how much potential we've really got until you push, you know, you push those limits, but it's not possible to push them to the fullest extent. If you're not confident that someone's got your back and that this support is there. If people do have your back, you can be very surprised at what you can actually achieve. And I think I'm, I'm testament to that, finding myself in roles that I never thought I could do, but I had people who brought the support, who believed that I could and helped me when I, when I limped or was lacking confidence or when I made mistakes. So, I try very much to do that in my own leadership practice just because I know those stretches have been the absolute making of me, but I've needed the support and the wisdom from us. And I think that what it, what it speaks to as well, because it's so, it's such an important point you make about it's not only the support or only the challenge. It's the combination of those things in the right ratio, you know, which itself changes. But, you know, one of the, I think on those, I don't know if you both would agree, but I think on the surface, a culture that can look like it's high performing, you know, is with the charging leader who has high standards themselves and expects everyone else to work at the same level as they are, only for them to sort of look in, you know, back over their shoulders six months down the line and find that everybody's actually just disappeared because they weren't engaged or actually they're sort of scattered, littered all over the road, you know, as kind of debris in the wake of this charging leader. And I think on the surface, that can be really appealing to investors to the board to, you know, we've got this kind of gung-ho leader, but it's not, back to our word from right at the beginning, I'm not sure it's sustained, well, I know it isn't, I know it's not a sustainable model. So your point about balancing, you know, challenge and support, I think is a really key one for who are leaders who are listening. Whole hearted agreement. Sorry, Justine. And I was just going to say, you were going to add something I could see you thinking. I'm in whole hearted agreement, I couldn't agree any more strongly. Actually, I think, coming back to the question I posed a moment ago about, like, behaviors, what behaviors do leaders need to exhibit? Your absolute right in kind of picking up this sort of stretch and support needs to be in combination. But actually, I think support, the right level of support can be so corrosive to performance in the medium and longer term, if it's not, if it's not present. That exactly what you just described there, you know, you can, you know, on the surface appear, like over the short term, we've managed to achieve this, you know, sense of high performance, but actually we haven't, because we should really be evaluating this, not just in the short term, but over looking at, you know, the impacts over the long term too, I've experienced that, like, very strongly in the past. And yeah, it just, it really resonated with me as you're both describing that. Just how important it is to have that present in a culture where you're looking to raise the bar and looking to, you know, continue to grow and outperform your competitors, ensuring that people are able to perform and grow and, you know, are not going to fall through the cracks as you go so it can be sustained. A very practical thing that came up for me when you were describing that as well as like OKRs. So, I've been in organisations where OKRs, and that's a very Silicon Valley sort of concept, typically it helps, you know, organisation objectives tend to be organised these days, where the actual premise behind OKRs is that they should be stretched, like, you shouldn't really be achieving them every quarter to all of them every quarter, so you haven't kind of set the bar quite high enough. And so, you know, we are consistently stretching towards that, but I've also seen it where that whilst it's on the face of it, described as the measure of success over long term, frankly, wasn't. And when there's a disconnect between the organisational signals of what success includes, and actually what success includes, which is, you know, how you go about doing what you do, then as well, I think that's really sort of corrosive. It's important for an organisation to stay aligned in terms of, like, what we need to achieve and how we need to achieve it, and that, you know, objectively we're, you know, driving performance in alignment with both of those ideas in congruence together. The question I now want to ask then, which is, OK, this is all great, but we've got this amorphous thing called a culture, and we're aspiring for it to be high performing, in your experience inside organisations just in how do you monitor that and how do you report progress, and what are the, I'm certainly more of the individuals to measure metrics, but how do you capture and report back to the people that need to know how the culture is serving the business? So, what surprised you there, I kind of remark that I don't think there's one single measure, or even three or four, you know, so organisation might use their culture, data, they might use their turnover data, they might use their sick leave data, you know, I think in this day and age we need to be looking at performance by looking at the business results, you know, so are we delivering to our investors, to our customers, what is the nature of that experience? We need to look at what other data shows us through your HMI years, or your talent forecasting, and all of your kind of people, data, you need to be looking at your risk, your reputation and risk, and then in addition to all of those wonderful measures of what high performance might look like, I think we don't often consider the really important power of observation. Just go in and have a look and see what it feels like. It's amazing how much you can learn by sitting in a reception of our organisation, it's amazing, lots on the walls, it's amazing, our people on time, people backed into their car park so they can drive out straight at five o'clock, you know, it does it feel warm or when you're sitting in a meeting or you're at a stakeholder briefing or you're at some kind of celebration like what client function? What does it feel like? What do you observe? What do you sense? And I think those other forms of data, whilst they might be somewhat more subjective, no one's seed feelings aren't data, they're just a different form of data, and they are forged by years of experience and wisdom and instinct and observation, I think they are, they're super important. So I think the high performance ultimately is an alchemy of multiple measures, financial, non-financial, quantitative, qualitative, and you need to take a look at whatever that mosaic would look like for your organisation to determine what a healthy, sustainable standard of high performance would look like. That would be my, that would be my thesis on measurement. Yeah, I like, I love the fact that you've tied it back to, ultimately whilst the purpose of a culture is, well, it's got to be tied to whilst the purpose of the business, because otherwise you're building a culture in isolation of the context in which it's set and which it's serving. But I think sometimes that the, well, certainly if you go back, well, you would know better than I, 15 years maybe, certainly then and anything before that culture was consisted of, was considered one of those soft and fluffy elements of, you know, what would have been called the people function or the HR function or, you know, personnel, maybe even back then. But it's, it's not, it's absolutely critical, you know. I remember you and I just in sitting in a meeting when somebody was discussing, you know, if you're trying to value a business, the culture of the business is one of the multipliers of the value of the business, you know, and they're able to, when they come and value your business, if you want to sell it or you're looking to buy it, it's, it's that critical that it becomes a multiplier of value. So this is important stuff and everybody has a, everybody has a role, right? Everybody has a role, not just the most senior people, but it's how everybody is living their life on a day-to-day basis and how they're interacting with each other and what the respect levels are, respectile, what the levels of trust are and all of those myriad of other things, which makes it feel hard to wrestle, but I think your point is get lots of measures that seem right for your business and just keep track of those on a, on a regular basis. There's, there's a really great point in there and I, I think about it as crew, not passengers. Right. All right. Their, their culture ultimately is everybody's responsibility. It absolutely is, it's not HR or people in culture or executive committee or you see it, they have a disproportionate influence over it, but you know, when it comes to culture, we are all crew, we are not passengers. A great phrase. Yeah. And so I think that there is, is a really important way we think about how culture is created and where value is created from a cultural perspective. And I certainly know from my private equity days that once that initial number has been kind of broadly scoped in a private equity acquisition situation. Very quickly in my experience with a legal acquisition, the equity partners go straight to once that number's been set, we want to talk about culture. And we, we want you to give us an understanding of what will be preserved and retained from our culture. And you learn pretty quickly that a lot of that acquisition value lies in the unique organizational culture. And so you become very thoughtful about changing that culture in any way that could destroy value. So what you were looking to do from a private equity perspective is to amplify the strengths and herit in the organization's culture, because to do anything less, to homogenize it, to dial it down, the reality of it is you are destroying value. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting, isn't it? It's on the note. Yeah. Well, just just just just just before we bring close, one of the things you just described around crew not employees. If you had one top tip piece of advice, hack or, you know, recommendation for anyone who's looking to establish that mentality or establish that further, you know, create value within the organization, what would you advise that they focus on? So again, this was another question that I hoped you would ask me, so I've thought about this one. And I don't think my answer is going to be quite what you might predict. So my note was that the culture of an organization is shaped by the worst behaviour the leader is willing to tolerate. And so I think one of the things we can all do is not walk past behaviours that are inconsistent with what we believe. And there's a American, so an Australian lieutenant colonel, I think he was David Morrison, who I had the pleasure of hearing when I was working for I.A.G. in Australia. And he talked about the standard you walk by is the standard you accept. So, you know, we get very concerned about the positive articulation of our values. And I think that's very important. And it's very important. There's another piece to that puzzle, which is about how do we build out cultures that we are proud of, that they have a legacy, that people talk passionately about, that deliver to those who have trusted and invested in us. And one of those simple things we can do is not walk by things that are counter culture. And there might be a large thing like a sexist remark, or there might be a small act of talking over someone. For example, you know, our culture is created by those things we repeatedly do as we've talked about before. And I think those small things, and those large things that we might walk by, or let slip to the keeper, can shape our organisational culture. So my tip would be, you know, keep an eye out, reflect on your own behaviour, the behaviour of those around you, and remember that you are, you know, the crew, not a passenger, and to jump on those those behaviours or, you know, actions that are inconsistent with the culture that you want to be part of, and shape it actively. The challenge with that, and I do realise we're just about to now spin off into another hour and a half long session. I will, I'll just keep it as an observation, and maybe we could put a pin in it to come back to for another conversation. But the culture has to be right for people to be able to challenge in appropriate behaviour against what the culture is looking to become, right? So it's very, it takes a very brave, uh, or, or, or of juice, or whatever person to have the willingness to challenge, maybe a senior leader who's being inappropriate. I mean, how many examples of that have we seen over the years come from really major organisations just here in the UK alone? So I think it's, I, I love that video, by the way, I'm, I'm going to see if we can put the YouTube video off Morrison in the, it, it really moved me, I have to say. I just sort of went, well, that, that, you know, something I'll try and hold dear. But it takes some courage. You have to almost be, he's giving people permission, isn't he, with inside that organisation to call out those behaviours. I think it's more challenging in some circumstances to do that, um, for fear of, well, all sorts of things. Let's call them reprisals. Broadly, but maybe we can come back to that when we do, uh, topics around leadership styles. I don't know next year or something. Um, yeah. Um, brilliant. Uh, just in, on behalf of Nezmi and I thank you, both, you know, thank you from both of us. It's been, as, as expected, um, but even more so, um, rich, uh, bit left field occasionally, which is lovely, because that's just the way you think, which is deeply and, you know, and creatively about these topics. So from us both, thank you ever so much for joining us on impactful conversations. It's been a real treat. It's been a, a, a pleasure to actually, you know, be invited. So I, I've loved it. Thank you both very much. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nezmi, I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Uh, and audience, um, I hope you've really enjoyed that. I've taken lots of, yes, high level organisational wide thinking out of that podcast, but certainly as well as some tangible steps that all of us can take because we're crew, right? Not just the passengers. Until the next time, uh, impactful conversations, we'll look forward to seeing you then. Take care.