From Theories to Practice: Psychometrics in Leadership

Niki: [00:00:00] Psychometric is a very interesting, topic. I’m very familiar in the sense that I led teams in the corporate world, and we went through this trainings and assessment and very useful. 

Oh Tony with Psychometrics, let’s say personal data assessment, especially in teams or organizations.

Yeah. What do you find that they can solve or address that otherwise people can’t.

For example, our team was 50 or 55 people. When we went through this, you might know the inside colors, but just like people realization that, okay, there are people whose main way to process information and situations is facts and logic.

People, emotions, and action. That was always very helpful. So in that context what do you think is not possible if people don’t have this understanding? 

Tony: I know that system really well, and I know people that worked on it and built their ideal customer model around it.

So they were very smart in how they marketed it and [00:01:00] used the terminology and the language that they used to articulate the meaning behind it. So it got people to be a really accessible way to understand how they might be processing things differently. 

Without that you’re flying blind and maybe pondering on or reacting to things without that insight.

It’s just being a bit more informed and forewarned is forearm sort of thing. So you can start to mitigate potential challenges with that level of insight. However, I do believe that because of the nature of those types of models where you predominantly red or predominantly yellow, or predominantly green, for example.

It comes with limitations. And of course, in a team of 50 people, the degree of nuance that you can have with each of those individuals is probably marginal. But I think perhaps the, just the marginal, incremental gains that you can have over a longer period of time are worth are actually worth fighting for.

They’re worth trying to get to. I’ve spent four years, four years deeply. Assessing all of these different [00:02:00] models for all of what’s good about them and for all of the negativity that surrounds them as well.

Lots of detractors from about Myers-Briggs or about the Enneagram, not being scientifically valid, and then you’ve got the big five, which is scientifically valid, but, people still question its usage. How do you actually apply this stuff in the real world?

So I’ve layered all these things together and tried to understand out of all of this, if we want people to perform, if I want my team to perform better, if I’m charged with managing a team or leading a team, there’s never too much information I can have about them.

How I utilize that is then with me, and of course my own perceptions and personality type will to some degree, predetermine how much information I want to take in about these people. 

It might even predetermine how much I actually really care about these people. However, if I’m charged with leading or managing them, I’ve gotta find a way to engineer without losing authenticity, I’ve gotta understand that actually I lack a little bit of genuine empathy. 

I might need to try [00:03:00] and dial that up in order to go and meet people where they need to be met, to have a conversation with them that’s gonna help me help them get the best out of themselves.

Without first the self-awareness that it can bring, I don’t think I’ve got any real chance of going through those key moments in a business or in the sports world or wherever, without making daily mistakes that I don’t need to be making. And when I say mistakes just errors of judgment around how my approach is impacting the people around me. I’m not even thinking about it. So I’m going in saying, this is the way I lead. This is the way I do business. This is what we’re trying to achieve. So some people that’s great. To the rest, they to varying degrees, they don’t like it, they don’t trust me, they don’t, the way I speak to them, they don’t understand it.

So I’m with, without arming myself with more insight of things that I can’t see, I’m interested in getting visible. Things that I can’t see on the surface. I always think of it like this, Niki. If I’m, and I’ve been in this situation many times a [00:04:00] football manager going into a dressing room for the first time.

I’ve never met these people before. The scouts have told me what they’re like, we know we’ve got the data analysis about what they’re like, but at that moment, they’re looking at me waiting for signs chinks in my armor. Is this guy going to pick me? Is he gonna like me? Is he gonna motivate me?

Does he know what he’s talking about? And for the sort of lesser, well-intentioned people in the room, when’s this guy gonna trip up? 

How can I get the better of him? What’s his weakness? So you’re faced with this all the time. It’s pretty handy to know a lot of that stuff in advance, right?

Yeah. And a lot of it is that there’s the reality of that, and then there’s also the perception. So how I think about that and how other people think about is different, and that in itself is worth consideration, I think. 

That’s how I look at it. And unfortunately for me, it’s been a labor of love for the last four years. It’s finally coming out into the book and the tool, which is which is fantastic. 

What I didn’t wanna do is type people or label people or put them into [00:05:00] boxes.

I want to conceptualize the idea that there’s limitless differences between us whilst we’re human and we are more predominantly red, green, yellow, or blue, let’s say. That’s what makes us, consistently part of the human race. We’ve all got varying degrees of this stuff, but I want to get a little more granularity about how is that gonna be. If we’re both predominantly yellow or we’re both predominantly blue, that doesn’t tell me enough about who we are or how we express who we are. It doesn’t tell me what we want. It doesn’t tell me, what needs need to be met.

It doesn’t tell me lots of stuff. So I want to get into that and help people have those conversations with themselves in the dialogue, first and then to then be able to have better conversations with other people. 

By recognizing that, it’s like perceptual positions. First person, second person, third person, all of that sort of stuff. Being able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes because you actually know a lot more about how they’re processing the situation that you’re in. If we go back, sorry. I know that was a long response, [00:06:00] Nick.

That’s fine. But just going back to your Zelensky Trump, interview and JD Vans, right? There was no agreement. We saw what we saw, right? We don’t know what was said before and all the mechanics of that, but there, there’s no agreement in advance of that as to, or no recognition of what each party wanted.

Niki: Yes. Yeah, 

Tony: So they’re already in the world of emotional responsiveness and strong opinions without fully understanding what it was they were having a discussion about and that was a problem for me. 

Niki: Yeah. It wasn’t framed properly. Yes. I soon recap every basically just riffing on from what you shared and few questions came down mind. 

It’s nice that you shared that what you shared about that meeting in the overall office, because that was my observation.

I try to look at things as best as the volume kind of objective way. Of course I have my opinions and so on, but when it started derailing, I could just see that I understood what the Americans wanted and what conversation they were having. And then I saw the conversation that Zelensky was having [00:07:00] and then you could see they don’t understand. 

They are like in a different conversation. So soon, they’re going to really clash. And like you said they didn’t understand where the other one was standing and yeah. So things that came, my mind is when you said, without this understanding, which I think that symbols and yet somewhat powerful understanding from all these psychometric is to understand that people genuinely actually think and perceive the world very differently. That’s already very useful because let’s say, if I’m Green, I’m thinking that everybody process things mainly through emotions. How it sounds, how it feels. 

If I’m mainly red, I’m wondering why aren’t we moving towards action? What are we here talking about This like facts and analytics. Like, why don’t we just move into action and if we don’t have the understanding because other people actually see this situation very differently and the way they want to move is different.

Then you talked about the [00:08:00] utilization, which you mentioned things like self-awareness, empathy. I think curiosity or eagerness to learn about people and to recognize that actually to be to lead people well is we need courage. I think we need to implement test. I think genuine curiosity about people. 

Like you said that a moment when you go into the locker room, it’s a big moment because in leadership we are in some way, we are inviting, we are asking people like, do you want to go with me on this journey? Shall we go there? 

It is only wise from people to look. Let’s see if Nick, if Rob, if Tony, let’s see if they really have my best in mind.

Let’s see if they are still two months from now still going there or have they changed their direction many times? 

I have a lot of clients who are leaders and sometimes they communicate about vision in their specific way for two weeks and people aren’t motivated and I always want them to understand, it’ll probably a year to get everybody really fully on board. 

[00:09:00] Like you said about, especially when we talk with group of people, if they are unconscious, that our main orientation should talk logic and facts, then only the, let’s say people who appreciate that the most, they will be on board. But then if they are yellow and we only talk about people and how it relates to people.

10 people who are action or emotion oriented or fact oriented might not be so much on board. So to like to be able to communicate to a group in a way that gets everybody there. And I find it very useful in general when groups or teams get stuck is when we have this understanding, then we can see where they’re stuck.

Okay. Rob is now stuck in this because he needs to get facts and logic, and so far we only talk about emotion. Or Niki is now stuck because he needs to see how this impacts people actually. I’m a little bit like touching different point of view that of the limitation, which I saw very much in our organization.

Now it became [00:10:00] about. I didn’t do it because I’m red. Oh, I spoke like that because I’m red, or they’re like yellow. Just forget about it. That’s very limiting. 

I have three questions. You can choose which one.

But one thing I’m really curious about is because I had this sense already probably seven years ago where I said. Ask our boss. Do you think people can change in this? If somebody’s very low and red do they think they can go up? 

Because for me, really that changed a lot. And in my observation, I might be wrong, but, because I used to have strong need to people to like me.

Then I wouldn’t be so direct, so that didn’t mean that I was red, but my fear was bigger. But as the fear was removed, my red went up like this. So I just, oh, that’s something if you want to go into can we actually change this? Also, you’ve been writing the book. I would be very curious how what’s different, how you were thinking about it differently before another, you’ve been writing it.

[00:11:00] And for many leaders is what do you think is preventing people from actually in, because as we know in leaders in general, you get gonna get information, but are you going to actually implement it? 

Tony: The first one, I think, Rob, you did an article not so long ago the adaptation tax. I work at it through three levels.

If you think about the dimension being the first thing, so the red, the green, the blue, for example. So the dimension says that’s the broad. That’s puts our peg in the ground of where we typically are. Then within that, there are different aspects that make up that thing. So the two of us in my models, which is a score model, so emotional stability for example, has got four facets that live underneath that dimension, four aspects. 

Each of those aspects we could score equally high or low on the dimension, but any of the four aspects could be making up those numbers to different degrees. So the way we express that emotional stability is different. 

So I articulate it like this. If you imagine that we are more predominantly objective task oriented. [00:12:00] Et cetera versus, emotionally attuned, people focused et cetera. 

It doesn’t mean the ones that score lower don’t have it. They just don’t access it. It’s not their natural way to process. So within that is the opportunity to grow.

But we’re obviously it’s not taking big steps like learning maths or learning English. 

It’s learning how to calibrate for the challenge ahead. For myself personally, to actually go, you know what? I’m actually stepping outside of what I’m really wired to do here. And it’s gonna come at a personal cost.

So with me, for example, if I’m asked to spend a long time, with routine detail oriented types of things. I’m switched off. I’m demotivated. I hear you. Okay. I can I do it? I can do it. Do I want to do it? No, I don’t want to do it. So my motivation’s already diminished before I go in there. My application is, as optimal as I can steal myself to do it. And that’s coming at a huge cost to stress ’cause I wanna be doing something else, efficacy. All of these things are being impacted now. That’s [00:13:00] happening. So going back to the vision statement, we all agree as a team we’ve done our personality profile and we are all in agreement that we respect each other, we understand each other, and we’ve agreed to point ourselves towards this collective goal, let’s say now every day that might change. 

The goal might shift, the business might change its expectations. Different manager might come in, a new person joins the team. All of these things have big impacts on those dynamics and what we agreed to.

But we have to be careful that we understand to what degree we’re exposing all of our people to an appropriate amount of tension, stress, outside of what they’re naturally doing. And of course, it would be unreasonable for us all to go, I want my perfect job within a team every day. It can happen, but it’s rare.

Because sometimes as part of a team, you’re gonna have to collaborate. Are you gonna have to be asked to speak up? You’re gonna have, all of these things that, that, that may be really challenging for different people. They’re all incrementally growable, coachable, [00:14:00] achievable. 

I talk about modulating our, behaviors, if you like, for want of a better reason. So we express our behaviors in a certain way, most naturally, highly assertive. More demure highly energetic, more laid back, whatever it might be. That’s an expression of who we naturally are, or maybe in some cases, who we’re trying to prove that we are who we’re trying to be.

But anything that’s outside of our natural state, there’s a degree of cost that goes with it. If it’s only a micro adjustment, it’s easily do I can dip in and out. If you are an ambivert, if you’re right on the cusp of introvert, extrovert is a really great example. You can dip into a group setting and it not cost you too much energy.

You spend time on your own and you’re not pulling your hair out trying to, get amongst the people all the time. That’s a really simplistic example of it. 

If you think about my model as cutting that into many more aspects than a two dimensional sort of matrix. Each of those things have got an, the introversion extroversion thing.

To what degree am I, extroverted or introverted? So to what level of granularity? Because at [00:15:00] that point I know that every time we’re doing this type of activity, these people are churning more energy. They’re burning more personal fuel in order to do what I’m asking them to do. And that’s the same as the manager.

If I’m using the example that you, Niki, that you raised about the, your, when you were able to bring your fear down to a degree where your assertiveness could go up, right? You became more read in using that language. It’s a great example of, two completely different systems at play there, right?

One’s on my model, one’s on one system, one’s on another system. But so knowing that which one of those you can need to modulate in order to get yourself into those zones, it’s a great example of you modulating your expression to get the job done that needs to be done recognizing actually.

Before you had this mastery over your emotional state, it would be coming at a high cost to have to be that person. Now that cost is diminished because you’ve increased your capacity. So I [00:16:00] think all of these things are trainable. We can’t change who we are. We certainly can’t change or try to change who the people are, but we can, I think, approach it with a degree of confident because we all adapt over time. We all grow through challenges. Yeah. We all grow through struggle. So we’re taking a team through a challenge and through a struggle, and we grow together. And we intentionally know that we’re creating the optimum amount of tension that’s gonna help these people grow through struggle.

I think we’re really on the right path when it comes to performance. Now, you’ll have to forgive me. I’ve forgotten what questions two and three were. 

Niki: That’s the whole idea also, but I really liked what you especially talk, talked about incremental steps and calibrating and this, understanding, which I think as you talked about it, I gonna be more conscious of it with my clients.

I realize I’m quite conscious of exactly that. It comes with a cost. To be something or do something that doesn’t really, isn’t really the most natural thing to us. There is the interesting thing. It’s just an observation [00:17:00] is that if it can reframe something like, let’s say for example for me to do admin things when I was leading my them and those things, if I would be able to frame it in a way that I see how doing this admin work benefits them, it’s easier for me to do it. I’ll have more answers to do it. Of course, we cannot reframe ourselves out of everything, but, I’ll jump a little bit into, not different topic, but the aspect of implementation.

Because you are writing a book, you probably want people to implement it. Now five years, over 3000 sessions, I think is one of my biggest observations of realization is that we have lot of information and insight, but people are not implementing it. And there’s, of course, I think one of the main reasons is, stress because how stress impacts the brain as, as you might know, what Rob was saying about when we are stressed, we literally we don’t see people as people. We see them as objects. This thing is either helping me to get rid of the problem and stress [00:18:00] this thing is causing more of it.

This thing can be ignored because it doesn’t do either. And like you talked about, self-awareness, curiosity, incremental learning. When we are stressed, then the bodies and the brain is in a state where we need to solve a life threatening problem now. And when we are stressed, let’s say we are chased by the lion want to be thinking, how might I change this?

Or I wonder how I could support chain more, or what’s the small next small change? Yeah. And that’s I think in general is one of the biggest difficulties in our time and era that, that we are sitting in Rob, you heard me talking about this. We are sitting in front of our computer in perfect safety and yet and then we are stressed.

For example, the reason why it’s so difficult for people to take a break, obviously it’s not a technical reason because taking a break is very easy technically. But if the brain are in some chronic low level stress state, the moment where the person tries to [00:19:00] leave their desk, they start feel literal, pull from the body and the brain do not leave.

But stay in the work because there’s all these connections of if I don’t do this work well enough, then I might not be liked. And if I’m not liked, then I might get fired. If I get fired, I earn money, and I’ll just end up dead on the street. And of course it’s very difficult for us to realize that our body and brain are really thinking that we are in a life or dead situation.

And then we will develop this whole story of I’m lazy or why I have all these ideas of what I would want to learn. All these things I know that are really important to do, but somehow I can’t make myself do it. And that’s mainly because people don’t recognize what is the stage they are in.

And I think that’s one of the main causes, even for leaders, why they can’t implement something. And then another thing that you mentioned, and I’ll start with that, is almost really unfortunate unwillingness or blind spot to take really small steps. I see it all the time, especially when clients start with me, [00:20:00] like they want to be this leader who’s able to communicate to everybody really clearly, be calm, be empathetic, be inspiring, however they are here and they have never even asked a question, what kind of communicator would I want to be?

Then they’re frustrated and discouraged because they aren’t here. It would be better for them to focus on, okay, next seven days. What’s a really small improvement? Maybe I could ask bit more questions. What questions? Maybe I can just ask people why something is important. That’s what I will do the next seven days, because that takes a lot of stress away and it’s impossible to focus on something like becoming a better leader because for the brain, it doesn’t need anything.

Yeah. What do you see just in general or in the context of the psychometric? Like how can someone help them do, for example, I things from implement things from your book, for example? 

Tony: Yeah. Psychometrics are just a tool, right? And most of them give you a point on the map. [00:21:00] You are here. That’s useless unless I know where I am in relation to where I want to go.

Okay. So when the goal is a big one and it’s a complex one, then if I’m in the car and I turn my GPS on and I want to go place I’ve never been to before, it knows where I am. But it is gotta work out the best route. It gives me multiple options. Do you wanna go the fast way? Do you wanna go the countryside way?

Whatever it might be. So I see this as a performance GPS and then along the way you come, the gps has plotted a route and suddenly there’s a roadworks that was unexpected. And now it’s now I’m stuck. These are like these people that get in the way or a change process or something like that.

Oh my God, what do I do? But GPS doesn’t know this, hasn’t worked this out. So this is about when it needs to recalibrate. I’m now here, take me in on a different route to overcome this obstacle. So I see this as a performance GPS type thing. It’s a navigation tool. Okay?

And of course that won’t give you all the answers, but it helps you just do more than define where you are. It’s in relation to where you want to go. So with your client, when I’m listening to you talk about your clients and they’re setting these big, I wanna be a great leader or a great [00:22:00] orator, or whatever it might be.

I think we’re always dealing in the gap between the reality, the situation, and the aspiration. 

What do we want and where are we going? Where are we? So the leader for me. We’re talking multiple people with multiple perceptions of where we are and where we’re going. The groups agreed that we are here and we are going there of them.

Their ideal route would be slightly different. Someone would take the long way, someone would get there as fast as possible. Someone would get there by gathering as much information as they can go. All of that’s that’s real. Nevertheless, we have to take a step. We have to go together. So already got people starting to go.

Oh. Like it’s not quite my ideal route. 

It’s helpful to know this, right? That as I’m taking them along this journey, some people at this stage of the journey are hurting more than others. It’s like going back to my role as a football coach, when you’ve got high fast twitch people. So the speedsters, the real electric pace guys, and you’ve got the marathon runners. Sprinters and a marathon runner.

Got completely different [00:23:00] makeups in their in their biology. And if we train them all the same, the marathon runner will never be the quickest, but you can keep doing sprint training. And they’ll might incrementally get better, but because they’re not so explosive, they’re not burning as much fuel.

Whereas if you do a hundred sprints with a sprinter and a hundred sprints with a marathon runner, the sprinter will win all the time ’cause they’re quicker, but the sprint is burning more fuel. And the sprinter will break down quicker. The sprinter will get hamstring tears.

You’re overloading a system that doesn’t need to be overloaded. So I think of it like that in terms of the psyche. We’re putting them into situations that they actually don’t need too much of this because too much of it, and they’re gonna start breaking down.

They’re gonna start getting the little hamstring tears and things like that. 

Even one aspect. If I think about emotional regulation, for example, okay, we talk about, in terms of self-awareness, we wanna be aware of and regulate our emotions.

We want to help people choose the right emotional expression, not just the easiest. So the easiest is often I’m reacting to the situation. We want ’em to [00:24:00] get control of that and choose what emotion. So in your case, when you need to demonstrate some assertiveness, rather than suppress it, that’s the easy thing. The hard thing is to actually come out and say it. Yeah. We wanna manage our response. From an emotional awareness point of view, we wanna understand the triggers or the patterns that make us tick, or the patterns that make us blow up.

Working in a aviation environment where we need to be at our best when our best is required, but these businesses say we want resilient people. We’re gonna put ’em under match pressure every day from seven in the morning till four in the afternoon. And if they survive, great.

There’s a high turnover. So I’m dealing with people who are emotionally and cognitively at breaking point because they were constantly under pressure to perform, which is unrealistic. In the football world, you perform on a Saturday, the rest of the time you’re recovering.

Training, learning, data analysis. And of course it’s not quite the same in business, the physical load isn’t the same. But if we use the analogy of the brain versus the body, it’s still the [00:25:00] same sort of thing. 

So this expectation of resilience, we’re talking about the emotional impact.

If I go home from work stressed, then my body needs time to recover in order that I come back in an optimal state the next day to perform at my best. So that recalibration that recovery ability needs time. So people that have been exposed to a higher degree of stress need more time to recover.

Of course, in the workplace. They’re all given the same amount of time. They’re all put under more stress than they need to be. So when they come back the next day, they’re incrementally starting from a slightly lower baseline than they were the day before. So over time, you get this burnout.

Accumulates in the lack of recovery, not in the amount of stress we put people under. In my opinion, in football, you. If you recover well, you can come back and try and be at your best on the next game. And the last one is situational calibration, adjusting the intensity of emotions to fit the context.

As a football manager is another example where the team [00:26:00] just at halftime, they’re coming and they just haven’t performed to the anywhere near the way that they train, the way that you plan for, the way that everyone’s agreed that we should, and everybody knows it, okay. At that point, in terms of that situational calibration, you have to be able to adjust the intensity of your response to meet the environment.

And not just fly off the handle because you’re flying off the handle irate because my needs are not being met. It’s like there’s a whole group of people there who need the right response in the right moment and that right response might be to turn the heat right up and blast them.

And then put an arm around the few that’s going have, shaken to their core. It’s complicated, right? 

So my thoughts are it’s not good enough to have a map that tells us where we are because that’s where you’ve got 60 page reports sitting in every drawer of every manager in the country ’cause they don’t know how to implement it on a daily basis. 

I come back, I had a great workshop with the guys from Insights, red, green, blue, yellow, which is fantastic. We understand each other better. We’ve got our [00:27:00] cards and cue cards, and today I’m feeling a bit stress, so don’t come at me with anything, whatever it might be. You got some brilliant prompts and things like some great stuff in there, but the reality that you are talking about, which is, I’ve gotta get this thing finished. I’m gonna stay back till the 11 at night to get it done. I feel guilty if I leave. And I need to feel validated by my boss if I don’t do it.

A million things going on. This is the reality. Yes. The expectation is this dream state that we’re all heading for. Implementation comes with a little bit more insight than where we are. It has to say we know we’re here.

That comes with a level of understanding. But in order to really have an impact. We know, we now know where we’re going. So if I’ve got a team of 10 people who’ve agreed that this is the vision, this is the big idea, this is the big challenge. We’ve got 10 different, ideal, optimal approaches to meet that goal.

But we’ve gotta do it together. And then I see this is where the implementation comes in. I might need to lean on Rob for some more, depth and rationale. But [00:28:00] otherwise, ideas central. I’ll think this is a great and my biggest failing, by the way, going back to, I was in football for a long time.

I use this a lot because it’s the one that really, captures for me some, so some of the essence of this. So where I’ve the core of this book comes from in practice I was taking people towards a vision they weren’t ready to go towards. 

So they were agreeing in the meeting room, in the team meeting, all the players are like, yes, boss, we’re with you, we’re going there.

But under the surface. For different reasons. ’cause they’re all different people. The further I went down this path, the further away they, they get. Now, to cut through that. If I believe in them more than they believe in themselves, it sounds like a really noble thing to do.

I believe in you guys, you can do, this is my vision. I believe that you can do it. If I haven’t taken the time to actually understand that they don’t believe that they can do it, and why they don’t and what they need, then I’m losing trust. I’m losing respect. Yes. And they ain’t following. So there’s some real hard lessons in there like that, that, that [00:29:00] have under underpinned this sort of research and, I suppose my aim is trying to help people be better in those moments where where your people need you to help ’cause you only need to lead people when they facing challenges they can’t meet on their own. If it’s a technical problem that they’re qualified to do, you let ’em get on with it and they’re happily be at the computers all day.

And maybe not feel stressed about it, but if they’re in a collaborative, really high level challenge that none of us have tried to accomplish before. Win the league or sell twice as much as we’ve ever sold before. If a new product we’ve never taken to market it’s ooh, we’re growing together here, we’re growing in public.

It’s a lot of vulnerability required, so it helps to know ourselves, know each other to some different levels and degrees of, that, that give us enough things that we can act on. So I can lean into you more if I know that actually, mate, this is a real challenge for me, but you can, we work together on this?

Or I’ve got a situation now. I’m working with a company and we’ve asked to present to a group in Saudi Arabia and I’ve been asked to, to put the [00:30:00] presentation forward. I’m really comfortable with presentations. But I know there’s somebody in the group who’s a better subject matter expert, and in the window that we’ve got to present, I think you’ll be a better lead on it.

So I think those kind of things. It just helps. 

Niki: So there’s three things that really stood out to me that you seem to talk a lot about. One is the calibration, and then you didn’t use the following word, but a rhythm. And then I just briefly rob want to mention what I was hearing and what insights came to me is in the corporate world, in the business world, the rhythm, often is of how people work.

It’s very in ineffective and just really founded on some industrial era ideas of how we are productive, but the rhythm is basically, the idea is that everybody can, and shoot all the time, be able to perform like this. 

But every time there’s a little bit dip here below, it’s people individually consider that there’s something [00:31:00] wrong.

There’s only one gear and that’s been super productive and focused. Everything else is bad, and so people like go here and then they start falling, like you said. That they will actually every day come with little bit less energy, clarity of mind, while really healthy and actually productive. Even like a science-based approach to work would be what you talked about.

Calibration, for example, that. Today, this is the situation, this homicide energy. These are things that I’m doing like, okay, today, I’m a little bit introvert. I need to speak with many people okay. I know that today I will set my rhythm bit differently. Yeah. And whatever. And then we then, the valleys, stop being problems.

We understand that I actually do need to rest. I’m doing it to give myself a little bit of grace, and then in my observation, then the performance can be like this. Yeah. And but again that asks in some way ask for a big change on leaders and companies. 

Tony: I’m a spokesperson for these [00:32:00] types of ideas because I come out of sport. In sport they call that periodization. It’s intentional energy and restoration management. Exactly. It’s factored into the exposure to stress. We talked about emotional resilience, but if I think about stress tolerance, which is a big factor in resilience and again, easy to you think about sport and a big match and 10 minutes to go and you need to score another goal to win the league. High pressure. The everything you do is under scrutiny. You get instant feedback from the crowd, from social media, whether you’re doing a good job or a bad job. So it’s high level of stress, but in the workplace it’s no different.

So pressure handling becomes, really important to maintain the right level under let’s call it match pressure. 

Then there’s recovery capacity, which is managing energy and restoration. Some people will naturally be happy stepping back and taking their time, recover. Work life balance is a natural thing to them, whereas others, high achievers, more rigid.

Sometimes perfectionists will be putting themselves under increasing amounts of pressure to get more [00:33:00] things done, but then that might also start to come around in a way that not only is it detrimental to me ’cause I’m overworking, it’s damaging my relationships with other people because now what do they think of me?

I’m not putting as much effort in, and now I’m starting to feel great and then start some resentment starts to build. So all of these things are feeding each other all the time. 

Then you’ve got change people’s, again, we’re talking about stress tolerance people’s. Ability to adapt, to adjust to changing demands.

Some people like me, happy as Larry, give me multiple things that change and that living in the chaos I quite enjoy. I love that. Giving me something that’s fixed and routine every day. I’m going nuts basically. Again, it’s about knowing the impact of these things on the people that.

You’re tasked with managing or leading. And the last one is personal resource management, as in, efficient allocation of the finite amount of energy that we’ve all got. So when you put those four things together, handling pressure, capacity to recover ability to adapt and [00:34:00] managing internal resources, the answer is in there and we all have it.

But because businesses, we say businesses, it’s people at the top of businesses, but the nature of the pursuit of the goal seems to outweigh, for all we have mental health practitioners on site now. Which sounds like a great thing in theory, and it is because they’re there to help the people, but they’re there to help ’em because we’ve created a problem, which is we’re putting people under extraordinary level of demand that they’re not really built for.

There’s an optimal amount of pressure that will make them motivated and perform. They need the optimal amount of recovery and restoration so they can bounce back and be ready to perform again at the top level. If in the state of the, ever changing demands and speed of change, we need to understand that some people are predisposed to enjoying that and some people are not.

So the stress levels that the stress tolerance is different for everybody in a changing environment. And then it’s helping, it’s teaching people to, manage their own resources. Some people may need to go [00:35:00] to for a run to recharge after work. Some people might need a massage, some people might need to turn the lights off and meditate, whatever it might be.

Trying to learn about that for ourselves and for each other so that we know. We talk about this increasing our capacity. For stress tolerance. ’cause that’s growth, right? We, if we wanna perform better, one aspect of that might be, I’m now more able to handle more stress in a way that’s manageable and effective.

I’m now performing better. I’m pushing those boundaries, rather than go under, rather than burn out. I’ve got all these things intentionally calibrated to optimize the people that I’m working with. At the end of the day, the best teams typically win the league are the ones that have kept their best players on the pitch for most of the season.

The teams that get lots of injuries and struggle to just don’t keep up. So we need our best performers on the pitch in the best condition to perform. 

Niki: Without these types of things we get burnout, we get stressed, we get illness, we get mental health. 

If I was to condense our conversation or especially what I heard from [00:36:00] you Tony, if I was to condense what you said, almost as this cycle or process that helps us to perform the best way and to be healthy and feel good, is first there’s like awareness of who we are, who others are and what’s the situation, which then leads to we are actually in standing in reality.

Niki: Then as we know where we’re standing, we calibrate. And then after you use the word optimize, so like awareness of the situation, actually seeing where we are standing, then calibrating, making decisions accordingly, and that leads to growth. And then opposite of that is what you mentioned in the beginning would be something like flying.

Flying as fast as we can, as long as we can just fix us. 

Tony: Yeah. Hoping we don’t hit anything. Yeah. 

Niki: Yeah. Yes. Hoping we’ll land at some point to, yeah. Rob, what did you pull from our conversation? 

Rob: I found it very interesting. The key thing for me is there was all that you picked up on.

The way I frame it, I like to [00:37:00] scatter ideas. And what I see is a spectrum. 

The opening frame is you’re starting from a position of stress because 50 people is like Dunbar’s numbers, everything is too much for people. And so we’re starting from, and I think that’s the old industrial model. 

The industrial model is that we just keep the line going. It doesn’t matter about people and what they’re doing is treating people as machines. 

The modern way of where we need to get to is I think we need to treat people like race horses, like the champion racehorse that you look after, you give them the time to recover you make sure they’re in the best position. 

Along this spectrum I see, Tony, you’ve developed a way that can work with 50 people because you can go through the psychometrics and you can have a good sense of heuristics of how people are gonna work.

And Niki, I would’ve liked to have got a little bit more into your model, ’cause I think we all have a model and your model is very much starting from inside. What does that meditation and peace look like and how do you get that tranquility? And then I think [00:38:00] I’m a bit on the middle, so I think we all have a model of how people work.

It would be really interesting to compare and contrast them.

Niki: Next one, whenever you’re arrange it. Me too. 

Rob: Maybe we’ll set that up and we’ll go through and we’ll work through that model from the inside out and then from the outside in.

Psychometric, you’re looking at behaviors, whereas I know your journey has been very much looking inside yourself. 

Niki: Yeah. And agreeing that both our needed. If there’s only internal change, nothing happens outside, then what’s the point?

And same way, can we observe and live in the world in a way that it actually helps us to gain more insights and so on. Tony, I really like talking with you, learn things from you that I know that I already want to pay a bit more attention with clients and looking forward to the next one.

Tony: Thank you, Niki. It was fantastic to meet you. I’m really keen to explore more about I have some questions for you next time.