Welcome to part two of our podcast, Exploring the Fundamentals of Leadership with Professor Carl Hanigan.
Professor Kamar Mitani continues his questions to Carl.
And in this discussion, we explore where your motivation as leader comes from succession planning, seeking, mentoring.
How leaders can engage with the media and the wider world. Plus, strategies for managing your work life balance.
We hope you enjoy. And it sounds like all your your you haven't lost that hunger for new knowledge.
You were just talking about learning from students. You are talking about learning from other statisticians.
I take it that hasn't left you? Yeah, I think that's an important aspect of the teaching.
You see, the number one thing about teaching and writing and communicating is I'm often trying to say, do I really understand this?
And the issues? And in doing that, can I communicate? And if I do, I think I understand it.
But there's so many things where we touch the surface of knowledge.
Now, there's a tendency for us to want to say, I have all the knowledge and therefore I have all the expertise and I should supply all the opinions.
As opposed to that's what's great about evidence based medicine,
is you trying to say when I have a question in trying to answer that question, what is the available scientific evidence to say?
How does that reduce my uncertainties? And in doing that, how can I communicate that forward?
There's a sense that we should be seen to be all knowing and all knowledgeable, and that to me seems an untenable position.
That breaks down really quickly. You just get caught out.
Whereas when you're trying to say, faced with this question, what type of evidence would you use to answer it?
How do you use that to inform the decision making? I think it's incredibly interesting.
I have to say is is as I've gone along. Is like the knowledge requirements have got greater.
And you just can't quite believe in any area of law.
Oh my gosh, this so much interesting information here that can help make a better decision that actually, yes, I am really hungry.
And I think that's one of my drivers is I I'm really passionate about.
Filling them knowledge gaps now in understanding myself and this this is is one of the things is sometimes I can be a bit of a procrastinator.
And and that's because I understand how I work, because once I start to work on something, I won't let it go.
And I'll be all over it. And I'm like, we're in there and it can be exhausting, time consuming.
And I work sometimes in the evenings and weekends and into the night because I'm like, I'm so enjoying this.
And I'm I'm all over it.
So sometimes I recognise that in myself, but also in the team around me, because I like once we start, we're going to make this happen.
We're not going to take our foot off the gas until it goes.
Therefore, sometimes I'm delaying things until I feel ready or there's a gap in the team that somebody has got some resources to help me.
But what we're not going to do is once we start, we are not going to stop until we've completed that task at hand.
And this is the other part of the total toys, which I think is really interesting.
That's why you really have to ask yourself, if we do this project, what difference will it make?
What will it lead to? What knowledge will I have gained? Or will we have built some of that world class?
And if you can't understand that, don't start. Because if you don't have the end game in mind, how will we know when you get there?
Because there's always going to be bets on the road where you're going to run out resources.
We're going to feel tired or you're going to want to give up.
But you shouldn't do that at that point. It should be the ongoing law.
Remember why we started this is a point now to double down and move forward my efforts.
And I think that idea. Or understanding before we start.
Where's the end? It is really important.
So, for instance, when we developing a new MSA, I say to people that go right there within a year, it's got to be a no, no, go, go.
We've got three years to make it viable, five years for it to be a world class product.
That's the end game in mind in five years. We are going to be the world leaders in evidence symphysis the go to place.
If you want trading this, that's where we're going. But you then take it slowly, move along that mission.
And as the road gets a bit bumpy, it's all right. We still on on track.
I just want to pick up a little bit about somebody said, Carl, about your leadership style in particular.
But you mentioned earlier about sort of building capacity.
And you alluded to the value of teaching training. Two things I wanted to pick you up on, if I may.
This is one about mentoring and how you see that, because you talked about people that you learn from.
And the second thing is as a leader and evidence based health care, as a director of a group.
And so when do you start thinking about succession planning as well?
And what do you think when you starting with the next generation of leaders to to sort of come through?
Yeah. So that's good. Let's take the mentoring one and then we'll come up to actually.
So I think what it is with mentoring, it's quite interesting is a deep felt.
Supervision is quite an interesting concept and it's a really good example of where I think you can develop good leadership,
good men and what you Gipp generally during through a deep fill is beginning.
I put lots more energy and effort up. They'll meet with you every two weeks.
We've got a problem in between. Come and talk to me. We'll talk it through.
But what I'm looking for is, is a journey where the person starts to become more empowered.
So beats up, take more of the decision, more of the responsibility.
And so by year two and into year three, they're e-mailing me, go ahead, call when everything's all right.
Don't need to meet with mom. Just let me know where we're up to. I'm on track.
Everything's fine. And any good with even eating.
The person is taking decisions. They know how to use me and appropriately are the resource.
And I'm going, that's what you're trying to do. How do we yujing each other at the resort?
So I think what you do is mentoring. You can have a big impact early on.
Well, you've got to realise that diminishing returns. Isn't it?
And then the best way you mentally can go through is, by the way we behave,
the way we make people feel and our emotional intelligence and knowing sometimes
when actually there might only be one or two times with the senior people,
look where you go, I can help this person is the point where I can give them a bit of my thought processes.
I might go about this this way. But in doing that, I'm recognising that's how I go around it.
And one of the things is I've said is one of the things is watch out for the advice which you get.
I wouldn't do that. If I was you. When people are saying that, they're saying, no, you shouldn't do it.
They're saying, I wouldn't do it because we all have different slight ways of doing something.
So recognising at some point the mentoring plan comes into a point where you go.
This person is going to make their own decisions.
All I can do is give them a bit of advice about how I would go about it, not how they would go about it.
And if they don't take it completely, fine. But I'm just saying, here we go.
Here's how you think about that. And I think we will find that because on our journey, we as we go, what's interesting is the politics gets greater.
The people who were up there are obviously all smart people have their own agendas and what they want to achieve.
And often in that, you've got to become more situational awareness, more forceful or never been in this position.
This is quite a delicate issue. Now, how do I strategically go about that?
And I'd say that actually when you go up the ladder, actually a barrel.
And this is just a generalisation, but about five percent of what I do requires a higher level thinking in a way that you being strategic.
And that's also, again, another point where you're talking to people. I talk to people in them five percent of my work.
I go college, just run this by you.
And the people who don't move up the ladder tend to react to make decisions without running it by somebody or thinking it through.
And I think that's where the mentorship comes in. I'm seeking mentorship from people all the time.
They don't even know I'm doing it. Kind of just run this by you.
At that point, somebody is being your mentor. I'm asking them to say, what do you think?
What would you do in this situation? And if they agree with me, it reassures me if they don't go a rethink.
So I think that's the mentorship. And I see that as why it's the same journey.
And if you're lucky in something like sports, you know, if you know, you do sports, you can have some coaching early on.
You can make big gains with really simple bits of instruction.
But as you get better and better at something. The advice, the training, the coaching input is very, very refined, very little bits.
And often you've got to make sure you don't make things worse for people at the high quality of what they're doing.
So, I mean, that's the mentorship within that you see is a role Wari.
In effect, succession planning is making sure people are empowered to take decisions.
And that actually, you could get to a point where you think if I stepped away from this organisation and was away on sabbatical for six months.
Would it survive? And I feel confident in the organisation we've got.
That is the case. Would it be done differently? Certainly would.
Some bits would be done differently. That's OK, because everybody has to bring their own way of doing things.
But also, what I think the best organisations do is you can see people coming through.
And then what I think of it is a bit like a Venn diagram. The way we work that the Venn diagram might have more than three bits.
It might have five. It might have seven circles. And some of them circles overlap with each other that are not involving me.
But there are some bits where we might find something where we're all together in this.
Now, that's where the teaching works really well, because everybody has a common goal where they go.
We're trying to get the student through this MFC. We're trying to get this defo right.
So that's where the teaching works really well in a way that the research doesn't quite do that.
And I think allowing the overlapping effect means that sometimes somebody might pull off and go, I'm out of here.
And that's completely fine. But if you just let me let it fly like that, what will happen is at some point they just come back and go.
We've got this particular project where I need your particular skills and input.
And at that point, you go, great, I'm available.
But what's happening is it's growing all the time because you've got not one person vertical in control.
You've got a very flat organisation where actually what you're doing is trying to allow everybody to say, look, let's be flat in our decision making.
Let's try and get on with taking forward initiatives.
And some people run faster than others. That's okay.
Let's accept it. I've got a couple more questions.
I didn't want to ask us not to discuss the sort of some of the cover global events, because, you know,
obviously you all play a fairly prominent role in that and with your expertise and your experience.
And I'm just interested in your perspectives on how leadership is presented at the moment,
because we're in a very interesting health care situation, to say the least, with different perspectives being put forward in different ways.
What are your thoughts on the current leadership at the moment?
Well, I think the first thing is to say we're in a different era with social media and the 24 hour news cycle.
In that there is an insatiable appetite for people to get information out there, but also for everybody to comment on it.
And that can be very polarising in terms of what happens and can feel very uncomfortable, because if you put your views out there in Fort.
Then you make yourself vulnerable. And I think it's a bit like politics.
If people like what you say, they're reaffirming. And if they don't like, they'll rail against it.
But I think what we did in this current pandemic was was quite a divergence from what we'd normally do is one of the key
areas we decided to do was to say we're going to work with the media to try and understand and explain what's happening.
And that largely started with the death statistics because we was one of the few people he
published on Office for National Death Statistics and been interested in all cause mortality,
excess deaths at some time. And I wrote a piece right back in February in the BMJ about it saying this is an important metric.
This is the sort of information we'll be watching.
And what's happened is huge number of journalists came on board and said, we don't really understand this material.
So we started out with a weekly webinar based on the owner's office for National Statistics, death data, just explaining what it is,
what it means and that it was taking all Tuesday morning and then presenting for half an hour and then doing a question and answer.
In doing that, also part of our group in the evidence survey said we need to fill some of the evidence gaps.
And it's been a huge amount of input from people to put together rapid reviews.
And then we publish it on the CBN site that over 20 million views, which has been, you know, impressive for a site that is basically not news out.
It's not a not a journal. It's just a CBN Web site.
So the evidence services fill that gap. And what that's done, that is led to more interest in appetite for looking at the data,
analysing the data, spotting the trends, but also where problems have existed.
One of the big issues we found was, for instance, nobody can ever die from konbit because it is once you've got a positive test.
Public Health, England, we're going to count that in your death stats, even if it's nine months later.
Or you can imagine what that data might look like today. If that was still being done, we would have panic.
But some days it could be from the deaths reported, of which only 60 occurred in the last 28 days serving in doing that.
But one of the big things we've done, which has created a lot of tension, is reflect the uncertainty in the evidence base for decision making.
And what we have found is there's been too much certainty applied by people who haven't fought through some of these issues over the long course.
These are these are fellow health care leaders you're talking about. Yeah. And reflecting on that.
And so my my points are the first thing you need to do when you're looking at the data and the evidence is actually understand what is happening.
And that is incredibly difficult to do with the current production of data and evidence.
Once you got there. Think about if you're going to intervene. How would you know?
It's it makes a difference. Is he going to intervene and continue to intervene?
You've got problems because then suddenly you lose the trust of the people if you produce in numbers or predictions and they're shown to be.
And this is an incredibly difficult thing to do, because even I find myself, it's what happens all the time in the media.
They want to know. So, Professor, what's gonna happen next or what's going to be the outcome of a circuit breaker?
And I have to say, I don't know. I have no idea.
I can tell you, I think in the next two to three weeks, cases like this stabilise if you pull a circuit breaker in.
I've no idea if they'll go. They'll come down more.
But if we don't actually evaluate it in a sort of evidence based way, we'll just last in this position where you go.
I don't know. And I find that astounding. Nine months in, we still uncertain about many interventions and we've not reduced dozens.
And if you think about that, the problem is now is, is this something within our society that wants to create third?
And in creating certain to manage our own anxieties and our own fears.
And something about that's the way we constructed as people to go about our daily business.
Otherwise we might get paralysed. I'm not going to cross the road because I'm a bit concerned.
I might not make it to the other side. But we make these judgements in by facing risk all the time to go about our daily lives.
What's happened in this pandemic is the fear factor.
Got so great now that actually people can't see the wood from the trees in the decision
making because they don't understand the risk to themselves and the people around them.
And therefore, you become fearful.
And if you're making decisions in state of fear, we have a problem in terms of having intelligent, thoughtful approaches.
And I think these are the positions in the leadership where you go.
This is really interesting.
My position is there have been quite a few times where I've been personally attacked or there've been lots of vitriol or lots of issues.
You can see that around in. And yet my emotional intelligence within me, I go, whoa, this feels actually.
And people want to control the debate. They don't want to speaker. And in doing that, again, you have to withdraw, just look after yourself.
Not react emotionally. We'll try and be analytical, and one of the things, if you watch what I say and write a law, I'm actually writing to people.
Slow down. And you're thinking. Slow down your reactions to the data.
Because if you don't support an intervention in place, you've got to give it time to work to know whether it's made a difference.
But at the moment is a daily diet of Kofod figures coming out on a daily diet of reaction because people go.
It's going up, therefore. Oh, it's going up. It's going to continue to go.
And this type of thinking, this very short term thinking has become a huge problem for us right now.
And it comes back to the tortoise and the hare discussion, doesn't it?
In fact, everybody needs to improve the data, improve their ability, analyse the data.
And then in doing that, make thoughtful decisions about what happens next.
That's the message we're putting out there. If you put that message out there, what I'm saying is in areas of uncertainty,
you take a lot of import and you probably go for the middle road until it becomes clear where to go.
But if you go to the extremes, you've got a problem, haven't you?
And there will be times when you're operating in uncertainty and you should just try and take the middle path.
So what strategies do you adopt? Because obviously, you know, if you are very funny in the media at the moment and you talk about your writing,
what strategies do you take or for yourself when,
you know the people are going to always agree with necessarily what you say, something that will support.
And as you alluded to, some people also may lose you some personal attacks on you.
What sort of what sort of internal systems do you then creating yourself to be able to manage that?
Well, I don't think I don't think somebody said you don't fight fire with fire and therefore actually fight fire with water.
Don't you know? I never understood that. But then if in doing that,
the first thing is I will never engage with anybody when it comes to a battle about my ideas are better than yours or I'm a better person than you.
And I do find that the sort of playground approach of, you know, trying to establish I'm more eminent,
new is not the approach and that's ingrained in us in the evidence base.
Manage them, because if it's coming down to my opinion, then actually we're at the lowest level of decision making.
And therefore, why should anybody listen to me about my opinion, it's just as likely to be wrong.
Does anybody else live in the face of no evidence? And so that's first is to understand that we can't argue all points of view as a scientist,
an academic, and I think what happens is a lot of people get that role reverse.
So they want to become the politician and the policy, the.
What I do is when I go to policy, I go, my job is to inform you so you can set the policy.
My job is to reduce the uncertainty or expressions of it so that you know about what you're gonna do next.
He said, OK, because there's no evidence base. We're going to have a rule of whatever, because we know there's no evidence.
But we've got to be shown to be doing something. Makes, you know, being the decision maker with the developer of the evidence and communicating,
that is a problem because soon as you do that, you'll start to be very Rhône opinions on the research.
You'll start to distort the research and the evidence to suit your agenda. Remembering that we start from a position of this doesn't work.
The evidence is there to disprove the null hypothesis.
And I have to build up an evidence base that said it's clear now it disproves the null hypothesis.
They were. And that's what we do in a court of law in effect.
Similarly, it's evidence that you're innocent until proven guilty.
That's a known hypothesis. And therefore, you build up an evidence base to say this person is guilty.
Build up an evidence base to say it's clear what we should do.
And I've always felt that's an important component, because when the evidence is clear, you don't need guidance.
You don't need my opinions. I've explained it to you. And also what happens and it's clear what should be done.
I tend to therefore avoid the discussion.
So, for instance, today I've had three or four media requests about what do you think about the effects of circuit breakers?
And that's a classic example of how would I know about the effects of something that's never been tried.
Never been evaluated. And something we're about to do and we will likely to evaluate.
So what has to happen in this situation is just to say, let the policy ride.
And in three weeks, the question I put out to my staff is, how do we best analyse this intervention?
What measures would we use to say this is working? Given that some of them won't be appropriate, like destines too late, that's too far down the road.
Some of the measures like cases that might not be appropriate should we have admissions from the community.
So avoid some areas where you being forced to give your opinion.
Vs. go to the areas where you've been asked to explain, well, why is this not working?
How should we evaluate this? What should a new alternative plan look like?
We're selecting a new one. You might want to say we want to build an evaluation to understand what's going on.
Now, what it's done is in our strategy, one of the cheap bits is writing.
It's sometimes better than the visual communication because in a clearly written piece, you can establish, you know, in a nice, slow, methodical way.
On occasion, we've got a bit over the top because the strategy is demanded at that point in time.
And then often what we're doing is and interestingly with the media.
One of the things I want to do is sometimes and rewrite some of your bits of your information.
And this happens with about a week ago. And in doing that, you look at the article and you go, that's not my article.
And that's not something I would say. And then again, you've got this interesting proposition.
If you're still wants to be in the media with your article and they're about to publish it, but you've got your other side going.
Well, actually, some people might not like that.
And it's not what I would have said. This is the point where you have to be clear, you walk away.
And so we just wrote in and said, this is not our article and we wouldn't want it published in this format.
End of the spoke with Tom. We said take it back or put it somewhere else in its original form.
And that's an important aspect if it's not what you would want.
You have to stand that. And particularly early on, you might be so I'm about to be published in the national newspaper.
This is amazing. I'll give in. That's the integrity aspect to do so.
Integrity is the long game. When you're not looking for the earthquake, when you're saying, actually,
this is what we want to say and I'm sticking with what we want to say, and that's the biggest import aspect of what you do.
The other thing I think, which is interested in the media is, again, the relationship.
It doesn't happen overnight that suddenly you're in a position that actually you're going to suddenly be writing a national newspaper.
Some of these people I've known for over a decade who would still fall into it.
And one of the things is they make come to us for a bit of advice. And I'm not going to get anything out of it.
That moment in time, apart from going, explains a national newspaper,
something about this analysis that you might look at it this way and that we do that we people from the BBC,
some of the newspapers all the time talking to knowing I'm not going to get anything out of it.
However, when I see the article, I go, actually, the public is going to get something out of it.
So I'm thinking about the end product. Yeah.
And I look at the end product and I've just seen a national piece in the BBC, which I spoke to somebody about two days ago.
I got the end product. It won't even know it's spoken to the person.
Both in the revolving door of the long game. I know at some point there will be a benefit comes back to me.
But you've got to understand, the people you're going to work with are going to give you.
It's a win win strategy in the long run. Well, you know, going to win on every event.
Not every cent is going to go your way. Sometimes the emplace an article and they reject it and go.
All right, we're going to get upset with it. This is part and parcel of the game.
Those are the times when that healthy selfishness, he talks about community count.
You know, you can put things to one side pocket for a that take your mind off things.
Go for a bike ride or whatever you took mentioning about, you know, take your mind off these things and in a way, preserve yourself as well.
Yeah. And I've always thought as well within that that healthy again, coming back to the is coming back to some of the Jeep rethinking as well as,
you know, in some ways when you have to rush and you have to supply and people want.
You want your opinion. I often go to people when you need it that far.
It's actually not going to be about much value. If you need a response from me that way and I do this, we might detail.
I say I'm still thinking about the issue. Because some of the things that people want answers on, I don't have the answers.
And we're trying to understand them through the issue. And and and in doing that, sometimes we're looking and going, we can't supply this answer.
So it's two weeks down the line. That's when I'll come back with the media.
That's when we'll start talking about it. And then between there's a lot of people who've made mistakes and the same things that we regret,
because in about two weeks, we'll have a much better understanding about the data and we'll be able to say much clearer.
This is what just happened as opposed to what I think is going to happen.
But I'd say I probably communicate with about 10 such, well, media people now in a regular way.
The other thing that's important. Is. When he gets to do some.
Oh, was thinking about 100 percent commitment or no.
So if I get asked to write an article for this up and this weekend at 3:00 o'clock on a Friday, can you write an article for The Telegraph?
The Sunday Telegraph? And the first question to go is, what's the deadline?
Twelve o'clock tomorrow. So and then the second question is how many words?
Hundred words. OK. So you basically go for a plug going abroad.
You're probably winding down for the week. You probably got one or two more things to do.
And you're thinking, right. But between now and twelve o'clock Saturday, if you're going to say yes, you have to do.
Never say yes. And let's see if you can deliver. And that's a huge problem because you don't want to get a reputation of saying you do something.
12 o'clock tomorrow. The papers go and we've got to avoid. Very good words.
They won't come back to you. So at that point, you better saying no.
But the second issue is that if you're in a century going back 10 years ago,
The Telegraph or a newspaper come to you and said by tomorrow and it's Friday evening and you go,
you're making dinner tonight, you're going to do this article, they probably said that was impossible.
So what you're doing is honing your skills all the time to the point when you get asked to do something of falling in value.
You read it and you don't have to go. I haven't gotten scales.
There's no way I could do this. The third issue is, is the agent of perfection.
It's in a lot of people. Perfectionism kills creativity.
And I think that's something we all have to be aware of, because there comes a point and you've got to let it go.
And when you put it out there, you also have to accept people are going to take it and use it in their own narrative.
And they'll see it in different ways sometimes to what you see.
And I think that's interesting, particularly in some aspects like the media and the TV and the radio.
I tend not to watch myself. But what I do do is seek feedback from the group of people who know me.
And that could be anybody, Warren, ranging to be a family member, to be somebody else.
What did you think?
I'm looking for them to say, you know, actually, and sometimes I'll get Second-Hand feedback through somebody, you know, somebody watched it.
All right. What about this? And that's helpful for me. But I can't judge myself because it's too painstaking to watch yourself in your own media.
So call that day when you have the invitation and the Telegraph, were you still able to make dinner?
Yeah, I made dinner. We wrote the article. It was a really thoughtful article.
But what I did is immediately what I do is you have to have a strategy. And and this is interesting.
When you start out, you would probably start writing a right to write and then you get stopped and paused about hundred words and you go,
no idea what went wrong, where it's now what we do. He set out the structure.
OK, what are the eight points I want to make? What are the points and within this article?
Bang, bang, bang. I'm going to get on the phone immediately to my colleagues. I'm just going to discuss the prunings is going to go well.
Let's make that point. That point. I'm then going to scratch it out and put the words in very quickly.
Go make dinner. Come back in the evening at about nine, 30 at 9:00 and start to polish.
You come again the next morning, then have a discussion with Tom.
And then what we do at eleven thirty, we sit on a Google doc together.
He's in Italy. I'm here. And we go through it line by line.
And finalise it.
And then when we've done that, we're gonna have a company and we come back again and we have another ten minutes just to finalise it again.
So what you've done is you've you've created so many points where you've come back to it.
You get to a point where you go clean. But what it's allowed me to do is to do some, have a break, do some of where you deflect yourself,
take your mind away, even go for a bike ride, come back, do another half an hour.
And that strategy works really well. Whereas what you tend to do is viewing.
I want to sit down and write from beginning to end. And then it will be done.
So this approach where you visited many times and in between give yourself rights is important.
It's a bit like the tortoise analogy. Again, an you put down.
Interestingly as well, the tortoise is important because this is important within careers as well and where you are in your lifecycle.
So what I'm describing is something easier to do now than what it was 10 years ago when I had young kids.
And nobody will forget. We'll forgive you if, for instance, in your family, when you've got young children, you spend all your time working.
And I think this is the Cauvery book, which I really like, is there some aspect in that book,
which is one of the books, you know, you think about some of the text you've wrote that been helpful in your thinking?
The seven habits of highly effective people is a really good strategy to look at.
I read about, you know, the read over, but there are some things in that book that are really helpful.
And what he says is really easy to be effective in one area of your life that you can be really good at your job.
You work all the time and you come home and you families fall into bits or you help fall into that.
So it's still got to be mindful in the long game strategy that you still got, go make dinner,
you can't go in and say, sorry, I'm not making dinner tonight cause I've got a really important piece of pie.
No, you've got to be able to shift and go when I go into that position.
I'm going to let that go beyond. So I'll be making dinner,
cooking away miniature and then but the family have a go at me because suddenly my mind about I'm relaxed and thinking, oh, I know.
I have to write that better. Nobody knows. And I'm really happy and I'm going to just.
And that's what I'm doing. So that's a really important attribute of the different bits of your life.
And in certain stages, you have to slow things down because you say if I speed that up here,
what's going to happen is my family life is to become more ineffective.
And that's where the the total choice of long term plans coming into place, you go,
it's OK because I can see three to five years, that's where I'm going to be.
And the kids will be at secondary school. That may need me a bit less.
But right now, they need me to take me to school, and that's having that ability to think long term.
The other thing within that, within the curve is, is there's a there's that structure, which is a two by two both.
Which there are important things in life. And there are not important things.
And then there are urgent and not urgent. And if you put them in a box, you can see you've got important, urgent, important, not urgent.
And then you've got over here. You've got you've gotten it.
Sorry. You've got it. I've got that slightly wrong that I have.
I'm talking it through. You've got the important stuff here.
And you've got important urgent things and important not urgent things down here, but not important.
Urgent and not important. Not urgent.
So what you should do in the box is we often spend our lives in the important stuff and the urgent stuff, don't we?
You know, actually today I've got an important teaching session. It's urgent.
I'm doing it. But often we spend a lot of our time in the urgent, not important things.
So you sat down having dinner and the phone goes. So you go and answer the phone.
You know, and it wasn't it wasn't it's not important. But it was urgent.
So you did it. And I think sometimes that's where we go wrong.
One of the key things I thought about a lot in life is it's been effective.
You have to think about the important issues that are not urgent.
And that's where we spend most of our lives as children. We can go and do stuff that's really important to us.
And they're not urgent. And anybody with a who's a parent will know this.
You're trying to get your kid out ready for school. No, no, no. I'm playing. I want to be doing this.
What's the problem, Dad? I didn't want to come to school. I want to be doing this.
And that's we go into adult. We find ourselves doing much more stuff that's just urgent all the time.
And lots of it is not important.
And therefore, what you have to do in your balance is try and say within my day what the important stuff in my box that's not urgent.
And I am unable to achieve this all the time. But I'll often have in my mind things like, oh, I'm sure it's really important.
I speak to Kemal actually today because actually I need to I need to email him because he
mentioned something really important on Monday that I need to speak to him when I'm alone.
I forgot to email. I tell you what, I'm going to do it by phone because it's more efficient for me.
And I can have a personal conversation. I'm going to do it that way. It's important, not urgent.
And what's interesting is there the things that should be, at least by the end of the week, you've gone up.
Tick that box. Now, you can take that to whole process in family life, can't you?
It's important on a Friday that we watch the movie when the kids were young.
Actually, that's what happened. That was the most important thing. That was not urgent on a Friday evening.
Didn't matter what work did to the man. If the BBC. Come on. That's fine.
Gone. So I think that thinking is really helpful to your whole balance and perspective and the things that really bugged me.
All the stuff where I go, it's important. It's not urgent. And that might be, for instance.
It's really important. I do my treatment exercise today. It's now four o'clock in the evening.
I've still got three hours of work to do today. I'm feeling a bit stressed.
But actually, you know what? For the next hour, we're going to take you out to make up and come back refreshed.
We've covered so much call on such a nice thing to finish up on a topic where we're what family and the importance of balance in your life.
And as you get busier and more experienced and and more responsibility, you carry not to lose sight of that balance.
I just want to finish that, if I may, because it's been incredibly insightful.
You know, people listening to your story and the experiences that you've shared much earlier on in their leadership journey in health care.
What top tips then, would you summarise for them to take away from what we've discussed today?
Yeah, and I think we've been a number of points. I think the Northwest News is always thinking about your own skills and building your own skill base.
And stop doing that.
The people around you and particularly the students will see for you really rapidly and move on to somebody who's hungry for knowledge and learning.
And I think that's incredibly important in what goes hand-in-hand with that is learning to communicate.
And you can do that in many different ways. You can do it through writing, teaching.
You can do small groups. But you're always thinking about within this interaction, what are we trying to achieve?
That's the best. And what goes with that is your own emotional intelligence.
How did it make me feel at the end of the day? How did it make this person feel?
And then going back to probably my final is at the end of the day is if you have a win win strategy in your mind all the time.
Whatever comes on your on your shoulder telling you it's time for a win lose.
You go, oh, government. What does this other person get out of this engagement? And if they don't, gonna get anything.
You need to go back to the drawing board and go right?
You need to rethink because if they're not going to get a win, they're not going to work with you over the long term.
And that's going to be a marker of success in my mind.
Look, to work with the people who have built relationships over the long term and have outputs to match the quality of what they do.
Fantastic. Karl, thank you so much for your time today, really enjoyed the insights.
Hearing the stories, sharing your experiences as well,
I'm sure there's plenty of people who'll be watching this with lots to to gain from what you've told us.
Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed part two of our podcast.
The Fundamentals of Leadership.
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