161. Lead with Wellbeing with Fleur Heazlewood

💭 Have you ever worn the badge of 'workaholic' with pride, only to realize it's weighing down on your well-being?

Fleur Heazlewood, an advocate of leading with well-being, joins Mick Spiers in revealing how true high performance is linked to work-life harmony. Her powerful transformation from a corporate titan to an ally of sustainable success sets the stage for an episode brimming with stories and actionable insights on redefining what it means to excel at the workplace.

In this episode, Fleur and Mick share how care and clarity are essentials for exceptional team achievements. To avoid burnout, it’s not about forgoing ambition, but rather about integrating habits that prioritize wellbeing over everything else.

Download this episode as an invitation to start your journey to lead with wellbeing.

Time Code:
0:00 Introduction
4:27 Prioritizing Wellbeing for High Performance
14:56 Morning and Evening Routines for Well-Being
21:28 Redefining Success and Work Identity
27:52 Fostering Sustainable High Performance in Teams
36:43 High Performance Through Clarity and Care
44:17 Building a Positive Team Culture

🌐 Connect with Fleur:
• Website: https://blueberryinstitute.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fleur-heazlewood/
• Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/fleur_heazlewood/

📚 You can purchase Fleur's books at Amazon:
• Leading Wellbeing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9QZBW3T/
• Resilience Recipes: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NQPH461/

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Have you ever worn the badge of workaholic with pride, only to realise it's weighing you down? There is a high chance that at some point in your career, you have experienced burnout or been close to it. If you haven't experienced it yourself, you have seen someone around you go through it. In today's episode of the Leadership Project, I am joined by Fleur Hazelwood. Fleur is a crusader for mental health and work-life harmony. In this conversation, we explore the murky waters of work identity and how it impacts the way we show up. Despite all of the stories we tell ourselves, true high performance is inextricably linked to well-being. In this inspirational interview, fleur shares her own story and gives exceptional advice on how we can break the patterns and focus on well-being and drive high performance. There's going to be something in this episode for all of us, so pay attention, sit back and enjoy the show. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Fleur Hazelwood.

Mick Spiers: 1:14

Fleur is the founder of the Blueberry Institute that focuses on well-being and mental health, and she's the author of two books being and mental health. And she's the author of two books Resilience Recipes and Leading Well-Being. And Leading Well-Being is her latest book and we'll focus a little bit on that, but I'm very interested in this resilience recipes, concepts as well, so we might unpack a little bit more as we go along. This is something, as leaders, we all need to focus on. We're responsible for the place where people are spending up to one third of their lives. We're also responsible for our own mental health and our own mental well-being.

Mick Spiers: 1:51

So, everyone, pay attention, have a moment of self-reflection today about whether you're looking after yourself in this regard and whether you're creating an environment that fosters the right well-being for your team. All right, so, without any further ado, fosters the right wellbeing for your team. All right, so, without any further ado. Fleur, I would love it if you would please say hello to our audience. I'm really curious to know your own background and what led you to be doing this great work that you do today.

Fleur Heazlewood: 2:17

Good morning and a very big warm welcome to those who are listening to us today. I'm super excited to be here. Mick, thank you very much for the invitation. So my own background is a leadership background, so classic type A overachieving corporate career path, grad through to CEO and I guess, all the trials and tribulations that worked as part of that and a big part of my story was very much around work and achievement and looking forwards at the expense of looking after myself in the meantime and my own health and my own wellbeing. So you'll probably describe it very much as a person who has preferred to sacrifice themselves to make sure that work and the company and her people were okay and in terms of why I do what I do. So I'm very much here around making the world of work a better place and helping people to understand that the health comes before the high performance. And not only does the health come before the high performance, because I learned this the hard way, but the high performance actually improves.

Fleur Heazlewood: 3:29

So my own burnout was as CEO of a small textile company during the global financial crisis and I was given a I guess a directive by our parent board at that particular time that I needed to reduce fixed costs, ie people, by 30% to make the budgets balanced. But I also had this firm view that we weren't going to recover or continue to perform well if we did the wrong thing by people. And I was one of those organizations, one of those few organizations left that still have manufacturing in Australia, and I also knew that many of the people that worked in our business so we had loyalty in excess of 20 years for many of our strongest workers that with manufacturing declining in Australia and no other types of skills, that if we lost anybody, they also wouldn't be able to pick up jobs that readily. And for me, you don't reward loyalty and engagement by dropping the ball at the first sign of trouble. So I have a fundamental belief that if you do right by people, people will do right by you, and we managed to navigate the GFC together, and so, rather than taking 30% out of headcount, which is what most people or most organizations expect, I negotiated with staff across the business, including union members, that if we all dropped 20% to 30% worth of work for three to six months, then we would figure out together how to make sure that everyone had some work while we were navigating the uncertainty of the GFC.

Fleur Heazlewood: 4:59

Anyway, to cut a very, very long story short, I was working around the clock, so close to 80, 100 hours a week for close to three years. As part of that, I was always switched on, always wired, so even when I did go to bed I wasn't sleeping because my mind was racing. But we got to the end of the GFC I didn't have one redundancy While our sales dropped, our market share increased and I returned the highest profit back of any other business in the group, and I was the smallest business out of a group of 10. So I have a strong conviction and belief that if you actually do the right thing by people and trust that they will recognize and appreciate what the circumstances are and work with you to ensure that the business is okay, then not only is wellbeing good for people, but it's also good for business as well, and I proved that with the GFC.

Fleur Heazlewood: 5:55

Unfortunately, I didn't put myself in that wellbeing basket along with everyone else, and so I became really sick, both mentally and physically, coming out of that, and so I think it took me probably a good 18 months before I was personally able to say yes, I'm well, I'm well again. So mental health and wellbeing in the context of high performance is something that not only do I firmly believe in in terms of the results, but I've also been on the pointy end of the stick, where the health has dropped out of my own career journey.

Mick Spiers: 6:24

Amazing. Thank you for sharing that, fleur. I'm going to say three things that I picked up throughout that, and I want to unpack the third one first, but I'm going to set the scene with the first two. The first one is that relationship between high performance and wellbeing, and I'm going to say it that what we perceive as high performance out there may actually be not a long-term recipe for success, to use your term resilience recipes, recipe for success. We've got it back to front, that we seem to have it back to front from time to time what we go.

Mick Spiers: 6:54

We put these high performers on a pedestal in the company and go, oh, look at how hard they're working, but it's not necessarily the answer to long-term success. Then, at the executive level, some of the decisions that we make that look good on paper, that probably have instant results to the bottom line, also not necessarily going to do what we think it's going to do, and I want to come back to that one later as well. And then there was an interesting part there about your own selflessness, where you were deeply concerned about the well-being of many others and you didn't look after yourself, which, unfortunately, is also something that I see all too often in the workplace we're caring people generally leaders. If you're a good leader it's because you care, but that care needs to start with self. Tell me what you learn about yourself through your own experience with stress and burnout.

Fleur Heazlewood: 7:47

One of the things I learned I'll call it the hard way is that stress is one of those things that creeps up on you, and I think this is one of the challenges that we all have when it comes to recognizing and also understanding the dynamics of mental health and mental illness as well. So it's pretty easy to figure out when we're experiencing a physical illness or a physical injury, so like if you break your arm, for example, you know one minute your arm's 100% well and the next, you know the next, it's clearly broken, and then there's a very, you know, visible and well-known path for fixing it. You go to the doctor, you get your arm set. You know, a couple of weeks later you get a lighter cast. Six weeks later you can move it again and somewhere we would all expect that between select six to 12 weeks that your arm will be mostly be you know, fixed and healed again.

Fleur Heazlewood: 8:35

When I was going through that particular period, it was almost like you know, that pot of water that was like slowly warming up and then simmering and then it got to a raging boil, and one of the things I learned about myself and as human beings in general is we have a huge capacity to deal and manage with what's being thrown at us, and for me very much. When I was in the thick of my burnout, I didn't actually realize until I hit rock bottom what had been happening and the importance of the small everyday habits. And I think, particularly in our Western business cultures we have this over-reliance on holidays for resting and resetting. And the reality is, the biggest thing that I've learned for myself and about myself is that if we're going to keep ourselves in peak performance, if we're going to make sure that we are okay and everyone else is around us is okay, then we need to be making sure that we're investing in our health and wellbeing on a daily and a weekly and a monthly basis. And once you experience or hit burnout, no two, four, six, eight week holiday is going to enable you to come back from that. The second part of my learnings, with that as well, is there's something around making sure that you are taking the time to enjoy the present, enjoy the journey along the way.

Fleur Heazlewood: 9:53

So for me, I was always playing this long game. Okay, I just need to make sure that the factory staff are safe. I've just got to get these orders in. I've just got to get to the next hurdle in terms of our sales targets, and then I won't have to worry about people's jobs anymore. I just need to get to here. I just need to get to here. I just need to get to here.

Fleur Heazlewood: 10:12

And so, personally, I've learned that if we keep waiting for the next horizon to invest in our wellbeing or take some time off or to take some time out, there's always going to be a new goal.

Fleur Heazlewood: 10:24

There's always going to be a new target. We're never actually going to get there, and so, as leaders, we're very, very good at looking at everyone and everything else around us and going okay, when we've achieved this project, when we've nailed this budget, when we've got to this point, then I can take a break and then I can focus on my wellbeing. Then I can start looking at my eating. That's out of whack. So, for me, I was living for almost, I think, two years on caffeine and sugar to keep my energy propped up and working through the day, and I didn't realize when I was in the thick of it, and so this is one of those things that we need to look at proactively before we go down the slippery slope Do I actually have the core pillars of my life in place to make sure that, regardless of what life throws at me, that I will be okay.

Mick Spiers: 11:13

Really interesting. The picture that's coming into my head almost like a story is a increasing or a compounding debt that if we just keep on pushing and pushing and pushing, and if we're a leader or I'm going to say maybe even worse an entrepreneur running a small business, there will never be a perfect time to take a break. There'll always be something that you could be doing. It's just whether you should be doing it right. And what I'm hearing from you is that if you keep on driving and driving and driving, you won't even really notice it. In fact, on the surface it may even look like the opposite. Your performance is degrading over time because you're building up this debt a little bit like a runaway train. By the time you notice it might be not recoverable back to what it could have been if you hadn't noticed and taken action early. So, like you said, the two-week holiday talk about that in a moment as well. I think the two week holiday is not going to recharge the battery back up to where it was. It's just going to be a temporary relief and then off you go. You're racing again.

Mick Spiers: 12:12

So what I'm hearing is don't let that debt accumulate. Make sure you're building in rituals along the way. Don't wait until you're completely burned out and stressed out to do that. Now, how do we do that? Do we do it just intentionally and go right I'm going to build this into my schedule or are there signals that we need to look for a flow where you go? Oh, hang on a second, my body is trying to tell me something, or my mind is trying to tell me something. How do we pay attention? Or is it purely regimented? We need to just intentionally build in breaks?

Fleur Heazlewood: 12:46

regimented. We need to just intentionally build in breaks yes, yes and yes. So the first thing that I think is most important is the mindset shift, and one of the things I'm talking about a lot in my programs and to leaders is for many of us, we've grown up and particularly in the work environment almost believing that you know well-being and happiness is your reward for results. So you get all your work done and you knock off all your priorities, you hit your targets and then you can take a breather and it's almost like we've put the health and happiness and reward thing into a. You know, this is our luxury or our treat for when everything else is knocked off and knocked over. And one of the things I encourage everyone to start thinking about is well is actually an investment. So health and wellbeing is an enabler for performance. It shouldn't be a reward for results, and we've got close to, I think, 12 years worth of research now coming out of Harvard University. So, if anyone's interested, sean Aker has a fabulous TED Talk called the Happy Secret to Better Work and he talks about the fact that if we invest in our health, our happiness and our wellbeing first, then all the performance metrics that count increase by anywhere between 9% and 30%. So we're talking about things like productivity, innovation, creativity, our ability to maintain and build better relationships, our ability to do better at sales. For people like doctors, they're 30% more accurate when it comes to prognosis and prescribing and things like this, and I think it's quite sad, speaking with leaders and workplaces, that I need to give people the business case for why they should prioritize themselves. But we've been on this track and this journey for so long where burnout has been maybe not an acceptable price for success, but an accepted price for success, and the reality is that it not only is not serving us, but it's not serving the business either, and so I think people will find it a lot easier to make some of those small changes by thinking about this as an investment in myself, an investment in my performance, and actually understanding that this unconscious bias that we have, that kind of goes, oh we're well-being slots at the end isn't actually correct or accurate all the way that we're going to be successful.

Fleur Heazlewood: 14:53

Then the second yes is very much around. Our daily routines are what counts, so how we start the day matters. For those people who aren't morning people, I'm really sorry to tell you, but our willpower is a muscle and it's highest in the mornings. So if we want to exercise or we want to make choices about healthy food and make choices about yesterday, I'm going to knock off early and spend some time with my family or friends. We actually need to be planning for it and making that happen in the morning.

Fleur Heazlewood: 15:21

So I'm very, very big on quite a routinized morning start and I think it takes something like you know, 21 days to create a habit, but then anywhere between sort of like another 30 and 90 days to actually embed it, so it becomes second nature.

Fleur Heazlewood: 15:37

So we do actually have to work at it.

Fleur Heazlewood: 15:39

So we want to be working at it in the mornings when our willpower is at its highest, as opposed to our willpower being, you know, steadily eroded during the day with all the decisions and the things that we're doing.

Fleur Heazlewood: 15:49

And then the third part of it is how we end our day matters. So for those overachieving, stress-headed, long working hour people that can relate to a little bit about you know what I've spoken about so far if we're not taking the time to make some kind of formal close or ritual between work and thinking and processing and even continuing the stimulation of listening to the news or reading nonfiction and so forth before we go to bed. We're taking our racing mind to bed with us If we're not having a break between when we finish our food and going to bed. Instead of our body resting, our body's actually still digesting our food. So there are a lot of really quite smart and simple things that are really helpful with an evening routine and making that decision, that work is complete and now it's time to rest and replenish and do the things that are going to enable me to be a well-being.

Mick Spiers: 16:46

Outstanding. So the things I'm hearing here around mindset come back to that, around investment and around this intentional routine. I'll start with the third one. I'll work backwards a little bit so I'll share something with you.

Mick Spiers: 16:57

This took me a long time to work this out, fleur.

Mick Spiers: 17:00

For sure I know that I'm a morning person.

Mick Spiers: 17:02

Now I was your typical kind of alpha style as well.

Mick Spiers: 17:06

I was working around the clock, et cetera, et cetera, and if I was given a task that needed to be done by first thing tomorrow by the way, what I'm saying here works for me because I've been able to build the self-awareness of what works for me I could stay up and burn the midnight oil and try and punch it out, or I can chill out, relax, take a few little notes which is really important for me so I don't go to bed thinking about it Take just a couple of little notes and then go to bed, wake up at 4.30 in the morning and knock it out, and I'm always more productive when I do that. I've learned that over time, that if I do it in 4.30 in the morning, the quality will be higher, I'll finish it quicker and it'll be less stressful if I do it in the morning, because I've learned that about myself, instead of trying to do it the night before. First of all, how does that sit with you? Is this what you're talking about when we talk about your routine?

Fleur Heazlewood: 17:55

Very much so, because one of the important things about taking some notes and then putting it down and then getting up at the time that works for you is that you've put it down in between and you've made the decision that says, okay, here is my rest time, I need some rest time, so you're not pushing through to midnight and then getting up at 4.30 before you've had enough sleep. And so we've got pretty well-known healthy pillars, and when I talk these through with people, I always get the eye roll going yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that, but the reality is is are you doing that? And so one of the things that we know is seven to nine hours worth of sleep every night consistently is what is important when it comes to healing and getting appropriate rest. But so many people are pushing the edges because we're working longer hours, so it's taking us longer to switch off. We're having a glass of wine before we go to bed to try and unwind, and all these things are eroding the first couple of hours that are going to help us to sleep.

Fleur Heazlewood: 18:48

And then, of course, our minds are still racing when the alarm clock goes off the next morning, and so we're in this sleep deficit where we're continuously not catching up. And then one of the problems in having a sleep deficit is that all of our good intentions go out the window because we don't have the energy or the willpower to stick to the things that we know are healthy. So we roll into the fact that, okay, we're behind with the alarm clock and we've got to get into work. We've chosen to crunch our exercise time because we didn't get enough sleep, so we're going straight into the office. And it's these small decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis that compromise our health, that add up over time. And so being very, very deliberate around what suits to making sure that we book that in is really, really important every day.

Mick Spiers: 19:33

I'm hearing that compounding debt come in again and they can be little things, but they all stack up and one of them could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, the other thing that I'm thinking about there. I just want everyone in the audience to take a moment of self-reflection. This is going to be a really obvious question, but just be honest with yourself. If you're listening to this on the way to and from work, whatever you're doing right now, just have a think for a moment and go. Do your very best work when you're completely stressed out, you're tired, you're irritated, or do your very best work when you're fresh and you're rested, et cetera. It's an obvious equation, but we always forget it. We always seem to forget it when we get into the rat race and we go I just got to grind it out, I just got to grind it out. But if you keep on grinding it out, you're going to grind to a halt. You're not going to accelerate. And how do we accelerate? We rest, re-recover, and we do the work when we're rested and in the right mindset. Let's go to mindset now, because I want to add a new word to that, and that's the word identity flow, and I want to test this one with you how much of this is related to the stories that we keep telling ourselves in our head and almost like a societal expectation?

Mick Spiers: 20:42

Let me share a story with you. So when I was that work around the clock type person, I got a reputation around the office. It would be, ah, mick, the man that never sleeps, because I'd be responding to emails at 1.30 AM and then responding to emails again at 5.30 AM and people would scratch their head and go where does this guy ever sleep? And, by the way, I've broken that habit now, but it took some time. And, by the way, it was also not a good habit because other people would watch it and start repeating it because they thought that's what success looks like. But when that story starts going around oh, mick, the man that never sleeps I start living that story because it's who I am, it's my identity, people, almost a badge of honor. How much of this is related to the stories we tell ourselves in our head and we start living that story?

Fleur Heazlewood: 21:28

One of the, I guess the lessons that I learned in that identity vein as well is we can often place a disproportionate amount of our self-worth and self-confidence and identity on achievement, and specifically work achievement. And so if we don't have a balanced view on what success actually looks like and that wealth equals health and not just money, and that the elements of wealth are family, friends, good relationships, supports, doing things that you enjoy, being able to be your best self, and that work is just a part of it, we can become over-reliant on work in terms of a driver of our identity. So if you do have that natural achievement kind of style and you are overly enmeshed in work, is what it takes for me to feel personally successful, or for me to feel lovable, or for me to feel worthy, or for me to be seen as a stable provider of the family? There are all these different stories that we tell ourselves which can wrap up in a very unhealthy version of our work identity. And so for you, you were the person that didn't sleep or didn't need sleep.

Fleur Heazlewood: 22:41

My work identity, very much, was wrapped around the flow can solve for and can fix everything.

Fleur Heazlewood: 22:46

So one of you know my badges of honor that I wore for quite some time is very much a.

Fleur Heazlewood: 22:53

If there's a problem, flow can turn it around and I turned quite a number of large multimillion dollar pieces of business around and you know I was wearing that and reallyillion dollar pieces of business around and I was wearing that and really, really proud of that label.

Fleur Heazlewood: 23:04

But of course, when you're putting in superhuman effort to do these superhuman tasks, then of course you are going to be compromising your own self and capacity and capability moving forward. And if I was to go back and have that time again, one of the very, very smallest things I would say to myself is you don't need to be in such a hurry, it's really important. Life is a journey. Life is not an outcome. And when we approach our careers and our work along the lines of when I achieve this, then I can be happy, when I achieve this, then I'll be worthy, or whatever our own individual stories are, that we're telling ourselves the reality is is, if we all slowed down a little bit and took the time to actually enjoy what we're doing as opposed to what we're achieving, then we would be feeling a lot more balanced and a lot less enmeshed in driving ourselves to the point where the only thing that matters is the outcome.

Mick Spiers: 23:59

So a couple of points there about redefining what success looks like, and then this whole thing around identity. So if someone's listening to this audience right now, what tips can you give them around? If they just resonated with that story where, yeah, I've become that, I've become the person that's got a badge of honor associated with how many hours I work, et cetera how do they rewrite that script and break the pattern?

Fleur Heazlewood: 24:24

Not trying to simplify it, but this is actually where things like daily routines and blocking time out in your calendar in advance for things that you enjoy really make a big difference. And so for me, I will come into the start of my calendar year and the first thing I do before I book out any work, clients, programs, training, speaking engagements, any of that type of stuff is I make sure that every quarter I have at least 10 days off. Every month there's at least one long weekend in and I've got two holidays booked that I can look forward to in six-month blocks. That are hard commitments and hard stops for myself, because one of the things that I know is, once I get into my work role, it can become a little bit all-consuming, and I think if we wait until the invitations come in, I'm not sure about you during that period of time, mick, when you were existing on the smell of an oily rag when social invitations come in.

Fleur Heazlewood: 25:21

I'm not sure about you during that period of time, mick, when you were existing on the smell of an oily rag when social invitations were coming in and you'd go oh my goodness, I've got too much on, or I'm too tired, or I don't have the energy for that or whatever the case may be, and so if we're relying on making the right decisions in the moment, when we're feeling wobbly or the wheels are falling off, it's not going to happen, and so one of the tips that I would share with anyone looking outwards is, when we do our annual plan, if you don't have a personal plan, when you're going through that budget process from a business or a work perspective, I encourage you to do a personal budget, and when I'm talking about a personal budget, I'm not talking about a financial budget here.

Fleur Heazlewood: 26:00

I'm talking about time, energy, what's going to be of value to you, what are your personal KPIs, what are your values and the things that you care about, and make sure that you're doing these concurrently, as opposed to prioritizing so like the work, priorities and budgets and then trying to fit yourself in around the scrappy edges. Only then it will become a little bit more routine.

Mick Spiers: 26:20

Yeah, all right edges. Only then it will become a little bit more routine. Yeah, all right. So it's a very intentional action. You might have to build in these routines and take stock, but I'm also hearing making sure that you think of yourself as you're doing your business planning or your team planning for the year. How does your own investment in yourself to use your term before, what does your investment in yourself look like during that period of time, and what are the rituals that you're going to build, to commit to and all of that? Now I want to come back to some of the things that we started on early in the conversation Fleur around this relationship and the decisions we make around high performance and what high performance looks like and what it doesn't look like, and how we've somehow reversed that equation somehow along the way. Tell us more of your thoughts there.

Fleur Heazlewood: 27:01

So one of the big lessons for me is that high performance doesn't stay as high performance unless it's healthy. So high performance needs to be sustainable, and I think one of the things that I found most interesting was during my particular period of burnout time. I was really proud of the fact that I saved jobs and that I steered the company through the global financial crisis and it came out in really good financial shape and really good market share and brand shape. But also, on the same token, after I left that business, 10 years on, it actually didn't exist anymore. The next person that took steward of that company after I did didn't burn anymore. The next person that took steward of that company after I did didn't burn themselves out working on the business and, after a succession of managers, that particular business unit and company that I ran actually no longer exists.

Fleur Heazlewood: 27:52

And so if you look back at these things and go, oh, my goodness, I was essentially killing myself for something that only, at the end of the day, is not a human being, is not important, it's a brand, it's products and it's a way of making money, it's quite leveling, I guess, when you start to think these through.

Fleur Heazlewood: 28:11

And so if we're also putting unsustainable superhuman efforts into our work or our business or our KPIs and so forth. It's not going to be sustainable unless we are in healthy shape either, and so, for me, I think I'd really love us to start redefining high performance with the healthy in there, and healthy in a sustainable way, not just in terms of the people that are working in this business, also achieving being able to live their best lives, are able to take time off when they need it, can work healthy and safe hours and know that a good result is a good result, and it doesn't have to be brought forward or at the sacrifice of something else, because the reality is is when we fall over, the business is going to fall over as well, and that holds true from whether you're an entrepreneur through to a CEO of a large incorporated company, like I was, for example.

Mick Spiers: 29:06

So I want to come back to something else you said before and balance those two things, or how we actually address it. So sustainable, fully get it and fully on board with what you're saying. We do get into that routine, if you like, of there's always something right. You said before I will just get through this and then we'll be okay, then we'll take a break. But if you keep on doing that, there will never be a perfect time. So if you're in a business, we've just got to get this tender done and then, once we get this tender done, we'll all have a break and rest. But then, when the tender's done, oh, there's another tender out and you just go from one to the next, to the next, to the next to the next. So how do we redress that sustainable performance versus always having something that could be done?

Fleur Heazlewood: 29:48

So there's a few things that we need to be looking at, particularly as leaders when it comes to sustainable performance, and, of course, there are always going to be peaks and troughs, so there always will be, unfortunately, a tender where they don't give us enough time to complete something that's really important for us. But what's really important around that is, when the big tender drops or the big urgent deadline drops, that we don't look at this as something that just layers in on the top of everyday business and business as usual. We have a hard look at the other things that are on our plate and are on our team's plate and we go, okay, which of these can be parked, which of these can be delegated, and if there isn't anything that can be parked and delegated, is this particular tender actually that worth it? So we need to get a lot better at when an urgent priority comes in stopping and reflecting and reviewing everything else that we have on the plate, and also stopping and looking at the skills and the talents and the people that we have on the team who has the capacity, who has the capability and who doesn't, and what's realistic and what's finite.

Fleur Heazlewood: 30:49

And as human beings, we've got this, you know, want more, achieve more and so forth, and we keep taking on and taking on and taking on work without actually making those hard calls around what's most important now. And so things like prioritization, things like respecting our team's capacity, energy and capability, our ability to listen when our team's sharing with us alternate ways of doing things, or what can and can't be done, or what can be done over and above, with extra help or extra resources those are the kinds of conversations that we're actually not having. We're just assuming here we go, here's something else that we've got to achieve, and so it actually does go back down to the fundamentals of building solid, safe and respectful teams.

Mick Spiers: 31:38

So there's three things I'm picking up there, fleur. The first one is the criticality element. So we always have a tendency to think that everything is urgent, everything is critical. Are we stopping and really thinking about what would happen if this doesn't happen? What's the positive impact if we did do it? What's the positive impact if we didn't do it? Is it really that critical, or are we just running from one fire to the next fire?

Mick Spiers: 32:03

The second one, then, is around the prioritization and to start thinking about saying no. And by saying no, we can do the things that we say yes to at a higher level of performance. So if we're trying to do 36 things, we're going to do 36 things very badly. If we focus on three, there's a good chance we're going to do three things very well. So that prioritization of what we say no to and that third one was really interesting and I think many leaders, we don't do this enough. Listen to our team, listen to our team. You don't have all the answers. You don't have your finger on the pulse of everything in the business. Your team will know what's going on and your team will give you signals of no. We've pushed too far here, or really, is that one, really the most important thing that we can be doing right now. We need to be listening to our team. How does that reflection sit to you around those three things?

Fleur Heazlewood: 32:54

And especially with our team too.

Fleur Heazlewood: 32:56

We'll often have our go-to people, so ones that we know if there's a stretch project, we'll take it, and we can quite often stretch their capacity to the point where we break them or we break. Then there are other members in our team particularly as well, the ones that are much clearer around yes and no, or we have our under performers that we don't want to have the tough conversations with. That undermine the overall capacity of the team as well, and so one of the things that we need to get better at is making the tough decisions, and the tough decisions around prioritization, but also the tough decisions around our team as well. We're not doing anyone any favors by carrying people that aren't pulling their weight, and we're certainly not giving our top performers the acknowledgement and the support that they need to continue to do well. And so your summary in terms of we need to get better at prioritizing, listening, deciding, delegating and listening to our teams actually come back as self-reflections to us as leaders in terms of are we actually having the hard conversations? Are we taking the time to brief people properly?

Fleur Heazlewood: 34:10

When we talk about priorities, if we've got 36 priorities as leaders, it actually means that we're not prioritizing, because 36 priorities are not priorities. I have a lot of people that will show me quite proudly at like a two-page task list which has got priority written all the way down it right. So the skillset that we're talking about here, when it comes to sustainable performance and the health and wellbeing of our team, actually comes down to us being prepared to make the tough decisions to back them, to back ourselves and to back our people and choose what it is that we're going to do well with and absolutely manage the team dynamics within that, so that everybody's contributing in a way that's going to elevate and lift the whole team as well as the performance on the things that we choose to do.

Mick Spiers: 34:55

If everything is your highest priority, it also means everything is your lowest priority. You've got no on-off switch, you've got no regulator in all of that, so that's a pretty cool good call to action right now, fleur. So think about everything that you're doing. Is it really that critical? Take the time to think about that. Think about, by saying no to some things, you'll actually do the yes things better. And make sure that you're listening to your team. You don't have all the answers. I want to come back to this whole relationship with performance again. You were talking before about, unfortunately, rationalization of your workforce and all of these things, but you said something interesting along the lines of it's not high performance driving the team, it's high performance is achieved through the team. Tell me more about what that looks like for you.

Fleur Heazlewood: 35:37

And I guess one of the things too about high performance, or what I'm calling being very, very deliberate about putting the health in one of the things too about high performance or what I'm calling, you know, being very, very deliberate about putting the health in front of the high performance as well is that high performance doesn't mean that every single second of every single day, people are performing over and above targets and results. So high performance means that as a team, we're driving together. We're all clear on what needs to be done, we're all committed to what needs to be done, we understand our part of that and we all care about what this journey and these outcomes are. And so high performance, we're not going to have high performance by just looking at a set of numbers on a piece of paper and going, yep, this is what we're here for. People create results, people are results, people are the journey, and we're not going to get there unless we absolutely understand that results come from people and performance comes from people.

Fleur Heazlewood: 36:32

And so many of us are given a set of KPIs and we look at the KPIs and then we start slotting people into boxes in terms of how this will actually come about. The miserable teams and miserable people don't stay, they don't perform, they don't put in the discretionary effort, and when we change course or we add that tender in at the last minute, they're more likely to go. Why on earth would I do this? There's no purpose to this. There's no point to this. This is not contributing to the team. I don't see how this is contributing to our customers. This is completely unrealistic and unreasonable because it doesn't relate to anything that matters.

Mick Spiers: 37:12

So the words that are popping into my head now is around clarity and care. So if the team aren't clear about, well, why are we doing this and what impact does it actually have, they'll soon get confused. Another C word they'll soon get confused, and when they're confused they're not going to put in all of that extra effort. And then, with the care, if you care for them, they'll care for you, and if you care for them, they'll care about the results. So they will understand it. So clarity and care are the two words that popped into my head there. How does that sit with you, fleur?

Fleur Heazlewood: 37:44

We invest in the things that matter first, so taking the time for the clarity and this is where that hard prioritization comes from as well and the care for our people as human beings and not just inputs for outputs Then one of the things that we'll soon discover is the results take care of themselves. So many of us are managing to outcomes and results. We're actually not managing or leading to get the best out of the people that we've got, and this is where the high performance comes from. If we do provide our people with the clarity, we do care, and care means backing them when they make a decision, even in the face of when things might be a little bit controversial or choosing not to do something.

Fleur Heazlewood: 38:28

When we do those things, the results that we get are often beyond our wildest imagination in terms of what people actually can achieve. So the other thing about I think we can sometimes fall into, or the trap we can sometimes fall into with our targets is we look at that as the end game. That's the absolute. This is where we need to go, but if we put in all the building blocks and we care enough and we support our team and we're very, very clear around what this journey looks like. That's when we overachieve things. We don't overachieve things by nailing and driving people to a specific finite result.

Mick Spiers: 39:03

So I'm hearing another form of reframing there, right? So getting away from being so outcomes focused and realizing that our job is actually to create the environment where people can do their very best work, right? So I'll just use some simple math here for a second. There's only one of you. You're a human being. You've only got 24 hours in the day anyway, whereas if you've got a team of 25, well, guess what? There's 25 of them, and if you can create the environment where they do their very best work, well, now you've got 25 of you going around, and as long as there's that clarity of understanding and expectation and purpose, now you're unleashing the creative potential of 25 individuals, not one individual, and that's our job. Our job isn't the outcome. Our job is to create the environment where people can do their very best work, and that includes making sure that they themselves are looking after their own mental wellbeing, their own care, so that they can perform at their best when they are performing. How does that sit with you, flo?

Fleur Heazlewood: 39:57

Absolutely, I was going to say, and often as leaders I'm not sure if I'm the right person to say this, but I'm not sure if I'm the right we underestimate the value of us making those hard decisions of prioritization for people and we may often feel uncomfortable doing that, because the hard decisions are the ones that are often personally risky. But our teams don't need us down in the weeds doing their jobs for them. Our teams need us with that telescopic view, looking at things ahead and removing the roadblocks that are going to stop them forgetting the outcomes. And I think that's a massive shift and it's quite a scary shift. And why so many of us as leaders are still in the weeds, burning ourselves out doing the work? Because we're afraid of maybe some of those more personal risks that comes with saying no to 36 priorities in air quote quotey marks and enabling our underperformers to keep skating along, while we're using our high performers, for example, as the go-to people to get that discretionary work done.

Mick Spiers: 41:00

Yeah, you've brought this up a few times. I want to know more about this. So you talk about hard decisions and around performers that maybe are just coming along for the ride versus the high performers and before you know it yeah, you called it go-to person, so something really high priority does come in the door and you always go to the same people all the time. So you're burning out the high performer and meanwhile you've got some passengers along the way. How do you address that?

Fleur Heazlewood: 41:26

So this is where it's really important that we're clear around our team's objectives or the business objectives, but we're also very, very clear and we're holding each of our individual teams accountable for what their part of that is. And one of the quickest things that we can do to demotivate our team and kill performance is to allow those passengers to keep taking a ride where we've got everyone else working to excess and working themselves to the ground, and so many of us underestimate the negative impact of people at varying degrees of attitude, belief, acceptance, engagement, support, teamwork and so forth, and I guess this is where that term psychological safety for me, comes in. So psychological safety means that everybody on the team has a voice and everyone on the team can call out ideas and differing things that need to be done and expect that other people on the team are going to pull together and want to do that with them. And a lot of the time, psychological safety seems to be sitting in that workplace health and safety basket as oh, this is something that we need to do for compliance.

Fleur Heazlewood: 42:34

What many people don't actually understand is that psychological safety is actually the number one factor when it comes to what is likely to make a team higher versus lower in terms of performance and psychological safety is when every single person can have the tough conversations with others and know that not only is it safe to be bringing differing views and calling people out on different things, but it's actually expected and welcome and it's actually an important part of constructive feedback and the way that things are worked out. And so for many of us as leaders, particularly when we're tired and burning the candle at both ends, it's very, very easy to sort of like let those hard conversations go, Whereas the reality is it's the hard conversations that are actually going to enable us to have an engaged team that you know respects each other and respects what they're doing and how they're achieving it.

Mick Spiers: 43:26

Yeah, this is how we truly unlock the creativity of our team to be able to give them a voice and to make sure that we are having those challenging conversations. And I'm going to say to everyone in the audience you know what happens. You know what happens in your organisation. You have these meetings where there's something that there's at least some people in the room, everyone's avoiding the topic because they're not sure that they can raise it or whatever the case may be, and that gorilla in the room, unaddressed, is actually going to hold the team back. So you're better off having that psychological safety where people can speak up and share their opinions and constructively think about well, what can we do about this challenge? And that's what gives people the environment where they feel like they're contributing, where they feel seen, they feel heard, they feel like they matter because they're addressing the real issues, not just the agenda. How does that sit with you, fleur?

Fleur Heazlewood: 44:16

Yeah, spot on. And that generally requires us to unpick some of our learned habits and unpick some of those informal ways of working that we slide into. We use that term go-to person before we get to a point where I mix the go-to person look, I don't have the time, or I don't have the energy, or this is a short deadline. I'll give it to Nick to manage. And so we as leaders need to start by going oh, hang on a second, who are my go-to people? Who are the ones that I'm avoiding having these tough performance conversations with? Who is the glue within the team that's trying to make sure that everybody is accommodated and the boat isn't rocked? What do our team meetings look like? Is everyone coming prepared? Am I holding people accountable for coming prepared? Is everyone contributing to the agenda? You know, have I let us get into, you know, some bad, bad patterns or bad behaviors that we actually need to go back and unpick and undress? And the reality is it's the small everyday things. It's really interesting, isn't it?

Fleur Heazlewood: 45:18

Team wellbeing is very linked to our own. You know. Wellbeing it's those like small, like daily habits that we've flown. You know that we sort of like, you know, flow on that add up. So it's those one percenters. So you know, it's when we don't call out the person in our team meeting, it's when we over rely on this person, it's when this person becomes the fixer and people start to accept that as the norm, as opposed to sort of like challenging and going, hey, is this the best thing to do? Is this the right thing to do? Is this the healthy thing to do? Is this what's actually going to make our team great or not? That we need to go back and regularly review and ensure that we don't stay in, I guess, those well-worn tracks and patterns.

Mick Spiers: 45:58

I think this is another nugget of wisdom for us all to think about here. Flora, and the thing I'm thinking about here is the word toxic and most people, if I use the word toxic, they'll think of the out in the open big toxicity, of the alpha style manager who's bossing people around and that stereotypical toxicity. And the interesting thing about that is most people can recognize that and in fact they'll probably leave right. So if you've got that toxicity going on, what I'm hearing from you is toxicity builds up. It can be, like you said, the little one percenters and before you know it, people are worn down, they go, oh, they're a bit exhausted from. You know, why aren't we addressing these problems? So the ignored problems that individually, one by one, probably don't matter, but as they build up over time they do matter.

Mick Spiers: 46:48

The toxicity level is increased because people are getting worn down by the fact that poor performance or poor attitude is not getting addressed, that it's always the same people that are carrying the weight, all of these things. Don't underestimate how impactful that is. We talk a lot on this show about. You know, you get the behavior that you celebrate, you get the behavior you reward and you get the behavior that you tolerate, and that tolerate is actually, I'm going to say, more impactful than the first two. When you tolerate that, everyone sees it and it either upsets them in some way or they start mimicking it. They go oh Jim, got away with it, I'll do it too. How does that celebrate reward? Tolerates it with you, fleur. How would you see that in this toxicity buildup?

Fleur Heazlewood: 47:32

So it's really important that we celebrate the right behaviors, not just the right results.

Fleur Heazlewood: 47:38

So even within the celebrate, there's that definition of what actually are we celebrating.

Fleur Heazlewood: 47:44

And celebrating can sometimes be effort, and when I talk about effort not good job for doing a good job kind of thing, but hey, really like the fact that you tried something different and we got a better outcome so celebrating is effort in terms of innovating or doing something a little bit different or trying something new or collaborating with someone different.

Fleur Heazlewood: 48:04

When it comes to tolerate, I'd almost like to add in another layer of definition for that, because not only are we tolerating, I guess, the bad behaviors or whatever the challenge is, but what we're also doing is enabling it. And so one of the things when we talk about tolerate, it's like oh yeah, I've just got to put up with this. It's a bit of a passive kind of way of describing it, and I think if you look at what we tolerate, we're actually enabling. What it really really means is we're actually making an active choice to allow this behavior, and so we need to take some of the responsibility for this behavior once staying and potentially continuing to manifest or magnify, Because as soon as people see those behaviors not being addressed, they go well. Why should I bother? Doing the right thing? So we're enabling it as well.

Mick Spiers: 48:52

I like both the things that you said there. So you spoke before about psychological safety or a speak up culture. We'll call it whatever you like, but the celebrate. If someone brings up an idea in a meeting and you're trying to encourage people to speak up, even if you don't agree with the idea that they've brought up, you need to celebrate and say, oh, thank you so much, thank you for speaking up. Let's unpack that To give them their voice, to give them the celebration that they had the courage to stick up their hand, and then, yeah, tolerate.

Mick Spiers: 49:19

You're right. What you're doing is you're enabling or fueling it. You're actually what you walk by. You accept what you accept, you encourage and, before, you're tolerating, behaviors that are not in line with the values and beliefs of the group, and that's when the toxicity starts to kick in Fleur. There's been so many things that we've unpacked today and I feel like you and I could actually talk for the rest of the day. I think the audience would not appreciate that. So what I'm going to do is bring us towards our rapid round, and I'm really interested in my fourth question. The audience knows what that is, which is how people find you and talk more about your services. But let's start with. What's the one thing you know now, fleur Hazelwood, that you wish you knew when you were 20?.

Fleur Heazlewood: 49:59

What I would be telling my 20-year-old self would actually be to slow down and take the time to enjoy what I'm doing, as opposed to focusing on the pursuing of the doing. So it relates back to, I think, our conversation around results and outcomes. It's taking the time to enjoy the values, the people, the learning, the experience, the small things, I guess, that actually provide the satisfaction on a day-to-day basis.

Mick Spiers: 50:30

Yeah, good, all right, thank you. What's your favorite book?

Fleur Heazlewood: 50:33

I guess on our health and wellbeing discussion thread at the moment. I read a lot, by the way, so asking me what is like your one favorite book is just like torture to me. But one of the books that helps me really transform my everyday relationship with health and wellbeing is Eat, move, sleep by Tom Roth. So it's a really short, simple little book. It's evidence-based but it's well written around. What are these like little one percenters that we can be doing on an everyday basis to be living a better life?

Mick Spiers: 51:07

Yeah, I think a number of us could benefit from either reading or rereading that book. Okay, well done. What's your favorite quote?

Fleur Heazlewood: 51:14

My favorite quote is you're never too old to set another goal or dream another dream.

Mick Spiers: 51:21

Oh nice, I love that Particularly, as I do feel old some days. Thank you, I like that one as well. And finally, there's going to be people that are really curious about everything that we've covered today, either from themselves the self-reflection point of yeah, I've fallen into many of those traps that Fleur has spoken about or they do want to create that environment where people can do their very best work and to focus on wellbeing in their teams. How do people find you and take advantage of your services, fleur?

Fleur Heazlewood: 51:48

So our website is blueberryinstitutecom, and people often ask me why Blueberry Institute the way I describe it is antioxidants or superfood for a workplace and ourselves, so blueberryinstitutecom is a good starting point. Or come find me on LinkedIn. Obviously, fleur Hayes would love a good conversation and if you'd like to understand a little bit more around how to help yourself. So Resilience Recipes is my little simple, evidence-based book around how we can be much healthier on a day-to-day basis, coping with both our stress and our energy. And one of the things I just want to put out here too, mick, is I wrote Resilience Recipes.

Fleur Heazlewood: 52:28

First, I'm a big fan of putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others. There's a reason why all of the airlines across the globe have that as one of the number one safety instructions on all of their safety cards. And then my second book, leading Wellbeing, is how we can better look after our teams, and one of the things I think is really interesting is Leading Wellbeing currently is doing double the sales of resilience recipes, and I really, really think it's because we are still focusing very much on everything else around us, and not that we shouldn't be. We do need to be looking after people better, but we also need to be looking after ourselves. So, yeah, feel free to get in touch via website or the socials for a chat or check out a little bit more about what we've been talking about from our books. But, yeah, we very much help leaders and teams to put their healthy back into high performance.

Mick Spiers: 53:19

Now we will put the links in the show notes so people can find it easy, and I love that advice. Let's start with self-first resilience recipes and then move to leading wellbeing and put your own oxygen mask on first. We don't normally do this, fleur, but I want to unpack this a little bit more for the audience. What does an engagement with Blueberry Institute look like? Right? So if I'm running a team and I go, yeah, it's about time we took this seriously. What do your services look like in terms of is it workshops? Is it training? How does it work?

Fleur Heazlewood: 53:50

At the Blueberry Institute, we do a combination of workshops so we can do workshops for team days. So if you need a team reset, that's a core part of what we do. But I guess our specialty and what we're known for is putting in place a combination of training and coaching programs that will actually help take you and your team from where you are now to where you actually want to be. So, with the stepping stones around, how we have the conversations, how we make decisions, how we look after each other better and how we define what high performance looks like for us and so I really encourage people to look at well-being and resilience as capabilities and capacity, not as sort of like projects and rewards, and I think what will help people most is actually understanding that mental health, well-being, resilience, psychological safety skills are an essential part of our leadership toolkit.

Fleur Heazlewood: 54:47

So this is an important part of how we develop our capability and capacity to keep doing well despite the challenges and adversity. So we've all had a pretty tough few years. We've limped out of the pandemic pretty exhausted, hoping that 2023 would be better, and, of course, with the economic uncertainty and the financial you know insecurity, we've got, you know, some pretty ragged people trying to do and actually doing very, very, very good work, and so it's around understanding that we need to do things a different way, and so we support teams and businesses in working well, and thank you so much for that question. I really appreciate it.

Mick Spiers: 55:23

Yeah, thanks, fleur. I was really curious. I know that the audience would want to understand how it works, so thank you for sharing that with us. I feel richer for having this conversation.

Mick Spiers: 55:32

Fleur, I don't know if you would notice you can see me on video. People on audio won't be able to notice this, but I spent the whole time holding a mirror up to my own face going, yeah, have I crept back into bad habits? And I was doing a lot of self-reflection of both my own approach to my mental wellbeing and also whether I'm creating the right environment for my teams. I hope everyone listening was doing the same. So think about it. Are you investing? Think of Fleur's word. Are you investing in your own health and your own mental wellbeing? Are you investing in creating the right environment for your team so they can do their very best work? Everyone deserves to work in a workplace where they are respected and that their mental health is looked after, and when you look after them, they will look after you. So thank you so much for the wonderful conversation, thank you for your time, thank you for your wisdom, thank you for your insights today.

Fleur Heazlewood: 56:26

Thank you for helping us share the message, too, that we can have both healthy as well as high performance. Really appreciate the opportunity.

Mick Spiers: 56:35

You've been listening to the Leadership Project. A quick reminder that we are now bringing you new episodes twice per week, doubling up on our mission to challenge the status quo of leadership. In the next episode, I'll be joined by Adam Bennett, author of the book Great Change. The world is now changing faster than ever before and if we don't change with it, we run the very real risk of becoming irrelevant. Adam Bennett shares with us his wisdom on change and transformation, why change is so difficult and what we can do to master change management. So stay tuned for what is a must-listen-to episode.

Mick Spiers: 57:16

Thank you for listening to the Leadership Project at mickspearscom. A huge call-out to Faris Sadegh for his video editing of all of our video content, and to all of the team at TLP Joanne goes on, gerald Calabo and my amazing wife Say Spears. I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Leadership Project YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram. Now in on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram Now. In the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.