Resilience, compassion and wellbeing in times of challenge

Rosemary Sainty (00:00:02):

Welcome everybody to our first positive organizational scholarship and positive psychology community of practice event. My name is Dr Rosemary Sainty from the UTS business school where I actually teach positive psychology as part of our management discipline group. So today's event is the first and what we hope is at least an annual event where we bring together both practitioners and academics to really develop a robust conversation around the topic of positive organizing really The purpose as well today is to really create a sort of deliberative space. And by deliberative I mean, a sort of a space where there can be consensus but there can also be contestation around the issues. And I think this is really important in the positive psychology and positive organizational space as both practitioners and academics are able to really,serve to inform each other in their, their mutual work.

Rosemary Sainty (00:01:05):

Of course. Now we find ourselves in a very challenging situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. And originally this event was meant to be an event where we all met in person. And of course now it's all on Zoom. But it is an interesting time to actually put to the test the positive approach and to see just how well we can leverage that as, as we all move through this really challenging time. So the format of our event which was held on April the First began with hearing from the practitioners. So we're first going to hear from Dr Suzy Green, Suzy's a prominent practitioner and also involvement in academia in, in this area. And she's actually going to provide us with a bit of an overview of the how, why and what of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship. We're then going to hear from Sue Langley.

Rosemary Sainty (00:02:02):

Sue also another prominent practitioner in this space, is also, is going to sort of look more deeply into the issue of strengths and the power of unique strengths in a time of disruption. Following our practitioners, we're going to hear from our academics. First up, my colleague Dr Ace Simpson. Ace has done some really interesting work in compassion in organizations, including compassion in times of crisis. And following Ace we'll hear from Distinguished Professor Stewart Clegg, who also be talking about compassion and more broadly about organizational studies and once we've heard from both the practitioners and the academics we'll then join together in a discussion. And I think you'll find it quite interesting. As we round up, we particularly focus in on the role of leadership during a time such as we find ourselves in and what positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship can bring to this. So I hope you enjoy our speakers and we look forward to hosting another event next year and looking back on this year, which I think will be very interesting. Thank you.

Suzy Green (00:03:20):

Hi everyone. I'm Suzy Green and I'm going to give a brief overview of positive organizational scholarship, otherwise known as P O S. So just a little bit of history, the fields of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship are quite closely connected. So positive psychology formally launched in 1998 with Professor Martin Seligman, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, and Professor Barbara Fredrickson was also one of the key leaders in the field. Not long after that, 2001 and apparently it was at a conference where it was first launched, this concept of positive organizational scholarship was also, came to the surface and publication was formally made in 2003 by Professor Kim Cameron Professor Jane Dutton and professor Robert Quinn.

Suzy Green (00:04:17):

Apparently Jane Dutton and Barbara Fredrickson were either studying or working, I'm not quite sure at the same university and obviously shared some ideas, and Barb went down the psychology path and Jane Dutton went down the business and management path. And I'll talk a little bit about the work that's been done by Jane shortly.

Suzy Green (00:04:41):

So firstly, what do we know from the science of positive psychology? And I guess for some of you that may not know what is positive psychology? Well, I still find there are a lot of misconceptions about what it is. It's formally defined as the science of optimal human functioning. It's certainly not the science of being happy all the time. There has been a lot of research done on the study of positive emotions and quite a lot of research to show that it broadens our mindsets. It allows us to be more creative, more solution focused, it broadens our visual perception.

Suzy Green (00:05:12):

So we see more in our environments, which is really important right now in the situation that we're in because we're often in fight or flight and our thinking narrows, the research tells us, so we need some level of positivity to be able to lift ourselves up and say they solutions to some of these significant challenges that we're facing right now. Also really interesting and relevant and right now is the research that's been done on immune functioning, and decades of research to show on the flip side that stress in particular has a significant negative impact on our immune functioning and increasing research to show that positive emotions and particularly interventions that cultivate feelings of love, have a significant impact on our immune function and also mindfulness techniques. Quite a lot of work done on strengths and Sue Langley's going to cover that,tis evening quite a lot done on positive relationships as well, the impact on our wellbeing.

Suzy Green (00:06:11):

Positive psychology is often critiqued as an individualistic type of psychology. And I have to say I disagree. The, the main aim is that when we're traveling well, we can have a significant impact on those around us. So for me, it very much is a relationship based psychology and hope, hope theory. For those that might be interested, we'll make available some key research papers, some initial work done by Rick Snyder and Shane Lopez to show that hope actually is made up of three cognitive components. The first one is the capacity to set goals, the second component, is this sense of agency or our belief in our capacity to achieve those goals. And the third capacity is the capacity to look for multiple pathways to our goals. And the high hope is and there are some individual differences in hope, the high hopers is tend to have numerous goals. They have a high degree of agency in terms of their beliefs around achieving those goals. And they have multiple pathways in as much as they have a plan B, C, D and E. The good news is there's been studies to show that you can enhance hope and in fact coaching, and the type of coaching that we promote, coaching psychology and evidence based coaching, has been shown evidence-based coaching interventions to be hoping enhancing interventions.

Suzy Green (00:07:39):

So why positive psychology at work or positive organizational scholarship? Well, increasingly for me the clarity is that it addresses three key issues that organizations are facing. One is the reduction of mental illness given the rates in our communities. The second one is wellbeing promotion, and a lot of organizations are interested in wellbeing enhancement right now. And the third one, which I think is not truly been realized yet is capability building. So the same key psychological skills that I might have used as a clinical psych for mental illness prevention or I would similarly now use in our wellbeing workshops to promote wellbeing is exactly the same key psychological skills that we've used for senior executives for performance leadership capability. But I guess the opportunity is now that these same skills are for everyone, for all staff, not just the leaders. And in the words of one of our clients at the moment it's about helping people to be better human beings.,virtuous organizational citizens, which is the language of positive organizational scholarship.

Suzy Green (00:08:50):

So what is POS? Well if you want to find out more and actually a lot it's available at the Center for Positive Organizations, University of Michigan, the Ross School of Business. You could spend a week on that website. There is so much information, academic papers, case studies, resources for academics in terms of teaching and some wonderful work that's been done there over the last 17 years I would say. So you can see the definition here is it's committed to revealing and nurturing the highest level of human potential. And it addresses questions like what makes employees feel like they're thriving? How can I bring my organizations through a difficult times stronger than before, which is really relevant right now. And what creates the positive energy attain needs to be successful. And in fact, Wayne Baker, who's one of the academics at the Center has done quite a lot of work on energy contagions through social network analysis, which you might be interested to follow up on.

Suzy Green (00:09:52):

Here are some of the topics that are actually identified on the website that are key areas of research and practice. So when it comes to ethics and virtues, questions such as how do we cultivate attributes such as generosity, forgiveness, and compassion and Ace and Stewart will be talking a lot about that tonight. What is the relationship between these attributes and organizational performance and how do we inspire people towards doing more good, not simply less bad when it comes to meaning and purpose? How do we identify a higher purpose for our business? How do we infuse this into our organization when it comes to positive relationships? How do we create energizing generative relationships in our workplace, and when it comes to positive culture, how do we build high performing cultures of thriving, high degrees of learning and vitality? There's a book that I would highly recommend by Robert Quinn, who I mentioned before, on the positive organization.

Suzy Green (00:10:54):

Positive organizational scholarship also has a strong focus on what's referred to as positive deviance. So often when we think about deviance, we think in terms of a negative, from a negative perspective, when in fact deviance actually means deviation from the normal from the mean. So in POS and, the scholars that work within it, haven't spent their time looking to organizations that are struggling and trying to uncover why they're struggling, they've looked to the organizations that are truly flourishing and tried to uncover what is it that they are doing or what is it about them that really allows them to flourish. There has been quite considerable research that's been conducted. Here's a snapshot here and you can see positive practices like forgiveness, compassion, positive emotions, which I spoke about, and positive, a broader range of positive practices have significant impacts on a range of organizational outcomes, such as well being, commmitment and climate.

Suzy Green (00:11:58):

Now in terms of the how, I guess we've talked about the what and the why, the how. And there are many organizational change models out there that have been used for a long time. This is a very simple one that we actually use. And I've borrowed from my colleague, Associate Professor Aaron Jarden, down in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Melbourne. It's simply the me, we and us model. So when you are looking to implement within an organization or perhaps even with a team, you're looking at the me, at the individual level, what can individuals do, what types of interventions can they apply to enhance their wellbeing and overall functioning? What can we do? And this is the role where the role of the leader comes into play and the role of the team. What can we do as a team? How is this science relevant to us? And I would argue that each team may do positive psychology differently depending on the challenges that they're facing. And I guess the area that they work in and then ask, this is where we're actually looking across the organization and looking at systems, structures, policies and procedures. And in fact there's actually no point running a resilience training if like at an individual level or a team level, if the organization doesn't seriously consider the impact of systems, structures, policies and procedures, which sometimes can actively undermine wellbeing and optimal functioning. So just briefly now, I wanted to highlight some of the positive deviance that we've been very fortunate to work with. The first one is the Starlight Children's Foundation,who I'm actually an official ambassador for now, which is something I'm very proud of. They were pioneers here in Australia, they were the first organization we worked with to train all of their leaders in positive psychology, four days of positive psychology.

Suzy Green (00:13:52):

It was then rolled out across the organization to all employees in a one day positivity at Starlight workshop based on the science of positive psychology. And we then worked with them,did some consulting with their head of people and culture to look at how it was going to be embedded in their organization, how they would bring back to life. Now they've been up and running by their very own for a number of years now and in fact the head of people and culture has completed a Diploma of Positive psychology herself. If you're interested, there is a podcast available,uconducted by Matt Purcell. It's called 'The Examined Life' where Matt recently interviewed myself, and the CEO of Starlight Louise Baker. And it's a fantastic overview of what actually happened at the Starlight Children's Foundation and Louise's business case for why they have adopted it and the impact it's had on their organization.

Suzy Green (00:14:51):

The second organization might seem a little surprising. I know I nearly fell off my chair when I received a call from the Reserve Bank. In fact it was just one department. It wasn't the whole of the RBA and it was a department of 60 and involved training of all staff, some further training on positive leadership for the leaders, some one-on-one leadership coaching to help the leaders actually apply what they'd learned. And then some collaborative consulting by myself and my colleagues with their people and culture team over a 12 month period. And we've had some fantastic results. We used some measures to assess that as well. And the last one is one that we're currently involved with this is our third year working with Extentia Australia and New Zealand. And this involves, I guess a combination of education and coaching. So three cohort days where a group of 30 leaders, senior managers, come together and learn the principles of positive organizational scholarship, appreciative inquiry, positive psychology and coaching psychology, which is also a key area that we should be considering when we're looking at the development of positive workplaces. The leaders then received one-on-one individual coaching. They have a 360 degree leadership development feedback tool and that goes over the period of the year. We were finalists in the Australian Psych Society workplace excellence awards last year and we we're very, very proud of that program and we had again some great results that were assessed internally by the Center.

Suzy Green (00:16:37):

And that's it. Thank you very, very much to UTS, to Rosemary for hosting this event. To Sue Langley for kindly hosting the Zoom. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or queries. Thank you.

Sue Langley (00:17:00):

Thank you Suzy for giving a great overview. So my job is then to sort of go into the strengths components. Strengths is one key component of positive psychology and possible organizational scholarship. If you look at what positive psychology encompasses now, it's huge. And strength is just a small component, but it is a component that has got a lot of research going on around. So I thought I'd start off with a little bit of interaction. So everything we do at the Langley group also always includes neuroscience. So I just like to ask everybody in the chat window to just send me a little message about thinking about how your brain is working right now in this interesting time of disruption. I'd like you to send me a little message about what sort of emotions you have been experiencing in the last week. So whenever you're ready, just type away in that chat box. Any emotions that you have been experiencing in the last week.

Suzy Green (00:17:58):

Unnatural Carl, ooo I like that one awesome, thank you. Shock, worried, perplexed. Detachment, optimism, uncertainty, frustration. Okay, what else we've got? Hope. Optimism. We've got frustration, boredom, worry, unease, hope. Open-Mindedness. Overwhelmed with kids and work. Thanks Melissa. Sadness, worry, joy, curiosity. Just from one person. Thank you Tim. Great to have you on I'm tricking to joy. [inaudible] Grea to have you here. Sadness, anger, fruitful. Featherless flight. Ooo I do like that one? That's my favorite one. Thank you, Sally. Collective sadness. Grief, surreal, compassion. Oh my goodness. Alright. So it's really interesting. Serenity and sometimes fear if someone [inaudible] yes, absolutely. Thank you very much for that. So what's really interesting, just in that quick snapshot that all of you have just sent through, it's my guess is every single one of us has experienced a whole range of emotions in the last week.

Sue Langley (00:19:00):

Everything from fear and uncertainty and worrying, anxiety, et cetera, through to joy and optimism and sometimes in the same five minutes. Because if you're anything like me, I've had those moments as well. Real like distress at what's going on and what I'm going to have to do from a business perspective. Cause like Suzy, most of our stuff is face to face. So you know, all that gets postponed. What do I do with my team, what do I do with the salaries, all those sorts of things. But also I see this as a huge opportunity. Lots of new things coming, not so new ways of being so quick. Many of you have just typed in that my brain has been going through all sorts of different emotions in the last week. And what tends to happen is because all of our routines have been thrown out, and many of you understand that your limbic system looks after your habits and your routines, and we don't need much fuel and effort to do those habits and routines.

Sue Langley (00:19:57):

When that gets thrown out, our poor little brain gets overwhelmed by all of a sudden that our habits and routines are thrown out. We are perhaps not exercising as we once were, because we're not getting up at the same time doing the same routine. Can I just get a show of hands. If anybody has found that their eating has been a little off, as in you've eaten more or less good quality. Okay. It's about a hundred hands that I've gone up instantly, beautiful. Thank you. So this is the thing, isn't it? So again, this is your brain doing what it's meant to do. It's having a moment and you are occasionally making very poor decisions around what you're eating. I know myself, I had a particularly difficult day on Monday and after I get off a particularly difficult call, I literally sat there and thought, I really need a bottle of gin right now.

Sue Langley (00:20:47):

Thankfully I know enough about my brain to understand what was going on. So I then thought I want a really big bag of crisps. Now I never eat crisps, but Hey, I thought it'd be a good idea, but I decided that that also was not the best idea. So I went with a bowl of chips. That was the less of the three evils, 'gin is sensible'. Thank you very much. Yes, Zara says, exercise has gone to zero. Very much missing it. Absolutely. Eating and sleep/wake cycle, more snacking, dinner is at 4pm. Thank you for all those. So this is a normal thing that's happening in your brain, but of course if we don't handle it, we know that significant stress over time leads to burnout. Insomnia, issues as far as mental health, things like depression, anxiety.

Sue Langley (00:21:31):

So I want to bring in the strengths approach because it is one small thing, but it is sometimes the smallest thing that you can do to make the biggest difference, as Alex Linley talks about, who's a big advocate and a researcher and a practitioner now in this sort of space as well. And I'd like you to think about how you might do this and this is something we use a lot within organizations because it is really significant when it comes to performance, but it can also help us right now with some of those emotions we're dealing with. So I'm going to give you a moment to read that definition.

Sue Langley (00:22:08):

And again, that definition comes from Alex Linley who, as I say, it's done a lot of work in this space. He was a PhD student of Chris Peterson. So if you're familiar with the VIA strengths Chris Peterson, sort of did a lot of the work around that and the Bible around strengths. Alex was a PhD student with him for a while and now he's over the last few years really developed the whole workplace and organizational strengths aspect. And the thing I like to highlight on that definition is preexisting does not mean you were born with, this is not talking about a personality preference or something. It just means prior to now, my guess is not many people came out of their mother's womb with strategic awareness as a strength or something like that. So it's more about just prior to now. It's about authentic and energizing and this is the key component that really is why it works well from an organizational perspective because it's about optimal functioning and performance.

Sue Langley (00:23:04):

Now I know I did notice that there's a lot of people on this call who are our diploma students, so thank you all for joining. So you've definitely come across this before. But this is a particular piece of research that I love. For a couple of reasons. It was done by the CLC, the Corporate Leadership Council, and they had any 20,000 real life people in real life jobs. So not just 33 first year psychology students, but real people in real jobs. And they looked at performance over a 12 month period. And they had some people that were being reviewed, if you like, with an emphasis on performance weaknesses. Now, many of you might wonder why on earth would an organization work towards performance weaknesses? But actually that's what we've done for many, many years in organizations.

Sue Langley (00:23:49):

We have basically gone, hi Sue, these are your strengths. These are your development opportunities. Let's put some goals in place around your development opportunities. Well, that was the people in purple and they found over a 12 month period that led to a drop in performance by 26.8%. Now that's really important because that's what we've been doing for a long time. The orange bar is the people who had an emphasis with their reviews based on performance strengths. So that's me coming into your office as my leader and saying, you say 'Hi Sue, these are your strengths, these are your weaknesses. If we need to get them to a certain level to be competent, we will, but we want you to focus for the next 12 months on setting some goals around your strengths'. That led to an increase in performance of 36.4%.

Sue Langley (00:24:37):

Now, I don't know about you, but as a leader I'd be happy with 15%, 20 would be nice. But you know 36.4 I can take that. So again, thinking about what we can do around this strengths based approach. And I guess I'd like to ask you why you think it is and what I mean from that is that emotional component that we just spoke about earlier. If you have to focus on the things you are not good at for 12 months, what emotions do you think start coming up? Just send me a little message in the chat box. What emotions do you think come up, if you have to focus on the things you are not good at 12 months. Resentment, yes certainly, no I agree. Fear, frustration, self-doubt, inadequate, disappointed. Thanks Rob that one. Yeah, brilliant. Uninspired. Frustration. You feel less engaged. Shame potentially. Thank you Rebecca. That's a brillant one. Worthless, boredom. Fantastic.

Sue Langley (00:25:32):

Now this is the interesting thing. Many of us want to fix our weaknesses. So initially we want you, we want to try and improve them. But over time, all of those wonderful emotions that you just mentioned come into play. And the reason we get this reduction therefore in performance is because yes, our weaknesses will improve. But guess what happens to our strengths during the same period because of all of those things you've just mentioned, our strengths drop. Whereas the orange bar, this is you focusing on the things you're awesome at. Guess what happens? We feel fantastic, we feel confident, we feel worthy, we feel excited. And what they found is my strengths do this and my weaknesses also improve because I'm fired up and confident able to handle it. Now again, I've only got a few minutes.

Sue Langley (00:26:20):

So when we think about what is a strength, performance, energy use, these are the three things that I think make the strength profile in my mind, one of the best tools from a workplace perspective, the VIA is fantastic cause it's free. But the energy component of the strength profile really helps bring it to life. And I thought I'd just share finally with you how you might bring this into practice because performance is the stuff I do well. But the strength profile will distinguish between whether it energizes me or de-energizes me, as well as how frequently I use it. So I like to be completely open and share with you. This is my profile. Now for anybody who knows me, it won't surprise you that time optimizer and work ethic are my top two realized strengths. I pretty much work all the time, but I just going to share with you how in times of crisis and disruption and difficulty and stress and pressure, you can still use your strengths.

Sue Langley (00:27:20):

So like many people, as I say, our business is experiencing some challenges and we've had to reconfigure our ops team in particular. And that means I've had to lose two people. And for me that was a really tough conversation and I knew it was going to be a tough conversation. So before that decision was made, I tapped into legacy and mission, legacy and mission is basically the legacy I want to leave behind and the goal, the outcome if you like. And I had to make a decision based on the best outcome for the business. And for the majority of the people in it. But while I was having that conversation, it was also using that sense of centered. So really trying to be as open as I can and emotional awareness is further down on my list. I was using that one too, to have the conversation with my team to try and remain inspired and connected even when we had to make some tough choices.

Sue Langley (00:28:15):

And what was really interesting for me is yes, of course I got off that call and I cried, but I also got messages from every single one of my team, including the ones that are having to move on to say that there's some of the best leadership I've ever seen. Thank you for giving us a gift. And I'm like, how is that gift? I've just had to fire people. But from their perspective it was done well and when you use your strengths it is very much easier to handle the tough stuff than if you just focus on trying to fix things. Just trying to roll through. So think about how you can figure out your own strengths and tell your own strength story. Use it in the times when you're feeling depleted and despaired and bored and stressed and anxious and all those wonderful emotions that you mentioned earlier. There is lots of more like Suzy that I could go into just on strengths alone. I know we could both talk about this for days, but I'm going to pass you over. John has a really good question, but we're gonna hold that John to the end. So I have seen your question, but we're going to hold that to the end. So Rosemary back to you to introduce Ace.

Rosemary Sainty (00:29:23):

Okay. Thanks. Thanks Sue. And thanks Sue and Suzy. That's a really nice both overview of the field and, and then giving us all a bit of an experience of what a core part of the positive approach is, the focus on strengths and something to away I think. So now we're looking across now to academia. And as I was saying, this is, this is the core of the, the idea about bringing tonight together to get those different perspectives to really round out the, the field. And I'm really happy to be able to introduce my colleague Ace Simpson. Ace is a Reader in human resource management and organizational behavior at Brunel Business School based in London and also an associate fellow at UTS business school. Ace's research is concerned with human wellbeing, flourishing and social justice with a research focus on the cultivation of organizational compassion. And in talking to Ace about what he might like to contribute to this evening his research in compassion in times of crisis, which was around the, the Queensland floods I think is particularly pertinent. So anyway, Ace is going to talk to us about compassion in times of crisis, including that research and cultivating a culture of compassion. Thank you Ace from London.

Ace Simpson (00:30:53):

Thank you Rosemary. Thank you Suzy and Sue for your wonderful presentations as well. Suzy I have some relationship with or association with. When we started the positive organizational positive psychology program at UTS, I invite invited Suzy to give presentations from a practitioner perspective to our students and that was fantastic. And then Suzy also sent in other colleagues in following years to help us out with that program because I wanted students to be exposed both to the academic side and the research that we do, but also to people like Suzy and Sue who are actually applying this and taking this out to organizations and working with organizations to bring this research into actual practice. So thank you once again for your engaging presentations. So a year ago today I started work at Brunel University London after having worked at UTS Sydney for nine years. On my first day I was introduced at Brunel business school in a faculty meeting as a new recruit from Australia. And I was asked to stand up and introduce myself. And when I said I research compassion in organizations, the room erupted in laughter.

Ace Simpson (00:32:20):

I didn't quite know whether I should laugh along or keep a straight face or, I was still pretty jet lagged. So I'm actually not quite sure what I did in the end. And I can say that even today, I still don't know what the joke was, but what I do know is that when I tell people that I research compassion in organizations or workplace compassion, I often get wisecrack responses such as 'does such a thing even exist' or another one is 'as a non-sentient thing can an organization even be compassionate?' From my research, I can tell you that every organization depends on compassion to function. From conducting hundreds of interviews, I can affirm that when pressed, every employee can remember an incident of receiving compassion from a colleague or a supervisor during a time of struggle. Some have to think harder than others. Some instead want to describe incidents to being bullied or abused, but when I remind them of the question, everyone gets there in the end. So as I share this with you today on this call, I'm sure you too will be able to remember a moment of receiving compassion from a colleague or a supervisor in response to some suffering that you might be experiencing.

Ace Simpson (00:33:54):

Causes of suffering can relate to workplace stress. It can relate to workplace injury. Sometimes it's about workplace conflict, tension and bullying. And in fact, that's been an area of research of mine in more recent times, helping organizations to address bullying, not through just through policy or some training for staff, but to work on enhancing organizational compassion capabilities, compassion strengths as a positive approach to addressing the persistent problem of workplace bullying. Other causes of suffering can be from outside of work, personal circumstances such as a relationship break-up or you might be grieving the death of a loved one.

Ace Simpson (00:34:52):

Another issue that affects us. Maybe a disaster, such a terrorist incident or a natural disaster such as floods has in Queensland, and the research that I did there in 2011, or bushfires as you've experienced in Australia. So devastatingly in recent times, or a global pandemic such as the Coronavirus that we are all being confronted by right now. In our academic research that has been initiated by Jane Dutton and others at University of Michigan that Suzy introduced us to earlier. In fact, I was there about two years ago. I was there as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan and I had an office right next to Jane on one side and Kim Cameron on the other,Bob Quinn jumped in,uudropped in a couple of times. They're all Emeritus now. So they've all retired and there's a, a need for a younger generation of scholars to take over and continue doing this work.

Ace Simpson (00:36:03):

But how we define organizational compassion is as a four fold process that I captured with an acronym, NEUR. NEUR, as in noticing the suffering of a colleague. E for empathizing, empathizing with their feelings, the emotions that they're going through. Then we have understanding, U for understanding, trying to understand the circumstances of their struggles and finally R for responding, responding to alleviate their distress.

Ace Simpson (00:36:40):

So noticing signs relates to possible change in routine. Maybe someone is generally very punctual, but then suddenly I start lagging coming in late each day. It's, it's uncharacteristic for them to put in reports behind the deadline. And so there's this indicator that we might pick up on, maybe it's a change in mood or a change in body language. Empathizing means checking in, listening empathically, trying to understand what emotions are going on for this person. Understanding means trying to see what the cause of the distress is. What are the circumstances that are behind this, this perceptible change in mood and behavior in this individual. Is it work related stress? Is it home-related,who's responsible? What can be done? Finally R responding, what action can be taken? So this is a critical difference then between sympathy or empathy and compassion, is that compassion concludes with a response. We take some kind of action to alleviate the distress, whether it's small or whether it's big. I learned while researching the Brisbane floods in 2011 that in some organizations this compassion flows easily and naturally in other organizations, it's hidden. Even clandestine, I call this narrow compassion, whereas the former I call broad compassion. Narrow compassion is generally shared among a clique, a group of friends who empathize with each other's struggles at work. They cover for each other and defend one another against a mean boss or an uncompassionate organization. This type of compassion support tends to be task related, helping each other get through the work day or get through the week.

Ace Simpson (00:38:44):

Broad compassion on the other hand, is expressed as a way of providing support for all kinds of distress, all kinds of suffering, as we discussed earlier, workplace tensions, personal circumstances, disasters. When compassion is narrow, colleagues are looking out for each other. It doesn't engender organizational commitment, engagement, trust, loyalty, productivity. In contrast, our research demonstrates that when compassion is broad, it engender's all of those characteristics and more including creativity, innovation, and heightened performance.

Ace Simpson (00:39:33):

What makes the critical difference then between narrow and broad compassion? The critical differences that one has organizational support and the other doesn't. When organizations and consultants sometimes suggest that we might increase organizational compassion through staff training or coaching, I say, well, yeah, that could help to some level, but as in the model that Suzy presented earlier, that's micro. It needs to get to the meso. It needs to get to the macro as well.

Ace Simpson (00:40:12):

So if you're interested in knowing how to cultivate organizational compassion within an organization, here's what we need to do. We need to look at the leadership of the organization. What behaviors are being role modeled there? What example is being set? We need to look at routines and policies. Who are we promoting within the organization? Is it all task-based or is it also related to how a person interacts and engages with others? What are our hiring practices? What are the types of people that we're recruiting? What are the criteria on which we are recruiting others? What are our policies of support? Do we have policies in place to support employees, members, team members during times of struggle? How do we define the roles that we employ people to fill within an organization? Do we define those roles roles narrowly as related to a specific task or do people see caring for each other as part of what it means to be a member of that organization?

Ace Simpson (00:41:29):

What is the culture of the organization? Is it a culture that promotes high level competition, each person competing with the other to get scarce resources, or is it a supportive team culture where everyone sees one another's success as their own success as well? What are we communicating with each other across the organization? What stories are we telling? Is it narrowly related to productivity successes or sales achievements or are we also recognizing the small things that are happening between people within the organization? The support, the care, the compassion that we provide one another because it is going on all the time. Narrowly, broadly. There's always compassion. There is always pain in the room and there's always colleagues looking out for and supporting one another with that pain. That's how we get through life.

Ace Simpson (00:42:32):

The question is whether the organization recognizes and supports that or not. So we termed these things as organizational compassion capabilities. You can also pay attention to what we call compassion competencies, speed, scope, scale and customization. How fast we respond to address a colleague or a members' struggles, how fast or how long we let it. We let it go. We ignore, we overlook a person's struggles or, or don't even notice those indicators that I was discussing earlier. The scope of support that's available, it means the different types of support that can be offered. Is it narrow? If a person doesn't fit within the box, then, sorry, we just don't have the policy in place to support you with this kind of struggle. Or is it more broad? The scale of support. And customization? Can it be tailored to the specific needs of a specific person dealing with a specific type of distress or struggle? When compassion is deeply embedded within the organizational leadership culture, routines, roles, espouse values and communication, people, employees, customers, and the community, they begin to associate compassion with the organization itself, regardless of the industry.

Ace Simpson (00:44:08):

I've seen organizations that are supposedly, well, they work in the not for profit area, but employees feel bullied and they struggle. I've seen others working in the for profit area where the organization itself is very compassionate and caring and when comes to crisis, it's difficult to fake compassion. Suzy, you mentioned the cat being caught in the headlights of a car. You can't fake it in that moment of crisis, the organization's in survival mode and so it's general culture will dictate how the organization responds in that moment. So if we had more compassionate organizations in the world, we would have less stressful work environments. Employees would have better wellbeing, there would be greater commitment, there would be high levels of engagement, trust, loyalty, better relationships and productivity. Society would also have more trust in business leaders. Something sadly that has been in steady decline in recent years. The days when bosses can get away with being mean just to exercise their power over others are numbered. Narcissistic bullying is self sabotage for the organization. It wastes organizational resources.

Ace Simpson (00:45:42):

As a research community, we now know enough about organizational compassion to be able to understand and advise leadership on how it can be cultivated the choice really is ours. So thank you for this opportunity to share with you. I see Lisa has a question and I will make a point of addressing that when we come to the, to the part of the session when we can discuss questions. Now I'd like to hand over to my colleague friend, and mentor, was also a PhD supervisor for me. Professor, Distinguished Professor Stewart Clegg. He is at the University of Technology Sydney also holds visiting professorships at universities across the world. He's a leading international researcher in organizational studies. World recognized as the authority on power within organizations an incredibly prolific writer. He's authored hundreds of academic papers published and top tier academic journals is also offered tens of books. Yeah, if we ask them, he will probably not be able to tell us either. He would have lost count ,including the recent publication on positive organizational behavior, which I have the honor of coauthoring with him. But there's books that he publishes every year. So he's going to offer some reflections on his engagement with positive organizational scholarship but it'll also relates to the current environment as well. So thank you. Over to you, Professor Stewart Clegg.

Stewart Clegg (00:47:49):

Thanks very much Ace. I'm kind of like the odd person out here. I'm not a psychologist, I did study psychology as an undergraduate in the behavioral science degree, but I ended up specializing in sociology, honestly, because that has to go back to what Suzy, or Ann, I can't remember, was saying to play into your strengths. It was pretty clear my strengths were not in statistical analysis. So I was told you better not do economics or psychology. You'd be better of doing sociology. So I listened to the advice and I did it.

Stewart Clegg (00:48:23):

Let me tell you a little brief story about how I came to positive organizational scholarship. Surprisingly, it was through the study, really organizations, I've been writing a book on power and organizations. It's the center of books that came to be a chapter on the heart of darkness. The type of it was obviously borrowed from Joseph Conrad's wonderful novel, the inspiration for practice book, all of those equally remarkable movie apocalypse now. And the chapter that I wrote discussed how totally institutions concentrated power relations. We discussed the organization of the Holocaust, the stolen generation of Aboriginal children, the institution of the Magdalene laundries, which spread globally from era throughout through the Catholic church, the total institution that was the German Democratic Republic before it was re-united with West Germany and usually these cases, extreme cases, I demonstrated through abstracting 20 rules for constructing really bad organizations, but these organizations were not somehow off the scale of normal organization, they just depended on the intensification of some normal organization tendencies. Every organization had in it the potentiality to be somewhat bad for some to be really evil. Later I went on to write a series of papers about the evils of the Khmer Rouge and the organization of their death camps.

Stewart Clegg (00:49:48):

It felt like I was cornering the market in really bad stuff. So mired in so much bad stuff, a friend suggested to me, why didn't I write about the good stuff that organizations could do? I wasn't convinced that there was a lot of good around, and this was before the Hayes Royal commission, the various reports on the institutional abuse perpetrated by various respected bodies such as the Catholic church, the Salvation Army, and various elite private schools. So you might understand my skepticism, but I had good friends who were increasingly working in what was becoming positive organizations scholarship community, one of who, of course, was Ace, and they encouraged me by, opening up to this emerging, opening me up to this emerging body of work and it was through working with three of them, with Miguel, with Armenio, and with Ace that our recent book on positive organizational behavior came about.

Stewart Clegg (00:50:40):

Now my way of entering into the POS world was through rethinking something that I learned as an undergraduate a long, long time ago. As an undergraduate, I learned that organizations were founded on communication, coordination and control. That communication occurred through imperative command, top-down. That coordination was required because of a high degree of differentiation, division of labor and that control consisted exercise and power of subordinates in the hierarchy in order to ensure conformance with organizational and management rules and dictates. Today we call these strategies. I also learned that the corollaries of these three big Cs was the three big Ss communication that was a top down communication that was top down bred sycophants coordination between different divisions of labor, bred secrecy as each element sought strategic contingency through what they knew and did that others did not know and do and that controls through imperative and impersonal command led to sabotage of the machinery literally and figuratively of organization through alienation and distrust.

Stewart Clegg (00:51:51):

Well today I think we need to supplement the big three Cs with two further Cs, and this is where POS comes in, the two additional CS are compassion and collaboration. The acquisition of the two Cs could transform old style management because once compassionate and collaboration come into play, the dynamics of communication, coordination, control, change, communication through collaboration, changes from top down broadcast to digital mass self communication networks through social networking channels, which opens up opportunities for open source strategy and innovation as well, one should say, for top down, manipulation and abuse of big data as we saw with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, these things are always dialectical. There's never just a positive. There's always the opportunity for the negative as well. So coordination also changes. There's opportunities for digital mass, self communication coming to play, but the biggest difference is in control exercise through power of the people.

Stewart Clegg (00:52:53):

It's wise to realize that control through power over people is not the only concept of power on which we can draw. There's also power to, and power with, as well as power over. While control as power over tends to be isolating and dominating, power to is empowering, creative and innovative. It recognizes the ability to make things happen while power over, the typical form of control, focuses on assuming conformance by punishing non-conformity. Labeling it as deviance for performative benchmarks, making sure that some things don't happen, stopping people from doing things. It's not an accident that the most popular academic definition of power saw it is the ability of an A to get a B to do something that B would not otherwise do. Now when we add power with to the mix, then we're tapping into the real capabilities that we have. Not only the power to do things individually, the power to be creative, imaginative, and innovative, but also the power to conjoin with others in order to do what might otherwise be unimaginable.

Stewart Clegg (00:53:59):

In terms of what organizations can do with power, they can use it as a negative corruptive force, but we need to acknowledge that power can also be an indispensable force for good. Without power, nobody changes the world. You can have the best intentions in the world, but if you don't have power, if you're not in a position of power, you don't occupy the the conduits and the capillaries of power.,you haven't got the relations of power at your command, you can't do anything. So power can be used to liberate as much as it can be used to dominate. Organizations can adopt processes to generate positive approaches to power. They can create cultures of speaking up, of moving from command and control to empowering, stimulating divergence through devil's advocacy. All of these things become possible. By power and positivity, organizations are doing a service to themselves. As major corporate scandals and to some extent a product of the misuse or the abuse of power.

Stewart Clegg (00:54:56):

And we have so much ample documentation of this in recent scandals such as those involving VW's diesel gate, or the recent Royal commission into the banking and finance industry. Of course, the positive can produce unintended or negative intended or unintended negative effects. There's invariably a paradoxical side to organizations, including positive organization. It's important to aim to avoid surface positivity. Often adopted when promising miraculous solutions. There are always people making a living out of selling solutions that promise more than they deliver. Modern medicine shows fakers and fairs are not entirely absent from modern corporate life and fostering positivity may be uses an instrument, a tool, a moral technology, and that gain more effort from satisfied employees. On the principle that much is contented cows allegedly produce more milk, so will more satisfied and contented employees produce more profit.

Stewart Clegg (00:55:58):

So people spend a significant part of their lives at work. Yet for many work life is far from fulfilling. We can go back to old movies like Modern Times, or more recently Horrible Bosses, and we can see that life is represented in organizations as punishing. We can see it as expressed in the deaths resulting from work-related suicides in places such as France and China and Japan. Work too often sucks rather than sustains. It negates rather than nourishes the spirit. It's a dismal reality that we wouldn't want to contest because we feel so worn down by it. There's now abundant research, however, suggesting ways to manage people decently rather than dreadfully. And that's what I find that encouraging and stimulating and fulfilling about being even as a fringe member of the positive organizations scholarship. Thank you very much

Rosemary Sainty (00:56:57):

Thanks so much Stewart. And it's good to have you on board on the positive approach and I think it is an important an important issue to stay focused on. That is power when you're looking at the positive approach. And, and, and that has certainly been articles, even in the popular media about the misuse for instance, of resilience training so that the workers sort of take more and more on board without actually addressing what the underlying cause is. So and that's, that's something that I think a community of practice can, can really embrace. So really kind of contest some of these issues. So important to have you in the camp, in the tent. So, so just sort of looking back on where we've come with the discussion so far, sort of Suzy picking from what you were saying that importance of integrating research.

Rosemary Sainty (00:57:53):

And then Sue actually using what's come from research, the benefits of strengths and actually giving everybody a bit of a taste of that. It's been Fantastic. And then Ace what you've learned from your research on compassion is just so pertinent to what's happening at the moment. And, and Stewart again in a sense I feel both from Ace and Stewart, there's a, there's a kind of, there's an optimism there of what this field can actually bring. And, and particularly can bring to where we are right at the moment. It's such a strange deconstructed place that we're all in and, and we are seeing some, some really positive things and we are seeing compassionate responses.

Rosemary Sainty (00:58:38):

At this point we've really wanted to have some questions from all of you out there, our participants if you'd like to put things up on the, on the chat. I, I did I did want to ask 'em if I can ask the first question perhaps of Ace. The, the, R of your acronym the R of response and organizational responses. It seems pretty obvious that some organizations are working hard at coming up with good responses. I had a great email from the CEO of Woolworths that pretty well spoke to, to that. And, and I wonder, do you have anything to say about that? So, you know, this, this could be for organizations that haven't yet cultivated their compassion, their compassionate cultures. And there was a question from someone asking about can broad and narrow compassion co-exist. And maybe in this sort of circumstance, that's pretty good question to ask. What'd you think?

Ace Simpson (00:59:44):

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Rosemary thank you once again for organizing this. I should have said that earlier, fantastic opportunity to bring together a community of practice as you have said. So the question on the broad and the narrow that was raised by Lisa and it's a fantastic question that I'd love to address. Before doing so, I'd just like to thank and acknowledge Wendy, for your comment I'm grateful for what you've shared. That and the Soul Brown shout out to you. We were studying together as doctoral students at UTS in 2010 and it's great to see you're on the call here. Regarding the broad and the narrow being in the same organization. Absolutely. It's possible. My research shows that particularly when you have a large organization with so many different departments and divisions and you'll have some divisions that are very compassionate and very caring and others where that's lacking and you'll see a lot more bullying.

Ace Simpson (01:00:46):

And I've created a measure to quantitatively gather data on the compassion of an organization. And we've done correlational studies with bullying and compassion and demonstrated a negative correlation between them and all within the same organization. So some departments who have more bullying, less compassion, and, and vice versa one thing that makes a critical difference. I spoke to it during my talk but if we're talking about research and quantitative methodologies we also have a measure of psychological safety. So when people feel safe in the organization, you see more of that broad compassion, when they feel unsafe and if there tends to be of a more narrow nature, but absolutely you will find the same operating, operating within the same organization,.in the same department, I guess so. I mean, life is messy and complex. So at an individual level, you might even have most people feeling good and, supported, but then you, you might have some individuals that are just not getting that for one reason or another. So yeah, that's the nature of life. So it's important to be aware and conscious of these dynamics. And the more we are aware of these dynamics and the more we can work to support compassion within the organization.

Ace Simpson (01:02:17):

And so to bring it to the current context Rosemary of, of your question about how organizations are operating today, we see absolutely that is the case. You'll see some organizations moving very quickly and just letting go of swathes of their employees just at the outset of the, of the pandemic, other organizations holding back, trying to figure out what to do, recognizing they have some responsibility but also that once we get through this, we're going to need to rehire these people again. I, if we let them go so quickly and so easily yeah, even if they do come back, how much loyalty and how much engagement will they have, how much of that discretionary effort are they going to reinvest in the organization?

Ace Simpson (01:03:08):

And so it is a challenging time for organizations. Thankfully. we have this unprecedented move by governments in some countries to guarantee 80% of employees' wages. That's the case here in the UK and New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, I think it's been introduced in Australia as well, a little bit later than the others. But that's going to be so interesting to see in terms of how quickly these economies are able to lift up again or revive once this pandemic passes. So will it be that those countries where they didn't guarantee people's wages and organizations are going to, will it be slower for them, more of an effort for them to get their economies and businesses back on their feet, so to speak, once again after it passes. It'll be interesting, or will members, I'm taking up too much time with this question, but will members who have, are not guaranteed that wage, in a country shift quickly to get work again and have a smaller period of self isolation. And so, yeah, this is all going to be so interesting to look at once passes.

Rosemary Sainty (01:04:33):

Yeah. Yes, that's, there's so much that we're going to be looking at. A questions come up about what evidence of there is there boards bringing compassion to the board room. And I'm not sure if anyone wants to pick that up as a, as a, as a topic. But and we got another question from, from John, a broad question, but he had breadth. Can you suggest any tips to implement, drive or drive positive thinking in a climate of uncertainty and downsizing that we have right now? Is there any research to show increased client satisfaction, revenue, profitability, i.e. The business case, is achieved from a positive approach. So I might throw this open to, to all of our panelists your thoughts on tips to implement or drive positive thinking in a climate of uncertainty and downsizing.

Suzy Green (01:05:32):

Rosemary, I might speak briefly on that and hand to the others. I think there's been an increasing recognition in positive psych together with academics and practitioners from the field of ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. That as I was sort of alluding to before, that it's not just about being positive, if you like, or being happy and getting rid of negative emotions. And in fact we know that the more you try to do that, the stronger they become. So the last thing you want to do is sort of, you know, think positive, we all need to be positive. We need to acknowledge the emotions as normal that we're all feeling right now and give people the space to do that.

Suzy Green (01:06:13):

Because that then will in a sense allow the processing of that to be able to take some action. A can't remember who else spoke about that somewhere in the event tonight. So I think that's a really important component that we need to validate and normalize for people how they're feeling. I think when we're talking about, I still struggle again with the term positive thinking. I'm not a fan of that to tell you the truth. For me, it's more around hopeful and optimistic thinking. And look, there's a dark side to optimism. There's absolutely a dark side, I've suffered from that myself with the Rose colored glasses if you lie. But I think, hope I mentioned the theory around hope. And I think right now that's what we do need. So for those that may not be familiar with it, hope theory looks at our goals or our objectives if you like, of what we're trying to do.

Suzy Green (01:07:02):

And I think for many of us it's not just surviving but coming through this thing, opportunities possibly and becoming, you know, I don't know, stronger if you want to use that term, I'm not sure. And then the other two components are looking at our agency, our beliefs about our capacities to get there. And there's a whole lot of work you can actually do from a cognitive behavioral or from an ACT perspective around that. And then the third component is multiple pathways. So we know people that are high on hope actually have a plan B, C, D and E. And I know for me, when this hit, and I'm sure Sue's exactly the same. I was up in the middle of the night just listing, listing, listing ideas, creative ideas of what I can do. And we also know underpinning that, that when you experience positive emotions, that's what allows you, as I said before, to be creative and solution focused.

Speaker 6 (01:07:51):

So we need that positivity to allow the solutions to emerge because I guess when you're in fight or flight, which a lot of us are, the research clearly shows that our thinking shuts down, fight, flight, freeze. So again, there's this balance between acknowledging the emotions, sitting with them, being curious about them, allowing time to process them. But then also building and I don't think it has to be an either or building some positivity if you like, bringing in a little bit of joy into your day to allow these solutions and ideas to occur to help us overcome the challenges we're in right now.

Rosemary Sainty (01:08:27):

Thank you

Sue Langley (01:08:30):

I might just build on that cause I did respond to John's message cause his question was a very long and complex one, probably not easily to answer here, but there is a lot of research supporting all of these things that Suzy's already touched on, and many other areas that link to productivity and profitability. And I noticed Stewart, obviously you mentioned that you know, many organizations are sort of trying to embed wellbeing and positive psych programs so that they can potentially increase profitability and that may well be the case. And I suppose my, my argument is is if your organization is offering you things around your wellbeing, your resilience, building skills, leveraging strengths and whatever you. If it is genuine and done to support you as an individual, they may well get productivity and profitability out of that because you'll be happier, you'll be more engaged.

Sue Langley (01:09:23):

And when you think about it, organizations have been measuring engagement for years. But often we just think of engagement as a, as a thing. It's a number. We've got 36% we want 46% next year. But really for me, again, engagement is an emotion. You can't have engagement without an emotion. So how do we bring in some of that emotional component, that compassion, that Ace is talking about, that positivity that Suzy is talking about. Because if I feel better when I'm at work, if I feel engaged, I am going to get that creativity. I am going to perform better. I am going to be kinder. I am going to be more collaborative. So I think there's that emotional component that sometimes we we seem to miss out on. And that's why I wanted to introduce it with the strengths element, is it's not just about using your strengths it's because when you use your strengths you feel confident and worthy and supportive.

Sue Langley (01:10:15):

And if I may, I'm just going to pick up on the other question that was in there that directly asked about overuse of strengths. Cause I think that's a really interesting one. And there are different ways that you can look at this. There might be some strengths that if you overplay maybe detrimental to you and you may start feeling energized by them, you feel like, you may be overusing them. Personal responsibility would be a classic one. Personal responsibility is when someone says yes to a lot of things and then absolutely make sure they deliver on it. Well, that can be pretty challenging and de-energizing over time if you overplay that, but there might be other ones that might be less effective to you or the people around you such as if you have the strength of humor.

Sue Langley (01:10:57):

I think all of us would probably agree that there are certain times where humor could be overplayed and may not be the best thing to use in certain situations. I know myself, I showed you my strengths of time optimizer and work ethic. I can't imagine ever being de-energized by those things. People say, Oh, you could get burn-out, but hang on. They're a strength to me. So it's very unlikely, but I am very well aware it can be de-energizing for other people around me. So proud of I dial those in. So that sort of builds on John's question, but also the other question about overplay of strengths and how that can potentially be detrimental to others often more so than ourselves.

Ace Simpson (01:11:39):

Rosemary, just very briefly, just to add, I already spoke quite a bit, but with regards to negative emotions, the research around compassion is really interesting here because for compassion to really deliver on the positive impacts of individual, enhancing individual wellbeing in terms of the compassion giver, cause they are great, but it turns out that it happens when a person actually has genuine feeling, genuine empathy, even compassion is Latin for suffer with. When you suffer with the other, it actually triggers a stress response. When you see other people's distress and there's a contagion effect. But then when you act to alleviate that, you respond, you take action to alleviate that. It then has this calming response, the you know, the rest and digest. It triggers the parasympathetic nervous system and that then is a boost in immunity and longevity. And all these great impacts. So the negative there actually goes on to support these positive outcomes. So a compassionate person is going to feel those negative emotions, but then there'll be overrided by these feelings of compassion. On the other hand, if it's just superficial compassion, pat, pat responses of, Oh, you know, I hope you feel better without actually feeling the suffering, then those effects of enhanced immunity and wellbeing and longevity are actually not achieved there.

Stewart Clegg (01:13:20):

Yeah, just a little, just a little remark, slightly different from what other people said. I mean you know, I guess we'd probably all start from the premise that reality is socially constructed, but the social construction of reality can sometimes change dramatically. We've seen that in the last few weeks. We've moved from an ideology of lack of compassion, a punitiveness and austerity to a compassion born admittedly out of a concern for the economy rather than society per se. It'll be very interesting to see what happens when the pandemic is over. It will be over one day. Do we? Do we somehow expect that everybody's going to go back to business as usual. We can, we can be just as mean and as vicious and as cost cutting and as, you know, just downright unpleasant as, as we'd been used to. Or is the, is the, is the emphasis on compassion going to be continued in, in government policies, in an employer's policies. It's not a question to which I have any answers obviously, but I think it's a, I think it's a very pertinent question for the times because ideology has been kicked right out of the window. As reality has given it such a big hit. And one of the consequences of that reality, it is that compassion is sometimes, reluctantly, sometimes slowly, sometimes being dragged, but it does come to the party.

Rosemary Sainty (01:14:45):

Thank you. Just reading a comment from our colleague Marco Berti, and he's fundamentally asking in a way it gets back to the points you were making Stewart about you know, traditionally organizations, but those three CS of communication, control, coordination and then, and then these other two areas of compassion and collaboration. And Marco is asking you know, could we stop sort of treating people as a problem to be managed, which I suppose political leaders do look at, rather, but rather as a resource for mutual support, advice and guidance. So that's that sort of collaborative approach. So in a sense, the collaboration is, is a grand collaboration. That's the challenge for us.

Stewart Clegg (01:15:39):

I think be, I think we can, but I think we have to realize that organizations are historical objects and if they've been running on control, coordination, communication, top down, for a long time. Even when you bring in the collaboration and the compassion it's still going to be an undercarriage, an undercarriage which was perhaps like a model T Ford, it's still supposed to underlie modern cars. Well, we may, well find that there's an undercarriage which is still underlying modern organisation even as they attempt to transition.

Rosemary Sainty (01:16:12):

Optimism is part of this. So I think I'm just in the last minutes we've got I was sort of looking at a way to frame a round up question to each of the panelists and, and looking at the, the various questions out there. Some of you when we were talking about what we would talk about today, did talk about leadership and I thought that perhaps it is interesting to see how different leaders, political and business leaders are handling the situation. And sometimes spectacularly poorly, but others other times with real courage. So I thought that perhaps we could round round things up with what each of you feel, could be essential contribution to our leaders from a, from a positive approach. So in other words, what, what can positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship how can that afford, how can that inform our leaders? How would you like to inform our leaders? hope that isn't too roundabout of a question? Who would like to go first? Sue?

Sue Langley (01:17:31):

No, Sorry. I was pointing to Stewart, he put his hand up first, but you couldn't tell I was pointing

Rosemary Sainty (01:17:36):

Oh, sorry. It's not on my screen, Sorry Stewart. Off you go.

Sue Langley (01:17:44):

I'm, I'm happy to kick off. So yeah. I think for me, and I appreciate it, I'm coming with my own personal bias that that emotional component is so critical. So I think one of the things from a leadership perspective, I don't care whether it's political or organizational or family is I suppose vulnerability, it's being able to acknowledge all of the emotions that we experience and not thinking you have to hide it all the time. And I'm not talking about breaking down in tears, but for people being able to experience the vulnerability of all of our emotions, however they may be experiencing. And I think that comes down to Ace's comment about compassion as well is when I do feel anxious and I do feel vulnerable and I do feel upset or whatever, it happens to be, I also have the compassion to go, it's okay, that doesn't make me a bad person. I can still handle this and then move into something that might be more optimistic.

Sue Langley (01:18:39):

So I think for me it's whether you put it under emotional intelligence or whether you just talk about it as emotions or whether you talk about it as the capacity to be authentic and vulnerable, whatever words you use. That for me is fundamental to leadership. And when we see it in political leaders at the moment which in some cases is more often, in some cases is I so often we really resonate to it. We, we pick up on it, we value that person when we see that moment of vulnerability where their emotions are very clearly there and yet they're still able to inspire us to move forward. So I think that's the thing for me.

Rosemary Sainty (01:19:19):

And it's certainly interesting, I guess for those of us in Australia watching Scott Morrison on that front, that's sort of the stumble through the Bush fires and then now into, into the coronavirus situation and how has some of that actually is coming into play a little bit. Suzy, what about for you? What would you say on that leadership fund?

Suzy Green (01:19:44):

Yeah, that's a tricky one. I guess resume cause there's so much that could be drawn out. And I guess I just reflect and think what we're seeing now in leaders, again, whatever sphere that is, is a reflection of the work that they had done on themselves up to this point. To be able to respond in the best possible way, I would say right now. And that, that work, that work that has gone on in terms of the investment of themselves around their own growth, personal growth and development. I guess is what we're saying now. But I mentioned the research on positive workplace practices that Kim Cameron in particular has done in some of the other scholars at POS and there are a number of them, but the three, and I can't remember the exact study off the top of my head, there were three that seemed to have the most powerful impact on organizational effectiveness and they were kindness and compassion, which I'm, I think is absolutely needed right now.

Speaker 6 (01:20:42):

The other one was gratitude. So expressions of gratitude. I know even for me, I know Sue gave a great example in her organization. I've been doing as much as I can to express gratitude because people are going above and beyond what I would expect of them right now. And it's just, so lovely to see and forgiveness. So people are stressed under the pump and mistakes are being made and we cultivate a level of forgiveness as well that we're all doing our best and you know, everyone's got a surface level of stress possibly right now. We've got to be a little bit more forgiving of those around us as well.

Rosemary Sainty (01:21:20):

Yeah, I totally agree. Ace, What do you think different set of circumstances in the UK, but

Ace Simpson (01:21:29):

Thank you. Rosemary for this question, we have done research on leadership and found some interesting results from these studies. Generally we might think, well there's a common perception that leadership needs to be strong and that leaders need to have all the answers and that they'll be more respected by their people if they are seen, if they communicate that confidence and that knowingness and having the solution for the problem. Our culture seems to communicate that idea as well with the bonuses that we, we give leaders, how their salaries are in some places America 450 times that of the average employee, the CEO wage disparity, CEO to employee wage disparity is a topic that we can discuss. So there's a reticence on leadership's part to communicate compassion and humility for seeing, for being seen to be weak. Our research demonstrates however, that this is not the case.

Ace Simpson (01:22:44):

So it's hard to measure humility. Can you give people a scale? How humble you rate yourself for humility one to five. And you know, we're gonna reverse code it or something. But the way we do this research is we get the leaders employees, their direct reports, to rate the leader in terms humility and compassion, and we also get them to rate their own sense of psychological safety and their own perceptions of the leader's effectiveness. And what we find is really interesting. Employees who rate their leader as more compassionate and humble, they also rate them as being more effective so they have greater respect for them. And we also find within these cohorts then a grade, a high level of psychological safety. So what's the mechanism here? What's behind it, they perceive their leaders as making better decisions because they take into account the best knowledge available at a given time. They take on the insights of experts and so they make what we refer to as balanced processing, a balanced appreciation or, or analysis of all the best information available and then they'll make a decision from there. And so this humility then enables them to engage in balanced processing and then make good decisions with input from others, respect those decisions and thereby respect to the leader and write them as more effective in what they do.

Rosemary Sainty (01:24:27):

Hmm. Yeah. Nice. Oh am I on. A good lovely application of the theories of practice. We're minutes away. We've got three minutes left, but Stewart did you want to have a comment there, cause you were going to be talking about leadership from our earlier conversations.

Stewart Clegg (01:24:47):

I totally agree with most everything that's been said by the three previous speakers. I think the important thing is that leaders need to realize that they've got to leave the huberus behind, that they're servants as much as anything else. That they should rely on experts and expertise. We've seen some appalling instances in global politics recently of people not relying on expert or expertise. I'm very heartened by the way in which governments around, most of the governments with an exception, are relying on expertise in the way in which they're handling the Coronavirus, [inaudible]. So I think, I think the main thing is, you know, leaders need to go on being leaders. They have to realize that their authority comes from a multitude from the demos from people that they serve and you know, being a leader is, is, is a necessary task. Somebody has to set some direction but they don't have to do it on their own. They need to do it collaboratively. They need to do it, communicatively with the multitude, with the demos. An to do it in an authentic way. I think a lot of leaders in, in business perhaps haven't really got that message yet somehow, quite a lot haven't. Cause it's a very, very competitive struggle to get there. If engage in that of Darwinian struggle all you're life you probably walk back a long way.

Rosemary Sainty (01:26:24):

Indeed. Thank you Stewart. There's a comment there about the role of the media in all of this and how they portray our leaders and I think that's a really live issue that they, they do also play a role in allowing for all of that.

Stewart Clegg (01:26:40):

Well, one of the problems with the media is that by the personalization needed to be to my various complex, you know, difficult issues. They feed the vanity of the people who are in the spotlight. Feeding people's vanity is not necessarily the best way to invite conversation.

Rosemary Sainty (01:26:57):

No, it's short term. Thank you so much. So we've got, we've got, we're, we're now at 7:30, so I just wanted to say a few thank yous. I wanted to thank Katie Johns back at UTS who's, who's hopefully online and, and being the person I've been tick tacking with to, to pull all of the invitations and RSVPs and the rest of it together. Thank you Katie. For Suzy kind of backing this idea. So it's got one foot in academia and one in in practice. So and a son that attended UTS I believe. And, and did some of those positive psychology subjects. Thank you Suzy. And then Suzy and Sue for your incredible generosity, both incredibly generous people with your ideas and your time. Thank you. And then of course Stewart and Ace fabulous ideas. Wonderful colleagues. Thank you very much.

Rosemary Sainty (01:27:51):

So the idea from, from from this event is we want it to have a long tail, so we'll work with Sue to get the recording. We'll put that online and send it out to everybody so that you've got that. And we'll also put some other resources in the same place so that you can pick, have a pick at those. And certainly I'm hoping that we'll be running something similar in a year's time and who knows, it might even be in person. So I'll just hand now over to Sue to, to wind up.

Sue Langley (01:28:23):

Thank you so much. Thank you Rosemary. And we will get the recording to you. And my sincere apologies again for my slight stuff up there, but I've also just put everybody's contact details on the screen there. For those of you still on the call. All four of us that presented today are very, very open for you connecting with us, asking questions, emailing, whatever you wish and Rosemary's details is already on there. You probably already got hers from the information, but they will also be Rosemary will contact you with regard to the UTS Business School web page, which will have the recording and other resources on. But please thank you Rosemary for organizing this. Thank you to everybody on the panel for sharing their wisdom and thank you most importantly to all of you on the call here who've given up an hour and a half of your evening or afternoon depending where you are in your place, morning Ace to share in this sort of learning and knowledge. So from all of us. Thank you so much and good luck out there with everything that's going on and keep tapping into those range of emotions that you might be experiencing. Thank you everybody. Thank you.

Rosemary Sainty (01:29:34):

Thank you.