Leadership Resilience: Navigating Burnout and Driving Organisational Change, with Liz Bradford

Have you experienced burnout, or know some who has? Today's guest is the remarkable Liz Bradford, a seasoned leader with 20 years of diverse experience, currently serving as the Managing Director of Wholesale Banking at HSBC Asia in Hong Kong and the CEO of Transform Perform. Liz shares candidly about her defining moment in leadership, experiencing burnout not once, but 1.5 times, and the crucial lessons learned from those experiences.

Liz emphasizes the importance of embracing discomfort, holding tough conversations, and building resilience, both as an individual leader and within the organizational culture. Our conversation delves into the complexities of driving large-scale transformations, where Liz highlights that 80 percent of successful change is rooted in cultural shifts rather than just technological advancements. 

Our discussion covers the significance of emotional intelligence, transparency, and setting a north star for organizational success. Join us as we explore the human side of leadership, learning from Liz's journey and uncovering actionable strategies for creating resilient and inclusive organizational cultures. It was an honour to hear Liz's valuable perspectives and lessons in this engaging episode.

Guest Bio - Liz Bradford

• Transform.Perform  https://www.transformperform.org/
• Book: Life is short
• Liz Bradford Linkedin

Liz Bradford has 20 years of diverse leadership experience having worked across three continents and at firms spanning HSBC, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and SWIFT. She is currently the Managing Director of Wholesale Banking at HSBC, Asia (based in Hong Kong) and the CEO of Transform Perform, a platform of coaches and workplace wellbeing and development providers to advise and support businesses building more sustainable employee propositions. Her career has ranged from product management to C-Suite roles driving operational excellence, people engagement and technology transformation across teams of 7,500+ in 14 countries, with oversight of U$bn+ P&Ls. Her passion is employee engagement wellbeing and culture, specifically nurturing healthy, inclusive cultures and tackling toxic ones. 

Examples include: 
- Leadership of employee resource groups representing 48,000 diverse employees across 60 markets globally 
- Design and delivery of female talent development programmes across 14 markets, and 
- Implementation of wellbeing challenges and programmes impacting 5,000+ a year globally. 

Through Transform Perform she delivers coaching programmes and facilitation for the empowerment of employees, to develop high performing teams, and to inspire people managers to step into enterprise leadership. An ICF accredited organisational and executive coach, a qualified personal trainer and a certified wellbeing coach, Liz regularly speaks on the topics of inclusion, female leadership, wellbeing, busting burnout, stress managem

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Kate Peardon
remove psychological securityand you create an environment in
which people cannot do theirbest work.
So I think it's just veryimportant that we train our
leaders, that we support ourleaders as well in being able to

(00:21):
hold that discomfort and havethose conversations.

Kate Perdon (00:25):
Welcome to the Level Up Leadership Podcast.
This is the go-to podcast forchronically busy leaders and
small business owners who areready to get out of the weeds
and start leading.
The weekly episodes have microleadership lessons focused on
how to level up your leadershipand help you to be 1% better
every day.
It's all about growing yourleadership wisdom, building your

(00:46):
team and being the leaderpeople want to work for.
So let's get into it.
This podcast guest is the everimpressive, honest and open Liz
Bradford.
She has 20 years of diverseleadership experience, having
worked across three continentsand some huge firms.

(01:07):
She's currently the managingdirector of wholesale banking at
HSBC Asia, based in Hong Kong,as well as the CEO of Transform
Perform.
Her passion is employeeengagement, wellbeing and
culture, specifically innurturing healthy, inclusive
cultures and tackling toxic ones.
One of the things I love aboutthis conversation today with Liz

(01:28):
is how open she is about herexperience, the ups and the
downs and some of the gems she'slearned about leadership along
the way.
I'm talking about a definingmoment in your leadership
journey that's had a significantimpact and one that's been
really defining for you.
I think is defining for so manypeople that I talk to, but it's
not something we often talkabout out loud.

(01:49):
Would you mind sharing yourdefining moment for leadership?

Liz Bradford (01:54):
Yeah, of course, and I think it's a shame that we
don't talk about it more outloud, because I think the reason
it's so defining is it bringsyou down to the humanity of all
of us, regardless of whatposition we're in.
And, as you can probably tellfrom my accent, I'm British, so
I was brought up in very much akind of always stiff upper lip,
don't show too much emotion,time, don't show any weakness
type way.
And it's a long time ago now.

(02:15):
But to the first time I sharedthis story and the fact that my
defining leadership moment isprobably when I burn out, and
then not just once, but managedto burn out 1.5 times.
You're such an overachiever,liz.
You had to do it twice.
The 0.5 was when I became therealisation that really it was
me, not the environment.
So the first time I'd spent 10years working in London, I was

(02:36):
working in investment banking.
It was very intense by allintents and purposes.
On paper, I had a verysuccessful career and I was
absolutely going somewhere.
And then I was offered apromotion and I found myself at
my kitchen table in floods oftears and just realising I
couldn't do this anymore.
And I couldn't do it even foranother two years in that new
role.
So this is before burnout was aknown thing.

(02:56):
Before resilience was a thingand I felt the only response was
to pack up my life, pack up myhusband, move to the other side
of the world.
And then, while I was travellingaround Asia a little bit on my
way to Australia at the time, Iwas lucky enough to be
headhunted for a role back inbanking.
So, having sworn I'd never goback into banking, I did, and
after about just under a year Ifound myself sort of at that

(03:17):
precipice again and that's whatmade me realise it was such a
different context.
So it was in a very differentculture.
It was a super collegiate placeto work.
It was a very different kind ofenvironment and I realised
really that it was my behaviours, my lack of boundaries, my work
ethic that I felt was necessaryto be successful that was
driving the burnout and that Inot only needed to, but it was
within my power to change thosethings in order to become a

(03:40):
better leader and become someonethat people should follow,
rather than someone who was rolemodelling very much the sort of
the negative traits of whatI've been brought up with.

Kate Perdon (03:47):
I think these experiences are often the exit
points people have in leadership, because they're like I'm not
cut out for it.
I really get taught how to doit.
And your story reminds me of atool in coaching and I know as a
fellow coach it's one thatyou'll probably be aware of and
it's the sailboat.
So this is the idea that youare the sailboat and you've got

(04:07):
a sail and you can have wind inyour sails and you've got a hull
, and is there a hole in yourhull?
And who's rowing your sailboat?
And there's a whole wonderfulmetaphor about a sailboat.
There's also the sailboatthat's in the water, and it's
the water that you're in and thewaves that crash through and
the ocean that you're in.
And I think a lot of peoplewill change jobs or change
industries, thinking there's aproblem with the ocean and the

(04:28):
water that I'm in, and oftenthat is the case.
But sometimes it's our boat andhow we're looking after it, and
we can put our boat in adifferent ocean, which can be.
You can go to a differentenvironment and then the same
stuff pops up, and I thinkthere's a good analogy of the
story that you shared, andsometimes the really confronting
part is to realise that it's inour control.

Liz Bradford (04:46):
That can be the really scary part, right I mean.
I've never heard that analogybefore, but it's a perfect one,
like it really does make sense,and I think obviously the more
senior roles that you're takingas well as you go on through
your leadership journey.
I don't know if you can stretchthe analogy this far, but you've
got other people in thatsailboat, so you also need to be
conscious of the environmentyou're creating for them,
because we filter that for otherpeople and the way in which we

(05:07):
show up is contagious.
If you just chuck it all in andbail, then other people are
likely to follow or think it'sjust too hard, whereas if you do
what sometimes is the harderwork of facing into the fact
that a lot of it is within yourcontrol, then actually it really
helps other people, and I thinkthat brings us back to the
point of it's good to be openand transparent about the
challenges you're having as aleader, because it means that

(05:28):
other people see that you don'thave to be invincible all the
time to do it, and that wereally are all human and that
it's something that we allstruggle with sometimes.

Kate Perdon (05:35):
Particularly how I learnt leadership, which was in
quite a masculine environment.
I didn't realise there wereother ways, and it was about
having the right answer and itwas about being tough.
A lot of my understanding ofwhat leadership was the ocean
that I was in.
I didn't realise that therewere different oceans, but that
also shaped the boat that I was.
Something else that I lovedabout your story when you talk

(05:55):
about burnout and how you've hadto change how you lead, you
also talk a bit about thattransformation.
We can change and transform aspeople, but we also have our
team, our company that changesand transforms, and I think what
everyone's experiencing at themoment is the environment around
us changing and transforming,and I know one of your areas of

(06:17):
expertise is all aroundtransformation.
I wonder if you could share alittle bit about leadership and
transformation, some of thethings that you've learned that
perhaps the rest of us might nothave to learn the hard way
because of your experiences.

Liz Bradford (06:30):
I've certainly learned some things the hard way
, and I'm very, very happy toshare on this.
So yeah, as you say, like mywhole job is transformation.
It's driving large scaletransformation programs and a
lot of the work I do at themoment is around to your point.
There are very key inflectionsat the moment around.
You've got Gen Z coming intothe workforce, you've got AI,
you've got big programs ofchange in a lot of organizations
where we are seeing them shift,shape and the way in which we

(06:52):
work as well.
I think one thing that I'velearned over the last 20 years
in financial services anddriving transformations, which
have typically been tech ones,is that actually it's much more
about the people.
So it's 20% the technologychange, it's 80% the cultural
change and if you don't focus atleast 80% of your time, energy,
resource, communication aroundthat cultural change, your

(07:15):
transformation will fail.
And it's really about havingthe courage to sometimes face
into a lot of those challengingconversations and be empathetic
and hold some of that discomfortfor other people that if you
don't learn how to do that andif you don't build your own
resilience up so that you can dothat, you will really struggle
to bring people along on thattransformation journey with you.
So I think a huge part of it isabout transparency and setting

(07:39):
a North Star that people aimtowards and explaining that
there is going to be ambiguityalong the way and that's okay to
feel very uncomfortable aboutthat.
That's what transformationfeels like.
No human likes change.
Some of us claim we do, but weonly really like change that
we're in control of.
So if you can set that NorthStar and say, look, some of this
is going to feel veryuncomfortable.
What we need to be able to dois have a dialogue about it all

(07:59):
times, and we need to be able towork through some of those
challenges together.
But this is where we're going.
People will be much more likelyto get behind and help with that
transformation and want to be apart of it and co create what
you're doing.
And I see this a lot at themoment in organizations.
If you stay silent because youare avoiding those tough
conversations or you wereavoiding the conflict, people
feel silence with the worstpossible outcome.

(08:20):
It's just human nature, and soyou create a lot of anxiety, you
remove psychological securityand you create an environment in
which people cannot do theirbest work.
So I think it's just veryimportant that we train our
leaders, that we support ourleaders as well in being able to
hold that discomfort and havethose conversations.

Kate Perdon (08:36):
Have you got any examples around like
transformation or difficultconversations, so people can get
a bit of like context or feel abit what it's like if they're
not used to it?

Liz Bradford (08:45):
So maybe if I touch on one very live one at
the moment which I think a lotof organizations are starting to
have, and that's aroundaugmentation with some of the
technologies that are coming.
So there's a lot of excitementon the one hand around things
like chat, gbt and AI, and thenthere's a lot of fear on the
other hand.
And if you look at what sellsmovies, you've got like Mission
Impossible saying that AI is theenemy, that kind of stuff.

(09:06):
But there's a lot of stuff inthe news around it'll replace
50%, 30%, 70%, depending onwhich day you're reading the
news of all jobs.
And until we get peoplecomfortable with how we
experiment with that and how webuild the future of work
together, people will be veryresistant.
It's just natural, and I thinkone of the conversations we're
certainly having at the momentwithin the firm that I work for

(09:27):
is that it isn't AI that's goingto replace your job.
It's the people that can use AIthat will replace your job or
your role.
So what we're trying to do iscreate capacity so that they can
retrain and learn those skills,but we do need them to then
want to and be motivated to dothat.
And the minute you say, createcapacity, people think cost cuts
, and so it's about forming thatcommon language with people and

(09:49):
it's about making sure thatpeople understand where you're
going with the whole piece andthe skillsets that are needed,
and that you are trying to setpeople up to be successful in
the future and to help youcreate the organization of
future.
Rather than they are a numberand they can be replaced, but
because there's so much silenceabout it in some firms at the
moment, then you see a lot ofattrition and you see a lot of
concern around.
Well, I'm just going to getreplaced by a machine.
Why have any loyalty to theorganization, kind of thing.

(10:11):
That's a very live example, Ithink, for a lot of firms at the
moment.
And then restructuringgenerally.
A lot of organizations arerestructuring across the whole
globe at the moment and you seesome very extreme examples like
Twitter, slash, x, slash,whatever it's called today, and
then where he's now having tobacktrack.
And then you see others whereit's just sort of death by 1000
cuts and people are never sureand I think from very personal

(10:32):
experience, those I have founddriving too many changes at once
can be a mistake.
So I would always advise bevery strategic about what you
can land and how much changeyour people can absorb at any
one point in time, and be veryclear in your communication
about why it's happening, whyyou are making very specific
changes and what happens then tothe people whose roles have
been removed or anything else,so that people know that you are

(10:55):
taking care of people asopposed to again.
It can be a bit easy to hidesometimes, especially when
you're feeling tired or burntout yourself, and it doesn't
help with the culture.
It doesn't create anenvironment in which people can
thrive.

Kate Perdon (11:06):
And I think it comes back to your point Any
lack of information.
Wherever there's a gap,people's minds go to worst case
scenario and they play out thatmovie and whether it is the case
or isn't the case it doesn'tmatter anymore, because they've
already made that movie andtherefore make decisions based
on it.
And your point about peopledon't like change unless they're
in control of it People feelingunsure or uncertain of what's

(11:27):
happening, or there's a lot ofchange in the company and they
don't have certainty around it.
One thing they can havecertainty of or control of is
changing a job.
No doubt they're going to be inthe same situation in the other
company, but they feel likethey had control over it.
And maybe it comes back to thesailboat and the ocean.
They're taking their sailboatinto the new ocean, but the
ocean is still full of water.

Liz Bradford (11:45):
I couldn't agree more, and there is something
that feels very empowering abouttaking that control, but I
think it's a very short livedtriumph.
And then, to your point, youfind you're just back in a very
similar ocean, same sailboat.

Kate Perdon (11:55):
Something, liz, that you do, that I would say
95% of people in leadershippositions and senior roles
within companies do, isovercommit.
And if I'm honest, that'sprobably how we got to the
positions that we did, becausewe took on more than what we
probably thought was possibleand just had some belief that
just keep on going and the moreyou achieve, the more you tend
to be given, and it justcontinues up to the point where

(12:17):
probably you burn out.
What have you learnt from yourown experiences of being a
serial overcommitter the good,the bad and the ugly?
Because I can tell you mypersonal overcommitment has got
me doing crazy things bothpersonally and professionally
that there's a small percentageof me that is so grateful that I
overcommit and do more.
I don't think things throughenough, otherwise I wouldn't do
it Half the things I do, and Ilove that.
I've had these greatexperiences.

(12:38):
But there's a point and findingthat point is a challenge for
me and I'm not sure if it'ssomething that you've managed to
find, but I feel like I've gota friend and you are an
overcommitter.

Liz Bradford (12:50):
I'm certainly an overcommitter and I think that
is very common in leaders.
I think it's also very commonin females, if I'm honest, not
really trained to say no anddon't really have that
conditioning, and I'm veryhypocritical on this.
So when I train clients or whenI'm talking to my people, I
always talk about the concept ofperiodic training and I have a
background as an enduranceathlete and with periodic

(13:12):
training you'll push yourselfright up to the point where you
can't go any further and thenyou have a rest period and then,
after that rest period, you canpush yourself to a new peak and
a new height because you'rebuilding muscle, you're building
mental agility, you're buildingendurance the whole time.
But that rest period is superimportant.
So the overcommitment or, toyour point, taking on something
that's that little bit more thanyou might if you really thought
about that, you might do thatcan be a positive thing, as long

(13:35):
as you then have the recoveryso that you recuperate, your
comfort zone starts to stretchand it gets wider so you can go
further and further outside it.
But if you don't have that,that's where you hit burnout and
that's what I have a tendencyto do, because I know I can
personally just keep going and Ihave maybe a little bit too
much of Angela Duckworth's grit.
That's fine if it's you as anindividual, because the fallout

(13:55):
is you and maybe the closerrelationships.
And I don't mean it's fine asin, it's okay, but that's a
limited fallout.
But when you're leading teamsand maybe that's 20 people, 200
people, 2000 people, 20,000people if you are over
committing on all of theirbehalf as well, then you will
reach a tipping point veryquickly whereby you start to
lose people and you lose yourfollowership.
They lose their self-confidencein themselves, they lose

(14:16):
confidence in the team and youare setting the whole team up
for failure and that's reallynot a great outcome.
So neither is a great outcome,but it's also being very
conscious of the boundarybetween your natural ability to
go yes, I'm going to do that andthen see if it happens, but
then doing that on behalf of theteam and being able to draw
boundaries on that one.

Kate Perdon (14:34):
I really like that analogy with being an endurance
athlete.
I'm like the 100-meter sprintat four shore.
It's only because I'm in andout, I'm off and then I'm
exhausted, and just also how Iwork, like all in sprints.
So this idea, taken fromendurance sport, had never
occurred to me to work inseasons, like a flower doesn't
season the whole year round, soyou've got to have gaps in

(14:55):
between.
But I think that is a wonderfulexample of stretch back,
stretch again.

Liz Bradford (15:00):
It's a super effective way of building
strength, whether that's in theway in which you work or any
other skill or any otherphysical strength.
But you have to remember thegap, you have to remember the
break, especially the last threeor four years.
We don't have breaks in the waywe used to, so even when we go
on leave, we take laptops orblackberries or our mobiles, and
in the evenings we have atendency to go home and then log

(15:20):
back on after dinner and afterstory time and everything else,
and so we're not recovering inthe way that we used to, and
that then becomes chronic andyou get chronically stressed and
then you really can't performat the level that you used to be
able to perform at.

Kate Perdon (15:32):
Absolutely true.
I love that idea.
I'm going to take that one onboard.
That's going to be my 1% fromtoday, or maybe I shouldn't pick
too quick or latency.
It's definitely a short runner.
If I think back, probablydecades ago, it was all about
the soft skills and we'relearning about emotional
intelligence and it kind of fellout of fashion and there's
always something new.
I'm curious to know, when youtalked about transformation

(15:54):
being 80% people, where doesemotional intelligence and
understanding of self fit intothe business context and
leadership context these days?

Liz Bradford (16:04):
It's absolutely fundamental to driving change,
and we are all driving changeall the time.
Now you don't get to stay withthe status quo anymore and I
think that the empathy side, theEQ side, of it is absolutely
critical if you want to bringpeople along with you.
And that's the thing aboutleadership.
There's no point saying I'm aleader if people aren't
following.
So, if they don't know that youare invested in them, if they

(16:26):
don't know that they are heard,if you're not investing the time
in genuinely understandingwhere people are coming from and
taking their world view andthen putting that into how you
do co-create where you're going,then they can't follow.
Why would they?
So I do think it's absolutelyfundamental.
I do also think and I've seenthis quite a lot before like IQ
will get you so far.
So being super smart, beingvery technical, will get people

(16:48):
so far.
But if you don't then learn theEQP, you will either burn
yourself out, or you'll burnyour credibility out, or you'll
burn your people out or, a worstcase, all three.
So you really do need tounderstand that generally we are
dealing with humans in what wedo Like our customers are humans
, our people are humans.
If you take that piece out, andthe term soft skills really
triggers me, so I apologize if Iflinched when you said it.

Kate Perdon (17:11):
I don't think I've said it in probably 10 years
myself.

Liz Bradford (17:14):
But they are so hard.
So soft skills is completely thewrong term, and the only reason
they're called soft skills isthey weren't mechanic skills,
and this was, I think, maybe40-50 years ago when they were
defined.
So it was an engineering termfor hard skills and soft skills,
but it just meant it wasn't amechanical skill.
But now we can train robots todo everything that's mechanical.
So they're not soft skills,they are human skills, and they

(17:36):
are what differentiates us, andthey're very often the hardest
ones to tap into, because youjust want to shut down,
especially if you've had a roughday or if you'd lack
self-awareness or you're havinga hard time.
So I do think that they areabsolutely fundamental to the
way in which we lead, and Ithink, whether it's
self-leadership andself-awareness or then engaging
with other people, you're notgoing to get very far unless you
can actually develop thoseskills, and they are skills that

(17:56):
can be honed over time as well.
So, as with anything, the moreyou practice, the more natural
it becomes, the better you getat it, and so it's important to
be quite conscious.
I think about that at times.

Kate Perdon (18:05):
Is that something that you feel that you've
learned along the way throughcertain education, through
mentors?
How did you learn these skills?

Liz Bradford (18:13):
So I learned them through coaching, and actually I
learned them from someonecoaching me, and it was the
first time I'd come into contactwith the coaching universe,
which was when I was on mytrajectory from my second
burnout, and I had a fantasticcoach in Australia and she
taught me about three pillars atthe time.
So you had the physicalwellbeing components so looking
after yourself physically, soyou could show up and invest

(18:34):
time in your mental wellbeingand your emotional awareness and
how you were engaging withothers, so self awareness.
And then how you're engagingand interacting with people.
And then your connectedwellbeing so how are you
contributing?
How are you interacting withwider groups?
What are you giving back?
How are you finding flow, thatkind of thing.
And so that's how I wasintroduced to the concepts and
then, being a bit of a nerd, Ithen deep dived into some of it

(18:57):
because the first bits worked.
So then I was like let's trythe rest, and that, for me,
definitely set my leadershipjourney on a different
trajectory.
So up until that point I wasdoing very well on the IQ point.
It was at a time when youbrought your work person to work
your work self, and then yourpersonal self was left at home,
like, god forbid, you were toshare that.
That's when I learned that,once you start to combine the
two, when you were much moreauthentic with people and don't

(19:19):
get me wrong, there areboundaries, I know that it can
go too far on that front.
But when you start to actuallyshow people who you are and
connect them on an individuallevel and get to know them, then
you can go so much further,both in your own personal
development but also as a team.
So it's really about how do youbuild your personal resilience?
but also how do you build yourorganizational resilience?
By creating those strongerconnections between people.

Kate Perdon (19:38):
And I think the fact you've had 1.5 burnouts and
you're still in the industrytells me that you've been
applying these skills as you'vegone along.

Liz Bradford (19:46):
Yeah, I'm not sure my team would tell you that.
Maybe I need to listen tomyself a little bit at the
moment, because it's thatyear-end piece.
Everyone's pushing super hardand they're like when are you
going to ease up?
So yeah, come Christmas time,but we'll calm down.

Kate Perdon (19:57):
Do you have favorite books or podcasts or
anything in the leadership spacethat you've found useful for
you?

Liz Bradford (20:04):
I read quite a mesh.
Mesh of stuff all the waybetween technical and I don't
know if we would call itselfhelp anymore but more around
self-development than everythingelse.
I'm a very big fan of AdamGrant's work and he's just
brought out a new book.
I'm a very big fan of BreneBrown's work as well, and the
whole piece around vulnerabilityreally was a game changer for
me back in 2014 or wherever itwas.
Again back to that concept oflike being yourself and the

(20:27):
courage it takes to do that, and, I think, anything podcast-wise
, I listen to quite a lot ofstuff around.
There's an Angela Duckworthpodcast that was the book on
grit asking you stupid questionsno such thing as dumb questions
.
And then I really actually likea podcast called Diary of a CEO
and he brings in a lot of verydifferent sort leaders and very
successful people.

(20:47):
That talks very much abouttheir journeys as individuals
and how they've gotten to thatpoint, and I think that's a
really nice way to get verydiverse perspectives around.
And it very often goes into howwe emotionally connect with
people, how we build resilienceand people who make it to the
top and realize actually wasthis it?
And then start resetting theirexpectations and realizing that,
the material stuff.

(21:07):
Yes, sure it's lovely, but it'snot why we're here and it
doesn't fulfill you.
So I find that quite a goodsort of level setter, and I'm
hiking with the dog in themorning.

Kate Perdon (21:15):
LESLIE KENDRICK A good reminder.
And I certainly was in thisspace as well, in the corporate
world, and it's everything thatyou are surrounded by, it's the
water that you're in and all thethings that you believed
success was, and the trajectorythat you're on and ticking
things off, and then getting tothe point where you've done all
the things you felt you weresupposed to, whether that was
career or personal or life, andthen still feeling this sense of

(21:38):
emptiness.
I'm wondering have I worked allto get here?

Liz Bradford (21:42):
and I've missed the point, leslie KENDRICK, it
happens so frequently and I seeit a lot in clients and I see a
lot in peers as well, and Ithink if we don't do the work
and it doesn't have to be a lotof work but if we don't do the
work to identify what reallymatters to us and our core
values and really what feelslike success to us, then we end
up living the lives that otherpeople design for us, whether

(22:04):
it's wittingly or unwittingly.
Leslie KENDRICK Consciously orunconsciously.

Kate Perdon (22:06):
I totally think a lot of people do it
unconsciously and it's only whenyou reach what you thought was
the finish line and you realiseit isn't the moment happens, and
I see it a lot with clients,and that's often when people
will come to me because they'reat a crossroads.
Do I throw it all in?
Is this what I want to do?
Why am I here?
And I know you wear twodifferent hats, probably many
different hats.
We've heard about that over acouple of years.

(22:27):
I've heard about it before.
Can you explain a little bitabout your two different hats to
give a bit of context?
Leslie.

Liz Bradford (22:33):
KENDRICK Sure, so my day job hat I work in
financial services, I work inbanking and I run a fairly large
team across Asia effectively inthe chief operations office.
So we're the ones that do allof the work that no one else
wants to do, and it's our job tomake sure everything runs and
stays running and runs fasterand you know nicer, quicker,
faster everything.
So that's where some of theovercommitment comes in, because
someone's like, yeah, of coursewe can fix that, of course we

(22:54):
can build that, of course we canchange that.
So, yeah, I'm the chiefoperating officer for North Asia
, and that hat.
And I've been doing bankingwork or in financial services
for 20 years.
And then about seven or eightyears ago, as a result of my own
personal transformation, gotvery heavily into personal
training and then intoorganizational development
coaching and executive coachingas well.
So my second hat is, as thefounder of Transform Perform,

(23:15):
based on diagnostics, I designorganizational coaching programs
to transform cultures.
So really, looking from theleadership all the way down
through organizational designprinciples into how do you
create the culture that alignswith the values, every company
has values they all are paintedon the wall but how do you make
that the DNA of your culture?
And how do you train yourleaders in EQ?
How do you train them inlistening as opposed to telling?

(23:38):
And then how do you create anenvironment where people are
very organically connected buthave a lot of psychological
security so that they canactually speak up and contribute
and feel that they are a partof where the organization is
going as well.
So that's the second hat andI'm very lucky that I'm allowed
to co-join the two and operatein that capacity within the bank
that I work as well.

Kate Perdon (23:57):
I think this links beautifully to the comments
before about authenticity andabout that leadership is an 80%
human Like.
20% is about strategy and likesetting the goals and the plans,
but it's the 80% that's humanand no matter where AI takes us
in the future, it will still be80% human because it will be 80%

(24:17):
managing AI.

Liz Bradford (24:19):
Absolutely.
I know that there's a lot ofscary titles out there and stuff
or headlines out there, but no,that's not going anywhere.
And until we learn how tofundamentally connect well as
humans and look after ourselvesand look after each other, then
you won't have a successfulculture.

Kate Perdon (24:32):
Is there anything else that you'd like to add, or
feel that if you could give alittle piece of wisdom about
leadership, perhaps for someonewho's feeling a bit uncertain at
the moment.

Liz Bradford (24:43):
So it's a bit of a cliche, but I think the thing I
always end up tapping back intois be the leader that you would
want to follow, whatever thatmight look like at the moment.
So, if someone's thinking oftapping out, or if someone needs
something, listen to yourself.
Understand what you need.
It might be that you need abreak, it might be that you do
need to change.
Whatever that may be, butlisten to yourself.
And then the other thing Iwould say and this maybe goes
back to your water analogysurround yourself with the

(25:06):
people that you aspire to belike as well.
So we all have energizers andthen energy vampires, and the
environment in which we're infundamentally changes the way in
which we operate, think, feel,respond.
So just try and shift,especially if you're feeling
drained and a lot of people areat this time of year and at this
point in the economic cycle andeverything else.
Surround yourself with thepeople that inspire you to be a

(25:27):
better version of yourself.

Kate Perdon (25:29):
Let it happen by osmosis.

Liz Bradford (25:30):
Sometimes we all need a little bit of osmosis.

Kate Perdon (25:33):
Thank you very much , liz.
I really loved that chat today,my pleasure.

Liz Bradford (25:37):
Thank you so much for having me.