In this episode of the "HR Mixtape," host Shari Simpson welcomes David Dilger, director and co-founder of Edge Legal, to discuss the critical topic of psychological safety in the workplace. David shares his extensive experience in employment law and HR, emphasizing the legal risks associated with employees feeling unsafe to speak up.
Listeners will learn about the importance of fostering a people-first approach in management, the biological factors influencing managers' fear of confrontation, and effective strategies for addressing performance issues while maintaining trust.
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding the legal risks of psychological safety, including workers' compensation and anti-discrimination claims.
- Practical strategies for managers to balance empathy and accountability in performance conversations.
- The significance of building trust within teams to enhance communication and overall workplace culture.
Tune in for valuable insights that can transform your approach to HR and management!
Guest(s): David Dilger, Director and Co-Founder, Edge Legal
Email: ddilger@edgelegal.com.au
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
You're listening to the HR Mixtape, your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel,
well, like work. Now, your host,
Joining me today is David Dilger, director and co-founder at Edge
Legal. David leads an Australia-based employment and safety law
(00:24):
firm, helping businesses navigate complex workplace challenges with
practical legal solutions. David,
We are very blessed to have you, because you are calling
in from Australia. It is very early where you're at,
(00:44):
so I have lots of appreciation for your country.
It is on my bucket list, as I was sharing a little bit offline, to see
before the end of time for me. So I'm so glad that you were able
I love it. Let's start with you maybe sharing a little bit about your
background. I think it's pretty fascinating, you know,
(01:09):
Yeah, so I started off as a lawyer, but I always was
fascinated with the HR, the employment and
safety side. So I did my early
time as a lawyer, then I went into an employer organisation
where we just provided employment, legal assistance just
to employers. Then I went into an HR
(01:32):
role. worked my way up into a couple of
those, moved into a CEO role, then
came back into an HR role and
then I I went into private practice again
and then I was an equity partner of
about a hundred employee type firm. And
(01:56):
then one of my business partners and I decided
to just create our own business. And our whole reason
for being was we wanted to work with managers.
to try and train them to be the types of managers we
would like our kids to work for. And we said, so
that's basically what EDGE does. We work predominantly with
(02:19):
HR managers, general counsel in bigger organizations, and
we got them through all the legal aspects of managing people.
I love that. And it's so needed. You know, every major
HR publication this year has continued to put leadership
development as one of the top priorities for 2025. So you're
(02:40):
definitely in that sweet spot of the work that needs
to be done. You know, I wanted to center our conversation
around psychological safety, but from a little bit of a different perspective than
I've talked about it before on the podcast. So let's start with this.
What are some of the legal risks that start to rise when
employees feel unsafe to speak up or share their concerns at
(03:03):
So your main legal risks of this, you get workers' compensation is
a big one, adverse action, anti-discrimination. You've
got your work health and safety laws generally, and
that's probably the area, particularly in Australia, where
most of the prosecutions come from. Breach of contract, unfair
dismissal, privacy laws, and bullying. Throw
(03:26):
all of that, and then you've got what you call your respective work changes,
which are things like sexual harassment, sex-based harassment,
victimization, sex discrimination, and hostile work
environment. It's just a plethora of
types of legal risks that you can just sort of intermingle, and
so what we find is Managers
(03:50):
get really worried about the broad types
of claims that could be made against them without
really realising that the fix is
with them and they can actually minimise their
risk by just managing their people with a people-first approach.
(04:11):
I've seen this before when I've talked to managers about
somebody who's having a performance problem. And they typically,
in those conversations, have gone down a very stringent,
authoritative route in their communications with those employees. And
sometimes it leaves the employee feeling like, man, I
(04:31):
can't be honest, I can't have a tough conversation, I can't ask
questions necessarily. How have you helped managers find
that sweet spot where they can still be a genuine human
being, have genuine empathy, but also protect themselves,
right? Because ultimately we don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we
become too friendly, you know, and
(04:56):
Yeah, good rule of thumb, be friendly, not friends. And
Brene Brown said it best when she said clear is kind, unclear
is unkind. So what we've found, I
understand what managers say, right? They say all
of the hyperbole around, you know, nasty
(05:18):
boss got this, a nasty boss. The biggest
sort of claim I tend to see in my job, and I do this
full time, it's avoidance management that is
your biggest risk. So it's managers not managing
the problem. Don't worry so much about overstepping. your
biggest risk is your avoidance. And
(05:41):
so I have four main principles. I always go, try
and characterize most of your behavioral issues as
performance. What we tend to say is managers look
for the silver bullet. And that is they try and go for
a misconduct, which is a breach of your policies, a
breach of the contract, breach of your enterprise agreement, all these breaches.
(06:03):
And what that does is it says, I'm looking for an easy win
to solve this problem. Whereas if
you characterize most issues as behavioral and
as performance, what you're saying as a manager is, hey,
this is a slippage issue. You are here. I need to
get you to here. And I'm the person that can
(06:24):
get you there. Right. And so what we
talk about is we're in it together. And we're going to solve this
problem and it is solvable. Then the second principle
is balancing what I call get on your seesaw of
competency and care. And what that means is
the law of itself actually takes
(06:45):
that into consideration. So sometimes you may be
dealing with exactly the same issue. Person
does a safety breach, one of them is
25 years old, been there for three years, done all the training. The
other one is a 65-year-old veteran, English as
a second language, four dependent kids, and a
(07:07):
very sick wife in hospital or something like that. Now
the issue there is when people come in and go, you've got to
do everything exactly the same. Now the law says, no,
you balance the competency and the care. For one of
them, you're going to slip into your sort of your seesaw and go
really heavy on that care side first. and
(07:28):
actually look at that, whereas the other one, you're going, no, no, there
are no other issues that I need to be aware of. You
treat those two scenarios exactly
the same, and you are lining yourself up for some
type of action. And I sort of gave you
the list of where it will come from. So that's
(07:49):
the second one. The third one is always focus
on reasonable management action in a reasonable manner. Now,
again, Most people go, oh, too
many legal words. No, it's not. It's judging the circumstances
that you're in, and it's generally not what you do. It's how
you do it. So you're absolutely allowed to
(08:12):
call out behavior. You're absolutely allowed to call out poor
performance. It's just that we just don't want the yelling, the shouting,
the name-calling, and all that that goes with it. And then finally,
when considering termination, always show cause people,
and that is build it up into one good piece of
documented, consolidated type of letter, and
(08:34):
give that person the opportunity to respond. Nobody
likes a surprise termination. Now, ultimately,
you might think, oh, they deserve it. I'm not so
worried about them. I'm worried about the message it sends to everyone
else, that then what they tend to do is go,
oh, I might be next. And a great guy
(08:57):
out of Stanford Uni, Bob Sutton, says
this, your team is watching you eight more times
than you think they are, right? So when you're being nasty, when
you're being obnoxiously aggressive, you
are basically undermining you
(09:20):
Those are such good four points. I feel like
we could spend a podcast on each one of them in-depthly. So
I really was taking notes as you were talking. So hopefully our
listeners are doing the same thing. How do you, how do
you think managers end up at the spot where they
are so adverse to that You
(09:42):
know, I've run into this many times in coaching managers, and
I'm sure those listening have run into the same scenario where you
have a manager that comes to you and says, Hey, I'm having this performance concern. I
need to terminate this person. And then you're like, Okay, well, tell me about the
conversations you've had. Well, they're like, they should know what they need
to do. Okay, show me the documentation. Well, I sent them an email six months
(10:02):
ago that said they needed to do this, and they haven't done it since.
There is such a fear of confrontation. Why
do you think that's happening? And then as a follow-up, how do we get them
All right, so firstly, there's
something biologically going on here, right? We
(10:23):
all do it. In your brain, you've got a couple of great
little things that are happening. You've got your frontal cortex does
heaps of rational higher order thinking. You've
got your thalamus, kind of like a trio centre, which takes
in all the information from your senses. And
then you've got this great little thing called the amygdala, right? And
(10:43):
the amygdala is what got us here today. It
got you here today, got everyone here. It senses
risk. Now, the problem with that is
when your amygdala fires, it's
not rational. It just senses danger. So
when you're hearing all those stories about, oh, they might make a
(11:04):
claim or people won't like me, that's your amygdala taking
over. And when your amygdala takes over, it gives you four
main responses, fight, flight, freeze, or
form. So some managers come out fighting, okay, I'm
going to take you on. I'm going to tell you your fortune. Some
managers do the flight, and that's the avoidance. I
(11:25):
run away. I hope it doesn't come back. I just don't talk
about it. Some people go into freeze, which is the play dead
mentality, and that is, we just won't even
raise this issue and then other people fawn and
fawning is I'm just going to be overly nice to you and that's what
Scott in a great book Radical
(11:49):
Candid talks about ruinous empathy right and
so I'm just so nice to you because I'm scared you might
make a claim. Now when all of that's happening your logical your
prefrontal cortex isn't operating, so
you're missing out on all of your EQ,
your rational thinking, and really all
(12:11):
you need to be doing is managing that person. Now,
I've got a seven-point plan that I
say every manager should know this. Once you know this,
you could manage absolutely any employee, from
neurodivergent to your A-grade student,
to your long-termer, to your new starter,
(12:34):
to any of those. That is, you have to know, when
are you at your best? When do you shine? When are
you in flow? What are you good at, right? And
are you fulfilled by that? Because lots of people like
a good at something, but it's actually not fulfilling. And that can be a
problem. And the other one is reverse it. What actually
(12:55):
fulfills you? And then are you good at it? Because there's
plenty of people who go and I'll give you a
good example. I love playing acoustic guitar and
singing typically 90s Australiana. It
fulfills me. My wife and kids would say I'm
not that good at it. Right. I like it. Right. So
(13:17):
then we've got to know what are the practices and preferences that
works for us? Do you want me to email you? Do you want
me just to come in? Do you want me to not give you the five o'clock
Friday? Or do you want me to wait to the end of the day? Do you want me to send
it all to you on email so you can have a look at it? Or do you
just want to barge in and say, hey, Shari, we're going to talk like
(13:38):
everyone will have that that position. Now with
that, you're also dealing with someone who
equally has an amygdala and when you come in
and you get the wrong mechanics, the practices, the
preferences, their amygdala fires and then you're going to get
one of those responses. Then the fifth one is I want to
(13:58):
know when you've been successful in a past relationship
and how does that help? How are you a part
of that? And then finally, tell me about a
past relationship that didn't work, and what was your part in
it? Because everyone can say, I had a terrible boss, but
I want to know, well, what were you doing with that?
(14:20):
Because there's got to be a bit of self-responsibility with that. And
then the final one, which probably covers it all anyway, is, hey,
if this thing breaks, how do we fix it? And so we
work out in advance so that when
we're having that fixing discussion, no
one's going, how did we get here? What's this all about? We
(14:41):
know this was coming. We've talked about it. And that
will calm your amygdala down, will allow you to
get what Dan Siegel talks about of
that optimal zone, where you're
not over-regulated or under-regulated, and your prefrontal cortex,
you're actually the smart person of yourself there. Your
(15:02):
amygdala's not giving you the four responses. It's actually going, hey,
David, work your way through this. Logically, we
There was so much value there. I have
heard that conversation around the different parts
of your brain and how you're reacting and how the amygdala can influence
(15:25):
you so much. And I think it's why there has been
so much focus, especially in the HR space, about mindfulness
practice and those types of things to help get you in the right mindset.
But I love your seven step approach. I think that provides the
landscape for managers to really think about how they're showing up. Let's
say that you have gone through some of the training that you've
(15:47):
done. You're using the seven step approach. You're bringing
psychological safety to your organization. But you have an
employee who you can tell is abusing that
relationship. I'm kind
of flipping the script there. How do we handle those employees? Because we
(16:08):
Yeah, look, the whole thing, and I'll give you
a great, great, great quote from Bob Sutton again,
who I just love. They asked him, hey, if
you could just have one rule to manage your
whole team, what would it be? And he said, no, it's false,
right? And Bob Sutton did some great
(16:30):
research and he said, here's what happens. You
get used to that toxic employee, that toxic rock
star. And he said, what will happen is you kind of
get addicted to what they deliver, because they're probably
hitting their KPIs, but guess what? their behaviour
is completely non-aligned to what we're trying
(16:53):
to do. And then what will happen is all of the performance
will plateau and you'll never be able to reach higher
performance from there. Then he says this, the
organisations who took the courage to terminate that
employee, and I'm saying you do it fairly, and
it's built up with a long series of conversations and
(17:15):
notes and stuff, and I'll come back to the notes in a minute, But
then he said, you'll actually take a little dip. And
he said, and in that situation, you as the manager is going to go, oh
no, I've made a mistake. He said, but hey, stay
the course, because he said the metadata shows that
once you get over that, like the stock market,
(17:36):
your performance will rise above its previous high. And
you'll look back and go, you know what? thought of,
you know, remove that toxic rock star earlier, here's all
the performance I missed out on, because your team will level
up and reach their true potential. So it's a hard
one. But when you look at the data, you're going, that's what
(17:57):
I need to do. Now, in that, I also say
this, Don't over worry
about beautifully written letters and
people telling you, particularly big law firms
are saying, oh, you've got to have all these things that you don't. I've
spent a lot of time in courtrooms dealing with this. And
(18:19):
what the commissioner or the judge really wants to
see is authentic discussions going
on. So things like notes in a daybook, a
long email train, just where you're responding. Write
a note on a napkin and take a picture of it, right? Send yourself an
email. They are the things that actually demonstrate, hey,
(18:43):
I just didn't wake up one day and go, you had
to go. This will be no surprise. And we talked about
that earlier. That is, we've talked about your
behavioural expectations. And I say, when you're working out
whether you're going to keep someone or not, Ask
yourself first, is this a skill or is this a real issue? Are they
(19:04):
just deliberately doing it or are they just not
up to where we need them to be? Ask yourself, am
I maintaining the organizational standards? Because, hey,
here's an inconvenient truth for you. You get the
culture you deserve. So what I mean by that
is the stuff that you let go on and on, might
(19:27):
be the eye rolling, might be the tut-tutting in
a meeting, that then escalates and it says,
this is what I will accept, okay? Then what
you get to is, can we move you,
scaffold you, right? Are there any options that
we can take your really good points and scaffold those
(19:50):
weaknesses somewhere else? And if you can't, If
you've looked at all of those, the only
And if you're doing it right, like you said, it shouldn't be a
surprise to that employee by the time you get to that point. It
should be a much, much easier conversation that's more
(20:11):
about how do we help you transition out of the organization rather
Yeah, if you want. I mean, generally, if
you do this well, there's a meeting of the minds that this just
isn't working. And what it'll actually show the
individual is they go, you know, the best way out,
(20:32):
because everyone will default to their self-interest. The best way
out of here is sort of that inglorious resignation where
You know, I get to say, hey, I'm leaving. And you get
to say, hey, thanks for your time, Shari. And, you
know, let's have a morning tea. And everyone just sails
(20:53):
I love that. You know, as we wrap up our conversation, I'm
curious what your advice is to HR professionals who want to
start making this transition in their organizations to be having more
honest and forthright conversations about psychological safety. Where
do they start? What's the one nugget that they should walk away from this conversation to
(21:14):
Okay, so the one nugget comes from Amy
Cuddy in her fantastic book, Presence, right? And
she basically is trying to work out, you know, why
does good stuff happen? And she
first thinks, is it all based on competence? Because she's going,
theoretically, the smartest people, your top five in
(21:37):
your class should go on and do this really well. She
said, that's just not the case. Humans are a little bit different
to that. And she said, the number one thing you have to
have before people can utilize your
competence is trust. And if they don't
trust you, it doesn't matter how good you are, what your
(21:58):
title is, what training you've done, none of it will
work. And here's the ultimate elevator
test, right? To work out when people go, well, how
do we measure trust, David? Because I get it. It's a nebulous concept. But
I put it down to this. If I say, go
into a room and I go, hey, Shari, come
(22:19):
into my office right now. Now ask the rest of
the team what they think. If they all go, ooh, Shari's
in trouble. You haven't got trust. If they go, what's
happened with Shari? And they go, she's just with her manager. I don't
know what they're talking about. Probably, you know, could be
anything from the latest stats, could be anything from, you
(22:41):
know, the end of year function. That's the test. That's
when people go, a manager and
the employee can have conversations as it
should be. And if you're not there, then it doesn't
matter what type of competence or how smart you
(23:01):
David, such good advice. Thank you for taking
some time out of your early morning to sit down and chat with me
about this really important topic. And if you
want to get in touch with David, I'm going to put all of his details in
the show notes, including email, website links, and
Thanks for having me. I
(23:25):
You can find show notes and links at thehrmixtape.com. Come
You're listening to the HR Mixtape, your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel,
well, like work. Now, your host,
Joining me today is David Dilger, director and co-founder at Edge
Legal. David leads an Australia-based employment and safety law
(00:24):
firm, helping businesses navigate complex workplace challenges with
practical legal solutions. David,
We are very blessed to have you, because you are calling
in from Australia. It is very early where you're at,
(00:44):
so I have lots of appreciation for your country.
It is on my bucket list, as I was sharing a little bit offline, to see
before the end of time for me. So I'm so glad that you were able
I love it. Let's start with you maybe sharing a little bit about your
background. I think it's pretty fascinating, you know,
(01:09):
Yeah, so I started off as a lawyer, but I always was
fascinated with the HR, the employment and
safety side. So I did my early
time as a lawyer, then I went into an employer organisation
where we just provided employment, legal assistance just
to employers. Then I went into an HR
(01:32):
role. worked my way up into a couple of
those, moved into a CEO role, then
came back into an HR role and
then I I went into private practice again
and then I was an equity partner of
about a hundred employee type firm. And
(01:56):
then one of my business partners and I decided
to just create our own business. And our whole reason
for being was we wanted to work with managers.
to try and train them to be the types of managers we
would like our kids to work for. And we said, so
that's basically what EDGE does. We work predominantly with
(02:19):
HR managers, general counsel in bigger organizations, and
we got them through all the legal aspects of managing people.
I love that. And it's so needed. You know, every major
HR publication this year has continued to put leadership
development as one of the top priorities for 2025. So you're
(02:40):
definitely in that sweet spot of the work that needs
to be done. You know, I wanted to center our conversation
around psychological safety, but from a little bit of a different perspective than
I've talked about it before on the podcast. So let's start with this.
What are some of the legal risks that start to rise when
employees feel unsafe to speak up or share their concerns at
(03:03):
So your main legal risks of this, you get workers' compensation is
a big one, adverse action, anti-discrimination. You've
got your work health and safety laws generally, and
that's probably the area, particularly in Australia, where
most of the prosecutions come from. Breach of contract, unfair
dismissal, privacy laws, and bullying. Throw
(03:26):
all of that, and then you've got what you call your respective work changes,
which are things like sexual harassment, sex-based harassment,
victimization, sex discrimination, and hostile work
environment. It's just a plethora of
types of legal risks that you can just sort of intermingle, and
so what we find is Managers
(03:50):
get really worried about the broad types
of claims that could be made against them without
really realising that the fix is
with them and they can actually minimise their
risk by just managing their people with a people-first approach.
(04:11):
I've seen this before when I've talked to managers about
somebody who's having a performance problem. And they typically,
in those conversations, have gone down a very stringent,
authoritative route in their communications with those employees. And
sometimes it leaves the employee feeling like, man, I
(04:31):
can't be honest, I can't have a tough conversation, I can't ask
questions necessarily. How have you helped managers find
that sweet spot where they can still be a genuine human
being, have genuine empathy, but also protect themselves,
right? Because ultimately we don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we
become too friendly, you know, and
(04:56):
Yeah, good rule of thumb, be friendly, not friends. And
Brene Brown said it best when she said clear is kind, unclear
is unkind. So what we've found, I
understand what managers say, right? They say all
of the hyperbole around, you know, nasty
(05:18):
boss got this, a nasty boss. The biggest
sort of claim I tend to see in my job, and I do this
full time, it's avoidance management that is
your biggest risk. So it's managers not managing
the problem. Don't worry so much about overstepping. your
biggest risk is your avoidance. And
(05:41):
so I have four main principles. I always go, try
and characterize most of your behavioral issues as
performance. What we tend to say is managers look
for the silver bullet. And that is they try and go for
a misconduct, which is a breach of your policies, a
breach of the contract, breach of your enterprise agreement, all these breaches.
(06:03):
And what that does is it says, I'm looking for an easy win
to solve this problem. Whereas if
you characterize most issues as behavioral and
as performance, what you're saying as a manager is, hey,
this is a slippage issue. You are here. I need to
get you to here. And I'm the person that can
(06:24):
get you there. Right. And so what we
talk about is we're in it together. And we're going to solve this
problem and it is solvable. Then the second principle
is balancing what I call get on your seesaw of
competency and care. And what that means is
the law of itself actually takes
(06:45):
that into consideration. So sometimes you may be
dealing with exactly the same issue. Person
does a safety breach, one of them is
25 years old, been there for three years, done all the training. The
other one is a 65-year-old veteran, English as
a second language, four dependent kids, and a
(07:07):
very sick wife in hospital or something like that. Now
the issue there is when people come in and go, you've got to
do everything exactly the same. Now the law says, no,
you balance the competency and the care. For one of
them, you're going to slip into your sort of your seesaw and go
really heavy on that care side first. and
(07:28):
actually look at that, whereas the other one, you're going, no, no, there
are no other issues that I need to be aware of. You
treat those two scenarios exactly
the same, and you are lining yourself up for some
type of action. And I sort of gave you
the list of where it will come from. So that's
(07:49):
the second one. The third one is always focus
on reasonable management action in a reasonable manner. Now,
again, Most people go, oh, too
many legal words. No, it's not. It's judging the circumstances
that you're in, and it's generally not what you do. It's how
you do it. So you're absolutely allowed to
(08:12):
call out behavior. You're absolutely allowed to call out poor
performance. It's just that we just don't want the yelling, the shouting,
the name-calling, and all that that goes with it. And then finally,
when considering termination, always show cause people,
and that is build it up into one good piece of
documented, consolidated type of letter, and
(08:34):
give that person the opportunity to respond. Nobody
likes a surprise termination. Now, ultimately,
you might think, oh, they deserve it. I'm not so
worried about them. I'm worried about the message it sends to everyone
else, that then what they tend to do is go,
oh, I might be next. And a great guy
(08:57):
out of Stanford Uni, Bob Sutton, says
this, your team is watching you eight more times
than you think they are, right? So when you're being nasty, when
you're being obnoxiously aggressive, you
are basically undermining you
(09:20):
Those are such good four points. I feel like
we could spend a podcast on each one of them in-depthly. So
I really was taking notes as you were talking. So hopefully our
listeners are doing the same thing. How do you, how do
you think managers end up at the spot where they
are so adverse to that You
(09:42):
know, I've run into this many times in coaching managers, and
I'm sure those listening have run into the same scenario where you
have a manager that comes to you and says, Hey, I'm having this performance concern. I
need to terminate this person. And then you're like, Okay, well, tell me about the
conversations you've had. Well, they're like, they should know what they need
to do. Okay, show me the documentation. Well, I sent them an email six months
(10:02):
ago that said they needed to do this, and they haven't done it since.
There is such a fear of confrontation. Why
do you think that's happening? And then as a follow-up, how do we get them
All right, so firstly, there's
something biologically going on here, right? We
(10:23):
all do it. In your brain, you've got a couple of great
little things that are happening. You've got your frontal cortex does
heaps of rational higher order thinking. You've
got your thalamus, kind of like a trio centre, which takes
in all the information from your senses. And
then you've got this great little thing called the amygdala, right? And
(10:43):
the amygdala is what got us here today. It
got you here today, got everyone here. It senses
risk. Now, the problem with that is
when your amygdala fires, it's
not rational. It just senses danger. So
when you're hearing all those stories about, oh, they might make a
(11:04):
claim or people won't like me, that's your amygdala taking
over. And when your amygdala takes over, it gives you four
main responses, fight, flight, freeze, or
form. So some managers come out fighting, okay, I'm
going to take you on. I'm going to tell you your fortune. Some
managers do the flight, and that's the avoidance. I
(11:25):
run away. I hope it doesn't come back. I just don't talk
about it. Some people go into freeze, which is the play dead
mentality, and that is, we just won't even
raise this issue and then other people fawn and
fawning is I'm just going to be overly nice to you and that's what
Scott in a great book Radical
(11:49):
Candid talks about ruinous empathy right and
so I'm just so nice to you because I'm scared you might
make a claim. Now when all of that's happening your logical your
prefrontal cortex isn't operating, so
you're missing out on all of your EQ,
your rational thinking, and really all
(12:11):
you need to be doing is managing that person. Now,
I've got a seven-point plan that I
say every manager should know this. Once you know this,
you could manage absolutely any employee, from
neurodivergent to your A-grade student,
to your long-termer, to your new starter,
(12:34):
to any of those. That is, you have to know, when
are you at your best? When do you shine? When are
you in flow? What are you good at, right? And
are you fulfilled by that? Because lots of people like
a good at something, but it's actually not fulfilling. And that can be a
problem. And the other one is reverse it. What actually
(12:55):
fulfills you? And then are you good at it? Because there's
plenty of people who go and I'll give you a
good example. I love playing acoustic guitar and
singing typically 90s Australiana. It
fulfills me. My wife and kids would say I'm
not that good at it. Right. I like it. Right. So
(13:17):
then we've got to know what are the practices and preferences that
works for us? Do you want me to email you? Do you want
me just to come in? Do you want me to not give you the five o'clock
Friday? Or do you want me to wait to the end of the day? Do you want me to send
it all to you on email so you can have a look at it? Or do you
just want to barge in and say, hey, Shari, we're going to talk like
(13:38):
everyone will have that that position. Now with
that, you're also dealing with someone who
equally has an amygdala and when you come in
and you get the wrong mechanics, the practices, the
preferences, their amygdala fires and then you're going to get
one of those responses. Then the fifth one is I want to
(13:58):
know when you've been successful in a past relationship
and how does that help? How are you a part
of that? And then finally, tell me about a
past relationship that didn't work, and what was your part in
it? Because everyone can say, I had a terrible boss, but
I want to know, well, what were you doing with that?
(14:20):
Because there's got to be a bit of self-responsibility with that. And
then the final one, which probably covers it all anyway, is, hey,
if this thing breaks, how do we fix it? And so we
work out in advance so that when
we're having that fixing discussion, no
one's going, how did we get here? What's this all about? We
(14:41):
know this was coming. We've talked about it. And that
will calm your amygdala down, will allow you to
get what Dan Siegel talks about of
that optimal zone, where you're
not over-regulated or under-regulated, and your prefrontal cortex,
you're actually the smart person of yourself there. Your
(15:02):
amygdala's not giving you the four responses. It's actually going, hey,
David, work your way through this. Logically, we
There was so much value there. I have
heard that conversation around the different parts
of your brain and how you're reacting and how the amygdala can influence
(15:25):
you so much. And I think it's why there has been
so much focus, especially in the HR space, about mindfulness
practice and those types of things to help get you in the right mindset.
But I love your seven step approach. I think that provides the
landscape for managers to really think about how they're showing up. Let's
say that you have gone through some of the training that you've
(15:47):
done. You're using the seven step approach. You're bringing
psychological safety to your organization. But you have an
employee who you can tell is abusing that
relationship. I'm kind
of flipping the script there. How do we handle those employees? Because we
(16:08):
Yeah, look, the whole thing, and I'll give you
a great, great, great quote from Bob Sutton again,
who I just love. They asked him, hey, if
you could just have one rule to manage your
whole team, what would it be? And he said, no, it's false,
right? And Bob Sutton did some great
(16:30):
research and he said, here's what happens. You
get used to that toxic employee, that toxic rock
star. And he said, what will happen is you kind of
get addicted to what they deliver, because they're probably
hitting their KPIs, but guess what? their behaviour
is completely non-aligned to what we're trying
(16:53):
to do. And then what will happen is all of the performance
will plateau and you'll never be able to reach higher
performance from there. Then he says this, the
organisations who took the courage to terminate that
employee, and I'm saying you do it fairly, and
it's built up with a long series of conversations and
(17:15):
notes and stuff, and I'll come back to the notes in a minute, But
then he said, you'll actually take a little dip. And
he said, and in that situation, you as the manager is going to go, oh
no, I've made a mistake. He said, but hey, stay
the course, because he said the metadata shows that
once you get over that, like the stock market,
(17:36):
your performance will rise above its previous high. And
you'll look back and go, you know what? thought of,
you know, remove that toxic rock star earlier, here's all
the performance I missed out on, because your team will level
up and reach their true potential. So it's a hard
one. But when you look at the data, you're going, that's what
(17:57):
I need to do. Now, in that, I also say
this, Don't over worry
about beautifully written letters and
people telling you, particularly big law firms
are saying, oh, you've got to have all these things that you don't. I've
spent a lot of time in courtrooms dealing with this. And
(18:19):
what the commissioner or the judge really wants to
see is authentic discussions going
on. So things like notes in a daybook, a
long email train, just where you're responding. Write
a note on a napkin and take a picture of it, right? Send yourself an
email. They are the things that actually demonstrate, hey,
(18:43):
I just didn't wake up one day and go, you had
to go. This will be no surprise. And we talked about
that earlier. That is, we've talked about your
behavioural expectations. And I say, when you're working out
whether you're going to keep someone or not, Ask
yourself first, is this a skill or is this a real issue? Are they
(19:04):
just deliberately doing it or are they just not
up to where we need them to be? Ask yourself, am
I maintaining the organizational standards? Because, hey,
here's an inconvenient truth for you. You get the
culture you deserve. So what I mean by that
is the stuff that you let go on and on, might
(19:27):
be the eye rolling, might be the tut-tutting in
a meeting, that then escalates and it says,
this is what I will accept, okay? Then what
you get to is, can we move you,
scaffold you, right? Are there any options that
we can take your really good points and scaffold those
(19:50):
weaknesses somewhere else? And if you can't, If
you've looked at all of those, the only
And if you're doing it right, like you said, it shouldn't be a
surprise to that employee by the time you get to that point. It
should be a much, much easier conversation that's more
(20:11):
about how do we help you transition out of the organization rather
Yeah, if you want. I mean, generally, if
you do this well, there's a meeting of the minds that this just
isn't working. And what it'll actually show the
individual is they go, you know, the best way out,
(20:32):
because everyone will default to their self-interest. The best way
out of here is sort of that inglorious resignation where
You know, I get to say, hey, I'm leaving. And you get
to say, hey, thanks for your time, Shari. And, you
know, let's have a morning tea. And everyone just sails
(20:53):
I love that. You know, as we wrap up our conversation, I'm
curious what your advice is to HR professionals who want to
start making this transition in their organizations to be having more
honest and forthright conversations about psychological safety. Where
do they start? What's the one nugget that they should walk away from this conversation to
(21:14):
Okay, so the one nugget comes from Amy
Cuddy in her fantastic book, Presence, right? And
she basically is trying to work out, you know, why
does good stuff happen? And she
first thinks, is it all based on competence? Because she's going,
theoretically, the smartest people, your top five in
(21:37):
your class should go on and do this really well. She
said, that's just not the case. Humans are a little bit different
to that. And she said, the number one thing you have to
have before people can utilize your
competence is trust. And if they don't
trust you, it doesn't matter how good you are, what your
(21:58):
title is, what training you've done, none of it will
work. And here's the ultimate elevator
test, right? To work out when people go, well, how
do we measure trust, David? Because I get it. It's a nebulous concept. But
I put it down to this. If I say, go
into a room and I go, hey, Shari, come
(22:19):
into my office right now. Now ask the rest of
the team what they think. If they all go, ooh, Shari's
in trouble. You haven't got trust. If they go, what's
happened with Shari? And they go, she's just with her manager. I don't
know what they're talking about. Probably, you know, could be
anything from the latest stats, could be anything from, you
(22:41):
know, the end of year function. That's the test. That's
when people go, a manager and
the employee can have conversations as it
should be. And if you're not there, then it doesn't
matter what type of competence or how smart you
(23:01):
David, such good advice. Thank you for taking
some time out of your early morning to sit down and chat with me
about this really important topic. And if you
want to get in touch with David, I'm going to put all of his details in
the show notes, including email, website links, and
Thanks for having me. I
(23:25):
You can find show notes and links at thehrmixtape.com. Come
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