Leadership BITES

Wendy Addison, Corporate Whistle Blowing

December 07, 2020 Guy Bloom Season 1 Episode 34
Leadership BITES
Wendy Addison, Corporate Whistle Blowing
Show Notes Transcript

Wendy Addison's act of reporting corruption at LeisureNet Ltd in South Africa in 2000 began one of the biggest corporate disasters in South African history.  Standing up for her principles and values, Wendy showed courage and a willingness to endure danger and the potential of losing both her livelihood and life, by taking a moral stand against bribery and corruption.

She was ousted as a whistleblower.  On one side were the wrongdoers, still with the credibility and authority of their positions and a wealth of resources behind them. On the other side Wendy was discredited in the public's eyes, unemployed, unemployable (because of the notoriety of the case), running out of money, receiving death threats and having lost the support of friends and family. 

Wendy's story is one of courage and endurance, of hope and justice. It covers ambition, corporate greed and skulduggery, telling the truth and alienation from a society that misguidedly applauds coveted wealth. It's about how life can dramatically shift from success to begging on the streets of London without warning.

The players in her story are many and varied: from the corporate world to the judiciary, governments and the UN.  

Wendy's battle has been for what's 'right' and along the way she has exposed much of what is 'wrong' in the world. It's about Truth or Dare or rather 'Daring to tell the truth.

Wendy is a critical thinker and a powerful speaker with fresh insights that both entertain and inspire.

She has spoken to thousands of people across three continents with past engagements including Tedx Tokyo, the United Success Women's Entrepreneurial Symposium in Amsterdam, the CFA Institute's Annual Travelling Conference in Africa and Mauritius as well as numerous corporate speaking engagements and university lectures.


To find out more about Guy Bloom and his award winning work in Team Coaching, Leadership Development and Executive Coaching click below.

The link to everything CLICK HERE
UK:
07827 953814
Email: guybloom@livingbrave.com
Web: www.livingbrave.com

well the thing is you see when with all this technology and all that i'm just i'm just about knowledgeable enough to do it but i'm on the edge of my competence you know so i have to just be very careful what i do guy i don't think you're alone there i think most of us operate in that sort of fuzzy gray area especially i'm a hell of a lot better at it than a lot of other people but not half as good at it as i'd like to be you know me too yeah yeah yeah it suffices for me it really is so on that note i'm gonna i'm gonna get us going wendy okay cool great so wendy it's fantastic to have you on this episode of leadership bites welcome thank you guy it's awesome to be here and i look forward to us rifting away i know well we've said we'll we'll rift and and and see where it takes us but i've done a little intro i always say that when i when i start these things and uh so obviously i know who you are i've just introduced you to the audience but it would be great just to get a sense of what it is that you do what it is that your inverted comma's known for by those that know you and then we'll kind of kick it off from there awesome okay well thanks for that um i think um i want to start with my company which i created in 2012 it's called speak out speak up and um the purpose of the company really um comes out of my own whistleblowing experience so i think in a very public way people might know me as the whistleblower for the biggest corporate collapse in south africa's history which is also known as south africa's enron and after i secured justice in in that particular case it took me 11 years by the way and i had this burning curiosity so a bit like you guy where my curiosity is one of the behaviors that ignites me to drive forward and i really had some burning questions around about what the hell just happened how come it's so difficult to speak up to abuses of power how come it's so difficult for power to listen up to a subordinate speaking truth and what is it about the human condition that we close we close ranks against this person speaking truth to power and that set me up on a journey uh where i started engaging with eminent social scientists around the world i was sponsored to go to berkeley in the states and then to stanford and out of that i then created speak out speak up and the primary purpose there is not advocacy for whistleblowing because it's a treacherous journey it's incredibly obvious and it is harmful for both the individual speaking up but also for the organization even though the person has good intentions about speaking up in the public interest there are very natural psychological conflicts that invoke people's uh default to shut people down because it's done in secret when you're whistle blowing you do it anonymously most of the time and so really from my studies and my experience i want to train individuals to be able to speak up and listen up through something called courageous conversations and this is before anybody needs to go and knock on the door of the whistleblowing department so how do we how do we not only have the language of courageous conversations and say guys you know i need you to speak up if there's a problem in our company this is part of our mission statement these are our values and how do we actually embed and bake in those behaviors because you know what it's not an easy thing to do and i'm not just talking about organizational context it's the conversation you have with your family it's the conversation you have with your neighbor about boundaries and the tree that you want to chop chop down it's asking for a raise it's saying no to somebody in need and it's about how do we navigate with curiosity and a beginner's mindset so that we learn about our conversational partner instead of wanting to teach them what we know only and you know that's really my mission that's really my purpose and that's the purpose of speak out speak up um so i hope that gives encapsulates a little bit of the work that i do yeah and that's what that's what attracted me to reach out to you and you graciously said yes you'd come on the the episode the podcast and i love that phrase truth to power yeah it's a difficult one though yeah it's easy to say right and easy to put on a t-shirt um but it's something i noticed that it doesn't matter if you're the ceo speaking to the chairman of the board or whatever it might be um it could be hierarchical it could be positional it could be psychological it could be it doesn't matter the your power it takes many guises right sure sure so yeah i do i i will i think we'll we'll kind of come back to this you know i think very much so because that's why you're on the episode and i think it's uh it's going to lead us down a great conversation i i think before we get into that almost the dynamics of what you're doing right now you did obviously allude to you know some of the sort of what you're known for it was leisure net i think wasn't it and that's correct yeah but you know there was a pre leisure net as well um so almost how did how did you get to um maybe this position you know that's what you're doing but how did you get here and you know i want to be careful when it comes to that experience but um you know there's because we could we could probably spend about two days of an episode on that i'm sure but i think it might be worth just people hearing an element of that story that said when your brain when we get to that part of the story where your brain went ah houston we have a problem some of the stepping stones that you had to go through so i'll i'll hand the baton back to you to maybe do the story bring that particular one to life and then get us up to present day sure thanks guy you know i really want to start um with my childhood really and my family dynamic because i think we are taught in our lives that people become successful in a very linear fashion fashion uh that we start here we're ambitious we get supported and we have role models and in bash boom we're suddenly a successful individual um i want to really knock that on the head and disrupt that complete notion a lot of people will expect that because i spoke up to powerful people that i had this moral i had moral role models in my family dynamic that um that created this part of my character and i want to share with people that's quite the opposite in fact my family dynamic was really fraught with what we would call a narcissistic triangulation um i was the scapegoat in in that family dynamic and rather than coming from a place of empowerment and and positivity the positioning of me in the family dynamic as being the scapegoat really gave me voice later on in my in my life um but often when we're growing up we don't really consciously understand the power within some of the fragmented parts of ourselves this power in that um and so i just want to park that there because it's an important part of my story and when you say powering being this you know being the scapegoat gave you a voice yes you know um no the narcissistic triangulation you normally have a nice one parent is narcissistic who has a golden child um and um and then the other children or other child becomes the scapegoat or the invisible child ah okay and it doesn't matter what you do as an invisible child or the scapegoat you are never good enough because you cannot compete with the golden child so it's sort of kind of out of a dark place it's coming from a darker place um but as the invisible child the scapegoat scapegoated child i always had a desire to have my voice heard i also had a drive to prove and it was it was driven by a sense of needing validation in the family dynamic that i became incredibly ambitious and quite driven um and this is quite a normal pathology in very successful people so if you look at some someone like steve jobs you know we only see him as a successful individual that he was but in fact there were some fragmented pieces of his psyche that got him there and i think this is an important part of of of sharing to other people that are perhaps struggling in life that you know you're in a journey this is this is not the end game some of these darker parts some of the broken parts of ourselves can actually drive us into very powerful empowered um characteristics later on in our lives um one of the really positive things in my life was i became a ballet dancer and very early on and that's because from an existing course and it's very interesting because when i go right back to my ancestry my great-grandmother was a performer um and she had her own troupe of singers and dancers that used to dance in the prince's theater in manchester and um her stage name was kitty kitty shaw um and then yeah it just it's amazing and she then passed on there to my grandmother who was a dancer for the royal ballet and to my mother who was a dancer for the royal ballet so whilst living in south africa my mother very kindly passed the baton to me and i became this this prima ballerina in in in the ballet company in south africa and and you know it was incredibly disciplined uh hard work you know to to become that yeah um and there was a period of time i was 1920 when i was off injured and my parents approached me and asked me if i'd like to become an accountant and to this day i don't know what the bridge is between valencia i don't know why i'm laughing but it's made me laugh everybody laughs because it's so bizarre maybe there's something about creative accounting in there i'm not quite sure you know but it gave me this ability to sort of pivot and not stand still the the flexibility of the mindset the agility the resilience to go from one thing to another uh without taking huge jettes or massive pirouettes there were tiny little movements towards change um so i took them up and they off i became this accountant and and just to set the stage we're talking about south africa it's the 1980s an incredibly macho um social dynamic and for anyone to be a a sort of academic or qualified woman it was quite unusual um and so again the sense of ambition again looking for validation uh i rose through the ranks of of various companies and found myself at leisurenet limited as the only female executive in in my group of executives reporting directly into the board of directors and i was operating as the international group treasurer and leisure net the company itself uh was a multinational so we operated all over the world it was called the darling of the johannesburg stock exchange a very much loved company and also in the south african context there was a lot of pride around this company and a lot of south africans are incredibly patriotic as well there's a real sense of pride that a company like that could could be doing such good work around the world and it was a health and leisure company uh was only that we had the imax theaters the planet hollywoods and various other bits and pieces under the umbrella and i remember you know in my 30s feeling a sense of arrival and i even remember thinking gosh i've got a leather lounge suite in my office i've cracked it i've arrived this is my arrival and this is here's the thing it's like no we we never simply arrive in life you know there's there are always much richer chapters that our need are going to need a title further along in our lives and if we feel or we believe we've arrived we rob ourselves of our true evil evolving our true becoming later on in life but i i as a 30 year old i thought this is pretty cool and i worked in that company for nine years so you know i would stomp around the corridors and i felt very empowered and especially as a woman um and then after about nine years i was asked to transfer hundreds of millions offshore into jersey bank accounts now again this notion of we went from year one to year nine and everything was cool and and wonderful in between that's not so it also didn't go from a company where there were monsters and unethical people roaming the corridors waiting to rob the public listed company not at all we were we were really good company founded on good governance but the crux of the matter was nobody would speak up to the very dynamic founders of the company who later became the joint ceos of the company when we listed and really that was the fracture within the company so we deferred our power to them we uh you know they they were great as entrepreneurs but maybe they weren't so great reporting into a board of directors and i feel that the joint ceos who were my friends as well as my colleagues really lost their independence they felt that they had created this company they were heroes we had a great big halo around the company but they really resented reporting into a board of directors that they felt didn't have this the special talents that they had had and this sense of loss of independence the loss of their special talents or the diminishing of that mattered to them a lot and so i think and i don't know this for sure but i feel that they then began to try and grab back their own uh their own self-concept in terms of the founders being the founders of this wonderful company and started me yeah there's an identity thing here isn't it it's that loss of identity it's not about the money at this point yeah i'm rich enough yeah this is about when i'm with my peers in the world i want to be the person that i now have portrayed myself as or i'm being told i am yes and actually maybe i never really defined myself that way but now i am being defined in that way i quite like it absolutely you hit the nail on the head a guy it's it's this notion which we all are vulnerable to of self-preservation and and loss and you know we often just compartmentalize losses you know loss of of life but loss you know we will do most anything to avoid loss in our lives whether it's loss of status whether it's loss of mainly our self-concept so who we believe ourselves to be yeah other people make us feel so this yeah this this narrative of this mindset around grabbing back that was i think what drove them to start taking shortcuts start you know shooting from the hip um real cowboy fashion and um and starting to really be incredibly dishonest and you know doing lawful but awful behavior which then cascaded into illegal behavior it's uh it's fascinating i've got two little things that jump into my mind when you talk about it one is that people kind of fall in love with their own caricature a little bit sure you know they like they like the identity but also very often those you know people that create companies at that level are not cut from the normal template sure you know i've i know quite a few entrepreneurs and they're up at four and you know they're they're working till four and they're built of a different thing and there's an adrenaline there's a risk there's a there's a there's they like bobbing and weaving ducking and diving and the state doesn't appeal to them they actually almost enjoy the risk of absolute failure absolutely very interesting paradigm those kind of behaviors yeah and it's interesting and the thing is that i think also the the the the tendency for these people to be great is there but the tendency also is for them to to ignore risk and peril and i think you know we not just as employees but also part of the community of societies we live in the world that we live in now um that we we are all responsible to be to to be able to speak up in moments and go hey i think you've missed this risk can i let you show what might happen if we go down this route if we go with your decision and so it's all up to us you know that we again we've learned this narrative of who am i to say anything well who are you not to say anything and i think we have a greater responsibility to be able to say to people in power because they are also fallible they are also vulnerable and so we need to take the responsibility to bring things to their attention in a constructive way in a helpful way yeah yeah marion wilson kind of you're playing small does not serve the world absolutely beautiful yes it is it's exactly that and and again this contagion of going back to marion williamson this contagion of you know by speaking up or shining stairs stepping into your own light i think she says you enable others to find theirs yeah if you give other people incredibly contagious but it takes the it takes the outlier it takes the disrupter it takes the dissenter the person that perhaps has a little bit of different experience to be able to have that conversation it's incredibly fraught with with conflict because of course and i am talk from my own experience but also from my research and also working with people in this field that when you want to speak up and listen up by the way you are also putting your self-concept on the line because the thought occurs to us in those moments of friction what if i have this conversation and something pops up about who they believe i am that i don't find tasteful how will i respond to that because our our default is going to defend who we are that's that's going to become the primary conversation uh piece it's not going to be about the conversation anymore it's going to be about how dare you say that about me and so most of us avoid having these conversations precisely because our self concept might be uh challenged and i do think there's a at a base level there's a kind of you know people never refer to maslow anymore which i think is a great shame because you know it's old hats but you know that baseline of i i fear the loss of a job and i feel the loss of a financial income and i so that is my self validity but then there might be that inherent primal fear of you know roof overhead you know just and those two things together you know my fear to protect and provide or not to be which is my which is my personal validation yes you know to survive in the world then put those two together and you can very quickly end up in a submissive space because i i want to protect that so listen when you went into this moment i mean you're using of you know the uh definitely the language of education you've educated yourself greatly in this you know area and space but thank you back when it happened did you know what you were getting into no not at all and this this is a very common thread for anybody that ends up being a whistleblower and so first of all i had never heard of the whistle the word whistleblowing whistleblower i really thought i was doing my job as the international group treasurer for public listed company to list on the london and australian stock exchange it was really i need to do this and my first port of call wasn't external and i think you know again i want to remind anyone listening that most whistleblowers don't go to the media they don't they don't go to the regulator they want to resolve the problem internally and so in just such a fashion i remember thundering down the corridor to speak to the joint ceos and i remember thundering it was like i had a fly in my ear and i was i was a bull on the rampage and that fly buzzing in my ear represented all the emotions of um frustration suspicion anger anxiety about the conversation i was going to have with them and i remember thinking and acknowledging i wasn't really a masterful in having this conversation i wasn't really skilled in having these kind of conversations and i had a lot of skin in the game and you alluded to it in terms of hey you know i was a single parent i wanted a roof over my head firstly and i wanted a job but i thought i was doing them a favor by bringing their potential illegal transaction to their attention and what it might mean for the company risk was huge risk and it was illegal and uh good right and and you know i remember thundering in and you know again absolutely no skill in having a narrative no road map a huge emotional dump and and naturally they responded by reminding me of my own vulnerability as a single parent and their power and i was quickly marched out of the offices and i remember thinking well that didn't really go well maybe i'll try the financial direct and the legal counsel who were both and again all these people were not monsters you know they weren't bad people uh but they all shut me out effectively and i remember going to my very plush office with my leather lounge suite and it occurred to me really very profoundly that i was being met with a moral dilemma it was you know it was why should i speak out again this this very natural if you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all um why should i be the person i'm the only woman on the team uh i'm a single parent maybe let somebody else do this this is not you know i'm at more risk and more vulnerable than anybody else why should it be me um and it was also you know my job is important to me and and then there was a sort of very nebulous crossover where my own internal dialogue turned into the possible future dialogue of my son he was 12 at the time and i imagined him as a 20 year old maybe yeah you know saying to me mom you were this big honcho at legenette and there was a massive scandal there what part did you play in that scandal and this is where there was massive conflict for me you know i think as parents we want to be good role models to our children naturally and yeah you've done something there which i utilize with execs when i do my work which is what is it that you can use as a lever to do what it is that you and your heart already know the answer to yes and my example is if one of my boys was watching me in real time on a video stream one of these documentaries and if you had his friends with him yeah and they were all watching me now would he be going oh god or would he be going that's my dad that is yes and find the lever yes because then it'll make you i think jack nicholson in that film you make me want to be a better person you know it'll make you be a better person right and that's for you that is a beautiful example of that internal lever yeah sometimes you have to self-apply so your own fear doesn't put you back in your own box absolutely and it really is you know working with that and you know the longer lever you have the more leverage you have you know it's like opening that tin of paint you know if you don't have the right screwdriver to pop open that lid you're not going to leverage that lid open and let all the good stuff out and and it was really a very profound long-term vision of what he might say to me and that then um catalyzed my thinking in terms of can i think beyond my employment contract to my social contract to humanity is there something greater here at at stake than just securing my job and can i ask you actually is i mean maybe not the exact words but to paraphrase is that the conversation you were actually having with yourself at the time you know it wasn't more of an emotional conversation and what i've done obviously over the years i put into it i put a narrative to it right okay i can hear it effectively yeah i get it but but i think there was a great sense of i've got to look beyond now i've got to look beyond now and and also i think as i'm talking to you i'm also acknowledging how pivotal my own ancestors have been in my behavior i am able to look back at my ancestors and what they were and what they became and their struggles and i'd done that work a long time before i was in that this position i'm talking about there's a sense of what's my legacy who who am i i might be this now but who can i be then and that was the the tipping point that allowed me to pick up the phone and then make an external anonymous phone call to the south african exchange control board and the reason i did what that was because we had a very strong legal caveat with them um and you know that wasn't an even easy conversation and again i wasn't blowing the whistle i was picking up the phone to say hey am i right in thinking if i transferred this money to jersey this would be illegal that's all i want i want confirmation i want to know if i'm right or wrong on this and they said absolutely you'd be breaking the law come in for a conversation with us and i remember considering this and thinking a different no because their board of directors played golf with our board of directors i was there now unbeknown to me this is the year 2000 and we had just south africa had just incorporated the king's commission of corporate governance and again i don't know this for certain but i think there was a very strong desire uh in south africa to do the right thing and to have strong corporate governance and so when i made this phone call the the south african exchange control board felt that it was their duty to immediately investigate there was no in between well let's flesh this out could we have a perfect situation at the perfect time right exactly exactly yeah and so they traced the call and did a dawn raid on the company and the company's premises within sort of seven to ten days um and very quickly i was identified as the they wouldn't have called me a whistleblower they would have called me a rat a snitch various other horrible things um and fired so here i was yes having lost my job having lost my livelihood but what was worse was um because of the death threats that followed there was a potential for me to also lose my life and the life of my son and you know i want to pause there because when i share my story internationally as an international speaker i do i do prepare people with a sort of by setting the stage because i know that when i tell my story a lot of people will defend their own positions by saying oh but that's in south africa that would never happen here or that you know that is a south african company that would never happen in our company and i want to say to people you're wrong on both scores it does happen it is happening the final uh um comment i want to make about that before and if we move forward is that a lot of people also because of this self concept will default to thinking so what that's not such a big deal that she spoke up i would too because i'm a good moral person and maybe that's correct and i really really hope that by thinking you know yourself enough that you would be able to navigate this difficulty but i also want to add that there's a reason there's only one schindler and one schindler's list because it's difficult to speak up to abuses of power this is not an easy thing to do and and we need to train around that and i think you know in our life we don't ever you know become something without preparing we don't become a chartered surveyor without studying yeah you know and why don't we do this when to speak and listen up to you we need to create the preparation for this so there's a couple of things there for me i mean one is i think it depends a lot there's a lot of variables in the human being and you know you've just got a new house and you've just got a new baby and you're financially on the edge but you'll be fine in due course but you know and then something happens and you go uh and you're just in covered and the market's not very good but you have a secure job and you think well if i do say anything how the hell am i going to get a job and i've got a so and then so some people that wouldn't matter they'd do it anyway and others the context they're in would shift their dynamic or later on in life i'm financially secure my mortgage is paid off well i'm not having this yes so there's a load of variables about intellectually we would all help somebody who was being mugged yes but then you might go well actually the mugger might stab me um right it's all intellectually we all you know very few people would say i wouldn't do the right thing but yes i think there is that and i think then there's something about it's too varied a set of truths to presume that just saying it's okay would mean it's okay what i've heard you say there is there has to be a psychological safety there has to be a proven safety of you know saying things with malice will be dealt with accordingly but if they come with the right intent in the right place then we're putting the work in prior to the event that may never happen yes yes but you know that or you believe that it would be okay absolutely and yeah and you know because we're very we're we're very vis vis visual creatures we go on what we see and not what others say yes so where is the demonstration that i will be safe have i seen it i might have heard you know turn at the top saying it's all good but have i seen it been demonstrated before it's very very important you know when we build climates yes it's what's visible and and and how that's interpreted because again the the the the complexity of ourselves as human beings is how we interpret that too and i think at the most simple at a meeting you know if my idea is shot down well if my idea shot down on that if you think i'm bringing anything big to the table if that's what happens when i just suggest that we should paint the car park blue instead of orange yes but i'm not going there i'm definitely not going for anything bigger than that so the evidence is in my everyday experience yes of how either debate or disagreement or just call it curiosity it doesn't have to be it's one of the things i use now let's not start with challenge let's start with curiosity right brilliant yes but if curiosity is rejected then i'm definitely not going for challenge absolutely abs absolutely you're not going to escalate it right and you know and also this talking about this sort of contagion and this sort of uh you you're creating the ripples before there's the tsunami you you want to be uh um embedding the uh the ability to bring innovative ideas and even if it's it's not a you know even if it's not a good idea and and you know you've you've offered something up that's a bit jerky and outside you know what everybody's expecting people ask themselves you know what is the listening up i'm speaking up to and if that person listening up the leader shuts you down with a narrative or even a micro expression you know rolling eyes to the sky is a beautiful one it's incredibly off-putting and everybody sees it we all take note of those things and so instead it's about saying to that individual who may have offered a jerky idea to be able to thank them you know articulate thank you for taking the time for bringing that to my attention and maybe that's something we can deliver or look at later on and it's not something we're looking at right now so it's that narrative of appreciation humility it's humility and volunteering you know the vulnerability that you don't know everything even though you're in a leadership position so it's supporting the intent even if i don't support the idea absolutely yes yeah there are times where i'm going to go in my brain new but you might have a brilliant one tomorrow so i want to support the intent that's right and i want to also nurture this person's curiosity i want to harness this person's propensity to bring these sometimes wacky ideas to the table but you know one day this person might have a wonderfully wacky idea that could really support the company's purpose or our group or teams of purpose you know when somebody once said to me i was a lot younger and it was one of those perfect moments when i said i went uh oh stupid idea you know they went no no god what what is it and i went oh it's it's a it's a rubbish idea and they rather brilliantly said the phrase guy at this moment in time your rubbish idea is better than everybody else has no idea absolutely it was just that way of encouraging me to volunteer something that may be ridiculous as you say maybe that might be the next big idea but etc etc but it's that willingness to accept which i thought was i didn't quite get it at the time but retrospectively i thought oh that was that was genius yeah fantastic great leadership and i also think this there's a conversation to be had about how we educate leaders how do we how do we support our leaders you know i think leaders are often put in positions and and not given the investment the training to be the good leaders there can be there's a sort of notion of um being trained as a leader to solve problems and to fix issues um and to know it all and so you know it it it takes again huge amounts of courage and humility uh um to actually say i actually don't have all the answers so to work with you wendy you know if if an organization was the story in itself is a great story i think it's a catalyst it's a it's a reason to pay attention it's you know there's a whole host of things in that um and there's an education in that story and your willingness to offer it then there's something about the experience maybe of working with you that goes beyond the story itself and what is what is that why would an organization knock on your door and what is you know we can all do things but what is your sweet spot where you go this is why you would call upon me this is how i would enable or help or develop so i'd love to hear about that yeah thank you well thanks again for for validating my journey um when companies do work with me it's there's a number of of of um ignitions for them so it might be about training their organization and everybody within a certain level of of their organization to have informal conversations that are driven through courage so something as simple as feedback has become fraught with tension uh because we all have our internal narratives and we have all we have ourselves concepts at risk both as the receiver of feedback and also the give our feedback um so what's worked in the past for organizations is for me to go in and to actually train teams and individuals in terms of how do we provide informal feedback every day so that it's not once a year kind of that really awful form that we all have to fill in and go through this awful conversation which nobody really cares about and it's fought with with tension so how do we build the narrative the road map around having learning conversations rather than uh having right and wrong conversations um what is yeah what are what are the narratives what are the words uh what are the body languages what are the micro expressions that we can do to to to help that become a growing experience rather than just a polarized uh opposite kind of conversation a linear conversation we need we want to be circular in these conversations so feedback is one of them the other one is i have been um really um worried uh and concerned that organizations have defaulted to the concept of if we get a hotline a whistleblowing hotline in our organization we now suddenly have an open con we have an open culture no not at all in fact in some organizations people will believe because they only have a whistleblowing hotline that the actual organization is a very closed organization that the only way you can have a conversation whether it's about malfeasance or whether it's about there being no toilet paper on the third floor toilets i can only go to the hotline to let people know about that because everybody's so fraught with fear and and insecurity so hotlines are not gold hot lines are barren land you have to dig for the gold and so what works for organizations that work with me is being able again to build the language the narrative the road map around having daily informal conversations around possible unethical behavior possible unethical practices that have have happened in the organization and stopping them at that point investigating them informally at that point rather than it heading down the slippery slope and nine years later you've got a wendy anderson popping up going i'm actually going to phone externally to see if this is an issue so it really is saying that courageous conversations is before the ethical slippery slope it's informal it's it's it's it's less expensive in the long run uh both from a financial point of view but also from a for a reputational point of view whereas whistleblowing might seem the right tick box to have in your organization right now but it's very short term and it can be very expensive in the long term and there's also something about diversity and belonging and contribution so again you know there's a big push around the the notion of diversity and belonging but there's another piece about that it's about contribution and speaking up and listening up is about contributing and it shouldn't matter what gender you are what race you are you know whether in a wheelchair what world experience you have the more diversity the better but how do we get people to contribute to a diverse team when they have their own internal dialogues going on that prevent them from doing that position and their relationship with power and absolutely and their self-concept as being different it's um i deal with some of my clients are in the construction industry and health and safety is an interesting one because if you're not in the construction industry health and safety is just one of those things that you go i don't know don't lick an electrical current i mean you don't think about it very much but when you're in the construction industry it's front and foremost and the training on it is not complex but the relationship with seniority and seeing something that's not safe yes and the willingness to in theory i'm 18 it's my first day on site something looks wrong who am i to say anything and the first thing they work on is look it probably won't be that difficult for you to realize what's safe or not the issue you're gonna have is with your relationship with positional power and who are you young new whatever it might be yes to actually go uh excuse me and if your line manager goes oh it's not a problem and you go uh it looks like a problem to me i'm sure those pointy things aren't supposed to be doing that you know then where would you then oh i don't have the right or i'm not to then go above that so their issue isn't with can you spot danger yeah their issue is with whether or not you'll actually raise the alarm on it yes and with the leadership can listen to you you know without you know thinking gosh i should have noticed that now all of a sudden my self-concept as a leader as a supervisor as a manager is at risk because this young 18 year old has come to tell me about that and in fact he's rattled my cage a little bit so i'm just going to keep that quiet and i think that was and i think now we have an industry that you know it doesn't matter you know if you you're 60 years old you're a seasoned veteran but you do not want to be the person whose site went wrong so they have this massive encouragement of listen i'm not asking you i'm begging you yes if you see a problem for the love of all things sacred yes tell me yes and they have a very they've done that work to get rid of the machismo and for easier people to feel it's their duty that everybody goes home safe that you know so they've done that work yeah the odd site where that's not but the majority of places i go to uh it's it's culturally inherent you know it's in there it's taken them a decade or so to get there but by ahead they've got there that's so good to hear and you know i think just looking at our politicians at the moment i think there's some work that can be done there in the sort of machismo uh i i'm not vulnerable i mean i don't even i never get sick even if i'm sick i'm working through all of this and um so it really is talking about sort of the humility and um there's a there's a bigger piece around this as well and it's an evolving piece that i that i um i i also want to mention um is that there's a big drive now around esg investing so this this investment portfolio managers wealth managers are really being um encouraged and this is going to be regulated by next year to be able to invest people's wealth into companies that have an esg not just a mission statement but they they're demonstrating that they are doing their purpose of their organization is for the good of society and not just for the shareholders uh that the purpose of the organization is for all stakeholders not just for shareholders right so the evolving mindset around this which i feel dovetails very neatly was the public interest laws and whistleblowing so people blow the whistle legitimately under public interest laws so we do it because there's a public interest issue and this fits very neatly with esg investments and and so it's really i think there's a there's a great opportunity to repackage and re-market the concept of speaking and listening up yeah because people that who have money want to make more money they want to invest in a company that does notice the plug with all the wires sticking up they don't want to have their money in a company like that that might blow up they don't want to invest in a company who digs up half of nigeria because there's oil there they they are now looking to invest their money in companies and organizations whose purpose considers all of society and the planet it's that triple bottom line yes and so it's almost like by stealth yeah the the mindset or for me the drive to to to invite organization leaders to be trained for courageous conversations is becoming more and more natural because organizations are going to be indexed and valued according to what their esg rating is and esg investment portfolio managers are going to be asking for the whistleblowing reports and what happened to the whistleblower so yeah and it's interesting so it's kind of not being driven by a negative that somebody's speaking up because something's wrong it's being driven by i want to make more money i want i i i also want to look after the planet so it's there's a there's an opportunity here i think for organizations who who at the moment may be in their mission statement are talking about doing well and doing good there's a there's a shift here i deal with private private equity organizations okay right you know and so there is something that's different between maybe a utilities company that are digging holes so the water pipes are fixed and kept running and they have these seven eight year contracts and they're they're thinking long term etc and then you're on a three-year run out on another you know kind of enterprise and you know i know it's probably uh we're squeezing everybody a bit hard but you know as one person said i can be a good guy after this yeah exactly and so the the context of what what gets rewarded gets done and yeah etc and all these different things come into it and there is this focus for me now on how does the ceo or the the board create a comfort or a reality within themselves of actually it's not so much that's the wrong thing to do it's illegal which is a standout issue but actually as a kind of a as a gateway to illegality yeah yeah the pressure that we put on ourselves absolutely where the commercial imperative is the only driver yes and what is the reality of me of us turning around and going well we could have made more this year yes however what we did was yeah yes and that's the conversation i think that we're all probably very interested is that what's the dynamic of that really going to play out axe yeah i i agree guy i think it's it's it's you know with climate change and you covered you know covert has reminded us that businesses are human institutions you know all of this is coming together in a great petri dish of saying this is opportune to having these conversations and you know really going back uh to my own uh unconscious uh at the time emotional a feeling of can i look beyond just my my my employment contract to my social contract and i think you know 20 years later i'm delighted to be talking about the social contract yes and i think organizations are coming on board with that and going yes you know do we stop issuing plastic bags and and you know but plastic bags give us some kind of income which gives us better dividends to our shareholders but do we think beyond the straightjacket of the shareholder and think about all stakeholders and and this is an evolving piece i think you know and but but what i'm loving is the people that are driving this and the positioning around it and how organizations are desperately want although it seems to be the sort of a desperate intention to get on board with that um so i'm i'm looking forward to how this conversation continues as we go forward and to be part of that conversation so you know time is uh is cruel um so i'm alert to the fact that with a with a bottle of vino and a curry in front of me you and i would just keep talking or i would keep talking i keep talking anyway and you you politely listen so just for me as we kind of bring this to a close which has been i think a fascinating kind of overview and insight into you and where your energy goes uh two things for me if people wanted to reach out to you where would they where's the best place to do that or what's the best route to that and i can put that in in the links below but uh be good to understand what where that is okay so thanks for that that invitation um if people want to reach out to me um they can go to my website which is speak out hyphen speak up dot org uh and yeah i'd be very grateful if you could put that in in the links there definitely yeah and there's a blog there that i i write most months about my thinking on things that as they pop up um and uh yeah various bits and pieces uh my service offerings are on the pa on the on the website too so they can can drill through that and of course just give me a shout out you know i'm on twitter i'm on linkedin all the various social media um yeah i'd love to hear from people and are you focusing on anything um i mean you know just keeping going in the environment that we're in is its own battle yeah but is there a particular project that you're invested in right now or that is on the horizon from you that we could look out for you know i think i want to go back to the esg conversation and i you know i feel it's been very interesting journey for me that a couple of years ago i would be working with organizations that had fallen foul of regulations and and maybe had been caught out doing something unethical and were not driven to kind of repair reputation and they would invite me in as an afterthought it was like oh we need to repair this now what i'm finding is that organizations that are already doing good that the mindset is already in the esg uh sort of social contract space or are reaching out and saying we are you know this is our purpose as an organization these are our people we want to enhance doing good we're already on that trajectory how do we do better and so i i think you know i feel in a sense that i want to be putting my energy in that because i because i feel it's going to be a really helpful ripple uh to get to getting people to think differently and for the public to really come on board here and understand that people do speak up in their interest um so i i i want to be the bridge between esg and and speaking up and company purpose fantastic listen wendy i'm going to bring us to a close so do stay on for a few moments after i press record and i've just got to make sure i don't stop the zoom call as opposed to stop the recording but just on a personal note thank you so much for taking the time to invest in a conversation with me so i really do appreciate that oh and and thank you guy for for inviting me uh and and also you know it's an opportunity for me to learn too and and and i've learned a lot from you so thank you very gracious so listen i'll just press the stop button and hopefully you'll be here three seconds later so we're done