Episode Overview
What if the biggest barrier to culture change isn’t external, but in how we show up each day? In this episode of Culture in Action, Dr Jeanne Hardacre unpacks the roots of what she calls the culture trap—those subtle, often invisible behaviours and beliefs that keep workplaces stuck.
Sharing insights from her book and decades of experience, Jeanne introduces the H.U.M.A.N. framework, a set of five practical practices that help individuals and teams move from frustration to freedom. With honesty, humour, and deep empathy, Jeanne and Luke explore how to shift from “if only” thinking, the impact of workplace shame, and why letting go of your job title might be the most liberating move you make.
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Read Dr. Hardacre’s top takeaways in this practical how-to article.
Beyond the Job Title: Discovering Freedom and Purpose
Luke: So I had the luxury of going to see Brené Brown when I was in Las Vegas. And she said a really powerful question, and it’s something that I’ve carried with me ever since, which is, let’s start with who you are and not what you do. So what should our listeners know about you beyond what they might read as your title on your LinkedIn profile?
Jeanne: Thank you, Luke. I’m also passionate about moving away from titles and focusing in on what do I do and what’s my purpose in the world, I guess. In front of me, you won’t be able to see this, but it’s a poster that I use. I have it on my office wall and it is by Mike Levy, who’s an artist in Brighton. And it’s a cartoon of a woman with no clothes on, on a bicycle, and it says, be free.
Luke: Okay.
Jeanne: If I were to share anything with people about who I really am, that’s it. It’s about being free. And it’s not an irony or a coincidence that my book is called The Culture Trap because that’s something we can free ourselves from. And beyond me being free and finding my way to be free, I now work with teams and leaders and have done for many years to help embolden them to find their freedom at work, oftentimes in situations where they feel anything but free.
Luke: Yeah, I can imagine. So tell us about The Culture Trap. Tell us about why now and ultimately what’s the book about?
Jeanne: So I suppose my first experience of what I’ve now started to call the culture trap was in my mid-twenties. So we are talking quite a long time ago now where I was on a prestigious management training scheme in the UK with a potential pathway to be a chief exec in 15 years.
Luke: Okay.
Jeanne: And what I realised in my gut, and I could not put my finger on anything at the time, I couldn’t articulate it, but I just had this sense of unease. And what I think I was realising was that I was being trained as a manager, and what I was being trained to do was to do things right according to what was expected. And more and more I realised that that was different from the right thing to do.
Luke: Okay.
Jeanne: Do you understand what I mean? So…
Luke: I think so. But…
Jeanne: I found myself feeling compromised a lot of the time in terms of what I really believed would be the right thing to do in a particular situation, and what I was being trained and rewarded for doing, which was different from that.
Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes it. I can appreciate that situation , because you often, especially in early stage management, you observe a lot of behaviours and the perception of what is right versus what morally or from a value standpoint feels right.
Jeanne: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Luke: Especially when, I remember joining an organisation that was a very large organisation , hundreds of thousands of people in it.
Jeanne: Sure.
Luke: And being in a position in which you, the world has moved on from some of the people that were setting the standard for what good looked like then. Thinking about the approach, thinking, wow, this, this just should be done in such a different way for the benefit of the people and for the benefit of the business. And I guess, in some respects, that’s what you do: feel trapped between what is right and what you think you should be doing. So…
Jeanne: Hmm.
Luke: …yeah, interesting. Okay.
Jeanne: And I guess it came to, there was a real catalyst, Luke, that after many years, which I won’t go into everything that I did and, and sort of roles I had, but in 2018 there was a real catalyst moment for me. And by then I’d been running my own consultancy for 15 years working with thousands of managers, leaders, teams. And one of the people that I love most in the whole world —and I have, I’m lucky to have several people I love hugely—but one of them became suicidal as a direct result of becoming a whistleblower , almost feeling they had no choice but to blow the whistle and the stress that resulted from that and the impact that had on them and me, and a wider family. Devastating is an overused term, but it literally pulled the rug from out under our lives. And I do still have to be careful talking about it because I’m still subject to a gagging NDA around all of that, which is often what happens with whistleblowing. And people say that you write the book you need. And I got to a point where I was almost not able to provide my services to leaders and teams because I was so cynical, bitter, angry, disillusioned with this thing called leadership and management , which is what I’ve researched and practiced with all my life. And I had a choice. I realised I had a choice at that point. I could either continue to embody all of that negative energy and that was who I was becoming, professionally and personally, or I could choose to change. And the change had to start here. And that change process began by me starting to write. And that was the beginning of the book , which became an approach which I have embodied into my own life and work, and I’m now sharing with others because it has been so powerful as a way of escaping from that utter despair and sense of powerlessness that sometimes work can leave us with.
The “If Only” Mindset and Finding Personal Power
Luke: Yeah, indeed. It is. I imagine the process for you was almost therapeutic in many respects , to just get out what you were thinking, feeling, what needed to change, how that could do, how your experiences and the research that you’ve done in your past can apply to new situations and propose ways to handle things differently. You get to the end, final word is written, typed probably , and is in a position where you, you think, okay, this is done. How has that journey then changed you personally? You come out the back of that process and what does the evolved version of you look like now as a consequence of the process?
Jeanne: The key change is that I have let go of something really that was holding me back. And that I see in so many leaders and teams I work with, and I’ve let go of wishing “if only”.
Luke: Yeah.
Jeanne: If only he would change. If only she would stop doing that. And if only they would X, Y, Z.
Luke: Yeah.
Jeanne: The first part of my book is a description of 30 years of “if only”. I spent 30 years in an “if only” mindset. And inadvertently what I was doing was I was giving away my power to shape and change things by wishing everyone else would be different. Does that make sense?
Luke: Entirely. I mean, I’m a relatively simple being, but I always come back to spheres of influence , like, what’s in your control, what can you influence, what do you have no control over? It infuriates my wife as a consequence of living by that mantra.
Jeanne: Yeah.
Luke: I can very quickly compartmentalise and either I’m in control of it and therefore I can do something about it.
Jeanne: Yeah.
Luke: And letting go of that is both really powerful and infuriating for others.
Jeanne: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Luke: But I, it resonates strongly with me for sure.
Jeanne: And it’s also an uncomfortable thing to let go of because as long as I’m holding onto an “if only they would change because they’re the problem,” I can kind of sidestep the fact that I personally might be contributing to some of these dynamics.
Luke: Yeah.
Jeanne: What was really the curiosity, Luke, that has fuelled me through many, many years of my work is how is it that people who view themselves as decent, good people , with the best of intentions, working really hard, somehow managed to create together an experience of work that is maybe less than enjoyable? It might be tense, it might be troubled, it might be even toxic. How does that happen? And once I started to understand how that happens, why that happens, why we as human beings behave that way , and why we create these dynamics and relationships and ways of interacting at work between ourselves the way we do , we can then choose whether that’s what we want or whether we want to shape something different. But we need to understand why and how we’re creating that in the first place.
Luke: Yeah, indeed.
Jeanne: And that is the culture trap. The culture trap is when we’re locked into this set of behaviours and dynamics that unknowingly are kind of trapping us into a way of being together. But none of us really want it. None of us like it, and everybody wishes it would change. That’s the trap.
Luke: Yeah.
Jeanne: So the human approach I’ve developed helps us to release ourselves from that culture trap.
The H.U.M.A.N. Practices Framework
Luke: Okay. So the, the framework of the book is around a framework called H.U.M.A.N. Aptly named. Do you mind just walking us through the very essence of the framework, what it stands for, what these principles really mean in the context of workplace culture?
Jeanne: Sure. And I suppose I would just, I would just nudge us into calling them practices rather than principles. And the reason, I don’t mean to be semantic, but one of the things that I got really disillusioned with was how much we can think and be clever intellectually about culture. We can analyse it, understand it, we can program, manage our way through it. We can create Gantt charts for it. We can quote gurus about it, but none of that actually changes it. And so the book is unapologetically practical. And it is packed full of practices that you can choose to try. And so the human practices are revolved around the acronym H-U-M-A-N. And you know, people might want to make a note of this because it’s the headlines of the framework.
The H is Honest. And that sounds so simple. Just be honest. But it is so hard to be honest at work a lot of the time. And this isn’t just about saying whatever you think or feel, that’s not the honesty we’re talking about. We’re talking about humble honesty about human nature. It’s about owning and recognising why we as humans behave as we do, sometimes with amazing impact and sometimes with the opposite. And each and every one of us is capable of hugely positive impact on others. And I believe every single one of us in certain conditions is capable of some really harmful behaviour. And when we can start being honest about that and not pretending, we can open up all sorts of new conversations with a level of vulnerability and truth that take us so far further in what we’re trying to achieve for our clients or our customers or the people we serve. And it’s about being honest about how people respond under pressure and really understanding human nature in that respect. And moving away from what I call a pattern of pretense , where we seem to think it’s the right thing to do to pretend that “yes, I’m professional, we are strong, we’re all on the same page, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re, we are good people”. “We are not the problem.” It’s all a pretenses because that’s not real. That’s not human. And so once we can understand how to be honest about all of this, it unlocks the possibilities for our culture in just ways that have been hugely surprising to me.
Luke: I think the thing for me as I listen to you speak is that Radical Candor was a good book, I enjoyed, but it…
Jeanne: Yeah.
Luke: …it’s about other people , rather than the truth of it. The hard bit is being honest with like, why am I being like this? Like, I can feel I’m being difficult, but I’m stuck now and I have to be difficult. Like, why am I doing this? What is leading me to do that? And I think it is often the “if only” mindset. It feels fairly consistent to me, to like, well, I am being honest. I am being candid. I am telling people that I don’t like when you did that thing. Or I don’t, we don’t, we’re not doing this, or you are not doing this well. And it’s having this effect on me. But very often we’re not in a position where we’re honest with ourselves because self-reflection and practice is pretty hard going, right?
Jeanne: It is. And that, that links to the U, the next letter in H.U.M.A.N., which is Uncomfortable. Because only through being uncomfortable can we change. If we stay in our comfort zone, we reinforce things as they are. But to move beyond our comfort zone is absolutely essential. To be able to have the conversations that maybe we would really prefer not to have , to address the issues that actually we’d rather turn a blind eye to. And at one level, these things might be insignificant little things that don’t really matter , but at a bigger, more extreme scale, it leads to behaviours, approaches at work that are not just uncomfortable, but they might be altogether inappropriate. They might be immoral. And actually, Luke, I’ve seen it where they’re illegal. Things going on in plain sight. And there’s a scale and a spectrum. And until we can find ways to have uncomfortable conversations in a way that doesn’t leave everybody feeling dreadful afterwards as a result , but also doesn’t tiptoe around issues that really just need to be explored and resolved , we will not change cultural norms in organisations. And so I work with people to help them learn the skills of entering into their own discomfort in a way that doesn’t feel utterly terrifying or embarrassing , which then makes people feel they can speak up, speak out for the values they have in a way that is considerate to themselves, but crucially is considerate to people for whom that message might be hard to hear. That’s the U – Uncomfortable.
The M is Messy , because, I don’t know about you, but looking at the way people work together in teams, things can often get messy. Yeah. And sometimes I walk into a team or a workplace and it feels like a life soap opera. It’s like, he said, she said, it wasn’t me, it was them. You know, it is, “Oh, you never hear what’s going on,” you know, people making up stories. It’s like, it’s like one episode, you see it in 10 minutes and you think, am I here for the box set? Do I really want to buy this? It’s drama at work and it’s messy, and that is the lived reality to some extent. But it’s awful, isn’t it , when teams are at loggerheads or when there’s these vibes at work and it’s just energy sapping and it gets in the way of us bringing our amazing skills to what we’re actually there to achieve? So the Group Dynamic Detox, which is the root out of messy, helps teams to understand where they’re falling into very predictable ways of behaving that are knocking them out of collaboration , that are setting themselves up almost as if they’re against each other rather than in support of each other , that are draining their energy and their emotional resources. It’s almost, without them realising it, because they’re putting so much time and energy into worrying about the dynamics and trying to make people behave differently. And so what I do is help them realise and recognise how they’re all contributing to that potentially, and to offer them a choice. To stop doing that and to start interacting from a different starting point. And it’s really, really transformational when teams start to take responsibility for their own dynamics rather than waiting for someone else to change it.
Luke: Yeah, makes sense.
Jeanne: So that’s the M. The A is Amazing , because some of this can feel really hard work and it does involve some quite deep and difficult stuff some of the time, culture change. And yet it can have such amazing impact. And what I see so much is people at work for all sorts of reasons, they learn over time that they maybe don’t have very much power. They learn and it’s almost a norm for people to just see other people as having power. And what I do is I help people individually and then together in their teams to find their power again , not so they can exercise it in a dominant way over other people, but so they can release their amazingness that is so often hidden or stifled. Or people are too scared to really show up with their full, incredible, unique talents because they don’t feel it’s their place to do so, or they’re not so-called senior enough or they’re not experienced enough. And once people really find their own power and learn to use it to embolden and support themselves and each other, it just opens up extraordinary opportunities for teams to do things they never thought they could do. So that’s the A, Amazing.
And then N is for New , because this is about embedding new norms , new ways of behaving, new ways of having expectations of ourselves and others, new ways of leading, and crucially new ways of using your power not to dominate and control everything all the time, but to emancipate yourself and others and to put clear boundaries around that. And finding new ways of setting boundaries and holding boundaries that keep me safe and keep my colleagues safe, that care for myself and care for others. And once we are operating in that new way of working, it provides a container to enable our human needs to be met at work. And when our needs are met, we can then focus on meeting the needs of our clients, our customers, and the people who need us. So that’s the H-U-M-A-N.
Unlearning to Embrace the New
Luke: Yeah. Okay. It gets me thinking immediately into the pattern that people perceive, which is change is hard
Jeanne: Yes.
Luke: And therefore adopting anything that is new is also perceived as hard. Doesn’t have to be, but it does require you to either adopt a new set of beliefs or…
Jeanne: Uh-huh.
Luke: …be in a position where you unlearn certain behaviours so that you can start to adopt new habits, ways of working or team rituals. Talk to us a little bit about that, like what are the key things from your work that you see people need to let go of or unlearn before they move to the new?
Jeanne: I love that unlearn, Luke, because for me that is at the heart of some of this. I think what we don’t realise is how conditioned we become , not just in workplaces about how we should behave, but actually through the way we’re educated. And so unlearning feels scary. And it is, it is so exciting when you start doing it. And so I guess the book is packed full of things to unlearn by doing mini experiments, but I guess I could highlight a couple just to illustrate. So the first one we’ve maybe referred to a little bit, which is letting go of “if only”. If I unlearn my habit of waiting for other people to change , and if I accept, actually maybe nobody will ever change, maybe they’ll all stay exactly as they are, I can still make a huge difference. So that’s, that’s the sort of fundamental one.
And another one of many in the book is, and this might sound a bit odd, is stop becoming a triangle.
Luke: Okay.
Jeanne: Stop being a triangle.
Luke: You’re going to have to give me more on that.
Jeanne: Yeah. So what I see is that people when they go to work, they start becoming part of a triangle and they almost behave as if they are a triangle themselves. And what I mean by that is that they, they see themselves in relation to others like this as sitting somewhere in a shape that looks a bit like that, a triangle. And depending on where they see themselves in that triangle, in their mental model, they then behave accordingly. So if they see themselves at what we might say, the middle of that triangle , they infer from that what that means about their value to the place, about their power, their influence, about leadership. If they see themselves at the top of the triangle, similarly, and if they see themselves at the bottom of the triangle, they behave as if that is true. And when, when I work with people to let themselves release themselves from the triangle being real, it’s a way of thinking about our relationships. It helps people compare themselves less and to really connect as peers wherever we are in the triangle. And I’m not saying hierarchy isn’t part of our reality for most people at work. In some ways it is part of the reality, but it isn’t the whole truth. And if we lock ourselves and trap ourselves to only seeing ourselves as part of that triangle, it is so self-limiting. And even if you are at the top of the triangle, it really traps you into behaving in, in ways that can be quite dehumanising and disempowering for yourself and others. So be less triangle is one thing that I encourage people to learn and unlearn. And people get very excited about it, get very excited about it because it’s this revelation suddenly that, oh, maybe this triangle is just something we’ve made up because it helps us to control everything. It’s not necessarily real.
Micro Actions and Mini Experiments
Luke: Okay. It would be good then to just explore a little bit more about like how you relate the H.U.M.A.N. framework back to me as an individual. In the context of what we talked about, which is maybe that leader that’s at the top of the triangle and feeling like “I should have all of the answers” as an example , or someone else that sat there saying, do you know what, I really don’t actually like the experience of most of my relationships and this team feels fairly fraught. If they’re that person listening, how do they apply the framework to their working life?
Jeanne: Okay. So the approach that I take in the book and when I work with people is, look, this can feel overwhelming. It is so enormous that it can be paralyzing, because it’s like, where on earth do I start? And I might have read all the books on culture. I might have listened to so many podcasts, but what do I actually do on a Monday morning when I’ve got that awful meeting I’ve got to go to? What do I actually do, Jeanne? And so I’ve packed the book full of what I call mini experiments. And they’re experiments because there is no guarantee that if you try something different, it will work. It might not. The key is just finding the courage to try something different in the way you respond to something. And for, for every aspect of the H-U-M-A-N approach, there are lots of mini experiments to try. And there are experiments that are grounded in me just choosing to behave slightly differently from the normal way I behave. And that might be as something as as tiny as saying nothing when I would normally give my opinion. I mean, it sounds tiny, but it’s about going out, consciously thinking “what I normally do in this situation is,” and, and so “what would happen if I chose to do something slightly different? What would happen if I don’t start retaliating verbally when I hear something I don’t agree with? What would happen if I share exactly what I’m feeling at this moment in time verbally, and I’m the person”? And it’s micro actions and yet they may sound insignificant, but they, and I have seen this so many thousands of times, have such a disproportionate effect. And so you have a ripple effect and people notice it. It changes the dynamic straight away. And people watch and they may not change themselves immediately, but they will be looking and watching and you, without realising it can start to then be inspiring others to have the confidence to try something a bit different. And that’s where the real momentum starts to happen.
Luke: I think often people don’t realise the power that they’ve got to change an environment or an outcome or so on. And you, you’ve worked with thousands of leaders, as you say, right? So what do you notice about how people start to just reshape that environment around them? And do they know that they’re doing it to begin with? Is it one of those things that is like, you’re consciously competent and you are doing the thing? Or is it actually you subtly try one of these experiments? And what’s the feedback loop for an individual that tries one of these experiments? How do they know that it’s, it’s moving in the right direction?
Jeanne: Well, it may move in the right direction or it may not. And that, and that is the key thing, is being willing and open that my mini experiment may not have the impact I’m looking for, but I only know that if I try it. If we just continue doing what we’ve always done, we don’t learn which aspects are, are, are worth putting more energy into and which aspects are not. And I think the one, the one breakthrough I see with people individually and when I work with them in their teams is when they realise how much of their behaviour is based on what they believe they should do. There’s this deeply held set of beliefs people have at work about what people should be doing and what I should do, what you should do. And the “should” things, they don’t stand up to scrutiny actually a lot of the time.
Luke: Yeah.
Jeanne: But because everybody else is doing the shoulds, it’s really hard to do something different. And when people realise they have a choice about how they behave, they have a choice about how they respond. It is hugely liberating because it, it, it brings an ownership and a responsibility, taking responsibility for my own choices.
Top Three Transformational Experiments
Luke: It would be really useful if you could just give me like the top three that you see have drastic impact on teams when you work with them , if you don’t mind.
Jeanne: The top three. I think there’s one around shame. That might not be what you’re expecting me to say.
Luke: I wasn’t expecting you to say, but I’m intrigued.
Jeanne: So much of organizational life is based on shaming , feeling ashamed of myself, so therefore giving myself a hard time, punishing myself, telling myself I’m still not good enough. I’ve need to improve. I’ve got to get better. I need that promotion. I’m shaming myself or shaming other people. Now, we don’t get up in the morning and say, right, who can I shame today? But organizational life, because it is so predicated on 20th century or even before, ways of controlling people , that is visible in the way that leadership and management is still enacted. It’s about controlling people. One of the ways to control people is to shame them. It’s to compare them with others. It’s to measure their value in relation to each other and that, that is insidious. And so one of the top three I would say is how could you let go of shame in yourself, towards yourself and to others? Because once we get beyond that, we can tap into a whole other level of confidence, hope, inspiration because actually we can let go of the fear that we’re not good enough. And if we can turn that around to an embracing of, and I am as I am, and I can still grow and be even better , it, that transforms things. So shame would be one.
Luke: Just, sorry, just so I very, very much resonant. What, what becomes the experiment? Is it a case that it’s a positive affirmation every time you feel that feeling? So, you know, “I’m still what I am and I can still grow”? Or is there a method or an experiment that you can try at the point in which you feel that sense of shame?
Jeanne: Okay, so how could you speak to yourself less as a bully inside your own head and more as a coach inside your own head or as a friend inside your own head? And then how can you verbalise that with others because nobody tries to be a bully? And yet many people’s behaviour can be perceived that way. And I have recognised that in myself that when I have felt passionate about things in the past, when I have felt angry, it came across, it came across, I used to come across in a way that could be on the receiving end of it, feel quite bullying. And I was shocked when I realised that. But once I owned it, I could then make that choice around, well, how could I first of all, start talking to myself in a way that isn’t so bullying? How can I do that? And once I can practice that in myself, do you know what, it starts showing in the way I relate to other people? And so gentleness is not soft and fluffy. Gentleness is powerful.
Luke: Strong. Last two.
Jeanne: I would say some neutral thinking. So what do I mean by that? This draws on the work of Eckhart Tolle, actually. And so let’s say you are late for our call that we’ve booked. And I’m sitting there looking at my watch thinking, Luke is late again. He’s always late. It shows how little he respects me. You know, he doesn’t have any consideration for what I’m going on. He’s so arrogant. I could, I could decide to think all of that about the fact that you’re 10 minutes late , and that is so energy sapping. And you know what? Most of it is a story I’m making up in my head. So neutral thinking would sound like this: Luke hasn’t turned up for my meeting. He’s 10 minutes late. Hmm. Fact. Neutral thinking. There could be all sorts of explanations for it. So I just choose, well, what am I going to do then? Because he hasn’t turned up. Shall I stay or shall I go and get on with my day? But what I’m not doing is getting sucked into the drama that I can make up for myself , which actually really gets in the way of relationships. So neutral thinking sounds really small, but it is massively powerful. And I get feedback all the time when I introduce this to people. They start realising how much of their life they’re making into a soap opera at work and how much of their energy that’s stealing away and how much it’s leading to assumptions about other people, often not very benevolent assumptions. And then we wonder why we end up with tension and fractious sort of self-defensive behaviours between each other. So neutral thinking’s a really powerful one.
And I think the other one might take us back to where we started actually, which is let go so much of your job title and really learn to express who you are in terms of what difference you want to make. So I work with teams of people to embolden them, to behave differently together so they can get even better work done. That’s what I do. And somebody listening to that will either think, oh, well that’s fine, good for Jeanne, but I, she can’t help me. I don’t need her in my work. Or, Oh gosh, Jeanne’s someone I really need to talk to , or I might be able to help Jean, but because I’ve said what I’m here trying to achieve, it gives something people something to work with. And it’s also influences people in a way by standing here and saying, “I’m a vice president of SDC in the Directorate of Momentum”.
Luke: Yeah
Jeanne: Sorry, what was that?
Luke: yeah, yeah. exactly that.
Jeanne: so it’s, again, it’s a little bit of a, a more lighthearted one, but, but when I work with leaders on this, we play with it. We have a bit of fun with it, and people realize how nonsensical a lot of their job titles are, how utterly meaningless they are for most people.
Luke: Yeah.
Jeanne: And, and once you can let go of, of being attached to those and really get to the heart of what am I here to do?
And that might be different in different contexts On a meeting, on a Monday morning, I might be here for a slightly different purpose in terms of what I can offer than that one-to-one I’m having on a Friday with a colleague. So, yeah, just letting go of the job titles as being so, so much a part of your identity is, is is maybe something to, to go away and try.
How would you introduce yourself tomorrow without using your job title?
Luke: Great. That is brilliant. Thank you. Jean, thank you ever so much. This has been really, really useful and the conversation’s got my mind whirring and lost in it, which is so enjoyable. I want to close out now with the last couple of questions. The first is, when you wrote the book, was it an unlock for you or did you have ambitions that it would unlock for others too? And if somebody stuck there in the, in the culture trap, what do you hope the book does for them?
Jeanne: Mm. It completely freed me from that state I described earlier on into a sense of ease with who I am in the world and what I’m here to do that I’ve never had before. So, yes, it unlocked me and I, because it has been so powerful for me and all the teams and leaders that I’ve used it with, I absolutely believe that this is a route to create a new sense of power.
Not power to control other people, but power to make your biggest difference. And the agency and the choice that this offers to people, whoever they are, whatever role they’re in, or even if they’re not even in a job and they’re desperate to try and find a job. I’ve worked with people in that situation with it as well.
So yes, it was first and foremost therapy for me.
Luke: Yeah.
Jeanne: And, and, and I get told it’s therapeutic for, for individual leaders and their teams, which has been astonishing to me to hear.
Luke: Right.
And if, if someone has listened and said, wow, Jeanne is amazing. I would love to follow your work or even work with you, where’s the best pace to connect with you?
Jeanne: So be the culture change.co.uk or be the culture change on YouTube or Dr. Jeanne Hardacre on LinkedIn. I think there’s only one of me, thankfully.
Luke: Hey, what a lovely position to be in. I Googled myself the other day and o only because I needed a picture of my LinkedIn, I think it was. And I was like, God, there’s loads of us.
Jeanne: Oh really? There’s only one unique you, though Luke.
Luke: Yeah. Indeed, indeed. So we do this thing on the podcast, which is we take a question from a past guest so they have no context of who this is gonna be asked to, which is quite a nice way of helping understand some of the areas of culture change that they’re intrigued by. So have one for you which is how do you ensure onsite and team members who aren’t directly in a corporate office setting still feel included in a cultural heartbeat of the organization? I’m also intrigued – Part B to that question is how would you apply the H-U-M-A-N framework?
Jeanne: Hmm. This might feel like a bit of a provocative response. But I, I suppose the word that stands out to me in all of that is unsure, because I don’t think you can ensure that anybody feels anything. And I think that letting go of this need to make people feel how you want them to feel sounds rather odd.
And yet I’ve seen the power it has when people let go of that as a leader and replace it with something else, which is, do you know what every human being has the right to feel, how they feel. They have a right to feel excluded or, or not as much, not acknowledged if that’s their lived experience.
And the belief that we can make everybody feel included or we can make everybody feel as if they’re, part of the cultural heartbeat of the organization. We can do lots of things to invite them into that and to keep those doors open by trying to understand what their needs are and being honest about what needs can and can’t be met.
But what we can’t do is ever ensure everybody thinks or feels or does one thing. It that is a controlling way of going about things. And a more liberating way of doing it would be to be absolutely mindful at all times of how, with my best of intentions to include people, I probably will be excluding people without even realizing them and constantly keeping that radar on around how is my best of intentions potentially having the opposite effect.
I think that’s the most valuable way of, ensuring that everybody has their chance to play their part.
Luke: Yeah, great answer.
So, one tech tool that you can’t live without in your work.
Jeanne: my webcam, look, it follows me round.
Luke: webcam, I’ve gotta be honest. The next is the moment that you look at with the most amount of joy in your career.
Jeanne: It was in July this year, I finished working with a team who had literally been at loggerheads and their, what they were doing was, was, was patient work, really precision patient diagnostic work. And it was starting to be really affected badly by their team dynamics. And I walked away from them in July, having worked with them for seven months, applying the H-U-M-A-N approach and they don’t need me anymore.
Luke: Okay.
Jeanne: And that, oh my gosh, the feeling of joy that, that I have given them what they need to, to escape from that toxic environment and to create something new for themselves so they can do their better work for patients. You can’t get better than that.
Luke: No, I agree completely. A thinker, author, or book that has influenced your approach to organizational culture? can say your own.
Jeanne: Oh, well apart. I, I have to say Barry Oshry, who is little known maybe compared with many of the gurus, he’s about 94 now and is still alive and kicking. And he, with his seeing systems work, has been possibly one of the most influential people for me. In, in my thinking and in my practice and in my own professional personal development.
Luke: Very cool. A culture trend that you are most excited about right now?
Jeanne: Young people. I have three young adults that I’ve brought into the world and brought up and their contemporaries, and they people under 35, they’re, they’re only in their early twenties. They are my inspiration and they are what I’m so excited about because they will not, they don’t, they don’t just suck stuff up.
They don’t just accept the way things are. And whilst that might be tricky to deal with, it is absolutely the energy for change that we are gonna, that is gonna save this world.
Luke: Yeah, indeed. And then very last question is we ask one question that you would love to ask the next guest. Dunno who they are. but anything that you would love to hear a response to in relation to creating culture change.
Jeanne: Mm. Okay. So my question is, if you let go of your need to judge other people as right, wrong, good or bad, and accept everybody’s imperfectly, human, and amazing, what possibilities could that create in your leadership and your teams?
Luke: Great question and a great ending to what has been, I honestly have really, really, really enjoyed the conversation and how long this is, is probably an indication of the fact that I have got completely lost in it.
Jeanne: Yeah, I loved it. Luke, thank you so much for it.
Luke: Thank you ever so much for your time and check, go check Jeanne out ’cause she’s been amazing.
Jeanne: Keep in touch.
