The Emotional Wake: Intentional Leadership and Its Ripple Effects

Mike Williamson: So Nick, great to be, to be with you this morning. Um, really, really pleased to be invited on. Um, so my name is Mike, Mike Williamson. I’m a leadership development consultant, um, and coach and I, I bring experience from. Uh, you know, several sectors including corporate education and not-for-profit, both in s and in the uk.

Um, and you know, I think what what’s interesting is I, I started out as a management consultant and my career has come full circle. Um, so, so what I, what I tend to focus on in my work is, um, helping leaders become better coaches. Uh, for example, also how to, how to establish trust and psychological safety in their team.

So I’m, you know, I’m sure we’ll, we’ll get into the detail of that as we go. Um, I’m based in Melbourne. Um, I live in the inner southeast with my partner, got three independent, uh, adult, I, I dunno what the word is, but I’ve kind of children, um, and, and recently, uh, uh, a grandson as well. So yeah, that’s, that’s a little bit about

Nick McEwan-Hall: Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Recently a grandad. That’s That’s exciting. That’s cool.

Mike Williamson: It is cool. It’s, it’s a bit kind of confronting as well. Kind of know. The last time I looked at my watch, I was still in my, my forties nick, you know, so, uh, it’s come, it’s just come around. It, it’s a wonderful thing though. It really is.

Nick McEwan-Hall: So nice, so nice. I, um, thought we might just jump straight into it and I know we’ve sort of had our notes backwards and forwards and one of the things that really stood out to me was you had a big list of things that, um, have that you said were the biggest kind of impacts in your life, and there were different dimensions professionally, personally, you know, you mentioned your partner there as well in your intro as

well.

Take us through, you know, what are some of those memorable things for you? What are those impactful things that have happened for you?

Mike Williamson: Yeah. I, I love this question. I think it is quite a hard one in some ways, but, um, when I think about. Influence or impact on me professionally, there is one huge standout, and that’s someone I worked with, um, a, a a couple of decades ago who was a, an amazing leader of an organization. He, he was a mentor to me.

Um, and, you know, I suppose what, what he, he opened the windows to me around leadership and, and how you can, you can really drive excellence and results in a, in a team, but you can, you can do that and still maintain great relationships. And in fact, you know, the two, the two got together. So he was a, a real mentor.

Um, I think, yeah, you know, I’m still in touch with him actually. And, and that, I think, I think that’s where the seed for me was sign of, you know, if you want to call it a fascination with leadership. Um,

so yeah, professionally, that, that is an absolute standout. Mm-hmm.

Nick McEwan-Hall: yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Like I, I talked to so many people you know about how they. Came to do what they do, and a lot of people, myself included, can kind of look backwards and look at a situation or a person and go, that person, you know,

in that situation, in that context, really had a big impact on me.

I think everyone’s got at least one of those stories along the way, at least to one, I reckon. Yeah.

Mike Williamson: Absolutely. And, you know, I think that’s, that, that kind of drives my work when I think about when you’re in the workplace, if you have a leader who is that influential in a very positive way that that has so many, you know, knock on benefits to, to people that they lead. Um, so yeah, that was, that was, you know, that was a, maybe a, a junction in my life meeting, meeting that person and being mentored by them.

Um,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Amazing.

Mike Williamson: I, I think the other thing to mention here though is that sometimes you, you in the workplace as well still, we, we come across people who perhaps are the opposite to that. And, they’re not, they’re not very pleasant and they lead a toxic environment and they teach us an awful lot as well. They teach us how not to do it.

Right. Um, and there’s some dangers in that, which we might, we might get to. Um

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, yeah. It’s true though, isn’t it? Like the, it is the two sides of the same coin, right? It’s like, well, this is what I like and what’s been impactful on me in, I guess what we could say is a positive way. And then, yeah, here are the impacts that have, that have, that I’ve had on me

in a negative kind of way.

Like things I didn’t like, things I didn’t enjoy, or that might’ve

been hurtful, or whatever it might be. Yeah.

Mike Williamson: And that makes me think of something that I, I, I remember probably 10, 15 years ago doing some, uh, professional development and personal development, um, with a, with a coach who said, you know, when you’re a leader, you, you will leave an emotional wake, whatever, whether you like it or not. Yeah. It’s, it’s really, it really kind of, um, resonated with me.

And so you need to get intentional about what impact you have. Um,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah.

Mike Williamson: so that’s, that’s really interesting. I think that that whole era about impact and intentionality, um, you know,

and, and the, the other side of things, you know, personally, I think. I, I, my parents, I came, I, I grew up in a very loving environment.

Um, I don’t, I don’t think my parents had any intentionality at all. I don’t think it, in those days, many people had the knowledge about it. Right? But, you know, the, the most important thing was there was care, um, and challenge actually, you know, um,

the idea that I think that my dad saying, you know, hard work brings you luck, which I think is true, but you kind of have to fight that work ethic thing sometimes as well to get the balance right.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. And as you’re saying that, like it makes me think about. You know, I’ve got this very visual picture in my head of like a big cruise ship, like cruising through the open ocean with that or wake that in like behind it. And so impactful. And that’s happening, like you said, regardless of what we’re intending, that kind of wake is happening and that intention versus impact questions really interesting too.

And it’s something I talk a lot about in mental health first aid training because people will say, well, I I had good intentions. Yeah, I, I wanted to help, but maybe the way I didn’t, maybe the way I did it really had a impact that wasn’t quite what I wanted. So this kind of intention and impact, this separate things that kind of work together.

And I, I kind of feel like you want both of them in your sites to kind of really do things well. And they should align a little bit if you can make that. But it’s such a visual way to think about that, that emotional wake. Yeah, it’s really

Mike Williamson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, really happy to, uh, whether we do that now or a bit later on in the pod, you know, talk about, um, some of those, I, I call them, you know, foundational principles to leadership that will make that, that weight a positive one.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, well let’s talk about it. ’cause your work is in that leadership space. You

know, your work is in that sort of

leadership coaching and development kind of space. So yeah, why don’t we talk about it? It’ll give people a good insight into the work that you do and Yeah. How you do it, which I think is really interesting for people too.

So,

yeah, tell me, tell me more. What’s on your mind when you, when we think about this whole piece?

Mike Williamson: So I, I think, uh, a number of years ago, Google did their research, uh, about what makes the perfect team. I, I don’t believe there is any such team. Um, there’s been a couple of sports teams like the US 1992 Dream Team, the basketball team. They were, seemed to be the perfect team, but I think in the workplace, you know, um, there isn’t any, any such thing.

But Google did their research, they call it Project Aristotle. Um, and it was, it was about the same time that Amy Edmondson, who’s a, a world or Harvard business professor, um, and now work in psychological safety. What, what Google did is they, they investigated hundreds of their teams. Thousands of employees.

And, and the result really surprised them. They thought it was gonna be about the demographics of the team and, and the technical capability in the teams. And what they found was the common denominator in the high performing teams was there was psychological safety in the teams. So people,

people felt safe.

Uh, it’s not, it’s not, I mean, defining what psychological safety is not is a good thing to do. And it’s not, you can do whatever you like. It’s not, we don’t have accountability. Um, what it’s about is people feeling safe to raise issues or concerns or to provide feedback up without any fear of repercussions.

And.

That was really surprising for Google. So I do a fair bit of work around that within teams, um, whether it’s, uh, one-on-one leadership coaching or, um, you know, co-design workshops with a particular team. So yeah, there, there’s, there’s so much in that, but I think, you know, there’s more and more evidence that that is a absolute truth.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. And it makes so much sense. Doesn’t it really? Like when we think about it, it makes so much sense,

that kind of idea that when people are being vulnerable, when, you know,

giving feedback or making a comment that. Maybe they don’t know how it’s gonna be taken. Right. Or there’s a fear that it might be taken the wrong way or there’s a repercussion or some kind.

But to the way I think about, it’s like when people are vulnerable, we want them to not only be able to be vulnerable, but if they want to, I wanna reward them for that. You know? I want them to feel a positive by being vulnerable with me. Right? So it’s sort of like that. It’s the whole thing. It’s the whole piece just wrapped up in a nice little, like nice little thing.

I guess where I sometimes get struggles with this stuff is that there’s an element of subjectivity to it. You know? So how do I know when somebody is feeling safe? You know, that kind of thing. But I think there’s some universal truths to how we can set this up, which I’m sure you’ve, you’ve worked on in your work.

Yeah.

Mike Williamson: Yeah, I like that phrase, Nick, universal truth. Um, and I, I think, you know, one of the things you can do, and Amy Edmondson, you know, uh, makes her work freely available is you can, you can go and measure the level of psychological safety in your team or your organization. Now, just by doing that and asking people’s input, input is, is gonna improve that area.

And so you could, you can measure it and, and then you can work out what. Perhaps you as a team or an organization need to do to make it better. Um, and it’s gotta be, it’s gotta come from, uh, the leadership level, the top level to, uh, make that decision. Um, but I think, you know, if you’ve, if you’ve got that, if you’ve got the psych safety, if you’ve got the trust of your people, it, it doesn’t mean that you don’t confront poor performance or inappropriate behavior, but it, it does tie in with the whole area of, of how to get and how to give feedback.

And I always say, uh, if, if you’re gonna do anything as a leader, uh, in the feedback space, make sure the first bit is, is to ask for it. And, and, um, I suppose the other principle in, in all of that is never, never, ever shoot the messenger. If you get, if you get bad news. Just say thank you. Whether that bad news is about results or whether it’s about you.

Just just say thanks. Um, so yeah, it, it is a, it’s a really, I, I think the whole, the whole area is very interesting and, you know, more and more neuroscience evidence is coming, coming through around this.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, it’s, it’s a fascinating sort of space, isn’t it? I think people, people might understand what it is from their own perspective, you know, like their own kind of experience of feeling safe, like psychologically safe, and, and it can be hard to kind of put that into words, I think, to kind of document it or to articulate it sometimes.

So I think there’s a decent amount of

storytelling that kind of has to happen here as well. Like people need

to say, this is what makes me feel safe. This is what makes me not feel safe at all.

And everything on in between, right? Between all those kind of, um,

yeah, between those two ends of that spectrum.

Mike Williamson: Yeah. And I think that that has to start with a leader. Um, I often use that there’s, I’ve got a framework of, of six questions that a leader can ask to promote psychological safety. And one of those might be something like, what, what’s one thing I do that gets in the way of you being successful?

And it’s really showing openness to that feedback. Um, so that, that’s,

for me, that’s one of the key areas. I mean, I also help leaders become better at being a coach. Um, not to say that coaching is always the, the best, you know, sometimes you’ve gotta be more forceful as a leader, but if, if you’re gonna have a default.

Being a good coach is, is a great one. And you, you, you know, you, you know that you, you are, you’ve worked in that space as well. Um, so I, when I work with an organization, I, I find, you know, that there, there’s less, um, efficacy. If, if I come in and go, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do, we’re gonna cover these things.

I, I, I tend to go in and listen to what is happening in the organization or the team, and then we’ll, we’ll co-design, um, around, around certain frameworks.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Nice.

Yeah.

it’s it’s interesting. I, I feel like, and it taps into something you, you, you and I talked about in our kind of pre podcast kind of discussions.

It it’s about those kind of connecting leaders, as you put that, as you put it, like connecting

leaders, middle, middle managers, people might kind of know these people as, and I find that a lot of the time people in those roles, because they have that pressure from above and that pressure from below, it can be a really difficult place to be vulnerable, right?

To be kind of vulnerable with people. ’cause you’ve got all these different kind of stakeholders and. And at the same time, we have such big expectations for this group of people in our businesses and in our workplaces. Talk me through, I know you’re passionate about this kind of wording around this stuff, so talk me through, you know, middle managers, connecting leaders, that whole piece.

Because I think if we understand a bit more about the differences in how we think about those folks, then we’re gonna do a better job at supporting them from a psychological safety point of view.

Mike Williamson: Yeah, absolutely. Um, okay, well you’ve, you’ve hit on the topic here, Nick. You know that you’re gonna get me started on this, I think,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yep. Go for it. Yeah, yeah. So look, calling, calling these people middle managers is just the tip of the iceberg for me. I mean, we talk about aspiring leaders. We talk about senior leaders, executive leaders, and then we go, you are middle managers, right?

Mike Williamson: You’re not even leaders, you’re managers. And so,

um, I, I love the term connecting leaders for this group. ’cause they connect the senior with the frontline, they connect strategy with operations and they are leaders. I mean, you know, you don’t have to have a leader in your title to be a leader of course.

But, um,

the thing that really, um, I dunno whether disturb is too strong a phrase, right? But I know that in the corporate world, I know people in the corporate world who experience this in a not-for-profit in the local government area, maybe not quite so much, but we, we, we say to someone, you are really good at your role.

I love what you do technically, and I’m gonna, we’re gonna promote you to lead the team, but we’re not going to give you any, any training or support. It’s extraordinary that we do that, that we expect someone, because for me, what it does, and as I say, I can get a little bit, uh, strident on this one. Um, but I do feel very passionate about it because if you let someone go into a team leadership role and they haven’t got the support or training, have done none of the foundational principles, it will affect their mental health.

They’ll be really stressed if they haven’t been given any, any, um, guidance. Um, now I’m not saying it happens all the time, but it does still happen now. You know, we’re talking about emotional wake. How does that affect the people that they’re leading when they haven’t had any training? So,

so.

Nick McEwan-Hall: question.

Mike Williamson: You know, um, yeah, I mean, I, I’ll, I will pause there because, you know, I can go on and on about this one, but it, it, it is a, it is a really important, you know, we think about future leaders as well, um, and the future of organizations.

We’ve gotta, we’ve gotta, um,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. It, it’s, it is interesting. I mean, I, that’s very much my story as

Mike Williamson: You know, I was, I was gardening early in my career, how, you know, we,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Oh, have I got you still there? Are you connected? Might have lost you. Oh no. There you go.

Mike Williamson: Hey, we’re back, back in the room. Yeah. When I was gardening yesterday, I was thinking about this. You know, we, we, you have to garden regularly. You have to clean, you have to prune, you have to water. And in the same way, we need to, we need to nurture people. Uh, that’s not to say we

Nick McEwan-Hall: it’s so

Mike Williamson: what they want.

Mm-hmm.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s so true. I, I’m thinking about one of my first real jobs, you know, when I first moved to Melbourne and decided I wanted to work in adult education and it was a not-for-profit. And, you know, the leader there left, the coordinator left, and they literally kind of walked, looked around and went and said, who’s good at their job? And they said, oh, Nick, you are good at what you do. This is literally the conversation we had. They said, Nick, you’re really good at what you do. Why don’t you be the coordinator? And I was like, great. Like as a young

kind of 22-year-old, I was like. Fantastic. I’m gonna be a coordinator. Like that’s amazing.

And

that emotional wake, you know, that idea that you’ve kind of planted in my, in my head now, when I look back at some of the challenges I had leading that team, it was the, it was the emotional wake I was leaving behind. I felt great. I thought I was doing a fantastic job. My leader at the time was kind of going, yep, you’re doing all the things we need you to do.

Like it’s going really well, we trust you. All of that sort of stuff. So from the top I’m getting, it’s all good, you know, messages and from the bottom I was getting, there was lots of challenges there. There were lots of issues

and. I, a lot of it has to have been to do with my skillset at the time. And that ability also, not just the skillset in terms of practical, like can I do the work, but also the emotional skillset there as well to kind of go, you know what, like I don’t, I don’t think I’ve got the right tools, or I think I’m stuffing this up, or whatever it

1. I just di it wasn’t that I wasn’t psychologically safe, it was that I didn’t have the tools to even know that that was what was going on, you know? And there was no leadership training. It was literally accidental leadership. I remember doing a conference presentation about accidental leadership in the sector that I worked in for a long time,

and it was that story and it’s so common

and, and you know, that question you, you posed before about it’s gotta be bad for our mental health. I think there was definitely parts of that job that really challenged me in terms of like, make me feel stressed, but because I wasn’t so aware, I didn’t have the impact. Right? So.

It’s this kind of awareness. The more we know, the more we can do that kind of piece. It’s really interesting. But that wake idea, I can, I can, I have things coming to my memory now about conversations I had that I can still remember. That was definitely because of the emotional wake that I was leaving behind

as a leader, as a manager in that place.

Mike Williamson: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, what you’ve made me think about there is the fact that, or the idea that, um, it is gotta be driven from top level of leadership. But you know, what, what are we trying to do? Are we just, after getting things done, are we just after getting the results. Surely we wanna help people grow and develop, and I think that’s what the best leaders do.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Mm.

Mike Williamson: and, and you, you need to be given guidance on how to do that. Um, you know, I,

I’ve, you know, I talk about this all the time, that, you know, how, how you define leadership, the words you use around that are really important. And I, I, I, I have simplified it over the years into, you know, great leadership is about getting results through other people, but helping those people develop along the way.

And you’ve gotta do both.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if we’re gonna develop, if we’re gonna achieve results through other people, we need to make sure that those other people have got the skills so they can get the result.

Mike Williamson: absolutely. Absolutely.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It makes so much sense. You must have seen so many examples of this where it hasn’t been working the way that we kind of are talking about it. Um, what do you think the barriers are for people that are in that situation? They’re stuck as leaders or managers or, you know, coordinators or whatever kind of words we’re putting on it. What do you think the barriers are for people who are in that situation who might

want to change it or don’t know that they need to change it? Like from your perspective working with them, what do you reckon the kind of key barriers, or maybe not barriers, but what are the things that you’d focus on with that person to help them see through it?

Mike Williamson: Yeah, it’s a great question, Nick. I, I love the question. I think for me, uh, it is about kind of individual awareness, self-awareness, and it’s also about the social awareness within the organization. Um, and for someone to change and grow and develop, sometimes you’ve gotta, it’s about. Stopping. It’s about what you stop doing.

Um,

so when, when we talk about coaching, we, uh, the leader as a coach, sometimes what the leader has to do is you’ve gotta stop giving advice. You’ve gotta stop telling.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Hmm.

Mike Williamson: You need to ask questions. The best leaders ask great questions. They don’t have all the answers, and they recognize that. Um, so again, I can, I can, I can rattle on for a while on this one, but I think, I think self-awareness, and I think if you can give people tools for, to become a reflective leader and give them some tools.

I mean, so for example, I, I, I do, you know, we, we talked before about kind of self care and, you know, I think sometimes doing some journaling and some reflection, I, I, I recommend that all leaders do it, at least, you know, maybe once a fortnight. Ideally once a week, you know what’s gone well. What hasn’t gone well, why not?

Um, so building that kind of self-awareness muscle is really, really important. Um, so yeah, that there are barriers, some, you know, um, and you’ve gotta have to, to, to grow as a connecting leader, you’ve gotta have someone who’s your manager, who’s willing to invest in you and who has belief in you. Um, so it’s about, again, it’s about relationship and it’s, it’s about that kind of really important personal connection to,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Hmm. And having that external person, I think like as a, in your role as a coach, to have someone

sitting completely thorough, thoroughly outside the situation, kind of objectively offering insights and observations and in that style of a coach sort of asking some questions about that and letting people come to that position as they are able to, you know, I think yeah, with that external support, and we see this the same with when we’re talking about mental health and supporting

people with their mental health. Often they need an external person because for whatever they’re going through, they cannot do it themselves. You right. It’s, it’s, it’s an inability and it’s not a. It’s not a competency based inability, it’s a, they don’t have the capacity, they’re unable to, it’s not a question of can they count, they should, they shouldn’t.

They, it’s just like, they can’t, you know, it’s

like, it’s like saying, well, that chair, I could, you know, the chair I’m looking at, I can wish for, you know, to the end of the day that it turns into a table, but it can’t. So it’s

sort of like, well, if I sit there and I keep going, oh, as soon as that chair turns into a table, everything be fine.

Mike Williamson: Yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: You

Mike Williamson: Yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: really doing the right thing. Yeah.

Mike Williamson: Yeah. And I think maybe what, what, what that suggests to me while you’re talking there is, you know, about helping people with their mindset. And when I’m doing one-on-one coaching, whether that’s at a senior level or, or you know, more, you know, in the connecting leader space or sometimes even with aspiring leaders, it’s really, it’s quite often that people are at a crossroads and they, they want to move up a level or they want, they want to go and do something differently.

And, um, that, that sometimes just, all it is, is someone in your corner to go, you can do this because you know, our own self talk and you know, and in mental health, I know you sure talk about this, this kind of areas is so important. Um, that’s not to say just by believing you can do it. But, but it’s, um, it’s a really important first step.

And the other, the other thing I find in one-on-one coaching, particularly at the senior level, is quite often, uh, you know, I’ll be working with someone that comes to coaching because there’s, there’s a real pressure. And, and it might just be, you know, I, I was doing some work with a, um, leader a couple of months, but who, he just wanted to leave the office before seven, three days a week.

And so that, that was, that was the struggle. And, and that’s definitely, um, you know, that’s around that, that’s definitely got a mental health aspect to it as well. Um, and then, and then sometimes it’s, well quite often in the coaching one-on-one space, it’s about interpersonal challenges at work. Um, so that requires.

You know, self-reflection, a bit of work, and once leaders can come to that realization that it’s perhaps about what they do and the effect and impact they’re having, that’s when you can get, you know, those light bulb moments and if you like a, a bit of a step change.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, it’s such a, such an interesting space to work with people in because I feel like. Part of what we’re asking as a coach for that person to do is to be that vulnerable piece to say, well, I don’t know, or, I’m not sure, or

maybe I don’t have the skills. And so, you know, if they’re not feeling that kind of safety in that conversation, then it can really hard for them, for us as coaches, if we’re working in that coach forward kinda way, that it can be really tricky to do that.

But again, I guess it goes back to the, the basics doesn’t, it’s about, well, we spend time creating those relationships and we spend time deepening the

rapport and the connection so that we can kind of do those things. It’s a bit of a safety net for those challenging conversations.

Mike Williamson: Most definitely, uh, couldn’t agree more, Nick. And I think that that one about yeah, you have that connection, the trust, the psych safety, uh, because, you know, the best leaders will, I think confronts not the right word, but they will challenge, and if they see someone who,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Hmm. who is not pulling their weight or they, they, they think they’ve got even greater potential, then, you know, it’s kind of holding the mirror up actually quite often.

Mike Williamson: And whether, whether you’re a,

a leadership coach or whether you are their, their, their manager in the workplace, I think it’s really important to, to do that when you need to. So that underpinning piece around Yeah, trust is, and, and connection is so important.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I think the Hold the mirror up. Kind of analogy is a really nice one because one of the things that I kind of focus on when I’m working with people to support their people, you know, from a mental health perspective, is talking about reality or just kind of objective reality. Like what’s happening, you know, without the judgment.

So it’s just like, well, here’s the

facts. Here are the, here are the factual things of what’s going on, and really working hard to strip away any of the judgment about this is good or this is bad, or this should be more of this, or less of this. And the mirror just reflects what’s there, right? It just kind of reflects what’s there without the judgment.

It’s like, well, if you see something in that mirror that you don’t like, it’s not the mirror. It’s the fact that

there’s something there that we don’t like, or maybe something we love that we wanna do more of, right? So

this reality piece of being objective can be so hard when you are in it, like you’re in, in the storm.

It can be so difficult. So again, to have that outside kind of assistance with, that’s really nice.

Mike Williamson: Yeah, absolutely agree. Yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. Interesting. Um, there must be so many

other kind of, um, other ways that mental health kind of intercepts in, in your, in your kind of work. How do you see mental health kind of popping up as themes when you’re working with, with individuals or organizations? Like how does it kind of show up most of all, I guess, in the work that you do?

Mike Williamson: Oh yeah. Um, I, I think in a, a lot of my work, not, not all of it, Nick, but a lot of it is in the for purpose sector and

Nick McEwan-Hall: Hmm.

Mike Williamson: quite often I often think some of the leaders you, you, you meet and, and come across and work within the sector. My word what, what amazing things they would do if they had the funding.

Okay.

Nick McEwan-Hall: yeah. Yeah. you know, if they had the same funding as some of the corporates, wow. What, what a, what a what change? We could see. Um, but they’re often in, you know, um, underfunded environments. And so there, there’s a degree of stress around that. I think, um, you know, I was working, uh, with an organization that, that, that does works in the overseas development space and overseas aid and, um,

Hmm. you know, Trump’s policies have impacted on them.

Mike Williamson: So this is kind of out of control sense for them, um, about the external environment. Uh, so, so that, that kind of stress part of it is, uh, you know, that’s, that’s quite prevalent I think. Um, let go to the other, the other kind of, uh, side of the coin. When you, when you see. Leaders get it, and they, they’re self-aware and they get the piece about psych safety and relationships and connection.

You can, you can almost smell it in the room, right? When you’re with a group, you can, you can see it, you can it, you know, taste it. Um, you can smell it, it, it’s really, really evident. And that’s,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Um.

Mike Williamson: that’s just a great thing to see because what you’re getting is it’s kind of wonderful, uh, combination of great results, great connection amongst the team.

Um, real challenge as well from the leadership. And then you’ve got, uh, uh, divided by, if you want the equation, wellbeing, you know, they, they’re getting, they’re getting all of that. And that’s down to the way. That the leaders are, are leading the group. So in terms of positive mental health, I, I love seeing that.

I love seeing that. And it is, it’s achievable, right? It’s about intentionality.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, definitely. I think with some of the principles we’ve been talking about, fundamental to that achievability, right? Like to kind of go, well, if we just kind of bake these things in as skills and practices and ways of working, then the payoff is that hopefully the positive kind of aspect of that mental health of that team or the kind of wellbeing of that team. Yeah. It comes to, comes to play and it is such a nice place to be when you’re there, right? Like as you say, when you’re

walking to a room and or you meet someone and you can just kind of feel it like it’s a really nice thing. Yeah. Like the texture of it almost. It’s like, Ooh, yeah, this feels good.

Mike Williamson: Textures there. I love that. Yeah. I love that. And, and I think, you know, um. If you’re talking about for pro for-profit organizations, this is fantastic for the bottom line, you know, because if you haven’t got those

foundational principles, people will leave. Your retention is, is, is going south, people aren’t engaged.

So yeah, it makes a lot of business sense as well. No doubt about it.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Reminds. Yeah. Oh, you’re absolutely right. I mean, it reminds me, or it kind of brings up into my mind that, that question of values as well, like our

personal values, organizational values, and where there’s alignment there, then, you know, there’s less friction kind of thing. And I, I find for our folks that I work with in not-for-profits, there’s often a very strong values alignment between what they like and what they want to do and how they wanna walk through the world and the kind of work that they do.

It’s, it’s quite often that I’ll meet someone in a not-for-profit and I’ll say, how long have you been working here? And they go, oh, you know, 15 years, like a

long time. Because there is that kind of values alignment as well. And I think if, if there is that values alignment, then that’s a positive thing in that step of the wellbeing, but it’s so fragile. Because not-for-profits kind of also have these realistic challenges like funding and resources and all things. So it’s a really difficult space for people to be in in a long term without feeling some of that pressure or

that stress or that kind of impact on wellbeing, I think. But it’s such a protective factor at the same time.

Mike Williamson: Yeah, definitely, definitely. So I think, uh, you know, my understanding is that, um, the, whether they’re laws or regulations, Nick in Victoria, by the end of the calendar year, will come in line with other states and territories around psychosocial hazards in the workplace, treating

those hazards the same as any physical hazards.

And it’s about time. Um, but that’s, that’s gonna be something organizations really need to have a look at. And I don’t, I don’t think it’s. It’s not necessarily hard to do, it just requires, you know, um, leadership, uh, commitment to, to make that, to make that

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah.

Mike Williamson: which kind of makes me think about what, what do you do about people who aren’t leading the right way and who are creating toxic environments?

And it’s really important that the most senior people in the organization don’t accept that. Um, and that’s gonna become increasingly important.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. I agree. I think it’s, it’s interesting this kind of legislative landscape that’s changing because

in a lot of ways, I think, you know, as, as companies and things, we always had that obligation to make sure this was a safe workplace and now it’s gonna be super codified and kind of go there it is.

Right. So I keep on saying to people, hopefully like we’re investing our time and money and effort and energy into this from a prevention perspective, um, rather than coming at it after something happened. And I think unfortunately, probably. For some organizations, it’s gonna be a little bit of like, something’s gonna have to happen, unfortunately, before we see that effort, before we see the, the input of resources into kind of developing that, that sort of muscle, which I think is really unfortunate.

But that’s, that’s kind of how it is. But the smart organizations have had some of this stuff in place for a long time because they’ve seen the value of it. But the smart organizations are ahead of that, of that curve that’s coming, which is to say,

well, it’s gonna be legislated at some point, you know, and underneath all of that, we can talk about legislation, we can talk about companies, we can talk about blah, blah, blah. But underneath that are the human beings in those organizations. And some of ’em are struggling, some of ’em are suffering, including some of our leaders who are, who are, you know, what we would perceive as being really challenging, really toxic, you know, it’s like, well, what’s going on for them?

That, that’s kind of making them that way.

Right? That’s one of the first things that goes through my head not to. Okay. The behaviors or anything like that, but just kind of go, well, yeah, you’re in a context, you’re a leader in a context. What’s happening for you that’s making you behave in these ways?

Mike Williamson: Yeah. And you know, I think, um, that that’s why, you know, the, these, uh, the connecting leaders that they’re, they’re the senior leaders of the future. So we’ve, you know, we, we we’re kind of, it’s really important to give them the skills they need, um, for, for the longer term. Yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. It’s, it’s funny, I, um, I was talking to someone last week and they said, oh, they asked me, they said, oh, you know what, what are the, what are the challenges with getting people to do mental health first aid training as one sort of way to address some of this stuff? And I gave the, the analogy, I won’t quite get it right today, I don’t think, but I said, I sort of said to ’em, it’s kind of like saying to someone. Who, you know, let’s say your operator, you operate a saw mill, you know, and you’ve got massive saws and things, and you say, well, you know, yeah, that’s a really dangerous saw there. But we don’t really train people. ’cause saws are sharp and some people will probably lose their limbs. Yeah. You know?

Okay. And people should, people should know that SOS are sharp and people should know that they shouldn’t put their fingers on it.

And

you know, they should know all these things. It’s like, well there’s lots of assumptions there. But if we think about that from a mental health perspective, what we know about that stuff is people do not know that, that things are challenging. People do not know how things work. They do not know how mental illness works.

They do not know how our mental health works. So this psych safety piece I see as a bit of a, like it’s a structural thing, which I think will allow people to kind of go, I don’t know that, you

know, I don’t know that I need to know that. I’d like to know. That’s like an enabling force, I think for some people.

But I think it’s gonna be really hard for others.

Mike Williamson: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Yeah, and I think, you know, that there’s few, few good things that came out of the, the Global Pandemic, but I think awareness about mental health and, um, the importance of connection and relationship were, were a couple of them. But, you know, when we’re talking about mental health, one of the things I wanted to mention was kind of non workplace, um, stuff around mental health.

I, I, um, think we spoke about this before briefly, but I, I think men’s mental health is, uh, all mental health is important, right? But I think men’s

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Williamson: is particularly, um, it has been problematic in this country. If you look at the. The male suicide rate. It’s, it’s unbelievable, isn’t it? Um, so I, you know, I, I attend a, uh, a men’s book club, monthly book club.

It’s called Tough Guy Book Club. Um, so that, that’s very tongue in cheek and ironic, uh, name, but it, it’s an amazing thing and how it’s evolved. It started in Fitzroy probably, I think 10, 12 years ago. Just a couple of people who started it and it’s now there are chapters of the book Club of Tough Guy Book Club right across the country.

There are hundreds. Um, it’s over in nz,

it’s in the us it’s in the uk. It’s quite phenomenal. And, you know, um, yeah, men who who read books were tough, you know, kind of, it, it’s, it’s very, very funny like that. But, you know, the, the mission of of, of the organization, ’cause it is a. Registered charity, um, get some mental health funding is to help men to read more, um, and talk more and connect more.

And that’s just a brilliant thing because a lot of that connection happens beyond the monthly book club and the book. The books we read, the books we read are, are really bring up. Um, some, you know, they’re carefully chosen. Um, some aren’t very popular, but, uh, you know, they bring up some really important topics.

Um, so amazing what the organization’s done. There’s two, there’s two great rules as well for book club. Uh, one is that you

Nick McEwan-Hall: her I was gonna ask you what the rules are.

Mike Williamson: yeah. Two rules. Um, one is you, you don’t talk about work, which, which kind of is, which is great. You don’t, what do you do for a living? You don’t, you don’t have that conversation. And I’ve been, I’ve been attending this, this for three years and there’s people that I’ve no idea what they do. For work. Um, and the other rule is, is um, no dickhead and, and that, and that’s a really good rule too.

Yeah. So that’s, that’s happening in communities, you know, all over Australia. And that’s, that’s only a good thing.

Nick McEwan-Hall: and it’s such an interesting model because it’s so simple. It’s like get people, get, keep people together around a common activity. Put some basic structure around it and let the rest happen. And I think you can so easily replicate those things in workplaces, you know, so easily. And it may not be a book club, but, but something else in, its in its place.

You know, let’s do, you know, people cringe about the, the lunch, you know, the team lunch and stuff, but actually kind of having places and spaces in, I’m thinking in terms of time in the week, right? Space in my week to

actually just talk to people about stuff, you know, is really nice. And it’s like, this morning I’m, I’m here at our shared office space and I was here last week and the guy out there was at the front desk, he was talking about his footy tipping and footage tipping is not, I have no idea about footy tipping, right?

I’ve got

no idea. But we had this conversation about it. Then I saw him again this morning, he was making my coffee and I said, oh, how’s your footy chip going? And he’s like, oh, it’s going really well. Like it’s going good. Like, and it’s just. To be really honest, like footy tipping is not really my jam at all.

I’m not particularly interested in football, but in terms of having a talk about something that’s a bit different, that’s not about work. It’s not about who we are as people. It’s just about this other random thing allows me to feel like I walked away with a smile off my face going, oh, we really connected about that.

You know? And it’s not, it’s not like

we’ve, our lives have changed right now, but it’s like, well, I got that little hit of, that was nice, you know? That was a nice connection. It was a nice thing to be able to do, and I felt like I, I’ve enabled that for them as well. Right. So yeah, just these simple things I think can be so important.

I don’t think we need to overcomplicate some of this stuff.

Mike Williamson: I, I agree, Nick. And one of the things you just reminded me of is, you know, I think during and just after the pandemic and there was, you know, initiatives all over the place around wellbeing and

there there was quite a lot of, um, uh, I don’t know, it wasn’t boredom. It was like, oh, not, we’re not doing games again.

Are we on the Zoom meeting? And I think that the smart teams and organizations learned that there is absolutely no. One size fits all for this. People will, you know, different, different things help with wellbeing with different people. And so giving people, agency in an organization to set up a group or do different things and, you know, find their own, as long as the organization can facilitate that, that that’s the important thing.

But, um, yeah, those organizations that don’t, you know, recognize the importance of wellbeing will, they’ll get left behind, I think.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I

think. I think so. And I mean, we know what the market’s like, right? People will leave, people will leave the organization because organizations are doing it well, you know, they’re doing it well. And it reminds me of the whole how I working at home or the office kind of thing. People will just go and get a job at an organization that fits them better.

So I, I guess our job is to actually create organizations that fit people better, like that, allow people to kind of feel welcome and to feel a hundred percent there. Like, I think that’s the job.

Mike Williamson: Yeah, I think welcome and, and the other, the other word I I often talk about with things is you’ve gotta make your people feel valued. You know, people are doing great work. If people don’t feel valued or recognized.

I,

think it affects mental health. I think it affects motivation, um, and, and performance.

You know, um,

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. catch people doing the right thing. Alright. And, and congratulate them. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s a nice thing, isn’t it? It’s nice to say, Hey, that was really great. That was really lovely. And I think we need that balance. As leaders, we need that balance. If we’re just, it’s so easy just to focus on, Hey, this needs improving, and, you know, oh, that hasn’t been quite right, or maybe we could do this and, and we can sit there going, oh, I’m being encouraging.

I’m, you know, showing people how to improve and things. But actually the genuine, Hey, that looks really great. Hey, that I love that. Yeah. Ooh, that wasn’t what I, what I was expecting, but it’s much better.

You know, like those sorts of things just out of the blue, they have to be genuine and you want to kind of look back at your week and go, yeah, I’ve, I’ve,

even if it’s been a massive storm of a week, there’s been stuff in there that I’ve actually can point back to, to say. Yep. I gave some good feedback and it was genuine. It was delighting, it was all those things. I think if we get that balance right, that goes so much to that sort of triple bottom line of, of, um, psych safety,

but also in terms of like helping people feel connected. Right? How nice is it to delight and surprise people?

It’s beautiful.

Mike Williamson: I think, I think one of the things as well that I, uh, a, a kind of a, a quick tip for leaders who wanna recognize people for their work and give that positive feedback is, um, if you’re gonna, for example, if you’re saying, uh, the meeting you ran the other day, that was great. That that’s not enough.

Tell them why it was great. Connect what they did with what the organization’s trying to do, or tell them what the impact was. Um, because just saying, uh, that was great meaning, and then off you go down the corridor, not enough. So we, we need to get specific on that. Um, but coming back to the thing about, you know, valued and, and recognized that, you know, if, if, if we’ve been in a team where we felt like that, we know how that feels.

It is not, it’s not a warm bath. Right. It, it’s really motivating when you feel valued.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, absolutely. Like people will show up and they’ll do more and they’ll be more, and they’ll be more innovative and yeah, they’ll just,

I think they’ll just go that step further and it’s not, and again, I think some people can think, listen to this conversation and think that we’re being, what’s the word?

Um, like, it’s like we’re trying to, like, we’re conniving. It’s not that it’s actually just saying. Hey, people come to work. Like the pe, the person you’ve got in your team has applied to work with you like they

want to be there.

You know that if we go right back to that, they’ve said, that looks like a team I’d like to be part of. They’ve interviewed you, you’ve interviewed them. They’re here now. Let them do

all of the things that they’re capable of doing.

Let them do it. You know, it’s sort of like, why do we bring people in and then kind of squish down on their kind of freedom to just do all the things that we think they’re awesome at doing, and that’s why we hired them.

It just doesn’t make sense to me. But

Mike Williamson: Well, I think there’s a I know how easy it is to slip isn’t there, a famous quote, I think it’s Steve Jobs, who said, we, we don’t hire people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people ’cause they’re gonna tell us what to do. You know, or something along those lines. Um, so yeah, really important. One of the things I recommend, um, leaders do is when, when you, when you’ve recruited someone, you brought someone onto payroll, um, you know, don’t, don’t wait until the six month probationary to tell them how they’re going.

After a couple of months. Ask them how we are going for you. I call them, I call them entry interviews, right? Yeah. How are we going for you? What’s, what’s good? What’s maybe not so good? And it just, you know, people. People are kind of quite taken aback by it when you start doing it. ’cause it doesn’t happen everywhere.

Right. But, um, yeah, it does, certainly

it’s a bit of a, a, an injection of motivation and and engagement.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. It’s such a reminder, isn’t it? About that, that importance of that psych safety. ’cause I think if people don’t experience psychological safety in those environments, when we say to them, so how are we going,

you know, if we’re not creating those environments in which people can tell you, then we’re gonna get the top line.

Yeah. It’s great. Yeah. And we can sit there across the table as the leader going, I know that’s not what you

mean, you know, but, but you know, we can’t really force them to say

1. We have to create the environment in which they’re, they feel like they can just tell you. Right. Like, yeah. I feel like if someone’s going to their performance review and they’re not sure how it’s gonna go, that’s a

problem.

You know, they should kind of know roughly how it’s gonna go, whether that’s good or bad. Right. But, you know, if they, if they don’t know, then maybe they haven’t had the feedback. Maybe they, maybe they just haven’t

Mike Williamson: definitely Nick.

Nick McEwan-Hall: throughout that time.

Mike Williamson: Yeah. And you know, that feedback get, getting, getting a culture of feedback where it’s, it’s okay to, um, you know, give feedback to your manager. It’s also, uh, uh, uh, you know, feedback is something you do in the every day. Um, I mean, there’s, there’s whole, whole workshops that can be done on, on feedback and how to, how to do that effectively.

Um, I’m, I’m involved in a webinar in a week or so with some not-for-profit leaders in the volunteer space actually. Um, so they, they, they help manage volunteers at their organizations and it’s gonna be about, you know, how do you elicit feedback and then how do you give feedback, uh, effectively and. If you, you or I, or anybody listening, if you’ve ever had feedback that was done badly, ah, you know, if we want to talk about the emotional wake, you know, you

Nick McEwan-Hall: I was just thinking about the like Yeah,

Mike Williamson: you just wanna run away when it’s done badly.

Um, I’ve got a couple of memories, which are now funny actually, but at the time they certainly, they, they didn’t, they didn’t amuse me. But, um, yeah. Really important capability as a leader to do that, to get feedback and to, to give it well, um, yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Interesting. Yeah, it’s, so the conversation, today’s been so interesting because. We’ve covered some such different ground. Right? We’re talking about the psycho safety piece, that connection, be it the leadership aspect, and it all kind of comes back to me, that emotional wake idea that we started off with just kind of picturing Yeah.

That sort of tr and I, in my head it’s triangular, it’s, it expands, it’s like, yep, the boat’s this wide, but that wake is huge and,

and it lasts rages. And if we look behind a giant cruise ship, it’s kilometers long and we can be over there kind of going, oh, look where we’re going. That looks beautiful. Like we’re going over here.

But if someone stuck back looking the other way kind of going, yeah. But at that point, that was really rough for

Mike Williamson: Yeah. Or,

or getting slapped in the face by a big wave. Absolutely. Um, so just, yeah. I’m glad that’s resonated. I think one of the things I’m doing at the moment is, is, um. Uh, what we call it, you can call it a newsletter or a series of articles about leadership. It’s called How You Lead On, on Substack. And so I think, um, haven’t talked to explicitly about the emotional weight piece for a while, but I, I think that that articles gonna come and it’s gonna have a, a, a photo of a big cruise ship with a big wake behind it.

Or maybe it’s the, the, the, um, the, the, the ferry over to Tasmania. But yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a highly resonant kind of image, isn’t it?

Nick McEwan-Hall: it’s

Mike Williamson: you know, I think it’s relevant in our, yeah. Sorry. You go. I was thinking, you know, in, in our, we’re talking about leadership and we’re talking about work, I think you know, this, this is applicable in all areas of our lives, isn’t it?

And we have. We have an impact wherever we go. Um, we can, we can try and be intentional about that. Um, sometimes it’s really hard. Yeah. It’s, uh, to kind of respond rather than the react, but we, yeah, we leave, we leave that, that impact wherever we go.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, it’s such a, it’s such a, I impressive. And what I mean, what I mean by that is like, it’s made an impression on me, this idea of that that wake that we leave behind and we’re just doing what we’re doing, um, and everyone’s doing, everyone’s gotta wake that, that they’re leaving behind ’em too. It’s not just the leader.

I mean, it’s everyone in that example, right? So if you had a harbor full of boats, they’re all leaving a wait behind.

Um, and so it’s, it’s complicated, right? But it’s such a visual kind of way for us to just think through about how we’re showing up, how we’re impacting people, and how. Other people’s wake impacts us as well.

I think it’s such a, a nice kind of summary for everything we’ve talked about today. I feel like, I feel like you need to go on a cruise, Mike. I feel like you need to book a cruise and, you know, just go and do that. Write that, write that article on a cruise, you

know, like, go

Mike Williamson: do you know what, I’ve, I’ve never gotten the ferry across to Tasmania. I’ve, I’ve always wanted to do it. Um, and I, and I will at some point, but I think I certainly, I feel like I need a holiday. I, I need some warm weather, Nick, so that I’m, I’m maybe doing something in November or, uh, might leave it till the new year, but certainly, um, yeah, a cruise.

I’ve never thought about doing a cruise, I’ve gotta say. Um, but I, I don’t mind a, a ferry trip.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I feel like the, the photo on your article should be a photo you’ve taken

Mike Williamson: Ah, I like that. I really like that. Yeah. Okay. You got me thinking now about.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I’m, I’m a big fan of holidays and booking travel, so you’ll always get that from me, but I think, um, it’s a lovely way to just think it through and to, again, like, like we’re talking about, yeah, you’ve said I’m, I’m, I’m yearning for some hot weather. It’s back to that wellness, it’s back to that kinda wellbeing piece, listening to what you need and how you work and what works best for you.

It’s a nice way for us to kind of think about our whole conversation today. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. Um, thank you for that image in my head. You know, when I think I, I’m pretty sure that in the next week or so I’ll be telling that story. You know, I’ll say, I’ve talked to Mike and he told me about this idea about this weight that we leave behind because it’s so relevant to the work I do and, and the work that you do as well.

But yeah, it’s a nice way for us to think about everything we’ve talked about. I

Mike Williamson: Yeah. That’s great, Nick. And look, it’s been, uh, my real pleasure to be on. I’ve, I’d love the conversation and I think, you know, um. Whoever’s listening wherever this gets to, you know, that, um, the intersect between how we run teams and organizations and mental health is so important in so many ways. So yeah, it’s been, it’s been really lovely to be involved.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Well, thank you for coming on. It’s been an absolute pleasure. We’ll put links and everything to into the show notes and things so people can find you as well. But

thanks again, Mike, for being here today. It’s been a real pleasure. Yeah,

Mike Williamson: No worries. Thanks Nick.

Nick McEwan-Hall: cool. Thanks,

Mike Williamson: Alright, now do, do

Nick McEwan-Hall: That was awesome.

Mike Williamson: that’s really good. I loved it. I loved it. Um, and, and as we’re

Nick McEwan-Hall: And we did cover most of the stuff,

like we did in different ways. We did.

Mike Williamson: Mm-hmm. I’m, I’m thinking that you, if, if, if you publish a podcast, you kind of almost need a place to put a picture of the. The cruise liner. Um, but it, it, it is a really resonant thing, isn’t it?

It’s kind of, we have no choice. We will leave that anyway, we won’t bang on about anymore. Um, thank you. Do I need to leave my browser open or something to ensure this all uploads.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I, you, you might, you might need to, I think it’ll tell, tell us when we, when we finish you

might need to, yeah. I think it kind of uploads as we go, but it might take a little minute or so, but

yeah, we,

Mike Williamson: says 99% uploaded at the moment.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Oh, well maybe it’s just gotta do a little

 Yeah.

Same on my end. So not quite sure how it works, but see, when we end it, it should tell us what,

Mike Williamson: Yeah.

So when, when I leave, it will say whatever I need to do or not do.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Should do.

Mike Williamson: Okay. Well, let me, let me know when you’ve, when you’re up with it and when it’s gonna go out and links and stuff Yeah, I. Um, always good to put that up on LinkedIn or.

Welcome to the podcast, Simone.

Simone Direckze: Thank you, Nick. Thanks for having me.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Oh, you’re so welcome. Let’s jump straight into it. Can you tell us a little bit about your story? Like tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are.

Simone Direckze: I am a retail professional, I guess you’d say. I’ve worked in retail properties, namely shopping centers.

Pretty much my whole working career, I’m about 20 something years in now. I used to be a retailer. So my background is actually marketing. That’s what I studied at uni. After I went to uni, I actually worked at a council in parking and traffic, funnily enough. Imagine marketing, parking and traffic. That was not fun, as you can imagine.

Sounds like a challenge. Yes. So I went [00:01:00] into my other passion, which is retail, and I became a retailer. Foolishly enough, I thought that that would give me flexibility. Back then I just had my first child and I was looking for something that I could manage myself and come and go as I please. I was very wrong about all of that.

And I ended up working far more hours than what I ever did in private industry. So I started off as a retailer, the GFC hit, I lost some of my stores, it was really tough times back then. And for my luck, I was able to get a position on the other side of the fence in shopping centers in marketing. So that’s.

Uh, essentially how I started my career in shopping centers. Amazing.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I, my brain wants to know what you were selling. What were you retailing?

Simone Direckze: Jewelry actually. Huh? Okay. I used to sell, uh, I don’t know if anyone remembers Klein’s, the franchise back in the day. Yeah. So I had a couple of franchises and then we moved into our own sort of semi precious jewelry.

Klein’s went under, it went bankrupt in about 2006, I want to say. [00:02:00] Uh, so we started our own thing from there on and it just snowboard from there. But as I said, the GFC hit and like now, similar to now, times are really tough. And we were seeing a lot of cost of living rises and that kind of thing. And people just stopped shopping in that same way.

So I had to morph and move my stores on and come back into working life. Which was nice. Don’t get me wrong. It was nice to get some holiday pay and sick pay back. Cause when you work in your own business, any business person will tell you. There is no time for any of that.

Nick McEwan-Hall: No. We have this picture, don’t we, thrust at us, like, have

Simone Direckze: your own business

Nick McEwan-Hall: and

Simone Direckze: control your life.

It is the hardest thing, I’m telling you, it is the hardest thing anyone will ever do is A, have the courage to start their own business, and B, have the nows and the tenacity to last the test of time. It’s really tough. I have so much respect for entrepreneurs and people that have the courage to start their own businesses.

It’s not easy at all.

Nick McEwan-Hall: And it must, that, that, that experience that you’ve had and the feeling you have about that experience, that [00:03:00] empathy and pride in people giving that a go must show up and be so usefully for you in your work now.

Simone Direckze: Yes. In fact, I am the leader that I am today because I went through.

What I went through with my own business. You know, I see things from a different perspective. It’s always interesting trying to balance the landlord’s agendas with the retailer’s agendas and so on. So I really see how much blood, sweat, tears go into business in general. And hopefully, and it’s been a cathartic process for me because I share that trauma.

I know what someone’s going through on any given day. I get it. You’ve been there. Yeah. I’ve been there. Exactly. So it’s good. I’ve had a good opportunity to help. Other people, hopefully, that are in the situation I was, through my own failings and learnings.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Ooh, as you said, my own failings and learnings.

I wanted to say, yeah, learning is just learning. We

Simone Direckze: fail fast, we learn quickly. That’s my mantra now. Yeah, yeah. Fail

Nick McEwan-Hall: is part of it, isn’t it? Yeah. I like the kindness [00:04:00] that you threw in there as well. The failing and the learning that happens at the same time. It’s just part of the. Deal. It is part of the deal.

It’s tough, but it’s part of the process. It’s that symbiotic

Simone Direckze: relationship. I don’t think you can have one without the other. And sometimes people go into business thinking they’re going to conquer the world and do everything and they’re going to make a million bucks overnight and it’s all going to be hunky dory.

Life, the environment, the macro environment, life happens and sometimes it’s not your fault. And that’s what I try and tell people where I sometimes, I have had people just. Breaking apart in front of me, tears and financial distress, and then you overlay mental health on top of that. Oh, yeah. It’s a whole different ballgame.

Sometimes it’s not your fault and sometimes things just don’t work. Yeah. You got to pick your socks up and move on and doesn’t mean you can’t try something else.

Nick McEwan-Hall: A hundred percent. A mentor of mine likes to say. You didn’t fail, the thing failed. Correct. I think [00:05:00]

Simone Direckze: compartmentalizing that is ideal. Yeah. Yeah.

And

Nick McEwan-Hall: then she also says, and you learnt all the things, you learnt all of the stuff. So it wasn’t a waste, it was an investment and it didn’t end the way that you wanted it to. And we label that as failure. Yes. But actually look at all the things that happen in general. That can be really helpful sometimes.

Other times she’s told me that and I’m like, I don’t want to hear that. It’s really hard to hear, but yeah. Okay. So interesting. So shopping centers. I, when I was thinking about who should I talk to on the podcast, who has interesting work that they do. Hey, your name was on the list because we have done a bit of work together in the past and through that work, I’ve really gotten a new appreciation for shopping centers, that retail environment that I think we all have an experience of.

We all use those spaces. We’re all there. And In preparing for the podcast, you said to me, I won’t get this quite right, but you described the shopping center now as like the Greek Agora, where people come [00:06:00] to meet and gather and do all that sort of stuff. Talk to me more about that. That captivated my thinking.

Simone Direckze: An old boss of mine created or mentioned that analogy and it really hit home for me because shopping centers are the modern Greek Agora. It’s the place everyone gathers to share ideas, to share services, to swap consumer goods, all sorts of things. It’s the number one hub or meeting place for people.

Think about where else you would go in your life more than you would a public space like a shopping center. There’s probably not many. Yet, we still facilitate just as many people, millions of people, like an airport with half the restrictions, of course, all the rest of it. It’s a really interesting place.

We, there are so many, I can’t tell you how many elderly come for air conditioning, for heat, for a cup of tea and a smile. We get so many homeless people. We get moms and dads running around with their [00:07:00] kids, just the everyday stuff. We have people coming in and out of our doors and you wouldn’t have a clue what, how mental health shows up for them in their lives, right?

Nick McEwan-Hall: Absolutely.

Simone Direckze: ASD, ADHD, OCD, whatever trauma they have, you would know, but yet here we are in a marketplace and have to interact with each other with no crystal ball of what, who you might be meeting on any given day.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s

Simone Direckze: a melting pot.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s such a visual way to think about what’s happening at a shopping center, beyond just people buying things.

I mean, that is what’s happening, but there’s all that other social stuff that’s going on. And when you were talking there about people seeking cool or warmth or shelter and those sorts of things, that makes so much sense. But I don’t think. Certainly, before I had the experience I did, like working with your team, I didn’t think about those [00:08:00] things, and I’m quite privileged to not have to think about those things, right?

To go, I don’t need to go to a shopping center to be cool. I’m very privileged to be in that position, but because of that privilege, I don’t think about it and actually it’s all happening there all the time and yeah, I honestly have not walked into a shopping center and looked at it the same way since I worked with your crew.

Oh, that’s

interesting.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s really cool. You mentioned there as well, like busy like an airport. Do you have an idea of how many people would come through a shopping center?

Simone Direckze: Currently, I work in centers that have about 8 million that come through our centers. Every

Nick McEwan-Hall: year?

Simone Direckze: Yeah, every year. That’s a lot of people every day.

That is

Nick McEwan-Hall: a lot of people every day. Yes,

Simone Direckze: but I have worked in shopping centers that have 15, 20 million that come through. I worked at the biggest shopping center in the Southern Hemisphere, Chadston, and you and I have swapped stories, right? We sure have. Of all the things that can go on there as well. It’s a public space like no other.

And at the end of the day, I don’t think people realize [00:09:00] Actually, how much it facilitates your day to day life, most people just think, Oh, I’ll just nip down to the shops and grab something from the supermarket or whatever it is. Um, but there are other people there for other things, like you said, shelter to be serviced in whatever way we get people escaping domestic violence.

So many things that you don’t realize, actually, I think before I worked in centers, I just thought center management. Which is people that sat in an office and kind of just walked past and gave you a, a smile and a wave every now and again, but you just don’t realize how much is going on. It’s really not like that.

It’s definitely not like that.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. Yeah. I know that now. Yeah. I

Simone Direckze: know you do.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah.

Simone Direckze: Yeah. Honestly, I couldn’t work in the environment without a big team to be able to facilitate all the ins and outs of a big building like that.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. I think especially with those sorts of Um, centers, like the big centers, like you’re talking about, there is such a, I don’t think about them and go, Oh, they’re, [00:10:00] they’re sometimes closed.

I couldn’t go there. It’s just like, I can go, I can go. If you think about Chadston, for

example.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s open pretty much all day, 24 hours, some of it’s not, but when I’m awake, I could go. That’s how I think about it. I don’t even have a thinking about, am I allowed to go? Could I go? It is such a public space, but it’s definitely not a public space.

Yeah. So, the dynamics of a shopping center are really interesting. Yeah.

Simone Direckze: And the ownership. I think the stakeholders, yeah. Like you said, you just think you can just get in your car and go. Whenever you need to go, it’s there to facilitate whatever you need it to do. It’s interesting.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s really interesting.

I’m fascinated by it. One of the things that stood out for me in the work that we did was learning about all the different sort of stakeholders you have at a large center like the ones that you work in.

Yep.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Can you talk us through what that stakeholder structure and map is like? Who are the stakeholders that have just got to all be working [00:11:00] together to have it just be there, let alone do all the things that we’ve been talking about?

So yeah, can you talk us through what’s that structure?

Simone Direckze: So essentially, a landlord owns a shopping center or landlords, a group of people, maybe a trust or whatnot, owns a shopping center. They may or may not manage it themselves. Usually they give it to a management company that are in the know that come in and learn and know how to operate a shopping center.

They then hire the team or the sort of the skeleton of staff for the center and that You will have a center manager, you’ll have an operations team, a marketing team, an admin team or finance team, customer service or customer experience team. Then that team has to look after the retailer, who you don’t see, who are in the background and they just put their retail shops in

Nick McEwan-Hall: and

Simone Direckze: then those shops have their own staff, the retail team on the ground or the frontline retail team.

Then we have [00:12:00] maintenance, then we have cleaning, security, really big parts of our team who are really front facing and they’re all the time. Yeah. And yeah, and then you deal with councils, police, so many different other stakeholders in the area because, because you’re effectively most shopping centers, the larger ones are in a town center.

Yeah. Therefore you facilitate. Bus bays, you might have a train station in and out of your center, all sorts of different ecosystems that have to collide and work with one another and speak different languages. Oh yeah. I always tell my kids, learn a different language because the synapses of the brain work in a different way when you learn language and when you go into a work role.

You have to look, you have to know how to speak operations, or you have to know how to speak council speak. You have to morph your language so other people understand essentially what you’re trying to get across to.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s incredible. The list of stakeholders is just incredible in a shopping [00:13:00] centre. It’s, it’s.

Yeah, speak. Yeah. And I think it’s funny, like a lot of those stakeholders you mentioned, you, like, I think most people would go, yeah, yeah, like they’re there. Right. But. If you really looked, but it looks so effortless a lot of the time, like it looks so smooth. To the naked eye. Correct. Exactly. Right. Yeah.

That is not the eye I have anymore about shopping centers, but yeah, like it’s that sort of, yeah, that, that’s a skill to bring all that together and to make that work in that way. So

Simone Direckze: interestingly, the caveat to that is that is the simplest form of how I can describe it.

Yeah.

Simone Direckze: But in this modern time, you add in other issues.

Like this is a mental health podcast, so let’s bring it back to mental health for a minute. And you and I made each other over a serious issue I had over mental health and how it presents in shopping centers. So then you overlay that with say issues with youth or elderly or domestic [00:14:00] violence or however else trauma presents.

And then your stakeholders change to. The CAT team at the hospital, carers, people that are facilitating residential homes for people that are homeless. And there’s a whole nother ballgame that we’re finding now in the last few years that me, my team has had to learn because we’re in this public space and we are faced with this challenge that’s growing on a day to day basis.

So yes, the, the stakeholdership extends far and beyond.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. It, it. It’s interesting, isn’t it? The question that’s going through my head is, how much of this did you expect when you made that jump from being the retailer, because I’m thinking about you in your store, in your jewelry store, in that shopping center, from that perspective, and as that business owner, the business manager, that [00:15:00] kind of thing, being in that environment, but I’m curious about how different.

was the view from that position to what it is in the position you’re in now. Because you’re both in the same scenario, you’re both in the same center, you’re both dealing with the sort of similar same things, you might have similar different wants out of that center maybe, but. It’s a flip. It is a flip, yeah.

Like you described it as like a jump to the other side of it. Yeah,

Simone Direckze: it’s frying pan into the fire kind of stuff, you know. As a retailer, all I want is my, for my business to make enough money so I can pay my bills, pay the rent, have some money to take home and I would have been happy on this side of the fence.

There are so many more elements that have to be ticked because everybody in that ecosystem has a different agenda. The landlords have a different agenda. Retailers expect to put their stores in and make money and have a different agenda. The staff that are coming to work in those stores just want a job so they can go and pay their bills and do the same [00:16:00] thing.

Exactly. So. Money is definitely a theme that runs through all of it. Not in a million years. Could I have told you sitting in my store and going, Oh yeah, let me just jump over this side of the fence and do some marketing PR stuff, blah, blah, blah. That I was going to learn and see as much as I, I, yeah. I have in my career since, because yeah.

It’s a whole nother overarching kind of position, and as stakeholder managers, there is a duty of care mm-hmm. For people that come through shopping centers, we have to provide that duty of care. Yeah. And make sure everyone’s in a safe environment to come in. That’s the bit that’s, um, challenging a lot of the times as well.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, I, I, I can appreciate that and I, I think it’s. From my experience of working with you and your team, the responsibility that you feel about that stuff is probably. Ways a little bit heavier maybe for you because you really do want to look after those people. You do want to look after the stakeholders who [00:17:00] are coming through that center and care for them and make sure they’re okay and make sure they’re getting what they need from being in that center.

As challenging as that can be from time to time.

Simone Direckze: Yes, very much. I don’t think anyone works in public service in this way. Without under, or without wanting to be in the service of others,

I

Simone Direckze: think that’s the main thing to keep in mind. Most people come to work and they do their jobs and can go home.

Shopping centers are always on. We’re always open. We’re, we’re open most of the day. And it is an always on type of role, but most people that work in shopping centers, you’ll find work in the service or in the care of others and understand that brief and happy to be doing that because that’s their value system or whatnot.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. Interesting. The coworking space that we’re in now, Hub Australia, they talk a lot about, it’s a shared office space. So it looks like an office. It is an office. We have a kitchen, we have rooms, we have meeting rooms and things. But Hub talk about being hospitality led, [00:18:00] they’re like, this is a hospitality led business and it’s about making people feel welcome, giving them a hospitality experience of you’re here in our space and we want you to be here in our space, enjoy the space.

They talk about a hospitality led experience and you feel it, like I, when I walk in, I’m like, yep. Very much. Yeah. It’s like a

Simone Direckze: hotel. It’s beautiful. Yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: And it’s an interesting way to think about an office space. Yeah, sure. You know, like it’s both things, but I think it comes down to who’s here, right? Yeah.

If the crew managing this space were not the crew who they are, taking that approach to public space or being a hospitality led. It could just feel like an office. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess the shopping center’s the same. It’s the experience that you

Simone Direckze: want. Yeah. You, you want people to go home having a good experience and people are at the forefront of that experience.

Ultimately, even here, you can provide the space and do whatever you like to it and it can be all nice and shiny. But ultimately, if [00:19:00] you don’t get the help that you need when you’re there or someone doesn’t help you facilitate whatever the reason you’re there, whatever you’re doing. Then it’s just a building, right?

There’s no life. Yeah. So it’s really interesting. But yeah, it just like it is here, shopping centers exist for people because people need people. We’re tribal by nature as humans, right? A hundred

Nick McEwan-Hall: percent. Yes.

Simone Direckze: Even if you’re an introvert and you go to a shopping center and want to be left alone, then you’re still in around a safe space with people.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. As you’re talking, I’m thinking about. I really like the fact that people are all so, like, we feel like they’re like, so we don’t feel the same everywhere. If you look at a lot of different retail environments, I’ve been in shopping centers and how different they can feel, but when you look at them, they’re the same.

Basically, they’re the same, a big building with shops inside, with common areas. That’s the very bare skeleton of it, but there’s so much that [00:20:00] goes into and on top of that structure to either make it feel like a place I want to be and I gravitate to and that I feel safe and connected to or a place I just want to get in and get out.

Yeah. It’s all about

Simone Direckze: placemaking, Nick. Yeah. Like, that has been a buzzword now for many years, but it truly is about placemaking and brands. Brands look at how they present to the market and what their values are and how they want to be perceived. All with how they build the place that they invite you to then come and visit, right?

If you go to Mecca, for example, and you walk through their store or Sephora, it won’t be the same experience as if you were to go to Apple. Yeah. There are different, there are definite differences there. Yeah. Yeah. They. And I think that looking at the spectrum of people they’re servicing and creating space from that is really the ultimate goal for everybody.

You need to know thyself and need to know your brand, right? Yeah, it

Nick McEwan-Hall: makes so much sense. And then

Simone Direckze: you build accordingly. So you build for those brand [00:21:00] values. It’s really interesting. Great. It is. It gives us all different experiences. It’s not homogenous. Yeah. We can have different experiences. You go to a place at Chadston, there’s half a million stores at Chadston, probably about 560 from my last count, you know, 560 different experiences if you really wanted.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Oh, okay. I thought my mind was blown before our conversation, but now that just the depth of it and the complexity and. Yeah, I’d like this idea of placemaking that you’re creating environments that people want to come to. And of course that makes sense in a shopping center, right? We need people to come, the shops need people to come there.

So that makes sense. And I’m also thinking about sort of what that also means in terms of some of the work that we’ve done together about how people do show up in that space. Because everyone comes through that door. Seeking things, and we mentioned before, people seek heat, people seek cool, they seek connection, they seek safety, maybe, you know, all those things.

Yeah. [00:22:00] Some of our work has focused around that mental health kind of piece. Again, this was another part of my kind of learning about shopping centers. I’ve got, if people come to my mental health first aid course, they’ll hear the story about my experience at Chadston supporting someone with a panic attack, but it’s, and that was a good story.

It was a nice story. It was a positive one and it was a good outcome. But also through working with you and your team, I’ve heard other stories that didn’t have the, they had good outcomes. They had good outcomes. Most people were really well supported, but. Um, it wasn’t as funny, it wasn’t as light, it wasn’t as, as maybe low stakes as, and I, I use that language, I’m very conscious that I’m describing someone’s experience as low stakes.

It was pretty high stakes experience for that person I supported, but it ended well. The person was okay and all that sort of stuff. But some of the stuff that we’ve focused on with your team has been really challenging. It has been challenging. Like super challenging. Yes. And I think this would be really interesting to hear a little bit about, like how does mental health.

Yes. Show up [00:23:00] at work. I get, I show up at work, but I guess in that really specific context of. Yes. The public using your space. Yes,

Simone Direckze: so, you said it before. So when people come to shopping centers, they’re presenting for a variety of things, not always just to do their shopping and go. They’re coming for the heat, they’re coming for all of the safety is a huge factor.

You just don’t know Who’s walking in the door at any given time and what trauma they have been through in their lives. And then you compound that by maybe a mental health diagnosis of depression or ASD or OCD or whatever else. And then you’ve got a kind of little melting pot starting to happen. Then they might encounter something that negates their mood for the day or whatnot.

And then you have a bit more fuel in that fire and suddenly you’re in an environment where you’ve got all these people presenting with different things, maybe someone just not having a good day

and

Simone Direckze: it becomes a whole nother ballgame. [00:24:00] At the moment our biggest issue, and this is topical because we’ve been speaking about it in the news and all sorts of things, is how many youth are presenting with mental health issues.

And, and simply coming in for safety and. To get out of the cold at the moment because it’s winter here in Melbourne, they’re homeless, they’re estranged from parents. We’re having a real epidemic of youth issues in this country at the moment that I think isn’t addressed half as well as it could be because we don’t have the policy and now we don’t have enough staff to be able to deal with all these things.

Hospitals are really at their wits end. Police are stretched, absolutely stretched. And so what happens, we exist for everybody, so if they need to go anywhere to get out of the cold, to stay safe, they come in to us. And what we have then happen is they start to congregate in areas like parents rooms that are not always used, but [00:25:00] they’re for mums and dads that have to breastfeed or change nappies or whatnot.

And then we start to get to a position where. You know, the two elements are colliding, and that’s when you often see fireworks in center with various people. And customer service, we look at our, our security workforce, security don’t have any powers. They’re just like customer service. They’re not there to pin people to the ground and they’re not playing police.

Police are there for police reasons. So I think the general public, there is a disconnect from them understanding exactly what their roles are and what they’re there to do. Versus what they do or what they see them doing. And consequently they get, they get a bad rap for things that are not in their power.

So I think there’s a lot of frustration. You add to that then the macro environment that we’re in where cost of living is huge. Really hard from a, if you were, if you, [00:26:00] your center is in a low socioeconomic area that could then be even more tricky. So, yeah, you see all of these issues and they all collide and mix and morph and whatnot.

Uh, and the shopping centers always open, right? There we are. That’s right.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Oh yeah. We’re back to that.

Simone Direckze: Yeah. And often I, like in the past, we’ve hired people that have helped. We’ve had a mental health connector walk through the center. Cause as I said to you in our center, we had lots of elderly and we could see, especially after COVID.

They were there all the time they hadn’t, they, they lacked that community or that tribe to belong to. And many centers now having little activation spaces for people like that, that can, men shared or you can have a like a little chess board game situation. We have ladies that come and knit all sorts of things, mall walkers that get out of the cold and come in just to walk the center in, in a safer environment.

So, yeah, shopping centers do exist [00:27:00] for a lot of people for different reasons.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I’m thinking about if I was walking through the world and I had some vulnerability around my mental health state, maybe experiencing mental illness and wanting to find a place that was safe or a place where I could feel some certainty or maybe some control or something like that, that a shopping center.

Would make sense to me as I can go and I’ll be around people and hopefully then because I’m around people will notice and they’ll step in and they’ll or maybe it’s easier for me to put my hand up or to say I’m over here or Something like that. I can see How it would work I think and the stories that we’ve talked about before just say yes, that’s how that’s what happens I was really surprised Um, when we were working together about the, the depth to which your [00:28:00] team went to, to provide the best support that you could from your position, right, because it has boundaries.

Your role has boundaries. Yes. It’s your center and you control it. But. There’s boundaries there about what you can and can’t do in a lot of different ways, but I was really impressed with the depth to which your team went to, to support this particular person that we were focused on. And we were talking about a young person who was coming to the center and there were lots of behaviors that were problematic and because of a mental health diagnosis, we think, that was the thinking there, but just the level that you went to, to try and make sure.

That center and everyone there was supporting that person as best as you could. That really impressed me and it really stood out for me. It’s not something that I would have thought that a shopping center would have done, but now I know about it. I think, of course they do. They have to, but.

Simone Direckze: They have to.

Yeah, spot on. Some of the folks was amazing. Because, you know, when they [00:29:00] present, they’ve often fallen through a crack in the system. Yeah. So this particular person you’re referring to was well and truly down a rabbit hole and we could not get her out and she presented so many times, I can’t tell you how many suicidal people we’ve had, how many suicides we’ve had, all of those things.

And we didn’t want this person to be victim of that. We had to do what we could to make sure she was getting the help. That, uh, was available to her, but we took you through that whole scenario and were on the phone for hours to the CAT team at the hospital, answering questions we couldn’t, facilitating things back and forth with, from this young person.

It gets really tricky because half these things, we probably don’t want to know all of the details either, but yet here we are, like the meat in the sandwich. If like in this instance, this person’s fallen through the cracks, they don’t have a phone, they don’t have all the items that they need. They don’t have.

Food or clothing, and they [00:30:00] don’t want to go back into the hospital system. So where does that leave them? It’s really tricky. And of course you saw some of my staff have been in danger from that as well. And what we’re trying to do. Is stop this person from lashing out or being frustrated and graffiting them all.

I mean, that particular month we must have had about 30, 000 worth of damage from this one person alone in our center. So it’s a double edged sword. We’re trying to make sure everybody else has a good experience and not have to visibly see graffiti or whatever it presents. But at the same time, we want this young person to get help, to get the help that they need so they can be a functioning adult.

It’s tricky. Trauma is tricky.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. A hundred percent. What’s going through our mind is that the fact that you say, everybody here, we’re trying to manage all this stuff. We don’t want people seeing the damage. We don’t want people experiencing the damage, but also we want to make sure this young person is supported.

Yes. I think it’s the bit that sets your team apart in my mind a little [00:31:00] bit because, so I can imagine retailers are not happy, landlords are not happy, police are frustrated. The cat team have been 600 times, like everyone’s frustrated, but still. You’ve got it in your head, in that thinking, and we want to look after this person.

There’s someone in the center as well. You want to look after them too. Like, you have their well being in the thinking as well, and I think that’s to be commended. I think that’s to be commended, because so many people would probably not think about that. They’d be like, okay, we’ve crossed this line. This just needs to stop.

Yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: But as you’ve said, it’s a shopping center. Yeah. They can come back tomorrow. Correct. So, you have to put them in your thinking, but I just think so many people, you know,

Simone Direckze: Yeah, I hope that they, I hope that they would, Nick, because at the end of the day, we are all human at the end of the day, right? So we need to make sure that as humans, we’re good to one another and are doing the best that we can from the kindest possible standpoint we can take.

Don’t get me wrong, utterly frustrating. [00:32:00] We were at our wits end when we called you. Um, for support and the whole team then has to internalize this trauma and it’s never a dull day. They’ve got to go home, front up again the next day. So it’s presenting, like I said, it’s a double edged sword, but what do you do?

We have a duty of care at the end of the day and we all must remember that we’re all in the service of each other as humans firstly.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Such a powerful way to think about it, Simone. I think it’s spot on. I think it’s a really good way to navigate complexity.

Simone Direckze: Yeah. Compassion, I think that empathy, we don’t know what this person has been through and how their lives have ended up in this way.

But if we can do something small or kind or just facilitate them, facilitate them, help them in some way through another facility, whatever it is, then we must try, I think.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, I think that’s right. And from knowing you and your team, that just seems to be like what you would do. That’s just, yeah, that’s how we work.

I guess not [00:33:00] everybody works that way, so it’s pretty special, I think, is what I’m feeling. It’s pretty amazing, and if you’re working with your team, we sat there for a couple of hours over a couple of sessions, didn’t we, thinking about what can we do, like, how can we do it, and what can we do, and just the mere fact that you pull your team together and go, okay, so, let’s get some external eyes on it, let’s really think it through.

That shows the commitment too, right?

Simone Direckze: Well, I have a pretty great team as well, so that helps. And, and, and great bosses that understand that these are the complexities we’re navigating today. So a great landlord that actually helped us get you back to, to teach us how best we can manage these situations.

There’s a few factors there that. Yeah. In our best interests, which I’m really grateful for.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I think from thinking back to that work that we did, there was a comment that was made in one of those sessions that I think really. Gave some hope to the situation and really stuck with me. And it [00:34:00] was, and I won’t get this exactly right, but, and I can’t remember who said it, but they said, look, ideally, what we should be shooting for is to create an environment where this young person, for example, they’re having the experiences that they’re having.

At the moment, in that context, and they’re not pleasant for anyone, including them.

Yep.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Right? So, the kind of intention that the team were thinking through, and I don’t know if they adopted it, but this is how I’m thinking about it, and they were saying, wouldn’t it be nice if we can handle this situation in such a way that when that young person who’s local, and who’s likely to stay local, and likely use this shopping center for the rest of their life, probably, in 10 years time.

Can walk back through the doors, walk past that pot plant or that ATM and go, stuff went down here.

Yep.

Nick McEwan-Hall: And it wasn’t pleasant for me at the time, but gee, they really did everything they could. Yes. As opposed to walking back [00:35:00] in 10 years time and going, that was awful.

Yes.

Nick McEwan-Hall: And even feeling comfortable to come back 10 years time.

So, having that intention of like, can we handle this now? in such a way that it allows someone in the future when they’ve got the supports and hopefully they’ve got those supports and they’ve done what they need to do or they’ve got the treatment that they need to be the way they want to be is able to come back and remember the full picture

that

Nick McEwan-Hall: yeah, it was hard, it was tough, but the response I got was empathetic and it was caring and it was people centered.

I think that was a really lovely way to think about How do we deal with the day to day frustrating stuff that is just frustrating, that is really hard, which is not nice. How do we deal with that? And I think that’s, that was a really I don’t know, a really elegant kind of way to think about that situation and that’s really stuck with me.

Simone Direckze: That’s really the outcome you want, right, is later on, as we all grow up, we’re, we can all, we will all rat bag kids, I’m sure at some point or another.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Oh [00:36:00] yeah, absolutely. And

Simone Direckze: we have the ability in hindsight to see that this is a much bigger picture. Yes. My hope is exactly that. And I know exactly the person that said that.

That is the outcome we want. You don’t realize, but we are all mentors in that public space as well. Right?

Yeah.

Simone Direckze: Yeah. We’re talking about young people at the moment because it’s topical and we’ve got youth issues everywhere, but you don’t realize at any given time how much of that mentor role you’re playing when you’re in.

The space of a younger person.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Oh, yeah. They’re so, it’s such a hard time of life. Like, it’s such a hard time of life. They’re literally trying to work out how the world works. And they’re looking, they’re soaking everything up and going, I remember that, I remember that, you know, so let’s give them some good stuff to remember.

Stuff that they can remember as, as good as it can be, you know, it’s not always about positive all the time, but just going, yeah, I was met with respect and [00:37:00] empathy and care and sometimes that’s tough, like sometimes it’s hard and it’s not pleasant, but actually we learn that best practice thing. And

Simone Direckze: when you know better, you do better.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah.

Simone Direckze: When you don’t know, you don’t know, but when you know better, you need to do better.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. I love that. I really like that. And I think, again, going back to your sort of culture there at the center, it was like, Oh, I feel like we could know more to do more and be better again. It’s like we can, there’s still a bit of gap here.

Let’s explore that fully. Let’s do as much as we can. Whereas I think a lot of people might’ve just gone.

Simone Direckze: Not my problem.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah, it’s hard. Like, we’ll just call the police every time or whatever it is, and sure, like, that’s a strategy, but I just, yeah, I think the real people focus of your team at the center, that’s when it shines, right?

When it’s challenged and difficult and you’ve got people in front of you, just, oh my goodness. How do we handle that? It was, yeah, like I said, it was fascinating. I just find it really amazing. [00:38:00] How do you, as a leader, how do you support your team when they’re dealing with this stuff? And I know you deal with it a lot yourself, and you’ve been there, and you’ve been into the bathrooms, and you’ve sorted things out, like, I know.

Your team are going through that, so I’m interested, like, in, in, from a leadership perspective, what’s your approach here in terms of supporting your team with this stuff?

Simone Direckze: So I, I guess the, the first caveat to that is that I’m really lucky and privileged to work in an organization that values mental health, so we do have our own employee assistant programs and that kind of thing, that are all confidential, that any staff member and their families could call and have professional support with.

But from a day to day basis, I think it’s about building resilience in your team. First and foremost, staying connected. I know in the team that I’m at the moment, we’re a very old machine now. We’ve worked together for some years, so we’re all connected. We understand each other’s skill sets, strengths, weaknesses, that kind of thing, and we [00:39:00] respect it.

And I know as a leader in my head who I need on the ground at any given time in any, in a particular situation. And trust me, Nick, like I have worked in a center where a plane has landed in my building.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I forgot about this story. You know, it’s

Simone Direckze: not, it spreads far and wide, not just. Youth issues of the day or whatnot.

So horses for courses and there are different skill sets for different emergencies that may or may not occur. But I think for me, and you were, you taught this to us, which I really appreciate and we’ve used since is that understanding where everyone is on that spectrum on a daily basis, if you can, is always a great tool.

Are you, are you at a one feeling good? Everything’s hunky dory or you’re at a 10 where you need a day off and you need to get some mental health space back. So understanding that is good. We’re an older team, so we know when someone walks in the door in a particular pace or is not their normal [00:40:00] self. As a leader, I know to probe a bit more and just say, Hey, should we go for a coffee or a walk or whatnot?

But I think as leaders, we just need to trust our guts more. That head, heart, gut piece is. Long being dismissed, but it really is. We’re energetic beings at the end of the day, tapping into somebody else’s energy and getting that gut feel will quickly tell you. If you need to spend more time with that particular member of staff, or if that member of staff needs to have a rest with, go home or whatnot.

So I think being in tune to that is really important. We don’t give it enough credit.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Mm. The old gut feeling. The old

Simone Direckze: gut feeling is still honestly, and the number one thing in my eyes is head’s great and head will come in and give you all the observations and pragmatic. Um, solutions are all balls of energy walking around.

So sometimes you might not verbally get the cues that you need to hear that somebody is [00:41:00] not right today, but you’ve got to tell you something’s not right.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Something you said in there reminds me of something I’m constantly saying when I’m doing mental health first aid training, which is if you’re not sure about what’s going on with the person or if they’re okay or they’re not okay or they’re just tired or what is it.

One thing I know for sure is the minute you ask them how they’re going and they start telling you, you’ll find out. Like you’ll find out. So Yeah. The, the gut feeling is the sign, I think sometimes it’s the gut feeling and it’s a sign for everything. It’s like gut feeling. You seem really happy today. Or gut feeling can be like, something’s off, like it’s off, but we can walk around.

Not sure, but the simple, I’m using air quotes is to ask them, engage, talk and as soon as they start talking, you’ll know. Yeah. And you gave us

Simone Direckze: permission to do that. I think you reinforced that for us. To say, it’s okay, just ask a question and, you know, open space enough for them to take [00:42:00] it and say yes or no or whatnot.

And at that point, I think when we had you in there, we’d forgotten just the simple, it’s like that, are you okay day piece, are you okay, just to, however you’d say it, just check in. Yeah. Yeah. The check in piece is so important.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. It is really important. I think it’s so powerful.

Simone Direckze: Very.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Get a bit of a pulse of what’s going on in your team or in your.

Family, or community group, or social group, or shopping center. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I wanted to, I have to include this either, but as we’re talking, I’m curious about all the stuff that happened at Bondi Westfield. Yes. Yes. And whether we can talk about. I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but I’m thinking about, yeah, how that might have

Simone Direckze: impacted.

Impacted? Yeah. Yeah. Look, that, that sort of scenario is something we train for all the time. I don’t know if you recall some years ago now, we had a spate of sort of shootings in [00:43:00] shopping centers in America and that led to a big training piece we do at shopping centers. Once a year. Okay. And, and it’s called Active Shoot.

And we, we talk about the drills that we do, reinforce what would happen in a situation as dangerous as that. Yeah. Actually, I don’t think it was America. I think it was like Af South Africa or Kenya. It was a big shopping centerpiece. Okay. Anyway, I digress. But. Yeah, yeah. You get the idea, following Bondi, we really had to, we’re so lucky here not to have guns and that kind of thing at our disposal, like other countries at our disposal.

Following Bondi, we went back into training mode and just made sure that everybody yapped on about COVID for so long and all of those rules. And that’s, I want to say it’s long gone. It’s not, but it’s gone enough. But we had to re, we had to pivot and really go, Oh gosh, let’s look back at what we do in a scenario like this.

So for us, we went back to training, we got everybody back in the center, all the retailers and so on back in training mode. And we looked at the pros and [00:44:00] cons, what we could have done better, what the role of emergency services are in that situation. And we just rehashed the training because you just never know what may happen similar to Bonneau.

No one wants to be in a situation like that. But we all want to be trained enough that we know not to panny. Yeah. And where it is that we need to go in a scenario like that.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Yeah. I can imagine that seeing all of that stuff happen in the news, that the center would have been really different. It was. In the days.

It was a

Simone Direckze: completely different vibe, Nick. Yeah. As you can imagine. Because that hits home.

Yeah.

Simone Direckze: Shopping centers, like we said earlier, is a consistent place you expect to go and nothing’s gonna happen. You can pick up your meat and veg and come home. Yeah.

Yeah.

Simone Direckze: But something like this happens, it shakes it up a bit, doesn’t it?

And you think, Oh my God. Absolutely. Where is it safe? Absolutely.

Yeah,

Simone Direckze: it really, that whole Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the safety module really gets questioned a bit. So yeah, the vibe was very low, flat for everyone. There were [00:45:00] retail, a frontline staff usually, and they’ve got to front up and serve every member of the public and net, they never know what they, what their day to day is going to be.

So yeah, it was a big deal to get over that hurdle. Where someone’s out now, and I would say things are back to normal well and surely, but that week was a tough week. Cause we, you feel for the people at that centre as well and what they’re having to go through. Yeah. People that passed. It’s a, it’s a whole thing.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s horrible. It’s horrible. I think as well, like, a lot of my clients, one of my other clients has a son who lives with schizophrenia and it’s really well managed, it’s been, they’ve been on a long journey and they’ve got all the supports that they need and it’s really well managed and all of that sort of stuff and You wouldn’t know that he lives with that condition, right?

It’s that sort of invisible disability kind of thing, right? And they were saying just how hard it was for their family in the days afterwards because they’d be kind of working,

yep,

Nick McEwan-Hall: they’d be lining [00:46:00] up for a coffee and then someone in front of them would say, Oh, did you hear about that psycho, whatever it is, right?

That language and, and even a friend of mine who’s a GP was like, yep, the, the, the week after all of my patients with, with significant mental health stuff in this space coming in for a checkup. They needed assistance and it’s because of the stigma.

Simone Direckze: Yeah. Very much. There is such a stigma around mental health in this way because you’re right.

It doesn’t present as a disability that you can see. It’s not. Visceral. Visual. Yeah. Yet, though, that language around it can be so hurtful because there are so many people on the mental health spectrum. I remember in my early days in shopping center, my son has autism, was diagnosed on the autism spectrum disorder.

He’s high functioning autism. And when I, when he was a baby, it was very hard to take him to a shopping center. Mm-hmm. He would have his e hands over his ears all the time. Yeah. Okay. And we would last 45 minutes, but before we had to go and he was just over, it was just [00:47:00] mentally overstimulating for him.

Yeah. One day I was literally sitting at my desk and looking at stats in, in this particular center that I worked at. And realize that there was a really high skew to mental health presentations in this area. And literally in a few hours, I came up with this concept of a quiet room where people could go, parents could take their kids, other adults on the spectrum could go and have some quiet time without being in the space of noise and you don’t realize actually how noisy.

And how overstimulating a center can be, right, with all its lights and everything. And I was so lucky that the center I worked in at the time, Vicinity, uh, was Northland actually, jumped on board and we delivered this project in next to no time with next to no money. And everybody jumped on board and it was the first of its kind anywhere, which was not sure it’s great, but great for the people that needed to use it.

Many centers have since [00:48:00] replicated that. And we see lots of sensory Santa sessions and Easter bunny sessions. So opened up a whole nother, from a shopping center perspective, it’s opened up a whole nother realm of possibilities where we’re servicing people that are on spectrum in some way or however it presents.

Um, it, it just helps for all those neurodivergent folk and there’s a lot, there’s a lot. We could all be on that spectrum. Well, I was just

Nick McEwan-Hall: thinking sometimes I just want to go into a quiet space myself and it’s just, I might just have a lot on my mind or I might be really overwhelmed or I just need a little minute.

I guess I’m fortunate I could go and sit myself and have a coffee and get that. I could do that. Yes. For a lot of people, that’s still stimulating. Yes. So having that quiet space is really important.

Simone Direckze: Yeah. Oh wow, amazing. So I’ve been seeing lots of people in there and you were talking about your friend earlier with her example of a schizophrenic son.

I think a lot of us that have been exposed to mental health probably present ourselves in a different way [00:49:00] from a work environment because we see how it permeates our day to day. Yeah. And, and I think that has been for the. For the better of the places we’ve worked in, cause we’ve been able to connect the dots there for a few other people.

If I can help another, I’m an old mom now. My kids are like 20 and 18 and 12, but if I can help a young mom that needs to do her shopping or with a child on the spectrum and can only make it in half an hour, yet has a room that they can go and just chill, the iPad goes on or whatever their, their relaxation bit is.

Then, hey, it’s a win for everyone, right?

Nick McEwan-Hall: It really is. And as you’re talking that story through, I’m thinking about, you know, I think I do a lot of work in workplaces and your center is a workplace as well, in many different ways. It’s a workplace for you, your team, the retailers and so on. I think if we go back to some of the basics of what we know about investing money in mental health supports and how it repays [00:50:00] us in workplace terms.

The sensory room that we’re talking about, or the low sensory room that we’re talking about. Um, delivers results for your center and the center stakeholders because it allows people to be there from a placemaking perspective. Correct. Yeah.

Simone Direckze: Dwell time in shopping centers is ultimately what we all want.

We want people to stay longer and buy that extra coffee or stay in, have dinner or whatever it is. Right. So it should be a win. However, don’t forget that shopping centers exist. We are property at the end of the day and we do, our main focus is, is to be able to rent space. Right. Yeah, and suddenly when you put in these sorts of functions, you’re taking up space that could often be rented.

So there’s a bit of a juxtaposition there. As a tension, I guess. And yeah. It is, it does take a landlord that really understands the larger realm of humanity and what ultimate outcomes they want over time. A small landlord might, might be all in for just rent and that’s it, but [00:51:00] a larger landlord might look at the advantages of having spaces like that and being able to attract more parts of the community in that way.

So. It’s a bit of horses for courses and different strategies, but

Nick McEwan-Hall: I guess it evolves over time too, right? It

Simone Direckze: does. Yeah. Yep.

Nick McEwan-Hall: I’m, I’m thinking about the, in your meeting room there, you’ve got that beautiful timeline wrapped around the wall about how the centres evolved. Yeah, I really do. I remember looking at it and going, I don’t, I haven’t, your centre’s not a centre that I’ve, I’d used before.

So you know about it, right? I’m, I was looking at it, I was like, yeah, you can literally see the evolution in terms of the building itself for the. But it talks about the functions that it plays in that community as well. And I think the stuff that we’re talking about now is part of that too, that evolution of space and the placemaking.

I guess if a shopping center is the Agora. It needs to evolve for the people who are going to use it.

Simone Direckze: Son, and that is, that is the number one thing we should exist to do is service our community. That’s what we are there for. We are [00:52:00] the town center. We are the meeting place. People come to see consistent faces behind those desks.

It’s all about servicing everybody that comes. So yes, it should live for the community. It should embody the community’s value.

Nick McEwan-Hall: Such a unique way to think about a shopping center. For me anyway, I think for people listening, they’ll be like. Yeah, it makes so much sense, but. Really eloquently put together.

We’re coming to the end, but I wanted to throw the conversation over to you. Is there something you’d like to tell the world? Is there a message you’d like to give people? Is there, the floor is yours. Is there something, and it can be A big message and inspiration, it can be just directed to one person in particular or whatever you like.

The floor is yours. What would you like the world to hear?

Simone Direckze: Oh, that’s a, that’s a big little question there, Nick. I guess if I was to leave you with anything, I would love your listeners to know to be patient and kind and [00:53:00] empathetic when they come into places like this. They’re shared spaces, right?

Everyone’s doing the best that they can. You just don’t know what someone else is going through and how they fronted up to work today. People are busy. We’re all into convenience. I know for me, I’m working all the time. So I’m like bang when I’m in the center, if I haven’t already gotten what I need, often I’ll get home and my son or daughters will say, Oh, I forgot to tell you, can you bring this?

But can we go now? I’m like, ah, I’m then trudging through the center, frustrated, blah, blah. But I’m always trying to remind myself that people are doing the best that they can. Be kind and patient. They’re frontline workers. They’ve got to deal with a lot of things. And be an advocate. Do the right thing. So many times I see people not sticking up for other people or when they’re faced with this challenge of intervening in a situation or not saying anything.

As a community, as humans, we have all backed away from being advocates for justice in a way. [00:54:00] And that is the reoccurring theme I keep seeing and I wish. It’s a litigious society and no one wants to say anything or do anything in fear of whatever it is. But especially when we deal, dealing with youth and we’ve talked a lot about the youth issues here.

We’re adults and we are mentors to these young kids. So if you can intervene and it’s safe to do, you don’t realize how powerful some of your words can be to a younger person as well. So that would be, that would be the message I guess I would just remind everyone of.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s a really nice message. It’s a really nice message.

So, Simone, it’s been a pleasure chatting and thank you for taking us behind the scenes of a shopping centre from so many different perspectives. I think people listening will be leaving this kind of recording with a different view about what’s going on in the centres that they’re in all the time. Such a good way and that message at the, at the end there is just a really nice way to allow people to do something with that awareness now.

Oh, [00:55:00] I hope so Nick.

Simone Direckze: And I, and I hope, you know, your organization and people, your coaches do so many amazing things for people like us that don’t have the language and the skills to deal with what we’re dealing with at the moment. I hope people see the benefit of having mental health coach. Come visit and give you all the skills that everybody needs.

I feel in this day and age, it’s just in life. Yeah.

Nick McEwan-Hall: It’s a people’s skill. Simone, thank you so much. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Pleasure’s mine. Thank you. You’re welcome.