Episode 10 Part 1

Trailer

Have you ever felt so out of your depth that you wanted to throw your something across the room? Or found yourself in a leadership position before you felt ready?

Tracy Kite's journey from nurse, to frustrated mature student to leadership expert and author is a testament to the power of determination and the human capacity for growth.

Her story yields universal wisdom like: Sometimes, personal leadership is born from moments of self-doubt and frustration, and the simple act of truly listening can transform what other people can achieve. And a way to approach writing a leadership book.

Join us for a special episode, in two parts, of The Manager’s Moment, with Dr Tracy Kite, author of Love to Lead, and Lead Like you Give a F**k!.

About Tracy
Tracy commenced her career as a mental health nurse in 1984 and has remained a proud nurse, on the NMC register for the past 40 years. She worked in the NHS, becoming a ward sister aged 25 and a senior ward manager aged 27. Leadership and learning was always her core passion, and Tracy worked routinely with student doctors and student nurses throughout her NHS career.

In the late 1990s, following a few years working clinically in the private healthcare sector in specialist dementia care, Tracy switched careers to work in learning and development roles and leadership learning roles. Whilst these roles included clinical teaching and NVQ and apprenticeship programmes, Tracy’s core passion has always been in leadership learning.

In the early 2000s, Tracy helped to create a Business School in the organisation she worked in, which qualified more than 70 senior leaders in Masters in Management and other post-graduate management qualifications. She gained a Masters in Management of Change from Sussex University and a Doctorate during that time. Her research and thesis focus on human-centric leadership and the relationship between executive coaching and successful corporate leadership.

Tracy is a qualified psychological coach, focusing on executive and leadership coaching. She is an experienced Action Learning facilitator and develops leadership learning programmes for organisations. She is the author of two leadership books, which showcase her experience and research – Love to Lead (Panoma Press, 2018) and Lead Like You Give a F**k! (Rethink Press, 2024).

INTRO

Belinda Brummer (host): This is the manager's Moment, and I am your host, Belinda Brummer. I am delighted to be in a position to bring you this very special episode. Followers of this podcast, you will have heard me in conversation with guests exploring what it means and takes to be the manager. Um, real managers, real leaders, real CEO's, all grappling with and reflecting on their respective journeys, the ups, the downs, the takeaways, and the hoped for legacies. In this episode, I speak with someone who has not only their own story to share, which we do get into, but my guest has spent many years studying, observing, researching, writing about, and teaching on the topic of leadership. You are most welcome in joining me for this two part episode that really is a masterclass in practical leadership. My guest is Tracy Kite, the author of Love to lead and that book's second edition.

Tracy: Lead like you give an f.

Belinda Brummer (host): In this first part of this two part episode, we get to know Tracy and how this registered nurse, who once chucked inaccessible academic books across the room in frustration, comes to write too academically researched, experience based books on the topic of leadership.

Tracy: I am a nurse by original background. I'm mental health trained. I remain a proud nurse. I'm still on the register of nurses even though I don't do hands on nursing anymore. Well, I've recently left an employed role to take on what I guess people call a portfolio career these days. And I've done this once before in the 40 years of my career. So I'm, uh, working some freelance work and I've really focused down on my writing. So I've been writing the second edition of my book, which was published in March. The original book was titled Love to lead because it was a second title, not my working title. The publisher wouldn't allow me to call it the title that I wanted to call it. When they invited me to write a second edition, the publisher had been bought out by someone else and they really loved the title. So that was the basis on, um, which I wrote it again because I don't think I would have done a rewrite if I hadn't been able to call it what I wanted in the beginning, which is lead like you give a f because that was really meaningful to me and I felt like I'd sold out in the first edition. I hadn't called it what I wanted. Now I've had an opportunity to rewrite it. I've written about 30% of the content for the second edition, and, uh, I'm really happy with it. Now.

Belinda Brummer (host): Do you want to tell us a little bit about what are maybe some of the key messages in that book, or how do you talk about it?

Tracy: It's originally from my doctoral research, and I have a story around that. I don't come from a professional or academic childhood or background. And I've kind of fallen into study quite late in life. So I didn't go to university as a youngster. People in my family didn't do things like that. So I came to it late on in life. And I don't have a first degree, but my master's degree, which I fell into by accident, believe it or not, made me consider writing and reading and academia generally, which I hadn't been exposed to particularly before. I recall my very first day on my accidentally master's programme, feeling very out of place, like a massive imposter. And we were given a sheaf of, uh, things to read from that first lecture. And I took those home and picked up the first one, picked up my dictionary about 16 times in the first paragraph, and then ended up chucking them across the room thinking, I'm never going to be able to do this because I can't read this stuff. I don't understand these words. People like me don't do things like this. So I, uh, picked them back up again and kind of stuck with it and achieved my master's degree and absolutely loved it in the end. But I made a promise to myself that if I ever had something to say, I would say it in a way that most people on the planet can understand. Because academia is really exclusive. It can be really pompous and turgid and difficult for ordinary people. And I never in a million years thought I'd have enough to say to write about. But I always promised myself if I decide to write it in a way that people like me could understand. When you do a doctorate, um, you have to write things in a deeply academic way. Great for insomnia, not great for picking up, Learning. I don't think I felt I needed to maintain my promise to myself and rewrite that in a way that people like me could understand. So that's why what love to lead and now lead like you give an f is. It's my doctoral research on leadership translated into a format that people can use and understand and learn from in a day to day context.

Belinda Brummer (host): How do you accidentally fall into doing a master's?

Tracy: Well, that's a good question. Um, I was working in Learning and development then, uh, in a large healthcare organisation, and my role at the time was to manage our MVQ academy we had a big MVQ academy with around 600 students at the time and a role came up around leadership development. And I'd really had a very keen interest in leadership and learning all of my career. And I remember saying to my boss, I'd really like to take on a role like that, ah, as the next step in my career. And she said, well, you'd be perfect for the role, but what would be great is if you could have some academic background to your knowledge. I'd got, um, a vocational qualification in management at level five at that time. But she said, you need to shore it up with some academic underpinning. So I applied for a certificate in management studies at Sussex University alongside my full time role. It was going to be a, uh, evening class thing. And then I went for the interview and suddenly got accepted onto the masters in management programme.

Belinda Brummer (host): As you do.

Tracy: As you do.

Belinda Brummer (host): I didn't apply for it, but here I am. Oh, fantastic. And so I'm fascinated by what you've said around first day. Wanted to chuck the dictionary across the room, but that you then came to love it.

Tracy: Yes.

Belinda Brummer (host): Which brings you to writing a book. What was your journey from wanting to throw the dictionary across the room to coming to love it?

Tracy: I think stubbornness, really. My mother would always call me stubborn. I prefer determined. Um, but I think I'm a bit of a terrier with things and I was hungry for something. I wanted to take a new step in my life. I wanted to do something different. I was afraid of it because I was afraid that I would fail, but I still felt hungry for it. I wanted to learn, I wanted to do something different. I wanted the job, actually. I wanted that leadership development job. So those are all the things that drove me.

Belinda Brummer (host): How did we meet?

Tracy: We were introduced by a good friend and colleague of ours. So she and I met when I was working in an organisation. My role there, uh, was I was in the leadership development role and we had scheduled, well developed, implemented, uh, a masters in management programme internally to the organisation. It was my responsibility to lead that and teach on it. Uh, she came into the organisation because she was a partner, an external Learning partner of my organisation. And we had mostly internal leaders on that programme, but we made a couple of places each year on the masters available to external people, to our organisation and she happened to be one of those. So that's how we met originally.

Belinda Brummer (host): You mentioned there that you ran a master's programme. Was this before or after you completed your own masters?

Tracy: It was after.

Belinda Brummer (host): So that's super interesting. So you go from not a first degree, wanting to throw a dictionary across the room, loving your masters, to actually then developing a masters and teaching on it, that's an amazing journey.

Tracy: So running through my whole career of being people, other leaders and managers who have impacted me, um, who have seen potential in me and supported and nurtured me, also who have knocked me down along the way, too. And I think both of those things in tandem have made me the leader I am, but also the investigator of leadership that I am. In other words, what makes great leaders and managers. So I started as a nurse and I became a award sister, age 25, which is really young, and a senior ward manager at 27. So that was a real baptism of fire into leadership and management back in the nineties, that was my first initiation as a nurse. I'd always had a real leaning towards Learning and development, so I'd always worked on wards where there were student nurses and student doctors and somehow I'd always managed to be the person who looked after those people and made sure that they achieved their objectives and got their experiences. So I left the NHS and, um, moved into the private sector, worked for a little while in specialist dementia care, again as a leader. After a short time, I got divorced and, um, needed to be at home with my kids. So I took on a staff nurse position in a dementia care unit evenings and weekends, and then in about five minutes, got offered the head of care role. So that didn't last very long. And then I had an opportunity to move into Learning in the organisation, which is wonderful, and got made redundant after a while, joined another organisation and took on, uh, I guess, different roles in Learning. So I've done clinical Learning, I've done vocational qualifications and I've done leadership Learning through that time.

Belinda Brummer (host): What does management mean to you?

Tracy: For me, I think leadership and management are two sides of the same coin. Or if you like, a continuum, so opposite ends of a continuum which people who are in leadership and or management positions skate up and down at, uh, will every second of every day. And in my mind, for me, and, um, you know, I think you'd spend years going through the plethora of books and theories about what's leadership and what's management. But for me, the conclusion I've come to over the years and decades of Learning and practising is that management, for me, describes the job, the task, the roles that we are required to achieve because of the badge that we wear. So those are the things, the practical, work based things that we achieve within our job, the things that, by definition, we absolutely have to do, have to make happen, have to ensure are happening. And certainly I created in my doctorate a, uh, theory around what I think that should look like as my original contribution to the body of knowledge. And then the opposite end of that, the leadership end of that continuum, um, for me, is leadership. And I think leadership describes the person, us as individuals, the people who we are as leaders in an organisation or thought leaders or leaders in a group of people. So those are all of our personality traits, the things that we're good at, things like inspiring and creativity, and the less tangible, more esoteric things about humanness in terms of what we do in our job roles. So the management end is about getting the job done and the leadership end is about how we get the job done. I think there are trends and the trend at the Moment is to call it leadership. So for example, the Institute of Leadership and Management as a professional body have dropped the management title and they're now calling themselves the Institute of leadership. So I think at the Moment the trend is to call it leadership. Uh, I think we have to look at both. I think we have to have an understanding of both because otherwise leadership practise becomes too esoteric, it becomes more about who am I and less about what do I do when I'm at work and what do I need to make happen. I think you have to have both, not necessarily an equal measure all the time. Ah, there are times when you're more leader and less manager and vice versa. But theory underpins, um, all of that. So I think one of the things that I've learnt from being fortunate enough to study is that you have to understand the theory. Anyone can write a book. If you've got something to say, you can write a book, but that doesn't mean you're writing something that is the truth or relevant to everybody. And lots of people write things that are contextual, uh, and are right for them in that Moment. And one of the big things that doing my doctorate taught me is question everything. So when you study for a degree or a masters, you tend to be looking for the theory on the planet that supports what you think, your mode of thinking and your way of taking things forward. When you study for a doctorate, you're taught to say, yeah, but what if that's not right? What if it isn't right? What would it look like if it was something different to that? Where are the holes in this?

Belinda Brummer (host): What's missing, Tracy, for you, in the context of how you've described that continuum of manager leader, what makes for a great manager.

Tracy: I probably would answer differently on any given different day, to be honest, because there are so many things. But through my journey, I think humanness sits at the core of leading and managing for me, and I think that's a massive shift that we're seeing. We're seeing that in the literature and the research. Now, if you look back, I don't know, 50, 70 years management was male. It was accepted that managers have the answers and give the answers to other people. So I'm the manager, you ask me what to do, I tell you what to do. And I think we're moving. We've moved m massively from that space. I think there's still a little of that to be done at work from time to time, but generally only in emergencies. The building's on fire. I'm not going to ask you what you want to do, I'm going to tell you what to do. But I don't think practise has necessarily moved as quickly as thinking. And I think there are a lot of managers still in business that still function like that. So for me, it's about acknowledging that there are still moments in our management practise where that may need to happen, but they're very few and far between now. So what do I do in all of the rest of the time? For me, a great leader is somebody who recognises that they're surrounded by thinking, breathing, intuitive adults, and, um, that is a self fulfilling prophecy. So if you don't believe that you're surrounded by thinking, breathing, intuitive adults and you start treating people as if they're not any of those things, that's what you'll get. So it's about self awareness, it's about an awareness of other people, it's about an awareness of the potential that people can bring to work. And you are the keeper of that potential. So you can choose to either maximise or minimise that potential and lead like you give an f is about, how do I do that? Because I think most of us know that intellectually. I think if you got, um, a big group of leaders around a table and said, and asked this question, they would come up with these things. But what I've found is people don't know how to do that. They know that they should, but they don't necessarily know. The skills aren't necessarily second nature in, well, how do I do that? You know, when somebody is standing in front of me and I'm a bit frustrated or they're a bit defensive, what do I say and how do I say that and it's that knowledge and that skill set, I think that makes leaders great or not great. Well, my doctoral research, uh, Washington answered exactly that question. How do you teach that? So I formulated and developed over hundreds of leaders over several years, a module of Learning that was pretty short because managers are busy, they don't want to, you know, not everybody wants to commit to a masters. Sometimes we need to pick up these skills really quickly. So I developed a core day and a half of Learning spread out where leaders could practise those skills. And for me, as an executive coach, there's a massive correlation between great coaching and great leading. So I was able to translate what does a coach do and what doesn't a, uh, coach do, equally importantly, and then what does that look like as, uh, a leadership skill set in the workplace on a day to day basis?

Belinda Brummer (host): And what did you come up with?

Tracy: Well, I think it's really, uh, developing people's skills in attentive listening. Lots of the literature we all know, uh, calls it listening or active listening. For me, it's attentive listening, paying attention, because most leaders are massively busy. We try and do five things all at once. We think we're listening to people and we're not, and we waste a lot of time acting on things that we think we've heard, rather than pinning down and acting on things we've actually heard and checked that we've heard from the perspective of the person that told us. So lots of stuff around listening. Uh, that's one major skill set and it has to be practised. Second major skill set is stop telling people stuff, stop talking, stop advising, stop guiding, stop saying, well, if I was you, I would do that. Or, well, when that happened to me, I did this and I think you should do this and ask questions instead. What have you tried so far? What are your thoughts? Have you ever been here before? What did you do then? You know, what do you think should happen now? It's that shift from telling to asking. Uh, unfortunately, in westernised society, all of our conversation is aimed at telling people what we think and trying to get them to think what we think. So that's a real shift. And people think that they do that, but they don't. So a lot of the Learning that I deliver enables people to practise that, to give it a go, to see, to unpick, um, it and practise it, because it does take practise even though we think it isn't going to. And we do that all the time and that's a departure for most leaders and managers, because when we put the badge on, what we do is we respond. When people have a problem, we say, hmm hm, yeah, okay, I think you should do that. And instead what we need to be saying is, what have you tried so far? Because that gives people permission to try something before they come to us. And what do you think should happen and guide people through that process? Because what we want to be achieving is not a team of people that comes to us to say, what shall I do? I've got this problem. What we want is a team of people that come to us and say, I had this problem, this is what I've done about it. I just wanted to let you know, because most of a leader's day is taken up with problems that are not their own, problems that sit somewhere else. Yeah.

Belinda Brummer (host): Ah, yeah. In a lot of the management development that I have done, one of the key things that managers want is that their teams operate more independent of them because they get dragged into the little things, the things that they don't want to. And part of the journey that I would be taking them on is trying to help them understand that they are creating the environment for that behaviour to exist and that therefore they can create an environment in which they can get a different result. People don't want to be micromanaged, so.

Belinda Brummer (host): They want the freedom.

Belinda Brummer (host): Managers don't want to be involved in those things because it means that they get dragged into the little things and yet the behaviour persists. And there is, uh, it comes down to what you're saying, Traci, and that we know what we should be doing, we know we should be asking questions. Why is it so alien to us then to slip into that mode naturally? Are we taught to not be in that mode? Is it a power dynamic? Are we asking people to go against human nature by demonstrating these kind of behaviours, by asking great questions rather than telling, is it such an alien skill?

Belinda Brummer (host): Did you know that 59% of 13 to 34 year olds listen to podcasts on a monthly basis? And the percentage of those older than 34 years old who do the same is growing consistently. Now consider the increasing number of employers using and considering using podcasting to engage and develop their employees. Podcasting, the employee experience is a great idea, but it's tricky to know where to start. Well, I can help. Drop me, Belinda Brummer, a message. If you want to talk about collaborating on bringing to life the voices in your organisation, for your organisation, to onboard train and inspire your people, you can contact me on belinda@boostlearning.online. Before the break, I asked Tracey whether asking great questions rather than telling was such an alien skill to humans.

Tracy: I think it's an alien skill, yes. I don't think it's an alien thought. Like I said, intellectually, I think we all know that this is the case. So for me, it's a social thing and it's a neurological thing. So I think, uh, we still live in a society where we think managers tell people what to do, and there is a power dynamic attached to that, I think. And neurologically, we work from a basis of habits. So what we know from how our brain works is that the more we do something, the more habitual something becomes, is that our neural pathways thicken up over time and then we fall into those habits without even needing to think about it. With this part of our brain, it comes from this primary part of our brain at the back, where we've got these thickened neural pathways. That's a habitual thing in cognitive, behavioural terms, it's called an automatic thought, and they happen in milliseconds. So if we want people to stop doing that, it's not just about knowing intellectually what's the right thing to do, it's about helping people to unlearn old behaviours before they'll learn new behaviours. And again, the Learning modules that I've put together focus around how do we get people to unlearn before they learn something new and thicken up some new neural pathways? And any coach working from that perspective will be doing the same thing. So it's about what can leaders borrow from coaches to enable their team to function independently and to the maximum of their capacity? Because what we know is when you tell someone something, so when you give advice, you tell someone what to do, you say, oh, my experience is this, I think you should do this. Then neural functioning starts to close down, it starts to slow, and it starts to function at a much lower level. Whereas if you ask a question, what you're doing is you're opening out someone's neural functioning, you're triggering it, you're enabling it to pick up and be at its most creative. So if you can stop telling and start asking, you're going to be enabling your people to function at their maximum brain capacity because their neurons are all firing. Now you have to get people to unlearn old behaviours. Not just the leaders are learning, but the team is learning too, because what they're going to be used to, maybe for decades, is being told what to do. So when you first ask a question, instead of telling somebody what they should be doing, they're going to go, oh, wow, this is weird. I'm not used to being asked what I think. And they might come back with, well, I don't know. You're the manager, you tell me what to do. You need to help people to unlearn that. Let me give you an example of that. That happened to me quite a long time ago. So when I. I was head of care in a big specialist dementia care unit, I used to have to be on call outside of work. And one night I got a call at 02:00 in the morning and it was from a staff nurse on the night shift and she called me to tell me that the washing machine had broken down and they couldn't get the laundry through overnight, which is one of the jobs that needed to be done. And we kind of talked it through and I know it was all a bit strange. And as I was dropping back to sleep, I just thought to myself, what am I doing? What am I doing that this woman who was in her fifties, who was a really experienced staff nurse, really competent thinking, what am I doing that has made her think that she needs to call me at 02:00 in the morning to tell me that the washing machine has broken down working with her? What's that saying about how I'm leading the team? Because I know for a fact, if she was at home and her washing machine broke down, she wouldn't do anything other than think, well, you know, as soon as the plumber's up and about, I'll call him in and fix my washing machine. And it really had a massive impact on me because it made me aware that the way that I lead was directly impacting the behaviour of somebody who's really competent and really experienced and really mature in a way that I know for a fact she wouldn't have behaved at home.

Belinda Brummer (host): You've hit on a really other important skill, or is it a trait or a characteristic? And that is to turn the questioning on yourself and say, what am I doing? That is getting that behaviour, what am I doing? What about you as a person, Tracy has you going there. How do you come to ask yourself that question?

Tracy: Wow, that's a profound question. Um, I'm not sure I know a direct answer to that. But you asked me earlier about, um, moving from doing my own masters at a red brick university to creating a master's programme that happened internally. And if I had to highlight the difference between those two experiences, I think that would be it. The masters that we created had that really deep, really strong self reflection component as a core part of the Learning that we did. Action Learning is what we sat at, uh, the core of those master's programmes that we ran about for about seven or eight years in that organisation. Action Learning is an accelerated form of leadership development and it comes in many guises which have evolved since its inception at its purest form, as you would expect any leadership and management theory to do. So Reg Revans was the gentleman who invented the term action Learning. He was a physicist by original background, worked in the coal mining industry on, uh, the executive board, worked a lot in the NHS after that. And, uh, he expressed action Learning as you would expect a physicist to do, as an equation. So l equals p plus q, so l, meaning Learning equals p. Programmed knowledge plus q questions. So what he did is he used to get groups of Managers together, which, of course, would have been all men in those days, back in the 1940s and fifties. Two problem solve together effectively. The way that that's evolved through the decades since then is that there's much more reflective components in there now. So my version, uh, Michael Marquardt is an author you might want to read, if you want to read a more updated version. Updated the equation to be L equals p plus q plus r. So Learning equals programme knowledge plus questions plus reflection. So I run action Learning sets for my clients now, senior leaders come together, which is a closed, highly confidential group where those managers can bring their business problems of the day and effectively, I guess I would describe it as team to one coaching in many ways, team to one, executive coaching. Now you can have one to one executive coaching, what normal coaching looks like. You can have team coaching, where, uh, a coach goes in and coaches the team, in my view, an action learning facilitator. What I do with my clients is I facilitate their coaching of each other and it's really challenging and that's why it's accelerated, because if a senior leader brings a problem to their action Learning set, they will already have created a highly confidential, highly trusting environment and they will ask questions of each other. So advice is banned. And I know that situation, this is what I would do, is banned. And over time, those people are learning to ask really insightful, really challenging, really probing questions of one another. And the point of that is to enable the person to get to somewhere where they will take an action over the problem that they brought and then commit to taking that action and bring it back to the next set to say, this is what I did. So there's a really deep level of accountability. Effectively, it creates a consultancy within your organisation where people bring their problems and solve them and take action as a result. There is research out there that looks at straightforward mbas versus masters learning with sort of practise based components. And I think it's really interesting. So my gut says that if you deliver a theory only management programme, what you'll get are people who know more management theory. Certainly when I was running master's degrees in my previous life, the most insight came, the most Learning came when some of those leaders were asked to step up to, uh. So for example, their line manager, I don't know, went off sick for three months or they got asked to uh, take over temporarily a more senior role or something like that. And every single person that that happened to came back and said, wow, I've just realised everything that I've been taught because I suddenly got thrown into a position where I needed to start to implement the things that I've been Learning in theory. So for me, the best leadership Learning is a combination of here's the theory, take it as you will, some of it will resonate with you, some of it won't, but here it is and then give people a direct opportunity to test that out in practise. And it's another reason why action Learning is so powerful, because it pushes people to that point. It pushes people to say, well programmed knowledge, the p of the equation is what I know or what I have the capacity yet to learn. In other words, I know that. I don't know that yet and I need to go and find out about it. That's programme knowledge and it isn't about someone telling me it, it's about me exploring it and finding it out and assimilating that and then saying, right, so what? I know this now in my mind, in my theoretical kind of underpinning, but so what? What does that look like in practise? Because it's very different and that's where I wanted to take my research, is we know this stuff intellectually, we know it theoretically. We know when we see a good line manager. We've all had them, um, we've all had people that have taught us what good looks like and what bad looks like. But how do I do that? What are the skills I need? What am I good at already and therefore need to do more of what am I not so good at and need to work on? What do I need to stop doing as well? That's getting in my way. So it's that combination of being pushed into that position where you have to take an action. Massive Learning comes from that.

Belinda Brummer (host): Have you noticed any threads or themes that have run through your life, whether professionally or personally, that you, you just kind of notice that they keep cropping up?

Tracy: I think it is this thread of care love, I've called it since my doctorate. I called it care in my doctorate because I come from a nursing background. So my research enabled me to kind of push together these two things, these two careers, almost, that I'd had in my life, one of which is being a nurse, a mental health nurse, and the other was being, uh, a, uh, learning specialist and specifically a leadership specialist is bringing those two things together and it crops up good and bad, uh, with frequent regularity, uh, through my career. And I think if I had to pin that down to just one thing, it's do what you say you're going to, because I think so much comes out of that trust, psychological safety, respect, civility and good manners. All of those things fall out of that small act of, if you've said you're going to do it, do it. And if you find yourself unable to do it because, you know, we're all fallible human beings and stuff happens, say, I'm so sorry, I can't do that. Because I think that the m most massive impact on me has been when my managers have said, this is what we'll do and then we do it, or this is what we'll do and then we don't. We just, we talk about it, we'll theorise about it, we'll pontificate about it, and then we'll do something completely the opposite and we won't even acknowledge that and move on.

Belinda Brummer (host): Like that never was a thing. And the legacy that that leaves.

Tracy: Exactly.

Belinda Brummer (host): You've mentioned in passing at times in this conversation that there are managers who can knock you down as well. So we've spoken about the great Managers and m the great leaders and what it takes and needs and is, I'm curious about the fact that you say that you can learn from those that knock you down as well.

Tracy: Yes, I mean, I think I'd want to be careful about that. Um, and acknowledge that no one person is all good or all bad. You know, we're all human. And I guess we can all look back and say, oh, gosh, I wish I'd never done that. But, yeah, I think there are behaviours that I've seen in leaders that have knocked me down and I always, in my own, uh, teaching situations, I'll always say to people. Look, life isn't always great, but the opportunity is learn from the stuff that didn't go so well that you didn't like. We can learn as much from the bad stuff that's happened as from the good stuff, and that's the good thing that you can take from it.

Belinda Brummer (host): As you've spoken about the continuum of managers and leaders, I love this idea that nobody is totally bad and nobody is totally a great manager. There are people who struggle, more or less, but that a great leader can have a Moment of where they do something and it can have a greater negative impact because it just lands in a particular context or a climate that suddenly breaks what was originally a psychologically safe space or something. So it is in those little moments, those little moments of leadership, when a particular behaviour can land badly.

Tracy: And if I may, I'd really like to talk about trauma informed leadership in that context, because that's the major change from the first edition of my book to the second. I feel incredibly passionate about it. I'm not saying that there isn't any, but I haven't found anyone else that's thinking or talking about trauma informed in terms of leadership anywhere at the Moment. Lots of stuff around trauma informed care and support in health and social care, of course. Um, but nothing in terms of how we lead. And I think for me, trauma informed leadership and the core of the new book around trauma informed leadership captures all of those things that we've just talked about.

Belinda Brummer (host): That's it for part one, folks. In part two, Tracy will explain what trauma informed leadership is and offers a new, simplified way of providing feedback. If you haven't already, follow this show for part two and for other thoughtful conversations with people who are managers and leaders. Oh, and this podcast is brought to you by Boost Learning, where management development is done differently. Find out more about our programmes and other things we do to augment what organisations do to support their managers and their leaders at www.boostlearning.online The Manager's Moment, seeing the person in this and every Moment.

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