Episode 18: Beyond Buzzwords: Straight Talk on Strategy with Alicia McKay
Trina Sunday: This episode is actually a chat that I had with Alicia Mckay, the straight talking strategist. Two years ago I spoke with her about connecting HR strategy, culture and leadership. Given that HR best practise can’t exist in a vacuum, Ashley tackles the tricky stuff in life and work and leadership and she’s specialised in different work with local government since our chat. But she brings so much to the table. She’s working with New Zealand and Australia’s most senior leaders in government, business and community and she brings fresh perspective and sharp insight. She’s seen the good, the bad and the boring and both of us loathe bureaucracy, buzzwords and bullshit. So strap yourself in for an hour of unscripted, straight talk about strategy, culture and leadership. Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trena, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started.
Trina Sunday: I’ve got a lot of clients that have been talking to me lately around having some difficulty building some strategy, getting traction for strategy, building strategic documents that sit on shelves and don’t do anything unless we hit people around the head with them. It just doesn’t work right. So I thought let’s have a conversation and from my perspective, who better to have that chat with than Alicia McKay? So Alicia is about all things leadership and strategy. She’s about cutting through the bullshit of business. She’s authored a couple of amazing books in that space. Is part of a much loved, from my perspective, anti qualification camp in terms of how we can bring real time conversations, real learning things that we can practically actually do to make things better, better for ourselves, better for our teams and better for our organisation. So super excited to have Alicia here with me and we’ll bring her in now so we can get talking about connecting our strategy, leadership, culture so we can make great things happen. So welcome Alicia, it’s great to have you here.
Alicia Mckay: Oh, it’s nice to be here. And I was just thinking, as you’re doing your introduction. Like I know that’s what we’re talking about, but also I get this kind of like allergic shiver when we go. I’m going to talk about all things, hr, leadership, people, strategy, culture, change, agile, transformation, buzzword, buzzword, buzzword.
Trina Sunday: And in like in 60 minutes. There are a lot of buzzwords, right? It’s part of the problem. Like we’ve got buzzwords on buzzwords, which then means the work we’re doing and what we’re driving doesn’t always land with the people that we need it to land with.
Alicia Mckay: No, and I think that’s kind of it. like there’s a language piece in here where it’s like, I’ll see even me saying that. A language piece. If you’re talking to a subject matter expert or someone on your team, totally talk about having a framework for emotional intelligence within your senior leadership. Totally say that.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: If you’re talking to mid tier managers or team leads and you want to talk about something that’s going to make their life better, please don’t talk like that. Like tell them that you want to help them to be better at their jobs or that you would like to point everyone in the same direction or what? don’t, don’t talk to them about strategy and culture. They don’t even know what they are. In fact, to be fair, a lot of the people who talk about those things don’t even know what they are.
Trina Sunday: And that’s probably one of the things which is a good place to start actually. How do you talk about strategy with people in a way that’s not bs Buzzwords talk to me about strategy and.
Alicia Mckay: Honestly it’s even kind of hard. So like I feel like a bit of a hypocrite a lot of the time because I’m all oh yeah, no buzzwords, no bullshit. But then I go to talk about strategy and I’m like, so what’s your objective? But my kind of basic explanation is always that strategy is always about change.
Trina Sunday: So.
Alicia Mckay: Mhm. You don’t need a strategy if you want to stay the same. Nobody has a stay in the same strategy. Everybody has a strategy when they’re in one place and they would like to be somewhere else. So strategy is your vehicle for figuring out how you get from where you are now to m where you want to be. But what is often misinterpreted in that kind of environment is that people think that equates to a plan.
Trina Sunday: Yes.
Alicia Mckay: And so when you say how are we going to get from M here to two times growth? They go, we could hire more analysts, we could reach new markets. And you go to stop, stop, stop. That’s a plan like the steps you can take, strategy about zooming out and going, what are we all about and where do we want to be cool? That’s our why. Got that sussed. And you can sub in vision, mission, purpose, values. Like you can sub in a lot there. But the essence of that is it’s your why. And then working out how you’re going to do it, not what you’re going to do, which is money that you want to spend, plans that you’re going to make, initiatives you’re going to run, products and services you’re going to launch, but what your approach is to moving forward. So maybe that’s a customer first approach and you’re deciding that your strategic priority is to retain and deepen relationships with your existing customers. What’s really cool about that is if you land on that as an approach that makes you what, really easy, you can go, okay, well if that’s what we’re doing, here’s where our marketing spend goes, here’s the kind of people we hire, like, here’s what we do because we’ve made that call. But if instead you decide actually what we need to do is diversify. Like we’ve been stuck in the same lane for too long and it’s getting old. We need to refresh who we are to our market and actually get out of this space. We hate it. Well, that’s a whole nother strategy that requires a completely different set of actions. And so the guts of strategy is do you have something you care about enough to want to change and then have you cut off a bunch of options to focus on how you’re going to get there? And then the other stuff just mostly takes care of itself. It’s the clarity of those two steps that’s usually missing.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. In your experience, so. Cause I think there is a lot that in what I see, a lot is plans on plans. Yeah. And I feel like a lot of strategy is actually operational planning badly disguised. And I, do think I’ve seen quite a lot of strategy for status quo, by the way, to pick up something, where I think there’s some self protection in some organisations where no, it’s really convenient for us to write a strategy that we know we’re already smashing so that we don’t get attention from the board or so there’s some elements of that which is where culture can sometimes come in. But how do you often work with teams to get them to zoom out?
Alicia Mckay: I want to pick up on the point you’ve made there about strategy or the world that it lives in being used as a stick to beat people with. Because if you’ve got a performance framework or a way to track progress against your goals, which is perverted and actually used as a disincentive for people.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: And that’s really problematic. Like if you’re doing an annual plan and you’re like, here’s what we do. We want to double our revenue and we want to reach new markets and we want to hire new people and do all this new stuff and then you use those goals as a way to punish your leadership team as a board or to not give you staff bonuses. If you’re the leaders, then of course people are going to create boring, risk averse ones.
Trina Sunday: Right?
Alicia Mckay: Yeah. You can’t do that. And if you are wondering, do that everyone. You can’t do it. There you go, you heard Effus. You can’t do it. So in my experience, every leadership team or board that I work with that tells me with their mouth, we need people to take more risks. People here are too risk averse. Well, there’s a reason for that. And the reason is a, you’re actually risk averse and every time they put their head above the parapet, you knock them down. And B, there’s no incentive for them to do anything new.
Trina Sunday: Yep.
Alicia Mckay: So that’s your job, to create the environment where they want to take risks and they feel safe doing it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And that’s where I feel like you can’t talk about strategy without leadership coming up.
Alicia Mckay: Right.
Trina Sunday: and without culture coming up. Because it’s kind of, if you do have a risk adverse culture or you have a blame culture avoidant, that fear and insecurity to make decisions, to make bold moves, then there’s not going to be a strategy that inspires anybody.
Alicia Mckay: Oh, 100 and it starts at the top. Right. So I had an example recently which I thought was quite good, which is a bit of a lame change, but makes the point where, in rural Victoria, when everyone in rural Victoria was in lockdown, a large government agency that deals with those places unnamed, was trying to make a real effort to support their people who were stuck at home. They’re all in ISO, they can’t get into the town to get what they need. And they’re like, shit, this is no good. And so they sent out A really thoughtful email around wellbeing. And they said, look, here’s a memo and we just need you to know that work is not your priority right now. And if you have to be with your family and look after your own physical and mental health, that’s what matters most to us now, that’s great, but that email was sent at 11:30pm on a Sunday.
Trina Sunday: Right.
Alicia Mckay: So at that point, it doesn’t matter what the email says, because there’s no walking the talk from the top.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And that’s the thing about boundaries, Right. It’s that leaders that will say, I don’t expect that you’re going to put in the hours that I’m putting in. And I don’t. That martyrdom that comes out and it’s like, come on, it’s the symbolism of it. When you’ve got people that are wearing that badge of honour in terms of the hours that they’re doing or, what’s happening. Oh, so tired. I had to work right through last night to get this strategy into the board or.
Alicia Mckay: So what you’re saying is, hey, if you’re like a pleb like you, you don’t have to, but if you want to be at the top like me, if you want to succeed in this place, this is what it takes, that’s what you’re saying, with your behaviour and if you have done a good job of hiring ambitious staff that really give a shit, which hopefully you have, well, they’re going to take that on board and go, okay, well, I want to, I want to be a leader, so I’m going to have to do that. And it’s like, I tell my kids not to swear and I swear. Yeah, not great. But the thing is, they don’t swear in front of me. And here’s an important point, I reckon, because I say to my kids, like, it’s not okay for you to swear. But then I regularly swear. They may not swear in front of me, but make no mistake, they will be swearing.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. It’s then what’s visible versus what’s invisible. And I think that true change is going to come from where we have transparency and visibility over, where it is that we’re going and. And who’s coming along with us. Try not to stay on the journey because.
Alicia Mckay: And since COVID not only are they on a journey, they’ve got roadmaps, they’ve got blueprints, they’ve got like. It’s good, isn’t it? But to come to your point around, okay, like, how do you get people in the right headspace? It’s actually not very complicated. We just make it really hard. And so there are two important components of it. Like if we accept that the why and the how are the most important kind of strategic pillars and that, the what comes after that. Well, getting people tapped into the why and pulling them out of their own headspace, it’s just asking them really important questions like, why do you actually care about this work? And how does what we do make other people’s lives better? Tell me about that. So it’s all of a sudden going. Instead of focusing right now on what’s in front of you and what’s in your email, go and look like, just put your head out the window and think about how you’re affecting your customers and your audience and your community. So that’s the first one, and then the second one is to push out horizon. So if we’re talking, why still is to push our horizon. So we’re not good at thinking about 10 or 20 years in the future. And one of my favourite things to do is a technique that was pioneered by Cameron Herald and it’s called Vivid Vision. I have people write me a story and it’s set three or five or 10 or 20 years in the future and I say, oh, I want you to write me a story. And right now it’s April 2042 and you still work here. Can you believe it? I want you to write what it’s like for you to come to work in 2042. What do you see? What’s the headline on the newspaper? Who’s here? Like, what have you been doing? What does it smell like? What does it look like? Write me a really cool story. And so people write these visionary stories where they’re like, I send my hologram into our Asia office to connect the innovation work. Yeah. And once you’ve done that and you’ve thrown your perspective that far out, it unlocks a piece of your brain that can see and feel it, because otherwise you don’t connect to it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: And so we did that here recently. But it’s 2027. We’re like, it’s 2027. Here’s a letter I’m writing you guys from 2027. And holy crap, it’s so great. Here’s what my day looked like this morning. It’s so good, right? It’s how you get your why your house stuff is generally about alignment, so you don’t need most of your team to figure out what your strategy is in terms of the approach. That’s a trade off conversation that’s had between your executive and your balloon. That’s fine. They make recommendation, the board decides, you move on. What lets people down is that they don’t line up the way they work with what they say they care about. Might be that you are, an education provider who doesn’t fund professional development for your staff in times of financial constraint.
Trina Sunday: Yep.
Alicia Mckay: If you don’t line up what you do with what you say you do.
Trina Sunday: Mhm.
Alicia Mckay: Doesn’t work. It might be that you’re a wellbeing company that doesn’t provide any mental health support for your staff. It might be that you have an organisational value around making work easy or making people’s lives easy. But your procurement system is so frustrating that your suppliers can’t get paid and half your payroll is messed up. And those things, those engine room pieces are what drives the day to day reality of a strategic vision.
Trina Sunday: That’s what drives the storytelling.
Alicia Mckay: Right.
Trina Sunday: That then brings strategy to life and makes it something other than a strategy. And it is around that from my perspective and with the HR game changers I’m working with that are trying to really level up in terms of what they’re doing and that’s where most people that are joining us here today will be. it’s not because you shit at strategy, it’s because people have an appetite for levelling up. like we’re wanting to look at things from different perspectives and, and I think some of it it’s that without wanting to use the word philosophy, but it’s knowing the core of that care factor and knowing what that relationship looks like that then translates in the space I work in with employees, but that then directly then flows through to customer relationships, customer experiences, and in turn kind of the business success type stuff 100%.
Alicia Mckay: Like I’ve always thought that internal or support functions, which I hate the words of, but let’s roll with it near the engine room of strategy. So the misperception often with strategy is that like it’s done in the leadership room and then it’s up to frontline staff to make it. But actually the enablers that build the systems and create the conditions for whether or not we can and do work that way they sit in hr, finance policy, procurement, legal, customer services. That’s where we actually either make it possible to go in the right direction or we don’t. And when we leave people out of those conversations, what we get are Situations where, um. Okay, so I’ve got a newly established business unit at Auckland Council about five or six years ago, and they called the Community Empowerment Unit. And their job, now that the council has amalgamated is rather than directly delivering community services, they, want to create a centre of excellence and empower communities to deliver their own locally focused, tailored services. Cool strategy, right?
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: So they’ve got a great strategy and a very clear vision and very clear way that they’re going to deliver on that as a unit. Eighteen months in, I get an email saying, I need you to come and facilitate a session with our team. I think we need to refresh our strategy because we’re just not getting the results we expected. our KPIs are terrible. I’m like, okay, all right, so I come in now, before I even get into the session with these leaders, I had to register as a supplier with Auckland Council.
Trina Sunday: Yep.
Alicia Mckay: Right. So here we go. Now, in order to be a community service provider with your Community Empowerment Lead, you need to register as a supplier. Also, whether you’re running a yoga class at a community hall or a youth safety group who needs to claim expenses back for the supplies that you’ve ordered, whatever, you’ve got to register as a supplier with Auckland Council. Now, having been through that process, even though it is needlessly complicated, but let’s not go there. the first section where you have to fill in your details has a thing in it that where you upload proof of your $2 million in professional indemnity and public liability insurance.
Trina Sunday: Yep. Cover your ass first. Yep.
Alicia Mckay: M. Now, how many yoga classes at Pukakawi Community hall do you think have $10 million in PI and PL insurance? None. So at the very first hurdle, it’s knocked out. Now, if you went and talked to Finance, who operate in a completely different part of the organisation, and you went, what’s this about? They would say, excuse me, Alicia Mckay, this is a best practise finance and procurement system. It mitigates as much risk as is possible. And we’ve actually done a presentation about this at the Finance Dudes conference where everybody lauded us for how amazing our, procurement system was. And you know what? They’re right.
Trina Sunday: Yep.
Alicia Mckay: However, the measure of whether or not it’s good is whether it contributes to the goals, not whether it’s best practise. And so, actually, because the finance system was so best practise, it was making it impossible, for the organisation to actually achieve its goals, which was to connect with the community and get it happening. And so when we kind of get that wrong, whether it’s HR or finance or legal or policy, the whole thing falls over. There’s no such thing as strategic change.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: The system enablers didn’t enable.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And that’s when I loved it. When we had a quick chat not long ago and you said, best practise can’t happen in a vacuum. And I’m like, yes, because some of the work that I’m doing in that HR space is. There’s a lot of best practise we look at. There’s a lot where, you’re looking at what’s happening globally. You’re trending stuff out, you’re reading phenomenal amounts of stuff, and then you try and sift through all of it and you go, okay, well, 85% of that’s not relevant to me, my industry, my market. Let’s take the other 15% and then look at what enablers, what appetite there is to kind of explore it. have I got what’s needed in place from a leadership perspective and all that, to try and make things happen? And then you kind of end up with. You’re driving something in this message around best practise. And it’s like. But it doesn’t work if it doesn’t align and fit with all the other puzzle pieces.
Alicia Mckay: So best fit. We don’t want to aim for best practise, we want to aim for best fit. So from a systems view, how do we fit in with all of the other parts of this in a way that, to use kind of an architect terminology, is building a better house, not creating better rooms. Right. Which is that classic silo thing. And so if we’re thinking best fit rather than going, what’s best practise for employee wellbeing right now in the pandemic and reading journal articles and going to conferences, you know what you’d do? You’d ask your staff and then you’d listen.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: So what tends to happen, this is a very cynical point of view, but we do these engagement surveys and we send out these things and we go, how do you feel about your job? Do you like it? Are you working hard? Blah, blah, blah. And the results come in and they’re not good. They’re never good. And that child goes, ah. Uh. The thing is, this was just after the announcement that we’d made about the realignment, and people were stressed because we’d just introduced the new CRM, so we can’t really.
Trina Sunday: We argue it away. Right?
Alicia Mckay: Yeah. And then we but then we put it away and it’s like, what if instead of doing those to argue with them, we did them to listen and we went out to our staff and we’re like, oh, tough times with COVID What would be helpful? And it might be that the last thing they want to do is dial into an online fucking yoga class or 5pm drink. But if you sent them a meal kit, all of them a meal kit once a week and they didn’t have to cook dinner for their family after a pressing week in ISO, that would change their lives.
Trina Sunday: But I think that’s at the core of it, right? Because I think, and I know in the space that I work in, so I call employee engagement surveys, like the happiness index and a lot of the time people are busting out 90% scores. It’s like, okay, so if we’re going to go from 90A, I probably don’t believe the diagnostics or the measures that we’re using. If we push the needle to 92, 93 or 94, which is the KPI that’s been set to measure that, is that actually going to translate to any phenomenal kind of impact on the ground? And most of the time it’s no. Right. And then the other structured place where we get feedback’s performance appraisal, don’t get me started on that, that’s a whole nother chat where I can tangent very quickly, so we won’t go there. But a lot of organisations are using that as the structured mechanisms for getting back and it just doesn’t work right. like it is about conversations. The challenge for people that I’m working with is a lot of the time is resourcing for that. And not to use as an excuse, but there’s lots of support functions who have been leaned up so much. Right?
Alicia Mckay: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: Carved up, leaned up, decimated financially due to constraints or whatever through pandemic bad, business, changes are made. We strip the L and D budget, we cut out all of the training support, all that good stuff. Wellbeing, can’t afford it. But it’s like, how do you then make sure you’ve got the reach on the ground? And the challenge I have is, well, it shouldn’t be HR’s job. Yeah, that’s a, part of the problem if we’re enabling codependency. But it’s then around how do we have managers believe in it? These are conversations that can be coming organically from them with their people. And all we’ve got to do is weave in a question into a chat that you’re already having. And that, to me is a sign of a lot of the time that doesn’t get traction because the culture’s not that given.
Alicia Mckay: We’re talking about hr. This is a what’s your job? Conversation, so totally get it. Everybody’s stretched for time. But what is your job? Is your job to respond to lots of forms that have been filled in that have come into your email, or is your job to create an environment where people grow and feel good at work? And if you decide that your job is to do that, well, that will change how you prioritise what you spend your time doing? And from a leadership point of view, what’s your job? Is your job to do finance or customer service, or is your job to, enable the success of your business through people? Which I think it is. And if that’s your job, then you’re spending your time asking questions of people like, do you know how you fit in? Do you know where we’re going? And more importantly, what’s making it hard for you to do that?
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And listening to the answer.
Alicia Mckay: Right.
Trina Sunday: So when people say no, I don’t understand how my contributions fit and make a difference. All right, thanks for that feedback. exit stage left. there’s wonderful opportunities to really make a difference and shift things from a leadership perspective.
Alicia Mckay: That is such a what’s your job? Thing to me, because I’m like, as a leader, your number one job is to know where the direction is and to make it easy for other people to connect with that. Like, that’s your first job. And so I get all, like, wound up. But, like, Crown Law’s a good example. So government Legal services in New Zealand. Yeah, wound up. I’m doing their org strategy with them and to their credit, as part of their process, which was awesome, by the way, they had me go and run some workshops with the kind of, like, middle tier to be like, what do you think about this? this is where we look like we’re going, are you going to be able to do that? What would that mean for you and your job? Like, what would be hard about that? What would we have to change? And it’s great chat because they’re like, okay, well, you can talk about thought leadership, but currently we have a, billing utilisation rate. That would have to change. We’d have to change the way we fund things or our people can’t do this. And we’re like, yeah, so this is all system stuff, right? Yeah, But I have all these internal functions come in and they’re like, alicia, it’s not like we’re not lawyers. So if you’re going to talk about, creating social good and, providing thought leadership for the legal community, we can’t do that because we are it in libraries. And at this point I pretty much like, throw my white book marker on the ground and I’m like, are you fucking kidding me? I’m like, these people want to be thought leaders. And out there telling the lawyers how to do their job, how the fuck are they going to do that if they can’t access previous case files in a logical way and they haven’t got support to prepare and disseminate materials? And it doesn’t let them do it. Are you kidding me? the most important part. And they’re like, oh, yeah. And I’m thinking, shouldn’t be me telling you this. It should be leaders who are going, you guys are so critical and your pace to how this place works, and I want to make it easy for you to be great. So tell me what’s making it hard. And the stupid thing about that is, especially when I go in and run the and Cranallo, they’re awesome, actually. They’re like teachers pet students out of some of the places I’ve worked with. But people want me to run them so they feel comfortable expressing feedback that isn’t career limiting. But every time I go and run them, and to be fair, people are a bit more like, brash with me and honest with me, and they’re like, oh, stupid. And I’m like, yeah, tell me about.
Trina Sunday: Tell me more.
Alicia Mckay: They’ve told everybody this more than once. They’ve filled in an engagement survey where they’ve gone, we can’t even share a cost code. What do you mean? Collaboration? Where they’ve said our job description or our salary bands make it impossible for us to do what you want us to do. Where we’ve said we can’t have the agile workforce you’ve put on the poster because our current recruitment procedure is so lengthy and needs so many approvals that I can’t act fast enough to get good talent and I can’t offer them five grand more because it’s out of my delegations. Like, they have told you this.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, but you didn’t listen. yeah, and I think it’s frustrating as an external person where you can see from the internal support functions perspective whether, like, I’ve said this 50 million times and then you Come in as the external person. You say the exact same thing and an exec team listens to you.
Alicia Mckay: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And it’s like. And so I’m really careful around saying this is what your team have been telling you. This is what, like now’s the time to listen. But you just. You watch physically support function and we need to stop saying that. But these kind of.
Alicia Mckay: What about like enablement wizards or like the people that actually make it possible for you to be fucking awesome. Like, what would you like to use it instead?
Trina Sunday: If anyone’s got some suggestions for that, we’d love to hear it. But I think that it is about enablement, right. And I think it’s the same for that leadership piece where it’s not about leadership development programmes and all this kind of crap. A lot of the time of forcing people into a room where 80% of people in the room don’t feel like they need to be there because it’s come from a leadership competency framework that’s been built and then we’re going to force everyone through this funnel. But it’s that manager enablement bit as well, where it’s then like. Because I do think to your point around, this is leadership number one job, right? I probably work with a lot of leaders that would not acknowledge that that’s the number one part of their job.
Alicia Mckay: Because probably no one’s told them and supported them in that. That that is the job. No one’s gone, like when they got the last promotion, so they were like the best accountant in town and then they were the team leader of the accountants and then they were the finance manager and now they’re the cfo. And no one at any point along that journey has stopped and said, hey, you don’t even know that much accounting now. Your job now is actually about enabling the future of your business through the people you lead. So can you just put 30% of your time there? No one has said that, so how could they possibly know?
Trina Sunday: Cause it’s like, ah, we onboard people when they come in as a grad and then we don’t give them any transition support when they move upwards and anything in between. So it’s like we, we leave people to fend for themselves and then miss all of that alignment, right? Cause it is about alignment.
Alicia Mckay: Like it’s all about alignment. It isn’t straight up and down. So I like that you used the word enable before. Cause the model that we use in our business and that we’re starting to try and use more Broadly with clients, it’s kind of this like two by two matrix. Right. And so we’re like, okay, what are the two kind of key variables that change what people do in our business? And so in ours we’ve got you either make things up or you make things happen as the vertical axis and you’re either backstage or on stage as our horizontal axis. So what we end up with is if you’re me, you are on stage and you make things up. And so, my job is to enlighten, it’s to sense, make and provide everyone else in my team something they can work with. Intellectual property, getting on stage, keynote speaking, bringing in clients. My job is to do the enlightened stuff and that’s my home. And I’ve got lots of different connections to different parts of the business, but that’s my home. Now if you’re on stage but your job is to make things happen, then you’re the empower matrix, Empower quadrant. And so that’s our facilitators and delivery staff and coaches who use what I made up and actually use that to empower people to change their lives.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: Move along one quadrant and you’ve got backstage and make things happen. And that’s our enabling quadrant. And so that operations and our HR and our, all this kind of backing stuff, which if that doesn’t happen, nothing else works. And then the top quadrant is our elevate quadrant, which is where you make things up and you’re backstage. So it’s marketing, sales, production, video design, that kind of stuff. What we do when we have these conversations as we go. Right. So there’s no hierarchy here. What there is, is a web. There is a web of mutual reliance and accountability and there are strings that run through each of these quadrants that connect us. And you rely on every part of this business. So nobody’s better than anyone, including me, right?
Trina Sunday: Yep.
Alicia Mckay: You rely on people for different things and you’re accountable to them for different things. But if you don’t stay in your zone enough, the whole system falls over.
Trina Sunday: Yep.
Alicia Mckay: And so that zone chat, that’s just going from the very beginning. We’re not giving you a role title that sits in a bloody structure which is designed for silo. We’re going, what’s your piece of the puzzle? And how are you so important in making it all work? And it’s a completely different chat from, oh, you’re over there and you report to so and so, and that feeds up through there in your KPIs about something that has nothing to do with our big objective. Right.
Trina Sunday: I think it’s part of the benefit. Cause it’s a phenomenal model.
Alicia Mckay: Right.
Trina Sunday: Because that’s just, it’s all built around interconnectedness.
Alicia Mckay:We start there, we start at.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, yeah. And I think that that’s the challenge with traditional large scale organisations that we build around hierarchy. We’ve got, we built in systemically power.
Alicia Mckay: Structures, we built silos literally.
Trina Sunday: And we draw them, we draw them. And because it’s the same with. I was talking or looking at some content around, talking with a couple of people around circular leadership. So they’re big organisations and they’ve moved to circle leadership where it’s like, the team’s enabled to make the decisions, do things. And I love that the parallel was drawn of, like, if your team’s not making decisions though, that as a leader that you don’t agree with and you don’t let those through, then you haven’t truly empowered your team. If you’re building these kind of fake innovative team management structures but then you’re wanting to sign off on everything or everything that’s ever happened you’ve approved. Well, yeah, it’s approval and you’ve still built decision making hierarchy. And even though you’re trying to build a different way of looking at it, when you talk about alignment and we talk about everything needing to be connected and we talk about not having best practise in a vacuhow do you navigate having. So let’s say HR are trying to drive some really phenomenal cool stuff, right? They are on board. They’ve made the transition from HR strategy to people strategy, which, in my world, like there’s quite a difference, and they’re trying to do amazing things but the other things that they need to connect to or the other areas they need to connect to are, not thinking the same, not aligned, not connected. How do you cut through?
Alicia Mckay: Well, if they’ve managed to develop a people strategy without talking to the other people that work there, then they’re doing it wrong would be the first thing I would say.
Trina Sunday: They probably talk to them, but they don’t have. I hate the term buy in, but the reality is people don’t believe, they don’t believe in what you’re doing and they can’t.
Alicia Mckay: Right. And so they actually can’t. And there’s a conversation that needs to be had, I think within teams, whether it’s within HR or within it or within policy that goes, you are, holding onto a vision of the future that nobody else knows about that yet. And you hold it in your hands because everyone is walking around at work banging into others, frustrated that no one else can see how important the thing they know the most about is, while maintaining a simultaneous ignorance about everybody else’s piece of the puzzle. And so I, learned a new word two days ago. A workshop participant gave it to me and I love it. And it’s sonder S O N D E R. and it’s the realisation that everybody else’s inner lives are just as vivid and complex as your own. And I reckon we need more of that at work, because what happens is your HR people are going, oh, my God, these backwards idiots. Why can’t they see how important it is to do leadership development? And the engineers are going, fucking hr. If we don’t maintain this asset by the end of the month, we are at $2 billion. I can’t even talk to them, right? So it’s this chat. And so the most. This is going to sound really dumb, but the most useful exercise I’ve done with teams who feel like they’re trying to drag other people along and they can’t. There are two things I do, actually. One of them is to get a bunch of representatives in a room, whether it’s like an ELT or whatever, and I have to draw a tree. Now, this sounds really dumb and I did this in ISO at one point. And while they were drawing their tree, I, like, wandered through to grab a coffee in the kitchen and my partner Cam was in the kitchen and he’s like, aren’t you supposed to be in a workshop? And I was like, they’re drawing a tree, so I thought I’d make a coffee. And he’s like, are they paying you for this? I’m like, yeah, mate. But I got this idea from Mark Trulsen, who does amazing work in the OD space. He’s an absolute machine. Essentially, you draw a tree and you’re like, all right, I’ve got the base of my tree, right? And the base of my tree is what’s the overarching goal or strategy of the place we work? Right? And so if you’re an FMCG company, fcmg, sorry, it, might be, like, Feed Australians. And so you’re like, okay, it’s to Feed Australians. Australian food, right? That’s our big picture. Cool. But then off our kind of main, big old trunk, you’ve got these, like, arterial branches, big fat ones. And you’re like, okay, this is distribution and manufacturing. This is online and E commerce. This is product design and development. You’ve got these kind of big ones and each of these big branches has their own line.
Trina Sunday: Right.
Alicia Mckay: Which is like, okay. We’re all connected to the idea of feeding Australians Australian food.
Trina Sunday: Yep.
Alicia Mckay: But our way of doing that is to make it easy for people to buy it.
Trina Sunday: Right.
Alicia Mckay: Or to get it into their house quickly after they order it, or whatever these big pieces are. yep. You got these wee branches that come off the fat ones. That’s like. And my team is the brand team. And while it might be easy for the brand team to say they feed Australians, actually we do, because we reach Australians so that they connect with us so that we can feed them. Cool.
Alicia Mckay: And then this can go on for a while. We get like a wee twig and you’re like, and this is my purpose. Which is all about, like, from bricks to clicks and there’s a nest on the end, and that’s. You can kind of do whatever you like. What’s fun about this exercise is that, like, I can’t draw trees for shit. And, yeah, other people become, like, artistic people. They’re like, actually, I’ve drawn. You’ll see, I’ve drawn roots. And the roots signify the foundation and there’s really an ecosystem, and they go ham HM with it and it’s really cool. But the point of the exercise is that after everyone’s done their trees and they come together and share them and everyone has a good giggle about how shit we are drawing trees, you start to get this kind of, ah, yeah, yeah, right. And this is how it all fits together. And I never really understood what these bloody agile coaches were, but now that I see it on the tree. And so you create this, like, collective tree, people are like, that’s pretty cool. And so it’s actually, are we. And I don’t care if you draw a tree or a web or what you do, but the point is, have you provided a way for people to understand how everything else works rather than staying in their own box because they can’t know on purpose? And doing a thing where every team does a presentation at a stand up and talks about what’s been going on for them? Rehearsal. That’s not fun. Like, that’s not direct. It’s not a conversation, that’s a lecture. It needs to be in conversation. So that’s one thing I do. The second thing I do that is absolutely amazing is I Do role plays for people. Because what’s really hard to do is to change your opinion without looking dumb. It’s just hard. We just. We don’t make it easy. And so instead you just do a fun thing where you’re like, okay, you’re the customer service person today, and you’re a customer today, and you’re the boss today and you’re the chairman. Tell me what’s going on for you. And everyone has a laugh. Again, this is a consistent feature. And they’re like, actually, as a customer, I hate this because I can’t click on the thing I need and blah, blah, blah. And they’re like, hmm, M. And just spending that, 15 minutes pretending to be someone else was enough. They needed to snap them out of their own silo. Because actually, the way we work, as you’ve said, with the structure, the way we work encourages us to be blind to the struggles of others. And you’re not going to make any progress if you’re sitting in your HR bloody kingdom talking about how dumb everyone else is for not getting on board. Like, go and be them M for a bit.
Trina Sunday: No one would do that. I’m sure. This is where the opportunity is that I get so excited about, though, like, working in the HR space or the people culture space. I don’t care what you call it in terms of how you.
Alicia Mckay: Oh, you’re not allowed to say it, Sharon. You’re more. Right. It’s like not a thing I do.
Trina Sunday: In the sense of purposefully, in terms of saying, reimagine hr. Because I want us to reimagine where it is. Right. And it starts a conversation around people going, you can’t say hr. We’re not resources. Do you call me if you say I’m your greatest asset, then I want to punch you in the face. But true. Right. Like, because it is a resource and it’s been a numbers thing and there’s a legacy attached to language. So it’s not to be dismissive of it, but it’s fundamentally changing what you do that’s important, not the labels.
Alicia Mckay: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And so the approach in terms of if you’re moving to that people and culture space and you’re talking to that space. Where I get excited is we do work across every single area of a business.
Alicia Mckay: Right. And you’ve got visibility.
Trina Sunday: So. So phenomenal. And I mean, uh. And maybe it just depends how you built. And I’m built this way. And I get stupidly excited about it. But it’s like. Because I love Learning new stuff. I love going and seeing what turbine machines being built over here and how cool that is, that that fits together. And, be like, God, Bob, you’ve worked here for 30 years. What the hell? Talk me through it. What’s kept you hanging in, and you chat about retirement because he’s just looking for his super. But there’s always something else, right? And that’s where the storytelling is. And I think we’ve got lost a bit in our development of strategy, in our drive for culture change, in how we relate to leaders, in all of.
Alicia Mckay: It, 100%, the relationship bit.
Trina Sunday: Right?
Alicia Mckay: Now, what you got, right, about Jet with your wind engineer is that you didn’t say, here’s why it’s great to be a wind Engineer. Here’s a PowerPoint slide with six bullet points on it to enable you to see your piece of the puzzle. You said, this is cool. How did you do it? I almost feel like this is so simple, I shouldn’t have to explain it, but let me do this right. Here’s Change Engagement 101. If you want to get people on a journey with you and you’ve got a new idea and you’re like, actually, I do think this contributes. And I think people will love it when they like in it, but they don’t get it yet. If that’s you, you’ve got one of them. Listen up. Here’s how you do it. Step one. When you send out your meeting invite for your launch or your discussion, do not, under any circumstances, name it the Agile Continuous Improvement People and Cultural Revitalization Initiative Workshop. Do not do that. All right? You have to name it something like cool stuff to make your life easier. Free Tim Tams, right? That’s what you have to name it. It’s got to be in someone else’s language and immediately say, what’s in it for them right now, if you’re lucky, and half the people that clicked yes turn up when they walk in, you do not put your slides up and go, this is going to be good for you. I’m going to tell you why. Now you can read them, but I’m also going to say them with my mouth. So listen, you do not do that instead of tell. And this is like, this is so easy. Here’s what you do. You ask, you say, what’s making it hard for you guys to be awesome at the moment?
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: And then, get this, they’ll tell you. And then you go, yeah, yeah, right? So you want to make the boat go a Bit faster. And you want to be able to pick your own training and development instead of having it in the thing. Is that right? And they go, yeah. And you’re like, why would that be good? Hear this. So, saying it back, ask another question. Why would that be good? And they say to you, well, then I could feel like I really own the direction of my role. I just feel like it’s more mine and people would actually listen to me. And you’re like, yeah, yeah. So if you had more say in how things work and you could see where career was going, you’d enjoy your job better and you like it. And they’re like, yeah. And you’re like, cool. Guess what? We’re going to do that for you. Do you want to see the strategy? And then they go, yeah. And then you chat about it. And then get this. Once you’ve chatted about it, which again is a conversation, not a lecture, you then go, how do you see this working for you? What do you need from us to make it happen? Question, question, question. And then they tell you, and then you give it to them.
Trina Sunday: That’s really easy.
Alicia Mckay: And all you need is Tim Tams. You don’t even need a projector.
Trina Sunday: Save on AV and use your AV budget on consumables.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: And then just like, make it engaging and ask people questions instead of giving them a fucking lecture. And they’ll be on board so fast because you’ve connected to the actual lives, you’ve given them space to think about how it works for them and then you’ve made it easy for them. Yeah, you didn’t even have to know anything. what’s cool about that. You don’t have to know about the strategy, you just have to ask good questions.
Trina Sunday: But a lot of the time, don’t you find, though, that you do know what those answers are? Because, like, a lot of the time people are tuned in and the strategy is not so off the mark. And that’s why you can then say, well, this is why we’re thinking, I think we’ve got you covered here because, you know. But the problem is m being able to show that you didn’t develop it right. It’s that it’s come from your people, it’s come from, that place because that’s where ownership comes from.
Alicia Mckay: And of course, accuracy is a very poor goal. Like, you can either have accuracy or you can have alignment. And I’ll tell you which one gets results in a business and it’s not accuracy. I don’t care if you know the right answer. being right doesn’t get things done. It’s a very lonely space to live. Being right all the time. So instead, if you focused on delivering things that people wanted, you get there. But the thing I always try to explain to people about strategy is I’m like, what you don’t want as a strategy? Like, if you give me 45 minutes on an Internet connection and maybe a Canva account, I can give you a strategy that you will be genuinely blown away by. You’ll be like, how does she know? You’ll read the one page and you’ll be like, we are the innovative leaders at the front of agriculture and we value telling the truth and respecting our clients. Wow. How did she know?
Trina Sunday: Perfect.
Alicia Mckay: She even knows we. Right. That’s easy, that bit. Anyone can do that.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, not.
Alicia Mckay: Not anyone. I’m underselling it. But anyway, that’s not the thing. You know what the answers are. you know what pisses them off and you know how to fix it. But that doesn’t help you. What helps you is the connection to people. And taking them on a journey actually means having them sell themselves on it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. Because that’s what builds, the how comes to life. Right. And so I think that that’s absolutely at the core of it. And I know. I’m just thinking of this client having a tough time right now. It is absolutely built to drive people change in the way that you describe. Yeah. But they’re in an organisation where that approach just doesn’t fly. So they’re not empowered to walk into a room and to be like, talk to me about how we can make your life easier so you can smash me out of the park. Right.
Alicia Mckay: Like, what is HR if not that? Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And I think this is the challenge for a lot of my clients is that. And this is why the culture is that. I call it the handbrake for effectiveness. Right. Stops anything from working. That’s cool. And it’s kind of trying to work with them around, how you kind of work through that. And it means that sometimes you’ve got additional stuff to do before you get to step into that room and have the conversation that you need to have.
Alicia Mckay: Here’s a grenade, though. What if you just did it?
Trina Sunday: Yes. So another client did that. They’re in a new job now.
Alicia Mckay: The new job bid it.
Trina Sunday: Yes. And so this is the thing. Right. A lot of the time we talk about the fact that our organization’s culture’s avoidant or it’s fear based or it’s a risk averse. Right. We have to step into our own power as change makers around how far we’re prepared to go. Now, there’s an element of risk you need to look at for that. I’m a sole income earner, I’m a single mom or I’m a, I don’t have the capacity to absorb any loss of salary, blah, blah, blah. There’s lots of real life stuff that you have to factor in. So I’m not being dismissive of that. But it’s like if at your core, you want to work in a different way, make a difference, those are opportunities for you to get real time feedback that that place is never going to be the right place for you to thrive.
Trina Sunday: And it’s that conversation around survive, thrive. I don’t want to survive.
Alicia Mckay: Imagine that. Okay, worst case scenario, you lose your job. So you go home and you’re in alignment with your values, but you, are worried about being broke. And so first of all, you’re in a buyer’s market with your skill set. So you get out there, sales market anyway, employees market.
Trina Sunday: So you get out there, play market. Yep.
Alicia Mckay: You’ve got a bunch of people that want to give you a job. And at the interview they go, oh, could you tell me what happened at your last place of employment? And you say, I was passionate about connecting people to the strategy that instead of following the bureaucratic process, I went and connected with the staff and fed that back to leadership. But they didn’t like it, so we weren’t a good fit. I was happy to leave. And so the reason you left was because you cared about doing something in an awesome way. Who doesn’t want to say that in a job interview? How much better is that actually as a story, than I was really successful in my last role. You go, I cared so much and I wasn’t prepared to have my values compromised and I made shit happen, you know what? I lost my job over it. Do you want me to work for you? And they will be like, yes, we do.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And if they say no and reject you, and this is what I say to my coaching clients, it’s like it’s a gift. It is a gift for people to turn you away at an interview because your approach doesn’t fit them. It’s like, if it’s not in alignment to how you want to work.
Alicia Mckay: Yeah. How good to learn that so early.
Trina Sunday: Learn it before you go in because it’s hard when you’re in and then you trying to find new information to figure out is it me? And this is where it’s about when, I bring Woo Woo stuff into sides of my business and people like, what’s Woo Woo like? It’s like. Because it’s intuition stuff, right? You’ve got to tap into the vibe. It’s the vibe of it, it’s the castle. It’s, it is about trying to trust that. And I think if you lose it, any, attempt, especially in the people strategy space isn’t going to stick. And what I believe you.
Alicia Mckay: Let’s be clear on Vibes Trainer, because if you want the science for Vibes, Vibes are, that your body has stored collective memory of cues and micro cues in situations that enable you to make good judgments around character and choices. And sometimes the logic of your brain, of the professional Persona you’ve created, make it difficult for you to have that as a thought. Because your brain’s one part where you’ve got a whole neuron system that’s got a memory in it, but your gut’s another. So your gut’s got a whole lot of stuff that’s stored from experiences you’ve had. It’s not woo woo shit. It’s just information that you access on a different level that you find hard to do while you’re being polite in a job interview.
Trina Sunday: I can’t wait to share with you the next Woo Woo event that I have run through the platform. But it is because it’s about energy as well, right? It’s energy out, energy in. And it’s kind of like. So when you’re having those conversations, like, you change 101 example and there’s a free flow of energy. When you’re going in and you’re presenting something, you’ve straightaway got a barrier around the fact that you’re sucking the energy out of the room for a start, because it’s boring. But there’s not engagement. And where there’s no engagement, there’s no energy. Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: and honestly, you want to talk about alignment. If you are doing a job where the purpose of your job is to support other people to thrive and m. You are not thriving or supported to thrive, there’s no way you can help other people do that because you’re already out of alignment, it’s not your fault, but it’s just, it doesn’t work. And people know. They just know in the same way that the wellbeing email didn’t land because the leader had no wellbeing and the training company who cut their staff’s learning and development budget didn’t keep good people. You’ve got that at a personal level too, where if you’re not thriving, there’s no way you can do that as an HR professional to help other people do it. So either figure out what your delegations actually are, which are probably higher than you think. Take a punt, have a stab and have a go, see what happens. 60% of the time, that’s actually going to work out great. 40% of the time it’s not. Which is brilliant because that’s a piece of information about whether this place is for you or not. And then you move on.
Trina Sunday: Great. I’ve never seen a delegation that’s written that says that you specifically can’t have a conversation with someone. It’s generally always built in governance, it’s built in compliance, it’s built in governance, it’s built in ass covering. Delegations aren’t, built for relationship building and they’re certainly not built for nurturing them. They’re certainly not built for maintaining them, fostering them.
Alicia Mckay: This is some mic drop shit right here. When people are, I can’t run that workshop. And you’re like, do your delegations expressly forbid conversation? Because I don’t think they do. Mic drop. That is so good. I’m going to take it somewhere else. It’s going to come up in the workshop and I’m going to be like, this Australian HR expert that I know, Trina Sunday, she once said, I’ve never seen a delegation, except once, that said you can’t have a conversation. And they’ll be like, whoa, it’ll be great.
Trina Sunday: And when I say that one time and just touch, in some work with a client yesterday, they showed me a relationship matrix. Yeah, it’s a bit scary, like your whole body starts to contract when you even start a little bit.
Alicia Mckay: But, I’ve got an open mind. Tell me how.
Trina Sunday: no, you don’t want to open your mind, you just want to shut this shit down. But it’s like, it’s hierarchy across the top, essentially, external stakeholders down the left. And it’s basically a green or red lighter, whether you can talk to them or not. Not joking.
Alicia Mckay: Okay, don’t tell me who this company is, but, what I want you to do after this, just for fun, is to go on the website and the bit where it says, drop down our values and our mission, just click on that and see what it says. And I’m assuming It’s going to say things like, we care about people here, we collaborate or we’re open or we listen. It’ll say something like that.
Trina Sunday: So I’m inherently aware of what their values are, given some of the work I’ve done with them. And yeah, but it’s where there’s the mismatch, right? It’s the mixed messaging, it’s the saying that you want the organisation to roll a certain way and then the way you systematically build out any innovation, connection or agility just is what thwarts the kind of people being able to step into that space.
Alicia Mckay: So, honestly, and I reckon I’m just thinking about this for hr, because one of the most common pieces of advice that I give a leadership team is like, how do we make strategic process? I’m, like, just have a. We look in the mirror first and make sure that before you go out and tell your community or your customers or your staff that they have to behave a certain way, you just need to cheque that you’re living and breathing that yourself, otherwise it’s not going to work.
Trina Sunday: So.
Alicia Mckay: And usually we’re not, because we’re all hypocrites. We don’t mean to be, but we just are. So you have to fix that up a bit before you go out for hr. when you’re putting together your people strategy or your L and D strategy or your OD plan and you are frustrated by being unable to take people with you with a new way of thinking about how they work with people, I just want you to cheque really quickly. When you’ve got your pillars or your principles or what you’ve said and cheque, you’re doing that first because if you’re not doing that, you cannot go tell someone else to do it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely kind of a sense cheque that needs to happen and hasn’t been happening and it’s thwarting the strategy space in terms of being able to shift some of that. Because I think, because there is this busyness and heads down and churning out work and all that kind of stuff, that’s not where strategy blossoms. It’s not where creative thing, it’s not where inspiration lives.
Alicia Mckay: Bad conditions, like if, strategies like bacteria, then it needs warmth to grow. No, is this not a good one? I’m going to shut this down.
Trina Sunday: No, because you got to water your tree, I guess.
Alicia Mckay: Oh, okay. Yeah, we can go back to the tree.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, we can fertilise it down, but.
Alicia Mckay: It needs to be out in the Sunlight, you can’t work with what you can’t see. So if you hide all these efforts away and you’re like, do you know? And actually let me take this extended metaphor. If you’re like, I’m going to do my strategy but I’m not ready to let anyone see it yet, wait till I finish making it and then you can have a look, you’re doing it wrong. It needs sunlight in order to be able to grow and so. And to be able to find out otherwise it’s wrong that you don’t know about yet. Like today’s chat, we were like, okay, HR strategy, what a yarn. that all got really off topic and uncomfortable and lots of fun. Here’s what you’d take from it. You have to have a direction that you care about enough to change for, right? You’ve got to have a why that people actually care about in order to even think about getting one on anyone on board with strategy and change, you’ve got to know which path you’re taking. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the right path. It’s like if you want to lose weight and you’re like, should I do keto or Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers or go to. It doesn’t matter. What matters is you pick a path and stick to it. Like you’ll get the result. But just know where you’re going. And before you try and figure out anything transformational or with a multi column table cheque, if you are lining up to deliver on that or if you’re making it hard, right, just cheque whether you’re making it easy to get there or hard and turn the mirror on yourself first. Before you try and come up with a new employee wellbeing programme, just go, if we’ve said health first, are we living that? And are we, making it easy? Are we making that hard?
Trina Sunday: Well, that’s the execution, right? Like a strategy is only as good as the execution. So if there isn’t that lens put on it really early, then you’re going out and then you’re building a rod for your own bat that you can’t deliver on.
Alicia Mckay: Well, strategy is not alive until it oxidises with the real world. Yeah, it’s just a piece of paper. And when you take your first step towards something, you know when you’re like, you’re pregnant for the first time and you’re like, okay, this is in theory like a child living inside me. But then you like buy its first outfit and you’re like, holy shit, there’s going to be a person in this. This is amazing. Or you’re like, I’m going to grow my business, blah, blah, blah. But then for us, Alban’s been, we’re hiring new facilitators and we’ve just started in the last week booking new jobs into the calendar of a person who has not yet hired. And so we’re like, okay, this is real, like we talked about this, but this person has a calendar and they’ve got work to do in June. So holy shit, we better make it real. Right. It doesn’t need to be a big unveiling. Just take the first step toward making it real and then you can believe it, you can grab it, you can touch it, but you’ve got to let it oxidise.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And I think that’s where the change 101 stuff fits in.
Alicia Mckay: Right.
Trina Sunday: Like I think the days and especially in the people strategy space. Especially. But I think it’s consistent everywhere. It’s that you need this grounds well. You need to change movement that comes from where it matters the most and that’s where the bulky people is. Not M. If nobody cares, are ah.
Alicia Mckay: You sure it’s right? If you can’t convince anyone, it’s probably wrong, mate.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. But this is where I think there’s a tension around how we miss. We misunderstand what we have to put into a strategy because we think that’s what needs to be in the strategy for it. Approved.
Alicia Mckay: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And I feel like we get lost in that a little bit. So I think if the, strategy is what we care about, how we’re going to do it and how we’re going to make cool things happen, it’s outside of the strategy document where the conversations happen around, if we’ve got engagement, there’s five times the productivity that’s going to come from this space. This might translate to this profit or. But it’s audience driven. Right.
Alicia Mckay: Oh, I just realised I haven’t made a really important point because I always forget that it’s a thing people don’t know. Strategy’s not an output, it’s a process.
Trina Sunday: Yes.
Alicia Mckay: Sorry. I just wanted to make that real clear in case anyone’s like, oh, strategy, you mean the thing I made no strategies on output. It’s not a deliverable, it’s not collateral, it’s a conversation.
Trina Sunday: And that’s where really a lot of HR strategy, for example, is a HR plan because, like, that’s what it is in reality. Like it’s a document. The Output is actually the plan. It’s reviewed once a year. and it’s measured against some metrics. That’s not strategy.
Alicia Mckay: That is a creation, but it’s not a conversation. And that’s what strategy is.
Trina Sunday: And I think that it’s trying to find where it sits in the middle. Right. It’s trying to look at how you can set the right conditions for having really great conversations that are going to inform strategy, adopt strategy and smash strategy. And I think that it’s about really knowing as well. From my perspective, don’t focus on the change resistors, all those people that hate on you or that. Like find all the people that believe are believing in the majority of the storytelling because that’s where the change’s support’s gonna come from.
Alicia Mckay: I’ve got a bit of a bias on this one because I get to do this because I’m a self employed person and so I don’t have to eat lunch with anyone on a regular basis. But like our goal, my goal is always to have like raving fans and like very cynical detractors. And I’m not too panicked about the bit in the middle. Like if you start off aiming for mass agreement, like what a mediocre goal, you’re just basically aiming to just be nothing. Like, wouldn’t you rather have like eight raving fans in your business? Holy shit, I can’t wait to tell my teams about this. And everyone else is cynical. Then people just be like, oh, okay, maybe, yeah, yeah.
Trina Sunday: And I think that that’s absolutely kind of where it sits. Right. Question I had come through was around how do you make your strategy future proof you can’t. Yeah. And I think because of context was around the scale of change that’s facing.
Alicia Mckay: So you know how I said there’s the there’s the why and the how and the what.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: Basically what happens is the why doesn’t change very often. Like the why only changes. You usually just have to find it changes like every 10 or 20 years. So strategy three, bit why here and what why really long term, big visionary goal, shouldn’t be able to achieve it. Very aspirational. Like you should read it and go, how the fuck are we going to do that? Right. This bit don’t change this bit. You might have to reconnect to what it is, but you shouldn’t change it. The how that sounds like approach, priorities, principles, that sort of stuff. This one usually changes every one to three years or if you’ve got a significant external shock. So you could review this One as part of a regular basis. Right. Or, if something really massive happens, that’s worth reconsidering. So we had a really clear. How about how we were delivering workshops until Covid hit and then we switched it to virtual first because it was a big external shock.
Trina Sunday: Right.
Alicia Mckay: And that lots of people and your. What is Budgets, plans, projects, money you spend, people you hire, stuff you do. So aspirational, intentional, operational. You want to change every bloody day. And so if your strategy is a budget or an action plan, it should change as soon as you get into work.
Trina Sunday: Right.
Alicia Mckay: Because then you’re like, oh, it’s not going to cost that. Oh, it’s going to take twice as long. Oh, that person left. That’s not a strategic issue, it’s an operational issue. And that doesn’t matter. That should change every day. That’s how it works. Otherwise you’re not responding. But the habit about future proofing, just be so fucking clear on where you want to go on White Matters and make it so big you can’t even imagine achieving it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. Huh? Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: I mean, change this bit now and again. Cause you just have to change tech sometimes it doesn’t change what you care about or what your values are.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Alicia Mckay: And you need to.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And I think that’s a massive takeaway. Right. Like I think it is about shifting mindset away from strategy. Being this thing we create and then we’ve done it. It is this daily kind of lived and breathed and it becomes a part of the employee experience. It becomes part of how we show up in terms of what we do and how we have to connect with all parts of the organisation if we want to smash it. Thank you, Alicia, for joining us. Take care. Thanks everyone and we’ll see you next time.
Trina Sunday: Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode as we look.
Trina Sunday: To reimagine how we show up for.
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