Are You the Leader You Think You Are? with David Neal

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

How good is micromanagement? I’m gonna get absolutely berated. I’ll probably get kicked off the platform again. The people go, no, micromanagement is annoying. It betrays trust. It does all these things. And you go, yeah, okay. Have you ever joined a new organisation or gone into a new role and they didn’t give you any training, anything at all. And what you wanted was someone to literally sit over your shoulder and show you click by click, step by step, but you know, from go to woe, authoritarian leadership.

People go, there’s no place for authoritarian leadership. Maybe. Well, I don’t know about you, but I would consider a court judge as a community leader. Before we get started, the team here at the Coast and Commerce podcast want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where this podcast is created, the Kabi Kabi and Jinibara people. We honour their rich culture of storytelling as we share the inspiring stories of business leaders across the Sunshine Coast. We pay our respects to their elders past,present and emerging. Let’s get on with the show.

G’day and welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. This is the show where we bring inspiring business leaders from the Sunshine Coast to help you in business, whatever you do here on the Sunshine Coast. And today, one of those inspiring leaders that we’ve got here is Dave Neal from Eighth Mile Consulting. Dave, thanks for joining me on the show today.

So you’ve got a number of awards kind of from Sunshine Coast Business Awards with The Eighth Mile Consulting to being recognised as LinkedIn Top Voice and all those various things. So you’ve got a lot of value hopefully to add our listeners here today. But before we get into that value, I’d love to hear a bit about your story. Cause it’s a really interesting backstory that got you into business today. tell me who are you, what do you do? What’s your backstory? Cheers Ben, appreciate that. Look, we’re kind of a weird hybrid over at The Eighth Mile. We’re kind of like this mixture morph between military and commercial contexts. And my background, I was born and raised in Canberra. I went through a very heavy sporting background. I used to do karate at the international level for a number of years. Got a bit of a itch in terms of trying to push myself a little bit more and then ended up going into the military to go through the officer training school, which is through the leadership pathway, and then would ultimately end up in the infantry corps, which is foot soldiering and leading foot soldier operations and the like.

Time would progress, I would bump into Jonathan Clark, who’s actually one of the co-founders of The Eighth Mile Consulting, and we hated each other’s guts when we first met. In fact, we ended up behind a very notorious pub in the back of…

Canberra called Shooters, which I don’t think exists this day. And we sorted out our differences and became best mates ever since. And with that considered, we went on through an interesting career bouncing around doing all sorts of weird and wacky roles within the military, number of overseas operations and things of the like. Ultimately, Jono and I would end up in our final year in a posting together, running operations around the world in a checkpoint, you know.

sorry, our communication point, doing secret missions around the space, which I can’t talk in too much detail. But ultimately, we would get a tap on the shoulder by the same doctor on the same day saying, yeah, your career’s done, your body’s cactus, too many broken things, thanks for your service. And so over the next six to eight months, we would start transitioning out of the military.

we would jump out of that and go into the non -for -profit aged care sector, which is not the most logical jump from running combat operations on a Friday to suddenly being in the aged care non -for -profit sector. And we were rolling out very large scale software projects known as ERP, Enterprise Resource Planner projects, very, very sophisticated, highly complex projects. And going through that transition, a number of the assumptions and I guess cultural

ethos predications that we had had from being from the military and then coming over into the civilian context were absolutely shattered. And I would say that we went into a highly toxic environment. We couldn’t quite understand why people were doing what they were doing. And it prompted us to start researching why people do what they do when they know what they know.

And that was the precursor for a lot of additional training on top of the military side of things. We would leave that job and then we launched The Eighth Mile. And I guess the idea behind that concept was to actually be part of the solution, as opposed to us where we were drinking the victim Kool-Aid at that point and down whiskeys at a rate that we probably shouldn’t have been trying to dampen the effects of what it was like to be in this toxic environment.

We were like, well, we can do one or two things here. We can keep whinging about it. We can actually try and solve the problem for other people. And we started business in doing that. And that’s where Eighth Mile was founded and born. And ever since then, it’s morphed away from like strategy and projects. And now we’re kind of exclusively playing in this leadership culture and personal development space. And that kind of brings us to where we are now. And, you know, the company’s kind of found its stride now and is continuing to grow.

So when you step out of the military and I guess you hadn’t had much experience in the workforce prior to the military, I’m assuming. Just at a junior level, I had a number of weird and wacky jobs. used to work in a liquor and smoke store when I was 14 and then I was working as a dog handler. I was a check, what are they? No, not checkout chick. What’s the other slang? Register rooster for a while.

I’ve had a bit of a variation in jobs and roles. But when we’re talking about leadership in the corporate context, we were definitely coming with that bias from the military. And one thing I’d say about that too is a lot of people romanticise military leadership. I think that’s… I don’t think that’s the most resourceful way to look at it because it’s different. It’s designed to be different and all the variables are different.

And moreover, I don’t actually think the leadership in the military was anything unique in and of itself. And I don’t like the fact that people retrospectively kind of glorify military leadership, although there are some incredible instances of some of the best leaders have ever worked for. I won’t take that away from any of those individuals. But it’s not better or worse than corporate leadership. It’s different. And if you consider the amount of, you know,

high performing leaders that have evolved in an environment where they might not have been resourced or trained, I think that’s incredible. The fact that some of these people are starting their own business and have never had leadership training and they still pull that stun off. It’s one thing compared to the opposite, which is in the military where you have a million dollars of just exclusive military leadership training invested in you. I actually think the inverse is actually quite more impressive.

one man’s opinion. So I kind of like to just ground that whole military leadership thing. There’s a lot of great instances and lot of learnings, but it was not better or worse. Yeah, it’s interesting when you think about taking that structure and even that leadership model from the military and bringing it into a corporate space or into the workforce. There’s similarities, right, but there’s also lot of differences. So what links do you see between, you know, the good sides of the military structure?

and hierarchy to, you know, the positive effects on businesses. We’ll start with the positive. Yeah, well, it’s a great question. I think the strength of military leadership culture, because it is its own culture, is centred around the understanding of influence. And I don’t think that’s as well understood or inculcated in the civilian or corporate sectors, because I think there’s a leaning towards management.

I would advise people not to drink the LinkedIn Kool-Aid on this one, you know, where, you know, it’s very low resolution thinking we go, leaders good, managers bad, or leaders good, bosses bad. It’s amateur hour. We don’t want to be playing around in that space. It’s not sophisticated enough to actually get us where we need to go. I think there is a distinction between leadership and management and both are mutually supporting concepts. And, you know, leaders largely coordinate change. They’re about influence, they’re about people.

Managers are about complexity. They’re about managing sophisticated systems and you need both in order to achieve most significant results. I think there is a leaning in the civilian space that gives towards management systems, processes, function, which are incredibly important functions in and of themselves, but I think military leadership is about influence. And if you wanted to boil it down to its rawest element is how do you convince someone to run out of machine gun?

I’d say, how do you do that? I have no idea. Well, I’ve got some ideas, and I’ve seen it happen. And so I think there is a there is depth in that side of the conversation, which favours this understanding about how you incentivize people to do things. And it’s built on hundreds of years of tradition and experimentation.

And the fact that they can convince people, or I could convince people, or I could be convinced by people to run at very dangerous situations is testament to influence. And some people will make a deduction out of that and say, you, the penalties, if you didn’t, it’s like, yeah, cool, I lose two weeks loss of pay for insubordination, or I get shot. That theory doesn’t hold out very long.

People would rather pay two weeks pay, you know, it’s like you shot or pay two weeks back Yeah, I’ll pay the two weeks pay so that it’s like people think there’s that it was the whip or the lash that got people over the line very rarely was that true and I do suggest that there are some other forces at play which are also anchored around fear, but they’re not They’re not in the way that people would traditionally think and so when you cross -reference that into a civilian context, you’d say

military leaders, especially those that have been playing around in the combat space for a while, who are good at what they did and they understood people, they’re forced to be reckoned with because they can convince people to adopt change better than anyone else I’ve seen. So I’d say that would be their strength. But as I said before, there’s an equal amount of weaknesses that also need to be acknowledged on the other side of the coin as well. Yeah, it’s interesting you bring up that distinction between leadership and management. And as you describe it, that idea of, you know, leadership being

person of influence, right? Influencing others in that situation of running at a machine gun is pretty intense. But I kind of imagine that in the world of business, because it’s not that intense, right? You’re not running a machine guns. The role of a leader tends to be a manager, right? You tend to get into a leadership role and your job is to manage people. So, but yeah, that’s very true, right? It’s the definitely the risks are a lot.

different and I’d say many a veteran has done themselves a disservice by not getting in the right frame of mind to understand the variation in risk because they come out and they’ll be like, you know, well I’ve done it harder and this isn’t that bad and you know, they make it about them. Good leadership is not centred around you, in fact, you know, on our shirts. got Hannah kind of sitting over there.

on our shirts it normally says leadership is not about you. And when it’s predicated on service then you will also acknowledge in the same breath that there is value in knowing that service predicates all. And you know there’s an old Gandhi quote and it says to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. In the spirit of influence I think those two bolt at the hip and there’s a lot of, a lot of

realignment in expectations that needs to take place and a good leader won’t make it about them. They won’t use their own fears and standards as the baseline. They’ll be leveraging off the group’s fears spaces. And if you can do that, we’ll have good things and then influence does become incredibly important. I think many veterans don’t make that transition particularly well. And as a result, it creates an us and them culture. And I don’t think that’s particularly resourceful.

I’m interested in your views on the idea of born, you’re a born leader. You’ve probably heard that phrase before. Everyone’s heard that phrase, right? The nature versus nurture. Yeah. Like, do you believe that that’s the case? A lot of people in business, whether they’re the founder of a business, you know, have to figure out how to be a leader, right? When their business grows other than themselves versus those that’s sometimes just in business as an employee, are pushed into a leadership role. Do you think that…

you can be a natural leader or do you think that’s something that can be learnt? This is going to go against the grain on many a LinkedIn post and professional opinion. I think it’s both. There’s a concept known as natural athleticism where an individual have an innate skill or talent and they won’t necessarily be able to describe how they do what they do. And moreover, that person is normally characterised in such a way that they

are frustrated that other people don’t seem to get it. You’ll normally see those two things happening when you’re talking about natural athleticism. I think leadership is one of those elements. I believe, you know, and I was on another podcast once before and I was with another, so I was kind of side by side with another army gentleman and we were both being asked questions and I didn’t really know this gentleman very well and.

a statement was said and it kind of rolled off the tongue as if it was a statement of fact and it said, well, obviously you’ve gone through a leadership training school. You would believe that leaders are made, not born. And I got nods on to the left of me and yep, yep, of course. And I actually was like, whoa, I’m push back on that a little bit because it didn’t, to get into the schools of leadership, you had to demonstrate.

natural talent. had to have been, you know, school captains, would have had to be in captains of sporting teams, you would have had to done community service, you would have had to have demonstrated the raw talents and skills that would enable you to be shortlisted in order to get into that school. It’s highly competitive to get into these colleges. And so and they’re talent based. And they know that you haven’t been formally trained.

you just have demonstrated the raw talent to get you baselined. So with that considered, it’s a bit of both. In the military context, they’re trying to find raw talent and then they’re trying to refine it. Many people like myself make money on the idea that it’s also inherently trainable. Now the question is about bandwidth or scope. Can someone who has very little inclination towards leadership

suddenly become the most amazing leader in the world? I don’t know, that’s a pretty tough gig. If you do concede that there is competition at the top echelons, I would suggest they would really struggle to do that. But can you always improve it and refine it with teaching? Yes, you can, in whatever state you are. So I think you can constantly drag it through new frames of reference and whatnot. in recent years, we’ve had

development in our understanding of what constitutes forms of intelligence is one such example. We’ve got IQ, which is intelligence quotient, which is people’s ability to problem solve through abstraction. EQ, we would have heard about emotional quotient, and that’s normally where the conversation ends. There are more. We have social quotient, which is the ability to map social dynamics and interplay so we can see

a person who might have very low EQ but an incredibly high SQ, walk into a room, look at everyone in the room and know who’s who in the zoo. At their different skills, they’re actually different forms of intelligence and the final one is adaptability quotient, which is resilience, the ability to reframe and keep moving forward and take things in your stride. And with all of these, we get variation across all the least levels. IQ is the one that is least adjustable.

I know that’s not going to be palatable for many people to hear, but even with the injective huge resources, you can see a shift of up to three or four IQ points. And that is a phenomenal amount of resource to achieve that, by the way, many, many thousands of hours, you know, a lot of education to get three adjustment points, which is not a lot. But when we talk about EQ, AQ and SQ, totally different story. EQ can vary a bit, SQ can…

vary a bit and AQ can vary a lot. And so when we focus more and we go into a bit more higher resolution thinking, we actually get a whole different experiment to play around with and more variables to tinker with and then we see better results. So you might have someone who’s very high EQ, SQ, average IQ and good AQ, and that might be their raw talent and that’s how they enter the game or you’ll be able to do a lot with someone like that.

they’ll be a very influential person with the right tools. It’s also on the dark end of the coin if they’re inherently negative in terms of they’ve got bad personality traits and they’re open to concepts like the dark tetrad where you’ve got psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, Machiavellianism. Those people with those innate skills can be incredibly dangerous people because they can become highly charismatic, highly influential.

and they can drag people off the centerline. So leadership is, and influence is a double edged sword. It’s good and bad, the cure and the curse. Yeah. Well, there’s a lot in that. there’s a lot. I mean, this is a question that philosophical has been going for 2000 years. So you’d be well within your rights to ask it and be a little bit confused by it. I’m just sitting back and taking it all in. was, I’ve actually never heard of that AQ and the SQ kind of concepts before. So that was really interesting and valuable. Well, it just gives us something.

else to consider what constitutes valuable in certain contexts. Someone, so you know I’ll give you an example the other day, I had a coaching client and you know, he’s got an absolute unit, he’s 130 kilos, he’s a big rugby player and he’s just got his first management position. The guy’s an absolute legend, I love working with this guy, he’s humble, he’s caring, he’s influential at his level and he’s surrounded by highly

detail focused, high IQ bean counters, know, finance, accountant types. he, he little, you know, sentence rolled off the tongue and he goes, you know, I’m not as intelligent as these people. was like, Whoa, be careful. Be very careful. You know, we don’t want all encompassing statements like that. I was like, you would be very high in EQ and SQ cause he’s a very sociable guy. And I said, they probably look at you in the, with the same thread. So just be careful about.

what we’re actually saying in phrasing here because intelligence means different things in different contexts. It’s just matching it for the right scenarios. That’s probably very validating for a lot of leaders listening who, you know, feel that they don’t fit the standard mould of leadership as well, because there is, you know, multiple strengths that you can bring to a role and you don’t, you probably can’t be high at everything, right? I would imagine. Well, you know, it’s, this is kind of one of those age old trade -offs, you know, it’s an adage about if you

try and do everything well, you generally don’t do anything particularly well. Yeah. You know, and so that’s the world of prioritisation and sequencing and all of that good stuff. In the case of professional development, some will argue that you want to find someone who has faults or deficiencies, self -confessed or identified objectively, and then you want to enhance

the deficiency, well there’s another train of thought that suggests you have people with talents and then you ignore the deficiencies and you put fuel on the fire of the amplifications of what they’re actually really good at. And then they specialise. So you can have, you know, as an example, you might have someone who’s incredibly good at sales, you know, and they sell well for a company. High EQ, high SQ, they don’t need a lot of…

technical information or IQ and AQ average, right? And that person just specialises, specialises, specialises, refines, right? Refines, iron sharpens iron and they just keep tinkering on this EQ, SQ until they jump over the threshold where there’s no one that can match them in that space. As long as they’re in the right environmental context with that new suite of skills, they’ll be unstoppable.

But if you drag that person and then go, here’s an Excel spreadsheet, mate, I need you to analyse this and come up with an algorithm, and they’re going to absolutely capitulate. The relevance hasn’t been matched with the competence. And with that regard, the inverse would be true. You could have someone who’s highly technically focused and great at systems, and then you put them in the sales role, and they absolutely suck, right? Because we haven’t matched the person’s competence to the relevance of the situation. So you’re not doing them any favours.

And so there’s two trains of thoughts and there’s a long standing argument between the two. And I don’t know where I sit other than to at least acknowledge the complexity of the problem. You’re either generalist or specialist. If you wanna go specialist, get very good at managing the context and scenario variables. If you wanna go generalist, well then you’re gonna try and improve across the realm and be applicable in most scenarios.

and you’ll generally have a leaning towards people as well, because people will be true across almost all forums. So you can either play one or the other, but you got to know which one you’re doing, because it’s a trade off. It’s a zig and zag moment. Yeah. I think that’s a nice segue into, I want to transition now into talking about, you know, leading to leading others, to managing people, to leading people. And you talk about a leader as being an influencer, right? Or an influencer.

You know, I think if you’re going to influence someone as a leader, having that understanding that different people have different, know, IQ, SQ, EQ, or AQ, you know, and trying to understand the people and then adapt your leadership style to those people, perhaps. Absolutely. One of the frames that we have used in The Eighth Mile, which some would probably disagree with, but I stand firm on, is communication is the responsibility of the sender.

And if there’s a message worth sending, it’s worth sending right. It’s not about you. So if we’re going to go through this rigmarole of having a conversation and we’re going to have discourse and we’re going to try and level each other up and rise the tides and any other metaphor you want to throw in there, well, then I will want to make sure that you’re understanding my point and I’m going to adjust my style to suit you. Now that

is predicated on the idea that I’m observant and I’m listening enough to know who you are and what you are and then I will adjust accordingly. But if it’s all about me, I’m going to send it how I want to send it. And you know, you’ll hear topics about values come up very, it’s, you know, it’s in vogue again, who would have thought. And, you know, you get people go, honesty is important to me. All right, fair enough. Honesty sounds like a very noble value and it is, but.

We’ve all met that person who walks around, you know, with honesty as a value system going, I just say it as it is. And if other people can’t deal with it, it’s their problem. There is a wake of destruction behind that human without fail. There’s just destruction. And the reason being is there are multiple ways to tell the same truth, some more resourceful than others. And unless you acknowledge that whilst walking around with your honesty value system,

buckle in for all the fracturing and disaggregation of your relationships at the rate that you’re walking. So it’s like these are powerful tools. They go good and bad, and they’re double -edged swords in and of themselves. So I think with that considered, yes, a good leader is constantly adjusting like a chameleon to suit different contexts and scenarios. To take that point a little bit further, if you are so inclined.

you know, if I was playing on LinkedIn or other professional network platforms like Cora or anything like that, and I said, how good is micromanagement? I’m going to get absolutely berated. I’ll probably get kicked off the platform again, right? And then, you know, the people go, no, micromanagement is annoying, it betrays trust, it does all these things. And you go, yeah, okay. Have you ever joined a new organisation or gone into a new role and they didn’t give you any training?

anything at all and what you wanted was someone to literally sit over your shoulder and show you click by click, step by step, you know, from go to woe. When I first joined the military I think about the level of micromanagement required in learning a new rifle or a new weapon. You’ve got a person, some sort of probably angry looking corporal with a smoke in his mouth, you know, who’s got a voice that’s 190 decibels loud blasting you going, don’t touch that.

move your finger here, don’t hold it like that, and you just constantly micromanage. All right, well, in time, I would become the instructor for such weapons. I’d also be the person who runs the ranges, who runs the instructors. Is it appropriate at that point for someone to be doing that to me? No, we’ll be in dark territory there. You don’t wanna be doing that. I’m as qualified as you are and maybe better in some areas. So you don’t wanna be micromanaging me. Micromanaging me, that’s not the right fit. If you played the game of

authoritarian leadership, people go, that is, there’s no place for authoritarian leadership. Maybe. Well, I don’t know about you, but I would consider a court judge as a community leader, an influencer, and they use precedent as their weapon of choice. We’ve all seen what happens when someone commits a heinous crime, they go to court and they get a light slap on the wrist by a laissez -faire judge and

Everyone loses their mind. mean look in the United States is one such example You see riots and cop cars flipped over and schools burn and the courthouse is you know, It’s just a gap suit chaos Why well the reason is people felt that they needed an authoritarian leader old school You know Old Testament judge to come out wrath of God style and go I’m gonna hit you with every damn punishment I can now I work in the prison systems with

criminals who have committed incredibly heinous crimes. Some of those people need to do incredible lengths of time in order to tell the community that they’re safe and tell the community via the actions of the judge that it’s not appropriate and there are consequences to actions. And when that happens, we see order emerge back in the community. So there is a place for authoritarian leaders. But if the only tool you’ve got in the toolbox is the lash,

It’s like be careful because people become micro conditioned very quickly to that and they get very thick skin. And so there is a myriad of different types of leadership, all of which have applicability and all of which are appropriate. But we got to know which tool for which scenario. And that requires a bit of forethought and planning and rehearsal to get that right. And the good leaders, the most influential people are chameleons. They’re morphing around, they’re playing around this space and they might walk into one room and they’re a coach and mentor.

And then they walk into the next one and they’re laissez faire and they’re calming everything down. And then they go into the next one and it’s like, massive infringement, harassment claim, boom, authoritarian leader. Then they walk out of that and then they go transformational and they’re strategic. They could be six different people on the same day. They’re morphing into a different character to achieve a different effect because it’s not about them. And if it’s not about you,

The next logical question is, well, what do my people need from me and what do they need me to be? Just like a parent who doesn’t want to be a disciplinarian, but they see the value of making sure their kids have boundaries as they go into, you know, adolescence and into adulthood. It’s like, I don’t want to be the bad guy, but I also don’t want to see you fail. So I’m going to adopt a character role to make sure you’re successful. And I think leadership is very true in that regard. The challenge is, of course, for most people in leadership roles is

It’s a difficult thing to manage and to navigate that changing chameleon role of a good leader. And that is the benefit of having someone from the outside coming in and reviewing or seeing and working with you, like you guys do at Eighth Mile. So I’m interested from that perspective, you know, when you come into an organisation and you’re working with the leaders in an organisation, what are some of the most challenging things for them that you might kind of turn a mirror on?

and reveal to themselves? It’s a really good question. I’m trying to think in recent times there’s been a number of little scenarios that kind of popped in my head there. One of the… I’m probably giving away the tricks of the game here a little bit to some extent, but let’s go through that process anyway. Go for it. Sometimes we might be dealing with an executive and the executive is actually the problem or a big part of it. But…

they’re also the person that might dare fund us to come in. So we as the facilitators have to get in and build rapport with all the parties by doing the very things that we teach them about. And then over time, bit by bit, we’re gonna kind of plant seeds and ask the right open -ended questions and shape the executive until the point that they might go, it’s me, isn’t it? And you go, yeah.

is partly you. You know, it’s never just one thing or the other. You didn’t never want to get caught in the trap of dichotomies. But the answer will be, yeah, it’s a big part of it. And they go, crap. You go, yeah, it’s all right. At least we know. But you need them to arrive there. Because if I come in guns blazing going, you’re the problem, hey, they’re gonna cut us off. We’re not going to be able to fix the problem. And then worse yet, you’ve got a team in there.

that has a leader that doesn’t know that they’re a big part of the problem and they don’t have any representation. No one wins that. And so we have to come in softly, softly. We’re doing the chameleon game, morphing and changing to make sure that we’re building rapport with the executive force, holding tension with them, not being a pushover either, and then working with their team and getting common language out and then slowly bit by bit we bridge them back together again.

And that’s a big part of what we do. So that’s a challenge. There’s a mirror holding and both sides for that. And also that there’s a level in there in order to build rapport with the executive. We might also have to chip the team for lack of initiative or a lack of managing up or a lack of empathy going up. And we kind of, in that way, we kind of crush them back together as well. And then we report it when it’s done. And then we, you know, reframe and we label and we do all of these different tools to try and make them.

feel like, jeez, did we just get through something? And have we levelled up? And did we just deal with crisis and all these great realisations? But there’s a lot of planning behind the scenes. But in our team, at least, I can’t speak for others to go, how are we going to crack this nut? Because we actually want to achieve the effect. The aim is not to come in and run some mind -numbing PowerPoint presentation and sit there clicking slides. I can’t think anything worse. That makes me want to puke.

And Jono is a sympathetic puker, so if I puke, he pukes. It’s a disaster. No one means that. Yeah, so for us, there’s this game. We actually want the effect. And so we have to get very, very creative about how we do that. And mirror holding at the right time, in the right way, and making sure that it’s done in a safety environment. That’s how we get the effect we need. We need that person to stumble onto the realisation themselves. But they didn’t stumble. We guided them the whole way.

I’m sorry for anyone who might feel that they were in that boat and they just heard how the magic trick worked. yeah. Well, there you go. But I’m interested when, you’re in that, organisation that needs to go through change or as a leader, when you recognise you see that mirror and you realise there needs to be some change here, you know, cause there’s one thing kind of calling it out, right? But there’s another thing affecting some sort of change. that as an outcome, a better outcome, but often there’s real challenging stuff that needs to happen.

Like whether it’s introspective, whether it’s changing some of the way you think as a leader or whether it’s organisational change, like, you know, some things that need to happen that are hard within an organisation. So how important do you think it is to go through the hard stuff in order to get to the good stuff? Does that make sense? I, you know, I firmly sit on the side of the value of tension. I don’t think life is meant to be easy. You know, there’s no,

coincidence is in my mind that philosophers for, you know, 2000 years and longer have argued about what constitutes the meaning of life. And almost all the philosophers worth their salt have arrived that life is suffering and, you know, to navigate your way through the suffering whilst being forthcoming is the meaning of life, is to find purpose in the suffering. I live in that space. I 100 % agree with it and I’ve drawn a lot of value from that.

It’s not meant to be easy. It’s meant to suck. And, you know, when we look at the behavioural theory and a lot of the experimentation, even at a chemical level, when we’re talking about neuroscience as one such example, you would say the concept of effort -based reward would become prudent and relevant. In some such experiments, you’ll see a rat A and rat B. They get identified with a very high degree of accuracy. We can measure.

the dopamine release, which is the anticipation of reward drug. And we can measure that and say that rat A and rat B love 30 grams of, you know, big, cheddar cheese, the same, to the same degree, which I think is really remarkable and cool from a science perspective. And then what you can do is you can separate the two rats and rat A will continue to get its treat. It doesn’t have to do anything. It’ll just keep getting it and it’s our baseline rat. Then what we do is we get rat B.

and rat B will never meet rat A. And rat B, who was baseline off rat A, then has to get its treat, well, it gets its treat, but it has to work and go through hell and high water to get it. It’s got to dig for it. It’s got to abstain. So sits there and looks through a clear perspex glass for very long periods of time, getting very, very hungry and anticipatory. And then the perspex glass will lift and it will go eat the cheese. It has to run on a wheel. It has to solve little puzzles.

The rat that was baseline the same of rat A will see four or more times the dopaminergic reward. That’s because of the effort. And frankly, that’s why participation awards don’t work. It’s basic economics. If you want to double the value of something, what do you do to its supply? You harvest. If you want to halve the value of something, you double its supply. So participation awards are great for getting kids into sport. They’re terrible for keeping them in there because

Once they’re established in the sport, then their eyes go towards competency hierarchies. How do I become better? How do I get in the best team? How do I win the tournament? How do I get on the state level team? How do I get on the international? It’s like there’s a constant hierarchy to go up and the reward at an intrinsic level is intensely higher the more effort they have to put in.

It’s not the actual certificate, it’s the symbol of the certificate. And I think we’ve done a disservice in many ways with that regard. And I think, you know, bringing it back to where we kind of started here as well is often to look at that change that needs to happen in an organisation is very hard from inside, isn’t it? It’s very hard to see that you need to change that culture or change that, change yourself as a leader.

So what value do you think that it is to have an external third party person kind of coming in or company like Eighth Mile coming in to turn that mirror? I’m as biassed as they could possibly Of you are. It’s a leading question. I’ll just frame my answer. This is loaded on my end. But I would also say that some companies are not ready for us and we built our company on the concept of good people helping good people.

And that’s a really pacified way of saying we don’t help bad people. So there is a values requirement that we have to match to some extent to make sure that we’re actually serving the right companies and people. For me, I do not like arming the wrong type of people with these skills because it is absolutely, you know, it depends how you play your language, right? This is basic linguistics. If I said leadership is about influence and

convincing people to be the best version of themselves. That would be inherently true, but it’s only part of the equation. Leadership is also manipulation. You’re getting in someone’s mind, you’re tinkering with things so that they think and see the world in a different way. I mean, like you can put a dark lens over that very, very quickly. And so if you put it, it’s like, wait, maybe leadership’s not so good. Yeah, well, sometimes. So for us, we’ve got to be very careful about who we work with and who we do not. And there have been times where we’ve just pulled the plug and gone.

no, no, no, I’m not creating a Skynet situation here, like no way. And we’ve pulled it and walked away. And that comes with reputational risk, but I think it’s a long -term reputational gain. In regards to how you prompt change, I think the question you’ve got to ask yourself is it change for change’s sake? You are we just doing this just to, you know, put your stamp on the ground or is it something of value?

If it’s inherently something of value, then it’s a lot easier to market. But I think the ever looming demon that sits in the room kind of breathing in the shadows is that it’s centered on an old concept. You know, I’d rather dance with the devil I know than the devil I don’t. And if you ever want to wonder why people don’t adopt new changes, almost without fail, if you go, well, what is the fear that is driving them?

to either move or not move, it will answer the question. And it sits nested under an overarching philosophical question. Are people’s behaviours predominantly anchored in motivation and reward systems, i .e. goals? Or are people’s behaviours predominantly anchored in fear? Now the key word in there is predominantly. You’re going to have a bit of both, right? And we now know from a neuroscience perspective about what these emotions are. We know that

in the affirmative, know, the running to the goal -based reward space, you’re looking at chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, things of that nature. Well, we also know the dark side as well, which is adrenocortical -responding. So where it’s fear, it’s stress. And I think when you go, I’d rather dance with the devil I know than the devil I don’t.

and you wonder why someone’s not budging, although you’re giving all the motivations in the world, the answer is you haven’t mapped the fear correctly and you don’t know the problem in enough sophistication. When you finally do map that person and map it go, what is the fear that’s holding this person back? Like, what’s the thing? Then it will manifest and you’ll be able to work on pacifying that fear or contextualising it. Sometimes, and this is going to go against the grain as well, it’s replacing a fear with a bigger fear.

Not allowed to say that anymore, but it’s absolutely inherently true. We need at times a bit of a kick in the butt to get moving and then we’ve got to be positioned from a leadership perspective with a intensely refined reward system once we start seeing the demonstrated behaviours. And, you know, one such faux pas in certain circles is to talk about positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement and punishment. Okay. Fair enough. There’s a…

a definition we like to work with that I think answers part of this question and it goes, our culture is comprised of the behaviors we reward and or punish. It’s a very pragmatic way to look at culture. Yeah. All right. So then you go, what do you do if all you have is reward systems and positive reinforcement and the candidate or the person or the rat or the pigeon is not demonstrating any redeemable behaviors? What do you do?

How do you get change from that animal or that person? What do do? Yeah, I don’t know. Crickets. Yeah, I know. I know it took a long time to answer this because if you and you’d be well within your rights like to ask that question and not have a have a conclusive answer. Well, I think, you know, history has shown us that there needs to be this tension between running to something and running from something. Am I suggesting you just get the lash out and beat someone within an inch of their life to get them to do what you want? No, I am not.

either literally or metaphorically. And to prove that point, you’ve got concepts like the stress performance curve, where if you keep cranking the stress, you’ll actually see a very high uptake of performance until it plateaus and then it drops off a cliff. And so if you go too hard with the lash and too hard with the running from and too hard with the cat smell, we’re in dangerous territory. And also you might be conditioning them to it and they just get very thick skinned.

So you don’t want to play that game exclusively. But also on the other side, if you just have reward systems to prompt change and all you do is keep coming out with more and more rewards, you also dilute the effectiveness of the reward. And every time we run the same experiment with the same candidate in the same application, the same variables, we see a half -life of the dopamine. So if you’re just using reward systems, you’re going to run out of resources by Tuesday. You’re not going to be able to keep up with that.

the demand or the entitlement that comes with it. So there’s this game of tension that is required to be played. Sometimes we need to give it a little bit of cat smell behind the rat to get it moving. And then we need a reward system to create the new doping, aminergic pathways in order to solidify new habits and behaviours. And there’s, when we’re talking about change, we’ve got to be playing with both of these forces in the right tolerances in the right way. And that’s one man’s opinion on change. think, I don’t think…

some of the methodologies or mindsets that are more broad within my industry are robust enough to actually roll out any significant change. It might make us feel good. It might make us feel like we’re a nice person, but is the effectiveness of the change actually gonna solidify and then are people gonna get to it and be rewarded with an effective goal? Probably not, maybe not. Dave, Neil, The Eighth Mile consulting, you mentioned your kind of…

tagline, I guess, of good people working with good people. But you also clarify that with not everyone is good people. So for those people listening or watching who think they are good people and would like to maybe reach out, connect with you, to work with you maybe, or even just maybe follow you to hear more, because I feel like we could have spoken for another half an hour easily about this stuff. It’s really fascinating. What’s the best place?

for people to go to kind of connect. Hit us up by our website, www.eighthmile.com.au. That’s eighth, not eight, lesson learned. But also if you are so inclined and you were playing around on platforms like LinkedIn is, you know, hit up our, either our company page or my personal account. We’ll normally be putting out mine grabs, you know, daily, if not multiple times a day. And I would say that our flares a little bit.

different to most, we’re kind of pushing back on some more traditional values. So if that’s of interest to you, and you wanted to explore that, well, we’re ready to receive you. Dave, tell me just quickly before we go to The Eighth Mile, what is that reference? Have you ever seen the movie Eminem eight mile? I have seen that. Right. Good. Is it an Eminem reference? Exactly. I thought there was more to it. No, no, no, no. And people think it’s got some sort of military analogy, like walking an eighth mile and a seventh mile.

That’s where people make assumptions, right? You gotta be careful about that. No, so the story goes like this. So when Jono and I left defence and we went into rolling out these large scale software projects, we had had quite a successful career. We were doing, you know, highly competitive, you know, in the competency hierarchy, so to speak. In the military context, we were doing well, top 30 % and all of that sort of good stuff. And Jono and I were in constant competition with each other.

But we had, in our latter years, once we’d had become a bit more established and we started experimenting with some different ideas. we called it the integrity card. And the way that would work is say you’re about to present your concept of a mission or an operation that you’re about to roll out. We would get up and say, hey, look, before I start, sir, you know, this is not the most robust plan.

And in fact, if you were to pressure test it in the second phase and you hit me on the left flank, I’m very vulnerable there. I haven’t considered logistics full enough. My offensive support and my artillery, you know, concept is terrible. I have not refined it enough. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I’m confident with the plan. I know that it’s got good bones, so I’d like to present it anyway. And normally what would inherently happen is the person would be watching it and they’d go, that’s all the things that you’ve listed were the vulnerabilities of the plan.

So that’s already on the table. And so the knives don’t end up in your back. They end up, you know, laying on the table. Time would pass. We’d be rolling out this project and we had inherited some, some cancers in the project, put it that way, right? We, we, get what you get and you don’t get upset. We got it in its current form. And so therefore we had to present to the board and we had basically explained that the project’s not going particularly well for reasons. And

you know, just before that night we had watched Eminem’s 8 Mile and you know, we’re talking about how we approach this, like what do we do? And he goes, we do the same thing we always do, mate. And he goes, we’ll do the 8 Mile play because we had just watched it night before. And then, you know, I kind of said to him, that’s the new name of the business because we were building the concept at the time. And that was that. So instead of 8 Mile, it became 8th Mile because it sounds a little bit more corporate and that’s about the sum of it. And I think that’s…

really, really funny because we work with some of the biggest companies on the planet now and they don’t know, well they do now, but they don’t know that we’re named after a tacky rap battle in Eminen’s 8 Mile. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Well to wrap up this episode, we’ll cue the 8 Mile music now if YouTube will allow it. Nice, perfect. Or not. Yeah. But anyway, for you guys watching, reach out to Dave Neal and The Eighth Mile Consulting.

If you’re interested in diving more into leadership and if you wanna learn more about some more inspiring business leaders on the Sunshine Coast, then subscribe to this podcast, subscribe here on YouTube and catch the next episode real soon. See ya.