Leading 4 Life – a conversation with Susie Ballentyne, Independent Psychologist and Bob Judson, Keynote Speaker, Podcaster, Leadership Facilitator and Coach

About This Episode

In this episode I am delighted to be in conversation with my two guests, Susie Ballentyne an Independent Psychologist and Bob Judson, a fellow podcaster, facilitator, leadership coach, and keynote speaker.

We delve together into: 

1. The importance of continually developing your skills as a leader, both individually and as part of a team.
2. The value of both mentors and coaches to leaders.
3. The challenges of building, leading and inspiring teams in today’s complex and convoluted working environment.
4. The really key requirements of a good leader.

Susie and Bob’s Three key encouragements for leaders looking to grow and develop their leadership:

1. Always remember that others have been there before you.  Very few, if any, challenges are genuinely new and unique and people will always be prepared to help you be your best self if you seek the right support.
2. One of the key challenges for developing leaders is learning to let go of tasks that can be done by the team and freeing up time to focus on the larger issues.  The great thing is that by delegating well and empowering your team members you build trust and capability in them that they will really appreciate as they develop themselves.
3. Pay attention to your relationships and your personal brand as absolute priorities.  They are fundamental to your future success and deserve to be given very special treatment. 

Connect with Susie and Bob:

LinkedIn: Bob Judson and Susie Ballentyne

Website: Leading4Life

To listen to other Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend go to my website, www.annitownend.com

A big thank you to my support team at the Conscious Marketing Group for helping me with all the marketing of the podcast, to Coco O’Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music, for the lovely design, and for the excellent editing and sound production.

To contact me Anni Townend do email me on anni@annitownend.com visit my website www.annitownend.com, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn.  I look forward to connecting with you, thank you for listening.

Transcript

Anni Townend: Hello and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend, the podcast that helps you to grow care, confidence and courage in your leadership. 

I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their personal leadership stories with you to inspire and encourage you on your own unique leadership journey.

Together, we delve into the people, places, and experiences that have made them who they are today and passionate about why they do what they do every day. 

If you haven't already, please do subscribe, share, and review the podcast. Thank you for listening. 

Today, I'm delighted to be in conversation with Susie Ballantyne and Bob Judson.

Susie is an independent psychologist, and Bob is a fellow podcaster, facilitator, and leadership coach. Together, Susie and Bob co created Leading 4 Life, offering leaders, their teams and organisations a unique approach to developing their personal, collective and team leadership. 

Welcome Susie, welcome, Bob.

Bob, what would be good is for you to share the four themes, the things that are really important to you and Susie, that you're going to be talking about today. 

Bob Judson: Thanks, Anni. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on with you. It's a it's fantastic. So delighted to see you again and really looking forward to this.

What we thought we'd talk about is the importance of continually developing your skills as a leader both individually and as part of a team.

Then the value of both mentors and coaches to leaders and the challenges of building, leading and inspiring teams in today's increasingly complex and convoluted working environment.

And lastly, the really key requirements of being a good leader. 

Anni Townend: Lovely. Well I'm excited to delve into these four themes and I'm really pleased that you mentioned the requirements of being a good leader. One of the things which I often talk about with leaders is that leadership is indeed more about who you are being than what you do.

Whilst what you do really matters, but it is our being that is really important and that it is a constant learning experience. 

Susie. Hello. I wonder whether we could start with where did you meet Bob? I'm interested in the places, people and experiences and in particular the place that you and Bob met.

Susie Ballentyne: Bob and I go back a number of years. it might be near 15, 20. When we both worked in the Ministry of Defence, And I worked in a very small unit in the Ministry of Defence that did policy analysis support to Defence ministers, advisors, decision making. And part of my role was to bring in behavioral science into MOD thinking. And so I ran a small sort of analytical team that used behavioral science to help decision makers in their policy work and their operational work. And Bob was the director of that department.

It used to be that I would just quiver as I walked past his office because it would be like, that's where the big boss is. So we worked together for many years, and then, as is the way in the civil service, everyone rotates on quite a sort of, fast basis, unless you are in a sort of specialist area like behavioral science.

So I've maintained my work in the civil service. But Bob and I went our separate ways, and then we reconnected again through LinkedIn when we realized that what we were talking about on LinkedIn and our interests and our focus in those subsequent years had moved towards people, teams, organizational change and very much on leadership. 

And I think Bob got in touch and was like, Hello, do you remember me? I think we've got a common interest. And then we also realized that we both lived in East Sussex. And so we weren't that far away from each other. And we both had more time in our diaries to meet up and think and explore our interests. I had just come back from being overseas, I think at that point. So I was looking for what could be new and interesting. And where did I want to take my skills and experience? And so we got together for coffee and the rest is history.

Anni Townend: I'm curious as to what was your first conversation when you met for a chat and discovered that you had shared interests and passions that had been shaped by your experience at the Ministry of Defence, MOD. Bob, what were some of the first conversations

Bob Judson: I think it was very much like, what have you been doing since we last saw each other?

But then we got pretty rapidly into why were we now doing what we were doing and what was the mutual interest effectively? As Susie said, quite a bit of time had passed between those two things. I had gone from a 34 and a half year Air Force career out into the corporate world and then stepped away from that from having worked at Deloitte for three and a half years and was running my own business.

And, I was basically looking at bringing together a lot of what I'd learned from both in the military and from the corporate world. Seeing there was clearly an opportunity to do better with leadership skills and so on for a lot of people, because it's one of those things that I think having worked at Deloitte, both internal to Deloitte, but also most particularly with the clients I work with at Deloitte that a lot of organizations just don't do this that well. And so we talked a lot about that and Susie obviously has got more academic qualifications than I will ever have. And is really into the kind of the specific detailed side of it. As a social psychologist, I bring the kind of leadership experience having run, some quite big organizations and done a lot of things militarily, but also then increasingly some of the stuff I've done outside the military. So it's just a very mutually convenient and symbiotic kind of approach that we had that we thought, okay, there is something in this and we should look at what we try and do.

Susie Ballentyne: I think the period of reflection of the intervening years was really interesting because I had gone away and refocused my training a little bit on interpersonal influence and had moved into working more with the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office on interpersonal skills and overseas diplomacy.

So I'd gone from a defense context to a overseas role, but I'd also Become much more focused on thinking beyond the traditional ways in which we think about people in terms of personalities and strengths. I was doing a lot of work at Sussex University on social identity. So I was talking to Bob in those early days about my reflections having worked in these enormous ministries in London where leadership is all around you.

Everyone's talking about leadership everyone's being a leader and my reflections as a social psychologist thinking I think there's more to it than this I think there's something we're missing here and that sort of dovetailed nicely I think into some of the conversations Bob and I were having around, we're missing a trick here: What are we not telling people? What are we not seeing? What else is there about this that people are missing? There's a lot of focus on traits and personality types and categorizations, but from my work at Sussex I was focusing much more on groups and a much more shared sense of leadership and followership. And so our conversation went along those lines really so it was a nice time to come back and reflect on our experiences of working in big organizations with other leaders.

I wasn't a leader of a small team in an organization, but I found it fascinating just watching the different leaders operate, whether that was in London, West Africa, the Balkans, Iraq, and then over in the Foreign Office. As a social psychologist it was an absolute, fascinating time.

And so we just had lots of conversations around that. And the corporate side, which I'm much less familiar with, having that side from Bob's experience of going from one world to the other, was really illuminating. And I think that's where we started to think, hang on, there's something here that we think we can address in this. It's a science of leadership and the expertise and experience of being a leader in these places.

Bob Judson: Can I just build on that a little bit, Anni? I think fundamentally, when I look at the way organizations do leadership development of people, if you start from the premise that even if people are naturally quite good at leadership and some naturally are better than others, you can do a lot of making a leader as opposed to just being born as a leader.

Nobody is born with all the skills they're ever going to need as a leader. I think the military is very good at giving you some seriously good foundations in leadership. That's what you do as a first platform when you first start and you build on that progressively as you go through. Not only do you have opportunities to lead a lot of pieces of organizations and then ultimately bigger organizations in total but also you actually get a lot of continued development training through the staff college setups and so on that the military has.

So they really do equip you incredibly well with the tools and techniques and ideas behind leadership. Corporates tend not to do that. They'll recruit you on qualifications or experience. They will train you to do what they want you to do in the business.

And then they'll frequently promote you based on your business delivery. And then magically, and I've had this conversation with quite a lot of clients in the world I now live in that they arrive in a position where they are now leading teams and they sit there and go, wow, okay, no, one's really equipped me to do this because they just haven't been given any particular thoughts about how do I do this?

And they'll have some ideas and clearly some people are much better at it than others instinctively, but the opportunity that's there, I think, is just to bring ideas, thoughts, tips, techniques, a bit of process and some additional experience to those kinds of individuals, because often that just helps them be better both as leaders, but also as Susie said, following is just as important here and realizing that just cause you're a leader doesn't mean you suddenly stop becoming a follower as well.

We've all got to do that as much of the time as we have leading really. 

Anni Townend: I think that's really relevant. And I often ask the question of leaders with whom I'm working is, why would anybody follow you? What is it about you that has people follow you? And I think it's a really great reflective question to ask.

Susie Ballentyne: This is I think this is the nub of it, really, One of the things I love about social psychology that led me into it is that psychology is always focused on the person in the team, the person in society, social psychology is about the team in the individual or the society in the individual.

When we think about leadership, it's not just about a collection of unitary people operating together. It's greater than the sum of its parts. Leadership and being a leader is about living the relationships you have. So it's not just about a single person. It's about a sense of leadership because it's a shared sense of purpose and identity.

I think this is why the military do it very well because that sense of purpose, objective and a shared sense of us, the collective, is so much more powerful. And I think some organizations lose sight of their collective fate, their objectives. And so you have lots of people operating according to their own goals and their own objectives and their own interests.

When you can harness that sense of collective identity, I think that's where leadership really starts to shine. And that's where the teamwork becomes greater than some of its parts. 

Anni Townend: I love that way of thinking about leadership, that it's the team in the individual. Not the individual in the team. It's a totally different way of thinking about leadership and organizations.

And I'm passionate about collective leadership. And I think that insight into looking from the bigger, from the whole inwards, rather than looking from the individual outwards

Bob Judson: I think the other thing that you see an awful lot is this confusion between leadership and management, and I think there are an awful lot of people in particularly in the commercial setting who they moved up through management roles, and indeed that often is part of their title, and they mix the two things up.

And for me, fundamentally in a word, management is about process. leadership is about inspiration. And it is to your point earlier on is why would people follow you? Hopefully it's not just out of curiosity. You actually want people to feel inspired and believe in you and trust in where you're going to take them and that you're going to do the right things with them and hopefully get them to be in a better place and develop them as they go through as well. 

And I think that's something that doesn't necessarily fall as a first thought for an awful lot of people when they're in management roles where actually they're much more interested in what do we need to do to get the job done.

And that's the process side of it. And the two things are obviously completely interlinked. Leaders often are managers and having to manage things and managers are often having to lead things, but they're not necessarily definitely not the same thing. 

Anni Townend: I think it's a well made distinction and like you, Bob, I talk about when we're managing, we are paying attention to the process when we're operating, we're paying attention to the content that what we do and when we're leading, we're paying attention to who we're being, which, of course, connects with what you said about being inspiring and indeed inspiring curiosity in others about their leadership, about why they're doing what they're doing and becoming inspiring more confident in who they are. With my colleague, who I partner, Lucy Kidd, together we have created a framework of Collaborative Leadership and we start with creating psychological safety and bringing three things to that. Curiosity, Care and Courage. So that in addition to bringing curiosity, the importance of bringing care and courage upon which then people can be able to have bigger conversations. 

And psychological safety I know is something that you also talk about Susie in your work and in particular, I'd like to link that to social psychology and what you discovered was missing in leadership around social identity. 

Susie Ballentyne: I love all the work on psychological safety and Amy Edmondson's work on failing well and being courageous to try things in different ways.

But fundamentally, psychological safety requires trust. And trust happens in relationships. And that brings you back to leadership as something, leadership doesn't operate in a vacuum. It only emerges either successfully or unsuccessfully when you're doing it with somebody. It's very much a kind of performance if you like, it's something that comes out from those interactions. 

And I think this is where the social identity work, and there's some really good work by Professor Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam, who are eminent social psychologists who've done work on social identity leadership, where leaders are, when you say, leadership is being who you are, when we take that outside, inward look, leadership as the leader lives the group.

The leader is the identity. The leader are all those people. The leader has to be curious about who's following them. They have to listen to their followers. They have to know them well, because they are of them. They are a personified version of what the team stands for. And their behaviors and their attitudes and their interactions should all represent and craft and enact that collective identity of the team of who you are.

Identity has to be enacted. It's something that is only meaningful. It only confers motivational benefits and psychological benefits around physical and psychological well being when it's actually lived. So the leader's role is to live the identity and to motivate their followers to also live that identity.

And when you've got that collective sense of us, it's incredibly powerful and very motivating and very rewarding. And that's where psychological safety also starts to emerge because people feel that they have an inherent connection and a sense of reward is not just about am I okay here, but it's about are we okay here?

So if you challenge and if you question and if you raise your hand and speak up, it shouldn't be about me and am I going to get into trouble or am I going to be rewarded? Am I virtue signaling or am I being a pain to my team leader? Your contribution is about making things better for our collective good, for the team's success, whether that's increasing profits, whether that's delivering produce, whether that's building a better service, creating safer networks, whatever it might be.

So the psychological safety. Really is a measure of the effectiveness of a team's cohesion and a team with a common sense of purpose and a shared interest in delivering things collectively when people start to fragment into my agenda, my focus, my ambition, my intent and ego start to become competitive.

You might have a fine team, but you're not going to have a great team. And the leader's responsibility is about recognizing what does this look like as a collective? How can I harness it and how can I represent it either to my seniors, to the public, to my shareholders, whoever that might be, but most of all to my team, because it's a very active process.

Anni Townend: And is that related to culture, would that then a cultural identity that you're talking about? 

Susie Ballentyne: Yeah, absolutely, because the culture of the team is the way in which identity is lived on a day to day basis. It's the spaces you occupy, it's the communications within the team, it's the frequency and the structure of meetings.

It's what people wear to work. It's how people address one another in the morning. And so where cultures are failing or are toxic, it's breaking down that sense of collective cohesion and people don't relate to one another, the trust is going and so the psychological safety becomes very vulnerable.

But where a culture is working well, it's basically scaffolding people's ability to come together. And to be the best collective version of themselves. And that's the responsibility of the leader there, is to be constantly like watching that scaffolding and making sure that the social norms, the cultural norms of the teams and groups are adhering to what you want.

Are you living the values of what you represent every day in what you do? And if you're not, what do you do about that? And that becomes tricky. Because how do you correct that? When those things are challenged, when people are pushing at the edges, when they're behaving in ways that aren't acceptable, how do you reinforce those norms and expectations and get people on board?

And equally, how do you reward them? How do you celebrate success? How do you celebrate and represent that sense of us as a team? And I just think it's lots of lovely, creative ways in which to do that. And I've worked with teams where they've had amazing ways of doing that across really diverse teams, whether it's diversity of ethnicity or gender or thought, how you can celebrate and live the identity of your team invites lots of opportunity to really get everybody involved, which I think is always a fun thing to do when you're working with away days with teams or leadership groups.

Anni Townend: Most definitely, and a sense of belonging and of being part of something that you're co creating and living through your leadership every day. 

Susie Ballentyne: And that's not just in terms of, obviously from a sort of corporate or private or public sector point of view, you're going to get high performing teams when that's there but at a kind of ethical level, you're going to be looking after your people, because if that's there, you are going to support the well being of your team. The research shows time and time again, if there's a strong social identity in a group that people feel that they belong their life expectancy increases, their physical health is better, their levels of stress are lower, your attention rates are better so the benefits that this conferred are numerous and long standing. So it's overlooked, I think, at the peril of the organization. 

Bob Judson: I'd totally agree with all of that.

I think one of the really key elements of that for me in leadership terms is the ability to listen I think that listening well is if you look at those themes we started out with at the beginning, in terms of one of the attributes of really good leaders is people who actually listen not only actively, but constantly and tune in to what they're hearing from people and particularly in their teams and the kind of wider environment to use Susie's scaffolding analogy, I think that's one of the things that's at risk with particularly authoritarian leaders, if you like, is that they talk first and listen later, which obviously shuts down all the input they get from other people. It takes away some of that safety because they're not actually sure that actually it is as inclusive a team as they want it to be.

They don't feel their voice is going to be heard and they're going to be recognized. So it's a really good thing to do. If you can get yourself in the position of, first off listening to what people are going to say, and if it's a problem you're trying to fix and so on trying to get views from everybody that's in the team. Because quite often in my experience, the most introverted, quietest person in the room is one of the ones that's going to have the most value to add on a particular issue. But you only find that out by getting that information out of them and you have to create the conditions to allow that.

Susie Ballentyne: And they have to be able to trust you. The reason that person's not speaking up is if they feel intimidated by you or they don't trust you as a leader. And I love that Edgar Schein, who's a big cultural organizational psychologist talks about humble leadership. And I love the work they've been doing on humble leadership around, decades of leaders effectively telling, this is how it's going to be and never asking.

And so that kind of, and I think it was built on their work around humble inquiry, which is just inquire, just find out, what people think, how they work, what their preferences are, what they find challenging and craft your leadership around that understanding. 

Bob Judson: One of the things that I see a lot and hear a lot is people's misconception. It is a significant misconception that the military is all about authoritarian leadership because it absolutely isn't. 

You would want the opinions from people that you then turn around and once you've ultimately got all those opinions, if you can't reach some sort of consensus, then whoever's in charge has to make some decisions. And some of the time it's about making decisions that are deeply uncomfortable and difficult and dangerous, obviously, in that kind of environment.

But at the same time, it’s said in the air force. You wouldn't get very far at all as a leader if you were just an authoritarian leader because you had to be in a position where the people that were working for you and around you believed in what you were doing and you were taking the right direction.

They were smart, academically clever, experienced, talented, technically able people who, if you failed to deliver on that pretty quickly, you would find it fragmenting. 

Susie Ballentyne: And I think authoritarianism is classically about I and humble leadership and identity leadership is all about we and when people can't part, when you look at the kind of classic big personalities in history you can analyze their speeches and look at the amount of times they refer to themselves as I instead or we Barack Obama is a good example of a we leader Donald Trump's a classic example of an I leader.

And you know that has a big impact on how they perceive themselves and how they can effectively deliver leadership. Leadership can also be delivered in other ways. 

Anni Townend: Most definitely. And it's one of the things that when I'm working with teams, I'm often encouraging people to use the ‘I’ when they're talking about themselves.

So this is how I feel. This is what I think and not hide behind I think we all think, but I don't know that. And then, of course, when I come to say, we the collective, it is so much more powerful because I've owned the we in the I coming back to that and the relationship between the I, you and the we is so important and understanding that and probably helped hugely.

One of your themes is the value of mentors and coaches the notion of constantly learning. That none of us are the finished article. You both met at the Ministry of Defense the place, who Susie, if I may ask you, were the people and experiences that shaped you and drew you to this work to psychology when you reflect back on who you are and why people follow you.

Susie Ballentyne: I grew up with quite a military family so it was, and I was always fascinated by it, but never wanted to be in it. I just find the whole military world fascinating. And I wanted to really understand what drew people to these powerful organizations.

Powerful in the sense that they had such a strong identity they could engender such a strong collective mentality that history shows that you could through the power of belief and brand alone, you could encourage people to go and do incredible things. Huge human sacrifice. The psychology of thinking about behaviors in World War I of people going over the top in the trenches.

And doing it, not really for Queen and country, but doing it because you have this sense of collective identity and shared solidarity with the person you've been training with day in, day out. You wear the same clothes, you talk the same way, you live the same life. And that identity is so powerful, and it can be a really good force for good, and it can be a really toxic, dangerous mechanism as well. 

And I think that's what led me to becoming fascinated by it being in and around institutions of power and thinking this is amazing and can change the world in positive ways and also negative ways. And I'm fascinated by the impact that has on people. And on the one hand, there's a kind of institutional social influence of it.

But in terms of actually then going into psychology, I think, I've always been fascinated by people and always wanted to help more people understand the psychology of their behavior so that they can have the opportunity to live the best life that they possibly can. And whether that's in work or not, and I'm a very big believer in, we have these multiple identities.

There's different versions of ourselves at work, at home, in our relationships. And that's part of our understanding about living a good life. Because fundamentally, at the end of it, work in an organizational setting is a very big part of our lives, but it is only one part of our life. And so in some of the coaching work I've done in the past, it's about encouraging people to find balance and recognition of how all these different roles and relationships contribute to their overall sense of self and where that journey is taking them. And I've studied with great psychologists who are colleagues of mine who are now clinical and business psychologists. And we all try and walk the talk, as difficult as that is.

But I learn every day from those friends and colleagues who are parents, business leaders. Friends, studying at university and it's a lifelong journey and I think that's fascinating. That's what keeps me engaged with it. 

Anni Townend: Wonderful. What about you, Bob? What drew you to the military, or who and what were the experiences that had you as a young lad decide you wanted to do what you have done?

Bob Judson: Yeah, it's a great question. I have a very military family. My father was in the air force as a World War Two bomber pilot. He sadly died when I was very young, but I think that, that influence was always there in the background. I actually was somewhat the black sheep of the family in the sense that the majority of them were army.

And I said no, I want to join the air force, which is a decision I've never regretted. And I had two uncles in the army. My mother indeed was in the army very proudly marched on Queen Elizabeth's coronation back in 1953. And yeah, every time that used to come on TV, she'd say, there's me, and she'd point herself out.

So that was a big influence. No doubt about it. And I actually loved. The kind of whole lifestyle element of it. I was in the combined cadet force at school and the scouts before that. I sort of the outdoor element, the leadership element, I suppose right from the beginning.

I enjoyed, I liked the kind of technical challenge when I went into the flying world, obviously as an Air Force pilot. It was just one of those things that I found challenging at the beginning, but very rewarding through career. And I'm in an incredibly fortunate position that I spent a very long time doing it and I never had a single job which I ultimately didn't enjoy.

Clearly there were ups and downs, there were the highs and lows, but every single role, and bear in mind we change roles every two or three years in that world. Every single role, actually, I would come out of it saying, you know what, I really enjoyed doing that. So it was lovely to be in that position.

And obviously I did some amazing things. I went to some amazing places, not all of them I'd want to go back to as a tourist destination, but it was incredible in terms of an experience and giving you a set of life experiences and comparisons and testing your own value set and giving you some focus that I think was incredibly valuable and not least actually just very early on.

It was the independence that it gave me. Having grown up with just my mom at home and I'm an only child, she worked really hard to get me the right opportunities to even get into the Air Force and get through school and all those sorts of things. And I'm immensely grateful to her for all that she did for that.

But then I was ready to jump ship and go and do my own thing. And the military allowed me to do that. So it was wonderful.

Anni Townend: It's a lovely example. Your mom is a lovely example of encouraging and enabling you to find your passion and being right behind you and believing in you, Bob along the way. 

Bob Judson: Oh, yeah. And the level of sacrifice for her. Yeah, she sacrificed an awful lot in terms of, she was a single mom in the 60s.

That was a pretty tough thing to be, I think, and had to build her own business. She bred dogs, she run a dog boarding kennels. I spent most of my formative years working in the kennels or helping her at dog shows and going around the country whenever I wasn't in school doing things.

But when I look back on it, a lot of it was, she firmly worked to make sure that I had every advantage she could possibly give me. And that was wonderful. You can't do better than that. And that's, it's amazing. I think as a parent, that was a wonderful thing for her to do.

Anni Townend: It's a real leadership role. I think you've described there in your mother of the way in which she parented you, believed in you, encouraged you, supported you, and enabled you to literally fly free and do what you wanted to do.  What about you, Susie? 

Susie Ballentyne: As a parent myself, I'm reflecting on my parents.

I've learned so much about leadership through looking in both directions. My mum worked full time, and my dad as well and the way that they parented my brother and I was, many of the strengths and many of the qualities were about almost more like stewardship, and we have a great phrase that we now use with our children, which is, we'll hold the ladder, you climb.

And I think, I love that expression because, and it's a bit like going back to the scaffolding analogy with leaders, it's about having putting the strength of the things in place you need, but allowing people to work out how to climb it, or which way they climb, or which direction, and I was very lucky in that my parents would guide us to what would be an aspiration, study hard, or, enjoy school, both my parents went to university, but there was never an expectation that you would go to university, you would study, you'd be a success.

There was always the focus on living a good life and living a life that is beyond you as an individual about your collective contribution. So I grew up with very public sector minded parents, teachers, doctors and brother in the armed forces. And it was about a sense of collective service and what you contribute to the group and how you pull together to make things happen, and there's no one big winner.

There's no one big sort of dictator or authoritarian personality. Things were discussed at the dinner table. We weren't told. We were advised. We were guided. But we were never, you must, we were never grounded. We were pretty good kids, I'd say. And I'd like to think I try and do that with my children as well, which is less dictatorial, more partnering than parenting in a sort of stricter sense.

When I've been a leader or a team leader myself, I've tried to develop partnerships and help guide people, but allow them to find their own direction and do it in a way that works for them. So my style would be very different from somebody else. We've got an agreement on what we're trying to achieve, but you find the pathway towards it.

And I do that as a parent now with the children, which is trying not to impose what I want to do, but say, listen, actively. Be curious. Don't judge. They're all very similar things with leadership and, just give people the opportunity. Open doors, hold ladders, feed them, clothe them, give them opportunities.

And, exactly as Bob was saying about his mom, Give people opportunities to shine. They might not always take it, but your responsibility is to at least provide the waypoints in the direction of a good life. And I think there's so much commonality there between leadership and parenting.

But maybe you should ask my kids whether it works. 

Bob Judson: Yeah, just to add one of the things we talked in the military about was a thing called mission command, where you tell people what to do, not how to do it. Essentially, this is the task.

This is what I want you to deliver. And you set the boundaries, you give them a box, if you like, to work within. And depending on how much confidence and trust you have in them and having the skills they've got and the experience they've got, it depends on how big that box is, and that's the rule set, if you like, that if they want to operate outside that, they need to come back to you and ask for a further box expansion and or upskill themselves to be able to do that.

And it was a great way of empowering people to do stuff really effectively, because what you'd find is you get amazing results doing that if you're not necessarily trying to control every detail of what's being done and you're not trying to stamp your own personal approach onto everything that makes a huge difference.

Anni Townend: and together you partner to create Leading 4 Life and as we come to the close of the conversation I'm curious to hear more about Leading 4 Life and what that's all about. 

Bob Judson: It was a common sense of there's some stuff we can do together, some ideas and themes that we can build on focusing around individuals and teams.

And trying very hard to just share some of that experience and bring encouragement to leaders, to give them confidence that there are people out there that can help them. We talked about mentoring and coaching earlier on. It's a little bit of that.

It's providing some almost sideline mentoring, just providing advice and experience and thoughts to people when I work with them. Some of the time it's one to one coaching. Some of the time it's definitely workshops with groups of people.

I do a lot of work with these days with Deloitte University having been formerly at Deloitte. And it's wonderful to work with, the senior managers and their directors who are all very ambitious, very capable individuals who want some further thoughts and ideas and experiences.

And I've got some thoughts about how I'm going to do this myself, but how can I actually adapt that? How can I learn from other people? And that's great fun to do. 

I think the opportunity to bring the two of us together on occasion, and a lot of the time it's not been, together, we do stuff independently is really useful because just getting ideas off Susie and some of the academic experience that she brings into this is hugely helpful.

Susie Ballentyne: Yeah, it's very complimentary. I traditionally have been much more focused on public sector and I'm very busy doing a lot of work with the FCDO at the moment and finishing my PhD, which should be done in a few weeks. And Bob brings the credibility of having been leading teams and a high performer and leading high performance teams in really quite demanding environments, really unusual and not many people will have been in those particular places dealing with the high level, high risk situations he's been in. 

So I have the privilege of being able to bounce what might be more theoretical or academic things and ideas or things I've witnessed through my own work against Bob and hear his take on it and get him to reality check the science a bit. So you've got this blend of, what research might tell us coupled with this is what it's like when you live it.

This is the experience. And I think that works so well. And I think. The role of social psychology in that and specifically around identity leadership has has the opportunity to add something quite different to our understanding of what leadership and followership means. And I'm really keen to translate that out of the world of academia and into the everyday lived experiences of organizations.

And I think that's where Bob and I come together because that's our kind of joint goal. We've got a vision for it and we've got a kind of rigorous empirical method for it. And we combine the two together. 

Bob Judson: Yeah, I think when you can bring real life examples to bear, it makes a huge difference as well.

Anni Townend: Susie, what's the title of your PhD?

Susie Ballentyne: The title is Identities in Exile, Social Identity Change and the Experience of Forced Migration. I got to work with lots of Syrian and Ukrainian force migrants who had you know been forced to flee because of conflict and look at how social identity supports or undermines their ability to cope and be resilient as they come to third countries.

So it's been really interesting and it has deepened my interest in social identity change. So I was very fortunate to have Professor John Drury at the University of Sussex as my supervisor who has got me through and has been a wonderful scaffold. He's definitely held the ladder as I've climbed, so I've got a lot to be thankful for there.

Anni Townend: Thank you. Wonderful. I look forward to reading that Susie and to talking more with you as well about it. As we draw our conversation today to a close, what are your three or four Key encouragements to leaders who have been listening to your conversation and learning from all that you've shared and the insights and wisdom.

Bob Judson: Yeah, it's a great way to finish. And I think there are a couple I'll start with, I think always remember that others have been there before you very few, if any challenges are genuinely new or unique and people will always be prepared to help you and you need to be your best self. And you can be your best self if you seek the right support. 

And then the second one I'd offer is that I think one of the key challenges is letting go of tasks that can be done by the team, if you free up time to focus on the larger issues for you, then actually you empower the team, if you delegate well, you build trust and capability in them, they'll really appreciate that as they develop themselves.

Susie Ballentyne: I think fundamentally the encouragement is to remember that as a leader, your relationships are you, they're not an additional thing to you, you are part and parcel of that interaction. Leadership is never done in isolation and it involves those interactions. And so making time to focus on the people around you and finding that collective ambition and living it and breathing life into it every day through how you interact with one another will be the measure of your success.

Anni Townend: Wonderful. What a terrific note to end on. For people who would like to find out more about the work you do and to find out more about Leading 4 Life. What's the best way of contacting you, staying in touch with you, of partnering with you and indeed of working with you both.

Bob Judson: We're both on LinkedIn. That's always a good startup for these days. And you'll find a lot more about us. I think if you look there we do have a website which if you look up Leading 4 Life.

And connect also to the podcast. 'cause I run a podcast as well as you mentioned at the front of this Anni. And that's Leading 4 Life Stories, which is a little bit of personal stuff for me, but also it's a lot of interviews with other leaders and getting experiences from them. Those are all areas I think that are potentially useful.

Anni Townend: Wonderful. Thank you both so much for this conversation. Anything you would like to add Susie?

Susie Ballentyne: No, I think LinkedIn is definitely the best way. Or there's a bit more information about me if you go to suzyballentine.com, it's there's a bit more about my background and there as well.

Anni Townend: Thank you both. Thank you for all your insights, wisdom and sharing so openly your experiences of what brought you together, but also what keeps you together of your relationship, that leadership truly does happen inside of relationship. Thank you for sharing how people can get in touch with you and for listeners who would like to listen to Bob's podcast, do go to his website, for listeners who'd like to listen to more of my podcast episodes, do go to my website, annitownend.com.  

A huge thank you not only to Susie and Bob, but also to my marketing team, Conscious Marketing Group, and to Coco O'Brien, who produces the podcasts and helps me with it, including having composed the intro and outro music. To contact me do go to my website and or email me, anni@annitownend.com.

I look forward to connecting with you. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Susie. Thank you, Bob. 

Bob Judson: Thank you. 

Susie Ballentyne: Thanks for the conversation.