This week on the UK Psych Health & Safety podcast, Sheila Lord is joined by Derek Mowbray, Director at The Management Advisory Service (MAS), and a charted psychologist who is passionate about building and sustaining positive work cultures. They are discussing how leaders and managers can build and sustain cultures and exhibit behaviours that lead to trust, commitment and engagement, and as a consequence produce high-level performance in individuals and their organisations.
Having a high-performing workplace is every organisation’s dream. Both managers and employees in any organisation have a responsibility to achieve this.
This week on the UK Psych Health & Safety podcast, we are joined by Derek Mowbray; Director, The Management Advisory Service (MAS), and a charted psychologist who is passionate about building and sustaining positive work cultures to discuss how to achieve a high performing workplace by building and sustaining cultures which drive toward trust, commitment and engagement from the staff.
Throughout the episode, we dive into career background of Derek, preventing stress, managing as a leader, working collaboratively, and more.
Starting the conversation, Derek shares about his professional career starting as an assistant clinical psychologist for a year, then the NHS graduate National Training Scheme for service managers, and then he dives into what made him interested in the area of the impact that the leaders have on followers and how it affects the performance in an organisation.
One of the biggest mistakes that organisations make is hiring managers instead of leaders.
Organisations need managers who are leaders if they want to make a workplace without stress. According to Derek, you need to address the challenges before they become a huge problem within the organisation, and also, the organisations need to hire people who would like to see the employees develop, grow, and thrive.
As a manager, what you do on a daily basis and what you are expected to do is two different things.
Most organisations have failed to understand this difference between them, according to Derek. As both a leader and a manager, you need to help the employees believe that they are a part of every single success that the organisation achieved, and if you can treat your people as equals with understanding and engagement, you are in business.
In the modern hybrid work culture, people are used to working from home rather than being physically present at the workplace.
Derek dives into two different sides of this hybrid culture; figuring out adapting to the hybrid work culture, which has a negative perspective because when people are working from home, there are a lot of things they are missing like educational training, brainstorming, and developing strategy and talking to people in a more humanistic way in Zoom which has a positive perspective where people are genuinely interested in someone’s wellbeing.
Wrapping up the conversation, Derek shares a piece of advice to all the business leaders out there, saying that if the workforce isn’t functioning as it should, it’s not only an underperformance but also will eventually lead to a huge loss of vibrancy, innovation, thinking and thriving in the organisation.
[02.28] Background – Derek dives us into how he started his career as an assistant clinical psychologist and what made him focus on the area of leaders and the impact of leaders in organisations.
[07.44] Prevention of stress – Derek shares what causes stress in the workplace and what kind of strategies an organisation can do to get rid of it.
[12.55] The manager as a leader – The workforce is in perfect order; knowing where it’s going and knowing how to get there are the things that managers need to ensure as a leader.
[18.27] Key triggers – The principle of sharing responsibility for future success among the entire workforce, which is difficult to achieve, is one of the key triggers of a framework that Derek has built to help organisations to transform leaders.
[26.38] Trends – Derek dives into two sides of the hybrid working culture at present in organisations.
[32.53] Working collaboratively – Leaders need to get rid of potential adversities and listen to employees about anything they have to talk about can lead to great success in any organisation, says Derek.
[37.06] ISO 45,003 framework – A document that gives guidelines to manage psychological risks within an organisation and enables the prevention of any kind of work-related injuries or illnesses of the employees to build wellbeing at the workplace.
Resources
https://www.linkedin.com/in/professorderekmowbray/?originalSubdomain=uk
https://twitter.com/derek_mowbray
Quotes
‘’ The thing about leaders and leadership is that they deal with uncertainty. Strategies are uncertain. Directions of travel for organizations are uncertain. And the biggest uncertainty factor is the workforce’’.
‘’That’s critical in the role of the leaders to ensure that their workforce is in perfect working order, knows where it’s going, and knows how to get there’’.
‘’ ‘’We need to shift the ask to have people who take the lead to think that every single human being that works in that organization is of equal value to themselves to the success of the organization. And to try and encourage each leader to understand that the combined intelligence of that workforce is far greater than the combined intelligence of its leaders’’.