Tag: D&I

Time To Talk Day – my “little episode”

~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

I’d been feeling a bit lost for a few weeks. Maybe a few months even, I’m not too sure. A while, anyway. Not completely without purpose, but lacking a little… something. “Not feeling it” as they say. It’d been a time of introspection, not all of it particularly useful, coupled with a fair bit of time wishing I weren’t so introspective. It can all get quite meta when I’m thinking about how I feel. And how I feel about how I feel. You get the idea.

I get like that sometimes. It’s kind of exhausting, to be honest. I get into my own head and get stuck there for a bit. Outwardly I’m fine – perhaps a little skittish or distracted – but inside I’m spinning.

When I’ve been like this in the past, there’s always the internal monologue that just says I need to snap out of it. To follow the good old masculine trope and for fuck’s sake just MAN UP.

But of course, I know that bit of me doesn’t solve anything. Rejecting how I’m feeling, pretending it’s not real, or (even worse) beating myself up for even having these silly, selfish, weak things called emotions is a road I’ve been down before, and it’s always ended up at a dead end. [If you’re interested in one of those roads – perhaps the first dead end I found, actually – then you can find my story about my anxiety here.]

Unfortunately knowing all this in your more calm and more rational moments doesn’t necessarily help when you’re in the middle of it, because when you’re in the middle of the forest you can’t see the wood for the trees. And I was right in the middle of the forest.

Allow me to explain…

A long time ago I decided that if I was going to be leading people, in any way, big or small, I’d do that in a way that felt genuine and authentic to me. I’ve always known that the best way to bring people together was to try to connect with them – and to connect them to each other – with shared passion and values and purpose and all that good stuff. I don’t need to tell you that you only build trust through vulnerability, and that’s what I’ve done, for years.

This philosophy requires me to be emotionally open, genuinely caring, and empathetic not just to the individuals but to the group that individual is a part of too. If I’m not all of those things, all the time, then the connection doesn’t work in the same way. I’ve doubled down on vulnerability, time and again, because that’s what I believe in. There’s no question that it’s made my working life richer than I could have hoped for, but I can’t pretend there aren’t times when I’ve wished I could shut off the emotional side because it does take a hell of a lot of energy. You can’t reverse back out once you’ve started with an open, honest, vulnerable relationship because if you were to do so, the trust you’d built up would break into a thousand pieces, never to be put together in quite the same way again. Once you’re in, you’re in. And I’ve always been all in.

The result of that can be neatly summed up by this little gem from the visual artist Adam JK (you can learn more about him here if you like), who put it thus:

And that, mes amis, is the life of an ‘all-in’ leader, especially in the strange razor-edge world of running an advertising agency, where every success means people are working too hard and burning out and freaking out and you can see that they’re struggling and you wish you could do something… and every little failure means you might have to send someone home without a job. Someone you know, and care about. Someone you really, really like. Whose family you’ve met.

It’s always been personal for me. And the last couple of years only heightened that.

Authentic, vulnerable leadership is hard at the best of times, but leading through two years of global pandemic, where people’s expectations of their employer changed overnight and never changed back, has taken its toll on leaders the world over. I’m no exception to that. Overnight I felt responsible not just for the agency I run or the jobs of the people who work in that agency, but for the people themselves, too. We were the de facto community that people were missing. Work was, for many, the only human contact people had.

And so through two years of sustained growth in lockdown, I knew people were allowing their commute time to be subsumed by work, and working longer hours than ever. To help with that we were trying to hire people so quickly that there was no way we could be doing a decent job of embedding them into the group and setting them up for success. I could feel that we were cashing in all the “emotional currency” we’d been banking through the previous years.

Emotional currency is an idea I’ve talked about for a good few years now, and it’s simple enough – when things are going well and work feels good and morale is good and the mood is good then all that good stuff gets banked in people’s minds but more importantly in their hearts. The more the good continues, the more you bank. And then when things aren’t so good for a while for whatever reason, you have some good in the collective emotional bank which means you get some leeway – some time to get things good again. But here’s the rub – it’s not fair. You might have two years of good in the bank, but once you start withdrawing it’ll be gone in six months.

I could feel that the bank was getting empty. Not in the red, but not snow angels in the banknotes either.

And then as the shared experience of lockdown and Covid became smaller in the rearview mirror, everything happened. All at once.

Work got messy. The razor edge was sharp and painful. We were under pressure and I was out on a limb, fighting for what I thought was the right thing to do time and time again, holding on so tight that I couldn’t release, and in my own head so much that I started to question my instincts on things. And I’ve always trusted my instincts. Always.

Life got messy. An old friend took his own life, which rocked me in ways I still don’t really understand. Family members were in and out of hospital for operations which of course were always going to be fine but of course there’s always that bit of your mind which likes fucking with you in the middle of the night because WHAT IF..?

My head got messy. Losing sleep. Losing perspective. Losing myself.

It all came to a head on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday morning at the end of June. My wife told me that she was going away with my sons for a few days in the summer holidays and I’d be at home for about 10 days on my own. My reaction wasn’t “sounds great, I’ll sit around eating pizza in my pants and get the lads round to play poker”. It was “I’ll go fucking crazy here on my own”.

The way I’ve described it since is by using the analogy of holding a mental tray. You’ve always got a decent amount of stuff on your personal tray, and most of it you put on there yourself so it’s all balanced in a way that you can handle. But if you keep on putting more and more things on it, then eventually you’re going to struggle. And then if other people stick some stuff on it as well, and aren’t as careful balancing…

I just about managed to put the tray down before I dropped it. Just.

I spoke to my team at work and agreed that I’d take some time off in the summer.

Which I did. A month away. Time to get some more stuff in my toolbox. Started some coaching and some yoga and meditation. Started going to the gym, too.

I can’t say the return to work was gentle, though. If anything it was worse than before the break: intense and toxic and kind of disgusting really. If you ever want a case study on how not to handle the return to work of a leader who’s been suffering with their mental health, give me a shout.

When, like me, you’ve spent your entire adult life ‘showing up’ as self-confident and full of energy, it’s actually pretty easy to fake it. To turn it on and turn up and get through and get out. So I tried to be what I thought people needed me to be. No one needs a leader who can’t trust his instincts. Who can’t trust himself at all, really. I was so wrapped up in my own stuff that I couldn’t really be the support that people needed, but I couldn’t tell them either because that would be putting more on them and they were already covering for me. I thought I was doing okay because the time off had given me a chance to get my nose just above the flood waters so I could breathe, but I was still only one slip from going under again.

I had a panic attack one morning before going into the office. I called my wife and she talked me down and I went into M&S and got some fruit and went into our offices and up in the lift and sat down and didn’t say a word about it to anyone.

I couldn’t take more time away because people needed me. Or at least that’s what I thought. But looking back, I wasn’t completely there anyway. By the time I started getting cluster headaches [read about the delight of those here if you fancy it. TLDR – they are horrible] towards the end of the year I was just limping towards the alluring finish line where 2022 would finally be consigned to history as the shittiest year of my life. Beating the year my mum died takes some doing.

BUT…

Lovely word, right? “But” makes everything that comes before it irrelevant. It turns the story.

But that was last year.

Yeah, I know that nothing magical actually happens at the end of December 31st, and that the whole idea of a “New Year” is just yet another construct that we’ve created – a story we’ve all decided to believe. But I needed to go with the romance of a new beginning. The turning of a page.

And as I sit here today, I do feel like I’ve turned the page.

Over the last six months since what I’ve euphemistically been referring to as my “little episode”, I’ve put a lot of time and energy into getting more things in my self-care toolbox that I can pick out as and when I need them. I’ve been going to the gym with a couple of friends who also could do with reshaping the dad bod [which considering I’ve been “Gym Free Since ’93” is quite a shift for me]. I’ve been doing a 1-2-1 yoga class every week since July. I’ve had some professional coaching which has helped me to get a better sense of my own values and what I need to be fulfilled. I’ve had a sprinkling of therapy along the way. Then just before the break in December, I learnt to meditate and now I’m doing that once or twice every day,. Last year I changed my meds and then this year got some advice and changed the dose which has helped. Hell, I even spent last weekend at a yoga retreat where as well as doing more yoga than I’ve ever done I also opened up to a load of complete strangers and chanted around a fire with a couple of shamen women for crying out loud [don’t worry I’m not converting – I just love a fire]. And perhaps above all, I’ve got my wife, and my two boys, and my dog, and the huge oak tree in the woods over the road.

I’m coming into this year feeling more centred and more solid than I have in a long time. Maybe ever.

At the same time, I’m also very conscious that all this is part of a journey and I can’t let myself be either complacent that somehow I’m magically “fixed” or concerned that “it’s only a matter of time before I crash again”. I just have to be whatever I am right now and be okay with that. I’m okay today. Tomorrow is tomorrow.

So why the hell am I telling you all this?

Well, there are a few reasons, actually.

The first one is then when I’m writing this, you’re not here. So I’m kind of talking to myself really – starting with the man in the mirror and asking him to change his ways [yes that is a Michael Jackson lyric – I couldn’t help mysefl and it’s lightened the mood a bit hasn’t it?]. It helps me to organise my thoughts, and as a result it’s kind of cathartic.

I’m also telling you because there’s a massive stigma around talking about mental health, especially in men, and if I can talk about it then at least I’m doing something to break down that stigma in some way. For me it’s just health -I’m not ashamed of my mental health problems any more than I’m ashamed of the fact that I need glasses or got diagnosed with gout at the age of 30 [a family disease for the Bartletts]. I take my pills for my brain at the same time as I take the ones for my liver. I take vitamins too. Sometimes I take something for allergies. It’s all the same. Talking breaks down barriers and stigmas and I have a lot of privileges in life so if I can’t talk openly about all this shit, who can?

If you’re a regular visitor to these pages, you may also have gathered that I’m a talker anyway, so this isn’t new news for a whole load of people. My immediate family know, and some of my extended family do too. A decent amount of the friends I’ve spoken to in the last 6 months know, because it would feel horribly inauthentic if they were to say “how have you been” and I were to say “yeah, fine thanks”, so I’ve tended to ditch the small talk and go for the big talk. And at work, I started off telling my immediate team, then thought it felt right to tell the whole agency about it because it’s real and I want them to know that it’s okay to not be okay. And then somehow I found myself in a really open and honest conversation with the new big boss in New York and I took a punt that he would get it and told him and he did get it and that felt good. So now a lot of people know I guess. Everyone, without exception, was kind and considerate and caring.

And now you know.

Which leads me to the last reason, which is actually all about you, dear reader

You see, the reason I overthink things and then write about it here is so that you can learn from my mistakes and avoid them (whilst, of course, making a whole set of completely different ones). Call it a friendly nudge, or wake-up call, or even a kind of non-specific remote intervention, but if you’re carrying your own tray and you’re wobbling, then please trust me, it’s not just going to magically fix itself. Yes, there may be light at the end of the tunnel but it’s no fun living in a tunnel on your own either and maybe, just maybe, a nudge around TIME TO TALK DAY might be the right time to maybe talk to someone about what you’re going through. It will help, I promise, and they will care, just like you would if the tables were turned. The truth is, they probably know already.

And on this day of all days, if you’re actually doing pretty well, actually, then you can make the world a better place by making a point of being emotionally available for the people around you who seem like they’re probably fine but actually might not be…

The colleague who always seems like they’re a step or two behind where they think they should be.

The family member who’s gone a bit quiet recently.

The friend who hasn’t made it the last few times you all got together.

Maybe they are fine, and you just have a nice chat and a catch-up and perhaps arrange a time to spend a bit of time together because it’s been too long, hasn’t it? But maybe they’re not, and you’re exactly the person they needed to talk to but just didn’t realise it. Either way, you get to talk to someone you care about.

Hey, don’t let me keep you. I’ve got a call to make anyway.

The Four Conversations

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

And so it came pass that on Friday of last week I went to the PM [Pharmaceutical Marketing] Society Awards 2020 – the biggest annual awards show for my bit of the industry, where clients and agencies come together at a posh London hotel, dampen their Dry January, listen to the celeb compère and comedy turn who’ve been booked for the afternoon and then wander round catching up with former colleagues and co-workers. 

And the winner is…

This is an event I’ve been going to for twenty years [more on the seismic generational shift of that in a future blog!], but this is the first time when there’s been an explicit focus in my job, my title and my role, on inclusivity and diversity… and the first time since I’ve been writing this blog and sharing my thoughts out into the world. Perhaps unsurprising then, that all of this became the focus of so many conversations I had in the day.

What was surprising was the kind of conversations – or more accurately, the themes those conversations fell into. Four clear, distinct themes, with four distinct groups.

I’ll call them The Supporter, The Convert, The Cynic, and The Conspirator. Let me introduce you to them… and the four conversations that came with them…

The Supporter Conversation

This was heart-warming. A diverse mix of people – in age, race, background and gender – who were kind enough to tell me that they had seen what I’ve been doing and wanted to offer me their encouragement and support. Some I knew well, some less so. But all passionate and enthusiastic and earnest, and many saying that they had been reading some of this stuff over the last couple of months.

Every time I spoke to a Supporter I had a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation full of determination about the future. Without fail, they made my day better.

The Convert Conversation

Not sure if the nomenclature is quite right, but The Convert is part of a group of people whom I’ve known for a while, since we were in less inclusive, less forward-thinking times and organisations. When we were led by the generation before us, some of whom held beliefs and exhibited behaviours then which would be totally unacceptable and inappropriate now.

The Convert Conversations were about what life used to be like. Men and women, we talked about our past lives with bewilderment really – the stuff we saw or heard but didn’t say anything. About how much we should judge our younger selves for not doing or saying more at the time. How we had grown and learnt and how we would do things now we had the opportunity.

Again, they were good conversations. Mutually supportive and full of care for each other. Full of optimism too about where we’ve come from and where we’re going.

The Cynic Conversation

This one I’ve come across before. Usually male (although in my experience not exclusively), and usually a little older (although again not exclusively), and usually someone I don’t really know that well. Or perhaps thinks they know me better than they actually do…

The Cynic Conversation usually starts with a “I’ve seen you doing all this diversity stuff…?” type of non-question, and from there it develops into them saying how inclusivity is a “very clever move”, or a “good thing to align yourself with”, or good for my “personal brand”. All with a nod and a wink, like getting into this was all part of a career master plan. Perhaps something I’m interested in, but more for self-serving reasons than anything else. Distrustful and disparaging.

This, I find, is the bloody difficult part of being an “ally” – particularly one who is the “Default Man” (from Grayson Perry’s book I mentioned in a previous blog). Usually it’s people who are from a minority group who are interested in minority groups, right? So there must be an angle I’m working… an ulterior motive. Right?

I know this is a conversation that’s going nowhere because it’s not for me to convert The Cynic. But it is an opportunity for me to reaffirm my beliefs. I know why I’m passionate about this – personally and for my agency – and inclusive, authentic and vulnerable leadership is where I’m going anyway.

The Co-Conspirator Conversation

The Conspirator (or to be precise, The Mistaken Would-Be Co-Conspirator) exclusively male, exclusively white, usually a little older (but not necessarily), usually someone I used to work with in some capacity and who (usually a few of drinks in, when the alcohol has thinned the blood just enough) feel they can put a sweaty arm round the neck, pull me in and say something like:

“What’s all this diversity crap about? What a load of old bollocks eh? I suppose we all have to do it now don’t we? But bloody hell, everyone’s a minority nowadays aren’t they – except us white middle-aged men?! Can’t say anything to anyone now with all this political correctness stuff – I guess you haven’t got a choice eh? But we know what’s really important, don’t we? Anyway see you later yeah?”

Like I’m going to agree. Agree that it’s all just a show. That I’m playing the game whilst thinking the opposite. I mean, who the hell would do that?

And even if they did, would they write a bloody blog about it every week to double down on the deception??

I never say anything in this one. I’m not there as part of a conversation, I’m there as a leaning post. I’m not sure anything I could say would make a blind bit of difference. Perhaps in time I’ll find the right words, but right now all I’ve got is “why don’t you just fuck off?” and I’m not sure that level of confrontation is a good look in front of the whole industry. So I just wait for the end, and let them barrel off somewhere else.

It’s a mixed bag, I think you’ll agree! 

From the life-affirming and motivating, the forward-looking and hopeful to the saddening and infuriating, the downright annoying and prickly. The whole spectrum of ideas in one afternoon, in a posh hotel somewhere in London.

But do you want to know the good part?

There were a hell of a lot more Supporters and Converts than anything else. Only a couple of Cynics, and about the same of Conspirator. Much more positive energy than anything else. And that wouldn’t have been the case even three years ago, let alone twenty.

Yes, we are moving forward. Yes there’s a long way to go on all this, and yes, sometimes it feels like things are moving glacially slowly. But we are moving forward.

Thanks for reading. Let’s crack on shall we?

The more you know…

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Diversity. Inclusivity. Intersectionality. So much to get your head round (especially from the perspective of being The Man – see previous blog), and just when you think you’ve got your head round one bit you realise that while you were playing catch up everything wasn’t just standing still waiting for you and now the conversation has already moved on; the language is different.

Like walking up a mountain and thinking that at long last you’re reaching the summit only to see even higher hazy hilltops climbing into the clouds, there’s a distinct sense that the more you know, the more you realise how little you know.

Weirdly it can sometimes actually feel quite ex-clusive. Especially when you’re really trying to do and say the right thing: both because it’s important to say the right thing for all the good reasons and because you want to show you’re someone who knows what the right thing is to say.

And as I’ve got deeper and deeper into a world of inclusivity, I’ve found that there are things that only D&I ‘novices’ say, which the vanguard might even scoff at. You quite often hear something along the lines of “it’s not about concept X anymore, it’s all about concept Y” – and I’m pretty much always thinking “I’ve only just worked out what I think about concept X, and I’ve never even heard of concept Y”.

As an example, I always thought that getting people to understand their own biases seemed like a good thing, but increasingly I find myself in conversations where the ubiquitous “unconscious bias training” is derided for being “Diversity 101” – the thing that corporations do to say they’ve done something. Or in the (approximate!) words of Ruth Hunt, erstwhile CEO of Stonewall, it’s where people can realise they’re a little bit racist but it’s not their fault…

Not everyone would agree with that of course, but when you haven’t quite worked out what you think about it yet it’s easy to feel… well, uneasy. Like you should know what you think, about everything, even if it’s constantly metamorphosing into the next thing…

And of course the discourse around Diversity & Inclusion isn’t standing still either.

Diversity is the thing we all understand, but that’s just facts and numbers – how diverse an organisation is can be measured today. And when it’s Diversity 101, all too often it’s just visual. We’ve all seen diversity used tokenistically in corporate communications (if you didn’t last time, check out Diverse-ish – it really sums this up perfectly).

Inclusivity is more forward-looking: a mindset, a set of choices and decisions and associated actions and behaviours. Because of that increasingly you can start to see the initials D&I flip places to I&D, where a focus on building an inclusive culture comes first so that the diversity that it drives has a chance to thrive the right environment.

But even with the seismic shift from D&I to I&D (so innovative Phil, you must be very proud on how you picked up on that one) I’m still constantly feeling that I’m behind the curve. Or certainly a curve.

It’s not a comfortable feeling really. Perhaps if I were a different person it might be too uncomfortable – to constantly being shown my own ignorance; constantly learning more about how little I know. Constantly seeing another peak loom into view…

What I have learnt, is actually what keeps me climbing.

I’ve learnt that everyone is on their own journey or understanding. Some are a little further on, have read a little more or had to challenge their initial thinking a little more deeply, but nobody is at the summit, looking down.

From that point it becomes clear that it’s really about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Because knowledge is less important than inquisitiveness; pretending you’ve considered all the possible angles and thus have all the answers is less authentic than discussing your ignorance and asking all the searching questions.

And authenticity is everything.

Who am I to argue?

And so it turns out knowing nothing is the first step in any journey of discovery.

Who knew?

Hold the line – a message for the Inclusivity Warriors on their knees

~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

There are people you meet by involving yourself in D&I whom you wouldn’t necessarily meet otherwise. Interesting people (almost without exception): passionate, thoughtful.  Often kind and generous with their input, advice and time. People who are determined and resourceful, strong and inspiring.

Most of them do it in their spare time. I say “spare”. They do it in their own time. On top of the day job.

But when I’ve spoken to some of those same people recently, I’ve noticed that there are other adjectives that I could use which I hadn’t seen before.

Dejected.

Disillusioned.

Exhausted.

“It feels like I’m getting nowhere”

“I’m just so tired of having the same conversation over and over”

“I can’t do this on my own”

“I’m not sure any of this is making any difference”

I know how they feel. Because I’ve felt the same recently as well. Too many to-do-lists where the urgent pushes the important to the bottom. Too many Too many conversations where people are agreeing because they feel they have to, not because they actually, truly believe what I’m saying. Too little actually changing.

In a twisted way I think it might have been easier before #MeToo, when lazy sexism (or any -ism you care to mention) just got blurted out by thoughtless idiots and was there, right in the open, to be challenged and argued. But only the most aggressive provocateur or mindless bigot (or arrogant, power-crazed sociopath like you-know-who) would blurt it out now. And as a life rule I try to make a point of avoiding people like that.

And now I’m constantly wondering if I’m having a conversation with someone who gets where I’m coming from, or someone who knows they have to pretend to.

There are tell-tale signs of course. Any mention that their organisation is fulfilling all legal requirements, or that they’re “looking into D&I really carefully”. Anyone who talks about the ‘unconscious bias training’ that everyone had to do… as though understanding bias actually changes anything…

If you haven’t seen the amazing “Diverseish” work done by some of my colleagues at AMVBBDO for #Valuable500 then check it out below – it’s a demonstration of the conversations across D&I that we’re having all the time…

And we’re all impatient. For others to see the world the way we see the world. When you have conviction in what you’re doing it’s incredibly difficult to see the other person’s world – it’s like having to explain to someone why you believe the grass is green or the sky is blue. You run out of words. Out of energy.

So what words do I have for those people who feel like they’re fighting a losing battle. Good people feeling isolated and small, confidence rocked, idealism shot to shit?

I say this…

Hold the line.

Hold the line and don’t take a single step back.  And know that I am here, alongside you. Arms locked, standing strong. We are all locked together, across geographies and oceans, and our strength comes from one another because in spirit we are as one.

Don’t doubt for a single second that you are making a difference, and even if you have to change the world one person at a time then every single second to that end will be a second well spent.

Listen, I know nothing will change overnight, but believe me, it’s changing. And we’re on the right side of that change, right now.

No Smoking

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

This is the time of year when dusty decorations are being eagerly extricated from a cupboard, and suddenly tinsel and sleigh bells take their short-lived but disproportionate place in all our lives.

It’s also the time when the season of office parties deliberately blur the line between work and leisure, with games and organised fun and the drinking that goes with it can blur judgement and dissolve inhibitions. It’s the inhibitions bit that makes me a bit uncomfortable.

When I was younger I worked somewhere where there was a senior man who was… you know… a bit ‘handsy’. The young women in the office brushed it off, and just made sure they didn’t find themselves passing on the stairs at the office party or (God forbid) sharing a taxi with him.

There were always stories about someone who’d seen something or spoken to someone, and you know, there’s no smoke without fire, right? But what could I do? He was much more senior than me and it seemed like ‘the girls’ were handling it. We even joked about it a bit at the time.

We don’t joke about it now.

Now, when I meet with people I worked with back then, we feel embarrassed – guilty even – that we didn’t speak up, challenge, DO something. 

Because we all left eventually and went our separate ways, but I’m damn sure this guy carried on doing exactly the same thing for years and years and years. God knows how many young women who added a #MeToo to their social feed a couple of years back, as a small fuck you to the man that made them feel uncomfortable and unsafe at work.

Today it would all be different. In today’s world he probably wouldn’t dare do it in the first place, but if he did then the young women involved would (I hope) feel more empowered to speak up.

And I know that I would stand up to him too – forget the seniority, you’re out of line and I’m not going to stand by and pretend the talk is just talk. Because you can get smoke without fire, but not this much smoke.

I can’t beat myself up for not doing then what I’d do now. I wasn’t the man then that I am today, and I think if I met my younger self I’d probably think he was a bit of a dickhead for various reasons that have nothing to do with this. But he didn’t know what I know.

What I can do is encourage you not to ignore that tell tale whiff of smoke in the air – in a meeting room, a lift, a conversation. Because if there is just a little smoke, then maybe you should break the glass and press the red button just in case.

Better a false alarm than someone getting burnt.