Wellbeing and Workplace Culture with Michael Matania, CEO Mycelium - OrgDev Episode 28

In our latest OrgDev podcast episode, we explore the profound systemic approach to wellbeing advocated by Michael Matania, CEO of Mycelium. Unlike conventional initiatives that often pay lip service to wellbeing, Mycelium focuses on fostering sustainable performance through comprehensive, culturally embedded strategies. 

Michael’s journey is particularly compelling—having overcome PTSD, addiction, and psychosis, he brings a deeply personal and transformative perspective to his work. Michael’s experiences and insights challenge traditional resilience and leadership paradigms, advocating for a holistic view that integrates individual strengths with supportive systemic frameworks

Michael Matania, CEO, Mycelium
  / michael-matania-65559061 

You can follow Michael's work, contact him, book a course or sign him as a keynote speaker here:: https://myceliumgroup.co/

Michael Matania is the visionary founder and CEO of Mycelium, a pioneering organization at the forefront of transforming wellbeing in the workplace. Mycelium is renowned for its innovative approaches to tackling burnout, building resilience, and reshaping workplace culture, working with esteemed clients such as Google, Sky, and the BBC.

With a passion for mental wellbeing and a commitment to innovation, Michael continues to lead Mycelium in setting new standards for organisational health and employee wellbeing.

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About Us

We’re Dani and Garin – Organisation Development (OD) practitioners who help leaders and people professionals tackle the messiness of organisational life. We focus on building leadership capability, strengthening team effectiveness, and designing practical, systemic development programmes that help you deliver on your team and organisational goals. We also offer coaching to support individual growth and change.

Find out more at www.distinction.live

We'd love to connect with you on Linked In:
linkedin.com/in/danibacon478
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Transcript

Transcript:
(00:00) hi and welcome to the org Dev podcast so how can you take a systemic approach to well-being your organization and what does that look like and what are some of the challenges with traditional approaches to well-being initiatives well today we're absolutely delighted to be meeting a Pioneer who is challenging the way we approach resilience leadership and organization culture within organizations we're delighted to welcome Michael matania he's CEO of melium now he doesn't call himself an OD practitioner but Danny and I have
(00:29) officially named one haven't we Danny yeah we have because he sees organizations in a systemic way and not just that but he really approaches his work and The Human Condition seeing it in a systemic way as well so he describes himself as a survivor of PTSD addiction and psychosis and he's used that to actually guide the work that he does myum are an organization that call themselves the future of well-being pioneers and it's a well- earned title in any previous careers he's a previous roles co-creating mind kit the world's
(00:59) biggest peer-led mentor resilience program he established the workplace mental health Champions Professional Network and for time to change the UK's biggest National mental health campaign and he's also worked extensively with organizations across the world including Google Facebook BBC Sky British Red Cross and many others now Danny you actually met Michael in 2018 didn't you I did yes was a a long while ago he he made a a very generous offer on LinkedIn to come in and deliver a lunchtime talk of part of mental health awareness week
(01:29) I think so I reached out to him he came in delivered a fantastic talk for the investors in people team and uh We've stayed connected ever since you guys you guys were compelled all the way through weren't you absolutely yeah got such good feedback when he came in people were just transfixed um so yeah brilliant so he's dedicated his life to sharing what he's discovered through his recovery with others as well and not only that fun fact he actually plays the banjo too so I thought we'd share that with
(01:56) Michael to see what a rounded person you are as well brilliant well welcome Michael thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me it's lovely to be here so it's lovely to have you with us Michael so just to kick off just tell us a bit about your role what you do and what melium does so at the center of it melum helps organizations create cultures of what we call sustainable performance and we do this through upskilling and reskilling their people and we do that through primarily talks workshops durational programs and
(02:30) Consulting basically acting as a thinking partner strategic advisor and my role within that whole piece tends to revolve around curriculum development been my life learning and creating our programs talks we very very rarely do things off the shelf we have a few core models and Frameworks that we work with but generally we try and be as responsive to organizations as possible because mycelium as an organism never looks the same way twice it grows to take the shape of whatever environment you drop it into and that's kind of how
(03:08) we work and so for those who don't know what mycelium is mycelium is a it's a Subterranean fungus that knits forests together by connecting their root systems and what it does is enables trees to pass each other information and nutrients and it's basically transforming human understanding of how forests work and that's essentially what we do we provide the invisible infrastructure required for individuals and teams to perform through periods of change usually what happens during big times of change is that we focus on the
(03:45) visible we look at the technology we look at the processes Etc but actually we're not looking at the things that we can't see and so it's easy to ignore and we can pretend it's not there so what we're trying to do is foreground this piece so that we can bring it into awareness of leaders when they're undergoing these periods of change and navigating the uncertainty and the volatility that is inherent to even the most ordinary organizational life wow that's fascinating and that's a really
(04:13) interesting way of looking at organizations isn't it and it's a little bit of a challenge to the norm how did that come about for you what was that what was your theory of change how did it come around we arrived at melium as a metaphor for a practice of trial and error so the company was initially called tough cookie and we were focused on human resilience and essentially we wanted to understand what does it take to create true human resilience and so we were researching and developing training and Consulting around this area
(04:42) and the more you nerd out on this and the more you deep dive into individual resilience the more you actually come up against the limitations of individual resilience because we're intimately bound to the people around us and the systems with which we're embedded in and so the more work we were doing with people we were equipping them with all of these new behaviors and we were supporting them to embed these behaviors and go on these Behavior change Journeys but as we examine the scaffolding that's
(05:13) required it's like no matter what scaffolding you put in around an individual unless you're looking at the system unless they're in an environment where they're being supported to embed those new behaviors it's really hard for them to sustain them in the long term it's like trying to give up carbs in January and then being at a banquet or a wedding right and there's all of these sausage rolls and everything there it's just much easier to give up carbs when you're at home than when you're at a
(05:39) wedding it's much easier to give up drink when you're in a an environment surrounded by lots of recovered alcoholics enjoying a sober night at a restaurant rather than being at a pub with all of your mates whose bonding rituals revolve around getting drunk just much harder to be sober in that environment and so for whatever reason we don't tend to or organizations don't tend to appreciate the role of the environment in the individual's Behavior there seems to be some kind of a block and so that's what at melum we're
(06:14) looking to do is to really look at okay the individual is incredibly important the sovereignty of the individual strengthening the individual in terms of their mindset their inner capacities in terms of how they manage their thoughts their emotions their nervous system how they design their life how they design their workday all of these different pieces but they don't exist in a neutral nebula they also are embedded in a relational web they have their horizontal support horizontal influences amongst their teammates they have
(06:45) vertical influences say they're line manager Etc so there's all of these different forces acting on this individual and if we don't honor and include these external forces when examining an individual then problems that could be solved systemically and relationally through shared team practices Norms culture leadership policy protocol procedure are instead fixated upon dwell upon and endlessly rehashed as these static individual problems and so what we end up with within I believe most modern organizations who are governed by what
(07:22) we call Legacy workplace culture which is the culture we've inherited from our ancestors it was basically drained up by Frederick Taylor and his contemporary in the Second Industrial Revolution we over focus on my stress my anxiety my B and in that over focusing in that siloed thought I don't pay attention to our stress our anxiety our burnout and so we're not solving these problems that are actually Collective cultural systemic problems it's just individuals and silos trying to go it alone and we
(07:57) see the limitations of that right you see burnout higher now than it was at the height of the pandemic despite record amounts of investment so what's happening there yeah there's so many interesting questions there and and we'll take a deep dive in a few moments I guess and and how do you actually work with organizations do you obviously taking a systemic approach do you work with people as individuals as groups like how how does it work always groups generally we might do the odd onetoone piece as in when required but we'll try
(08:25) as much as as possible steer organizations away from that and so towards group- based work because so much of the work that needs to be done can only be done in groups because it's culture and culture exists in relationships it also exists in mindsets and norms and when I say Norms I mean Norm systems in terms of what behaviors do we punish what behaviors do we reward but in terms of how we work we tend to work through talks workshops and programs and most of our work falls under two buckets one is performing
(08:58) through change and specifically looking at sustainable performance and the other is leading through change so looking at leaders and managers and within the first performing through change we have various programs we've got one on fundamental resilience which is looking at okay if you couldn't contact anyone and you couldn't move how would you cope with adversity so it's all about managing thought emotions and nervous system and what best practice actually looks like in that we've got one on
(09:29) mindset which literally means how is your mind set in which position is your mind set and how does that both limit and enhance depending on the mindset how you're relating to the world around you and so we're looking at how do you create adaptive mindsets and then we also look at what we call performance by Design which is essentially looking at how do I design the different cycles of my life the day the week the month the season and the year to maximize performance and maximize what we call work life integration which is basically
(10:05) an innovation on work life balance which obviously views work and life as a zero song game between the two and actually that's not something we agree with but I can come back to that if you like but on the managers and leaders front we're looking at how do you lead groups through change and So within that the core constituent parts so how do I as a line manager create psychological safety in my team how do I provide effect of support in terms of supporting people to stay well and then responding to them
(10:35) when they're really not okay if things don't go to plan and then also how do you as a leader make AI work for yourself and your team given the rapidly changing tectonics in that domain generally all of these different topics that I've named each one we have talks workshops and full durational programs on each subject depending on how deep people want to dive and I was basically in a wormhole for about a year and a half I barely spoke to anyone outside of the organization just just in a room covered
(11:09) in poits and nerding out so I love it brilliant and how did you support organizations to make that shift from thinking that well-being is all about the individual and they need to they need to do individual stuff around well-being how do you help them see a different way of approaching the the situation when organizations come to us most of the time they've already sense to skew they've thrown everything they can for many years including the kitchen sink at employee wellbeing and they're not moving the dial on the metrics the
(11:39) needles that they're looking at aren't moving in fact they're getting worse and so generally they come to us from a place of we' tried all of these things and nothing's worked now what and generally un n organizations got to that point where they said now what they're not really ready to work with us because the kind of work that we do is not one and done it's the work that we do really resists the oversimplified mechanistic models of change that's put forward by behaviorist and constructivist paradigms
(12:08) which we can double click on those two things and my beef with them later but we are what we call Unapologetic developmentalists we believe that change is messy and hard and happens over time and is sometimes one step back two steps forwards and needs to be stuck with the ordinary living and working and also requires structures and SC in and so what we're generally in terms of working with organizations we've been focusing on bringing together a few different practices one is called micro solidarity which is a an approach developed by my
(12:47) friend Rich Bartlett who really is a innovator in this space and he is was based in New Zealand you know was in Italy with his part of that team it's essentially a a philosophy of how you increase the depth and density of relationships and connections within organizations and there's basically two components to it one is scale and one is tempo so scale is this notion that human organisms form different human groups form different types of organisms of different sizes and different size groups are good for different things and
(13:25) small groups that can fit around a dinner table is the best size for for transformation because let's say six people you think of the average dinner table six people is about the number that can hold a shared context once you get past six notice that the dinner table tends to break into two conversations in four for example and so it's the number of people who can hold a shared context together easily without government structures and so this size group is a really great size group in order to do work together and that's how
(14:00) we work we put people into groups of six which they Journey on together and this brings us to the second piece which is tempo so Rhythm and ritual explains a huge amount of human behavior and also if you're going to be in a group and you're going to be supporting each other to change you need to have meaningful conversations meaningful conversations require emotionally risky dialogue and emotionally risky dialogue requires psychological safety and psychological safety requires trust and trust is something grows over time there's
(14:30) actually an equation for working out how trustworthy someone is developed by Harvard which is credibility reliability and empathy divided by self orientation and these things grow over time as you Journey with each other and this is why one and DS don't work we need to come together multiple times at least three times but we make people come together six times in their small groups and obviously when peers come together youve got all sorts of social dynamics that show up because in order to change we need environments as I said of
(15:04) psychological safety and that requires intimacy Mutual support care um partnership but we've been conditioned by Legacy corporate culture for separation competition hierarchies domination and so we have to unlearn some pretty deep patterns and so we need Scaffolding in order to help us do that and this is where Effective Thinking environments comes in this was a a term first by Nazi Klein and um have a sick on my tea and it's essentially a way of placing a structure on a group of people whereby the conversation follows a very
(15:40) specific format slows the conversation right down and enables people to do their best thinking talking is actually just thinking out loud it's how most people do their best thinking and so what we need in order to do our best thinking we need equality we need presence and we need self-regulation uh in the presence of those things I will do my best thinking and Effective Thinking environments creates a scaffolding to enable those three things to be present and so you're coming together in a group without a
(16:10) facilitator but because of the particular methodology of Effective Thinking environments you don't need that facilitator to mitigate the power Dynamic so you're not having to deal with the fact that some people are over contributing taking out too much space some people are under contributing and leaning back and not showing up well enough um and so these two things together can create a huge amount of intimacy in a group and trust and psychological safety so what we find is in our leadership programs I was checked
(16:40) to someone not long ago who you run a leadership training in was it Morning Star last year beginning of last year and they're still mean you know that's the that's that's the power of these groups of six you know so you're being a big cohort together but you'll also be in groups of six um and we're actually now developing piece ofch technology to automate this for us because it requires a fair amount of admin wealth on our side to do it in a scaled way and also on the client side um if you're doing it
(17:09) on maass you know some of our clients have 100,000 people and so for us we've just been awarded grant funding by innovate UK to build a platform to automate this process of breaking entire organizations into groups of six them going on a journey together um and that being done all by AI in terms of matching just the right people together just the right combination of personalities and diversity both in terms of surface diversity and deep diversity and availability and seniority and all of these other pieces that make
(17:42) a group Vibe actually feel like it's humming rather than feeling like it's dead and then that group meeting together in a platform that we have built specifically for emotionally risky dialogue for psychological safety for intimacy death equality self-regulation in the way that Zoom is built for work meetings this is actually built for micros solidarity and Effective Thinking environments and then there's an AI kind of quietly listening to everything that's being said and offering Reflections and eventually it will be
(18:14) creating and creating the content in all time but our approach to scaling the relational component we've done a lot of thinking about this over the last five years in fact it's taken us five years to even work out what the problem is or even what the question to ask is and we come down to this is like the reason scaled interventions don't work is because what two failure points micro interventions work running workshops running programs they work really well but that's all given to leaders and
(18:44) managers because that's where the organization wants to invest fair enough I do the same right they're the highest leverage people everyone else has e-learning for and e-learning doesn't work when it comes to wellbeing mental health culture performance in the way that it does with compliance for example and the reason for that is firstly it's optimized for cognitive rather than emotional processing it's been basically designed by people who I say on the whole most it friends I know tend to
(19:13) under index on empathy compared to some of my HR friends for example but also it's just a way it's just been the passion but cognitive processing is inversely correlated with emotional processing and if we're not having shifts at the emotion level then you don't see the changes in well-being and culture it's absolutely essential now even organizations that are targeting emotional processing let's say headspace or calm it's still happening in silos it's me with my app on my own clicking
(19:45) through my learning doing my meditation feeling my feels but ultimately I'm focusing on my stress my anxiety my burnout and my conversation is never reaching our stress our anxiety our burnout as I said before and so what we need is technology that both enables emotional processing and requires and breaks down the SOS because so much of burnout and behavior change requires accountability that requires human relationship accountability means being able to give an account to tell the story of what happened and this is what
(20:22) we're trying to automate in this as what thankfully the British government has given us a few B to make it happen s let's see one of the things that's sort of sticking out for me is just how much you're disturbing the system when you're doing these things so again my understanding is like it's kind of disturbing patterns of behavior patterns of interrelating patterns of feeling patterns of thinking what what does that do when you start to do at scale in an organization one of the things we say to
(20:53) Champions within an organization Champions is our name for people who have a vision for a new way of doing things and are willing to stick their neck out to make it happen or entrepreneurs and the first thing we say is like look you have to be willing to ruffle feathers and if you're not ruffling any feathers you're not really doing the job because the status quo there are many people who really benefit and have done really well within the status quo and for them the fact that de the latest deit study has seen 51% of
(21:23) people experiencing at least one clinical burnout symptom at any given moment doesn't really for them it's like oh get on with it stop complaining and part of this is because at the upper levels of the organization I don't know if you work with the insights leadership colors much the red yellow green blue yeah yeah maybe for listeners Fair I'll give you the packet description of it basically everyone has four different energies within them and each energy has a color sign to it so blue is about
(21:55) Precision detail questioning thoroughness yellow is about fun creativity novelty imagination green is about feelings inclusion balance and red is about power accountability Drive Etc and at higher levels of the organization especially bands eight and above you tend to see a massive over representation of red energy and the thing is that red energy on the whole actually gets quite triggered by Green energy because a lot of well-being and culture change comes from Green it's like we want people to have more work
(22:32) life balance let's let's gather more perspectives and have diversity and let's include more people and actually a lot of people who are very high in Red Energy I'm that triggering so ey roll pull your sleeves out get on with it I had to because they've made incredible sacrifices to get to where they are and so those are the people who are guarding all of the doors and holding all of the keys and so you need to speak in their language and you need to get them on board because they're the ones who are the budget
(23:01) holders ultimately you a lot of these budgets with culture and wellbeing and dni PIV P you could have an organization that's a multi-billion dollar organization and their well-being budget might be 100K and so it's like you need to change the parameters of the conversation that requires a champion to be prepared to play the game of power internally it's very much a political thing and it requires strategic thinking it's like a very long long game of chess where every move happens maybe once a week and
(23:33) you're slowly building stakeholder what we call complicated alliances across the organization and really that's a lot of what we do is coaching our champion to think bigger and Bolder and being ready to tolerate the discomfort inherent in experiencing the disapproval of people who are wedded to Legacy corporate culture but Legacy corporate culture has to be evolved it's given us many incredible things it really has actually in terms of the technologies that we have the level of performance that it can create but what
(24:12) we're seeing now in the internet age is that Legacy corporate culture it's not as fit for purpose as it was before it needs an iteration and an evolution but it is resisted and so that pattern has to be worked with throughout all levels of the organiz ation too you know we call it the folded arm Brigade why is it that only one in three men for example engage with any workplace wellbeing initiatives because often well-being initiatives are being couched in the language of green if we're using the
(24:42) insights colors yeah whereas actually they are deep in red for example and so I'm using very broad brush Strokes here and and so the language that we're using aren't speaking to the particular considerations and concerns of r is why I like the language of the increasing use of the language of performance within wellbeing moving it from like fluff and self care as it's seen Through The Eyes of Legacy corporate culture into the world of no actually if you look at the science the organizations who are going to
(25:15) outperform the others are the ones that get this right they will just simply attract and retain the talent and ultimately that is the Great Piece that is required is we need to attract and retain the right Talent and if you don't get this right it's like see you later 10 years time you're out and you've made the change between made the connection between sort of change and wellbeing and and a lot of organizations for some whatever reason known to them don't make the connection between change and
(25:43) wellbeing how how does that play how do you help organizations get an understanding of how those two things are connected and how you need to integrate CH well-being into the whole change program I mean it comes down to neurobiology the what happens one of the most stressful things you can do to a human being is subject them to Too Much change too quickly it's called Future Shock and so what happens when you're under stress is that your working memory depletes you lose your capacity for perspective taking and that sits at the
(26:12) heart of creative problem solving and Innovation and so what's required in that instance is you need to reduce the amount of cortisol and adrenaline in the system so that you're then capable of Divergent thinking and within change management the things you need to do is take people out silos you need to make them open to change they need the right mindset when people are stressed and overwhelmed even low level burnout even the very lowest level it's like good luck like they're so much more resistant to new ways of
(26:43) doing things so really it's uh for us that's a big piece is neurobiology and I can go into the neurobiology of the nervous system but that would take some time to unpack but that's I suppose the first piece and the second piece is the team that sees reality most clearly is the team that wins that was aligned by the former chairman of ge's name rades me but they one of our clients I remember seeing it I was like go that's so spot on and psychological safety which Falls within the bucket of well-being is what enables
(27:23) team to see reality clearly in a fast changing environment Collective sense making is absolutely essential all perspectives it's like who gathers the most perspectives wins right so we need to gather lots of perspectives and there's multiple levels to that firstly I need to share if I'm not okay because that actually what happens is that we're often in a prisoners dilemma when it comes to change something gets changed I did it once in my company uh we did we made a change uh to a team and it was a it negatively impacted
(27:54) them and um they didn't tell us for months because they were quite new members of staff and I just assume because I've got this open door and I talk about psychological safety and I try and be vulnerable and role model that but they would just come forward and tell us that there's a problem and they didn't and it was a real moment for me of like oh yeah of course people are carrying Decades of conditioned responses from Legacy corporate culture so can be as open as I like but if I'm not creating the right
(28:23) structures for these people to come fors I can't just rely on them putting meeting my telling me I need to actually put Scaffolding in there for them and so what happens is that if I'm someone makes a tweak in a change management process I struggle with that but I don't tell anyone my colleague also struggles they don't tell anyone and maybe uh I tell my boss that I'm struggling but my colleague doesn't and I'm the one who looks like I'm not really performing and they're the one who looks like they put
(28:55) their together and in that instance Maybe they Advance because with me so I we're in a prisoners dilemma because if I reveal and they don't I'm advantage and if they reveal and I don't then their advantaged then basically we're incentivized not to reveal you to to conceal rather than reveal in our work of organizations we tend to find 70% 60 to 70% of people conceal burnout or difficulty from their line manager so line managers are Flying Blind often they have got the right instruments to
(29:25) tell them how the change management process is going and so what is required is psychological safely in order for people to name when things aren't okay but that's hard because that's the highest level of psychological safety it's one thing the lowest level of psychological safety is feeling like all parts of me are welcome that if I'm having a bad day that that mood is okay I don't have to put on my smile yeah the next layer is that I can give my peers feedback so when this one but the highest level is I can challenge
(29:53) the status quo and I can tell my superiors quote unquote that something isn't cool and if I can't do that then they're flying by and that's why most CEOs think that well-being in their organization is improving the latest deoe survey well just the end of 2023 when actually it's decreasing because they're insulated so they're making these changes they're not actually getting accurate data because they haven't streamlined psychological safety vertically throughout the organization
(30:21) so this is another reason why wellbe is so important because you need an accurate dashboard and you need to understand uh where people are struggling where tension points are arising and therefore what soft skill development might be required or what alterations to processes might be required and that's why psychological safety is so important and so there's two things there's a Stress Management component and there's the psychological safety P piece one question we always like to people ask people on the podcast is how did you get
(30:47) to this point what was your journey to this kind of this type of work my own recovery Journey brought me to the issue of mental health and had a psychosis in my late teens which was a crescendo of a life of Abandonment and by my Father which was unprocessed an overstretched mother who did her damn best but really just had the had the world stacked against her you having to you know go being a single mom working 9s or five and doing Child Care on your own Jesus I could not do that like I literally I doth my cat
(31:28) mothers all over the place my mom did her damn best but anyone in that situation is going to really struggle to meet every need of their kid and unfortunately those unmet needs in me led me to get LED astray for a period of time and got into the world of South London honor culture basically Rude Boy culture and um skunk and drugs and anyway a lot of unprocessed trauma combined that with skunk ultimately combinated in the cyclosis and recovery from psychosis was a long road and it was a road that brought me into contact with
(32:04) all sorts of people who I never otherwise would have met different therapists and mentors and wisdom keepers of different kinds and like me they had had an unusual path up the mountain they' had their own Dark Night of the Soul they' found their way out and they were guiding others and for me they helped me to understand what happened in my mind to lead to my psychosis one of them in particular really helped me understand what would happen in my family Dynamics to lead to my psychosis therapist cash as we' for
(32:29) five years and eventually one of them Robert Mitchell helped me understand what had happened in my culture to lead to my psychosis and so I took everything I learned and I basically decided to dedicate my life to sharing it with as many people as possible and so I joined at National mental health charity mind and joined in Frontline services in South London and was focused very much on prevention how do we prevent people from reaching crisis point so we're focusing on like well being mindfulness resilience and made a name for myself
(33:03) and found my way into National strategy and that journey through M mind was like a family for me it was a raft through which I learned my trade the beginnings of my trade um and then I went down to part-time and then I became the meditation teacher of Facebook and taught there for three years that was such a weak gig I tell you like one lunchtime one Wednesday no Tuesday Wednesday Thursday lunchtimes and then we just like Swan around Facebook with Barefoot eating food and drinking alcohol it's like so Facebook
(33:38) and then this Center for young men in gangs and I was really trying to develop practices that both Tech nerds and rude boys could relate to in a way that was kind of universal and accessible because so much mindfulness and meditation was being taught in a very therapeutic way mindfulness space stress reduction which is a it was designed for therapists and patients it's not designed for workplaces but ultimately it's been a victim of its own success because it hasn't innovated because it has to stay
(34:08) the same because it's got the massive evidence base and so if every every if all you've got is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail and I say that with the fullest respect to nbsr I've done the program and I'll rate it but just that's my one critique maybe but yeah developed mixed mental Arts taught a load of people in my living room how to teach it they went out and taught it we came back we iterated it and we kind of it entered the market and um it did well we won awards we won the product
(34:35) impact Awards twice actually that's a lie we didn't win we came highly commended one of the judges reached out and just like just so you know you are my favorite but anyway Lou coming Second Twice was was a burn but highly commended I suppose that still counts as I don't know if that counts as winning an award but was the beginning of the journey was mixed mental Arts inner capacities that's what we were teaching how do I manage my thoughts and my emotions and my nervous system when the came and um my journey has evolved
(35:14) over time and and we were doing therapy with my mom and uh and deepening into my understanding I think of Legacy corporate culture my mom had really been working in some pretty fullon organizations and a desert of connection some of these organizations and obviously we work with hundreds of organizations so we can feel the culture it's palpable people talk about culture but most people actually aren't privileged enough to really understand what it is because they don't visit enough organizations and you walk in and
(35:44) it's just this atmosphere it's the the facial expressions it's how they are on a zoom call there are some organizations we've worked with through it's like god it feels like you're you're engaging with a distortion field such as the distress and these are the people who care the most about wellbeing and so yeah for me over time especially with myself realizing as a Founder on the startup Journey over the last five years I've come close the burnout several times and that's with all of the practices at my
(36:16) disposal and you know I realized that my psychosis was really about fixing myself quote unquote whereas I realize now it's much more about parenting yourself wisely and that's Journey that I'm still on and uh for me it's a journey that can't be done alone that's what I've realized is uh I need the people around me and if I need the people around me other people do too because what is most personal is most universal like we're tribal primates and we're evolved neurologically to be intimately bound to
(36:49) each other and yet Legacy corporate culture tells us that we need to have have our together on our own or do you see that with all the movies and it's our neurobiology says completely different anyway that's my very long response to how did I get into this work or this approach to this work if you think about everything you do what what is it that drives you what do you find most fulfilling about the work that you do to be honest for me it's in terms of fulfillment it's either having being on
(37:17) a group call with or watching a recording of like one of our facilitators on a group called an organization and they would have come back from breakout rooms and they're having a harvest as a whole group and basically someone has a meltdown on the call and the thing that's never been named in the organization that everyone knows but it's never been named comes out and then our trainer like coaches them through the moment and you can feel the culture shifting in real time it's electric these moments and obviously it's very
(37:53) high risk these moments and that's why you need Artful facilitation and someone who can hold it who has real depth and by depth we mean someone who has an intimate embodied relationship not just with professional expertise but with tragedy and beauty and mystery you can feel that so they can meet people when they're in a very dire place so that's really powerful also though to be honest I think the most rewarding thing for me is uh I grew up in a progress estate in southeast London and and uh grew up working class poor single mom
(38:34) and sometimes we find ourselves and my head of strategic Partnerships bow um we work very closely together he does all of he's way more detail oriented than me so for these big Partnerships where in order to understand the pain of an organization you have to go very deep and very detailed to really get what's the thing beneath the thing um so we'll be on a lot of calls together and sometimes we'll be having calls with people who are responsible for yeah hundreds of thousands of individuals and
(39:03) it just feels like very um high impact and like high octane spaces and then but you really feel your own power and influence and that could be really potent to experience and then we'll come off the call and he comes from a similar background to me and we'll just have this like quite hilarious Fant back and forth like I can't believe can't really believe we're in these conversations to be honest and we're just yeah the way we talk to each other is how we would have spoken to each other back in our sort of more Rude
(39:33) Boy days so it's quite funny you get my much more like polished University middle class voice whereas like the yeah he he and a few others get a very different side of me and yeah that that's super rewarding and also the going on a journey with a champion this is one thing we realized over the five years is that actually it's all about the champion it's the person you know when I think about Say Craig in sky who's just they're they're like one of my personal favorites in terms of
(40:01) clients and I met Craig when he was working in operations and he was a he' shared his own mental health story on a podcast in sky and as a result of doing that to do to go first and do that in an organization is a big thing and um he found himself in this volunteer role running the body mind Network as sky and then slowly just like watching his journey through the organization widen his like his sphere of influence and power and potency and his like sense of what's possible and being a part of that journey and being able to collaborate
(40:40) with him because you know Champions and external providers need each other external providers need people who have high levels of context and have their finger on the pulse of the average person in the organization and they need someone who isn't in the context day in day out who can ask them questions who wouldn't have thought of asking themselves and it's these beautiful Journeys that you go on with these individuals where they become more like friendships and in the camaraderie of working through a tough problem together
(41:07) uh yeah for me relationships long-term relationships with champions in organizations is probably the deepest most rewarding thing incredibly interesting that Journey that you go on it because I think people underestimate the word transformation it gets banded around doesn't it but it is sort of true transformation when you're doing this work what what challenges do you encounter what what's the tough stuff one of the big things that is hard to work with is um again Legacy cultural culture instills within us a mindset
(41:38) that we call in melium the what's the thing mentality what's the thing just give me the thing let's just B half an hour in tell tell my people how to be happy and then we're good and um and if you accept the premise it's like the what's the thing mentality is part of the problem so it's like you almost have to reject reject the premise entirely of the request like yeah we want we want um half an hour for you to do this thing and it's like yeah we can come and do that sure just so you know and people
(42:09) will come together they'll feel great maybe even some of them might change a behavior or to but it's not going to have the impact that you believe that it's going to have but it will have a positive impact and that's one thing is the what the thing mentality and how you work with that because change you need to slow people down first one of the reasons people don't slow down is because when you slow down you have to feel all of the submerged content comes up and that's why many of us would
(42:40) rather drown ourselves out with content on our phones rather than experience our own thoughts and feelings and because that's what happens when you have to slow down so yeah part of it is that and people people are rightly not rightly well yeah rightly afraid of slowing down spend their lives of it and um you have to hold them through that very delicately and that's that's a challenge how do you slow people down who really don't want to slow down you know particularly at senior level there's a lot of
(43:07) suppression of feeling a lot of suppression of anxiety and often retrofitted with logic oh I did that because you're like hang on yeah that was a knee-jerk reflex because you were angry or you were frustrated or you were anxious whatever it was and and so sometimes people don't think that emotions and things like that should be dis discussed in the workplace we're here to do work like is is that one of sort of the the challenges you have to overcome or is that kind of contracted up front yeah I mean we're always like
(43:37) for us the great um the great challenge of our timeing is how is getting again to return to the insights leadership colors is getting the people who are really over index on red on board because they are over represented at very senior levels and they need to understand the business case and so it's really helping those people understand the business case really laying their fears because discernment is really highly priced by these people and they've got strong detectiv and unfortunately there is a lot of
(44:08) out there there's a lot of vanilla garbage and a lot of wellbeing washing and a lot of like hyperbole is like we're going to come in and we're going to in 45 days this with this is going to transform your organization there isn't enough SRI so know the thing is with people who over index in red at high levels of an organization it it one of their coping strategies we tend to find as a pattern is to to to succeed within Legacy corporate culture you often have to hide and suppress your vulnerability and what
(44:39) happens if you do that is that you also start to suppress the vulnerability in others starts to elicit a disgust response because and it is disgust I believe is a right emotion like we so we'll try and we'll either attack vulnerability in other people in the same that we do we do in ourselves and I get I get how you get that way it's like the sacrifices you have to make to to to achieve very high levels in your organization I get it I've got way more red since I became a Founder I used to be all green
(45:11) yellow and then I've had to like over index red in order to push the organization along and I also I I really get the um I've had to work on my own running a well-being company and then people wanting to take time off for selfcare when I was really Under Pressure to get project over the line and it elicited disgust and anger and so and it's like whoa Michael you're running while being company at the time you know that's such Rich material for the work though isn't it when you're in that when you're in
(45:43) the seat and the pressure's on isn't it it's how do you stay ethical how do you stay moral and how do you 100% but that's the real test isn't it so it gives you an amazing of empathy I imagine as well uh just one question I wanted to ask and Dan we've got loads of questions we want to get through there was just that sort of link you making you talked about performance by Design and the whole Act of being intentional and really getting into the way in which people organize themselves and the
(46:12) habits and the rituals and all that kind of stuff as well that that's a really nice way of thinking about things how does that work in practice we're cyclical beings and we're most of what we do is cyclical we're involved in different circles of different kinds and Cycles different kinds everything from menstrual cycle the moon cycle the solar cycle all of these different Cycles even down to ultradian Cycles which are 90 minute Cycles roughly that our attention and alertness is grounded in and we need to learn to recognize
(46:48) ourselves as cyclical and to design our activity into that so that we can ride our cycle on natural cycles rather than resistant and so performance by Design is basically views our views a lot of burnout and poor mental health as a design issue not just organizational design but life design many of us have never thought about how we intentionally design our life and iterate our life in that way some of us do but for us what we did is we looked at the different Cycles we looked to okay we've in a 24-hour cycle what does the science of
(47:31) well-being resilience and performance have to say about what activities should be happening and when in terms of performance criming in terms of actually activating and in terms of deactivating and decelerating the evening coming back into relationality with my family so I'm not trapped in an always on mentality where I can't be present with my kids and then looking at okay within the week what activities and rhythms are required what are my non-negotiables for me it might be a non-negotiable that's been a
(48:04) big one for me has been a Thursday evening play date with my partner's son Z where it's a way that we we basically inverse the roles he gets to decide what we do and we do child Le play for 90 minutes after work and I'm either he either wants me to be basically a monster or some kind of wise Sensei which is really interesting to think about the psyche of a child because that's the two states that he probably sees me through depending on how Rudy's been to his mom and so it's the yeah for
(48:35) me as someone who struggled in the in the role of a step parent type role um that's really important in order to maintain a buffer that can absorb those that can absorb the inevitable shocks that come with even the most peaceful family life you know and so some things only have to happen once a week to help you feel good and function well even just having a date night with your partner some you know we don't tend to think of what's happening outside of work is factoring into work but you know if I'm on a stool with four legs work
(49:07) Health home and friendship and my work leg is stable but all three others are wobbling I'm going to find it very hard to do a good job in this podcast I'm going to be focusing on trying to stay stable and so I know when my relationship's wobbling my productivity that they feels it if I get that message on WhatsApp first thing in the morning we need to talk it's like good luck being present with a piece of design that I had to do that day work and life which I believe is a full Synergy weave into each other um but for
(49:40) us it's basically okay how do you take those four areas work Health friendship uh and home but also a deeper more meaningful life also requires us to look at other aspects which provide meaning such as healing or inspiration and connection what the ancient Greeks called easis cathis and communitas and how you weave those into your life at opportune moments because this is something jie will talks about most of the time we like we're feast or famine when it comes to um designing our life you know we go too focused on work
(50:16) and then we realize our life's become dull and our circle of friends is shrunk because we're ghosting people and then we kind of take the foot off gas at work because we're exhausted and then try and focus on other things and then our professional identity starts to suffer and our team feels it and it's like rather than feast or family how do we keep things on the Sim and that's what real intentional life design looks like so it's looking at my week it's looking at my month what are the things I do
(50:38) once a month in order to feel good and function well what are the things I do once a season what things I do once a year and helping people to understand how to Leverage What are the highest leverage things because not all activities are born equil that's what I mean by Design it's looking at these different cycles and designing in and actually entering it into our calendar so important because we're so good at scheduling things when it's our work or it's our kids Athletics but we're not
(51:06) good at scheduling the things that help us feel good and come alive so if you look back at everything you've learned what would you say the most significant lesson or lessons are that you've learned so far you know as someone who started off as a green yellow I wish I'd hired a red blue when I first started um I would have saved myself a load of trouble I think you know thinking about neurodiversity in teams and how you optimize for that neurodiversity neurodiversity that is there for a reason it's how tribes perform not
(51:37) everyone needs to be the same um yeah the highest performing teams as far as I'm concerned is a red a blue and a yellow being led by someone who's high in green and obviously I'm really simplifying everyone has all of the colors but you know what I mean um emotional processing and relationship have to be honored and included in any intervention that performance and well-being are not mutually exclusive they need each other but there are some business decisions that can only be reached by going into
(52:14) wild nature for a week with your phone off there's some pieces of strategy or innovations that only come on mountains or by rivers or in forests and that for me has been a great source of inspiration and Direction maybe finally greatest thing I've learned is um how much power um my um partner wields over the fate of my organization because so many bad business decisions I have avoided by a really well timed piece of Pillow Talk where she's given me just a strategic nugget or a question that's reframed
(52:59) everything or she's given me a piece of feedback that maybe someone in my team might not feel comfortable giving me but she's just willing to bring it and I think actually having friendships talking to your friends about your business and asking them for their advice and your friends who knew you before you had the armor of your job title before I was a CEO those are the people who are most likely to tell you as it is and not should be Co and you can do as much psychological safety work in your organization as you like and
(53:28) sometimes there will still be things that a friend is really well placed to deliver friends and partners often the unsung heroes of organizations AR in terms of providing the ability just another context whatever it is but just to give people more to them than just the work as well well I just want to say a huge thank you Michael it's been just a really enjoyable conversation really enjoyed the way you've sort of taken all of our questions and just answer with a real sort of thoughtfulness and depth
(53:56) and real precision as well so thank you and there's there's loads of takeaways that I'm taking from it I'm sure you have as well Danny there's loads of good phrases I've got I've got uh the team that sees reality most clearly wins what is most personal is most universal which I love uh Chang is messy and hard and takes time I think sometimes we forget that don't we um sorry Dan I'm steing all the good ones here and performance and well-being aren't mutually exclusive
(54:24) as well and I just that I guess the other thing is just just the intentional intentionality of Designing how we just don't spend enough time thinking we're always doing and and and the importance of that whether we're applying it in how we work how we U resource ourselves whatever how about you Denny yeah I'd Echo all of that and I think a few other things I'm taken away the comment you made about the people needing scaffolding to be able to speak openly that you can't just kind of say you can
(54:49) talk openly you trust me come to me people need scaffolding to be able to do that I think the importance of weaving performance language into the wellbeing dialogue and how that's really important in terms of getting our messages and creating change I love the phrase um some organizations like deserts of connection it's such a strong strong phrase and a strong metaphor and you feel it that you can feel it when you walk into organizations that just that that felt sense that you know people aren't talking even if they they're not
(55:15) connecting even if they're talking and then the the importance of getting rid of the what's the thing mentality that kind of come do it in half an hour do your thing in half an hour well well thank you so much Michael if if people want to follow you your work if they want to a lot of people will be compelled by the things that you're saying what if they want to reach out to you what's the best way for people to do that they can reach out on LinkedIn Michael Matel or they can go to myum group.co and drop us a message and we
(55:43) can hop on a call or a member of my team can reach out and if that fails they can strap a letter to a p and living through pigeon will know where to find me okay we'll get on that as well brilliant well thank you so much Michael really appreciate your time and thank you we've really enjoyed it thank you thank you so much to you both for some really thoughtful questions and um yeah you can tell so much about the quality of questions that people ask you so yeah my sense is that uh you both really are on
(56:21) a quest to figure out how do we do this thing these humans working so yes may may you keep asking great questions and if you figure that out before we do then just send the P send the pigeon send the pigeon okay r that Echo one thanks [Music]