 This next talk addresses a thorny question. In a world where the majority of people are suffering from imposter syndrome while confidence gets rewarded, how do we create an organization that helps people succeed? Bethan is a returned speaker who is joining us to share her experience from the last 18 months when she left her job and launched a new business. She'll also offer insights from research into what makes certain leaders and organizations more successful than others. The takeaways will give you a blueprint of making your organizations more supportive and inclusive and the people around you more resilient, comfortable and ultimately happier. What's better than that? Enjoy. It's not an understatement to say this that the last 18 months have been frankly extremely difficult for all of us. We've been isolated from our friends, our families, our communities. We've watched the human toll of the pandemic as well which has affected most people I know in a very kind of personal way. We also all had to change the way we work pretty much overnight. And there's no wonder then that this has caused us to really pause and reflect and think about why we're here, what we're doing and where we're going and how we want to work in the future. But it's not just the pandemic that's contributing to this. We will already undergoing one of the biggest industrial changes since the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. We've seen the rise of the knowledge economy where it's more about kind of what you know and how you figure out a problem than cranking out widgets on a factory line. That's also coincided with the idea of output over factory hours and the all encompassing move towards digital over physical. So it's no wonder that we're all feeling exhausted, full of imposter syndrome and frankly, really unsure about our future and especially the future of our work. And if you're feeling this way, you are really not alone. So this is some stats I've pulled from the state of workplace report by Royal Training. This research for the report actually happened primarily with UK respondents in the last kind of six months. But I think we can probably take these stats and kind of generalize to what a lot of us are experiencing. So the two things that stood out for me, 96% of people have experienced imposter syndrome. So if you're feeling that way, you're really, really, really not alone. And the fact that 4% of people feel fully confident at work, that blows my mind because I have spent my career working with some frankly, fantastic, wonderful, inspirational, really good at their job people who should feel fully confident at work. But on the other hand, I'm reasonably good at my job, I would say. I always tried to do my best and I don't even know what feeling fully confident of work would feel like. I don't think I've ever experienced it. So something about our internal feelings don't match our external realities. And the pandemic really, I think is driving a lot of this as well. Because for me, the pandemic really was a bit of a kind of stop and think about it moment. So the picture on the side of the screen is actually my partner and his brother and our best friend. The first time we saw each other after four months of being locked down, that was a lockdown one if you were following the UK. And it was just such a poignant moment for me. And it made me really think about the fact that there is more to life than work. And actually in work and life, the relationships you have with other people and the collaborative work you do with other people is often the kind of best part. The pandemic also made me realise that nobody has complete knowledge. Nobody knew this was around the corner. Yes, there were people who did talk about the fact that a pandemic could happen, but nobody could predict it. And also as the pandemic rolled out, nobody could really predict what would happen next either. Governments were scrambling to get up-to-date information and to see into the future. And with all of their resources, even they couldn't have complete knowledge. But this also brings me back to the point that uncertainty is really, really permanent and it's kind of a fact of life. We don't know what's around the corner on any given day. We've kind of just got a role with it. It's unfortunately part of the human condition. But really for me, thinking about the fact that this is permanent, I then realised that doing something is always better than doing nothing. Taking action is always better than waiting for life to almost happen to you. So before we kind of carry on, I probably should introduce myself. I'm Beth and Vincent. I'm a marketing consultant. I work with technology companies on their positioning, growth and marketing strategy. And 2021 was, as you probably guessed, a bit of a kind of watershed moment for me in the way I think about life, work, everything. And in the last kind of couple of months, I actually decided to quit my job as the marketing director of a really good tech company here in the UK to set up my own business. Something I've been wanting to do for years but never really had the courage to kind of pursue. And this was based on a pretty fundamental realisation that there is no special secret to success. We are all making it up as we go along. That there is, everyone is doing their best with the information they have at any given time. We're all winging it. We're all making it up. And that's absolutely okay. In fact, it's more than okay. It's actually the secret to doing really meaningful impactful work. And I think organisations and leaders could probably leverage this to their advantage, the power of vulnerability, the power of not knowing. And that's what this talk is really about. How I felt empowered through just submitting I don't know what I'm doing. So I'm going to talk about three kind of concepts here or three groups of my learnings into radical openness, inclusive collaboration and realistic resilience. But before we go on a really important point, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm not just saying that to be kind of humble. No, no, really, I'm just winging it. And this talk is based on my experiences, my observations, the work I've done with and in companies. And it's my unique perspective on the world. And that is completely valid and acceptable. So we're going to start off with radical openness. I love this quote by Benet Brown. And if you haven't seen her TEDx talk on shame, it's really worth a listen. And I think shame plays a really important role actually in the way organizations operate and the way we operate at work because a lot of us don't want to admit that we don't know something or that we've made a mistake or that we failed something. And this causes us to kind of not be truthful with what the status quo is and holds us back, I think, from being vulnerable in front of other people and actually being a true and authentic self. But there is a great power and vulnerability. And I actually realized this recently because I was working with a client who I'd worked with quite a long time and they bought a new project to me. Looked at the project, it wasn't something that was really in my wheelhouse in my skill sets and maybe could have done it, but I didn't feel that comfortable with it. And frankly, it wasn't something I was really going to enjoy. But they're really good client. We'd had a long-term relationship. And I was really scared of going back to them and saying, I actually can't do this because I was worried they think, huh, if she can't do that, she can't do everything else. She must be crap. She must be awful at her job. And in the end, I did have to come clean. And I said, look, not for me, but I can recommend someone who'd be really great at this and compliment me really, really well. And I was waiting for the, you're crap, common. It never happened. It never happened. Do you know what they said? They said, oh, okay. Yeah, that's fair enough. And you know what, we're really grateful you were open and honest with us about this because we've worked with people in the past who have said they could do something but never really could deliver. So we really appreciate that. We'll bring that person in, off we go. And the relationship was so much stronger because of this. And I think we default to projecting this all knowing, this always right persona, especially when you're in a position of leadership, but it actually does people a great, great disservice, especially people who are earlier on in their careers because I remember being a marketing assistant. It was my first job. I was just new to this whole working for people thing. And I would be in meetings and all of the senior managers would be so, so confident. But because I didn't really know what I was doing, I was just figuring stuff out. I really felt like there was such a gap between me and them and I felt really, really othered by the experience. So we've got to have a little bit of a think about when we project this all knowing, this infallible kind of leadership, I guess, ideal, we're othering a lot of people because they don't feel like they live up to it. And frankly, nobody could. And it's not just about making people feel othered or not part of teams. We actually risk having adverse outcomes when we have a culture that prioritizes people projecting the sense that they're always right. And if we don't allow people to admit failure, there can be pretty bad consequences. And the story, if you've heard it of Volkswagen and the emission scandal is a good example of this. So if you haven't heard Volkswagen basically were fined and it was found out that their engines were breaching emissions regulations. So the emissions coming out of the engines was much higher than Volkswagen said it was. And there was a massive kind of investigation into this, why it was the case, it cost Volkswagen billions, I think about $8 billion in kind of recalling the vehicles and then the lawsuits that piled on top. So obviously they wanted to kind of understand how had we put engines on the market that failed the emissions tests? And when the internal investigation took place, it was actually found out that it was the culture of Volkswagen that had allowed this to happen because employees kind of further down the ladder were so afraid of making a mistake that when they found out that the engines weren't going to pass the tests, instead of going to senior management and saying, we probably should do something about this, we need another plan, they didn't do that because they were afraid and they installed defeat devices, so code that essentially overrope the results of the test and made it look like the engines passed the emissions tests. It was the culture of fear that stopped them doing that. And I'm not saying your company is going to be open to a Volkswagen style kind of lawsuit or engine recall situation, but this can be happening at a much lower scale. If people aren't kind of empowered, if they are too afraid to come forward when they've made a mistake or they've failed, those things will just get brushed under the rug and nothing will ever be addressed or improved. So if you want to create an open culture, I think firstly you've got to see failure really as part of the process, it's frankly going to happen. If you think it isn't happening in your organization, it is just nobody's telling you. I think part of this is allowing people to repeatedly respond with, I don't know. And I know a lot of us can do that once or twice in a meeting or in several years of an organization, but you've got to allow people to do it all the time. It's an acceptable answer. And part of making it acceptable is modeling this vulnerability at the top and also creating individual time for reflection so people can think about mistakes, what they would do right, what they would do next time, maybe what the solution is. And I think finally, we've also got to value constructive dissent so people disagreeing. Again, disagreement is part of the process. Disagreement generally makes a product, a service, a decision better because you have multiple viewpoints in the room. So we're going to come on to inclusive collaboration. I know all of us collaborate and all of us probably try and do that inclusively. And I think one-on-one, we all do really, really well, but part of the problem is the organizational design because some organizations, I'm not saying this as a caveat that everyone does it, but there is kind of a norm that a lot of us probably have experienced. When we have organizations that prioritize confidence, always knowing, always being right, knowing an answer on the spot, we actually do a disservice to certain groups of people. To illustrate the point, I think these stats kind of show something quite interesting. So 33% of men break their performance higher than equally performing women. Interesting. And we see this kind of bear out in the fact that women are less likely to apply to jobs where they were equally as qualified to, or maybe they don't meet all of the criteria to that men would apply for. And only 5% of leadership positions in tech companies here in the UK are currently held by women, which is such a shocking statistic. But having seen a lot of cultures that are really about macho confidence, I can see why women don't feel comfortable in that situation. And this is not something that's specific to women. I would never argue with that. I think it actually affects a lot of minorities because when you see the status quo as being a certain type of ideal that you don't feel like you can ever fit in with or live up to, of course, again, you're going to feel really othered and not part of the company and not able to perform your best and not able to progress. And I actually encountered this kind of recently, this feeling of really not feeling good enough and it held me back significantly. So, you know, you've seen me for about 10 minutes now. I'm a pretty confident person. I love talking. I'm a, I'm a talker. My mum would say that. And this is me on the stage at the Barbican Center in London, very famous stage, speaking to about 1600 people a couple of years ago. I can do that. That is something I can do really nervous beforehand, but the talk went pretty, pretty well. But the thing is, I'm the person that can do this, but I've never felt good enough to run my own business. And that was what was always holding me back, setting up on my own. And that was partly because I always double questioned my assumptions. I always felt kind of unsure about decisions I was making. And I always kind of dug into things really, really deeply to see all sides of the story in all angles of how something could basically go wrong. And when I met other business leaders or entrepreneurs, they never were like that. They always projected the fact that they were so confident and they were so sure. And this led me to think, well, you know, I'm not like them. How can I run a business? Because I'm really unsure and I make it up as I go along. But what I realized is my tendency to kind of do a lot of introspection, think of problems through very kind of logically from all angles is actually an asset. It's not a problem. And that all of the people I was speaking to feel just as unsure as I do. And that realization was pretty powerful, actually. So if you want to create a culture which is inclusively collaborative, you need to openly embrace the fact that there are different skill sets and there's different skill levels. You know, your entry level employees, of course are gonna not gonna be able to have the same answers or do the same standard of work as someone who's been in the job for 20 years. That's to be expected. We've also got to recognize that everyone's experiences are individual. The way certain people experience a certain type of confident culture, shall we say, may not be in the same positive way as other people who benefit from that culture. And this is where we've really got to start rewarding results, not confidence, not the person who dominates the meeting, not the person who shouts the loudest because that's sending a lot of signals to other people that that's what you need to do to get ahead and then very other ring to people who don't operate at that, who are more introverted, who maybe don't want to dominate the room, who are a lot more collaborative by their very nature. So moving on to realistic resilience and just again, a really quick point about this. So we've all had to be really, really resilient over the last 18 months. We've all got through a lot of stuff. And the point about realistic resilience is you don't have to be 100% resilient all the time. That is an unsustainable, unmanageable ideal. That's a standard you're holding yourself up to that you can never meet. So when I talk about resilience, I talk about it in the sense of just do your best in the situations you have. You don't always have to have everything together. So the problem is we often work in spaces where there are no purely right or wrong answers. We have to really experiment a lot with ambiguity to get our work done to achieve results. And this can be quite hard to reconcile with, especially when you look at places like social media, which really reward binary and very short opinions. So our experience of work is extremely messy, it's extremely squiggly, yet we're presented with this idea of there are right or wrong answers. And I've only been in business for like six weeks now, by taking a lot of comfort from the fact that all I need to do is do my best with the situation I'm in. Everyone else is doing that. And that's how everyone else is getting good enough results, good enough, really, really is good enough. But the thing is the problems we encounter are extremely multifaceted, they're extremely tangled and they're only gonna frankly get more complicated, I imagine. And the thing is your unique value isn't in having an immediate solution to the complicated tangle. Your value is actually solving and untangling and figuring out the solution. And often there are multiple valid solutions. It's very well read that there's one single path that you need to take to achieve successful results of whatever you're trying to do. It's about pushing through, it's about finding the different paths and selecting the one that's best for your circumstances. So if you want to have realistically resilient organizations, we've got to give people thinking time, thinking time to think through the problems, to think through the entanglement and the mess. And this again, a really big realization for me over the last couple of months, the busy, i.e. writing or doing something or creating something is not always me doing my best work. Sometimes it is just taking a step back and reflecting. So really don't correlate being busy, doing busy work, we're doing a good job. That's how you end up being burnt out, trust me, I've been there. I think we've also all got to stop reading this success story porn. It's frankly, again, an unrealistic standard that we're never gonna live up to those people on LinkedIn being like, I have this one hack that made my life amazing, that brought in a billion dollars of sales and you can do it too. The thing is, even if what they're saying is true, they won't have just come up with it overnight, it will have been a process to get there. And I think finally, we've all got to recognize that in our work, most problems have multiple valid solutions and picking one valid solution is good enough. It's all good enough. So hopefully this talk has made you think about the fact that everyone is frankly making it up and that it's absolutely a-okay. And frankly, it's the secret to do a good work. I actually asked my granddad, who's 96, when he kind of realized that he was an adult, that he was kind of good at things, that he was sure about his life and his response was, I've never had that moment, I'm still figuring out, I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm 96. So that was kind of scary in a way, but I also took quite a lot of comfort from it. I think we've got to understand that if we're a leader or we're an influencer in an organization, we need to be authentic and honest. We've got to model the behavior we want to see and if we project this unrealistic standard, other people are going to be held to it or feel like they're held to it. I think also uncertainty is a fact of life. I'd like to leave you with that. You never know what's around the corner. That's what makes life fun slash terrifying. And I don't know is a valid answer in any context. Feel empowered to say that. And if you're not quite there yet, this is something I always use. So I'm afraid I don't know, but I'm happy to go and find the answer because that is the value is the finding of the answer and not knowing it immediately. So fear an imposter syndrome, holding you back from applying to that job or that promotion, building that MVP, darting your new venture. I challenge you to imagine a world where you didn't have to be 100% correct or certain, where good enough is good enough. And the value of your work is figuring out that tricky thing, not having the immediate answer because that is the world you are living in now. So try it and see. I jumped in and it's working out so far and I'm just figuring it out as I go and I'm really enjoying doing that. So thank you so much to GitLab for having me. Really appreciate it. If you wanna connect me on LinkedIn, Twitter, platform with your choice, I'd be super open to that and to chatting about my experiences, honestly and vulnerably. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.