Carla Miller [00:00:02]:
Many workplaces are dominated by short term thinking, intense pressure to produce immediate results, and a focus on growth at all costs. Sound familiar? This short term focus often leads to poor decision making, poor long term performance and risks employee burnout. In today's episode, my guest Kath Bishop makes a powerful case for implementing what she calls long win thinking. Now Kath knows a bit about winning as a 3 time Olympian with a silver medal and a fascinating career in diplomacy within conflict zones. Now she works as a coach and consultant advising on leadership performance and culture, teaches on the exec education programs at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, writes for The Guardian, and cohosts a podcast called the Inside Out Culture podcast. Now in this episode, we discuss why workplaces benefit from focusing on the long win. We talk about how Kath's mindset around winning shifted across her 3 Olympic games and how she felt sat at the start line of her medal winning Olympic race compared to how she felt at the start line of her first Olympic race. We also talk a little bit about her diplomatic experience and what insight she's taken from that into her leadership coaching.

Carla Miller [00:01:22]:
We have a chat about how early in life we start thinking winning is important and sharing stories from our kids when they're 6. And we talk about how do you separate performance from results and winning. And then we finish up by sharing Kath's really practical three c model for implementing long wind thinking in your team. My name's Carla Miller, leadership coach, author, trainer, and founder of Women Leading, the community that helps women lead without overwhelm. I'm on a mission to empower women leaders in the workplace and make leading less lonely. And this is the influence and impact podcast for female leaders, helping you confidently navigate the ups and downs of leadership and feel less alone on your journey as a leader. In fortnightly episodes, I share practical tools and insights from myself and my brilliant guests that will help you to succeed in your career. This episode is really timely for me.

Carla Miller [00:02:18]:
If you've been listening for a while, you know that I'm psyching myself up for turning 50 in January by just saying it a lot right now. But I've also been thinking about that idea that you know, it's not too long till retirement, probably sort of 15 years ish. And what what do I wanna achieve during that time? What legacy do I want to leave? What does success mean to me? And what would it look like to just be really happy as I did that rather than just driving myself really hard towards this ultimate goal? And that's really in line with what we're talking about today in terms of long term thinking. And I've been thinking a lot about my mission as well. I've had this mission for ages of empowering 10,000 women in their careers. And quite frankly, I think I might have already done that. When I look at the podcast downloads. We're on about a 190,000 podcast downloads now, the book, the workshops, the seminars, all the different things that have been done.

Carla Miller [00:03:18]:
And so I've been rethinking and thinking it's it's really about empowering women in the workplace. So empowering women to believe in themselves, to recognize how good they are, to go and get others to understand how good they are. But this other theme has been coming up for me again and again. And and it's why I created women leading really, which is that I'd like leading to be less lonely. Because I think it can be very lonely and very isolating if you don't have a fantastic group of peers in your organisation. If your organisation is going through change, if you're under huge amounts of pressure, if you love your job but you just feel like you've got no more energy to give it. All of these are really hard things to talk about at work and not necessarily things that you wanna come home and talk to your partner, flatmate, child, fur baby. Choose whichever is relevant for you about.

Carla Miller [00:04:11]:
And so we've been having within women leading, we've been having these peer support calls where you get 3 women together in a breakout room to talk about what's going on for them. And sometimes, they just wanna be heard, and sometimes they want to have a sounding board to talk through what's going on. And I've been checking in with members and saying, how's it going? And so far, those have absolutely been the most powerful sessions for them. And people have been describing them as powerful, as having breakthroughs, as helping them to really understand that this stuff is going on in all of our heads. And we're not alone in it. There's nothing wrong with us that we're finding leading hard. And I think that's hugely empowering as an insight. So I love hosting those.

Carla Miller [00:04:58]:
I'm really pleased I created Women Leading, and I would really love more people to come and give it a try. So we are now doing a monthly membership, so you can join for just £49 a month. You can cancel at any time. So if you're feeling lonely, if you want more support, if you want to develop new skills, if you wanna talk about your menopause symptoms, we do all of that, much, much more. You also get access to group coaching with me, and I'd really love us to take our relationship to the next level and get to know you better. So have a look at joining with a monthly membership, head over to carlamillertraining.comforward/womenleading. So that's a bit about me and and my definition of success at the moment and what I'm trying to achieve. But let's roll the episode so you can hear from Kath, her insights on why it's important to think long term and how we just bring a lot more joy to work if we focus on the long win rather than the short term

Cath Bishop [00:06:01]:
win.

Carla Miller [00:06:02]:
Welcome to the podcast, Kath. Very excited to be here having read your book. What I'd love to do is to jump straight into this idea that you've come up with of the long win. And I'd love to just set the context with a bit of an explanation of what is long win thinking and why does it matter to people in the workplace.

Cath Bishop [00:06:23]:
So I think I've always been fascinated by this question of what does success look like? What's required of me? How are others defining it? Am I successful? Will I be successful? All these questions. I think we think about literally as we're growing up. You know, what do I need to do to get my parents' attention and all of that or my teachers' praise. And so I think there comes a point though, where as adults you start to question some of the definitions we might have grown up with or we might have taken on. And, you know, I noticed across all my experiences in sport, business, education, public life, that we seem to be defining it in an ever narrower way. It's just a moment in time, It's temporary. It's a number. It's a certificate.

Cath Bishop [00:07:04]:
It's a medal. And, actually, this doesn't serve us well. It's not actually helping us get the most out of ourselves. It's not making us really enjoy it that much. And so we need to redefine success and that's what long wind thinking is about. It's about reimagining, redefining and then redesigning your pursuit of that success once you've really thought about what matters most to you over the longer term as well as the short term.

Carla Miller [00:07:33]:
I love it. And it's something that's on my mind a lot. I'm constantly juggling with those external ideas of success that I find myself temporarily taking on. And then when I check-in with myself, I'm like, oh, actually, is that what's important to me? And so how does this fit into a workplace context? Why do we need to think about long wind thinking when it comes to the workplace?

Cath Bishop [00:07:54]:
So it's essential from every aspect. It's essential from actually being productive, from performing and perhaps most importantly, sustaining performance. So it's really critical to, you know our experience at the workplace, it's critical to our motivation. So if we know why something matters and we're excited about how we're going to work together in pursuit of that, then we're going to give our all willingly. We're going to chuck our ideas in, we're going to be listening to each other, we're gonna be innovating and we're gonna be in a good space. If we're just chasing some arbitrary number, there's someone else's set, we're not even quite sure why that's the number and how that connects to perhaps the work that that we're doing then we pull back, we don't engage as much, we don't enjoy it, we don't give our best and we get stuck in that cycle that frankly we see a lot in the figures around disengagement, lack productivity, lack of innovation and leaders wanting more of those things. And what I found is that definition of success is often a really important hub. If you want to change the collaboration or you want to change the amount of innovation or your team engagement, you don't just go in there.

Cath Bishop [00:09:01]:
Think about what is it that's actually driving that that's motivating people to be innovative, to give their best ideas. And it's probably going to be very much something around what are we actually aiming for? What does good look like? Is innovation in our picture of success? If not, then it's not very clear to people that you think it really matters. So sometimes we have this conflict between, you know, we want, sort of, 10% growth and we'd like everyone to collaborate. But it's not really clear why collaborating helps or that the leaders are going to really recognise it, reward it, promote it, support it. So we just drop that bit off and kind of churn out the stuff we've always done. So often it's this coming back and helping people connect to that picture of success. So it's not just a number, that's no good, 10% what's that mean to anyone? It's a round and round number. Why is it 10%? Why isn't it 12% growth? Why isn't it 9% growth? What are we going to do with the responsibility when we grow as a company? Do we deserve to be the market leader that we're aiming to be? How are we going to make people's lives better? It's about adding meaning around some of the simple targets that we set and then people can really connect with them and start to, you know, give their best work, come up with better ways of doing things and really start contributing to creating value as our organizations always want.

Carla Miller [00:10:21]:
That sounds super inspiring and very different from a lot of the organizations that I've worked in, that my clients have worked in, where there is that huge disconnect between meaning and definition of success and those goals that are set. Now you know more about success than a lot of us, because, incredibly, you've competed at 3 Olympic games. And I know my audience would love to hear a little bit about that. And I'm really fascinated by how your mindset shifted as you went through those 3 different experiences.

Cath Bishop [00:10:50]:
Yeah. So that's sort of when I first got a kind of up close and personal, intense experience of a high performance culture, as they might describe it. And people will sometimes say to me, what's it like to be in an Olympic high performance culture? And of course, it's not one thing. Each Olympiad, I did it for 3 year for 10 years and went to 3 Olympic games. Each time, under different coaches, with different, you know, environments, others, different, sort of, sense of of what mattered most. It it felt different. So we always trained really hard. That was common.

Cath Bishop [00:11:22]:
But the experience we had shifted and in particular, kind of in the early years, so I go back quite a long way, my first Olympics was Atlanta, then I went to Sydney and then I went to Athens. And in the first two Olympics, really, we were stuck in what I call a very outdated, macho world of more is good, train harder, be, you know, show no weakness, be tougher than anyone around you, be the last person standing. All of that sort of stuff that we see in the Hollywood scripts. Frankly, we still see it around, you know, the the touchline of, you know, kids playing football. And, you know, I just thought, well, I have to learn that's what you do if you want to be good in this world. Because that's that's kind of environment I come into and what do I know? And so I did it and I found it really difficult and I found that, obviously, when I was having a tough time, I couldn't reach out for help. I often felt quite burnt out. I felt we were always pitted against each other so therefore, you know, nobody's helping each other.

Cath Bishop [00:12:15]:
And actually, when I look back on it, we weren't really supporting each other to learn and what happened when we came to race the rest of the world who were the real competition? We weren't fast enough, we were nowhere near winning medals, couldn't have trained any harder, couldn't have been any tougher. But it was not smart in any way at all. We'd done things that had actually kind of slowed us down, that had held us back. Even though it's described as a high performance culture, it's about going to the Olympics. Nobody could train harder or, you know, with more dedication. But that's just, you know, not good enough. And that got me really interested in 'there must be a better way to succeed', what are we missing in that environment', What are the other elements? And it was at that time, coming to my 3rd Olympics, when we had a different coach coming in, and there was quite a lot of new thinking coming in through sports psychology and people were just starting to realise that the environment you're in is really important. So it's not just about making each row of themselves individually really good, Actually, the environment within which they're training is going to have a big impact on that too and other people are responsible for that.

Cath Bishop [00:13:23]:
And so that was starting to shift thinking and that enabled me to have quite a different experience and at the same time to be able to, you know, have a lot more fun. I mean, still pretty tough, but a lot more fun. And and one of the big shifts in sports psychology is that we separate out now these concepts of performance and results in sports. Now we tend to mix these up in the business world in lots of thinking, lots of talk. But the reason we do that is because the results we can't ever completely control. So I can't be completely sure I'm gonna win a gold medal. It's gonna depend on things that are beyond my control. What my competitors do, luck will play a role, the umpires, the weather.

Cath Bishop [00:14:04]:
I could be injured at the last minute. But what I can do is take full responsibility for developing my performance that I bring to that race and to making sure that I'm improving it all the time. And so we shift in terms of let's maximize all the things I can do that help my performance. So that's strength and fitness and, you know, technique. But it's also my mindset. It's how well I recover. It's my relationships with others in that environment and the sense of trust. It's whether I'm able to give really good feedback and receive the feedback and act on it.

Cath Bishop [00:14:35]:
And so all of these things become what we call performance ingredients, if you like. And we work on improving those. And so success changed from let's be obsessive about winning to let's be obsessive, still a little bit, about improving. Let's be world class at improving. Let's improve more than anyone else because that's actually what we're doing most of the time. And that will give us our best chance of winning on the days that that comes. But it brings a humility, it brings an openness to do things differently, it brings that importance of learning from each other being now critical if we're trying to improve as much as possible. It's in all our interests that we learn from each other.

Cath Bishop [00:15:15]:
And so that brought a real shift in experience I had and the performances. Suddenly, you know, we're up winning medals. And I realized how critical this was. That was the beginning of the long win.

Carla Miller [00:15:29]:
Absolutely. Fascinating how you made that shift. And so, when you were sat in the boat at the start line for your 1st Olympics, what was going through your head versus when you were sat at the start line in the vote for that that last Olympics where you did have medal success?

Cath Bishop [00:15:44]:
Yeah. It's a really it's a really interesting, question and and it's a very different experience. So, you know, the first one, I was thinking, I've got to win, I've got to win, I've got to got to beat everyone, and got nowhere near that. Felt huge negative kind of pressure, and then, of course, huge devastation afterwards. And in the last Olympics, I was really excited about, you know, how close can we get to giving the best performance we possibly can? And then let's see where that comes out. And so there was much more of, you know, let's see what's possible. We used to talk about that. Let's see what's possible together.

Cath Bishop [00:16:23]:
Can we put the best 260 strokes together over this 2 1000 metre course? Try and make each one better than the one before. And, you know, so then you're kind of fully in the moment. Yes, you're, you know, you're responding to the environment but you're not thinking about what's gonna happen at the finish line until you get there. And that's much more liberating, much more fun and much better for performance too.

Carla Miller [00:16:45]:
And I can see, like, of people are listening, not watching, but I can see the joy on your face as you talk about that different approach and how it felt doing that. Now once you, had your Olympic success, you went back to the diplomatic career that you had started. Again, super interesting. But what from your diplomatic experience do you bring to your leadership coaching, do you think?

Cath Bishop [00:17:10]:
So I think, I mean, also people often think those are 2 very different worlds but what I loved about them both is they're very people centred worlds. And, you know, in an Olympic environment, we wouldn't sort of skim particularly in that more enlightened one at the end, on building relationships and trusting each other and knowing each other beyond simply being the best rowers. And the wonderful thing about diplomacy is it's all about relationships. It's our only currency. It's our only means of making progress. And so one of the things that it gave me that I bring to, yeah, the coaching work I do, the team coaching, individual coaching, leadership coaching, is a real understanding of what it means to invest in relationships. To help people sort of switch out of sometimes quite a task focused mindset about what I've got to do, to thinking about what are all the relationships that you want to invest in that will help you to deliver those tasks and how you're going to do that. So if you're looking at a diary, you look at your electronic calendar you might look at, you know, I've got these pieces of work to do and this stuff, these documents and these deadlines.

Cath Bishop [00:18:19]:
And I try and shift the lens to think, okay, who are all the people in the calendar this week? So, I've got one to one conversations, I've got a team meeting, I've got external stakeholders. Okay, So, where are those relationships at the moment? And how can you, in the course of discussing what you've got to discuss this week, find out more about them, find out more about their expertise, get some more insights to help you do your work. And, you know, really just get to know them as people as well. So that at the end of this week, yes, you've finished those tasks. But what you've done that's much more useful in the long term is you've taken some relationships and invested in them, deepened them, strengthened them, and then they'll be even better next time round. And if you've got difficult issues to discuss, the relationship can withstand you having disagreements, seeing things differently and staying together to find a way through.

Carla Miller [00:19:14]:
Fascinating. I, coach a lot on influence. And my first step to my influence model is always about building that relationship because it's such a solid foundation if you want to work successfully and problem solve alongside people. Now in the book, you talk a lot about our obsession with winning and our focus on short term success. When do you think we start to pick up these messages around winning being so important?

Cath Bishop [00:19:40]:
Frighteningly early. And and that's why the first part of the book is actually looking at how have we got to this point where it's it's everywhere. It's in advertising, it's in book titles, it's on products we buy, it's in the playground. And I think there's a sort of history of how we've told those stories over and over again, the battles that we won in history, there's this sense of people winning and defeating others, dictating a lot of what we might learn in the history books. That then shifted into the business world so that it became everything's a battleground and that language kind of shifts across. But it's old, it's been there for sort of 150 years And the workplace now is a very different space where we want to often collaborate much more. You know, even with people who are our current competitors, we may well want to collaborate in some form. We certainly probably want to be learning from each other.

Cath Bishop [00:20:36]:
We haven't got time for one of us to defeat the other. It doesn't work like that. We're both cooperating and innovating and potentially got some overlap, we're gonna have people probably working in each organisation who will move between the 2. It makes no sense to be in some sort of slow conventional battle place and yet that's the language that we use. So, you know, history has sort of seen it come into the other language of business. We see it in sport, of course. And often we see sport through that narrow lens of a binary win lose space. But I think sport has evolved over the last, again, over the last century.

Cath Bishop [00:21:15]:
And what we understand is that sport is something that helps us transcend who we are, to connect us as groups. You know, Federer and Nadal, when they're playing, they're not just trying to beat each other, they're trying to take their tennis to the next level and they need each other. They're friends, they're the closest of friends because who else knows what it's like to be, you know, a multi grand slam finalist and the pressure of those moments. The other one, you've got more in common than you have with probably anyone else in the world. And you need each other in order to bring your best performance. And so we see in some spaces in sport also, a means of thinking very differently than a purely winloss, goodbad, everybody's an enemy, sort of thinking. And I guess the other thing is we, there are sort of 2 parts to how our brains work. And sometimes we like this sort of binary, you know, it's easy, I've got something I've won, it's good, my team's won and I get little, you know, I get a lift from that.

Cath Bishop [00:22:13]:
It's actually quite temporary. The thing that gives us a longer lasting sense of satisfaction and fulfillment is when something meaningful has happened. So in fact, it might be on some occasions our team has won, but because and because they've done something like the lioness is won and they've changed, you know, it's what we might call an extrinsic level of motivation. Because it's quite, what we might call an extrinsic level of motivation. And so thinking about that playing much more to the part of our brains that likes meaning is much longer term. But what happens is we, you know, we, in our organizations, we look at bonuses and prizes and awards and, you know, at school we operate around that. So very, you know, at a very young age you may be getting a sticker on a chart because you held the door open. And that's actually rewarding, in a way that isn't helpful.

Cath Bishop [00:23:06]:
I can remember actually, just a sort of quick story with my son. He was suddenly at the top of the star chart one one one day. He was about 6 or 7 and, I was like, oh, you know, how's that coming back? He said, yeah. On top of the charts. Well, I realized, if you if you hold doors open, then you get stickers. So I just hold doors open for loads of people. And then the next year, you didn't get a sticker for that anymore. You didn't hold the door open for anyone.

Cath Bishop [00:23:29]:
I was like, how monstrous is that? That, you know, we had quite a chat about why there might be other reasons to hold the door open than getting a sticker. But I really fear that kind of mentality, that if he's not really learning about how lovely it is to make someone else's day and connect with them and be kind and if you're kind to them, they'll be kind to you. If you're not learning that, you're just learning about a little sticker. We've got things wrong, haven't we?

Carla Miller [00:23:53]:
Absolutely. I've been having this discussion with my 6 year old boy, actually. So he wants to go to beavers camp, which he's he's not quite ready for. And so I've decided against it for various reasons. And he's disappointed, not because he doesn't get to do the cool activities, but because his best friend Aaron is going to get more badges than he is. And they get badges all the time. And I have to stick these flipping things on. I've learned to use fabric glue, not so now.

Carla Miller [00:24:16]:
It was the bane of my life. But it was really interesting. I was like, I thought he'd be upset about the kayaking or the camping. But, no. What he was upset about was someone was gonna be ahead of him on something he decided was important that nobody else thought was important. It happened so young.

Cath Bishop [00:24:32]:
It's something that the environment taught him is important. It's not really him making that decision because I think if he went, would he come back and he'd probably go, Wow, the kayaking was amazing. But at this point, it's the badges that's being noted in that environment and so it's worth, you know, perhaps even trying to sort of reflect that back that, yeah, what what do we, you know, how do we help them kind of take a a different joy out of this rather than, yeah, do it for the badge. I mean, that's the classic thing, isn't But it's not you know, I really would say it's the environment that's leading him to think that's what gets rewarded. They probably have a big ceremony when you get them. You know? And so that's your signal to you that that's what success looks like. So I've got to learn those rules. And so we kind of, at the time, buy into it.

Cath Bishop [00:25:16]:
But then we get to a point where we go, it's actually not that satisfying. And that time I went kayaking was that really was fun. And maybe I want to redefine success for myself. And that's what this book is about. Helping us go, where have I got sucked into some definitions of success that aren't working for me? Probably aren't working for anyone else either? And how do I now rethink that on my own terms?

Carla Miller [00:25:41]:
And I use some of the questions you had in the book to help me do that actually because running my own business, like, when I go onto LinkedIn, I start to think, oh, I should be doing a TEDx. I should be doing x and y in order to be successful, and yet I've consciously made the choice. Move to Cumbria, work less hours, enjoy life with my child, and just do good work. But it's a constant internal battle. And so I found the questions in the book really helpful for helping me to reflect on what's important. Now interestingly, in the book, you talk a lot about that short term focus and how it's not helpful in a business environment. You also talk about there being too much focus on growth. And I thought that was really interesting because so much focus goes on growth for the sake of growth's sake.

Carla Miller [00:26:26]:
And so many of my clients right now are telling me they're overwhelmed, they're burnt out. Even the senior leaders who are the ones setting the pace are saying it's too much, but people are finding it really hard to slow down. How do you think this long wind thinking can help us with that obsession with growth?

Cath Bishop [00:26:45]:
Yeah. The the big thing is to come back to the question you just mentioned there really. What really matters? So is it okay to burn people out in order to achieve this growth? I'm not sure. And if it isn't, then let's go back and and think about how we define success. You know, is it okay, you know, to have growth at all costs? You know, is is growth helping society, the environment, our communities? So it's really that step back to think about our impact, our purpose, if you like, the impact we're having on others around us. Maybe very local, maybe our family, maybe the community, maybe, you know, wider than that in nationally, internationally. But to always come back to the impact on people as well rather than a number. So if we make this much profit, what does that actually mean in human terms? So who's benefited from that? Are the products you've created, you know, are patients receiving a better jog or whatever it might be? Whose lives have you made better in the process of creating that profit? And, you know, what's the impact on the people who've worked in your organization? Where did they have they had a good time? Have they I mean, I don't mind growth in the sense of personal development.

Cath Bishop [00:27:55]:
That's great. Have they grown? Have they become better leaders, better managers, better colleagues, work better as a team? So now, whatever your next challenge is, you know, we go in to that with renewed energy and skills, or are they all completely burnt out and, you know, need to take things off? So it is that always thinking about the human impact of what we do that I think helps us then go, yeah, maybe maybe we that isn't the right way to do it. It It can also be sometimes about shifting the emphasis. So let's try and improve the impact we have on our, whatever it might be, customers' lives or, you know, who whoever it is we work with, our colleagues. And then let's see. In the process of doing that really well, let's see how much we grow. And do you know what? Sometimes the growth is actually very good, but we find out in a very different way rather than we're gonna cut loads of corners in order to get to hit this number. You know, you're you're certainly not being unambitious.

Cath Bishop [00:28:50]:
You're just changing the focus and you're actually saying, you know, in a more broader way, let's find out what's possible. Because sometimes you also then realize that there's a sort of secondary impact you're having that might be really positive and and have some value in it as well, social value or commercial value. And you want to explore that all the time rather than be on this doing this one thing, bashing the hell out of it to get that next chunk of market share. So it's also that kind kind of having the opportunity to think more broadly and, you know, really to to engage the participation of everyone in your organization, to be part of that, for them to kind of say, what do you think is possible? Where where could we go next? So you're involving people much more as well. So it's about humanizing what growth means, and then sometimes you end up defining it in a different way.

Carla Miller [00:29:41]:
I would love to see more of that happening in the charity sector in particular. So that's my background, and there's a lot of charity sector clients that I have. And because what they do is so important, the the people that they're working with, the change they're trying to make in the world is so important. That gets prioritized completely, and the human cost to the people that work in the sector is really deprioritized. And I think there's a time for a rebalance there. So I'm hoping this is gonna prompt some charity leaders to be reading your book. Now, Yeah. Great.

Carla Miller [00:30:13]:
In the book, you talk about these practical approaches to long wind thinking. So clarity, constant learning, and connection. I'd love to hear a little bit more about each of those so that people can start to understand, right, what can I put in place to become more of a long term thinker or to encourage my team to do so?

Cath Bishop [00:30:32]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So the 3 c's are have come out of they've evolved from my coaching work and experiences and that initial sports experience as well as being ways of thinking that help us rebalance. So they're deliberately not prescriptive, just do these three things. It's about sort of almost 3 questions, The 3 c's. So keep clarifying what matters. And, you know, the constant learning. What what else are you going to learn in the course of, what you're doing? How else can you learn? What can you learn from what you've got on today? What can you learn from people around you? And the connections.

Cath Bishop [00:31:08]:
So we're prioritizing connections in what we do. And as we talked about beginning, think of the calendar as connections first, and through that, we'll get some tasks done. And so they are very much about helping to shift our thinking, and then we do different stuff. And what I find is that a lot of my work with leaders, with teams, and the business school groups that I work with, then it's the thinking pattern that I want to change rather than simply go away with 2 actions. If I can go away with you thinking asking some different questions, you'll work out some different actions to do. And so, yeah, the clarifying piece is is then a series of questions to help you think what else matters that we're not currently measuring or that isn't in our immediate growth target. What else matters? Get that down next to it. You know, and thinking, so the why, getting much clearer sense of, you know, why are we doing this? Why does 10% growth make sense? You know, why does that matter in the world? What happens if we don't achieve 10%? And why are we the right people to be doing that? Why is my team the right, the the right team to be playing a part in that? And then to be also coming up with clarifying how we're gonna do it.

Cath Bishop [00:32:15]:
So we could kill ourselves on the way to doing it, or maybe we could work and explore how we work better as a team in the course of doing it. So the why and the how, we start to clarify those, because those are what determine the experience, and they often determine the sustainability of the performance that we create. So not just am I gonna hit this target, but but the why and the how are going to determine whether we're going to hit any targets after that as well. And then thinking, you know, also about what matters over slightly longer term. So we might have this annual figure, but where are we going? Where are we heading? What's that on the way to? Again, to have a sense of meaning, to be able to bring my best self to work, I need to know what that's about, what's the bigger change, what's the bigger piece, that that's part of. So we create that that meaning. Yeah. Constant learning, I think, is such a great fuel and tool for us to feel that we, as humans, are growing all the time.

Cath Bishop [00:33:07]:
Sometimes stuff doesn't go so well, but we learn a ton of stuff that helps us be better in our jobs. I really like to see that much more in the picture of success. So we will achieve this. And in the course of this, we are going to get better at these things. We're going to be a better team in this way. You're going to benefit in your career by being part of this team for this year or this next 5 years or however long it is. You're gonna make you better at your job and you better as a person by being part of this. That's really important for me, and it's really helpful for performance and teamwork too.

Cath Bishop [00:33:39]:
And, yeah, keeping the connections, you know, running through that all the time. Who do we need in order to achieve this growth target, whatever it might be? You know, who's important there? What are the relationships that we need to connect with? You know, a bit of the old stakeholder mapping, almost. And how are we going to develop those over time? Because they're not quick fixes. But how are we going to make sure we invest in those relationships, rather than a last minute try and get something done and and rely on somebody we don't really have a strong enough relationship with? So there's lots of questions. Each chapter has questions at the end, as you mentioned on those 3 c's. And I've got lots of stories, and I'm sort of adding in more to this website that I've built around the book, which is the longwind.com, to help people. Because people will always say to me, how can I do it? Tell me how to do it. And I'm not gonna tell you exactly the answer because the beauty is in you working out through these questions what's right for your context and defining it in your language or with your teams, you know, in your terms.

Cath Bishop [00:34:37]:
But I want to create as much sort of help and stories that you can learn from. I think, yeah, that that can relate to that leader doing that or or this team over here. So I've literally just launched that with the second edition of the book, and that's gonna grow and and I hope be a sort of great resource for people to sort of go, oh, how do I get back into this when I've got stuck in that short term, hitting the next, deadline mentality?

Carla Miller [00:35:02]:
Amazing. And so if you're a leader and you're listening to this and thinking, I would like to start to shift how I and my team approach our thinking, How would you suggest starting with that? Is it about, do you think bringing it to a team meeting, having an away day, starting to share your thinking first? Any suggestions on how you start to make that shift?

Cath Bishop [00:35:23]:
Yeah. I mean, there's there's no one right way. I think, first of all, probably the, you know, the the starting points to go is how we define success. What does success look like? And do we even if I asked everyone in my team, you know, you might even do that sort of quite casually around conversations. Like, do we even have the same idea of it? And then to think about what else matters that we're not really measuring, acknowledging, recognising. So that's a question I use a lot. So what else matters that you're, you know, that isn't in your key metrics that you're holding yourselves to? To start thinking about how we're going to make sure that we don't lose sight of that. And often that is around the relations piece piece or the individual development piece, all of which is really crucial to doing our best work and and hitting those targets as well.

Cath Bishop [00:36:11]:
So I think I go back initially just to reflect, really. What does success look like to you? What do you think the team would say? And then maybe ask them. And then, you know, start to build out. It depends sort of what phase you're in and, obviously, what size of organization and all that, but start to build out this sort of what else matters? What else do we want? How do we humanize that picture of success? So is that picture of success a set of numbers, words, like, where are the people in that? You know, those would be my, sort of, initial starting points. And then, you know, yeah, often that clarifying then leads you on to thinking about the the learning and the connections as part of making sure that's in your in your future adapted, new long wind view of success.

Carla Miller [00:36:56]:
Fantastic. And you said you had lots of stories. What's one of your favorite transformations that you've seen as a result of an organization or a person pulling in place this long wind thinking?

Cath Bishop [00:37:07]:
Well, I have probably in in sport where I've worked with some people, I've seen some really, yeah, just people winning and having fun. You know, it's as simple as that, that we've kind of lost that sense of how to do that. So there's a great story, on the long wind sort of sport page where I tell you that, you know, the Canadian women's rowing crew won a gold medal in, Tokyo. And sort of literally kind of 18 months of that, I'd had had a bullying coach, had had, you know, really, really difficult time, really pitted against each other, really isolated lots of mental health challenges and stresses and struggles. And they brought a new coach in, female coach, and she just completely changed and just got to know them and literally was rebuilding them through. What's important to you? What makes you tick? Why do you do this? What brings you joy? You know, why does it matter, how fast we go at the Olympics, and how do we work together? What can you do to help each other? So really invested in that. And they were not the favorites, had an incredible race. And Andrea Prolska, who's one of the athletes in that crew, her story is told on the long wind thinking in sport page, and it's a beautiful one.

Cath Bishop [00:38:21]:
And it's one that I use a lot because I'm you know, we get so stuck in this fact that because in the past, we've won medals through abusing athletes and damaging them, we don't have to do that to win now. And in fact, it's not good for performance either because you flood your body with stress hormones. It's there's no competitive advantage in beating up an athlete. So we need to have more enlightened environments. And I think often we look to sports to sort of think about what does a winning culture look like. So I'm always trying to highlight some of these kind of really different examples.

Carla Miller [00:38:54]:
And have you seen I'm wondering if there's any gender element to this. So have you seen any difference between how willingly men and women embrace long wind thinking, for example?

Cath Bishop [00:39:04]:
Yeah. I I I don't think it's clear cut. I think that there are some sort of short wind thinking, the old, the outdated, narrow, pursuit of success I think is typified by what we would call masculine traits. So it's quite macho, it's quite tough, it's quite physic, it's about physical strength and dominance. And the long wind thinking embraces femoral, what are traditionally known as feminine qualities of connection, vulnerability, collaboration, teamwork, purpose. Now I think that most enlightened leaders understand that way of thinking. And, you know, for me, it's about finding people who are, who connect much more with a sense of purpose. And those are the ones that I find, you know, are on the path in a way towards more of a long wind thinking.

Cath Bishop [00:40:01]:
And it's about then kind of creating the culture that goes with the with that. I think we're all, you know, fundamentally driven by purpose. It's part of how we tap into that deeper motivation of what it means to be human, to go to the moon, to do things we haven't done. That's what, sort of, characterises us. And we do that through cooperation, not through just sort of, isolation isolating itself or defeating each other. And I think, therefore, it's it's more finding people who kind of perhaps are aware of that sense of purpose and have that much greater. But I do think you get this sense of, kind of, masculine qualities, feminine qualities, but, of course, women can exhibit the masculine qualities and and vice versa.

Carla Miller [00:40:42]:
Interesting. And so as we bring this to a close, a couple of questions. First of of all, if people want to work with you, so they can buy go and buy your book, which is fantastic. That latest edition is now out. If people want to work with you, how can they do that?

Cath Bishop [00:40:57]:
So I'm easy quite easy to find. So I have website, kathbishop.com, as well as this website around the book now, the longwind.com, and I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Instagram, kathunderlinebishop, and I'm on Twitter

Carla Miller [00:41:09]:
at thecathbishop. So I'm quite easy to find and I'm always up for long wing conversation. Brilliant. And then finally, if you wanted people to leave this interview with just one takeaway, like, one key idea from what you've said that you think will really make the most difference to them, what would that be, do you think?

Cath Bishop [00:41:27]:
I think it's about maybe projecting, sort of, 10, 15 years ahead and to stop back to step back and think. When you look back, what are the things that you'll think, constitute success? And 0, you know, zoom out have that kind of slightly broader perspective as you think. What does success really mean for you?

Carla Miller [00:41:51]:
I I think that's great. And I think, so I'm about to turn 50. And so I think turning 50 ish makes you think about, well, I am about 15 years, hopefully, from retiring. What do I want my legacy to be? What do I how do I wanna spend this time thoughtfully? So I think I've started to do that naturally, and a lot of my clients have as well. But if people could start doing that earlier, it would serve them well. Thank you so much, Kath. Fascinating to talk to you. I highly recommend the book.

Carla Miller [00:42:19]:
I've really enjoyed reading it. And I really hope that listening to this interview is gonna create some shifts in people's thinking about how work can be better. So thanks very much.

Cath Bishop [00:42:31]:
Great conversation. Thank you very much.