Carla Miller [00:00:02]:
When I was sent a book called the emotional overdraft, I instinctively knew that this was a topic that was going to resonate with me personally and you as listeners to this podcast. An emotional overdraft is when you as a leader habitually overcome your employer's challenges at the cost of your own physical and mental health. Sound familiar? I am seeing this a lot at the moment with the women I work with, so I was excited to dive into this topic with the book's author, Andy Brown. Andy has over 30 years experience as an award winning adviser and coach for people based businesses. He's also a podcast host. And this book, the emotional overdraft, 10 simple changes for balancing business success and well-being is an Amazon number one bestseller. Now, in this conversation, we talk about what happens when you go too deep into your emotional overdraft. How you can start to pay it back? What are the behaviors or drivers that create these emotional overdrafts? We also talk about the role of management skills and being able to influence effectively in changing a culture which relies on people being emotionally overdrawn.

Carla Miller [00:01:15]:
We talk about that tricky situation where things feel urgent and you're filling in short term gaps and how to approach that more strategically. And we talk about how the emotional overdraft shows up outside of work. It was a really interesting and wide ranging discussion, touching on all sorts of topics I know will feel very relevant for many of you. My name's Carla Miller. I'm a leadership coach, author, and trainer, and this is the influence and impact podcast for women 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. Now I've had a busy few weeks since the whole end of school holidays, going back to work thing. I've been delivering influencing training to the global marketing team of a Fintech company, and that's developed into a little bit of a niche actually, supporting internal facing teams with the confidence, ability to own their authority and their expertise, and the skills to be able to influence and navigate successfully internally.

Carla Miller [00:02:27]:
So, now, I've run it for a finance team, for an IT team, and for a marketing team as well. So if you are running a team that is internal facing and you want to upscale your team to be able to be seen as the strategic productive team that they are, then do get in touch to chat about that. I've also been running my b boulder training in house for a national charity and lining up some keynotes for women's network. So it's been lovely and busy, and the sun is shining in Cumbria. Now one piece of news for you is that due to popular demand, we are bringing Be Boulder back starting in February 2025. So for those of you that don't know, Be Boulder is my 4 session confidence and assertiveness course. It's relevant for women at any level, so it might be appropriate for you. You might want to send team members.

Carla Miller [00:03:19]:
And we look at tackling imposter feelings and self doubt, mastering your mindset, courageous conversations, including setting boundaries and saying no, and speaking up and getting your voice heard in meetings. If you want to find out more about that, head over to my website carlamiller.co.ukforward/bolder with no space between the b and the boulder. Okay. Let's find out about emotional overdrafts. So delighted to have Andy here talking about his book, the emotional overdraft. And as soon as I saw the title, I was like, oh, this sounds like something that's very relevant to me and my audience. So great to have you here, Andy.

Andy Brown [00:04:03]:
Thank you. And really good to be on the pod. I I've listened to a few of your podcasts, and I was struck. I it may not have been Efor O'Brien, but someone talked about happiness at work. And they said, it's not your job to make them happy. And I I just thought, I'm I'm in my happy place now. I'm in I'm with my people because I hear myself saying that a lot. So it's and having to tell myself that.

Andy Brown [00:04:27]:
So it's great to be here, and thank you for having me. I'm also very aware, very conscious that you don't have many men on your podcast, as a ratio. So thank you. I appreciate it. I really do.

Carla Miller [00:04:39]:
Excellent. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your background and how you came to write this book in the first place.

Andy Brown [00:04:46]:
So my background my background's entirely in in creative businesses, advertising, marketing, communications businesses. I paid my way through university by doing street field work, street street interviews. So, even at university, I was doing sorts of advertising y stuff and a planner. So I was a strategist and a data guy and spent years in advertising and was quite good with clients and not bad at it. Set up a couple of my own businesses. Sold 2, sold 1 quite well, and sold 1 very not well. So I've experienced both sides of running a business, but all sides probably running a business. And then I guess about 6 or 7 years ago, I became a board adviser to creative businesses.

Andy Brown [00:05:31]:
So I have half a dozen clients who are research companies, digital media agencies, those sorts of things. And so I can work rather than working in one business, I can work across a few businesses and share my experience. And it works it works really well. It's been it's been really edifying. But what that's meant is over the years, I've I've spoken to a lot of people in in the industry. And in the last dozen years or so, I've spoken I've advised lots of businesses. And what I saw was a behavior in men and women, so this is not just the male behavior, which was this idea that people gave so much of themselves to their business. And they'd look at their profit and loss.

Andy Brown [00:06:14]:
You know, classically, you look at the bottom right hand corner and see, you know, is that number a big profit number or a big loss number? And they'd see the profit, but what they wouldn't see was the the the hidden cost line, I call it, that that goes on in there, which which is the price they paid themselves. The the mental or physical price they paid themselves to subsidize that success. And so the question I ask my clients is, is that really profit, or has something is there a cost that we need to be thinking about? And that manifested itself in terms of staff churn, sickness rates, declining, recommendation rates, net promoter scores, things like that. You you'd find that you'd be burning your business out. And what we've seen since lockdown is is more evidence of burnout. We've also got more people talking about burnout and using the term to mean tired. So I'm not I'm I'm not lumping everyone in together, but definitely there is more burnout, more overwhelm, more stress, more anxiety at work. And that's because it's been completely reinvented around us.

Andy Brown [00:07:11]:
So I suppose about 3 years ago, I thought I'm a researcher by training. I'll go and find out if this thing I'm seeing is a real thing. And did the research, spoke to about 50 companies. And spoiler, if you think you're buying the book, everyone has an emotional overdraft. So, you know, there's there's no surprise there. And the question is how how quickly you you pay it back. It's like any I called it the emotional overdraft because there's an it's an emotional cost, but also it's like an overdraft, a tangible thing. There's a cost associated with it.

Andy Brown [00:07:44]:
So I define an emotional overdraft as subsidizing the success of your business at your own personal, mental, or physical cost. So you're subsidizing the success of your business or the success of your family or the success of your friend group or the success of your community, people that can't say no at your own mental or physical cost. And whilst I've written a book about business leadership because the publisher said you need an audience, so I I I targeted to there, and that was my experience. I do think emotional overdraft is a pretty universal universal issue, and I think probably that's what we should be talking about or might want to talk about today. So the book came from the research. The research said, unequivocally, this thing I now call emotional overdraft exists in almost all business people. Almost all leaders are paying this personal cost, but not recognizing it. So I thought it was really important to give it a name or a label because as soon as you can label something, then you can recognize it's happening.

Andy Brown [00:08:44]:
And if you can recognize it's happening and take a pause, then you could do something about it. I wrote the first half of the book thinking I was being very clever. Lots of theory, lots of thinking, lots of what are emotions, and then I gave it to a publisher who said, where's the rest of the book, Andy? Where's the bit that tells us what to do about this thing? So it took me 2 years to write the rest of the book, and and there's now a lot of information in there about what you can do about it. So it was it's a bit of a it's a very long answer. Sorry about that, Carla. But that's that's where the book came from.

Carla Miller [00:09:15]:
Excellent. And it's so interesting because I hear those same themes, as you say, coming through from the mid and senior level leaders that I'm working with. And it's interesting that people who run businesses who have a choice about how how much they give or singly have more choice are doing it as well. So when we're putting it in the context of leaders within an organization, it's using your own mental, physical, emotional energy to subsidize the organization, really. It it's going above and beyond.

Andy Brown [00:09:47]:
And the currency of an emotional overdraft, if we wanna talk sort of stretch that poor analogy to its to its limits and break it, is is the currency of the overdraft is resilience. So what you're talking about there is mid and senior leaders who are subsidizing their business's success, the company's success, at the cost of their own resilience. And I've been reading lots of things recently and and and writing a fair bit about the body knowing before the mind. People I've been talking to have been saying kind of my body knew before before my brain did. And I think that we we we see it very quickly in so I'll give you an example where people you might stop going to the gym as often as you did. You might stop running. You might stop looking after yourself. You might start eating less well because you don't have time, and your body quickly responds to that.

Andy Brown [00:10:37]:
And you end up feeling not as not as bouncy, not as resilient, maybe unwell. You're less resistant to there's a flu going around at the moment. I've got clients dropping left, right, and center. You're just less able to fight all that off. You go to work, and you become more irritable because something's going on in your system. You're too tired. You're not recovering as well as you should. And you become you become less able to to make good decisions.

Andy Brown [00:11:05]:
You become less a less capable leader, and then that feeds on itself because then that does get into your mind. That creates thinking, which allows you well, which leads you to go, well, you know, maybe I'm not so good or they're all idiots. Depends on how you see, you know, your view of the world. And then you start responding to that because we we live in the reality we create in our own minds. I know it sounds a bit woo woo, but we we create our own realities, and then we respond to that. We don't respond to what's really happening. We respond to the reality we're creating in our own heads. And that's when the lack of resilience and lack of bounce back ability and our and and our impact is affected, and we start to become less impactful in the business.

Andy Brown [00:11:48]:
And it's a vicious circle. And then that physical thing does start you start to recognize what's happening and and perhaps you do become stressed, or you do you do feel anxious or or struggling with anxiety. But, yeah, I've spoken to people who who are blacking out, who are self medicating with alcohol. You know, I spoke to someone who was drinking 2 bottles of wine before 6 o'clock in the evening to just kind of knock themselves out, and that's that particular case. He blacked out and nearly fell under a bus on a visit to London. Fortunately, it's a wobbled, and and someone pulled him back. And they went to the doctor, and the doctor said, you are suffering from really extreme anxiety. You're not well.

Andy Brown [00:12:33]:
He just refused to accept it. He refused to acknowledge that he was unwell. He said I'm doing the business is doing well. I'm hiring great people. We're growing very well. My team are thriving. I'm getting great feedback from clients. How can I be anxious? How can I be unwell? So even when his body was screaming at him, you are deeply overdrawn.

Andy Brown [00:12:53]:
You really seriously need to pay this back. His brain was still not letting him see it. And that's the that's the worst situation, I think, is when we we're so hardwired into it. We're so coded. Societal pressure is so strong. I'm I'm particularly thinking about women here where, you know, the expectation of of, of caring that we we're trained and coded and and pressured in into behaving in a particular way that we stop listening to ourselves. So it's not just a physicality. But the the reason it's an overdraft is because an overdraft itself is not a bad thing.

Andy Brown [00:13:28]:
I have an overdraft. And when I need to, I can go into my my financial overdraft, and it helps me out. But what I'd also know is it's the most expensive form of borrowing you can get. So I pay it back as quickly as I can, and that's what you should do with an emotional overdraft. So I used to run quite a large advertising agency. We'd pitch for business. We'd work, you know, night after night to prepare a pitch and practice, and we had a really good win rate, and we were really proud of what we did. But we'd be burning the candle at both ends.

Andy Brown [00:13:57]:
We'd be not seeing our families. We'd be doing that thing for a period of time deep in our emotional overdrafts, I think. Once we pitched, though, then I absolutely made sure that my team took the time off unplugged, that we planned their diaries so that they didn't go, well, that's done straight into the next bit of activity. I made sure that my team were able to pay back that overdraft, regain their resilience, and then go again. And it's so easy to just blur straight. You know, we've done the pitch. It's done. Well done, everybody.

Andy Brown [00:14:29]:
Now crack on and do all that work that you haven't done because we've been pitching. It doesn't have to be pitching. It could be a big report. You know, we've all we can all relate to that sort of activity. So that means planning that into into your time and into your team's time because, otherwise, you are just burning the candle at both ends all the time.

Carla Miller [00:14:49]:
I love that. I love the idea of planning that time in. And, actually, in a bizarre way, I do that in the I have school holidays and I'm a solo parent, and I take off the day before school holidays and the day after school holidays as me time so that I'm not going straight from, like, full time childcare into the whole to do list that's been building up whilst I was away. But I think it's a really great idea to build in that space. And I'm guessing over emotional overdrafts have got so much worse since COVID happened because we were all in crisis mode. And then even if it stopped feeling like quite so much of a crisis, we never actually really dialed that down or took a break. There were very few organizations where they were like, right. We're gonna have a little bit of time off, or we're just gonna slow things down for a while.

Carla Miller [00:15:35]:
It just the pace just kept going at that same level. It's really interesting actually when you were talking about subsidizing organizations. I think that's happening systemically at the moment. I heard a quote the other day from someone who was working within the NHS, basically saying that, people working in the NHS are they're working in a system that is understaffed by choice effectively. It it runs because everyone does go above and beyond what they're paid to do and puts in the extra effort. And I think that's happening in, I would say, at least 50% of organizations right now. The leaders are relying on the goodwill of employees to go above and beyond and to cover for the people that they can't retain, who've left because they're exhausted, just the people who are left and the people left after restructures and redundancies are taking up that slack. I think there's a lot of deep overdrafts going on right now, Andy.

Andy Brown [00:16:35]:
That's undoubtedly true, and we're seeing record levels of burnout. And there's other reasons for it. There's lots of research that says that the contribution of what we eat is very significant, particularly ultra processed foods that that make you very ill. Was I reading about someone the other day or or listening to a podcast? And this lady had, was getting more and more ill at work and becoming really quite ill and was misdiagnosed for months. And it turned out she had DDT poisoning, which is, an insecticide they put on crops. But it wasn't the DDT that was the chemical was in her. She was eating this from fresh fruit in America. But it wasn't the DDT that had caused the illness.

Andy Brown [00:17:15]:
It was stress that had triggered the chemicals that were in her bloodstream to then so she could without stress, she'd have carried on having this stuff in her system, and it wouldn't have affected her. But the, the ongoing level of stress that she was dealing with then gave this chemical the opportunity to get get hold and really go for it. I think that's what we've been seeing since lockdown. I think we are we're not allowing people to we're not thinking about resilience. We're not thinking about recharging. I I I wrote an article recently, and I said it's a bit like when your mobile phone has run out of battery and shouting at it and going, just one more call. I want one more call. It's clearly, palpably nonsense.

Andy Brown [00:17:56]:
If the battery's gone, the battery's gone. And I think we are the same. We have to plug ourselves back in. We have to we have to recharge. And then if you think about your phone, I suppose, this just occurs to me while I was still talking about it. If you plug your phone back in, but not in an organized way overnight, you just plug it back in, you get 10% of power back, and then you have to run off and go to work. Then you're gonna be that's like being in your overdraft all the time. You're teetering on the edge of you know the battery's running out.

Andy Brown [00:18:26]:
So you got emotional overdraft feeds on itself. That's the thing. You you become aware. Your bat it's driven by behavior, and we can talk about the ten drivers which have come from the research. But it's driven by behavior. And if you can imagine that you you feel like you're under pressure, you feel like you're running down, and it's always waiting, you're waiting for the phone just to die. The stress of of having to be on the phone or being on a train trip when you're relying on your phone and you can see the bars disappearing, that's kind of like being in your own promotional overdraft all the time. For a while, you can live with that.

Andy Brown [00:19:00]:
But, eventually, the stress of dealing with that is is just untenable. So so we do need to work out how to address it. If we haven't had a a global pandemic, I would say this is a pandemic. I think this is universal wherever I see it. And I'm definitely emotional overdraft, the book is not the answer, but it's some of the answer because a lot of this is about behavior. A lot of it, if you're working in a business, is if you don't run the business, is about the culture, the way the business is run, their their attitude. So, you know, we saw Samsung recently, Samsung Korean company losing losing money or profit not losing money. Actually, profits were down.

Andy Brown [00:19:42]:
Samsung's answer was to get all of their senior all of their mid and senior managers to work on Saturdays. So now they're working 6 day weeks. Now in what world is that medium term or even short term the right answer? You detach those people more from their from their families. You detach them more from their communities. You give them less time to recover. You give them less time away from work. You create less space for creativity and solution ideas. It's the most bonkers idea, but it's a it's a reaction of a company.

Andy Brown [00:20:18]:
And no matter how in control or understanding of your emotional overdrive you are if you work for Samsung, you're gonna really struggle. You're going to struggle to manage that because inherently, the company's going, we don't care. We just don't care. You are managers. You get on and do your job. And, interestingly, it's the managers they picked on, not not the workers, and haven't really got to the bottom of that. But it's it's not everybody working 6 days a week. It's the it's the middle managers.

Carla Miller [00:20:48]:
Interesting. And so how do you talked about plugging your phone in overnight or, paying back the emotional overdraft. I know we're gonna talk about some things you can put in place so you don't go into it in the first place, but how do if you recognize if someone's listening and going, I am totally deep in my emotional overdraft right now, how can they start to pay it back?

Andy Brown [00:21:11]:
What's interesting well, I say it's interesting. I wrote the book, so I find it interesting. But what's what's interesting about emotional overdraft is that it's it doesn't happen. It feels like if you're listening to this, and I know because people write to me sometimes, they're nodding. People are nodding and going, yeah. I I can relate to that. That's me. And because of the way we're we're wired, we feel the world.

Andy Brown [00:21:37]:
We tend to be well, we're the center of our own universe. And so we our experience of the world, we tend to think is everyone else's experience of the world. But with emotional overdraft, there are these 10 broad behaviors, and the shape of those behaviors is different for everybody. So what the way you experience it and the way the rate the way you are contributing to your own emotional overdraft by your by your behavior, and that's the bit we can control, will be different from the person you work next to, the person who works for you, or the person you work for, let alone people in other companies or other organizations or people in the NHS or people in an advertising agency. It will manifest itself differently because you have different drivers. So I'd say the first thing first critical thing is, and it's why I wrote the book, is is to recognize that you do have an emotional overdraft. And if it's getting worse, you can track it. Maybe we could talk about that.

Andy Brown [00:22:31]:
But recognize that it exists and that you're dealing with it. And if it if it feels like it's getting worse, just having a name for it can give you a pause, and it can give you the opportunity to go, hang on. What's so this feels like it's getting worse. Even just pausing is probably 80% of the way towards get doing something about it. If you don't notice it or don't acknowledge it or can't acknowledge it, then nothing I guarantee nothing will change. So the first thing is to notice it. I think the second thing is to know what your drivers are. So understand what your profile of behavior is that's causing the emotional overdraft to happen.

Andy Brown [00:23:10]:
So so I talk about the 10 drivers, and I won't go through them all because, you know, it's it's half a book. It's 30,000 words. I know because I counted them all. But it's things like, trust, urgency. If you're a doer, you know, I just get things done. If you're empathetic, and we maybe we should talk about that one in a minute. Do there's a there's a self assessment online. So we we created a, I wrote a Cosmo quiz.

Andy Brown [00:23:36]:
My sister is 2 years younger than me. And when we were kids, maybe she was teenage, she used to get Cosmo magazine. I have no idea if Cosmo still exists. But there was the Cosmo quiz, and it was things like 50 ways to tell if your boyfriend is gonna last the summer. Quizzes like that. Yes, no quizzes. And I've always liked that kind of simple analysis. So we did what we we created what we call the Cosmo quiz for the emotional overdraft.

Andy Brown [00:24:00]:
And it's not will your boyfriend last till the end of the summer, but it's, do you have a notion emotional overdraft, and where does it occur? Critically, it's where does it occur. And it produces a spider chart, so it's not nearly as much fun as Cosmo, but it does produce this spider chart. And that will tell you where your particular drivers tend to be, and you'll find that of the 10 drivers, typically, 4 or 5 are where people index quite high. And some other ones, they look at and go, well, why would people you know, I I absolutely trust my team. Why would trust be an issue? So I think the first thing is recognizing it is this. The second thing is knowing where it occurs for you. And once you've done that, what I think is great I used to used to have a I I we've recently moved, and all of my books are not here anymore, but I used to have I have hundreds of business books. And I'd I'd point to them and go, the great thing about emotional overdraft is you don't need to buy any business books to sort it out.

Andy Brown [00:24:56]:
Once you recognize what behavior is driving your particular overdraft, you will know what to do about it. And that's why I say it on on the front of the book, it's 10 simple changes. They're simple. They're really not easy, but they are you will recognize that you could do something about it. And it's broadly about changing some habits. So I can't change how Samsung Samsung decide corporately what they're gonna do 6 days a week. That that stuff, Andy Brown, emotional overdraft, Carla Miller, we're not gonna fix that. But we can absolutely fix how we respond in a pressure situation, how much of us we decide to give, what are the things that are causing us to causing behaviors that that that will damage us, and we can control that.

Andy Brown [00:25:42]:
So that that there's probably is that does that answer the question?

Carla Miller [00:25:46]:
It does. Yes. And there there you have got the 10 drivers, and I picked 3. There were there were lots that resonated, but I picked 3 that I see come up a lot in my clients. And so what I'd love to do is focus on those. So the first one that comes up a lot is urgency. So can you speak to that for us?

Andy Brown [00:26:07]:
Yeah. So I call them the drivers, but, effectively, they're behaviors. And to change behaviors, most of our behaviors happen out of habit, out of reflex, so we don't even think about them. That's so they're it feels like, of course, that's just the way it is, but brushing your teeth is a habit. You know, we learned that very young, but it's still a habit. So you can create habits and you can break habits. It's really hard. There's a whole genre of books around, you know, forming new habits, which are very interesting, and and I've read a lot of them.

Andy Brown [00:26:38]:
But, it's about habits. So what we're talking about here are habitual behaviors and urgency. In the research, it was, what I'd hear is things like, I'm short of time. I don't have time to to delegate this. I don't have time to do something else. I I'm going to do it. I take it on myself. And that's the broad theme of an emotional overdraft is when you decide the answer is you.

Andy Brown [00:27:02]:
When Carla is faced with a problem at work and she goes, Carla is the answer. Those are the things we're trying to capture because, actually, those are the behaviors we can start to change in lots of different ways. So with urgency, it's things like I'm acting on reflex. I'm just not thinking. I don't have time to do. I I'm I'll just pick it up. And what happens is that that creates a sort of an urgency, which which in itself creates stress. Just in itself that that the body creates stress hormones or stress chemicals, which which are unhelpful.

Andy Brown [00:27:34]:
And then if you think about working with a team, if you're thinking, well, the answer is me. I'm I'm gonna jump in. It's it's it's an urgent problem, so I'll I'll step in and sort it. What message does that send to your team? So your team tend to think, well, hang on. We we had a plan for that, but our our manager, our our boss has just stepped in, and now they're getting involved. What's that doing to them? Is it distracting them? Is it disrupting their thinking? Is it undermining them? Is it causing them to go, well, then why do I bother? And then what you start to see is good people feel disempowered, and then they leave. Bad people think this is great. My boss is doing this for me.

Andy Brown [00:28:17]:
My my line manager's sort of stepping in and sorting stuff out. I'll just sit here like an inert sack of potatoes and let them do it. So the there's a double whammy. It's in its extreme, if you're a line manager or sort of a manager leader, you can find that your good people become disempowered, your bad people stay. You end up with a worse team. And then you wake up all morning thinking, why am I having to do all this? Why are my team so inert? So you're actually creating that. You there's, you know, there's no such thing as bad dogs, just bad owners. It's it's you've trained the team to behave that way, albeit inadvertently.

Andy Brown [00:28:50]:
So I think that that urgency is very damaging, and lots of people behave like that. Lots of people behave like that. It's it's an absolute classic. I think see urgency for what it is is really important. Why has something become urgent? So it it feels like there's a deadline or urgency is something that's time limited. So, you know, we've got a pitch on this day, and we've got to turn up. We've got a deliverable for a client. We've got a an operation in the NHS.

Andy Brown [00:29:19]:
I haven't worked in the NHS, but, you know, I suppose you could cancel the operation. But, you know, we we've got a deadline. An urgency comes from that. But what's really interesting about most urgent situations and in the moment, people say to me, Andy, you I don't buy this. I don't buy it. But outside of the urgent moment, what's gone wrong so that that thing has become urgent? And that then you go, hang on. So that's really a management challenge. That's not a psychological challenge.

Andy Brown [00:29:46]:
That's not an emotional overdraft. That's a management challenge. How do we spot when things are going to become urgent? Have we got clients who I have one particular client who everything is urgent for this client. Everything is urgent, and they'll WhatsApp me or phone me up and go, Andy, I need this by the end of the day. Well, if I keep responding to that client and keep letting them do that, I'm gonna have a client that that creates urgency in my business, which creates stress, which does all those things that damages the business, damages the team, damages my reputation, stresses me out, creates an emotional overdraft. Even the thought that they might phone me up creates stress because I've got my day sorted, and they might just phone up and crap all over my day. Let's be honest. So even then, it's in the back of my head.

Andy Brown [00:30:34]:
But the answer is to go, well, don't let the client behave that way. How do you manage the client properly? How do you put systems and do you change your scope of work? Do you change the way you specify? Do you have rush charges? Because in my experience in agencies over the years, if you said to a client, yes. You can have that really quickly, but it's gonna cost you twice as much. The number of times they go, well well, actually, maybe then we'll leave it till next week. Because they don't know the consequence. They don't understand the implications of it. So urgency tends to be either a process or a system failure somewhere. So in the moment, it's really difficult to fix it, but you can create less urgency by thinking about once the urgent thing is resolved, get together with your team and go, well, how did that become urgent? What happened? Have we trained the client to behave that way? Have we got something missing? Have we got a process that failed? Could we change some some things that happen in our business? Because you can remove a lot of urgency.

Andy Brown [00:31:34]:
The boring answer to emotional overdraft a lot of the time is to become a better manager. It's become a student of management, become a student of leadership. Because if you just keep assuming the urgency and in the end, let's go back to the urgent client. If that urgent client refuses to change their behavior and refuses to pay for the for the urgent delivery, is it really a sustainable client? Because what's what's the old line? You can have it quickly, you can have quality, or you can have it cheap, but you can only have 2 of the 3. If you've got a client that wants it quickly, wants high quality, and wants it cheaply, they don't value what you provide. So in which case, if you have to go right back to basics, maybe that's not the right client for you and maybe you're attracting the wrong clients. Maybe you priced it wrong. You know? So it's still not an urgency question.

Andy Brown [00:32:27]:
It's still a question of good management and good leadership. Boring, isn't it? But that's but that's what it is.

Carla Miller [00:32:34]:
Oh, it's not boring at all. It's super interesting. And I think if you put that in the context of someone who's a mid level leader, for me, what it says, it's not just about your management skills. It's about your influencing skills. It's about how can you influence upwards? How can you help create changes in the system, how can you raise awareness of these issues in a way so that people will listen? Because there's so much control you have over how you deal with things and what's within your remit, but there will be things which you'll want to be trying to influence upwards on. Because we can't fire our boss even if they're a terrible client. But we can leave, but we can't always leave quite as quickly as we might want.

Andy Brown [00:33:15]:
No. We can't, but we can leave. And I think that's the other thing is if if you're subsidizing somebody else's company, their profitability at your own mental or physical cost consistently, and you don't have a culture in that organization where they want to hear what you have to say, and you don't have a culture of change and development, and you don't have a culture of of learning and curiosity, then you've gotta think, are you applying your powers into the right organization? Get to an organization where and this is a a luxury in the industry I was in because there's so much demand for marketing, communications, creative, digital, social people. So there's so much demand that certainly in my industry, those people can walk, They can go and find someone who will value what they've got to say, who will think my measure of success is their success. I measure success by how well people progress. And there's that lovely expression, train people well enough so that they can leave and treat them well enough so that they don't. That's how if you're a leader at a sort of higher level, that's how you should be thinking. Don't be scared to train people.

Andy Brown [00:34:25]:
Encourage people. And if they leave after 2 years, but they leave thinking that's the best work I've ever done with the best people I've ever worked with on the best clients I've ever worked with, but I'm I've seen a bigger opportunity somewhere else. Thank them, pat them on the back, celebrate it, and wish them well. And as a line manager, it's the same. If you've because that will pay you back 100 of times over because it means your attitude is completely squared towards the success of your team rather than some other some other more selfish metric, which is always limiting is always going to be limiting.

Carla Miller [00:35:03]:
I completely agree. So that's urgency. Now the other one I wanted to raise with you is load balancing. So when there's gaps that need to be filled, you step in and fill them. You're the one doing that. And I see that happening all the time and people thinking they don't have a choice on that. So they've got gaps in their team.

Andy Brown [00:35:24]:
Step in.

Carla Miller [00:35:25]:
Yeah. And they're filling them themselves because they don't want to put anybody else out, and they don't see any other option. And I'd be really interested to hear, well, how do we look at that in a way so that we can see there might be other options?

Andy Brown [00:35:40]:
What's interesting about the drivers is that then none of them are discreet. Obviously, they're all interconnected behaviors. So this is quite in the in the spider shot, this one's quite aligned with with urgency and load balancing. Load balancing is more about I've got a short term need. So rather than, organizing more resources or managing the time, I'll step in. So it's it's a lit it's different from urgency. It's a sort of short term need thing. I'm stepping in to fill a gap is the sort of quote that we heard in the research.

Andy Brown [00:36:11]:
The thing about that is that it's extremely addictive to save the day. If if the team are going well, you know, we've got loads of more loads more work on. We can't hire someone quickly enough. So, you know, what are we gonna do? You step in and go, I'll I'll save the day. I'm I'm a good egg. I'll I'll come and roll my sleeves up, and I'll get involved. And that's really addictive. It's great to be the per the white knight, you know, to come in and and or or the fairy godmother or whatever you wanna call it, you know, grant the wishes.

Andy Brown [00:36:44]:
Here's some more resources. It's me. But the trouble is that it's this is more about process probably than anything else. Is that, again, you are avoiding making a better decision by doing the simplest and what feels like the easiest thing. So if you step in, what does that mean that you now can't do that you would have been doing otherwise? What's that stopping you from doing in terms of leading that team, planning resources, thinking about anticipating those kind of load balancing requirements, giving other people opportunities to grow and develop? So you might be thinking this ties into trust a little bit as well. Well, I've got people in my team. Why not give them some headroom? Because my experience of of talented people and one of my super skills in business was spotting talent. I was really good at spotting great people, and lots of them have gone under and done amazing things.

Andy Brown [00:37:41]:
And I don't think I take no credit for their achievements, but I do take some credit for spotting, you know, high for attitude, not for not for skills was always my view. But if you jump in and load balance, what what have you removed from the system that might have been an opportunity for someone to have some headroom to grow into? What have you taken away as that space to grow? The more space you you give your staff, generally, if you've hired well, the more capacity they will take on, the more they will grow. And the problem we saw when everyone went and worked in lockdown from home, where lots of businesses who hadn't historically had working from home, was that people and the fear was for I can tell you the fear from the the owners was, well, they're just gonna watch daytime TV and, you know, turn their camera off and not be present, is actually that people were more present, couldn't switch off, do more work. So people, most people, have the capacity to do more. Your job often is to try and contain that as much as you can. But with load balancing, I think you're missing an opportunity to let people step up. You're missing an opportunity to to let people go, well, actually, let's let's take take, you know, I'm gonna get your name up, Sarah, and and say, Sarah, I'd like you to step into this role. I'm gonna give you a temporary, title.

Andy Brown [00:39:00]:
You're gonna lead the team, and and this I'm a be very, very clear about what it is you want them to do. So clarity is kindness, isn't it? Clarity is the key to to most things in in in my world. As long as you're clear what it is you're giving them to do and as long as they understand what what it is you've given them, so you've checked that they understand, and as long as it's reasonable amount of work and possibly that you've allowed them to dump some of the other stuff they have to do in order to do it and and reorganize your team. So all of this is difficult organization and thinking and planning. Then you could have someone who's got a brilliant opportunity to step up and show you what they're capable of. The alternative is you go, all of that's too complicated. All of that takes too much thinking. I'm just gonna jump in and do it for a couple of months.

Andy Brown [00:39:47]:
I'm gonna be the person that steps in. You roll your sleeves back up. But then what have you done? You you've taken your eye off your job, and someone in your organization has said, we know what your job is. Your job is to lead this team or your job is to develop these products, but you're gonna go backwards and roll your sleeves up and get on the tools. And and that then limits everybody. That removes that's when you start canceling review meetings because they don't feel important. That's when you start your behaviors towards your team start changing because you're busy on the tools, and then you've got different deadlines, which are the deadlines dictated by the clients and so on. So load balancing is a a very insidious and very subtle, but very dangerous behavior.

Andy Brown [00:40:30]:
And if you it's one of the ones actually that your team can spot probably better than you can. And if you've got a great empowered team, I'd encourage them to to pick out this behavior, most behavior actually from an emotional overdraft point of view. I would encourage you to get to do the self assessment, work out where your drivers are, and then tell other people. Help get some accountability from other people. Get them to say, Andy, you're jumping in again. You're doing a bit of load balancing. We know that's one of your things, so just take a moment. What can we do about this? Are there opportunities? If you're concerned about reorganizing the team for this thing, well, let's take half an hour, jump on a whiteboard, and we can do it between us.

Andy Brown [00:41:09]:
What an opportunity to share share that thinking. You know, this is the stuff you miss when you just jump in and go, well, I'll I'll step into that role for now and and until we can work out something better. Because if you do it once, you'll keep doing it. It's a bit like missing a lecture at university. You miss your first lecture, and you feel terrible about it. My my brother tells this story. So he studied history, which is utterly pointless. He missed 2 2 or 3 lectures in his 1st year, got into the habit because it gets easier to miss lectures, and then he more or less missed his entire 3rd year.

Andy Brown [00:41:40]:
Because and that but he didn't feel bad about it because by then, it's just okay. And this is what I mean about habits. These behaviors just become normalized. They become I'm so sorry, Matt, by the way, if you listen to this. I'm apologizing to my brother for outing him on that. My parents never knew he did that. He's still got a degree, and he's still a very bright man. So that's that's one thing.

Andy Brown [00:42:01]:
The other sorry. The other flip side of of load balancing is that I see it in in the industries or the businesses I work with is overservicing. So quite often, the load balance requirement is not down to additional opportunity, additional revenue creation, or creating new products. It's down to overservicing clients. And lots of my you know, I'd encourage everyone to think about utilization rates and so on. But I have clients who talk about, oh, yeah. But it looks like we're overservicing the client. And often it's worse than that because it's over servicing suggests that the client feels the service.

Andy Brown [00:42:40]:
You know, they're getting more service than they should for the time, and everyone listening can probably relate to that. You know, there are clients who get more than their fair share, but it probably isn't over servicing. It's probably over delivery. And over delivery is when you spend more time doing work on a client and they don't even notice. That's the worst because they're not going out. Those guys are going the extra mile. They're doing loads of extra work for me. I really appreciate that.

Andy Brown [00:43:05]:
They're just going, well, that's the way they behave, isn't it? That's just what I get. They don't see it. That's just over delivery. And if you're over delivering, then you start having load balancing challenges all the time because you're and and if you're jumping in and doing load balancing yourself, you're not fixing the over delivery problems, which is probably something to do with training your teams, talking to the clients, putting the right things in place to measure that, and so on. So there's a there's a lot of issues that pile into into, into load balancing.

Carla Miller [00:43:39]:
Lots to think about there. And I love this idea of taking more time rather than jumping straight in, taking time to look at, right, why are these issues occurring, and what can we do to sort that out? Or if you are going to give someone else an opportunity to do it, not just giving them the opportunity and sending them into emotional overdraft because it's on top of all the things they already have to do instead looking at, right, what can we stop doing? And every team leader at some level has a degree of autonomy. So I know there might be some people think, well, well, I couldn't do that, but there will be a level of autonomy you have about how you run your team. And it's working within that, and like I say, trying to influence beyond that. Now I wanted to quickly touch on one more driver before I just talk a little bit more about how else this can show up, but empathy was the other one that really resonated with me.

Andy Brown [00:44:34]:
And I'm smiling because I I love that you brought empathy up. Because when I say empathy is one of the drivers, people go, empathy is great. Everything I read about says empathy is important in management and leadership, and, of course, it is. Of course, it is. But when empathy shows up as people pleasing, when empathy shows up as wanting to be everybody's friend, then there's a problem. And that's that's the challenge of the the if you are if you rank high for empathy when you do your self assessment, it's probably the the sort of phrases you get are, I'm I wanna show I'm part of the team, or, I'm showing my commitment, and I'm showing that I care, or I feel guilty if I don't. Now that's a that's driving the wrong behaviors. You you don't need to empathize and be everybody's friend to be a good leader.

Andy Brown [00:45:25]:
In actual fact, your job is not to be their friend. What was it that that, Aoife said was was it's not your job to make them happy. And that's why that resonated for me because I've definitely been there. There's a great book by Liz Wiseman called multipliers, And she talks about the accidental diminisher. And a multiplier manager is someone who takes all the skills of their team. And by the way, they they encourage and manage those people. They multiply the impact of those people and those working those organizations feels amazing. Those behaviours of those leaders and managers is almost exactly the same as the accidental diminishers.

Andy Brown [00:46:06]:
They think they're doing the same things, but they're accidentally causing everyone to be less impactful than they could be. And and, definitely, the empathy thing sits in there. So, yeah, I think I think understanding this one's more about don't become an unempathetic. Don't lose the empathy instinct, but understand where it's coming from for you and and what behavior it's driving. And is that helpful behavior or not? So there's some self awareness to be done on the empathy driver definitely. So in short, that's understanding what empathy actually is, not being everyone's friend, not wanting to be one of the gang, not wanting to be involved. You can see it. You can see it.

Andy Brown [00:46:47]:
Go and study it in your own organizations. Go and look for people who get it just right. They're probably the ones that leave the office party a bit early and leave everyone to it. They're not the last one there. Empathy is not being the boss or the line manager that's still there at the end. Empathy is knowing when to leave everyone to it. Look out for those people and start start thinking, well, who are the ones that people really appreciate? And it's not always like, the teachers. Let's go back to teachers when we're at school.

Andy Brown [00:47:13]:
Everyone went to school. The great teachers were not really the ones that were trying to be everyone's mate. The great teacher was were the ones that understood where our relationship to the subject came from and found a way for us to connect to it for for us to connect to it. Not for them to connect to it or not for us to connect to them, but they found a way for us to connect to that subject. And that's what great leadership is. That's what great great use of empathy is, but it's really easy to get it wrong. And if you're a people pleaser, which I definitely am, if you're a people pleaser, if you are someone that wants to be liked, none of my skills are in counseling, so I don't know. You know, where it all comes from is a different question.

Andy Brown [00:47:54]:
It's not for this book. But recognize it in the moment. If it's one of your drivers, it's sort of on you because you can change something about it. Yeah. You can do something about that. And the worst thing about this one is that if we take it outside of a business environment we were just talking earlier about about carers and and caring responsibilities and particularly how that lands on women. If you feel that you have to be you have to give of yourself at work, you have to give of yourself to your family and your children or your elderly parents or your community or you volunteer in a, you know, a sports club or you're a local counselor or you're you're giving of yourself all the time, on the face of it, that's fantastic. And that's great behavior and a fantastic instinct.

Andy Brown [00:48:44]:
But if what it's doing is not allowing you to recharge, if you're starting to resent it, if you're, worse, borrowing from other people's emotional overdrafts, you know, if your partner is suffering because you are overempathizing, over engaging with with external activities in and out of work, then that's really damaging, and your resilience will drop and drop and drop as will those people around you. And so it has completely the opposite effect of what you hoped it would have. And I I know this from personal experience, and my wife's brilliantly communicative and explained to me pretty clearly what she thought about it when I was doing that sort of thing. So I have my my sort of Jiminy Cricket conscience, fortunately, who who will tell me when I'm being needy.

Carla Miller [00:49:30]:
And I think linked to that, this idea of if resilience is the currency of your emotional overdraft, presumably, lots of us are in emotional overdraft before we even get to work because of caring responsibilities or money wise or whatever it is that's happening. I really noticed so I have a I'm a solo parent to a 6 year old boy, and he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes about 6, 7, or 8 months ago now. And I really noticed thank you. And he's doing really, really well, but I really noticed that my resilience, my ability to cope with things, it all all the fat energy and ability to cope was focused on getting us through that. And when it came to work, I had very little left to give, and I couldn't deal with problems as resiliently as I had done in the past. So I think as well as that the pattern you were saying earlier, which is basically if we're showing up at work and overgiving, it's probably not the only place we're doing that, but I guess also recognizing that you're going to have less bandwidth in your emotional overdraft for work if you've got stuff going on outside of work at the moment that's taking up a lot of that.

Andy Brown [00:50:47]:
I think I mean, that's that's your lived experience, and it's totally correct. And I recognize it and and wouldn't dispute it for a second, and it's true. It happens exactly as you've described it, and I've experienced that. What I do hear, though, sometimes is there are people who plugging in is different for different people. You know, recharging is different for different people. And I did some quite, intense research with a chief exec who I worked with. And what she she had some horrible situations going on at home, fairly extensive problems with the family. But she found that going to work and, okay, she's a chief exec, so she had more autonomy, but she had different pressures.

Andy Brown [00:51:26]:
But she found going to work actually was her plugging in. So what was interesting was and it surprised her because she hadn't thought that. She thought it was the other way around. She thought the work was causing her not to be able to but she realized that going to work and having a purpose and and working with other people and being distracted and being able to focus on other things was exactly what she needed. So the interesting thing is don't assume that recharging, plugging in your your mental mobile phone or recharging your mental electric car is the same for everybody. It's it's like the profile of your emotional overdraft. Everyone has a different reaction to these things. So some people, they might recharge by sitting on the couch, playing computer games, not being connected to anyone, not making decisions, just doing whatever, you know, doing that thing, eating popcorn.

Andy Brown [00:52:16]:
For me, it's walking. I I I get out on the hills, and I just go walking, and it powers me up like nothing else. It's different for everybody. And for some people, it could be doing the work. The danger of that, there's a small danger of of identifying with work, is that it's it's probably just disguising. It's probably just just you're probably just creating a kind of distraction to stop you from really understanding what what you're dealing with. So you may think that work is is you recharging, and you could be. It depends on the sort of job you do.

Andy Brown [00:52:56]:
But in reality, it could be. If you feel that you have to go to work in order to recharge, there's some other stuff going on, which is beyond my beyond my pay grade. But, I would that's a warning sign for me, probably.

Carla Miller [00:53:08]:
Absolutely. Now we've covered lots here, and there's lots more in the book. But if people want to find out more about you and working with you, where should we send them, Andy?

Andy Brown [00:53:16]:
So emotionoverdraft.com, you can get the the self assessment there. There's also a a a little free downloadable emotional overdraft tracker if you want to track it across a month, or you can get the book wherever you buy your books.

Carla Miller [00:53:29]:
Brilliant. Well, thank you for sharing these insights, and they really align with some of the episodes we've had recently on overcommitting and people pleasing. So I think it's fantastic for people to hear it from another angle with another voice and really interesting how those themes come up, whether you're working in business as a business owner or whether you're working as a leader in an organization. So thank you for bringing the emotional overdraft into the world so that we all know that it's happening, and thanks for sharing your insights with us on the podcast today.

Andy Brown [00:53:59]:
Oh, it's great. Thank you for having me.

Carla Miller [00:54:03]:
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I really appreciate you letting me join you during your day. Now if you have loved the podcast, if you found it helpful, please, please, please do head over to wherever you listen to your podcast. Give us a fabulous 5 star rating and a review so that more people can find this podcast and it can grow and reach others. Now if you've listened to the podcast and you're thinking, how do I work with Carla? Just to let you know, we've got 2 open programs at the moment. We have our be bolder confidence and assertiveness course coming up in February. And then I will be running influence and impact, my 3 month women's leadership development program, probably just after Easter. We also work in house with organizations on management and leadership.

Carla Miller [00:54:55]:
We're often training people on influencing, on confidence, giving feedback, delegation, all of these things. So if you find my style useful, please do introduce me to or, suggest that your l and d person gets in touch with me so that we can bring some of this practical training into your organization and make it much easier for you as managers and leaders to perform at your best. Thanks so much. Have a great day.