I have an issue, I really (and I mean really) dislike not knowing what people think about me. it may come from a childhood place of always wanting to please, it may come from a little of that “imposter syndrome” that many of us know and dislike – who knows.

I also dislike phone calls – whether work or personal – I can’t hack them. I’d much rather communicate by email or messaging but preferably face to face. There’s just no substitute for me – a good old chat with a mate, a colleague, a family member.

18/03/25

The Fear Factor

That moment when you know, for whatever reason…toxic culture, personality clash, corporate goals not aligned with personal goals, perhaps even narcissistic management.
Whatever it may be, it’s time to move on.

But you don’t.

You stay because, perhaps, you have responsibilities. If you leave, that salary, those benefits, the share schemes, that job security, will be at risk.
So you stay right?

Wrong!

No matter how hard it seems at that point in time, it will be exponentially harder further down the road, especially if you are no longer able to influence the final decision.
This fear factor is natural. For those of us with responsibilities, it can sometimes be the over-riding factor, but leaning into that very fear makes things so much harder later on.

Beat the fear factor. Take the hard decision, and do what’s really right for you.

21/03/25

Radio silence

Jen Marr posted this last week, and it’s a post that really hit home, one that I’m sure, resonated with many of us.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jenmarr_showingup-liftingup-supportivecare-activity-7306292608266342401-RI0f?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAVZEkgBb-o-GaZYovNq_gNG5yduSPTgAx0

As Jen put it, “The people…just vanished”.

My experience after leaving the company I’d spent 12 years at, differed slightly.  Yes, some former colleagues immediately went quiet and I’ve not heard from them since.

But a sizeable number of the remainder just gradually faded out of touch.  I count myself lucky that a few are still in touch, and are valued all the more for that.

But I don’t see this as something I should blame others for because  I’ve also gone radio silent in the past when colleagues and team members have left the company.

I had forgotten how important that little note or message could be.  Not a full-on epic, certainly not a “Have you found a job yet?”

Just some form of contact.

It is all too easy (and I talk from experience here – I did it) to wrap yourself up in the work, in the colleagues who are still alongside you and just move forwards: to not send that little note.

So just try please. We all (well the good folks among us) talk a lot about kindness at the moment.  This is a great little example of that and…it takes what…30 seconds to write a little “Hey” note.

27/03/25

Love, growing up and consequence

A departure from the norm for me, something triggered a memory about my son earlier (he’s 17 now, so this was from a little while back).
When he was at junior school, all of about 9 or 10 years old, I’d occasionally be lucky enough to drop him off to school. It involved a little stroll from the village hall carpark up to the school playground, hand him whatever I was carrying for him, a quick hug, a kiss on the cheek and a “have a wonderful day chap”.
Seemed natural and normal and off he’d go.

Then one day he came home and he seemed sad. So I asked him what was wrong. He said Mr “SoandSo” (name removed), the headmaster had told him off. I was a little surprised and I asked what my son had done to deserve this and he told me.

It turns out the headmaster of this particular school had taken it upon himself to tell my son off for something I’d done: namely giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
Apparently, my son was now one of the older boys in the school and needed to set a better example for the younger children and that me giving him a kiss and a hug when dropping him off was too babyish.

Let me put this far more politely and calmly than I felt at the time – I was a little perturbed.

I won’t go into all the detail of what happened after that, but I made it very clear to “Mr Soandso” that our children grow up all too quickly nowadays as it is and that our family would hold onto our little loving routines until the children didn’t want it anymore and NOT, when “Mr Soandso” said so. He backed down and our little routine continued until it didn’t.

Why am I posting this on LinkedIn you might ask? Work stuff only right?

Well, think about it, the consequences of that ill-informed little approach from the headmaster might have had long-lasting impacts on the young mind of my son. It might have made the headmaster’s job a little easier if the younger pupils were more resilient from an earlier age, but what would the impact on my son have been?

So, for those leaders amongst you on here, always consider the wider consequences of your actions and your words, rather than just what’s right in front of your face.

hashtag#imnoexpert hashtag#leadership hashtag#speakup

30/03/25

Life and sine waves

A number of years ago, I was lucky to get a pretty good redundancy package from a great company that I’d enjoyed working for but realised that it was just time to move on from.

I scratched my head for a bit trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, this was before children, so my choices were a little more “free” at that point.

Eventually I fell back on my love of architecture and building and set up my own property company, with some help from a friend and my brother.

It went well to start with: life was good, our first Batt junior was born a year after the company started and things looked wonderfully rosy, it was very hard work both physically and mentally but everything was moving in the right direction.

Then that lovely little thing called fate hit me square in the face: the great recession of 2008/9. The company went down, very, very quickly and income went straight to zero. My wife who’d had a very successful career, had taken a career break when we had our first bub and by this time number 2 had joined the fray.

It was desperately hard: we had a mortgage, two little ones under two and absolutely no income.  I remember sitting in the Job Centre with one bub in a pram, one toddling around beside us  as we tried to see if there was any kind of help we could get whilst I tried to find some new work – there wasn’t

I began to despair.

Then little things started to happen: a very kind friend managed to get me an interview for a contacting role, somewhat ironically at the company I’d left a few years earlier. This meant we had some money coming in. From there, some three months or so later I got an interview for a perm job with a good company and that started a climb out of despair.

That role led to another and then onto another company and then to some stability in our lives. We lost a house, I lost a company, my hair was a lot greyer, I’d learned some valuable lessons but most importantly our family were all healthy and we were moving forwards again.

Sadly, life is a sine wave: it’s all about peaks and troughs. I’m in another trough now, looking for a role after taking redundancy last year and as I’m sure many of you know: the market is blurry tough at the moment.

But I know, as with all things, this is temporary, life will be good again, there will be another peak in that sine wave.

The moral of this? For anyone out there that’s finding it tough at the moment: just keep on keeping on or, as Henry Ford once said: “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

06/04/25

Spread the load

I joined a team a while back who were a little “broken”, they were under pressure, they were at odds with each other, their priorities were conflicting, some had even been signed off ill through the stress of it all.

I was new to the company, new to the team, new to the type of data, but whilst I swam through those early days full of acronyms and “shouty” stakeholders, it was evident that I needed to help.

In title I was their manager, but just managing is what they’d had before, and “just” managing is what they were doing….just.  They’d had tasks thrown at them, it had been made clear to them what the hierarchy looked like and that they, were not at the top of it.  Morale was low, health was dropping, camaraderie was non existent and fun was an alien word.

I could have “managed”, I could have looked after myself, but for me that didn’t cut it.  So whilst I was figuring out what a few of the acronyms meant, I spent the next six months mucking in, figuring out where the pressure points were, where the cracks ran deep.

As I did this, I applied the best plaster I could to the problem: I spread the load. Rather than one individual carrying the weight of the world upon their shoulders, I made sure everyone was engaged and invested in the successful delivery. That each task had not just one person responsible for it but three folks working together to deliver it and only one person accountable for it – me.

Over time that approach bore fruit, the team became just that: a team, the stress morphed to something like pressure and then only at peak times, quality improved, deliverables were delivered and folks discovered or rediscovered that thing called fun again.

You see, in my mind, if I want to call myself a leader, then yes, I need to deliver against my objectives for the sake of the company that pays me, but there is no way that happens without the people who work with me: my team.  And to have them with me, they have to have the best environment, the safest space and trust, to be able to deliver whatever it is that is put in front of them.

Simply put, a critical element of leadership is to spread the load.

#imnoexpert #leadership #teamwork #kindness

23/04/25

Noi and Judgement

A little while back, when the Batt juniors were, well, more junior, we took a family trip to a lovely place on holiday.

Part of the prep as always for our holidays is me spending time on Tripadvisor looking for restaurants that are worth a shot – normally 6 or 7 of them, so we have some choice.

So on this occasion, one of the places was called Noi.

We left the hotel and after ten minutes strolling through the 100% humidity, the children were getting antsy and the buildings less inviting. Just in time we found Noi, walked in and took a beat.
The restaurant looked like it sat around thirty or so, but with just two booths occupied and every other table empty, the lighting dim, I worried that maybe my research had gone awry for once.

Cutting the story short to save folks’ patience, we had both the best service and the best food of the holiday, perhaps the best I’ve ever had overseas, so much so that we went back three more times during our trip.

Noi means “little” in the country we were in or “not much”, when we entered that could have meant that “noi” is what we could expect in quality, the reality was very much different.

There’s a very old saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” and that certainly applied here. But it very much applies in the workplace too.

Anyone who makes the mistake of judging folks like that is making a huge mistake. Appearance, accent, background, education, the list goes on. None of these dictate the quality within a person.

So, get to know those new team members, new managers, new stakeholders before making a judgement that might be a mistake, that might mean you miss a real star.

Oh, and by the way, Noi was packed within 30 minutes of us arriving.

#imnoexpert #supportiveleadership #kindness #trust

19/05/25

Filling the Void

It’s a strange paradox that when you’re not in a job, your mind occasionally and sometimes frequently fills with negativity.

It fills with thoughts of how you were wronged, of what you should have done differently, of how you were stupid to be loyal. Why didn’t you shout louder when you had a chance…..of what’s wrong with me, or “why on earth do you still support Man United”……ah maybe that last is just me.

At the very time when you need to have faith, to be hopeful to be positive, to not show any negative side to any prospective hiring managers or recruitment consultants, you tend to remember that you MUST keep that smile on.

Essentially, you dare not show what you’re really feeling……I find that rather sad but true. 

It’s highly unlikely that a hiring manager is going to hire someone who spouts negativity, or someone who literally oozes it from their pores. Not because they want to, but because they’re struggling.  So instead, the smiley, positive veneers win out when it comes to getting those roles (that is of course, if the armies of ATS bots don’t win the battles instead).

The sad thing is that one of the reasons our minds fill with the negative is because there’s a void.  Yes – we can do our best to fill our thoughts with the positive: our family, our pets, our house, our garden, our friends.  But the negative seems to always find a way to curl it’s little tendrils around the corners of positivity and find a way back in.

And yet, as in all things, there is a light at the end of that dark tunnel.

When a new job is found, a new purpose often comes with it, that void starts to fill with thoughts of new tasks, new objectives, new goals, new working relationships. It fills all the space around the positive, so those negative nasties just can’t find any space to get in anymore.

So if and when you’re in that space with the dark stuff filling the void, please just keep plodding forward. Because there will be a time when the void is filled again.

#imnoexpert #kindness #keepgoing #nevergiveup

03/06/25

Ever-Decreasing Circles

Friends. We all love having them; in dark times they can be a blessing, and in bright times they can share.
When you start out in your career, your friends are your friends, your colleagues are your friends, your customers are your friends – everyone is your friend.

But when you start out on the leadership path that circle decreases…necessarily. Whilst it’s not mutually exclusive to manage someone and for them to be a friend, it gets trickier.
You see, you’ll be party to knowledge that may adversely affect that team member.  Knowledge that you couldn’t – and shouldn’t – share with them for professional reasons.

That creates a little wall. A dwarf one to be sure, but a wall nonetheless.
Then as you progress in your career, and move up the ladder, that wall gets higher and the circle gets smaller.

No reason you can’t still have a laugh and a joke with folks, but there is always an element of caution and pause. Work “do’s” can no longer be the all-out fun friends’ session they used to be. They can be fun, but…

That friendship turns more to acquaintance and respect rather than friendship and fun. Not a bad thing. You still have those friends outside of work don’t you?

If not, then there’s a lesson in there. Tempting as it is to focus only on work and the people you know there, work doesn’t always last forever. Jobs change, companies change, careers move on. As a result, the people in your life quite often change too, and thus the circle decreases.

My caution here is, no prizes for guessing as it’s not rocket science, don’t discard your friends from outside of the workplace. Those ones who have always been there in the dark and jumped up and down with you in the light. If that circle gets added to, then the more the merrier. Just don’t let it shrink any further.

#imnoexpert #realconnections #cherishtherealones

24/06/25

Comfortably Numb

There is a state we’re all susceptible to, which like the tide, is one of those things that sometimes just creeps up and catches us unawares, it’s called being “comfortably numb.”

No, it’s not just sitting there listening to some 70’s rock. It’s that state of play we reach when aspiration fades, excitement dulls, learning becomes limited but weirdly the work is something we excel at, without having to take a breath.

This can be called “underload”, and it sits on the bottom left-hand side of the Yerkes-Dodson law bell curve graphic. If we’re here, then we’re underloaded, we’re not stretched; we might be bored or we might feel just laid-back.
But from a psychological safety perspective and also for the sake of our career, it’s not a good place to be.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say, it’s as bad as being on the other side of that bell curve where things are very dark, where people are overloaded, anxious, burnt out and on the verge of breakdown.

It’s where we are comfortably numb.

And if we’re numb, we don’t feel, we’re not stimulated, we’re not excited, we’re not striving and we’re not moving forwards.

The world we live in needs momentum, it needs us to move forwards in search of something, it craves stimuli. That might be learning, it might be career progression, it might be the act of delivering something successful. It might also, of course, be striving to provide or to better ourselves.

But unless you’re one of the lucky few, then you – like me – need to work to support the lives we lead outside of the workplace.  And consciously accepting the state of being ‘comfortably numb’, or being in it but blissfully unaware leaves us at odds with this. Being blunt in our ever-changing world, it will leave you as someone perhaps most at risk when corporate restructures, re-orgs and the like come into play in the workplace.

If we’re not evolving then the likelihood is we’re being left behind.

Don’t be comfortably numb.

Be alive and looking forwards.

#Imnoexpert #learning #progression

17/06/25

Shamelessly taken from another “ahem” social media site. This is so perfect.

hashtag#imnoexpert hashtag#bekindActivate to view larger image,