Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Jono Nicholas (Part 2)

While the content and conversation is still highly relevant, this episode of the Change Happens podcast was recorded to Australia going into lockdown as part of the Australian Government response to the coronavirus pandemic. Please bear this in mind in regards to the current context of events while listening. And to hear more from Jono Nicholas and his insights into working through life during COVID-19, go back to episode 2 of the Change Happens podcast.

Change happens. How we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how senior business leaders face change – the good, the bad and everything in between, because whether we like it or not, change happens.

Janelle: Hi. My name is Janelle McMaster and I’m the Managing Partner of Markets at EY Oceania. I’ve spent my whole career fixated on people. Why do they do what they do? How do they respond to change? What experiences led them to respond to change the way that the do? And how do they help others through change? The reality is that change happens and it’s how we deal with it that makes the difference. This podcast is a conversation with senior business leaders on leading through change and the lessons that they’ve learned along the way. Well today’s conversation is with Jono Nicholas. Jono!

Jono: Hello.

Janelle: Hello. Who are you and what do you do?

Jono: So I’m most importantly a husband and a dad of three boys and I run a specialist consultancy business in mental health and wellbeing called the Wellbeing Outfit and in a previous life I spent 22 years at ReachOut.

Janelle: And how would you describe yourself?

Jono: Optimistic. I am fascinated with human beings and why they do what they do. And I also would say someone who’s just trying to live the lessons that I share with other people around wellbeing and how can I do that the best I can.

Janelle: OK. So you’re being your authentic self all day every day.

Jono: And failing at it regularly! I think that’s the big part of doing this work is you have really good insight into how to be well because of the work that I get to do and you therefore realise how hard it is to implement on a daily basis.

Janelle: Tell us a little bit about your experience with change? What stands out in your mind as some of the more critical moments of change in your life?

Jono: One of the most seminal moments in my life, I grew up in New Castle north of Sydney, which as people know New Castle, BHP pulled out of there roughly about 30 years ago, but it’s still identifies as a steel town. And it’s, you know, a great insight for me that change is as much about the story you tell yourself and New Castle tells itself the story that it’s a steel town when really it’s a medical, university, white-collar town. When that happened there were was a raft of suicides and sadly for me my friend, when I was 14, suicided. And it changed my life but in a way that’s different than what most people think, which is I realised I was actually just really good at sitting in the mess with people. I realised I liked spending time with people around that and I was good at it. People like talking to me and sharing things and I liked the journey out of that mess. So I made a decision at 14 that I would work in mental health and suicide prevention. And I feel really blessed that, you know, most people spend most of their life trying to work out what they’re going to do and where they’re going, and to have that realisation at 14 was really fortunate. And then when I was finishing my Honours degree in suicide prevention I got introduced to the founder of ReachOut, Jack Heath, and he had this idea of reducing suicide by using the internet in 1997. As you said, when we started, or he started ReachOut there was 37,000 Australian’s on the internet. No one had any idea what they were doing and we went on, you know, for me went on this amazing journey to really build a new model of psychology. So that was for me, you know, each of those moments were about recognising something I think. Recognising that there’s something important and you’ve got to pursue it without having really any idea as to what that would look like. And just the confidence to go with it.

Janelle: And some incredibly powerful moments there and I want to come back to a few things that you’ve said, but perhaps I’ll start with the interaction with Jack and this business. As you say, you know, there’s a lot of really progressive stuff in what you’re talking about. You know, the first online medical service in the world. 1997/1998 you’re part of creating what would arguably have been, you know, one of the original digital businesses before that was even a term. You know, if you pushed that further I know you’ve described it as the first digital charity. You know, you spoke up and said why don’t we let the voice of our customers really help design this? And if I think about your customer group we’re talking about youths and potentially youths with significant mental illness playing a role in the design of this first of firsts, online digital business. And some of those things around co-design and digital is mainstream today, 23 years later, but definitely way ahead of it back then. What was it like to be part of all of that at that time?

Jono: The big thing for me was I was young and so one of the joys of being young is you have nothing to change. You just get to experience. So for me it felt more like a journey and experiencing it. I think either it’s been a blessing or a curse but I’m not famous for my humility. And so that kind of confidence to say well why are we doing it this way, to challenge authority, and to do that in a context of – 

Janelle: Naïve bravado?

Jono: - exactly! To do that in the context of a small business in a start-up where you have that opportunity. Often I think when I spend time now with people in really large organisations they feel as if their voice is constrained and challenging authority is harder for them. But for me that was really relatively easy. And it became really operationalised. We did really simple things like everyone had to move desks once every six months so that you got used to change in our organisation. So you had security of where you sat but you had to move. We used to – I probably changed the structure of my leadership team every six months, again so that we could tap into new ideas that people didn’t feel – so this idea of feeling secure but not settled was a big part of it.

Janelle: Yeah, sure. And actually it really – you fostered sort of self-disruption every step of the way, right? So rather than waiting for it to happen to you, what does it look like if we disrupt ourselves?

Jono: Yeah. And, look, part of that is a personal drive. I get bored really easily. I don’t think there was any kind of great kind of humility in it but it – but I think for us it was always in the service of the mission. And that was the other part which is that we existed to help all young people be happy and well and that one of the things that makes change in the business model easy is if you say you can always change the business model as long as it’s always in service to the mission. And when I see organisations fail it’s because they’re protecting their business model above the mission and that – what we found was that always led to challenging but not conflicted conversations. And I really like that. You know, I like that.

Janelle: I do too.

Jono: Actually our job is to serve and help all young people be happy and well. Is this the best and highest way that we can do that? If not, what would we be prepared to change? And some of those things it means that you double down on things that are important. We always believed that the best way to do that was to involve the people who used our service. So those things never changed but it meant that we were willing to look at different ways to deliver ReachOut.

Janelle: I think about your world and I think about the fact that you’ve had, in the time when you were at ReachOut, four different Ministers for mental health in five years under four different Prime Ministers from two different governments and then I think about the fact well each one of those Ministers would change their staff, it would take at least six months for the incumbent staff to get, you know, momentum happening and build up their corporate knowledge. Surely that’s got to slow down the pace of change in the mental health space and for a not-for-profit organisation like ReachOut I’d imagine that each incoming Minister will then have more uncertainty, need more briefings, need to be convinced again, maybe they would divert their resources. So in some ways you’re sort of having to start again over and over with these players. Was that the case? Or how do you keep momentum going in your own organisation when that kind of landscape is constantly turning over? You’re constantly having to prove the value proposition and was there any ways that you could kind of insulate yourself from that kind of external set back or anchoring?

Jono: The only way, if I answer the last part of that first, the only way we could insulate ourselves was keep tightening up the story. How do you make what you do as simple and clear as possible and not divert from that core story? And if people didn’t understand, see that as the fault of the story not the fault of the person for not understanding. But to your point, I think one of the things that we experience in mental health which is fundamentally trying to convince government to redistribute it’s health dollars differently. Every time I think there is a change of leadership in government what happens is government goes back, and probably most big organisations, go back and to BAU, because BAU is safe. You’re not going to get in trouble for opening another cancer centre despite being, you know, having more than probably we need in Australia. You know, investing in a digital mental health service, that’s a pretty risky proposition for a new Minister and so that’s where we saw some real challenges I think in mental health, to get through some of that change. Ultimately you have to have optimism that if you do what you do really well people will realise it. And every year we saw that story come to life. So I was always really optimistic about it.

Janelle: Do you think, Jono, that one of the reasons that diverting of capital to mental health hasn’t happened is because there isn’t an exact science on how to fix it? You know, that it’s a bit more grey on what it’s going to take?

Jono: I think that’s argument given but the evidence doesn’t hold up.

Janelle: OK.

Jono: So if you look at other areas where we’ve addressed issues and made remarkable advancements within a generation, I look to issues like breast cancer, that had the same stigma, for example. It’s about body parts, it’s about identity, it’s about all these things that people traditionally didn’t talk about. It was between a woman and a doctor, you didn’t necessarily even tell your partner. To having the Day 3 of the cricket in Sydney be dedicated to the issue it takes capital to be spent in places that involve risk. So if I look at HIV AIDS, why did we address it? It wasn’t because we knew the answers at the beginning, we didn’t even know how it was transmitted originally. It was because we had enough capital to go down enough rabbit holes that the answers emerged really quickly.

Janelle: Exploratory kind of.

Jono: Exploratory science. Taking really radical social solutions like needle exchanges in Australia was a real pioneer of needle exchanges, that we launched great organisations like the AIDS councils and ran really controversial marketing and engagement campaigns in the community to stop transmission. So when we look at some of those experiments and what’s happened in mental health is we’re actually too worried about the dollars. 

Janelle: But what was the tipping point there that we haven’t reached here?

Jono: Well, two things I would say that happened about those other issues. Firstly that we see those other issues happening to innocent people and we see mental health largely as a moral failing, so that it’s a failing of you. And then the second thing with mental health is we haven’t had a social infrastructure and a medical infrastructure to advance it. So if you look at something like NH and MRC funding, mental health funding is massively underweight relative to the size of the problem, which means that we don’t have enough scientists, who don’t get enough money, who don’t get enough – who don’t create enough science, who don’t create enough money. So what we see in some of these issues that the pre-existing infrastructure reinforces quick answers around something like COVID-19 will probably address relatively quickly, but something like mental health we see as difficult. What happened in HIV community as well is that it had a great community response, predominantly the male gay community in the first instance were very politically active to make sure it stayed on the political agenda and as a result, you know, you got quite significant movement in the community to address it far quicker. And we to date we’ve probably had a little bit of that with mental health but no enough.

Janelle: Not enough. I want to turn the questioning a bit more to you personally. You started off by saying that you realised when you were 14 and you lost your friend who was 14 that you had a gift to sit in the pain, sit in the mess. For 20 years with ReachOut I imagine there would have been a hell of a lot of pain and a hell of a lot of mess. How do you take care of you in that situation? Who looks after you? What have you learned about how to look after yourself when you sit in all that pain?

Jono: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think the first thing for me is I learned that as I went. I don’t think I was that good at protecting myself and there was one instance when I spent a lot of time working in Southeast Asia and saw some things that – some behaviours that I can only describe as evil, particularly related to kids and had a trauma response when I came back to Australia. I blacked out for probably a few minutes and I can’t – I have no memory of what happened between these two destinations. And it was a really great lesson for me that everybody has their breaking point, and despite being really good at sitting in the pain there’s only so much pain someone can sit in. So for me that was one of those lessons. I think I’ve always been really good and very, very conscious to keep talking to people. I think one of the things that I learn, and this was a gift that my wife gave me when she almost broke up with me shortly after meeting me, was that you get very used to being inside your own head because you don’t talk to a lot of people about confidential things. And what that can look like and genuinely appear is to be shut off. So I think one of the other gifts I had of having a wonderful, long term relationship is just the need to keep coming out of your shell and talking to people. For me they were, you know, some of the really big lessons of being on the edge of getting it really wrong. I think the other part was with the young people I directly helped who were suicidal was that same kind of lack of humility and confidence that I had when I was young which is, do you know what? If it comes to a battle of the egos your desire to die will be outstripped my desire to help you live and I’m going to win. And what I realise is when people are really suicidal they need that energy. They need some - 

Janelle: Yeah, they’ll feed off of your confidence and optimism.

Jono: Exactly. They need that and you have to be willing to kind of go those places. And that means that you have to kind of also be open to the fact that sometimes you’d lose that battle, but thankfully I never did. So that was a good one for me which is – and, again, if I look at how that’s applied into broader lessons of my life, which is it’s the same thing with running an organisation. What’s the thing that’s going to hold you back is that I think for many leaders it’s better to lose small than win big.

Janelle: How do you instil that kind of awareness of the impact to the wellbeing of yourself and certainly you’ve worked with Lifeline for a long time as well? How do you make sure that systemically that is fostered throughout the organisation?

Jono: So the first thing was I made sure that all compulsory notifications. So when someone is suicidal you can override their consent to get out emergency services. So it’s the ultimate in a breach of trust and something that people in our world take very, very seriously. So when that happened I made sure that I was the only person structurally in the organisation who could do that. And the reason why I did that wasn’t that I didn’t have faith in my team, it was that if the decision was wrong then I wanted it to be on me and that the CEO was institutionally the most protected, and that was very different than someone on the frontline at, you know, a younger person maybe at the start of their career saying I just made this clinical judgement and got wrong. So that was the first thing we did. And then what we did is we managed it like any other risk. We made sure that there were escalation policies, that every quarter our audit and risk committee looked at it as our number one risk. We recorded instances, we did quality reviews and so that institutional discipline was really important. And I think, you know I look at that now in the work that I do spending with organisations trying to put in place mental health infrastructure for their people, what I find really surprising is that they don’t often take that same level of discipline. If you operate a business in the cognitive economy you are monetising people’s brains and the performance of those people’s brains is like your supply chain management, and if you have a system for managing your supply chain then you need a system for managing your people’s wellbeing and you should look at it through that lens. And that was sort of what we did at ReachOut and it worked really well.

Janelle: And it sounds like you created the conditions for psychological safety and I think, you know, we struggle with that in organisations particularly when we’re asking people to take risks, be bold, to innovate. Maybe not all of things come through and what are the conditions that we create around that to make that safe.

Jono: Exactly. How do you create those environments systemically? So really practically what we did to deliver on that was once a quarter we would have an all staff meeting that went all afternoon. We’d always present the financials for the quarter to the staff at the same time the Board received it, which was something our Board had to agree to do. And my argument for them was if you see the money going up I want it to be transparent, but if the money goes down I want it to be transparent. And so part of that psychological safety was transparency.

Janelle: You said, Jono, that you’re most important role is that of husband and father. You’ve got three boys – and are they 6, 9 and 11?

Jono: Yep.

Janelle: So what kind of influence has your work had on the way that you parent? And I guess conversely what has been a parent influenced what you do at work?

Jono: What always keeps me motivated around this space is I have three boys and, as we spoke about earlier, the leading cause of death for young people, particularly young men in this country, is suicide. So there’s a real kind of personal drive for me that comes from my work about understanding the reality that it’s not likely to be, you know, a drug overdose or it’s not likely to be a car accident that kills my kids, it’s likely to be suicide. And that is incredibly confronting but means that you – and my wife and I have always talked about mental health with our kids from a really young age. The other part is that we’ve also always been really pragmatic about it. You know, I’ve got anxiety that sits in my family. On my wife’s family her grandfather had quite significant bipolar and we know it a significant amount of it is genetic and so with each of our boys we effectively do a running mental health analysis.

Janelle: What does that look like?

Jono: Well we know, for example, our oldest boy has always been anxious. He’s bitten his nails since he was two, and so when he was seven, you know, we had a reward system for him to feel good enough about himself to not bite his nails. You know, with our youngest boy he’s a really gentle soul and I’m really conscious on because he’s not sporty, unlike his brothers, that he’s got to find his own space and identity, which can be really hard for the youngest. So I think for us mental health and good mental health it’s just part of the way which we approach it. We still fail all the time and yell and scream at the kids and do all the things that parents do, but I think the one thing I keep coming back to and I learned from that work is that ultimately if your kids know that you have their back, then the kind of ups and downs of life you can work your way through – because that was the big lesson for me with almost all the young people that I worked with is they were not sure that adults had their back. And it’s a great one for leadership. It’s like do you people know that you’ve got their back, and if they are unsure then you’ve got some work to do as a leader. I think the other thing in terms of what have my kids taught me, which is your legacy in life will very rarely be the work that you do. You can delegate almost any task at work – try delegating a date with your partner!

Janelle: I have! It didn’t work out so well.

Jono: It didn’t work out, right? So you go try delegating someone to, you know, someone to go with your kids to the awards night and see how that goes for you.

Janelle: Yeah, so true.

Jono: And so what people I think get trapped into at work is thinking that their legacy will be the work that the do when in fact, you know, almost anyone in a job within two years of them leaving most people will have forgotten who they were. That isn’t true for your family. So I think, you know, I always say for people yes your work is really, really important but if you manage your work life well in relation to the things that you can’t delegate, which is your family and your personal life, then you tend to get that balance more right. So that would be the big lesson I learned form having kids because I’m incredibly passionate about the work that we do. I decided on this space when I was 14 and so therefore – and there’s a lot of ego in working in a charity and a lot of people who pump up your ego and tell you that you’re more important that you are. So that whole thing about actually I love ReachOut but there’s another CEO and they’re going to do a great job and it’s an easy thing to leave.

Janelle: Great segue to my next question which was, you know, clearly ReachOut is fundamentally aligned to your personal purpose and to your mission, so how did you make that decision to leave?

Jono: Yeah, I got a great piece of advice when I started as CEO. I went and spoke to – again, one of the great benefits of running a charity is you get access to some of the best business minds in the world who just give you their time and they often buy your lunch at the same time, it’s pretty cool!

Janelle: Whilst pumping your tyres?

Jono: While pumping your tyres and telling you you’re an amazing human being! But one of them said that you should decide on your exit criteria at the start of your job because most CEOs stay too long because there’s another challenge or another reason they feel needed. And really they’re afraid. They’re afraid of what’s next. And so for me I really took that on board. Every year I would say have those criteria been met and as soon as they were met, and it took me almost 10 years, then I was out.

Janelle: Jono, tell me about the Wellbeing Outfit?

Jono: So I started the Wellbeing Outfit after I stepped down as CEO from ReachOut and essentially is a specialised consultancy business in mental health and wellbeing. We work with organisations. So if I think about the first part of my career was all about public service and about helping young people. This really for me is about the other part which is we spend, you know, at least 50% of our time at work. So if I could help people have better mental health at work then it was sort of for me a really nice rounding out of that experience.

Janelle: So, what, it’s two years now in this space?

Jono: Two years.

Janelle: So, what have been some of the themes and observations that you’d have consulting to us big corporates in the mental health space?

Jono: Yeah, I think the big thing that I’ve seen is that the leadership of organisations, and it’s a self-selecting sample, very few people talk to me unless they care about their teams mental health, but the leaders of organisations recognise that it’s a really significant issue and that very few are working their way through it in a disciplined way. What I’ve seen in organisations is that they tend to be very initiative led - so we’ve got EAP, surely that’s enough? Or we did an RUOK breakfast, I hope it works, rather than being strategy lead – where’s our business trying go? In my view, as I said, if you operate in the cognitive economy, whether you’re a consulting firm, a law firm or a charity, then what happens with your people’s brains is the value of your business and therefore investing in a very systematic way into the mental health and wellbeing of your people I would argue is just a good business competitive strategy. And I think that’s probably the big part that I’ve seen leaders start shifting around, which is if we see it through the lens of we care about our people you end up with a welfare strategy. If you see it through the lens of we want to be the best organisation we can and built into our business model are the brains of our people, then you see it through the lens of a business strategy and you invest differently. And that’s, I think, the big light bulb moment that I’m hoping to help a lot of leaders through.

Janelle: I think that’s exactly the path we went down with diversity and inclusiveness. So, you know, if you see it as, you know, just the right – the nice thing to do to have equal representation in men and women, for instance, versus this is competitive advantage to be able to tap into a full talent pool, to match the customer profiles, to think more broadly, it’s a very, very different imperative and it gets very different actions and very different outcomes when you think like that.

Jono: Absolutely. I’m seeing organisations move through the first phase of this of oh, well, we kind of hope that we’ve done enough but we hope that it will go away, to organisations now really looking at, you know, leadership culture and work design. I think the most confronting thing that I see for organisations is the work design and business model.

Janelle: Oh, how so?

Jono: Organisations I think that will thrive through the next phase are willing to say that business model that got them here may not be the business model that will get them through the next stage. But that means the leaders of those businesses that have benefited most from that business model need to unwind their thinking. And if I go back right to the beginning I think that’s why a lot of organisations would benefit to your point around diversity from having outsiders, having people who didn’t win from that strategy in the leadership space because they are the ones that will point out that there’s a different way. And then those leaders have to be brave enough to challenge the business model and that’s hard. That requires some really deep, hard work at a leadership level.

Janelle: Well you’ve lived it 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago, when you were that kind of disruptor, so really what you’re saying is businesses need to really recognise that what got us here probably won’t get us there and have the courage and the security to be able to listen to disruptors, ask the advice of disruptors and adapt.

Jono: Absolutely.

Janelle: So, what gives you the most hope about the world today?

Jono: Actually the thing that most people find pessimistic about I actually think that the outsiders are winner at the moment. I think that’s coming out in really dysfunctional ways in leaders like Trump, leaders like Putin and others, are galvanizing a group of people who were really disadvantaged through the economic changes of the last 20-30 years and they’re having a voice. So the same big group of people that the outsiders that voted in Obama, if you look at it through the insiders/outsiders, this is just a different group of outsiders and we don’t like what they’ve got to say. So I think if the world’s going to change that it needs to be confronted with some of these realities and then those people who have benefited have the humility to say, look, what are they trying to talk to us about? And if we do that really well and we galvanize those communities back together the healing will take place. I think the concern that I have at the moment, which is we need to learn curiosity again, and we need to judge people less and be curious more. If we decide that we know what they think before they even say anything then the next period of change will actually be really, really hard. But if we do it well then it will work.

Janelle: We can move mountains.

Jono: Yeah.

The last three – three fast question on change to finish the podcast

Janelle: Well let’s start with a popular misconception that a lot of people have about you?

Jono: That I’m an extrovert.

Janelle: Oh, I would have thought that myself actually.

Jono: Yeah. So that would be, given my whole working life is about spending time with people, whenever I have an opportunity I chose to run away from other human beings.

Janelle: OK, good to know. I’ll let you out of here on time! And what’s one guilty pleasure? And I do like to keep it PG rate please.

Jono: I love playing video games.

Janelle: OK. Any in particular?

Jono: Actually one of the – for someone who did psychology really violent, bad video games. I’m currently playing God of War, which involves just bad…

Janelle: OK, that’s disturbing. I’ll try to work out what my guilty pleasure of watching Married at First Sight every nigh is all about, for another time. And what about one thing that you’re hopeless at?

Jono: Anything that you would pay an Airtasker to do. I am the worst handyman.

Janelle: Quite useless. Jono, I want to thank you for your time today.

Jono: Thank you.

Janelle: Thank you for being so open, so candid. I’ve personally taken a lot out of the conversation, certainly judging less and being more curious is amongst that. You know, your passion and your optimism is super clear, particularly when I think about the kind of environments you’ve been work in, that passion and optimism can still come through so strongly is fantastic. You know, I feel your lessons around being prepared to disrupt yourself as long as you are clear on the mission and the purpose that you use as your north star. Allowing ourselves to bring that outside thinking in, whether we bring it in ourselves or encourage it from others respectfully. And I love that comment around don’t delegate – you can delegate work but don’t delegate your family, don’t delegate your life. I’m sure that there’s plenty more things that others would have taken away but for me that was really enlightening, so thank you,

Jono: Thank you Janelle

The Change Happens podcast, from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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