I would like to thank the following friends, colleagues and clients for devoting the time and effort to making this book the best it can be: Dr Christian Pitsopoulos, Ted Surrette, Peter Gates, Owen Cooper, Dr Tim Payne, Fernanda Afonso, Kate van Hilst and Carly Fisher. I would also like to thank my researcher, Maja Jovelic, for her tireless assistance.

Two special mentions are also necessary. Firstly, John Honey, the man who changed the course of my life in one conversation. I will be eternally thankful to you. Secondly, Damien Diecke, a man wise beyond his years, who put the cherry on the cake of my social skills. Thank you for sharing your many wisdoms and insights into human nature.

If you’re reading this book, the chances are you have come to a turning point in your life or career. You have most likely decided that now is the time to invest in balancing your skills as a manager or leader. I wouldn’t be surprised if your technical ability to do your job is exceptional and you are a highly intelligent man or woman. You may even be the subject matter expert in your field. Yet there has been something eluding you for a while. Something which, up until now, you may have put in the ‘too hard’ pile. That something is your ability to understand, influence and connect with people. If this is the case, this book is for you.

These people are called Engaging Executives.

An Engaging Executive is not a title but a concept, a way of seeing the world, and a methodology for making the kind of impact that gets results. An Engaging Executive is someone who appreciates both tasks and people in equal measure. This could be anybody who is working in a professional capacity and who needs to get results through other people. Engaging Executives go by many job titles, such as Accountants, Actuaries, Engineers, Medical Practitioners, Lawyers, Public Servants, Military Officers, General Managers, Partners, Senior Managers and so on.

Why is engagement so important? Because essentially all human beings are social animals. We have evolved over 6 million years to rely on each other and to work as a team. It is hard wired into us, and much of our physiology and neurology is designed to understand human interaction. Yet in a world shifting its focus towards knowledge and technology, we are losing our ability to communicate and connect face to face.

At the very core of every human being is the need for connection, the need to feel understood and the need to feel valued. This book will help you to achieve the intersection of technical or task excellence and interpersonal excellence. This book is a pragmatic guide on how to influence people more effectively by understanding others better, being understood by others better, and by being engaging and interesting to others.

If you are already sold on the need to enhance your interpersonal skills and you are keen to get stuck in then feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter. However, if you are sitting on the fence then allow me to share with you some noteworthy reasons why this is so important.

This is a powerful epiphany for many people who have come up through the technical professions. Many people with a purely task or technical bent tend to hit the ‘Technical Ceiling’. They are brilliant at all technical or knowledge based parts of the job, but when it comes to the people side, they struggle.

Let’s consider the typical journey I have seen so often. A person initially chooses a profession that lends itself to his logical, rational skills. He studies hard and achieves exceptional results at school and university. Then he gets his first job, which is normally a highly analytical role and one that allows him to flex his academic bent in a real-world setting. However, as the years go on, things start to change. As this person gets further into his career and higher up the corporate ladder, things start to shift. All of a sudden he finds himself in a role or at a level where he does not need to be the technical expert anymore. He needs to be the leader of people. This is the moment of culture shock, the moment when he realises that all the things he has ever practised and enjoyed are not the things that are going to get him success in the higher levels of the organisation. Now he has to deal with the feelings and emotions of others, with abstract concepts that don’t have an answer, with other people’s values, and with differing personalities. None of these things has he ever before focused on or placed much importance on. This is the Technical Ceiling.

Having coached executives of various levels, professions and corporate structures, I have found some similar themes. So what are the common challenges that these technically or task-minded executives face? These include difficulty in:

Technical knowledge continues to be highly valued, but at the same time you need to be able to wield these skills with tact and diplomacy. Having previously had 15 years’ experience working in a company that specialises in the science of selection, I can tell you that the blue chip companies and leading government departments place a very heavy weighting on a candidate’s ability to display team and leadership behaviours. The recruiting teams will turn over every stone to ensure that a candidate has the correct cultural fit. They have a fine array of tools and processes with which to investigate. This could be a personality questionnaire that is designed to assess your character and give telling information about how and how much you like to interact with people. It might be a behavioural-based interview in which you will be probed to give answers about tough interpersonal situations you’ve had to manage in the workplace. It could even be a ‘day in the life’ assessment centre where you are immersed in a virtual world that uses professional actors to test and provoke you to see how you respond. I have used all of these processes on aspiring Senior Managers, General Managers, Partners and C-Suite contenders.

There is one thing that shines through from almost every assessment I have ever completed: it is never the technical skills that lose people the job. Nine times out of ten it is their inability to demonstrate the softer skills of leadership.

If you are thinking to yourself, ‘You would say that, being a Psychologist’, then let me share how these decisions, of which I have been a part, are frequently made. Typically in large firms there will be a panel of Senior Executives or Partners who review each application. They will have a look to see if there is a business case to support you as a moneymaking or saving entity in your own right. Clearly, your technical ability serves you well here. Then they will look at the corporate values and behaviours that Senior Executives or Partners are supposed to exhibit. I have lost count of the times I have been in a room where an applicant had the right commercial or operational experience but did not have the leadership and interpersonal skills. What’s more, it was the senior corporate stakeholders who were the most adamant about these being at the appropriate level. All of these issues can also apply to promotions within the workplace.

This anecdotal evidence is supported by the work of Zenger and Folkman, two leadership experts who have conducted decades of empirical research. In an article in Harvard Business Review they discuss their research on the interaction between task and people skills. Only 14% of leaders who were strong in results but not people focus achieved extraordinary leadership performance, defined as 90% in overall leadership effectiveness. When they looked at it from the opposite angle, only 12% of people-focused leaders achieved extraordinary leadership performance. The magic happened when leaders were at 72nd percentile in both task and people focus. This led to an impressive 90th percentile score on extraordinary leadership.

The need for interpersonal excellence is not going to disappear. This is because of the changing demographics in the workplace.

According to the people who categorise us by the date we were born, that would make you a Generation X, like me. That is, you were born between 1963 and 1980. If you were born before that you would be classed as a Baby Boomer, and if you were born after you would be a Gen Y.

So what? Well, you have probably started to notice that there are now more people in your organisation that are younger than you than are older than you. While we cannot and should not generalise too much, we can notice that the younger generation have different ideas about how a workplace should be. In the old days – and I shall refrain from calling them ‘good’ – we could have expected a teenage or early twenties new employee who started asking about promotions and ‘what’s my next job’ to get a clip round the ear. However, these days that just won’t cut it. Gen Y’s have such a strong identity and collective culture that articles are being written about how to manage them every day Research by Intelligence Group on Gen Y’s has found that:

In another study conducted by Ashridge Business School in the UK it was found that over half (56%) of graduates expect to be in a management role within three years of starting work, while 13% of graduates expect a management role within a year. That’s a significant change in workplace attitudes. In addition, graduates want their managers to respect and value them (43%); support them with career progression (36%); trust them to get on with things (35%); and communicate well with them (34%). Finally, 75% of managers believe they are fulfilling the role of coach/mentor, but just 26% of graduates agree.

Such statistics confirm the changing nature of workplaces, and why being technically proficient is no longer enough to get you ahead. You also need to be an Engaging Executive if you are to connect with the emerging workforce.

Robert Waldinger is a Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst and Zen Priest. In 2015 he delivered a fantastic TEDx lecture which, in my view, made a profound point about the importance of developing soft skills and connecting with others. He talked about a Harvard study which has been running for over 75 years and which he is currently the Director of. At the time of Robert’s lecture there were approximately 700 people in the study, and it continues to grow. By just about any standard this is a meaningful sample for a longitudinal study and hence worthy of note. The purpose of the study was to answer the question, ‘What leads to ongoing health and happiness?’

The lessons from tens of thousands of research pages were quite surprising if you contrast them with what Western society conditions us to believe will lead to happiness. None of the findings point to wealth or fame or working hard as sources of contentment. The clearest message is that good relationships keep us healthier and happier, period. Now, you are probably not falling off your chair with shock because you know this book is trying to make this very point. However, to summarise the findings of the study, there were three big lessons about relationships.

First, social connections are really good for us and loneliness kills us. People who are more socially connected to friends, family and the community are happier, healthier and live longer than those less connected. The study went on to explain that loneliness leads to less happiness, which leads to a decline in health.

The second big finding from the study was that it is not the number of friends you have or whether you are in a relationship, it is the quality of the relationships that matters. We can all be lonely in a crowd or in a bad relationship. High-conflict marriages end up being worse for your health and happiness than being alone. The study looked at what predicted the quality of life for subjects from middle age to being an octogenarian. When starting from age 50 it wasn’t their cholesterol levels that predicted their quality of life, it was how satisfied they were in their relationships. Those most happy in their relationships at 50 were the healthiest.

The third big lesson learned was that good relationships are better for your brain too. For less connected people, brain function also declines sooner and they live shorter lives. Now think about that for a second. That thing you value the most, your ability to calculate and intellectualise … diminished. It is a humbling thought.

Robert’s final message was that you need to replace screen time with people time. This applies equally to the workplace. This is the goal of an Engaging Executive.

When writing this book I interviewed many Senior Managers, Directors and Partners in some of the most prestigious global organisations in both the private and public sectors. I recall one such conversation with a Senior Partner named Bill where he described his turning point. It was a tough pill to swallow for Bill. He was a technically brilliant accountant working his way up in one of the top-tier professional services firms in the world. He always knew the solution to your problem before you even finished telling him about it, and he let you know this through his abrupt communication style. One day, Bill recalls, he was shown into an office by one of the Partners, who said, ‘The way you come across is impatient and you just don’t listen to others. This is why you are not getting put on the jobs you want.’ This moment was so impactful, Bill can still recall the colour of the room and the table he was sitting at as if it were yesterday. He never knew that this was the way he came across to others – he thought he was just being efficient and solution focused. Despite finding this confronting, Bill took on board the feedback and since that time he has fast tracked to Senior Partner. Bill argues that ‘in today’s professional services, technical skills are a given. You need to be able to create some level of excitement. You need to be able to draw people in through your actions.’ He went on to describe how the best Partners in his firm were those who could collaborate, be inclusive, demonstrate great listening and not show off their technical skills but be there to grow others.

So, are you convinced yet? Whether you are a Lawyer, an Accountant, an Engineer, or any other technical profession, the message is the same.

Hopefully this chapter has given you some solid reasons to be motivated to enhance your interpersonal skills. But who am I to tell you these skills can be developed? Well allow me to share with you my story – from social misfit to social coach.

If you feel like you might not have what it takes to make this leap, understanding my story could help you on your own journey to becoming an Engaging Executive. I have been described as charismatic, charming and engaging, but I wasn’t always the person I am today. I was once a quiet, retiring kid. I had to learn how to become outgoing, how to interact with people, and how to do things I was uncomfortable doing. Being sociable didn’t come naturally to me at all. To demonstrate that anybody can become an Engaging Executive, allow me to share my story.

As a child I always admired those people who seemed to be successful at school. There seemed to be two camps: those who were really clever, and those who were really popular. Very rarely did people seem to fit into both camps, although there were people who didn’t fit into either group – like me. That being said, sometimes there was that special person who managed to transcend the dichotomy. I remember a boy called Neil. He was in all the top educational streams, and he was also a charming boy, popular with both the guys and the girls.

As a 16-year-old boy I didn’t realise it at the time, but that intersection between being clever and being socially skilled was the key to success in the modern world of work. However, it wasn’t just that Neil was clever. It was what he was clever in. Neil was brilliant at mathematics and sciences. Now, if he had been into the arts or literature then the contrast wouldn’t have been so great. That’s almost expected. People who are ‘arty’ are quite often socially comfortable and expressive. That was what made Neil special. He was a scientifically minded person with social skills – an unusual combination, and a most powerful one.

I was a very, very shy boy with little self-confidence. I didn’t mix socially with the other kids in my neighbourhood or at school once I got into my pubescent years. I found it very awkward. I didn’t know how to relate to them.

This phobia of talking to people was pervasive in all areas of my life. When relatives visited I would find as many reasons as possible to leave the room. When the phone rang I used to stare at it, afraid of who could be on the other end. I didn’t answer it in case I didn’t know the caller. If someone knocked on the door of our house, I would creep up and look out the side window. If I didn’t know who it was I wouldn’t open the door because they might try to sell me something and I didn’t know how to refuse.

This problem was still present when I was in my late teens.

When my Mum and Dad got divorced, Mum returned to her working-class roots, which was West London, near Heathrow Airport, and she took my sister and me with her. I ended up in a working class school in the rough part of town.

Given the fact that my self-confidence was at zero and I attended a school that was more a training ground for bullies than an academic institution, I didn’t fare too well. I was never great at exams, and back in the ‘good’ old days everything was about how well you did in the last three hours of a two-year course – there was no ongoing assessment like there is today. You can imagine the feeling of opening your exam results letter as soon as it arrives and seeing that two years of your work had been reviewed and deemed ‘unclassifiable’. Not even good enough to be ‘poor’. I did retake a couple of courses, but I never managed to get higher than a D. So I left school with little to show.

Once School Performance Tables were introduced the year I left the school, my school only had two stand-out statistics: the lowest amount of exam passes and the highest number of days truancy. It turned out I had gone to the worst school in the area.

I tried really hard not to get the job, but alas, I didn’t try hard enough.

So I ended up working for the Police just for a lack of anything better to do. It was an administrative job which was very repetitive and 100% paper based. We didn’t get computers for another six years.

By the age of 24 I knew that pushing forms around wasn’t for me. I still didn’t really know what was for me, but after a bit more thought, I considered it was time to learn more about what makes people tick. So I applied for a job in Human Resources (HR), which in those days was known as Personnel. At exactly the same time that I put in an application, the MPS was launching a brand new outplacement facility and they were looking for employees. The MPS had just undergone a review that criticised their organisational structure. So they threw a tonne of money at a state-of-the-art Outplacement Centre and packed it full of self-development gurus, psychologists and career coaches.

That was probably the luckiest break I’ve ever had.

I became very interested in what was happening. It was all about helping people to work out what they wanted to do when they left the

Police Service, and I thought to myself, ‘Hey, maybe helping people to find out what they want to do is actually what I want to do … ?’ I was promoted to be Centre Manager and I started to co-run the Outplacement course with one of the external consultants. The more I did that, the more my confidence started to grow.

That’s when my first life-changing event occurred.

I see my life in two halves: before I met John and after I met John. Coming from my past as a poor academic performer and a socially inept person, I was still carrying a lot of baggage and believing I was an academic idiot. I used to feel intimidated by anyone who had a university degree. If someone had a Master’s degree then I couldn’t even look them in the eye. In fact, as I started to become more friendly with people at the Outplacement Centre, I realised that many of them had Master’s degrees. On one occasion I was invited to a party by a friend who was a Psychologist. My first question was, and I kid you not, ‘Will there be anyone else there with Master’s degrees?’ To which she replied, ‘Of course’. So I told her I was busy that night. That was how it was in my inner world before I met John.

After co-delivering the Outplacement Courses with me for about a year, John took me to one side and did a Jedi mind trick on me. He could see I was passionate about helping people, and he could see something in me that I couldn’t see in myself. He said, ‘Duncan, you would make a great Psychologist’. I was shocked, floored, gobsmacked. Unfortunately, at that time the force was not strong enough in me, and so I replied, ‘I can’t, John. That would mean going to university and I am too old, too dumb, too poor and too scared’. However, John was a Psychologist and a Master Practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). He could see that I was being held back by my limiting beliefs, and he wasn’t about to accept it. So he challenged me on all of these issues; he challenged me until I started to think differently. One by one he questioned my beliefs and probed and disentangled the story I had been telling myself all those years.

That challenging of my beliefs about myself gave me the impetus to turn my whole life around, and that one conversation was the single most important conversation I believe I’ve ever had in my life. From that moment I realised I wanted to become a Psychologist and I believed I could be a Psychologist, so I applied to university.

Of course, I had to overcome the fact that my academic record was atrocious, so I had a chat to the university entrance panel who told me that on the plus side they did like mature students, and I was 27 at this point. On the down side, I would have to undertake more study to meet their entrance requirements. I think they warmed to my plight, and the challenge was set. So I started studying another ‘ A’ level subject at night school while working full time. I had to finish the course in 26 weeks instead of the normal timeframe of two academic years. It was tough, but I was on a mission and so I threw everything at it.

Then came the day I had to phone up for my result. Now considering the last time I had got my ‘ A’ level results, at the age of 19, I received a D and E and a U (unclassified), you could say that my apprehension was rather high. I remember the call like it was yesterday. I phoned up and said, ‘Hello, my name is Duncan Fish and I’m calling about my “A” level results’. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘hold on’. So off she went to look them up. Every second felt like a year, and my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. She came back on the phone. ‘A,’ she said. I replied, ‘That’s right – “A” level’. ‘No,’ she responded, ‘You got an A’. So I replied, ‘Sorry, this is Duncan Fish … have you got the right person?’

It turns out she did have the right person, and I was on my way to university.

I ended up finishing in the top 5% out of a class of 100 students. Turns out I wasn’t such an idiot after all. I guess your results are a bit different when you start to believe in yourself. So now I was off to change the world.

I wanted to be an Organisational Psychologist, just like John. I wanted to help people change their lives, just like John. That became the narrative that sat behind my drive to get into the psychological profession, and I thought that becoming an Organisational Psychologist would mean doing all of this wonderful life-changing work. But as I went through my two degrees I realised a lot of it was more about statistically proving things, and that very little was actually solidly provable. Even the things we hold on to very dearly as Organisational Psychologists really only have a quite low predictive validity.

I realised after a while that I wasn’t actually very interested in the ‘statistically’ proven things. What was more interesting were the stories that people told about themselves; that is, what they believed about themselves. I guess after about five years on the job I realised that psychology didn’t necessarily have all the answers; or not the answers that I wanted, at least. Being a classically trained Psychologist gave me a great ability to label people and describe situations but less ability to effect changes in them.

So I started learning about Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). In a nutshell, this is the study of linguistics and how this impacts on our thought processes, which in turn impacts our lives. I read some books, and then I did my NLP Practitioner course in 2006. It was eye opening. I loved studying the subjective, which was far more telling to me than a cold and sterile standardised questionnaire. In fact, I found NLP so enlightening, I went on to complete my Master of NLP and Trainer of NLP certifications. As a Psychologist I was able to cherry pick from the toolkit of NLP and choose those methods that were the most powerful. This was where I found some of the most useful tools and processes to complement my psychological knowledge. What fascinated me was the realisation that everything we experience is subjective and that we are all prisoners of our own beliefs. Once I started delving into what someone believed was possible and impossible, I could see in others that self-doubting man I had once been. It became my purpose to help free others from their self-imposed prisons.

In 2012, after working in Australia for a while, I decided to take two months off work to circumnavigate the continent on an adventure-tourer motorbike – a 20,500 km round trip. At the time I thought the trip was going to be about physical endurance, it was going to be about being physically uncomfortable in unusual surroundings, it was going to be about challenging myself to do things that could kill me. However, as in all good stories, there was a twist.

The biggest learning I took out of it, the thing that was most life changing, was actually something that took me right back to being that shy, socially awkward boy again.

After three weeks of being on the road and having relatively little company, I arrived in Darwin. Now Darwin is a small city in the grand scheme of cities but a big city compared to everything else in that part of the world. So when I arrived I was really excited to go out for the night. I checked into a motel that was a pleasant treat after sleeping in a tent for the previous two weeks. I asked the receptionist, ‘So, what are the people like here?’ She said, ‘They’re so wonderful, they’re so friendly … all you have to do is stand by the bar and they’ll literally come up and talk to you’. I responded, ‘Wow, that sounds awesome. Just what I need’.

So I found the busiest pub in Darwin and I stood there with a beer in my hand waiting for these friendly locals to ask me about my travels and share a yarn or two. Nothing. For two hours I stood there and not one person spoke to me. This was when my big learning smacked me in the face … and ouch, did it hurt. As I stood there in a packed pub full of people laughing and joking all around me, I found it completely impossible to cross through this imaginary force field between me and them to start a conversation. I was absolutely rooted to the spot. There was nothing I could do. I felt completely incapacitated. I suddenly realised that after all the work I had done on myself and with all the skills I had learned in business communications and relationships, I was still the scared little boy who didn’t want to talk to strangers. No matter what I said to myself I just could not overcome my anxiety about speaking to people. I had all this chatter in my head saying, ‘What do I talk about? What value do I bring? Why would they want to speak to me? I’d just be a nuisance’, and a thousand other unproductive thoughts. So I stood there, a voyeur of other people’s fun.

Despite the fact that I was in the busiest place that I’d been in for the last three weeks, I felt the loneliest I’d felt on the whole trip. In fact, the loneliest I’d felt for a long, long time. It made me realise there was some part of me that wasn’t how I wanted it to be. There was some part of me that was still that shy little boy I was many, many years ago, and now I was absolutely determined to fix it. So I vowed that once I got back to Sydney I would find the most extreme way of overcoming that fear.