Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot UK. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places.

So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 102 with the title Humanising Business and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Ben Afia. Ben describes himself as someone who makes business more human, and when I asked Ben to describe his superpower, he said he has a particular sensitivity to the nuances of language. Hello, Ben, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Jo, it's an absolute pleasure.

Yeah, we've been having a great chat in the green room and I'm so looking forward to this humanising business. What does that mean?

Yeah, it's quite a bold statement, isn't it? I suppose, but it's been my mission for possibly the last 2025 years. I've really started focusing on language, in particular, when I was at Boots, the chemists, about 25 years ago, and I got to work on the first brand tone of voice. We were working on brand strategy, the tone of voice and language of the business. And in any large organisation, you've got a level of complexity and dehumanising, if you like, because you've got a lot of people, so you have process and you've got bureaucracy and politics, and that all gets in the way of relationships inside the organisation and that gets in turn in the way of relationships outside. So with customers. So at Boots, I was trying to help the organisation to relate to customers in the way that they want to be related to, the way they would want to be spoken to. And then when I set up my consultancy about 19 and a half, nearly 20 years ago, I found myself coming across organise other organisations who had similar problems. So I worked with companies like BP, Vodafone, Aviva, Google, and I found a similar pattern that these larger businesses, just because they're large, they have certain issues that get in the way of being human.

And what's the impact of that? Well, certainly when I was an employee, I felt slightly dehumanised, actually. Boots was a wonderful place to work. But I worked in some less wonderful places before that. Many people have this sense of working for the man and that being a dehumanising experience. So if we feel treated less than human internally, how does that reflect in the way that we treat our customers? And it's that connection that I'm really intrigued about. And what I've learned, I suppose, through all the work, that all the consulting that I've done with various clients, is that in order to change the relationship you have with your customers, you need to change the relationship with your people internally first. So that's the nub of it, I'd say.

I like that. I like that nuance. And we see that echoed in, you say the companies you've worked for, the airline industry changed the way they operated many years ago as well, we can probably imagine. I see on LinkedIn every day, people get really frustrated with computer says no, or whoever you talk to. I appreciate you're not necessarily talking about customer service here, you're talking about how you communicate. But sometimes you get a letter and it feels like you're being, I don't know, criticised or attacked or sued in a correspondence that should be friendly and warm. But that warmth never comes through, does it?

Absolutely. And to that extent, yes. I am talking about customer service, because what is a business? A business has products and services that it sells to an audience. That might be a business audience or a consumer audience, or both in many cases. So ultimately, we're creating something that serves a need for people, and people will buy that or not. And so that's where the sense of customer service comes in. Because when you get through the selling and the marketing communication, it's the customer service that really matters. Do you deliver what you promise in your marketing, through your service? And all of those tiny moments, all throughout a customer's journey, are absolutely crucial in shaping a customer's perception of what you're like as an organisation and what you believe in, what you stand for.

So every one of those letters, every one of that, and I look at the kind of the micro copy on websites, the form that you fill in when you make a purchase, or the terms and conditions when they come through at the bottom of the email, when you've bought something, all the contractual stuff is all evidence to a customer of what you stand for, what you believe in. And as a business, it's a promise. It's all part of your promise. What's really interesting is that most organisations spend a lot of time and money investing in the marketing and the sales pitch and aren't necessarily following that through in the rest of the journey, which is when you really learn whether you can trust their organisation and whether you're prepared to stay with them. And the end result of that for me is, and all the evidence shows that companies that deliver on their promise and turn customers into advocates, people who come back and buy more and bring their friends with them refer are more profitable. And I was just listening to a webinar the other day with Fred Reichld, who created the mps net promoter score system at Bain and Company 25, 30 years ago or something, and his latest book, winning on purpose, I think it is. And he has great case studies. He talks about T Mobile in the US in particular, who were at the bottom for customer service, who then really spent time focusing on turning customers into advocates and referrals and became the top for customer service and then for profitability amongst all the mobile networks in the US.

So there is really compelling evidence that treating people like human beings, humanising for your people and for your customers, works.

It's quite easy for you and I, we're solopreneurs, we run our own micro businesses. Our tone of voice is inherent in everything we do because it's basically only ourselves speaking. I like what you're saying there. It's thinking about all those subtle touch points and nuances. I worked with a mutual friend of ours, Sarah Fox, on my terms and conditions recently, and when I wrote them originally, I wrote them with my bouncing ball on the words in my head so that they actually sound like me. And I was very keen. I didn't want them to sound distant, detached, legal. I wanted them to sound warm and friendly like, this is what I'm thinking.

I hope you're thinking the same thing. This is something that I'm worried about. This is something you'll be worried about. I want us to work together and come up with a collaborative solution. If it doesn't work out, let's have a chat about it was kind of my approach. And what do I mean by this? I mean this and it's written in that very friendly, chatty language, which is my internal head voice. And that's what I asked Sarah to keep going. I don't call them terms, I call them my expectations of our relationship.

And she followed that through. And I think you're so right. Everything I do has to have my bouncing ball in my head of how I speak on the words as I speak it, and it has to have my cadence, my rhythm, my bounce, all those. But when you work for a corporate, the challenge is they're so big, so large, who has that internal voice that you're trying to match and how do you communicate?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there are some, although few businesses, maybe like virgin, and they can imagine a person at Virgin, they can imagine Richard Branson speaking, and there's the voice. But for most large businesses, you don't necessarily have a publicly known figurehead that you can lean on in that way. So you do need to find a way of describing that voice in a way that the people using it can apply. And I suppose that's what I've done a lot of in the last 20 years or so, is helping an organisation to develop its strategy and its brand strategy, in particular values and behaviours, and translate that into ways of speaking and writing that people who don't have english degrees can relate to and actually employ. Now, you might call that tone of voice guidelines, perhaps, which is something I've done a lot of over the years. But those people who are connecting with your customers, first of all, your marketing teams, and if you're Vodafone, you have hundreds, if not thousands of marketers, you then have tens of thousands of people in customer service, potentially, and you have salespeople dealing with customers in stores, on the phone or in b to b going out to see corporates. So you've got thousands of people representing the brand day in, day out.

So how do you help the ethos or the story of the brand come through consistently? And that's, I guess, what I've been really interested in, because we don't want to turn people into puppets, we're not trying to turn people into drones and get people scripting and repeating the same phrases. I actually strongly believe in help, in empowering people and in equipping people to bring their own voice into it. And what I've found is that when people feel more confident in the way that you want to say things as an organisation and the messages that you want them to bounce off, they actually become much more confident communicators and they will reflect the brand with confidence, naturally. So partly is about definition and defining things, in defining the tone of voice, but then it's also about developing the skills, the capability for people. And quite often in business, we use language day in, day out. We write all the time, don't we? We write emails, we write web pages, we write pieces of marketing in customer service. We're on web chat, or we're writing letters to customers. And how often have we had training? Quite often.

I'll go into an organisation and there's been very little training in writing. It's almost the assumption that you've learned to write at school, so you ought to be able to do it. But actually, no, there's a way of writing in business that is actually different. And it's interesting. My daughter is about to do her a levels. She's doing english literature, and I almost can't coach her because they've been taught to write at school in a way that actually is. They've been taught to use adjectives in a way that I never would in business, because we aim for simplicity and clarity and humanity in business. And it's almost like at school they're being taught something else, and then in academia, it's even worse.

Yeah, don't talk to me about academia. I was doing an MVQ and I couldn't handle the assignments because every time I had it moderated, it was saying, no, you have to write like this. Have to write like that. And I said, no, I can't write this without filler words. I can't write this without my voice in it. You want me to strip it down to short, factual sentences? That's not me.

No. What this makes me think of is the perceptions that we have of the way that we should write. So we grow up in whatever environment we do, learning a way that we're taught to write. We should write the way that we should sound. And so we sort of enter the workplace with lots of assumptions that have been drummed into us as if they're rules of grammar and they're not actually rules of grammar. So a good example is starting a sentence with and but because or so now, if you read most newspapers, you'll find that they do that a lot. I think the Guardian doesn't, but most newspapers just do that with abandon and you don't even notice. But in business writing, it's almost as if we've been taught that that's not correct.

And people have this idea embedded in their brains as if it's a rule of grammar, but it's not. It's actually a style rule. And style emerged. I don't want to get too distracted on too much of a tangent here, but style emerged in the victorian period when people were coming into the cities in the victorian period looking for work, they were coming off the fields and looking for jobs in the factories, when in the industrial revolution and things were booming in the factories, people were coming in and starting businesses, earning money, and you had this emerging middle class coming in from the villages, but there were people who didn't feel very confident in communicating, in conveying themselves in polite society. So you had a whole raft of out of work actors who were turning their hand to creating these style guides to help the aspiring middle class to sound poshure. And this is where a lot of these rules of grammar that we perceive and have become embedded in the last kind of couple of hundred years, but they're actually matters of style, and what they were writing were these style guides. So we have this hangover in business that we should have a certain formality, but actually, our business language, certainly in Britain, to the US, to some extent, Australia as well, has become less formal. So the Internet in the last 2025 years ago or so, has actually brought in different styles of communication, different forms of language.

If you think that we came into the Internet age writing formal letters, and we now have text and WhatsApp and telegram and all sorts of apps, where we message in a much more immediate form, and what that's done is it's brought a style of speech into our writing. And so now, if we write in the traditional letter way, as organisations tend to, or we feel that we should, in business, actually, customers and the public at large find, feel that actually, that's rather over formal, and that puts a barrier up. And I did some work with legal in general, 1819, years ago, not long after I'd started freelancing, and they had done a piece of discourse analysis that highlighted that actually, this language, this formal insurance language, was putting a barrier up between them and customers. And that was the spark, that was the catalyst for them to make some changes.

As you were speaking, I was listening to the way you were constructing your sentences and the words, and you were using the word and sequentially, in a way that you would never use that if you were writing a letter or writing a document, because you just wouldn't have. And this and that and this and that, you'd almost force yourself to shorten that sentence and start again without the third. And because you just look at it and go, that doesn't seem right, but when you were speaking it, you were linking paragraphs and sentences with, and listening to it, it sounded relaxed and normal and typical conversation. So is it a challenge trying to turn the written word into the internal voice of the person, reading it in a way that they can understand it and pick up the same feeling in which it was given onto the page?

I think it is, yeah, that's a really good point, Jo. So, quite often, what I'm trying to help people to do in organisations is to be more themselves and more conversationally themselves. So when I'm working with marketers, it's actually a bit more straightforward because there's a distance off generally between them and the customer, so they have time to think and to think about what's going into their advertising or into their social media or onto a website. So they've got time to consider and they can work as a team to bring more of their spoken voice into play. It's slightly different in customer service because in customer service often people have been taught certain ways that they've picked up in various training over the years, but often that training hasn't been very comprehensive, so they don't have that much confidence in being themselves. I can remember running a workshop in Aeon, so I helped Aeon transition from Powergen to Aeon must, what was it, 15 years ago? Or something like that. I worked with Aeon for about eight years, I think, and we went through that transition. My team and I trained about 4000 people there and I can remember a workshop with some very senior customer service people.

And they were translating a letter, they were looking at a letter and they were really struggling to get the clarity into the tone of voice that I was trying to encourage. The clarity and the informality, not necessarily chattiness, because I don't think customers want that and certainly not from an energy provider. So it's not a chattiness, but a more conversational human tone helps somebody. It expresses, for me, expresses empathy. It shows somebody that you've heard them, a simplicity and a clarity and empathy that shows that you've heard. And I can remember there was a couple working together and I suggested, and they were really struggling to get through their kind of legalistic language, the formality. So I said, why don't you say it as you would say it on the phone to the customer? So person a say it to person b as you would on the phone. Person B write down exactly the words that they say.

And they wrote the words down. I said, there's your letter. They said, what? We can't say this. It's too simple, it's too natural in a way. And I said, you absolutely. Can you tidy it up? You edit it, you can turn that into a letter. But what you've done is you've then brought 25 plus years of experience looking after customers to bear into that letter. And you've shown some empathy and you've connected on a more human level.

So for me, it is about having empathy for the audience, what they're likely to take on board in terms of a message and how they want to hear it and how they're going to feel recognised as a human being, as.

An individual is the challenge with that, though. Whilst we talked about having an avatar of the tone of voice. So Richard Branson Virgin is clearly a person you're talking through, but do you have to try and find an avatar of the receiver? So the person is going to open that letter and that must be a massive challenge because of the multicultural nuances of the person. Open the letter, their heritage, their lived experience, which part of the country, which part of the world, which language they speak. They're going to interpret things with their own bias or lived experience. And that must also be a challenge.

It is. And so there's two sides to that conversation, isn't there? There's the company. So what's the character of the company? And yeah, what's the character of the person you're talking to? So let's take both in turn. So start with the company. In the jargon, in the corporate speak or the marketing speak, I would call this brand personality. And there are all sorts of ways of describing brand personality, but that's part of the kind of the process of developing a brand strategy and it needs to come from the values and it comes from the behaviours that you want to encourage through the organisation. The personality is how that all comes across. So when you connect with a customer or connect with somebody internally, how does that convey itself? What personality traits would you describe yourself by? So that's the first step and you can have some fun with that.

The key is to try to bring it to life in a way that enables people within the organisation to project themselves onto it, to see themselves in that personality. It needs to not be completely prescriptive. You can't tell people how to be as a human being. You can encourage, but you can't force people. So you have to do it in a way that people will relate to and enjoy playing with, enjoy working with and expressing. So that's the kind of the business side of the conversation. But when it comes to the people that we're talking to, I have an exercise that I've used for many years which I found is really powerful for this. You've probably come across the idea of audience personas and I think that they can be misused in a way, and can we really ever describe one segment of an audience in a way that makes sense? There's all sorts of arguments about this and in fact, in my book that I'm hoping to be publishing within two or three months.

The human business. How to love your customers so they love you back. I have a chapter on brand personality, and I talk about this process of an exercise where I help people to step into the personality of their audience. So trying not to be too prescriptive about audience personas, I run this exercise where we use. It uses NLP neurolinguistic programming, and there's this idea of perceptual position, so stepping into somebody else's shoes. So I get people into groups and I give them a communication. So we get some communications from within the organisation that could be better. Obviously, I'm generally looking for communications that are quite poor, but actually you don't need to look too far within an organisation to find things that people want to improve.

And I get people to spend 20 minutes, 25 minutes scoping out, getting an idea of a character of one of the audience, somebody who might be receiving a letter or reading a web page or receiving an email or something like that, or reading a social post. So give them a name, give them an age, imagine what they do, what's their family set up, where do they live, what job do they do? And then imagine a day in their life right from the moment they get up. Because I want people to have the idea that when you're talking to your customers, when you're communicating with an audience of any kind, the context in which they're receiving a communication is the whole of their life. It's almost like within business. We've got this idea that when you're writing to somebody, they're in their business mindset or they're in their customer mindset, and it's obviously not true. We get up, we walk the dog, we get the kids to school. We are panicked and stressed. The packed lunch didn't go quite as well.

There was a traffic jam. Getting the kids to school, you got to your office, or you got back to your desk at home and you're already fraught, and then you read that letter or you get that email through. So when we imagine the whole of this life context for a member of our audience, we immediately have more empathy for that person. Then I get them from that place of empathy to go, okay, in character, in audience, character. Now read the communication. How does it feel to you? What does it make you feel? And people go, I'm confused. Actually. It makes me angry.

It's legalistic, it's formal. I don't understand, I'm not clear. And immediately people know what they want to do differently immediately in that place of empathy, they know what they want to do differently. And that's how I help them to step into an audience frame of mind and appreciate what's going on for them.

I love that. That's so true. I often use a similar example of that where, because we're reading a lot of communications now on our phones, we've got even less control about where that person will pick up that correspondence, whether it's a text message, email, whatever it may be. They could be sat on the toilet, as you say. They could be in a traffic jam, they could be just dropped the kids off at school having a stressy moment and suddenly ping, they go, I'll just quickly read that. And I've picked up communications and there's nothing particularly wrong with the tone of voice or what was being sent to me, but my frame of mind was in completely the wrong place. I was not in the right place to receive that, no matter how good it was. What I should have done was turned my phone off.

What happened was I read it and it then destroyed my mindset for the rest of the day. So I'm looking at the other side sometimes is I'm getting stuff that I really shouldn't read. But we have to appreciate when we're sending stuff, as you pointed out, we've got little control over the situation the person's in.

Absolutely. I've actually got quite an extreme example of that just at the moment. So I'm working with a lovely norwegian consultancy called DNV. They're 14,000 people. They're global. There are 119 nationalities. So I'm thinking about translation and non native english speakers. I'm working on the people HR, intranet and LNd programmes and that sort of stuff.

And they have engineers and surveyors who are literally out on ships. So they do risk and assurance globally. And so many of their people are going to be remote, they will be managing large teams. They might be reading a communication on a phone or a tablet. They probably have patchy Internet access. And I'm trying to encourage them to think, okay, everything's got to be mobile, responsive, everything has got to be super concise. We've got to be thinking about what's in it for our audience, not what do we want to communicate as a company. And this is classic across all of the companies I've ever worked with, because I think it's human nature to have an idea of what we want to say.

And it's so much harder to think what do people actually want to hear? What do they want to receive? So what I'm encouraging in this situation, as I always do, is what's in it for our audience? What do they want to hear, and what way are they most likely to receive that message? How are they likely to take it on board? How can we help them to be open to our message? Because a communication that doesn't land is not a communication. It's completely one sided. It's deaf ears.

And how do you work with organisations where you may be trying to diffuse some conflict? Because sometimes correspondence that goes bad ends up in conflict, or disgruntlement or frustration or whatever it may be. So the customers may be responding to you in writing, via text, in the chat window, however they're going to communicate or on the phone, and there's conflict there, or there's escalation, there's anger, there's frustration. Do you have techniques to help people respond to that sort of communication in a human fashion?

Yes. I think the key to that is leaning into the reality of the situation, the reality of the conflict, the nature of the conversation, or the nature of the negotiation and being real and not trying to clothe things in legal and corporate speak. So what tends to happen when we're in conflict is we default to ways of speaking or ways of writing that legalistic or have a formality. We put a formality to it in order to give the language more gravitas. And that's understandable. That's human, that's normal. The problem with increasing the formality of the language, which is what happens in conflict, is that that then puts your counterparty's barriers up. That actually inspires them to react negatively.

The way to bring those barriers down is to be more human. It's right to the start of the podcast where we talked about making business more human. It's to be more simple, more clear. Use Anglo saxon language. What do I mean by that? So a lot of the language of the professions that arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066, so he brought French, French came from Latin. And so a lot of the language of authority and the professions and power and control has a latin origin, and we end up with these longer words, which people don't trust, interestingly. So what the research suggests is that in British English, certainly people tend to trust shorter anglo saxon origin words, words like love and friends. I don't have any more examples there, actually.

So shorter, simpler forms of words we trust instinctively. And so this is what I'm trying to encourage people to do when they're communicating, whether it is strategic communication. Chief exec or leaders communicating with their board, with their stakeholders, investors with their people, or whether it's in customer service, talking to customers. It's to simplify the language and to get really specific about what you mean. And so what tends to happen is, when we're not feeling confident in conflict, we dress up our language in order to have an appearance of more confidence. It takes confidence to lean into what's actually going on in the situation and to tackle it more directly and to use simple language. And that actually then disarms people. It brings the temperature down, it brings blood pressure down, and it enables people to be more receptive to what we're saying.

As you're talking, I'm thinking about different dialects in the UK. And you look at, say, the traditional received pronunciation, the BBC language, the World Service language that the BBC had. You're right, is all about authority. All around. These very formal language constructs sentences, long words, complicated things. I remember there was a musical show when I was little called the good old days, and they used to have this announcer on stage, the biggest words you could ever imagine, that no one knew what they meant, but everyone was whooping and cheering at them to make it sound impressive. And then you think about maybe a different part of the country. I'm just thinking about Yorkshire as a dialect and as a culture.

People see people from Yorkshire as being warmer and friendlier and, okay, hard, more hard nosed negotiations sometimes, but actually warmer and friendlier, where someone may be from London or from the home counties as more businessy and standoffish and less warm and friendly. So is that just the nature of the dialect and the language constructs maybe used outside of the city and more into the rural areas?

There's a lot of interesting stuff going to unpack there. And I guess the way I'd think about this is to think of language as being tribal. And what I mean by that is, so we, you know, language. We use language to identify ourselves, we use language to. To say which group we belong to, and we also use it. So we use language to include, and we use language to exclude. So perhaps in the professions, language might be used to exclude, to say that we have special knowledge that you don't have access to, and you need us to interpret it for you. You need us in the legal profession or an accountancy, for example.

You need to pay us good money in order to make sure you're on the straight and narrow, because only we understand the language. And I think that happens in corporations. So it's the language of leadership. Interestingly, I find quite often that the language of middle management is more corporates than the language of very senior management. Quite often when I'm working with very senior teams, with executive teams, they are actually much more confident in simplifying their language because they've achieved status already. So we have this idea of language reflecting status and reflecting the tribe or the group, the in group, the out group. So if we think about language in that way, we can go, well, how are we including or excluding people with our language? And so quite often people are using language to exclude or to show that we have special knowledge unconsciously. It's not necessarily a deliberate thing, but it's a subtle dance all of the time, all of the different subtleties of class, of grouping within a country, between countries, they have very subtle nuances of inclusion and exclusion, and that's how we're using language.

So if we're coming to using it using language in business, I'm thinking, what is your purpose, what's your intent towards your audience, whether it's internal or external, what's your intention behind your message? And then use the language that's appropriate for that intention.

Yeah, I've written four words down on my pad next to me. I've written reserved, caged, measured and considered. And that is often the language of corporate. You have to be measured. People very often don't have full authority to speak their mind. They're speaking on behalf of a company or an organisation, that they don't have an authority to interpret that view. They have to give the view, therefore they step back. Whereas I and yourself have the escalated privilege.

If you want to speak my mind and interact with my audiences and the people I'm communicating with and represent myself how I wish. And I've often found that by rolling up my sleeves and almost like sitting cross legged amongst the group and saying, look, I don't have the perfect answer. This is how I think, this is how I view, let me brain dump as it's coming out my head and let's talk about how that works for you. And that's a very much more approachable because everyone goes, great, we can all put our hackles down, we can take our pretence out and we have a proper conversation now and resolve this. That's hard to do when you've got a corporate voice or a corporate behind you. You can't have that conversation.

No. And what I find helps here is an approach to change called appreciative inquiry, that I've sort of delved into deeply in the last sort of ten years or so. So when I first started working on language at boots, I realised that I was actually working on change. But at the time I didn't really have the tools in order to encourage change. I got from writing into tone of voice, into training in written and spoken language throughout organisations. But I really wanted to find a way of supporting that change, because when you're training, you are creating change in the organisation. So I trained in appreciative inquiry and this was quite an awakening thing for me. Appreciative inquiry starts by hearing the stories of times people are at their best in organisations and we can use it in interviews, in workshops, in all sorts of different ways to get people expressing times that they've been at their best at work.

And when people tell these stories, they re experience some of the endorphins that they felt at the time. When you've got a room, let's say, sometimes I'll have 30 people or 60 people, sometimes 90 people in a room, and we get people pairing up and telling these stories of times they've been at their best, and then coming together as groups on roundtables of six or eight people and giving the summaries of these stories. You get this volume increase in a room and you get this energy, this outpouring of energy. So what's going on here? So we're telling these stories, we're reexperiencing, experiencing some of the endorphins. We're putting ourselves in a more emotionally available and emotionally positive state of mind, which then enables us to be really creative about imagining what the future could look like and being creative about finding solutions. So often in organisations we're actually inadvertently triggering flight and flight we spend all. It's human nature. When we're walking down the street, we're scanning for snakes and dog poo, sabre tooth tigers.

That's how we evolved on the savannahs. So it's human nature to scan the horizon for danger. And that's why news is negative. You get the one nice story at the end of the news, but all news is negative because good news doesn't alert us, it doesn't trigger us, it doesn't get us engaged emotionally and the same is going on in organisations. So we are constantly diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions to them. And this can set up this kind of negativity spiral in organisations, a downward spiral where people are constantly in flight or fight or freeze, and that's how people spend much of their working lives. So with appreciative inquiry, we can turn this on its head, we can turn this around and start exploring times we've been at our best. That encourages people into a more positive, you know, more positive emotional state, a positive feeling state, connecting with their colleagues, connecting with their people across the organisation.

I get people the maximum mix of people, so I get people, senior and junior, from all parts of the organisation. The general idea is to get the whole system in the room, ideally, and I have had that at times. I worked with the British Lung foundation some years in ago and I had 90 people, 90 employees, the whole organisation in the room for one workshop, which was incredibly empowering and very exciting. You get people meeting and telling these stories to people that they've never met before. And the really surprising thing, or maybe it isn't surprising, is that people find that they value the same things. So telling those stories, the things that they valued from those experiences are very, very common. I don't think I've ever had anybody tell a story where I did it all on my own. It was all about my own personal genius and capability and drive and ambition.

I did this all on my own. The stories are always about moments of connection, where teams have had each other's back, where people support each other internally, and in turn they deliver for customers because they have the support of the organisation, support of their colleagues and empathy for the customer. So we have very, very common values. And that then gives you a starting point for behaving in a different way within an organisation.

I've actually been on one of your workshops where you did appreciative inquiries, so I can actually say that I've experienced what you're saying there. And I remember the thing I struggled with at the beginning was trying to find something I thought was relevant enough and meaningful enough that had a positive emotion enough that I wanted to share with somebody else. I had to really kind of dig deep. And that was the hardest bit of the exercise, is trying to find that moment that was worthy.

People do struggle with it and so they struggle to find a story that's good enough, because. When were you last asked? Everybody listening now, just think, when did somebody last ask you? Tell me about a time that you've been at your best, when you've been most alive, most engaged, most excited, most involved. Tell that story and tell it in the first person. So I did this and I spoke to John and he spoke to Betty, and she got the team together. So narrating the story in the first. We never do this. Nobody ever asked us this. So it's different.

And I think that difference is very powerful, but it also gets us to a place that is very emotionally resonant for us. It gets us wellbeing a story and recognising something about ourselves and we just come out honestly, you just come out of it feeling bloody good and feeling good about the people around you. So in this negativity spiral that I talked about and in most organisations, constant firefighting, all organisations leaders, their people are under massive stress and it's only getting worse. We're firefighting, we've got inclusion, we've got recession, we've come through Covid, we're struggling with hybrid working. How do we get that mix right? How much are we in the office? How much are we working at home? How do I as a leader, relate to my team when they're home working and I can't see them crying, but I know that they are because they're so stressed, how do we relate and then pick up and support those people? We're under more pressure than we've probably ever been under. So this negativity spiral is almost endemic.

It's one of the kind of rules of networking and relationship building is when you're trying to engage someone, ask them about themselves, because people like to talk about themselves, they like to be listened to and they like to lead the conversation mostly. So I suppose what you're trying to say here is, rather than the traditional thing, what happens is, how are things going? Oh, yeah, my leg hurts or cat got run over yesterday. We dive into this negative stuff. We start really trying to dig deep down into what I'm proud of, what's made me happy this week. I tell you about a success thing or talk about something my child's done that amazed me or something, and bring those, as you say, the happy endorphins as opposed to the weather's bad, car wouldn't start, had to scrape the ice off this morning, which is. We tend to get stuck into that, don't we?

We do. And one of the pivotal things for me has been actually about ten years ago I trained as a coach. I did the Institute of Leadership and Management, level seven coaching training. My reason for going into it actually was I've always had a remote team, so I've been in business coming up for 20 years. I have had a team of freelancers around me for all of that time and for about around five years I was trying to scale and I had a team of five and in the long run it made me poorer and it made me unhappy. I didn't like employing people. I think my thinking style is a bit too sketchy for that consistent leadership. But I had an office manager who was working with me and she was a massive extrovert and she really thrived in an office and she was struggling working from home.

And I thought one answer to that might be to train as a coach. So I took on this course and I have to say it was completely transformative. Unfortunately, that person didn't last with me. She went back to working in an office in the centre of Nottingham and she's thrived ever since. So that was the right move for her. However, the coaching training actually shifted my perspective and I do some coaching, but more than anything it's made me a better consultant because it's helped me to understand how to ask better questions. So rather than the sort of skin deep, small talk questions that you've just talked about, it's helped me to see how I can ask questions that encourage people to open up and to go deeper, but to feel safe going deeper. So it's about, I suppose, creating a sense of psychological safety where somebody feels like they can open up and that the question suggests that it's not loaded, it's not political, I'm not judging, I genuinely want to hear what's going on for you.

I want to hear who you are as a person and I want to hear your story, because when I hear your story as an individual, that's enriching for me. And when I'm trying to find a pattern in those stories for a whole organisations, I want to hear lots of those. I want to hear many of those stories from across the organisation. And I can only do that if I create a space, the safe space for people to do that, for people to open up. And a coaching style helps that. And that then comes into the kind of the change programmes that I'm encouraging in organisations, I am trying to encourage them to develop a coaching culture, which is quite difficult. And what do I mean by that? It's coaching from leadership down. So exec teams being good coaches, managers being effective coaches.

If your leadership and your management are all effective coaches, you actually don't need so much in the way of training. And that saves you money because you are developing people individually all the time by asking those coaching questions. And the coaching questions really are helping people to understand their own thinking and develop their own thinking. And that matters because when we develop our own thinking, we are more likely to behave differently as a result of that change thinking. Whereas if we have a traditional leadership style where we tell people what to do. People resist it because humans don't like being told what to do, but they love being encouraged to think. We love being encouraged to think.

Yeah, I think I've been on a similar journey to you, where I've employed people. Then I had my own business, which was an IT company, 25 30 staff and lots of customers and things. And I downsized to be a solopreneur. Then for some reason I got it be in my bonnet that I wanted to be bigger. So I hired a few people and I found that I had a lack of satisfaction. Firstly, the balance sheet went down, my cash in bank went down, and I wasn't getting satisfaction by the managing the people relationship. I think I learned from that, that what I actually need in my life, virtual assistants or pas or people that it can enact my thinking rather than me managing thinkers. So I want people to assist me to deliver what I want to do, not manage other people to deliver something else.

And that's what really brought it home to me. That's the relationship I need with people.

I've done a very similar thing and I have worked with people freelance in a range of different roles. Pretty much everything that I do, I have other consultants who can back me up and they may be copywriters. So I mentioned my client DMV, and I have a team of writers and designers and a project manager who are helping me with that and we are producing. So it's kind of creative agency production work. But what I'm also doing in that work is I'm encouraging change within the organisation because I'm helping them to develop their working style as teams and their process internally, helping them to develop briefs, helping them to get clear on scope terms of reference for projects. So I'm doing some sort of internal coaching and consulting in that sense. And then when I'm working on brand strategy, I have brand strategy thinkers who can support me in that way on spoken tone of voice. I have specialists that help me with that.

When I'm working on culture and behaviour, I have people who specialise in values and behaviour frameworks, for example, people with really strong hr or people backgrounds. So I work in a very similar way. And yeah, I had a point some years ago where I was getting Sunday night dread again, I was dreading the Monday meetings and I was like, I don't know, ten years into my business, I was like, why is that happening? I'm running my own show here. It needs to work. The first rule of business I think is it's got to satisfy the business owner. It's got to fulfil what the business owner needs, because the business owner needs to be out there selling. And if we're not energised and full of life and vigour, we're not selling and we're not drawing in the business. So we have to be feeding ourselves first before we can feed other people.

Not just in terms of cash, but also emotionally and satisfying our desires as well and our motivations. Absolutely.

Yeah.

You mentioned storytelling, listening to each other, and it draws me back to a previous podcast episode that I recorded with somebody who the title was listening, not fixing. We have a habit or a danger that what we do is we listen to respond, we listen to fix, we listen to trying to add value. And sometimes listening to acknowledge is a valuable skill as well. And I guess if you're a great coach, it's part of that coaching kind of model where you're just asking questions. But not everybody wants to be fixed. There's dangers. We dive in there and want to go. I know the answer to that.

Yeah, and I'm a bugger for that, actually. I do seem to have this kind of inner drive to fix things or to solve problems, and it's taken a few decades to develop the skill. One of the books that I read a few years ago, which was seminal here, was time to think. Nancy Klein and I haven't been on her training, actually, I have wanted to, and I know that some of our friends in the professional speaking association have been on her training. And it's very much about creating space for people to think, and people appreciate that so much and it's such a gift. But so often when we're talking, we are thinking about what we're going to say next, aren't we? We're thinking about what's my next step in the conversation rather than genuinely listening. And I do think you can make more of an impact on the world, honestly, if you are able to be quiet and to absorb and to nudge and encourage rather than be looking for, what am I going to say next? And I think the same goes with customers in business. When we're looking after customers in customer service or as marketers or salespeople, how can we be listening more than selling, more than talking? Because everybody hates to be sold to, but everybody loves to buy.

And if we think about it that way, then we should be listening more than we're talking.

I actually love a good salesperson. I actually love a really great pitch or a really great hook or something where I can stand back, clap my hands and appreciate, go, that was top notch, well done. You are a Mastercraft salesperson. And I said that to someone once and they went, well, I'm not a salesperson. I said, trust me, you are. You may not think you are, you may not label yourself as, but you've done a fantastic job there. Put me at ease. You had all the facts, you explained the product, and I had to applaud their technical skill on selling.

And sometimes you find people who are either natural or have that ability to do that. And I think credit where credit is due. And I think this person found it a bit patronising. I was trying to put him down by saying, oh, you were very salesy there, but I genuinely meant it. I enjoyed the experience, his professionalism. Running this podcast show is a challenge because I'm listening to what you're saying. I'm also thinking ahead of what I'm going to ask you next, how this conversation is flowing. But I've also have this little subroutine in my head that's listening out in case you say something that I need to acknowledge and have empathy for or reinforce.

I've really found that hosting this podcast has been a real challenge in listening and just developing those communication skills that I wouldn't necessarily have if I was just having a chat in a coffee shop.

Yeah, no, it is an art and I think coaching skills actually really help and good selling skills. And I'm with you. I do admire a great salesperson, and for me, a great salesperson is a good listener. They hear what you want or how you talk about your problem or the thing that you're trying to solve and listen to that before jumping in with a solution. And so often people do just jump in straight with a solution. And it's quite binary, quite one sided. So it's quite a rare skill, I find. I'm just thinking about somebody recently, I think I was talking about something around the house that I needed doing and I spoke to this chap and I kind of presented a problem and he just launched into a sales pitch about his business and I was like, okay, I can see that you can do the job, but I don't want to do business with you.

You've just talked to me, talked at me for three or 4 minutes. You haven't really asked any follow up questions. You haven't really understood my problem or what I'm needing, what my priorities are. So he didn't get the business.

And we see that in superficial sort of bulk marketing on LinkedIn where people are connecting and pitching, they're shoving their calendar link in your throat without even understanding who you are and doing a fact find. So yeah, I agree with you completely. It's about that humour, sensitivity, sliding in building a relationship, having a conversation, seeing where people are at, listening to that problem solving.

And I suppose this is what I mean, just going back to the opening to the podcast, talking about humanising business. I think this is what I mean by being more human. It is connecting as human beings, whether it's one to one in customer service, or whether it's create writing marketing or broadcast marketing, or whether it's talking to our staff in a larger organisation. How do we relate and set up that relationship as human beings and think about people as individuals and respect them and acknowledge them as individuals? Because quite frankly, I think that just makes the world a better place. Acknowledging somebody as an individual is such a gift, but is so rare and in a way so simple. It takes a bit, a degree of humbleness I suppose, to acknowledge somebody and appreciate somebody as an individual. And we can win friends within our business and we can win customers who will work with us for stay with us for years just by acknowledging them as individuals. And it almost shouldn't be so hard.

But I do think for organisations, quite often there's a lot of people perceive they don't want to get into trouble. That's the main thing I find they don't want to say the wrong thing and so they stick to what they've been told they should say. But often that guidance is not adequate, it's not enough and it's not enabling enough and it doesn't enable them to be themselves. Just give you a nice example. So I was working with Vodafone's webchat teams in India about five or six years ago. I worked within with Vodafone on and off for about 15 years. And so I was over in India and part of the job, they had 1000 people just working on webchat just for UK customers and the poor Indians struggling to understand us. The weirdness of us Brits and the problem for non Brits is that quite often we complain in a very underhand sort of way, in a very passive aggressive way, we might say, oh, that's a bit disappointing.

I thought that would be cheaper or whatever, but we say it in a very gentle way when really we're furious. We don't reveal our emotions very well. And so for people who didn't grow up in Britain, it's quite hard for them to interpret and understand that actually we're making a complaint. And so the project was about empathy skill. How do we help these teams to have empathy for UK customers so that they acknowledge what customers need and give them that thing? And there was quite a big awake. So I did some work on cultural awareness and I used some of Erin. So Erin Mayer is a professor at Insead, I think, specialist in culture. She's an American based in Paris and she talks about eight dimensions of cultural difference.

And the one that helped the Indians, interestingly, was the way that Brits engage and build trust and when we're on. So Britain is quite an individualistic culture and that expresses itself in business, in if you fix my problem, then I trust you, then we have a relationship. But I don't need chat beforehand in order to have the relationship. I need to know, be confident that you're going to fix my problem. India is a we culture, a much more communal culture. The relationship comes first. So it might be more natural to ask questions about how's your day been so far? But to a Brit on webchat, we don't want to be asked how our day's been so far. We want to know that you're going to solve our problem quickly.

So where does the relationship come? And when they realise that when a Brit is on webchat, because they're there to solve a problem. Otherwise we would have picked up the phone. We don't want a relationship, we want the problem solved. It was almost like the scales falling from their eyes and they immediately changed their behaviour and suddenly they knew how to do it. Don't do the chitchat. Don't ask how the day's been. Give the reassurance that I'm going to sort your problem out in as few words as possible. So suddenly there's increased empathy and recognition of customers as individuals and that's really empowering.

That is so insightful. I can relate to that concept entirely. That's how I want to do web chat. It's short, superficial, short sentences, one word. I don't want to keep typing stuff. I'm using one hand on my phone doing something else. I just want my problem solved. Yeah, I can completely relate, Ben, thank you.

This has been a fabulous opportunity to get to know you better and have a conversation. How can our listeners track you down? How do they get hold of you? Tell us a bit more about your book as well.

Well, the probably first place is my website, which is benafia.com. So benafia.com and that's where I've got loads of content. I've got videos, I've got articles, but also I've got my book. So the book the human business how to love your customers so they love you back. I am expecting to publish in March, and that really lays out all of the thinking that I talked about. So we talked a little bit about culture and how we work internally. So employee experience, we talked a little bit about brand strategy. So to my thinking, you need to build your brand on top of the strengths of your culture, not just on customer insight, which is how it's often done.

And that then gives you the customer experience. So that's the third element that I talk about in the book. So employee experience, brand strategy and customer experience, and I talk about how you can relate those all together in a practical way. I've got a chapter on each segment of my model that's on the website, and I've got a series of podcasts that kind of bring the book to life and they're on Spotify and everywhere you get your podcasts. And I'm a fairly frequent inhabitor of LinkedIn, so I do like to chat on LinkedIn. If you just search my name, Ben Afia, I should come straight up. You find out more about me there. Engage.

Connect with me on LinkedIn. Say hello, say you heard me on the podcast and I'll be glad to connect and tell me what you found interesting about it and I'll be glad to continue the conversation.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Ben. And a huge thanks to you, the listener, for tuning in for listening to the end. I really appreciate that. If you're not already subscribed, please do subscribe. Click follow. Click like why not give this episode five stars in the comments below, I have a number of other exciting guests lined up over the next few weeks and months that I'm sure you'd be equally excited by on this Inclusion Bites Podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S.

And of course, if you'd like to be a guest yourself, please let me know. Drop me a line with any feedback or suggestions to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk and finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It has been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.