1. With over 25 years in clinical and business psychology, how does your background as a Neuropsychologist and Chartered Coaching Psychologist shape your approach to HR leadership and talent management?
My early training embedded a “scientist-practitioner” approach to human behaviour and behavioural change – starting with an examination/interrogation of the existing evidence, generating hypotheses to be tested through experimentation, staying impartial and balanced when considering new data, and allowing solutions/ways forward to emerge without pre-empting outcomes.
2. What advice do you have for organizations redefining leadership paradigms in today’s business landscape?
One key shift is the way we think about diversity. I would advise organisations to move from a sole focus on traditional DEI vectors such as gender and ethnicity to consideration of non-traditional DEI vectors such as cognitive diversity and personality diversity – particularly important for innovation-reliant companies.
3. With experience across various sectors, what commonalities do you observe in the psyche of successful individuals from different fields?
No doubt this is a bias because I am clinically trained, but early experiences do inform the psyche of successful individuals in particular ways, no matter what field they excel in, for example, perhaps some event(s) that caused the individual to feel they did not fit in and/or that they were different from their peers, maybe some experience that reinforced that self-reliance was important, perhaps because those in authority could not always be trusted, and/or something that fuelled a fierce desire early on to prove others wrong. If you listen to the stories or read the biographies of successful people, the internal fire to excel is there in some form before adulthood.
4. As an expert in Extreme Psychology, how do you think HR can support employees facing unique psychological challenges at work?
Again, because I am a psychologist, I would maintain that this sort of support is something that requires specialist skillsets if it is to be done well – it is not something that everyone can do without training and supervision. The basic tenets of holding the space for someone in distress include creating the conditions for psychological safety, showing unconditional regard, being clear about the bounds of confidentiality, staying within the scope of your practice, and knowing when to refer to others when the presenting issues are beyond your area of expertise, etc.
5. What effective methodologies do you use to assess and unlock individuals’ potential in an organization?
I am of the belief that all human beings have potential and that most human beings know where their potential lies. The question for organisations to help employees answer is potential for what, when, and where? I am not an advocate of fixed potential models that are used to categorise, label, and box people in, without taking into account the stretch opportunities available to the individual, the fit between that individual and the ecosystem they inhabit and their personal motivations/preferences/life choices.
6. How can HR leverage neuroscience-based assessments for more informed talent decisions?
The world we are facing requires a fundamentally different type of leadership and a fundamentally different approach to Talent Management than anything that has gone before – we have crossed the Rubicon since Covid. The boundaries between who we are and the work we do have altered and mutated in irreversible ways since 2020. We need to get clearer around unique set of qualities that allow some of us to embrace the chaos of the polycrisis planet – neuroscience can help unlock that for us – if it is done well – and that is a big if.
7. With a background in clinical and business psychology, how do you see the intersection shaping the future of HR practices, particularly in employee well-being and performance?
The demarcation between clinical and business psychology was always an arbitrary one, similar to the demarcation between psychology and sociology, economics, anthropology and philosophy. Psychology is at its most powerful in the liminal space – the place between one discipline and another. The burgeoning field of Resilience is a case in point – robust Resilience training needs to be informed by clinical and business psychology.
8. What advice do you have for HR professionals looking to enhance their coaching skills?
I would ask if they are ready to be coached. Coaching is a reflexive practice, you give and take in equal measure from your clients. It is a dynamic bilateral process – coaches do not coach people, they partner with people using coaching skills to navigate the challenges being brought into the room. If you are not ready to reflect, flex, adapt and change as a result of every coaching encounter, maybe it is not for you.
