‘If you love somebody, set them free,’ advised Sting back in 1985. Little did he know he was setting out a core principle of leadership for the 21st century.
It’s the big idea behind award-winning author Helen Beedham’s second book People Glue: Hold on to your best people by setting them free, which leans into that paradox with rather more by way of helpful detail than the Police front man ever provided. Through rigorous research and conversations with top CEOs she has identified four key freedoms that top talent most values, and also the anti-freedom forces that most frequently prompt them to walk out of the organizational door.
We also talk about what it means to write a second book – why WOULD you put yourself through that again? And what might you do differently second time around?
Helen’s site: https://www.helenbeedham.com/
The Business of Being Brilliant podcast: https://www.helenbeedham.com/podcast
Helen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenjbeedham/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Link for submitting your clip for Episode 500: https://bit.ly/45RfpdY
Alison Jones: This is brilliant. I’m here again, welcome back Helen, with Helen Beedham, who is an organizational expert, a speaker and host of the Business of Being Brilliant podcast, and she’s the author of the award-winning The Future of Time: How reworking time can help you boost productivity, diversity, and wellbeing.
And her new book is called People Glue: Hold onto your best people by setting them free. Well, so first of all, welcome back. Lovely to have you here.
Helen Beedham: Thank you Alison. I am very honored to be back a second time. It’s lovely to be back joining you on the pod and I can’t quite believe I’ve managed to pop out a second book .
Alison Jones: Well, you just have to keep doing it because I just have to, you know, keep having you back on here. It’s a great opportunity to have a chat with you so you know that…
Helen Beedham: love to.
Alison Jones: But tell us about that title first because it is such an intriguing one. People Glue. It’s so evocative, isn’t it?
Where does it come from? What does it mean?
Helen Beedham: Well, it emerged actually out of my brain on one of my daily runs, and a lot of people say, so, you know, where did your book start from? You know, what was the seed that then turned it into an idea and a book? And actually the it all did start with the title for me.
For me, a little way I unwind on my run is to think about fun book titles that might work for a future business book.
Alison Jones: Oh, I’m here for that.
Helen Beedham: I love it. And most of them don’t survive the run home, you know, they’re already discarded by the back door. But this one was niggling away at me and so I got curious and was asking myself, you know, so what do we mean by Glue and People Glue? And I started speaking to people about it. And actually I heard your voice in my ear as my publisher saying, what’s the big idea?
Because that’s something very important you have to be able to convey succinctly to people. And the big idea is really that I describe and explain in the book is that despite what’s going on around AI and reshaping workforces and all of that, business leaders really, really care about hanging on to great people for all sorts of reasons. It really matters from a business point of view.
At the same time, we are living in a day and an age when people want and expect a whole lot more freedom in their work lives and their careers. And I can dig into what kinds of freedoms those are. So how do you square that circle, you know, how do you bring these two seemingly incompatible trends together? And the answer is to create what I call a really sticky organization: high trust, high transparency, full of purpose, putting people at its core in a way that actually enables people to come in, do their best work, ideally have a great day, have good friendships, and go home feeling like, I love what I do.
So that is really what People Glue is; in essence people believe in what they’re doing. They know the part they play in making that happen, and they are in it together. They feel connected and part of a really powerful community. So that’s People Glue.
And sorry, you asked me about the title and I remember we had a conversation early on because someone, a professor from London Business School brought out a title while I was kind of writing mine called Glue.
And we had, I certainly had to panic at that point. I think you were like, Ooh, it’s a bit similar. So I promptly read his book, which I had been aware of, but he focuses very much on the kind of leader’s interactions with people. So actually it’s quite a different space.
Alison Jones: Yes, I was quite relieved once we dug into a bit bit more. It’s a great example though, of how, it so often happens actually what appears to be a paradox actually isn’t, these are not mutually exclusive things. You giving people freedom does not mean that you lose them.
Helen Beedham: Yes.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s a great metaphor as well, and I think that that’s why it works so beautifully is that it creates this intriguing, very visual, almost comedic sort of picture in people’s minds.
So yes.
Helen Beedham: Yes, it did. I would say a reflection on having a book title that contains a paradox and a book message that contains a paradox is, it makes it quite hard to land a cover.
Alison Jones: Oh yes.
Helen Beedham: Because like that’s quite a complex thing to convey in one visual. Somebody, a friend said to me, really helpfully after kind of version six, which bit of that paradox do you really want to emphasize?
And that was really helpful and it was really for me that I realized it was about the freedom as much as the retention, you know, if not more than the retention.
Alison Jones: Which is why we have those beautiful birds flying across the cover.
Helen Beedham: Yes, exactly. But I think, yes, having a paradox is a really intriguing way to set up a story and to hopefully draw people in because I do explore lots of different dilemmas and points of tensions that are the realities of working life and running a business today.
Alison Jones: Well, let’s dig into that a little bit more. Tell us a little bit about those freedoms that you identify in the book. And, maybe just briefly give an example.
Helen Beedham: Sure, so just to explain before I dive into the freedom, so I spoke to lots of CEOs, COOs and chief people officers as part of my research I also did a big survey and got people to talk about their experiences of freedom at work and what they’ve valued and what they’ve lacked and how it’s affected them.
So I brought lots of different perspectives and voices into this as well as a ton of desk research with big studies and stuff, and what came through are the four freedoms that I talk about in the book. The freedom of autonomy, which is over how, when and where you work. That’s obviously things like remote working, flexibility, the time of day that you work, but it’s also about your freedom to choose the best way to get your work done that day and to be trusted to make that decision and not to be micromanaged endlessly about that. So that’s autonomy. And a great example of that might be there’s, I mean, there’s a whole debate, still raging around the best way to bring people back to the office willingly.
I would say the way not to do it is an abrupt U-turn mandate. Everybody, bums on seats every day of the week. What companies that seem to be doing it really well is to give a broad guideline, you know, X number of days a month. Clarity over what type of work should be done at home versus together. And then trusting teams to come up with the right kind of solution that works for them as a team. So that’s what I mean by a good example of autonomy in practice.
The second freedom is the freedom to grow, to grow your skills and your career path in a way that is meaningful and motivating for you. And you know, around that companies, some companies are doing tons of great stuff, it might be offering lots of secondments and making that a norm even when you are early into your career. Might be having internal talent marketplaces where there’s real visibility about how can I move around this company given my current skills and expertise and what’s available to me and how I can easily apply for that.
The third freedom is the freedom of self-expression. And this encompasses a mix of things around being able to come into work and express your identity, to speak up with your point of view and be heard, and for your expertise to be respected, to feel like you can say things safely. So a culture of psychological safety and to feel like you belong, to have found your tribe and to, you know, to have good friendships and a sense of community.
And, you know, lots of D&I initiatives tend to focus on this aspect around belonging and equality. But I think the firms that do things really well on this front, for example, to encourage psychological safety and encourage people to speak up about risks or concerns. They train leaders in listening up first, because unless leaders and managers really know how to listen carefully and spot cues and how to inquire, et cetera, somebody might be speaking up and you’re completely missing it.
And the fourth freedom is the freedom to do meaningful work. So work that feels purposeful to you. It might also be pro-social and contribute a benefit to society, it might not, but that’s okay. It can still be meaningful. It’s also work that is not overly bureaucratic, political, you know, bogged down in a daily grind and busyness, the kind of stuff that makes it us feel like we’re wading through treacle and really demotivates us at the end of the day.
So, good examples of what companies are doing are really kind of streamlining processes. Kind of really taking stuff off the plate instead of constantly adding things on and helping people really understand what part they’re contributing to the overall company vision.
So those are the four in a nutshell.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. And I mean, everybody listening is going, that’s absolutely the kind of environment in which I want to work. I would happily stay at that organization.
How did, tell us a bit more about the process of the research, of how you got there, the conversations you had, what you discovered along the way.
Helen Beedham: Yes, so I reached out to kind of anyone I knew in senior C-Suite role because I didn’t know a lot of chief executives directly myself, and I said, this is what my book’s about. Just sent them a paragraph and I said, do you think your chief executive or chief operating officer might be open to a conversation for me to hear what thoughts this, you know, triggers in them, but also their view on retention and offering freedom. You know, what’s easy, what’s difficult, what they’ve done worked well, what they find challenging.
And I was really gobsmacked that not a single person I approached who asked their CEO, no one said no.
Alison Jones: Wow.
Helen Beedham: Yes, because I was really expecting quite a lot of, sorry, bit too busy for this. Sounds really interesting, but dot, dot, dot. But they all, to my amazement said, ‘sounds super relevant’, which told me something as an author that I’m onto the right topic here. And they were open to conversation, so I had lots of one-to-one calls with them and that really helped me understand the leaders’ challenges probably more, most of all around what holds them back from offering more freedom. Also kind of why they want to do that, why they see it would help their business so much.
I did that survey that I mentioned, so I just really simple survey in Qualtrics I used and just asked everybody to spread the word. I got just probably under a hundred people participating. I’d have liked more, but I needed it at fairly short notice. But it was really, really rich data. I asked people to rank the four freedoms in terms of importance and their experience, and then to add some commentary and that gave me tons of different perspectives. And I cut the data by age, by gender, by race. By whether they worked from home or in the office a lot. So, it really helped bring out the richness and the diversity of people’s experiences.
Other research I did, I actually did ask someone to be a research assistant, something I didn’t do for book one, and they were brilliant. So for about two months, three months, they kind of worked under my guidance and they did a lot of the desk research for me. So they picked out really relevant studies and academic papers. They had access to databases that I would not have had access to. So that was really valuable. But it was also then a question of sifting through and finding what was right rather than taking everything that was there.
But there’s some really big studies, like Gallup does a huge kind of state of the global workforce study. Gartner does some great big studies, et cetera. So I was kind of mining all of those. A lot of the big consulting firms do big studies too, as well as kind of business school papers and stuff. So I do, I’m really driven by the research. I spend a lot of time when I’m not writing a book, tracking trends and what’s going on.
So I had a big spreadsheet of other sources that I had collated over the previous two years that I drew on heavily as well, and that really helped. And then I also host my own podcast. So I went back through all my podcast conversations over the last two years, all the transcripts, and picked out all the nuggets of advice and stories that were useful.
So I had lots of different things to draw on, which really helped.
Alison Jones: It’s textbook. I love that because you, you know, you have that sort of moment of inspiration, the spark, here’s the title, here’s the peg on which I can hang all this stuff. And then you’re weaving in your own lived experience because obviously you’ve worked very closely with so many organizations, the one-to-one conversations with leaders that you’ve reached out for.
And I hope that that’s really encouraging for people, actually, you know, if you’ve got a good point, do dare to reach out because I mean, the worst that can happen is they don’t respond or say no, but it’s surprising how often they do. And then you’ve got the the paperwork that’s already out there, really looking, doing the desk research. And then you’re doing some original research of your own. So really strong rope that you are, of strands that you are weaving together there, to illustrate your points, to evidence them, to tell stories around them.
Helen Beedham: Yes, definitely. I think there’s a balance to be had as well when it comes to the writing and how you tell the stories and some really helpful feedback I got on from my beta readers, and actually from the editor as well on the first draft, was that I was bringing in lots of different snippets and people’s voices and stats and at times they said my voice got lost in that.
Alison Jones: Yes and that’s so easy, isn’t it? because it’s all so fascinating and you want to pull all in. Yes but actually your Four Freedoms Framework, I think is a real help to that because you are driving the narrative, it’s your model, and then you’re pulling in stuff rather than simply dropping something in and responding to it and trying to work a narrative around it.
Yes.
Helen Beedham: Yes, and I did go back for my second draft and I changed a lot of the kind of the text heavy, maybe stats heavy sections into very simple visuals to make that lighter. I rewrote sections to make my voice and my point of view come out stronger, more assertively. And I think that massively helped, you know, polish it up better.
Alison Jones: This is why we have development editors and beta readers, isn’t it? Yes, absolutely brilliant. And I want to find out a little bit about your process as well because I’ll never forget when we’ve talked the first time round after The Future of Time, and you told me that you sort of caught yourself coming down for about the eighth time, going, oh, this chapter’s not going to work. It’s terrible. And your husband’s sort of pointing out, this is your process, this is how you do it.
Helen Beedham: Yes, tomorrow you’ll come down with a smile on your face saying, I’ve cracked it.
Alison Jones: Was it the same this time round? What was it like doing it second time round?
Helen Beedham: So I would say it was less of a rollercoaster and more joyful, actually. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love, I discovered, I loved writing a book the first time, but it definitely was a rollercoaster. I think I would say it was less of a rollercoaster this time because I felt less daunted by the challenge because I had done it already got it under my belt.
So I just came into it with a bit more certainty that it might look a total mess at this point, and I might seem a million miles away from having a clear structure and it all thought through, chapter after chapter flowing out of my pen. But, I will trust this process. And I think having written one book, I was better able to trust the process.
And I think lots of people choose to write a first book, kind of out of curiosity and maybe a bucket list. I’d love to do this. I think you have to really want to write a second book, a bit like running a marathon. So it gave me another reason to, I guess, lean into it, is that I’m choosing to do this all over again. I think the, yes, so it genuinely was a pleasure to, you know, to come back into my book time, book writing time, and to do this deep, really immersive dive into really deep thinking, really brain stretching work and trying to find the right way to express what I want to say. And I think that feels, for me anyway, a real luxury when, you know, as a working parent in the world of work that’s full on, to just, you know, go deep on something instead of constantly bouncing from item to item to task to task.
And it felt restorative actually, I’d come out of a writing session, frankly, feeling as good, almost as good sometimes, as if I’d been to the spa for an hour and like, you know but without the glowing complexion.
Yes. I found it very energizing. Yes.
Alison Jones: And this is the work that that nourishes us, isn’t it? That stretches us and gets us into the flow state and so interesting. Yes.
I always ask my guests, as you know, for their sort of best tip for somebody who’s starting this journey, I’m going to ask you, with the sort of benefit of two books under your belt now, what would you say to somebody who’s starting their first.
Helen Beedham: To starting their first. So I would say, and this is something actually I learned more this second time around, and it came out of a conversation with a friend who’s a CEO and a brilliant critical thinker. And she encouraged me during a conversation to play devil’s advocate because when we are writing our book, we have a point of view. We might have a framework or a methodology. We’re advocating, you know, try and take my advice, or here’s a better way of approaching things. She said, the more you can play devil’s advocate and try and shoot down your own argument or present the opposing view and then argue against that, that’ll strengthen your argument. But more importantly, or as importantly, it helps your message come across as really, really relevant.
So for example, her challenge to me was, but do CEOs really care about retention? Because you know, grad job numbers are declining, they’re introducing AI, they’re doing headcount reductions by stealth. And I had to really think about that.
And I went back to all the CEO interviews and I said, actually, they do really care about it in the age of AI and here’s why. And I think, you know, another challenge was, you know, does every company need People Glue? And as I wrote in the book, no, not every company does, but here’s some very clear cases why you might not want People Glue, you know, and you’ve got to be be upfront about the why.
So I think I would say absolutely set out your stall in terms of your belief and your methodologies. But the more you can bring in transparently, you know, people’s questions around that and deal with them really openly. I think that makes for a much more compelling argument.
Alison Jones: I think that’s fascinating. So the two things that that sparks off in me, one is the idea of, you know, the sales technique of managing objections and having a sort of, almost like a script where, you know, knowing what someone might say and having thought that through and having an answer.
But the other thing is the fact that when you, and very many first time authors I think do this, is they write with a sort of mean-spirited critic over their shoulder who’s sort of objecting and saying, well, that’s obvious. And you know who are you to write and that is quite a miserable experience for the writer. And that can translate into quite a miserable experience for the reader too, if a writer is continually sort of on the defensive and preempting objections.
So how do you balance that? Because I agree it’s a really important, challenge to yourself, and it’s going create a more robust framework and so on.
But how do you do it without sounding as if you are expecting people to object to every turn of the page?
Helen Beedham: Yes. I think I, two things: I remember when I started writing the first book, I did your bootcamp and you did some incredibly valuable coaching for me around the mindset that, you know, you are taking into your writing and I’ve still got somewhere, the page or two or probably five, that I wrote about all the negative thoughts going around my head about how this book is going to… my first book’s going to turn out and I read them, actually, I think I even might have referred to them at my first book launch.
No one’s going to enjoy this, it’s going to be irrelevant, you know, all the worst things you might say about a book. So I would say follow your fabulous advice and if you’ve got a lot of that milling around your head, get it out on paper. And then, you know, it is kind of classic CBT thinking as well, you know, what’s another perspective that you could take that might be more pragmatic or balanced?
I think around, you know, the critical voice, not sounding defensive in the book. I think just try and approach it with a spirit of curiosity. Because in a funny way, I mean, when my friend asked me this, I did think, I slightly felt my shoulders go up and think, oh, I’ve got to defend my point of view. And I noticed that defensive instinct and I thought, hang on, she’s asking me a really useful question here, because someone else might ask it.
So instead of getting defensive, get curious about it. So I just dug into it a bit more and thought, well, yes, I would ask that if I was a CEO, so, what is genuinely my answer to that? And I think it helped me look at it from other angles that perhaps were less prioritized when I was writing.
So I think it just genuinely helps to be a bit curious if you stand the other side of the lake and see the argument from someone else’s perspective.
Alison Jones: Yes, I love it. And actually in our coaching questionnaire for new authors, we have: what are the objections that somebody might raise to this and how might you answer those? Yes, it’s a really interesting exercise to do and I infallibly find when I’m sort of reviewing that and then reviewing the proposal, often that those answers, those arguments for the book and the reason why people need it, don’t always come across clearly in the marketing copy.
So that’s another point. It’s not just the book itself, it’s how you present the book and the arguments you make for it when you’re trying to sell it just in a paragraph of marketing text that somebody’s going to glance over.
So it’s a really useful exercise for that too.
Helen Beedham: Yes, I can see that. And it’s really hard, isn’t it, to get it across so succinctly that it fits on the back cover.
Alison Jones: It’s an art. It’s a dark art. Yes, absolutely. Brilliant.
So, you know, I’m going to ask you to recommend a book, you’re not allowed to recommend Future of Time or People Glue. Which book will you recommend us Helen?
Helen Beedham: I am going to recommend…
Alison Jones: …ooh…
Helen Beedham: …The Happy Index. For those of you watching, I’m waving a copy called The Happy Index: A people first approach to leadership. It was a Sunday Times bestseller, and it was written by James Timson, OBE.
Alison Jones: He is fascinating, isn’t he? Yes.
Helen Beedham: Yes, and he published this, it came out last year.
I actually only came across the book itself when my book was already in production. But I had interestingly referred to Timson because I’d heard of their upside down management approach. And honestly, you can tell by the number of Post Its, every…
Alison Jones: …if you’re watching, you’ll be laughing at this point…
Helen Beedham: …yes. There’s a small tree attached to every page
Alison Jones: You should have flagged the ones that weren’t relevent.
Helen Beedham: Yes, I know. Page markers. And, it’s a library book. I’ve got to give it back.
But it is just, he really lifts the lid on his philosophy around employing people, building a high-performing, people-first centric organization, but so much practical detail and every page I was like, oh wow, that’s just brilliant and and it’s written super simply. It’s literally like he’s just standing there talking to us. It does not feel jargony or anything.
And honestly, if I had to go to a company and look for a job now rather than work for myself, that would be my first port of call. It’s incredible, kind of reputation building book as well.
Alison Jones: And I mean, obviously he hadn’t read your book before he wrote that, but he kind of should have done, shouldn’t he? because he would’ve…
Helen Beedham: …yes, well…
Alison Jones: …given him a framework for all the stuff he’s talking about.
Helen Beedham: Exactly. I’m now thinking of just, you know, being brave and asking him if he might come on my podcast and talk about it, because it’s such a brilliant example of an organization with strong People Glue and a high degree of freedom.
Alison Jones: Yes, well, he’s got a book to promote. He might, you never know.
Helen Beedham: He might.
Alison Jones: Fantastic, great recommendation. Thank you so much.
And Helen, if people want to find out more about you, more about your books, more about what you do, where should they go?
Helen Beedham: Thank you. So I have a website, helenbeedham.com, where you can find out about my work and the podcast and my books. Also very busy on LinkedIn at Helen J Beedham, I think.
I post occasionally on Instagram. That’s more for fun than anything. Not really anything too serious, so my website and then my podcast as well The Business of Being Brilliant.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. I’ll put those links up on the show notes @extraordinarybusinessbooks.com.
Thanks for your time today, Helen. It was brilliant to hear about the topic of the book. Brilliant too, to just lift the lid and find out a bit more about how you put it together, what the process was like, and I think that would be gold for people who are trying to do this themselves.
Helen Beedham: Oh, thank you. I really hope so. And it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you again.
