What if the biggest barrier to thriving at work isn’t performance – but the way we lead? In this episode, Anna speaks with Nigel Kilpatrick, co-founder of The Compassion Exchange, about his dramatic journey from toxic leadership habits to human-centred, compassionate leadership. It’s an honest, hard-hitting look at why old models of authority are failing – and what truly creates change.

Key Moments

[00:00] Introducing Nigel and the shift from authoritarian to compassionate leadership

[02:09] Nigel’s backstory: hospitality, tech, and early success (and failure) in leadership

[07:58] When empathy becomes a weakness—and how Nigel swung to the opposite extreme

[21:22] Why fear-based execution destroys performance and wellbeing

[23:19] What Nigel would say to the “I’m an SVP, don’t you know?” leader resisting change

[38:43] Calling out corporate hypocrisy—why compassion must be authentic, not PR

[40:47] Creating The Compassion Exchange: merging home, work, and human behaviour

[50:44] Practical daily tools to shift from ego to compassion

[52:08] Anna’s closing message: share the episode beyond the echo chamber

Resources mentioned:

• The Compassion Exchange
• The quadrant model: The Wise Compassion Matrix
• Connect with Nigel Kilpatrick on LinkedIn

Compassionate Leadership

Anna Lundberg:
Reimagining Success, episode 369. And in this month’s interview, I’m speaking to the co founder of the Compassion Exchange. Now, in the episode, Nigel Kilpatrick shares his own career journey, going from hospitality to tech and to building this latest project. And there is such a huge overlap in his mission and in what I believe. So he’s not just sharing his own personal transformational journey, but also the shift that we have both seen and that we both see the need for in terms of moving from the old authoritarian style of leadership to a much more human version of leadership. And very intriguingly, Nigel shares how he was too empathetic in the early days of his career, then he flipped to the other end of the spectrum and took on some very toxic behaviours. And now I think given that experience, given his own path that he’s trodden, he becomes a very credible voice. He in hopefully persuading some of those senior VPs that we mention in the podcast episode to rethink how they’re leading and to lead with more compassion.

Anna Lundberg:
Enjoy. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for, ready to redefine success and build a business that you love. Let’s get started. So, hello everyone and welcome to this month’s interview. And I’m really excited to have Nigel Kilpatrick. I went to one of his events a few weeks ago and I couldn’t help but jump on him right away to get him to share his story because I was so aligned with what he was sharing and he had such a powerful personal experience of what I talk about.

Anna Lundberg:
So I’m really excited to have you on, Nigel, and I’d love for you to tell everyone who doesn’t know you yet, who are you? What is your past life, I suppose, and what are you doing today?

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Well, my past life, crikey, that goes on detail. Listen, but thank you so much, Anna. It’s a real pleasure to be here. And yeah, we had a very good conversation when we first met, so it’s real privileged to be here. So who am I and what’s my backstory? So I’m again, NigelPatrick I’ve. I guess I’ve come out of the world of high tech for the last 30 years and on that journey I have done pretty much everything from being an entrepreneur, selling a business. Part of my first sell my business when I was 27 years old, I had no idea what I was doing, didn’t know what the word equity meant, which I did. I thought it was something that actors got as a card.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
But I’ve done that. I’ve been a part of work for big global software companies on their global leadership teams. I’ve done MBOs, I’ve done part of IPOs, everything. Worked for small companies, scaled them up, sold them on, travelled the world, done everything, seen everything. But I guess in what we’re going to talk about today is that there was a part of my journey where I went from being this incredible, empathetic, lovely people manager into this horrendous, toxic individual, both to myself and to others. And eventually it was a moment in my life where I was able to see the light a bit and then come out of that and then go on to my journey to do what I’m doing today, which is all about compassionate leadership. That’s who I am.

Anna Lundberg:
I love that. And interestingly, there’s a bit of nuance there. There are two pivotal moments, as you said, going from empathetic to toxic and then going from toxic to compassionate. So with that in mind, through that lens, what did success look like for you when you were starting that tech journey? And as you said, equity and my goodness, all those exciting high tech and so on, and then how has that shifted possibly more than once over that time?

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Yeah, it was great in the first moment. I used to be in the hospitality business, which was full of empathy and incredible diverse individuals and everything else. But what a great setting for me to learn because I was working In a restaurant, 150 people working for me, working seven days a week, 18 hours a day in the middle of Soho, the biggest restaurant in the UK. You know, it was, it was crazy. But what a great grounding because we were doing, we were looking at gross profit twice a day, sometimes three times a day. And then I thought, you know what I’m going to do? I’ll go find my fortune in America. You know, all the, all the pathways are full of gold, all that kind of rubbish. But I believed it and I fell for it.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
But when I was, I was doing the hotel in the restaurant business in New York, but when I was 26, I got diagnosed with my first bout of cancer. So I Came back from New York, got fixed in the incredible NHS in the UK and went back to America. And there was no way I was, you know, had the energy to work seven, seven days a week, 18 hours a day. So I thought I’d do, I’d go work five days a week, 18 hours a day now in that space. But in my. So I fell into the will of tech purely by accident because I was watching these guys walk up and down the corridors. I was doing NLP sales training at the time, watching them. And I’d go and do this sneaky little thing.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
I’d go look in the visitors book and they had bank of Tokyo, Goldman Sachs, all these incredible people who I was playing rugby with. I was playing a lot of rugby when I was in Manhattan. So I said to them one day, what do you guys do? Oh, we’re a video conferencing company. Okay, that sounds great. Why is that? You know? So I kind of had to teach myself what they were doing. And then I was too young and too naive and I said to a business partner friend of mine, hey, let’s put some money in this business. So let’s put $200,000 of your money, I haven’t got any of your money into the business. I’m going to take and we’ll do something with it, we’ll grow it.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And we turned up for the first day, which was a use of proceeds meeting, how are we going to spend the money? And they looked at me and my business partner Robert, and they said, well, what do you mean? Because we spent all the money paying off all our creditors, paying off all our debt. I’m like, ooh, sorry mate, about that adjustment. So I had to learn extremely quickly. I had to kind of go, nigel, you’re going to have to stand in the moment and do something here. So I just used what I thought was my sensibility and say, right, what else is going on? Oh, by the way, they said, we also can’t use any of the hardware that we’ve been using. They want it back. I went, who is they? Oh, it’s a company called Digital Equipment Corporation. Who were they? I have no idea.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Who are they? Where are they? I said, they’re in Boston. Right. Who’s going to drive to Boston? So I did. I said, go around. I rented a car, drove to Boston. And there was a moment in this guy who was called Jonathan. I remember this moment. This is my first experience of what it like, what it’s like to be compassionate, what it’s like to Be tolerant.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
What’s it like to be gentle? Because I walked into his office, he knew what’s coming up. And I called him and I said, listen, I got no idea what I’m talking about. None. I’ve got no idea about the technology. I just know. I told him the story. We’ve invested in this company, and I need your help. I just need your help.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
He said, nigel, thank you so much for coming. You get all the help that you need from me because I’ve been calling these people for so long, and they got no response because they were too scared to speak to me because they didn’t want to hear what was about to tell them. But because you’re here, boom. And that relationship grew. And then we were able to do something with that business, which meant we sold it 18 months later for $15 million worth of cash and stock to another, to a publicly listed company. So in the moment, I learned. That was my first learning that I think I learned about what it means to be genuine and what it means to be authentic and what it means to just be brave and be courageous enough to say, here’s the truth about this situation. I’m just going to bear everything, bear all and see how it goes, how it lands.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
But I can’t walk away from this meeting with you, not you not knowing what the truth is. And I think that was my first experience of that. I’m not sure if that’s answered your question, but that’s.

Anna Lundberg:
It hasn’t. But, gosh, there’s so much to unpack that, funnily enough, I’ve just come off a panel talking about confidence. And what I love there is that, you know, you can kind of. There’s almost. Yeah, there’s performative confidence and there’s sort of subtle inner confidence and actually admitting that you don’t know the answers and bring that curiosity is the best way to learn and in this case, make a connection. Which then led to those amazing results. And I guess to come back to the original question, it was around success. So was success for you.

Anna Lundberg:
Those $15 million, like, how are you defining it at that stage of your.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
That meeting was the most successful thing. It’s the only thing I remember because actually, I remember that moment. It was a moment with Jonathan. I don’t remember the money because it meant nothing to me. It was because I. Because that you can’t carry forward. You can spend as much as you want. Again, I had no equity, so I didn’t mean much.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
I had to stay with a company. But for Me, it was a moment when that was successful. I think all through my career, when I’m looking back on it, success has always been about human engagement. It’s about who I have met along the way and all I’ve learned from those engagements, both good and bad and success for me most recently is when I was really was a real toxic person. I was given the opportunity to self reflect, which I did. So again, for me that was a highly successful part of my career. So success had never been monetary to me, never.

Anna Lundberg:
But interestingly you had, as you said, and I love that moment was the fact that they’ve said, oh, none of these other guys have talked to me and you’re the one, even though you don’t have the experience and that’s such a memorable and rewarding thing. And then as you said, now of course you’re working in the area of compassionate leadership, but there is this that you keep alluding to the sort of toxic you. Which is hard to understand. So tell us more about that and did you get caught up in chasing monetary metrics there?

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Did I just. Yeah, I fell for that trap. Did I? So I think so. There was a moment when I, you know, I was through my career. I started working this company in 2006 in the South coast software company, nothing massive, £20 million, 150 people, that kind of thing. Incredible clients and we had an incredible relationship with our clients. Again, to me I’m saying that’s the most successful thing at least. You just told me something, I just learned something.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
What you just said that I went 20 million quid, not a lot. Then I talked about relationship with the clients and the whole energy rose because I felt it. And we were doing incredible things. We were trying new experiments, we were trying different ways to run the business from an operating model perspective. And then the wheels fell off because we got bought by a Silicon Valley big global software giant who walked in and said, right, we bought you. Our identity is that we’re aggressive and we’re all that kind of stuff. And the founders of the business I was working for, they left and said, Nigel, good luck, you’re going to run the business now, you’re going to have to integrate it into the mothership. And I started to notice how incredibly inhumane they were on this acquisition.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Now, from a commercial perspective, I get the fact we do consolidation M and A activities. It means getting the best out of consolidation, but it’s a way that you can do it so consciously. I started to notice how a bad M and A activity was Having an effect on people’s personal lives. In hindsight, I recognise it now, I was noticing them, but it was probably subconscious. But because this business had this identity, had such a fear based culture, I became like that because I felt that’s how I should be perceived. Because that’s what I felt they wanted to see in me. And that was manifested when I was in, you know, we, we spent all this money on a president’s club. Once a year we’re celebrating the 1%.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Forget the other 99% of the people in the company will celebrate. The 1% who don’t need celebrating. I mean they’re at the top of the game, they don’t need the help. But we did it anyway. That’s kind of a toxic culture that people do. But I was in this moment and I was and I was the leadership of the company came up to me and said, right Nigel, we are going to go public in two years time and we see you at the top table. Brilliant. It’s gonna be great for you.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Your name will be in light money, no object, don’t worry about it, you’ll do well. And I said, okay, great. What’s my pathway? What do, what do you want me to do? Right, get on the top table. You’re close. But what you want to do is lead with fear, right? We want you to sack Your lowest performing 10% without any, any reason. Just do it. And we want you to be really, you know, be like us people scared of us. I want you, I can see that.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And what you know now, you know this thing about you’re so good about market competition and understanding who the market and the competition in the world. No more. Your competition is now internal. We want friction and chaos internally because we believe that’s going to drive performance. So that guy over there who runs that business division is now your competition. Okay. I’m like, I don’t get it. Morally I don’t get it, but commercially I don’t get at it.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
The math just doesn’t make any sense to me. How’s it logical? And in a moment I said, my wife is there with me on this big trip. And I went, yeah, I’ll do it. In that moment I became toxic. So I went from being empath, full of empathy, which is dangerous, we can talk about this. But I went from being really people centred, listening to everyone’s problems, being everyone’s best friend, all that kind of stuff, to becoming this toxic individual. And I got back to the uk, I was doing horrendous things I was shaming people publicly. I was the guy that would send Anna an email at 3 o’clock in the morning if you haven’t called me, responded to me by 4:00′.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Clock. Anna, it’s Nigel. Why aren’t you calling me back? You know, why are you responding? I’m that kind of guy. I’m the boss you didn’t want to work for, didn’t want to leave because you’re too scared. I would do things because I was living and operating in a quadrant where called uncaring execution. My numbers were brilliant but it wasn’t a nice place to be because my whole world was centred around KPI delivery. Never give up attitude, you haven’t hit your numbers, you’re going, you know, it’s great if that’s the style of the business that you want to do. Whether the only metric of success is number live in uncaring execution.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
So I was in there, I, I came from a place of caring avoidance which was, I was high, high in empathy and I dropped straight down into, into uncaring execution. And I lived like that for about six years to a point where I left that company and I was part of a new company and we grew that, we scaled that company so quickly and you would have thought that I would have changed my way but I didn’t. I, I, I got, I got so self toxic, you know it, it caused such a personal problem for me that I went from starting that life of that company in this quadrant we were starting at nothing and we grew it to 30 million, something like that. We won every award under the sun so we had to focus on top line, bottom line revenue ebit. Revenue ebit. That’s all we cared about. The bit in the middle, don’t care about that. The people, ah, don’t worry but that’s the bit we’re going to focus on.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
But over time I began to move into another quarter which is called ineffective indifference. And this is where I lose all my curiosity, I lose all my drive, I lose everything. I’m just going to turn up and exist. I’m not going to sit below the radar. People don’t generally get fired in this box in this quadrant because it’s safe but you don’t do anything, you don’t contribute so it actually has a huge impact to your own self anxiety and self stressors. But so at the moment when I went I was making horrible decisions both personally and professionally. I was ignoring my responsibility as a father, as a husband, I was doing all these things that were Just horrendous. I was smoking too much, I was drinking too much, I was doing all the stuff I see all around me all the time today.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
I see it in people and we’re like watch out. I was you, you’re going to hit the wall very soon. And for me hitting the wall was going to be I was going to do something silly with my life because I was in a real bad situation or I was going to get ill. For me the result was I got very ill. But it took a moment where the chairman said to me Nigel, go and present your sales strategy to the team. And I felt in hindsight that what was going on that Nigel is so good at self sabotaging that we are going to have a reason to get rid of them because this won’t be good. So it was true. So I turned up and I hadn’t prepared, I didn’t care, I was in such a bad state.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
So this is what toxic, this is what fear control can do. This is what self toxicity ends up looking like you in a real bad state and the effect it has on you. And if you’re a man, by the way, you still go home and say, hey, I’m a superstar, I’m a vp, don’t you know, I’m an svp, don’t you know? I’m a founder, don’t you know, look at me, I’m all, don’t get me involved with the home stuff. I’ve got, I’m too important, I’ve got other stuff to do, I’m supersonic. What a fallacy. Anyway, so I turned up this meeting, it was horrendous. I didn’t do it very well, I hadn’t prepared, it was rubbish. Three or four nights later I’m in a bar talking to the MD and I’m uncontrollably crying.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It just happened. Having in a conversation I started, I can’t stop crying and I said to the chef I was worth the time. A friend of mine said listen, I’ve got to go speak to my brother because he’s going to warn, he’s going to point the finger at me and say right mate, you’ve got to do something. So that was in my toxic world. But what happened in that moment was a period of time when I started to realise and self awareness. I was given a gift. This horrendous place I was in, I was self aware enough to say Nigel, this is a gift to you. You now got to change.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
So I threw all my crap books, I put all My Tony Robbins book in the bin. You know you’re not doing anything, you know you’re not doing anything for me, mate, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to go in the bin. You’re not good for me. I need to replace it with something else. I replaced it with spirit, which gave me a breathing space to go. There’s a new way of doing this, but you’re gonna have to go through a journey. And that journey started so I left the business that was high, uncaring execution, a bit of ineffective indifference. I ended up working in a company where it allowed me to be living and working in a quadrant called Wise Compassion.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
At the time, I wasn’t using that word. I was talking about kindness and being people centred and having empathy and even not the way we were engaging with everybody, but the way our operating model was. Our contracts were the way we sold, the way we marketed, the way we engaged, the way it was working. HR was working. I built this whole new operating model based around this new principle just before the pandemic. And when the pandemic hit, I was able to demonstrate how effective and how successful this could be. Again, my metrics weren’t revenue metrics, were my success metrics. Great question.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
When I started because I’ve actually been able to, I’ve gone back into my deep thinking there and I was able to apply these human based success metrics to say there’s a new model. But back then I wasn’t using the word compassion, I was using these other words. But post Covid, Post Covid, we went public with that business and I came out of that business and I was looking around, I was going, right, this world’s broken, oh my gosh, there’s no playbook for anyone. What are people going to do? We’ve got stress anxiety, we’ve got a new generation, they aren’t being trained well enough. What are people going to do? I’ve got an idea. I’ve got something. I know I want to go and talk to business leaders and say there’s a new way. And this new way is called compassion.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It’s called compassion nicely. Isn’t that just being kind? No, it’s not. It’s a strategy for you and it’s high performing, it’s highly profitable, it’s highly effective, it’s the same, it’s long term, it’s and also allows you to cater for the new generation of workforce that’s coming in post Covid that you’ve got no idea how to manage or control gen Z, whatever you want to call them, you’re worrying about that. This allows you to cope with that. It also allows you to navigate bias, get bias out of your business. And it’s just the right way to do it. And so I’m sure we’re going to talk about the compassion change later. But I was able to in that moment go, ah, okay.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
My journey is empathy, toxicity and compassion. I must prefer this world of compassion because it allows me to live in joy and peace. Empathy is stressful because I’m taking everyone’s problems onto me because I’ve got a huge desire to be light. I’m a team leader, I’m a people manager. Come to me with problems, give me problems. I’m like, oh my God. I’m burdened with them all of a sudden over time. And then I start to hide low performance.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
I used to make excuses up for anyone who told me your problem. I would protect you if your performance dips. Don’t worry about it, I won’t bring it up, I’ll hide it. That is not a place to be. So I knew that empathy was dangerous. It’s a great skill. You gotta listen with it but don’t leave with it. I understood how dangerous fear based cultures and self toxicity can be to my health and to everyone around me.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It’s very destructive. It’s not good. It’s really anyone who thinks that we’re going to lead this business in uncanny execution, which means fear. And you think you can drive a good business that way, you are so you’re lying to yourself. You know all the swear words I used to say, but it doesn’t work. Compassion is the only way now. It’s the only way out of this problem that we have where we have a quarter of the population who are sad, angry or scared. Big thing.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
We have a suicide pandemic issue called the United nations. We have 80% of the workforce that are disengaged. So just turning up to get a paycheck, which means because there’s no self contribution, what they’re doing, they’re going home and they’re taking that kind of lack of self worth home with them. And it had an impact on their home life. Therefore tomorrow when they come back to work tomorrow, it’s just compounding. So we have to have a new way. We have to be courageous enough and brave enough to say that compassion is the way out of the current circumstance that we have.

Anna Lundberg:
I think it’s so good to hear that from you because I talk about this, but as I hinted to you and I guess I had a bit of a moment of realisation when I spoke to you a few weeks ago that to some extent I opted out of that world before I even got down that path. So it’s really important, I think, and it has to some extent greater weight to hear it from someone like you, who is a man in the tech industry, who had that sort of high powered job and the SVP don’t, you know, and a couple of things, I guess, the I love the quadrants and we’ll definitely link to that to make sure people can visualise it as we’re hearing it. Getting to that wise compassion. I’m curious about something you said. So that man who’s saying I’m an svp, don’t you know, I imagine they’re not listening to this podcast, but if they were, is there anything you could say or what would you say to them before the health crisis hits, but before they burst into tears, before they have that big dramatic awakening, is there anything we can say to them today to help them have this realisation themselves?

Nigel Kilpatrick:
They may pretending they don’t want to listen to it, but reality is they know deep down if they were just able to listen to a different voice, you know, this voice that goes on all day long in all of our heads, but particularly if you’re in an svp, don’t you know, I’m an SVP kind of world, it’s full of self doubt, self criticism and self judgement, which is preventing the ability to take the time to listen to this podcast or take the time to really understand you should be doing something different. Take the time to living a peaceful and joyful life that’s so much more happier and so much more financially. If money’s your thing, you’ll get more of it. If health’s your thing, you’ll get more of it. So it’s just saying, just for a tiny moment, just listen to a different voice. Just give that voice a bit of space. Listen to this podcast, listen to all the other things that are going on around you. Just listen quietly, but do it, because if you don’t, you’re kidding yourself.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Honestly, I see it. Why do we have something called burnout? We have given this thing a category. We are measuring burnout. Why? Because men are walking around going, I’m an svp, don’t you know, typically, Right? That’s why we have this thing called burnout and that’s why we’re measuring it. And this is why we have 9% of our global GDP. As a result of which is $9 trillion, which is based on lost productivity because I’m an SVP donor. I mean, that’s it. I mean, we’re going to break the cycle, break this.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
I would say to a man who’s listening to this, I’m not just a man, but anyone who’s listening to this has got this kind of false identity because I haven’t done the work to do. Self identity and self values is that stop pretending, be brave, be courageous and listen. And listen for the first time in your life, be brave. Because when you go home, you might be brave at home. Are you acting as a mother, a father, a brother, a sister or uncle or aunt, a grandparent, wherever it might be, you have those brave moments. So stop wearing all these hats. When you wake up, you think, I’m going to work, I’m going to put my work hat on. Just take the hat off and keep your human hat on all day long and give yourself a break and be brave.

Anna Lundberg:
That’s so interesting, that, yeah, brave, it’s courageous. And yet it’s also just coming back to who you are, who you were before all of those identities and hats and performance metrics that have been conditioned into you.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Yeah. Because you know what? Every human being on this planet is born compassionate. Everybody. Everybody. So in day one, minute one, you’re compassionate. The issue is on day two, these things start to get clouded with a bit of the way the world exists. So we go to school, we go to college, we go to get our first job and we start forming these habits that are really not our true identity at all. So I think this is about getting back to some pretty good basics.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And I think there’s one thing that the one data point I want to talk about, you might think it’s about odd harm, I’m talking about it, but it’s all about how we make decisions and the impact of everything getting back to being human. So from 1979 to 2000 in the UK, our productivity per hour was growing at two point per person, growing at 2.5% per annum. Nice, predictable, safe. From 2000 to 2020, there has seen in those two decades the biggest investment in technology we have ever seen. Mobile phones, laptops, smart fridges, smart TVs, email, Internet, AI, you name it. Everything on the promise of this is going to make us more productive, more efficient, more effective. This is going to make us a better society. The result of that is that our productivity has dropped to 0.5%.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And at the same time, we layer on the human impact of anxiety, stress, low productivity, low engagement, sadness, anger, huge increase in grievance, grievances against companies, huge issues around that. So these two things are connected. So connected. And there’s a recent study done by Cornell University on their experiments they have just done, where they tested different managers, AI managers versus human managers. AI had human, sorry, had male, female and gender, gender neutral on the human side, obviously male and female. And they tested all the employees across 500 different companies and they found that the AI was fast, it was super amount of information, but it was highly toxic because it couldn’t read emotion, it couldn’t understand emotion, human emotion. On the human side, it was slower, it was more accurate because they were giving information based on what was being said because the humans could read the room. So as we now move into this new generation, as individuals we have to remain brave in how we make decisions.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It’s so important that as individuals listen to this different voice. We have to go back into the days where everyone was happy at work because everyone was being human first. This means we have to think differently and that means we have to think with compassion. Because if we think with compassion, we go back to the very first moment we were born. It’s who we really are. We are compassionate individuals. We are designed to help each other. That’s what we need.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It is a biological necessity that we must do this. But it gets clouded up in the fog of everything else. So that’s what we must do. At business, every business leader has a responsibility. Every people manager, every team leader, every whatever you’re doing, we all have to take responsibility to make this change happen. Otherwise we’re going to end in a very sad place. We’re going to do it.

Anna Lundberg:
So I saw a headline just the other day that said, you know, AI is going to mean that we only have to work three days a week or something. And of course it makes me think of Johnny Cain’s prediction that we were going to work 15 hour weeks. And that hasn’t happened. Instead I saw another post which got me quite riled up that was talking about the 996 and about how that’s so amazing to, you know, I’m so dedicated and I love my work and so on. What I’m hearing from you is actually that both from the human side, which is where I typically come from actually, you know, life matters, your wife matters, your children, your health, humanity and the sort of meaning of life. And from a high performance perspective, it seems like common sense as well. But working 24 hour days you’re going to burn out. Sort of worst case, probably quite predictably.

Anna Lundberg:
But if not in the meantime, you’ll probably. I mean, when I’m tired, I, I make mistakes, you’re rushing, you’re, you know, you’re. And I loved your point about not hearing those different voices because innovation comes from hearing things that are disconnected. If you’re only in that tech throw bubble of working on your startup or whatever, and that’s all you’re hearing, you’re missing so many other insights and perspectives and so on, and I think that’s where things can go wrong. So I find that such a powerful duality that it’s not just that, oh, we should be, as you said, empathetic and kind and human and so on, but there’s a real monetary, as you said, if those are the metrics you care about, benefit to slowing down and to being more compassionate as well.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Yeah, because the Buddha used the phrase meaning of life. And Buddha said it something beautifully. He said, the meaning of life is this. When you’re hungry, eat, when you tired, sleep. That’s the meaning of life. So if we can apply these principles. There’s someone who put a post on LinkedIn recently. I got quite a.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
My temperature rose a bit. He said, what I’ve just done. I’ve spoken to my employer, by the way, aren’t I great doing this? Aren’t I the Great Leader on LinkedIn telling everyone I’ve done. He said, I’ve given everyone Friday afternoon off again, paid for it. That’s what I’m doing. Four and a half day, week. I said, why we stopped there? Why did you stop there? Why do we have weeks? Why do we have nine to five? Why did you just stop that? You’ve not been brave enough in the decision. I was the only person didn’t have a negative comment.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
I’m trying to encourage him to think differently, be a bit braver and say, why don’t you try this? I said, get rid of nine to five and start putting things on output, not on time, because time doesn’t exist anyways. And we made this concept up so it doesn’t exist and neither does money, but it’s a whole other story. But try and do your job spec and your performance metrics based on output, not on time. So never say to anyone, I expect you to be here in this day, just don’t even say it. And when people come for their onboarding and their first couple of weeks about what you expect for them, tell them what you want for the year. And then that’s it, then get on with it. Give them the space to do it and change all these things. Because we haven’t changed anything since the Industrial Revolution.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It’s so bonkers, it drives me insane. It’s going to take a bit of time. We know there’s a lot to change. Because what happens is my personal worry is if I make you and I, you’re so connected in the same values. All of us in this collective who are trying to drive a more humane society and we have everyone running around being more compassionate and listening with empathy. And if the business isn’t making the operating model match that new world, we’re going to get a lot more friction. So these two things have to run in parallel. So yes, there’s a different way you can act, but you’ve got to start thinking differently to be able to support the way that you’re thinking.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And I’m telling you, if you get this right, this world is just going to be so beautiful and peaceful and joyful and so productive and we will start thinking about the impact of AI in a whole different light.

Anna Lundberg:
And as you said, it’s the industrial system and we’re not being brave enough to look beyond and we’re just kind of incrementally tweaking. I always think, actually, where does this 9 to 5 come from? It’s very arbitrary. You know, that happens to be the, the most recent experience, the last hundred years. So as you say, somebody suddenly says, oh hooray, Friday afternoon is off. And I’ve seen quite a big movement, which is great to see. This part time works, hashtag part time works. But then it’s also. But who decided what full time was? Full time could be 100 hour weeks, it could be 20 hour weeks.

Anna Lundberg:
You know, term time, as I’m sharing a lot about now, is 39 weeks a year. Core hours are basically four or five hours a day. And studies actually say we’re not productive for more than three or four hours a day anyway, so. So again, it just seems so absurd. But because we’re so, we’re on that kind of conveyor belt autopilot and perhaps we’re not opening up to other things. We don’t have the courage to reconnect to who we were before and also to just almost build from scratch and to design the whole thing differently. And with that in mind, I’m conscious of time and I want to talk to you forever. I’m sure people want to listen to it forever, but I want to hear about and let you talk to us about what you are building right now.

Anna Lundberg:
So where can people find you to hear more about the work?

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Can I just go back one bit, please?

Anna Lundberg:
Of course, yeah. I’m very happy to keep going. No worries at all.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Let’s keep going until we don’t need to do it anymore. Another thing that gets me mad is not only just the seven day, the five day week, nine to five, and this is a conversation I’m pushing out with Bizd and I get pushed back and I get why. I also say, listen, I’ve been on this top leadership table, I’ve done this, I’ve said the same lies to everybody else, I’ve hidden the truth. Corporate culture, we care about it and we don’t really, because team leadership, again, we’re addicted to performance, which means we’re addicted to the world of effect. Therefore we avoid root cause change because we can’t who is too scary to go into that? But that’s where we must go. We must be brave enough to go into root cause. And one of the triggers or one of the effects that prevents that is the way we budget. So we budget for a forecast, we’re doing a forecast week for a year and then we do projections a year, 2, 3, 4, 5 and all that kind of stuff.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
So in the forecast for each year, which we break it down to quarter month, week or by day, if you’re at fmcg, you’re Amazon, you’re probably doing it within a minute. So that is the parameter of how we build. So everyone gets payroll, all these line items, pipeline items, marketing, spend, everything. So that drives the business because that’s the performance metric, the ultimate performance metric, which means we never have time to go into root cause analysis. So you know all these transformation programmes, why they fail? It’s because the dominating factor is our in year budget, that’s why. Because we’re not really going to give enough time to go and do root cause change where we need to do it. So rather than saying, oh, let’s get rid of 9 to 5 and have how many hours you want, why don’t we have a forecast that’s three years long, let’s change that to give the breathing space we need to change it. And this also plays out in the world of politics.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
So in the uk, I think, is it four or five years? That’s a maximum that you can have. A Prime Minister can be in power. In America it’s four years and we have this stupid thing about, oh, I’m going to have my cabinet, my own party cabinet and Trump’s got his republics and it’s like, come on, have the best person do the right thing. Come on, if it’s another party member doing it, but give everyone, give them 10 years to do it. You’re never going to fix anything in five years in this country. We’re so in debt. America’s broken. That’s in debt.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
We’re all in debt. It needs time, it needs a different way of thinking, which means we have again. It goes back to this one point. We’ve got to be braver. And the only way to be brave is really know your true identity. And so one thing I talk about in my book, which I wrote, and I’ll plug it, the 10 traits of a Compassionate Leader. Yeah. Which we talk about trust.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And you know, and when I was growing up as a, through my management career, I was always told by my superiors, nigel, go and get the trust of your team. It’s the most important thing. They must trust you. And I’ve learned now that’s the biggest Crockett poop that we ever have, world. Because unless I can trust myself, I’ll never get the trust of my team. It will all be just about can I get them to accept me? That’s what’s going to happen there. So if I’m living in a world of acceptance and not trust, which we all think it’s trust, but it’s all Martin that way. But if I’m living in a world of acceptance, I will start making decisions based on being accepted.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Therefore I won’t truly make decisions based on who I really am as an individual. And then you can roll that up into the way the corporation thinks. It’s the same about culture, it’s the same about operating models. If the operating model is being designed to try and get customers to believe who you really are, then you’ll make decisions that aren’t truly real, who you really are. Amazon, I’m calling you out right now. Amazon, you have. And you really pissed me off because you have got a TV commercial going on right now that says you give your parents who work at Amazon half term off, right? You have this in a what looks like a nice suburban four bedroom house. Reality is you have a broken, toxic work culture.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It does not match reality to what this fictional thing that you’ve got. And in this fictional TV programme you’ve created, you have falsely identified because a large proportion of people work in the warehouse without walking out of the warehouse. Do not live in a four bedroom house in suburbia. It’s not like that. It’s not real. So this is what I’m talking about. These are compassionate decisions that we have to start changing because these are false, these are lies, these are not genuine. We have to get back to our core principles of what it really means to be human, which means we have to begin to understand what that really means.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It does not mean I can take a big paycheck home. That’s not what being human is. It’s not mean. You know, there’s loads of things. I’ll go off my soapbox in a minute, but that is what we’ve got to start doing. Only then can the world of business change. And like you, Annie, you know, we are kindred spirits. You’re in this world of doing this needs more of us.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
But we need this SVP who’s not prepared to listen to the podcast to just go, oh, all right, I’ll give in. I’ll do. I’ll listen and just take those little moments of what you might learn and grow from that, grow from that. And this is where the world of the compassion exchange came from. I had to give myself a little segue. So I was, you know, I was talking when I. When I left this business in the uk, in London, came out postcard. I was walking around, you know, build this real quick consulting business.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
I wrote my book, all that kind of stuff. But I was talking to my incredible wife, who’s extremely forgiving. And I’ve got to say, you know, male svp, pay attention to the family, because I could have lost that, and that would have been another huge loss. So stop going, you know, go home and share your problems. Be open, be honest. It would just be a massive performance improvement for you if you can do that. If you’re not doing it, grow up and be courageous and do it anyway. So we’re talking to Jane.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Jane’s a family coach. She’s a trained hypnotherapist. And we were talking a while ago, and I was saying this. I’m quite worried that I can’t scale this word compassion enough. I know what it means, but the only people who are getting it are those I’m talking to. And she was saying, yeah, I’m noticing the same thing in the parenting world, in the family world, where the triggers are work, because most people who are working from home, that is their work. So the triggers are happening in work have a real direct impact at home. Pre Covid, when kids were at school, you didn’t know what was going on.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
But now you can See it. So we said, listen, let’s build something where we can bring these two worlds together, home and work. We will create an online community and we called it the Compassion Exchange, which is purely centred on. We have different tiers of membership and compassionexchange.com, but really what it’s trying to provide is giving us all the tools and resources and coaching and events and networking events and playbooks to help everyone understand this is how we can live in a compassionate way. Again, I said, we have these playbooks, so it gives. These are things that are open for business leaders to start thinking differently about. About how they can make small, incremental changes every single day or every single week. They can participate in group networking with other executives around the world because it’s an open community, it’s not closed.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
So people can share and learn from each other about how they can make changes to operating model, how they can make changes themselves, how they can make changes to home life that has an outcome of living with peace and joy and happiness and high performance. So this is what we’ve done. You know, we’ve got. And I also track breaking news. I want the Compassion Exchange, ideally in the future, to be a lobbying voice. So we’re tracking all the good, bad and the ugly, what’s going out there, who’s being naughty? Amazon, you know, Disney, who’s been doing. Who’s doing really well. Duolingo.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Well done, Duolingo. And all these things that are going on so we can give everyone an awareness. And one thing that was interesting, I caught a. Caught a couple of months ago, I was just tracking this tribunal in Edinburgh and This lady won £15,000 because her boss, the people manager, gave her the eye roll. So she didn’t like that. She thought it was bullying and so she won £15,000. But the tribunal said, this is now bias, this is now bullying. So I thought, bloody hell, who knows that? I know because I’m tracking it, but no one else knows it.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And if you’re a small business, this could kill you, you know, £15,000, three or four times a year, business overdone. So, you know, so we’re using these kind of breaking news moments to say, be aware, tell everybody this is going on, why you’re fixing the reason why it happened in the first place, because it shouldn’t happen, but it did. So you can fix your culture. So we’ve got breaking news, we’ve got a social feed. Everyone can come in and chat with each other and anyone can come and join our wiki networking. We’ve got weekly coaching and by the way, we’ve got nine coaches, soon to be 12, 13 coaches. We’ve got a forgiveness coach, we’ve got a mindfulness coach, we’ve got a behavioural scientist coach, we’ve got a clinical psychologist coach, we’ve got coaches around psychological and psychosocial safety. So these coaches are really coming in a.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
To provide help and resources where someone might need intervention or help and support or giving guidance and help to help business leaders change the way they need to change their business to be. To become a lot more compassionate. So when people are walking around being compassionate and using a different vocabulary and having different wants and needs, then the business can respond accordingly in harmony with that. We’ve also got a wellbeing radio station. If you click a little button, you can click the wellbeing radio. And if you want a bit of that, we have a sanctuary space. So it’s a wellbeing space. So if you want to have meditations, you can listen to meditations.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
If you want to learn how to quieten that voice that I was talking about, the get the little change of their voice, we’ve got courses how you can do that, you can learn how to do that. So it’s a community centred on making the world become a lot more compassionate. This is a business community that also caters for the home. So Jane runs a weekly Parenting Power Hour every Friday. So if you’re a parent, you come in, I need a space just to go. But when that’s happened, we want to take that information we’re getting and feed that back into policy change. So what a parent. So this is what parents are saying in the business.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
How can we help business leaders make those appropriate changes to create a safe environment? We have one thing and I’ll leave it. I won’t go much further than this. We have a menopause coach and this other data point is driving me insane. I was talking to her and she said, nigel, she’s based in British Columbia and she’s an incredible individual. 15% of perimenopausal or menopausal women leave the work leave. 25% are thinking about it. And I just took a step back and I went. It means something to me because I’m getting treatment for my.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And I’ve got advanced prostate cancer. So I’m getting treatment for cancer, which means I’m getting hormone treatment, which means I have male menopause. So I get it, I get it. And it really drove me nuts because when I was If I’m in a meeting and I get the hot flushes or I get the sweats or I get the brain fog, I make light of it. Oh, then I went, if I was a woman, what would happen? So I got really, I get quite passionate about it. But I also thought, hold on a second, we’ve got a quarter of our economy who in their prime of being compassionate are leaving because they don’t feel safe enough. And this is biological, this is unavoidable, it happens. How we can help people manage it is different.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
But it’s going to happen. So we got to do better. So we’re helping business leaders think through that as an example. These are the human changes that business need to make. This is it. Not saying I’m going to add 20% to your target next year, you’ll make more money. You know, that is not the point. You know, stop thinking.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
In this world of uncaring execution, we’re going to move out this quarter of uncaring execution and we’re going to move into wise compassion. That’s what we’re doing and that’s what the community is all about.

Anna Lundberg:
So much to reflect back and almost don’t want to ruin your big, you know, impactful ending there. But, but the menopausal thing is interesting. And of course women opt out early on as well when they’re having children. You know, I have friends, colleagues, sort of work life balance just doesn’t work, flexibility and so on. And unfortunately, and I usually tend to steer clear of the gender you. But I’m hearing, you know, I’m hearing that in you and I think, since you can say, I’m going to say it too, that actually, unfortunately, that’s reinforcing the toxic culture because men without families, or at least with wives, I guess, who are taking care of the rest of it, are just perpetuating that kind of performance and the, the senior VP kind of patterns that we’re talking about and, and more women are leaving. And so then, you know, I celebrate that because I think working for yourself is a wonderful thing, but that’s not the right thing for everyone and it does leave organisations looking in a particular way. The other couple of things I want to reflect back was the organisations again, you know, without I guess calling out names.

Anna Lundberg:
But I’ve seen parental leave, you know, they say, oh, we’ve now extended it to, you know, four weeks for men or something ridiculous. And also the reality that it’s performing metrics again, that the day to day live reality is that people don’t take it and so on or they don’t take the full vacation days and then the political reason again, I tend to steer clear of politics but I love that you said that longer time horizon. My goodness, it’s not even just the four or five years, right. It’s the media is going to jump on you before you’ve even announced a policy, let alone when you’ve announced it. So I’m by no means saying, and I’m sure you agree that the current political, past political leaders have the right policies but we’re not even giving them a chance to, to do it, you know, for kicking out the next PM again, you know, is there someone else who’s going to be able to turn it around in a few weeks? Probably not a few years. You know, we do need a total rethinking. To me that feels quite overwhelming and I suppose that’s why a lot of us are kind of just opting out in our own little ways. And I wonder.

Anna Lundberg:
You’re giving me fire in my belly to think bigger but I suppose as a sort of final, but not final, but a first thought to leave everyone with. How can we begin to tackle that as an individual, someone who’s listening to this nodding and yes, yes, I do want this, but it just feels so big. Where do I start?

Nigel Kilpatrick:
Well, first of all, come into the community and you’ll be in a place where of like minded individuals and you’ll be able to learn and pick up lots of different things and techniques and tools that will just help you rebalance as an individual or as a business leader. That’s the first thing I think you can do while at the same time give yourself a break, get out of your own way. Listen to this different voice, this voice that it’s so dominant, it’s the ego. The ego is so dominant in our mind and we need to be completely aware. The ego’s design is to hate us. It’s not to do us any favours, it’s not to work with us, it’s designed to work against us. This is why we always have this voice of self doubt, self criticism, self judgement. So no wonder we’re in the crap that we’re in.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It just goes to reason. We’re in this horrible place. We are thousands and thousands of tens of thousands of years later we’re in the situation we are now. It’s getting worse because we listen to this wrong, we listen to the wrong voice, take a deep breath, have a bit of courage, a bit of bravery every single day, just Try and give just five minutes in the morning. There are three minutes in the morning when you choose. You wake up, it’s the most clear moment of your day because the ego hasn’t kicked in yet. There’s a moment you wake up, that’s the moment where you start to say, today I’m going to live with peace and joy and happiness, and everyone I meet is going to be a wonderful engagement. Do that every single day and you’ll start to learn.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And the last thing at night before you go to sleep, as the ego’s gone to sleep, just before you go to sleep, you say, everything that happened today can no longer harm me. Nothing today can no longer harm me because it’s in the past and the past doesn’t exist. And you’ll sleep well and you won’t carry the burden that we always carry every single day of the history. And history doesn’t exist. It’s just not real. It can’t do anything to us. And the wonderful thing about tomorrow is that it never arrives. Tomorrow is never here.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It never gets here. But we’re always planning for it, but never gets here. So I say the little techniques you do are come and join us more than welcome. If you can’t afford it, you get for free. Don’t worry, everyone will be able to get access. Give yourself a break, get out of your own way. Start listening to a different voice. And a way to do that is just take the moment before you go to sleep.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
And when you wake up in this last, the last moment, the first moment, are the most glorious moments of how you can change your day.

Anna Lundberg:
What I’m hearing is a bit of compassion for yourself as well. Right. And I love that quote from Buddha. I, I define success now as very much being present and being where I should be, I, I, E. Where I want to be. So I, I haven’t heard it that way before, but if I’m tired, I want to go to sleep. If, you know, that’s a very simple way of, of reminding ourselves of that if someone is listening to this. And thank you for sticking with us because I appreciate we had a long conversation, but if you are listening, I think you already won over.

Anna Lundberg:
In which case I would love for you to share this episode with someone. It might be a bit passive aggressive to share it with a toxic leader, you know, but if you can share it with a friend, share it with the community, I would love that, to spread the message because I think somehow we’re perhaps talking in an echo chamber. We’re already very much in this. As you said, we’re like minded, we’re in this together, which is great. But I would love for you to share it a little bit beyond to maybe introduce it to someone who hasn’t been thinking this way. And I hope and I believe that Nigel’s voice will land more powerfully than perhaps mine does sometimes to some of these listeners. And so thank you Nigel so much for sharing so generously. Obviously all the links and your framework there, the quadrant model being there, your book, your community and I look forward to staying in touch with you over the coming weeks.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
No, thank you. And let me say a few listeners you mentioned a very good thing about spread the word about passive aggressive. I think it’s slightly different if you share this with your, with anyone who’s in a toxic world or angry, whoever it might be, it’s the best gift you can give them. No matter the response that you get, it’s still the best gift you can give them. And anyone who’s angry at you is also the best gift that they can give you because nothing’s a reflection on you. So I would also, please, please spread the word, give it as a gift. But it’s also been a great gift to spend some time with you, Anna. It’s been wonderful.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
It was a great blessing and a gift to meet you as well a couple of months ago. So I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and I’m so glad we can go on a journey of change and let’s get as many people we can on our movement, our rebellion.

Anna Lundberg:
I’m with you. Such an honour. Thank you so much for sharing again and yeah, yeah, let’s, let’s grow the movements and looking forward to seeing that change that you’re talking about. Thank you so much, Nigel.

Nigel Kilpatrick:
You’re welcome. Thank you.

Anna Lundberg:
Thanks for listening to Reimagining Success with Anna Lundberg. I’m sure you know someone, a friend, a colleague who could also benefit from this podcast. I’d love for you to share the podcast or maybe your favourite episode with them so that they can listen too. Thank you so much for your support.

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