Emma Halahan: How You Could Benefit From a Leadership Apprenticeship with Happy

Thank you. Okay. Well, hello everyone. I'm Emma and I've spoken to so many of you and probably evangelised about the apprenticeship program so far. But yeah, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my apprenticeship experience. I was on the level five; I think it's technically called the operational and departmental manager apprenticeship here at Happy.

And I think what I'll do is I'll talk about the experience in a series of questions. So, the first one is, who was I before my apprenticeship around 18 months ago? Well, I had been tasked with, and I'm quite young, with leading, building and growing an entire UK function of a charity, and I felt like I had quite good instincts as a leader.

I'd been managed, as I'm sure we all have, really poorly in the past. I'd been micromanaged, I'd seen everything go really wrong and I understood what I didn't want, but maybe I was struggling to understand what I did want. And I'm a Gen Z, and I know that's scary though, Gen Z leaders now entering the workplace, I'm technically the oldest, oldest year, so I'm called an elderly Gen Z, which is really, really humbling these days.

And there wasn't a lot of leaders who had had experiences like me in the workplace yet, and so I felt quite alone, and I was a disaster at finance and forecasting, and I really needed some practical help in those places and I really liked flexible leadership, but I found it really hard to have difficult conversations.

I'm sure as we all know, difficult conversations are the bread and butter of being a leader and growing and managing a team. So, what's a Happy apprenticeship? Well, basically, you get put in this cohort of around, it can vary in numbers, but mine was around 10 other people, other leaders, who were in a variety of positions across various sectors, including kind of public, charity, health, and private, and they were all incredibly and vastly different people to me.

And you undergo some classroom learning, so actually my sessions the entire time were fully remote.  But it was like today, there was lots of breakout sessions, lots of interactive talking, and I really got to know these 10 people really well, almost better than I knew myself at times and you cover some theoretical knowledge, and I'm sure you're a bit like, "oh god, theoretical knowledge, how dry".

But truly, the whole purpose of the apprenticeship is to then put that into practice, and you leave with this incredible set of facilitation skills and tools to actually use to make your practice better. And then you do some written assignments, and you have to devote 20 percent of your time to learning every week, which is actually such a challenge and it's a bit that everyone on an apprenticeship find hardest because you have to devote time to making yourself better.

So being on a Happy apprenticeship looks like, and my first one is eating a lot of humble pie because you discover all of the ways you are not a good leader. And the first practice and the first thing we were asked to do was undergo a series of heavy reflection exercises where I learned so much about what I was as a leader and definitely what I wasn't.  And then it was a lot of learning live from my peers and learning about their experiences. Some of them are managing incredibly difficult contexts in drugs and alcohol rehabilitation, others were managing whole dog shelters.

And it was really interesting to learn through them and we learned through a variety of obviously that classroom teaching, but also coming to each other and having to coach each other through some really difficult situations that I had no knowledge about how to run a drugs and alcohol rehabilitation program.

But I did have lived experience about managing difficult people and trying to get something past the CEO when they're not feeling their best. What did I learn for the first one was how to empower people. But mostly how to empower people who don't want to be empowered, which was something I had really struggled to verbalize before, that there are people who feel really safe in their box, in their bureaucracy box, living their life and doing their rules and not having to innovate and think wider.

And I learned a lot about how to empathise with those people and ask them questions and use liberating structures to actually unpick how they're thinking and to empathise with them.  I learned how to make a happy workplace within the confines of my organisation. So, I would get coaching on the places where I could really flex and innovate and investigate how we could make something better.

And I learned, and this was the most humbling learn, is that I am an accidental diminisher. And what that means is that when my team are getting really overwhelmed and the CEO is swooping and be like, we need you to do X, Y, Z. I would go, oh my god, how dare they ask you to do all of this work? I'll do it. I'll do it. Don't worry. I'll do it. Or that person in the other team's been really mean to you. Don't worry. I'll have the difficult conversation with them and actually, I just disempowered my team the whole time. I stopped them from having small doses of pain that would grow them as people and help them feel more comfortable in the workplace and time and time and time again, throughout my apprenticeship, I was told I was an accidental diminisher and I needed to become a multiplier and I think I've learnt roughly how and I'm beginning to implement it, but it's a journey, let me tell you. 

I learnt how to challenge the leaders around me. So, I now, when I started, I was in a really radical charity that was super transformative and really aligned with Happy.

I'm now in a 27,000 strong NHS trust with a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of difficulties managing current political context. I learned how to challenge the people around me and I had a language to tell them the way that they were behaving didn't fall in line with our values and didn't make people feel good.

So mostly I learned all about my blind spots, all of the things I won't know about myself and the lived experience that I have that's really different from other people.  So, what changed? Well, my team got happier with a capital H. I saw a performance skyrocket as I was able to implement some of the project management and the empathy and the leadership and the coaching techniques within my team.

My relationship with everyone became radically candid, which I'm not sure if lots of you've heard about radical candour, but it's probably the one theory that has changed my life a lot about being radically candid with people while still being empathetic. I now have difficult conversations every day and I also leave three things unsaid.

So, if someone annoys me throughout the day, I challenge myself three times throughout the day, not to tell them because maybe they're just having a really bad day, or maybe it was a mistake.  And I'm now in Guy's and St. Thomas dismantling a workplace that thrives with hierarchies, that loves tradition, that has a long legacy of structure.

And I'm creating. Little hotspot, as Nigel said, within my team to try and show what is quite an inflexible organisation, the benefits of being lean and being agile. As a result, I can stand here and do stuff like this and be seen as a coach and a leader in my organisation. And that's probably one of the biggest gifts that Happy has given me.

But the best bit was learning from all of those people. I think the Happy Apprenticeship and the way that Happy teaches that management theory and challenges you to do the coaching in every session, to talk to each other, means that I've now left with 10 friends for life and 10 people who will support me throughout my career.

So, if you choose to go on an apprenticeship, which I really think everyone should do, just know that you'll probably leave with a network that you'll have for life, and I'm happy to take questions at the end of the session, etc.

Nigel Paine: Did you ever have self-doubt? Was there a point in this where you thought, I’m going to give up. It's much easier just to go backwards and to go forwards. Did that ever happen? 

Emma: Yes and no. So, the resilience that the apprenticeship taught me how to access my resilience, so it taught me a lot about understanding when my chimp enters the room, which is the idea when your real emotional part of you enters the room and to understand what triggered my chimp.

Often when I felt like my resilience was lacking and I wanted to go backwards, I needed to recognize that my chimp had entered the room, and why had that happened, and talk to someone about why. So, yes, and it continues to be. Change, changing workplaces is the most difficult thing I've ever done, particularly in my current context.

Showing my blind spots, having a language with which to talk to other people compassionately about what they might not be getting right, has meant that when my resilience is lacking, I have tools to build it back up. Scaffolding. Yes, scaffolding is exactly what it is. Structure to help me find the walls.

Mike, your question?

Mike: Hiya Emma, it was just, I'm doing the level five at the moment, I'm about halfway through and I'm just wondering how you managed the off the job learning?

Emma: Audio books would be my big suggestion. If you can do passive learning throughout your job. Also, if there's shadowing opportunities that you can undertake, that would be beneficial.

So, ask someone to kind of mentor you and as part of that, you can do some shadowing. That counts as you're off the job learning, but audio books are probably the best way that I digested  Lots of learning, I've got my hours down, but the off the job hours are the struggle, and everyone struggles, so you're not alone, and I wish you luck.

Mike: Thank you. 

Henry: Okay, now it's the break, 15 minute break.

Audience Member: One more, one more, okay. I want to ask you about you wanting to feel empowered how did you do that, and what is, do you have a key insight for us?

Emma: So, I think it's been hit on, on parts of the day, that some people might not. feel that they've been loved in the past and actually a lot of the people who didn't want to be empowered it was the result of having a whole organisation look upon them as people who were quite underperforming they developed a lot of apathy and them doing Only the very finite things that they felt comfortable doing was the way that they coped with that.

So, it was a lot of building people up and really encouraging people, giving people feedback in the way that they wanted. And then it's that small doses of pain element. It was pushing people a little bit every time past what they were comfortable to do, asking them to give the presentation, asking them to go on this training course because I was too busy, etc. to do it. And over time they got the confidence. Transcribed It's like a positive feedback cycle. I guess.