Kay Vessey (Host): Hello and welcome to the Now…Why? Podcast. My name is Kay Vessey and I’m going to be your host for today. This podcast is all about talking about the magic and the power of PRINT®. Today in the hot seat we have Simon Jones. Simon is responsible for the programme called Top 30 Under 30.

Kay: This is a successful recognition and development programme that puts young potential, absolutely in the spotlight. His mission is to give young people a platform to be celebrated for their contributions at work, to help develop them into effective leaders, and to promote them as role models – sharing their stories to help inspire the next generation. Originating in Hull and the Humber region, Top 30 Under 30 has expanded into Leeds and, this year, into West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, with other and further expansion plans on the horizon.

Kay: I’m really excited to talk to Simon today because he has integrated PRINT® into his programme. So welcome, Simon, to the Now…Why? podcast.

Simon Jones: Pleasure. The pleasure’s mine.

Kay: So my first question to all of my lovely guests is: tell me about the first time that you encountered PRINT®, and the impact it had on you.

Simon: PRINT® was actually introduced to me by a lovely lady who’s been part of my programme for a long time – Nicola Elwood. Nicola has been trained in PRINT® for a while, and the leadership programme I’ve developed has evolved over time. We’ve always looked at working of the different aspects of leadership, and the idea she was responsible for was about getting our winners to find out about themselves.

Simon: And so I was there going, “I like the sessions, I just don’t think it’s quite impactful enough, yet.” And she just went, “You need PRINT®.” And I was like, “Right… what’s that?”

Simon: She was like, “Look, trust me, you need PRINT®.” And I was like, “Okay, that’s fine – I don’t know what it is.”

Simon: So I went and did a little bit of research, and she said the best way to experience PRINT® is for you to be PRINT®-ed and to see it. So I was like, “Okay, let’s go through that process.” Always up for being a guinea pig. And actually, yeah – when the report came to me, it was… “Oh wow. Okay.” This is explaining me in language that I wouldn’t necessarily put to myself – but I know it’s true. Does that make sense?

Kay: Yeah.

Simon: And obviously, because we all have a tainted vision of ourselves. I suppose I only see the good, not necessarily the bad, and all those sorts of things. So when you display the shadow and best self and you’re there looking at your shadow look and you’re going, it’s like, “Yeah – I know that’s me.”

Simon: It’s something you have to swallow, I suppose. And if you’ve got good self-awareness, then you say, you know it’s you. And that was the moment I was like, “Okay. Right. I need now to incorporate this.” So at the time – and I don’t know if you know this – the money that was spent was actually a personal investment. We didn’t generate the money through the nomination and selection process that year, but I just made the decision we were going to invest the money to implement it in, and I’d figure it out later down the line. That’s the level of impact it had on me – it made me put my hand in my pocket and put some money in to make sure my winners got that experience as well. That was the first time I came across it.

Kay: Yeah – that’s amazing. And I didn’t know that. That is incredible. So obviously it did had a huge impact on you – seeing it in black and white and seeing those two different states that we operate in. I know and I’ve worked with you over the past couple of years with the Top 30 Under 30 programme, and I know it’s an incredible programme, but I think our listeners would probably love to hear a little bit more about what it’s designed to do and how you integrate PRINT® into that programme.

Simon: So as I say, it’s a recognition and development process, essentially. The idea around it is to give a platform for young people who are doing amazing things at work. A, initially the recognition to say, “You’re doing amazing,” and give them that confidence boost – because a lot of young people have that imposter syndrome going on quite loud and proud in their heads. And so a bit of reassurance for them that they’re on the right path, doing the right things is I think really important. So that’s the first thing.

Simon: The second thing I spotted when setting up Top 30 up was this “overnight manager effect” that a lot of young people go through. I’d suggest that – maybe as high as 99% of young people go through this transition without any real understanding of what that transition means. What I’m taking about is that transition of the young person that start their careers in tactical “doing” roles – whether they’re there to do sales, to do marketing, to do production, whatever it is. Then because they’re good at the job, they then get promoted, maybe to a team leader, supervisor, manager – whatever it maybe, and then they are assigned the role of essentially leading and managing people that do the job. And what is never explained to them is actually in order to do that and do that well: yes, you have to know the job still, but you also have to have a number of other skills and other bits of insight that will help you to lead, to motivate, to guide, and to coach — all those sorts of things for your team. Because that doesn’t happen traditionally in most businesses in the UK, I decided it was really important that we put something in place to fill that gap so that these amazing young people who are clearly doing good things because they’re being recognized by their businesses to actually give them, to fulfil that gap for them, and give them that skillset and self-awareness that they need so they can start to become effective leaders and to start to drive a new form of leadership brand for themselves and their organisations. That’s where the idea came from initially. I say leadership programmes – there are a lot available but my goal with the leadership programme is to make sure it punched hard that it had real effect and real impact on our winners.

Simon: Since 2019 I’ve had feedback that the programme’s been life-changing by at least one member of our cohort every year. That’s a testament I’m proud of. I don’t know yet what this year’s cohort are yet to say but and I’m hoping to keep that going.

Simon: There are three traditional segments to a leadership programme, one being around self-awareness – knowing yourself and what you stand for. And what I found in the early days, of doing the programme it was ok, it ticked at the outskirts of who these people were, but it didn’t have that hard hitting punch moment where it was “Oh wow – ok I can now really take this and be something with this.” PRINT® really fulfilled that gap for us. Every year since we’ve had PRINT® in we’ve had comments. We get feedback from all our winners. It’s all on camera every year, and then ever since PRINT® ‘s come in, PRINT® has been mentioned as being one of those key moments for some of our winners, that moment of realization, that revelation to them about who they are, what they are – and that information being so useful to them so that they can now understand how they’re responding in certain moments and why they’re doing so. Why things are triggering them, and all those sorts of things. It’s that information’s key and that then gives you insight and gives you control in terms of how you next respond. You can’t control your initial reaction to stuff, but you can control how you respond once you have awareness of it. And that’s where PRINT® has been amazing for us in the process and for the winners obviously.

Kay: And I love the fact that you call them “winners.” I know the first time that we came along to an event evening for the winners – and it was that wonderful celebration and it was a jaw-dropping moment of seeing all those little videos people made about PRINT® and the impact that it had had. That self-awareness piece it’s like holding a mirror up isn’t it, to yourself? Sometimes you look at that reflection and you love it and sometimes you look at that reflection and think, “I might need to change that slightly.” I always describe PRINT® as “the difference that makes a difference,” and it sounds very much that having that as part of your programme has created a real powerful impact for everyone that’s been involved, being a winner, across all three cohorts this year, which is incredible.

Simon: It really has. The feedback’s been consistent. So 90 people have gone through this process this year, and nobody yet to turn around to us and go “oh this was useless”. Even if it’s slightly uncomfortable, in terms of “oh a document has just revealed everything about my inner-self” even if it’s uncomfortable nobody ever comes away from it from our experience of it, at least, where they’ve gone “oh this has actually had a negative effect”. No it’s always been so fundamentally positive. A big portion of that is because of the age and the audience of our winners. For some depending on your life experience and all those sorts of things you’ll have better insight into yourself than maybe others do. And I think regardless of where they are though with us, they are only early in their careers, so they are still learning about themselves and how they show-up. This really fast-tracks that awareness to make sure that they have full insight into who they are and what they are. Kay: I think sometimes you don’t get that within your career until further down the line so actually being able to have that quite early on, is an accelerated way of being able to think about your own practice, how you lead and manage others, the impact you have on other people and how that can make such a difference so quickly.

Simon: 100 per cent. I think leadership is a really interesting topic because I think most people think it’s the top echelon. So if you take a company of 500 strong for arguments sake. People tend to see that leadership involves probably the top five, six people within that organisational chart. Well a, that’s not leadership culture. Culture is involved across the whole business. So if you’re a leader out there going actually I want people to be their authentic selves for example and I want people to lead with their values on show and all those sorts of things. It’s great that that the top five or six are having a decent leadership experience with some development but actually your future talent, your team leaders, your managers, they all need to have that insight if they’re going to do that effectively. And return on investment is massive if you invest in this type of thing. So for me so many wins, for an organisation investing at this kind of level. It really becomes a no-brainer for me. And not just a win in terms of the organisation because of the performance of that individual. A win in terms of the culture you’re creating within the organisation. A win for that individual personally so they can manage themselves better. I could keep going on about the amount of benefits this type of process can have on a business and on an individual. For me it just needs to happen more. Which is what I’m trying to do with what we’re doing.

Kay: You doing an absolutely amazing job. I do think that is really interesting that we set out with programmes like the 30 Under 30, or leadership programmes where we have a very specific set of outcomes that we’re quite clear that people will get from it. But there’s always these secondary gains aren’t there? Where people have got individual needs, they’ve got their own bespoke context that they’re operating in. And I’m sure a lot of them will share stuff where you think “oh I never actually expected you to get that out of 30 Under 30 and understanding yourself better.” Simon: Every year. Every year there’s a surprise. There’s always something, whether it’s a personal relationship changes because actually they’ve reveled something, for better and for worse about themselves, I’m not going to lie, about themselves. Also like just the little things in terms of the spin-offs that happens when we teach them something. And then they go off and implement it within their own organsiations. We had a person last year who went away and took their team in the end to basically replicate some of the sessions that we did. They did it themselves on a day’s retreat, and just reported back in terms of the feedback from the group that how much better they’re working, how much more productive they are. That’s all come from one person’s individual’s experience of the session that they’ve span off into a bunch of all these other things. We’ve got one in this year’s classes in South Yorkshire who one of the communication sessions that we’ve done – they’re now going to replicate that for the whole business. Doing that again, a day’s event for the business. Where she’s going to do a watered down session for the whole business around communication styles. It’s impossible to understand all the spin-offs and all the things that happen form this process. The one thing I do know is that regardless of what happens, it’s net positive for the business and the winners.

Kay: I know that you have got the wonderful Nicola Elwood and Gillian Mason who are PRINT®-accredited coaches, that have been accredited for many years and do an absolutely sterling job at introducing PRINT® and taking people through that journey and you use PRINT® right through your programme, don’t you? And have a very specific PRINT® discovery, but then continue to refer to it. This is a bit of a funny question really: the PRINT® profile has a number of elements to it. But I wonder if you have a particular part of that report you love most?

Simon: That’s a really good question. I’ll actually tell you a story about my four. I’ve always known I’m a perfectionist. I’m a one, four for the audience. I’ve always known the perfectionist side of me. Always knew that. I’ve been very at peace with that for a long time. For the four, “to be special and find meaning”. I really struggled with initially. The word “special” I struggled with and it’s because of my interpretation of what I thought it meant. Actually, now I love it, because I realise that that’s such a big part of who I am in terms of making me who I am and why I do what I do. I wear my three-piece suits, I put myself out there to really help these people as much as I can – and I wouldn’t be doing any of that stuff if it wasn’t for my four. I really wouldn’t be. It was just a blind spot that I had because I didn’t ever see myself in that way. So actually the thing I really love now, although initially it came with friction, is the fact that I’ve come to accept that as part of me. And I think that’s really helped me be a bit more content with who I am, rather than battling against it. Actually come to accept it. So that now holds a special place for me. Also allows me to empathise when somebody is struggling with whatever they’ve been given because I went through that journey myself. I think it’s testament to that blind spot that you may have where you might think that doesn’t sound like me actually it probably is you and actually is a bit of self work to get yourself to a place where you’re more content with it and I’ve done that work and I’m really happy with it.

Kay: You’ve talked about outcomes, and measurements and return on investment, which any type of pragramme like this within an organisation, they want to know what type of return on investment they’re going to get don’t they? Sometimes that can be a hard measure and sometimes that can be a soft measure. What are the types of things that you would look at from a measurement point of view to say that was successful, that was effective actually that has hit the nail on the head of the outcomes that we want as a Top 30 Under 30 and that individual.

Simon: We focus totally on the outcomes in the sessions, because we then know that that’s going to generate outcomes externally to the sessions if that makes sense. I think one of the issues around certain training provisions, certain programmes, is that they’re very good at telling you what you should know but then you leave the room and within five minutes after leaving the room you’ve forgotten most things that have been spoken about. Because I don’t come from a traditional training, l and d background I’ve maybe done it in a slightly different way, I don’t know really, but I’ve really focused in on. I don’t want our winners to experience that three hours, four hours of sitting there, PowerPoint presentation, looking out the window slightly because they’re bored, all that sort of stuff. Then they come away from it going “that was alright but I’ve not remembered a thing.” We have three core objectives for every session we do, and I want three core outcomes that really land with each participant. The reason I’m talking about that is because then that then triggers the outcomes in the business themselves. With 30 young people in a cohort, sometimes it’s confidence, sometimes it’s the way they need to communicate, sometimes it’s around their self-awareness, and all those sorts of things. But if we concentrate on covering all those areas off, they’ll go back to their businesses you’ll see a stepped and marked change in their behaviour because we’re delivering properly in the sessions themselves and then that’s the thing that then spins off. One bit of feedback I had from the University of Hull actually. They put someone forward last year and they turned round to me and said: “You’ve developed this person three times faster than, you know they’ve taken three steps forward in the year that they were with you, rather than just without you basically. And that conversation was “Oh you’re Simon from 30 Under 30. I just want to say thank you for your help with this person.” And I’m like “That’s amazing”. It's hard because leadership is hard to quantify. You can’t turn round and go we can guarantee you more money on your bottom line. We can guarantee you a real change of the way they’re going to approach things. Fundamentally they’re still going to be the same human. But yes my god if you invest in it you do see change. You see real change in who they are, how they show up. I suppose for a lot of young people they often go into situations and react, instead of taking a moment and then responding. So instead of reacting they’re now starting to respond in the appropriate way, starting to deal with themselves in a different way and that, all of a sudden you see their career trajectory go up and their performance improve because they are starting to really be considerate of the people around them and the impact they may have. It depends on who’/s listening to this, will depend on what they want to hear. But does it add value to your business? Absolutely it does. Does it breed better cultures? Absolutely it does. Does it make your person more skilled? Absolutely it does. Can I give you a definite in terms of in twelve months’ time you’re going to see a b and c. No. But I can tell you it’s going to happen. Two hundred and forty people in Hull, sixty people in Leeds and West Yorkshire, thirty people in South Yorkshire now and we don’t see any different. Every time it’s the same process and it’s the same type of return.

Kay: And it goes on. And it continues to go on. I have this little question and you might have already shared this but I’m going to ask it to you anyway. In the spirit of sharing best practice, what do you think others can learn from you? Simon: So I think from my side the one thing I think we’ve done particularly well is on the developmental programme we’ve created, it’s actually just focusing on outcomes. Again I’m not a learning and development professional but my experience of being on developmental programmes for most of my career is that people can get a little bit obsessed with imparting knowledge on to you. and you need to know you know twenty things in this four-hour space. From our side we just simplify it down to three key outcomes we’re looking to develop from every session. And from that we then work backwards to really make sure that those outcomes are generated. If we want somebody to really understand a particular skillset for example coaching, so if we want them to understand coaching how are we going to make sure they really embrace and engage with coaching as a methodology. So we then figure that out in terms of activity. And then it’s like ok what are they going to need to know about coaching before going into the activity to then generate the outcome. So we’re really outcome-focused in every session. And what that’s done for us is that you know we’ve then really taken ownership of that. It’s then made sure that we’ve landed those key points across to the audience. I think it then allows us to have those “magic moments” with those winners to be able to go, “Oh man I didn’t see this. I didn’t recognise this. I’ve got his new skill I’m really embracing it.” Because we’re kind of obsessed around just that small number of objectives for each session. So that will be the one thing I would say is that I think sometimes and again I’m talking in very general terms here but sometimes a programme or a session or some learning could be landed better and it could be more effective if there was a bit more focus on what we want the participants to know and really take home and not be so obsessed on imparting information on through a PowerPoint presentation for example that in fairness then nobody then remembers. So that would be my nugget of gold.

Kay: So that is a fabulous nugget. And I know how wonderful the programme is. I’ve had the pleasure of being a little fly on the wall for some of your programmes and how engaged people are and the wonderful facilitation and it’s just a fabulous programme. So if any of our listeners are interested in getting in contact with you or finding out more about the thirty under thirty programme what should they do next? Simon: Website: www.top30under30.co.uk. Nice and simple. I was amazed that URL was available when I took it on. So top30under30.co.uk. You can come and find us there and you’ll see where we are geographically at the time, see more about the programme, and hear more from our winners on there as well. Everything you need to know is on the website.

Kay: Amazing. Thank you so much. So I’m building a bit of a playlist Simon, I think I’ve told you this before. So my playlist is called “Now That’s What I Call My Why.” So I’m inviting all of our guests to share with us one song that is their go to for a motivational pick-up, pick-me-up. So that song that you go, I really need that little bit of drive or energy or passion or something. What am I going to listen to. So what is your song and why have you chosen it? Simon: I’ve gone for “Live For The Moment” by The Sherlocks. And the reason why is because I’m one of these overthinkers because of my perfectionism. So I’m always in my head, always analysing, Always puzzling things out. And I think sometimes I need to remember to live for the moment. And so that’s the song and I love the song, I love The Sherlocks as a band anyway. But that song and the lyrics of that song puts me in a better position sometimes and makes me realise I need to get my head out of the mud. And maybe appreciate and embrace the things that I’ve got today. And that’s why I picked that song.

Kay: Amazing. Thank you. Well that will be added to our list. I just want to say thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been an absolute pleasure having a further conversation with you about PRINT® and thirty under thirty. It’s been wonderful to hear the story and the origin of the programme, and long may it continue to blossom that potential in all those wonderful leaders – not only in our region but in other regions and I’m sure you’re going to be going further and further afield.

Simon Thank you

Kay So thank you so much.

Simon No I’m looking forward to doing that whenever that happens here. Thank you.

Kay Thank you Simon. What a pleasure it’s been talking to you. Wasn’t that a wonderful overview of how Simon uses PRINT® in his programme Thirty Under Thirty. So if you’ve enjoyed this, please like and subscribe, and remember to tune in again to hear more power of PRINT® in our next and up and coming episode.