Top 15 Heather McGowan Quotes

It's absolutely the best date that I've had. No one is going to live up to that. This wasn't on my bucket list but let's just end the list now. There's nothing that's going to beat this.

'I asked about his wedding and he told me that he got to the point where he was just like, 'wedding planners, leave me alone'. He did say that he was really involved in his wedding, though.

I was really worried that I would be a mess but I held it together. It was a day that I am honestly not going to forget. I'm quite lucky he was late. It let me get accustomed to the situation and compose myself a bit.

It still seems a bit surreal and now that it's over, I can try to absorb all the little bits of the day. Getting a kiss on the cheek from him was absolutely brilliant

As a society, we've put work first, and it hasn't helped work. We have not done better work when we put work first,

Let's say I'm scanning the horizon, and I might see the need to understand Chat GPT or generative design. And so, I bring that research back into the project as well as back into my functional home.

It's not like the old way was working, and now we're suddenly loafing," she joked. "Instead, I think we're now putting work in the right place in our lives and getting the right social connections and support so we can do better work."

leaders should understand that employees want to feel like their work has a purpose and act in that way. Yet, if we look at Gallup's research over the past 20 years, we can see the highest rates of disengagement, mental illness, burnout, and loneliness, which are not exactly traits that highlight being purpose-driven.

You'll meet many Gen Zs whose attitude is essentially, 'I'm going to work with a sense of purpose or not at all,'

You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube now."

Yeah, first of all, let me just empathise with you. I know it's not comfortable. I make all my audience say with me, "Let's all say the four scary words, 'I do not know'", and we say it together. And I say, "And I know you were brought up as leaders not to say those words. But what's happening now is, if you pretend you know and you don't, you could be leading your team down a very dangerous path. You have to acknowledge what you don't know as an opportunity to learn, because the first step of learning is to say, 'I don't know', because if you know, you're not learning".

You have to have empathy for folks and say, "I know you gave up all those things. I know what you went through frankly sucked. And the people who are coming along now that you're going to be leading are not going to put up with it, it's not going to work. So I need to have empathy and respect for what you went through, but I've got to tell you, if you want to be successful, you are not going to be successful with those tactics".

I'm telling you to have empathy, but I'm not having empathy for you". And I think that was a huge aha, is that if you were brought up, raised with this, give up your Saturdays, don't go to your kids' soccer game or cricket game, whatever it may be; work comes before everything, maybe get on to your second or third marriage because you've ground all your relationships to dust. That's how you become a leader, and then in order to lead, you've got to have your people be afraid of you and not like you and that that's what you were brought up with. This does seem like, "How could this possibly work?

It's a huge shift and I gave a couple of talks one week to commercial real estate folks and they were all, it was mostly boomers, some Gen X, they were mostly kind of alpha dog folks, more males, one of them was almost all male. It's not gendered though but that was the case in this instance and they were like, "Don't you think we're getting woke, and aren't we getting soft, and aren't we losing our edge?" And I thought, "Oh, I'm not explaining this right, if that's what you're taking away from this".

I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled. Empathy ultimately drives performance. It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance. Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that. What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life. And we had agency over our personal life. And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life.