Carrying It
Carrying It explores what responsibility creates in people.
Through conversations with people who hold responsibility, and people who feel it, the podcast examines how pressure, behaviour and influence move through work, relationships and everyday life.
Because responsibility doesn't disappear. It shifts, and someone carries it.
Carrying It
How Far Does Responsibility Reach?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode of Carrying It, Phil Scott speaks with Stephen Rose, CEO of Render Networks, about one of leadership's hardest realities: responsibility often reaches further than your ability to see its effects.
Together they explore what happens as organisations grow and leaders become increasingly distant from the people and decisions they influence. The conversation examines why some distance is necessary, where it becomes dangerous, and how leaders can stay connected without becoming controlling.
They discuss trust, one-to-ones, employee engagement, decision-making, organisational culture, and the small everyday interactions that often have the biggest impact on how people experience work.
If responsibility travels further than visibility, how do leaders make sure they still notice where it lands?
Responsibility doesn't disappear. It shifts, and someone carries it.
That's true inside organisations, but it's also true in society. Every episode of Carrying It supports organisations working to improve how responsibility and mental health are understood and supported in real systems.
You can learn more about the organisations we're supporting through the links below.
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/local-minds/
http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/
Responsibility is unavoidable in leadership and influence. In all kinds of roles, from surgeons to CEOs to judges. What matters isn't whether it exists, but what it creates and where it travels. Responsibility creates an emotional load. That load doesn't disappear. It shifts and someone carries it. Welcome to carrying it when responsibility doesn't stop. That's what this podcast is interested in. Not how hard leadership is, but what responsibility creates. This conversation is about distance. What happens when responsibility reaches further than your ability to fully see its impact? Today I'm joined by Stephen Rose, CEO of Render Networks, who leads across teams, decisions, and consequences that inevitably travel beyond direct visibility. Welcome, Steven.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great. Great to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me.
SPEAKER_00Alright, let's dive straight in. Obviously, your role CEO traditionally top of the tree in most organizations. You can't have direct relationships with everybody and everything within your organization. So what changes what have you noticed change in yourself and in other people and in the way that you lead when responsibility goes beyond those direct relationships?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's really interesting. I think there is a number of misnomers that come along with, you know, what does a CEO do? Yeah? How much power do they have? How much responsibility do they have? And I typically say to people, actually, you have all the power, but you have none of it. You have all the responsibility, but you have none of it. You have all the accountability, that is for sure. And you have all of that, 100%. You have all of the budget and you have none of it. So it's really interesting. You have to actually appreciate that, you know, the role of a CEO is really to make sure that everybody else is loaded up with all the things that they can do to do their job effectively, and then actually get out of the way to the maximum extent you can. So it's a great is a number of things that you need to do in there. You need to make sure that you understand how the controls are going to work. What are the points of intervention that really matter? Do you have a solid understanding of the capabilities of your leadership team around you? And to what extent do you need to then marry yourself to that problem if you can, or how do you other get you know combinations of of other skill sets to support each other? So you're really meshing an organization and you're trying to understand what at what point do you need to really intervene and whatnot. But for the most part, your job is to set direction with the team, you know, be collective around that, and then get out the way. And that takes a great deal of trust to be able to do that. So, you know, probably as the classics sort of say, starts with culture and it ends up with structure. Focus on those things first. That's the most important part of being a CEO role.
SPEAKER_00So the distance is actually a good thing, right? Uh how much distance then do you think is the right level of distance?
SPEAKER_01In much distance. I think it's about really just setting up the conditions and the agreement between you and your leadership team as to what is the point of intervention that matters. Yeah. Now, you know, there's a few things that you can think about. There's the classic of up on the balcony, down on the dance floor. So the one of the things that you do have to do is to is to remain close to the heartbeat of the organization. There are a couple of ways you can do that, of course. A great believer in being able to, you know, go out and actually see how the work is being done. So getting close to somebody that's, you know, two and three levels below you and and and just working with them for a little while, talking to them, making sure you understand what their environment is. I'm not a great fan of skip level meetings. I know that that is a way that uh people trying to close the gap and then come back away from it again. But skip level meetings, in my view, typically just end up becoming performance and management assessment of the leader that actually uh you're engaging with, and it becomes a a rather negative, almost nervous experience for the employees because they don't know how much they can say, and for the team leader whose team that you're actually engaging with. So I'm not a great fan of those meetings, I have to say. And typically you only get one or two voices. If there's a team of ten, you'll get one or two voices speaking up, the rest will stay silent, yeah. So it's not a great way. So I think keeping a distance is enough to recognize that, again, your intervention can be positive, but it also can be not necessarily harmful, but it certainly can be abrasive or it can have unintended consequences. I think the other thing that comes with distances is more about you also appreciating the you you just don't have to know, and you will never know what's going on at that granular level. So how customers will use your product, how your teams understand the environment where your customers are using the product and maybe what's going on technologically in the world. I mean, there's just too much happening at once. So again, you've got to you've got to become comfortable with the idea that you're probably the furthest away from the customers to some extent. I mean, not again, you're going to be engaging with customers, but at the granular level, the use of your product is going to be something that somebody understands way better than you, how the product should evolve. And those types of things are are really important because otherwise, what you do is you bring in a very heavy assessment of where the market's going and what do you think, and you you start to do things like introduce anecdotal evidence. So there's a real danger, again, of of when you're talking about distance, if you're so close to it and you think you're on top of what the market needs and wants, you're probably deluding yourself. So that distance actually is a protective mechanism. It isn't necessarily a bad thing.
SPEAKER_00I'm with you on skip level meetings. I think the negative consequences of those far outweigh any possible benefit you might get. But the the one-to-one, you know, going out and and living a day in the life of one of your employees, that that's an interesting way of doing things. You have a lot of demands on your time, right? Before we hit record, we were just saying it's uh not a good work-life balance in your situation. How frequently can you do those types of things?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think every time you're on a trip, there's the opportunity to do so. So I want if I'm going on a meeting with a client, you know, one of the things is obviously we'll go and meet the client, but then you take that time to spend with the team that you that are there locally, right? So I would say that I'm spending every month, at least twice a month, working with somebody that is two or three levels below me and having that granular discussion with them about how's it going? What's, you know, tell me, tell me how you experience employment life. What is your perspective on where the market's going, how the customers are using, where we could be improved, what are the things that are getting out in your way of being successful? Being genuinely curious that the person that you're interacting with has a perspective and it's really, really valuable. The harder thing is when you are doing this and you're running an international business. I can do it a lot here in the US, but half the team is in Australia. Now that makes it harder. And so the the way to do that is you've just got to make sure that the people understand that you are available even though you're 11,000 miles away. I was talking to one of our finance team last night on a Slack message, and she wrote to me and she was asking me about something simple, you know, hey Steve, I need your thoughts on something. And instead of saying, here's the answer, the first question I ask is, Hi, how are you?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01And that simple question of hi, how are you? Let's go there first, and spending that two to three minutes of Slack interaction and making sure that you use that window. You had that window. It wasn't presented to you in a structured way, it was an organic way. And asking that question first makes people think that this person actually cares and they do want to really know about those things. And and you'll pick up on that, and you do that enough, and then you'll get send people the signal that that you're actually asking the question because you really want the answer. You're not just going through the motions of that. So just that's where it gets harder, but that's where you have to then exploit every small opportunity, not just the big ones of a visit down in Australia.
SPEAKER_00I came into this thinking I was going to talk about distance, vertical distance, the hierarchy of an organization. But actually, there's there's so many different ways you can measure distance in an organization. 11,000 kilometers, that's a hell of a distance when you run businesses like that. When you do those things, whether it's in person or that little example you just gave uh in a Slack message, what do you think that that does with the employee in terms of the responsibility that they feel and the load that they're carrying in terms of their job? How does that help them in what they're doing?
SPEAKER_01I think there's there's two things. There's the confidence, you give keep people the confidence to speak up about the things that they're bothered about. And they are. First thing to really consider, and that's very important, is that most people come to work. I would say 99% of people come to work every single day wanting to do a great job. Not a good job, they want to do a great job. And they have concerns and they would love to solve for those concerns. They don't always necessarily feel empowered, they don't necessarily always have the confidence, whatever it happens to be. So those questions, asking those questions gives people the confidence to say, hey, I see a problem and I'd love to do something about it. And your role as a CEO or any leader for that matter isn't to solve the problem for them, is to ask them the questions that are going to enable them to say, hey, I've got a problem here. Okay, what do you think we should be doing about it? I'm all ears, yeah? You don't have to agree always. But then at the end of that discussion, you've got to really wrap it up with, okay, I agree or disagree with your ideas. If I agree with your ideas, I'm not just gonna sit there and say, okay, great, after you. It's I think that's a great idea. I'm I'm you know, gonna back you to do it. By when will you come back to me and give me an update on how far you've got with this? Because they may come up against other problems that they can't, you know, so they they take the problem away, they might try and solve it in different ways and find there are new obstacles. And you're obliged at that point to step in and help them. Getting difficult obstacles out of the way of a particular problem, of solving a particular problem is part of your charter. So I think people would want to see whether or not you really care about the problem they specified by showing that there's follow-up and that you you want to see the follow-up, you want to see the action. And of course, that's a great opportunity for you to see whether the person was just complaining or whether they were really taking the accountability and the responsibility to solve it with you, uh, and then that's a good way to see the productiveness of that discussion as well.
SPEAKER_00A good way of marrying the needs of the business with the the needs of the employees and the human side of that emotion versus the strategic nature of the business. So that's all great, right? And if you can have those moments with every single one of your employees, great. You're not gonna be able to see everything though. I think that that's clear. There's just too much going on for you to be able to see everything. So have you noticed anything in particular where you miss things and then when you've discovered that you miss them, you make a extra effort to make sure that you're a bit more focused in a particular area or in a particular way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so knowing where and and how to spend your time is the most critical decision that you make at the beginning of every single day. And the way that you do that is you you you've got to be able to set things up in such a way that you have a balanced perspective of the performance of the business. And for me, there are four measures that are actually kind of simple for that. Employee MPS, yes, a net promoter score, customer MPS, ebida, and top line. If you have an understanding of where you lie on any one of those metrics, and you start to be able to dig down, you'll be able to see where your focus needs to grow. So, you know, employee MPS is generally speaking a factor of how well people are being left, led, how happy are they in their roles, to what extent do they feel that they have mastery and autonomy in their roles, etc. That's a really, really easy way to figure it out, and you will see the difference between function A and function B and whatever else, and then you know you can start to analyze the problems over there. Customer MPS. Is the service quality where it wants to be? Is the product doing what it should be? Uh are we resolving issues? Bottom line performance and top line performance, you'll be able to see very, very quickly which part of the businesses are struggling. So that's how I manage the business. I just have those four key metrics. I'll use those, I'll find out where the issues are behind them. And the most important thing is you're doing it with the team, is that you're not doing it to the team. Yeah, that's not the point. The point is if there's an issue, you want to discover what the root cause of that issue is together, and that's where you get to put your focus in. Which of those four metrics do you think gets sacrificed first? I don't know which one gets sacrificed first, but I can tell you the if you sacrifice employee MPS over customer MPS, a customer MPS will suffer in the end. And so with the other two metrics. I know that there are certain organizations and they'll say customers always ride and we're customer-centric, and that's what even one of our values. If you have an organization that is so harshly driven by every single piece of anecdotal feedback, or or even if there are patterns, you rotate too harshly on them and whatnot, all you'll do is you'll demotivate and demoralize the uh organization. So I think employee engagement and employee MPS is where the product becomes the best it can be, the service becomes the best it can be, you'll make great decisions, and and so as a result of that, you know, your revenue and your margins will improve accordingly. So I think for me, it's not which one suffers the most, but which one gets invested in the least. I can tell you the one that will, if you don't focus on that, it will destroy the other three KPIs pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_00And that one, the employee NPS, is that sort of emotional connection to the company. Customer NPS and the financial side of things, very fact-based, as you say. You can look at one chart or one table and see, are we doing well or are we not doing well? Employee NPS is is much more nuanced than that because, well, it's dealing with human emotions, right? You can ask different questions in the same way or the same question in different ways, and you get different responses from that. How do you stay close enough to that to make sure that you can trust the numbers? It's really easy to interrogate financial numbers, much harder to interrogate employee metrics.
SPEAKER_01I'm not sure I agree. I think you can. I think you just have to decide that actually social science, which is really what we're talking about here, is actually a lot more scientific and a lot more measurable than you would perhaps expect. If I'm looking at how much leadership development are we doing in a single year, do we have an innovation curve? And if we have an innovation curve, to what extent is everybody participating? Something as simple as, and I had this feedback just in the last three or four weeks. It's taken our employees way too long to fill in an expense claim form. Super frustrating. They go on a long trip, they come back, and guess what they get? They get all the thanks by saying, and here's a really annoying way of having to finish off your trip rather than doing the follow-up from the trip, you're doing expenses instead. That's the sort of thing that will really irritate people, and you'll get feedback on that, and that's the sort of feedback you need to work on. So there are many ways in which you can truly measure whether or not your uh employee engagement score is going to be good. I think what we have a tendency to do is to over-rotate on the obvious things. Are people incentivized enough? Yes, absolutely they should be, and there should be enough money on the table that it doesn't become a topic. I think it was Dan Pink that said that. But if your other motivational conditions aren't correct, you know, if there is a poor alignment between employee expectation and the targets that we have, that's where you're going to have really, real, real big problems with pulling in an employee engagement score up. We shouldn't be looking for the most obvious things. Bother to dig into the small things that really affect people's everyday ways of working. That's where you'll uncover small but very, very important issues to be cleaned up. And that's those are the things where you're going to get your employee engagement going up as well.
SPEAKER_00Everybody would naturally focus on the bigger picture and think the bigger picture is where you make the biggest gains, and tinkering around the edges actually doesn't change much. But what what you've just explained there is that it's often the tinkering around the edges that can make a much more significant difference to people in in their everyday lives.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean it's both. You can't have a really, really efficient expense claim form and a terrible pay scale. I wouldn't advocate for that. But what I am saying is that it's not just the big things, it's really the small things. It's how often do you communicate with your teams? To what extent do they understand what's going on in my mind? How transparent are we with what's going on in the business? And truly having a very transparent discussion with the employees about how I feel, what I think, how the others' people, and then inviting other people to share. It's all of those things combined, really.
SPEAKER_00Like your pay scale versus expense form scenario, but what if you flip it around? There's probably a lot of companies that have very good pay scales for their employees, but have lots of painful processes and systems. And they think that the pay scale almost justifies that. And it's like, oh well, they're well paid, they've just got to suck it up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, I don't I mean, I I just don't think that works. In the end, it doesn't work. I've worked in companies where they pay really well, but there are just too many other issues, and the general assumption was if we keep paying enough, people will overlook those things and whatever else. Well, first off, that just ignores all manner of thought around what motivational theory is. So motivational theory, as far as I remember it, was drive to acquire. But drive to acquire might not just be money, it might be knowledge, it might be certification, it might be any one of those things, right? But then you also have to look at the the drive to belong. People want to actually feel that they're in a community and that they're doing something. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are just as important as each other. And to and to overrotate on thinking that money will get you everywhere. I think people's values have changed enormously, and they're looking at their employers as do I align through my value system as much as I do anything else, and money won't get over.
SPEAKER_00Do you think there's uh an emotional detachment on behalf of some of those employers? They've been making those decisions for long enough that it's actually the connection between the decision and the impact to the employee has been fundamentally broken and can no longer be repaired, so they just kind of carry on. Maybe they're not even aware that it's been broken.
SPEAKER_01There are firms, no question that that is more of an issue than others. Are they aware of it? Probably. The question is, do they really understand how to solve the problem? Aligning organizational objectives and employee objectives, you know, we all have very different wants and needs, and wants and needs change over time. What I wanted at 20 years old was to grow and to learn and to go fast and all of those things. And then you hit your 30s and then you want to have children and all of that sort of good stuff, and suddenly your motivational criteria changes again. The trick is having leaders that truly understand where people are in their stage of life, what's motivating them, whether it be intrinsic or extrinsic, and then maintaining that understanding over the period of the life cycle that you're with that employee and with that you know that part of their career. Firms that don't invest in leaders to gain that understanding because they have an underappreciation for it. And I've seen too many firms in my career where they just look to HR to say, solve this problem for me, and they'll always go to the extrinsic. This person's at the top of the pay band or at the bottom of the pay band or somewhere in the middle. That's the reason why they're not happy. We all know that if you and I got pay rises, doubled our pay tomorrow, within six months, you'll have adjusted that to become the norm again, and then you'll be back to being miserable or at least less happy.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna go back to that emotional connection. That's basically you've got to maintain that emotional connection over time through challenges that all companies go through, all teams go through. You talked earlier about that regular communication. What other ways do you use or have you seen work for maintaining that emotional connection?
SPEAKER_01It's interesting. I think one-to-ones can be useless or they can be really, really powerful, and it depends on how you use them. I have a 15-minute one-to-one with my team most weeks. I know some people that do a one-to-one once a month. That feels really odd to me. I never quite understood. Let's do 12 checkpoints a year. Because actually, what happens is when you do 12 checkpoints a year like that, it actually becomes a performance evaluation. It stops becoming a one-to-one discussion. You're actually talking about, so what did you do at work in the last month? How's it going? Tell me about this particular issue or that. I don't have those discussions in one-to-one when I can avoid them. What I typically do is I'm trying to understand the emotional state of the person in that short period of time. How's your week? What's going on in your life that really matters and is affecting positively or negative your emotional state? Second question is, what are you doing to build your skills and your and the repertoire of skills? So that's all about the person. It's not about the job that they're doing. It's about how are they investing in themselves. And then the third question is what actions that they're taking to build their career? And people will say, wow, that seems like a really Odd discussion that you would have a career discussion on an every week basis. But of course, you're not going into this massive part of the discussion. What you are doing is you're saying, is it still true that you're thinking about doing this next? That's really you're just confirming that part of the discussion. And in any given week, maybe something happens with that employee that they say, Well, actually, I had a thought or I came into contact with somebody and they gave me a different idea. But that middle part, what are you doing to build your skills? And that skills is really not just about are you going on training courses? Are you building your network externally and internally? Who are you using as a mentor at the moment? What articles are you reading? Really using that part of the conversation to make sure that the person is building a repertoire of skills, network, and knowledge to be able to then navigate whatever things that they're doing and their jobs every single day, but also to help them build their careers. It's all about them. That's the whole point. That one-to-one discussion is all about them. It's not about the performance of the business, it's not in their role. That's what the monthly MBR is for.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we've all sat through one-to-ones that turn into pipeline reviews if you're in sales or project reviews if you're running a campaign or code review if you're a software engineer and you've written that kind of thing, right? I remember some of those indeed. You taught there a little three-point agenda for all of your one-to-ones. What about flipping it around and letting the employees set the agenda? I mean, no problem at all.
SPEAKER_01Actually, generally speaking, the first question I ask is, what do you want to talk about? In many respects, that means that there is no agenda. The point of a one-to-one is not to prescript it, you know, in such a way that I'm getting something from that discussion. The only thing I get from that discussion is I want to be able to walk away feeling like the employee that I'm was in the one-to-one with felt heard, listened to, understood. Then I know that that was a successful one-to-one. But if they want to sit there and say, actually, I've got one topic that I want to talk about today, and it is whatever it is, this is what's keeping me up at night. This is, you know, the thing that really matters to me most. I'm all in. It's got 15 minutes.
SPEAKER_00Use it. And how do you encourage uh your employees to prepare for those? Or do you? Is it just uh let's turn up and and see what happens, or is there some advanced preparation?
SPEAKER_01No, not really. I mean, advanced preparation is for something that's much more structured and a lot more intense and probably requires evaluation and all that sort of stuff. It's not meant to be that. This is the one moment in the week where you just get to free flow discuss between two people what's going on and again, whatever matters most to the employee. So no, absolutely. This shouldn't be a cognitively intensive, stressful event. If there's stress, it's because there's something in the discussion, you know, that the employee wants to bring forward and they need to get it off their chest. Perfect. I'm all is, yeah? But that's where the stress should come from. But the event itself should be completely stressless.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna bring it back to the distance again. We've talked about the emotional side and you know, the making sure everybody's got the warm and fuzzies, if I can paraphrase it in that way. But there's a point where you need to make decisions in a business, and not everybody's gonna like those decisions. The question I asked at the beginning was some distance is good, what's the right amount of distance? I'm gonna change it slightly and say, can you lead without having some emotional detachment, some distance?
SPEAKER_01Leading without emotion is impossible. I mean, literally, unless you're a psychopath, and there are many CEOs that have been called psychopaths in the past, and they're probably right, by the way. But should you? No, absolutely not. But that doesn't mean that you will then have to be led entirely by those emotions. Most of the decisions that you start with are anchored in data. There's emotion behind them, but you are there, you are there to do a job. Uh, the role of the CEO is to make sure that they create shareholder value over time. That is their primary legally bound duty. If you look under the law, that is what is um I'm required to do. And so that will lead to tough discussions and it will lead to decisions that make you feel really, really upset and really, really miserable. But anchoring your decisions in data, being able to explain them in a logical way that shows that the decision making that has been done has been done well. That is a critical part of maintaining trust during tough times. And and then, of course, you need to over over-rotate on communication during periods of tough times as well. Yeah, so there's there's no question of that. But should it be emotionless? Will it be? No, absolutely not. Not and again, not unless you're a psychopath or you're all about the money and you're not about the humans. I mean, that will come through in your work. People will feel that, they'll sense that, and it will, it will be a big turn off real, real quick.
SPEAKER_00So some distance is healthy, some emotion is definitely healthy. What does that do to the visibility of responsibility and and the pressure and the stress? So let's say you're taking a difficult decision, you've worked through that, you've done it for all the right reasons, it it may well make you feel miserable. How do you stay aware of any further consequences from that?
SPEAKER_01I think having a constant dialogue, and again, that's that's back to the early part of the discussion about moving off of the balcony and down onto the dance floor. As soon as you're going to make tough decisions, you've got to get down to the organization, start having one-to-one discussions, start picking up the pulse, making sure that your leaders are also communicating a lot, extra emphasis on the one-to-one. We've all been guilty of going through a busy period where the one-to-ones get skipped because you're on a flight, you're really, really busy, you met yesterday. Those things happen. But if you start skipping two and three meetings over a number of weeks, you'll lose trust. People will start not to believe that really matters. Using those ways of communicating and those windows of opportunity uh during periods of stress, super, super important. They should not be compromised. As tempting as it might be, they absolutely should not be compromised. The follow-up to that is making sure that you're doing things like double down on some of the discussions around career advancement and career opportunity or growth of some sort. And it might feel oxymoronic because, hey, you just made some redundancies, or we've just decided to sell a part of the business that lots of people liked, or whatever it happened to be, and then you're turning immediately to, hey, and let's discuss your career. But of course, what you're really demonstrating in that moment is yes, a tough decision got made, but it got made so that we can have this discussion, not the other way around.
SPEAKER_00So really, I think what we're saying is that distance is as close or as far as you personally make it, and there will be people who let that responsibility and those decisions travel beyond their visible range and either don't care or or don't realize it. But what we all need to do as humans and as leaders and employees is make sure that we're keeping visibility over as much of that responsibility as possible.
SPEAKER_01If you're a hierarchist and your whole way of setting yourself up as a CEO or any leader is that you only hear what comes from your first line of hierarchy, your N minus one organization. And then whatever happens underneath that, that's their problem. That's an almost guaranteed way for failure. You will be very distant from the entire organization very negatively if that's the way that you want to operate. Um so it is getting a balance between that and then moving down into the organization. There are real simple ways to get to know people in an organization, especially in a let's say small to mid-sized company. You know, you'll have special problems that go through the year. Instead of actually just going directly to your next line of leadership and saying, can you solve that problem? Is well, if you've decided as a CEO, that's a really important thing to think about. Go and recruit two or three people from the organization and find out who would be the right person. Invite that person directly. And if I spoke to somebody and I would say, Hey, I, you know, I'd love to invite you to come and join me on this project. It's a problem that I need to be solved for. And you're going to have a combination of different people on there. There are just lots of opportunities that will get you to the lower organizations without just making random phone calls and doing skip level meetings. It's just whether you choose to be a hierarchist or not.
SPEAKER_00And on that very practical note, I think that's a good place to wrap it up for today. So, Stephen, thank you very much for joining me. Fantastic conversation. Really enjoyed it. I hope you did too. Indeed, yeah. Thanks very much for inviting me. Each episode of Carrying It supports organizations working to improve how responsibility and mental health are understood and supported in real systems. Links are in the show notes. This conversation was about distance and the uncomfortable reality that responsibility often travels further than visibility does. Because when pressure moves through organizations, someone else eventually has to feel it.