Hayden: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to my first podcast series on leadership and well being with Hayden Fricke. I'm really excited to begin this podcast series and share lots of things related to leadership, performance and well being. Sharing stories, interviews and evidence and research that I've gathered over the last 30 years, uh, on these topics.
But before I go into that, the first is really going to be about my story. Who am I? Who's Hayden Frickie? So let me share my story with you. My story actually starts right back at school. When I was at school, all I wanted to do was play tennis. I travelled around Victoria and Australia playing tournaments.
My mum would drive me everywhere. I had a lot of success, uh, won trophies and, you know, tennis became my life as a teenager. But Mum said to me, Hayden, uh, just make sure you get your HSC or Year [00:01:00] 12 as it was back then. And I said, what do I need that for? I'm going to be a superstar tennis player. And she said, oh, just in case as backup.
Okay. So I did, uh, successfully pass Year 12, although I've got to admit I failed two out of five subjects. So I only passed three, but that was enough to get me a pass. And to be honest, I thought I was pretty dumb academically back then, but later on. Recognized I wasn't I was just focused elsewhere on my tennis.
So after finishing year 12 I thought well, there's not quite enough experience, world class experience in Australia So I decided to apply for and was successful in getting a full tennis scholarship to a U. S. college in Tennessee, , it was a college called Freed Hardeman College and there were tennis team.
I was number two in the end. We had a playoff to see what rankings people would get. The number one guy was a Spanish player, very talented player, Sergio. , and then I was number two. Number three was from West Indies. I think there was another [00:02:00] Australian number four and a Swedish guy number five. And only the number seven and eight in the team were actually from the U.
S. So it's really. We had an amazing time and I had an incredible experience. This is back in 1985. My experience was all around travelling, to play other colleges and have lots of match practice. After 12 months of doing that, the college wanted me to stay on in the U. S. and finish my degree. But for me, it was just a year of experience that I needed before turning professional.
So I turned professional, came back to Australia and played the world satellite circuit. So that's the lowest level of professional tennis, but it is at the professional level. And look, I had some amazing experiences for about three years. I learned about myself, and one of the things I learned about myself was that I was a very good tennis player.
I was taught how to hit the ball well. I was fit. I was motivated, but I used to, um, choke. I used to get nervous and anxious, and no one had ever taught me [00:03:00] how do you cope with pressure and stress and anxiety? How do you play like you do in practice in a real match when it really counts? How do you play in the flow state?
Back then, in the 80s, it was thought you were either born mentally tough or not. I had studied a couple of psychology subjects in the US and I really enjoyed them. I'd learnt more about and read up about sports psychology and I decided, yep, that's what I want to be. I want to be a sports psychologist.
So I decided to stop playing the world circuit and go to university and become a sports psychologist. So I went to Melbourne University, where I did an undergraduate degree in psychology. I then did a fourth year, a graduate diploma in health psychology at La Trobe University. I went there mostly because it was under the tutelage of a professor, Rob Kirkby, who was a sports psychologist who was running the course at La Trobe University.
as well as that, it was a great course in counselling as well, with, uh, cognitive behavioural [00:04:00] therapy kind of. uh, background and focus to the course. So I finished that course and then to become a registered psychologist I did two years of supervision under Rob Kirkby and so got a lot of experience and work with him in the sports psychology area.
For about five years I juggled being a sports psychologist, working with tennis players but also footballers and swimmers and karate and. different athletes. There wasn't quite enough work to make a full time living out of it. So I also did drug and alcohol counseling and I worked a little bit with people with mental illness.
So whilst All that was happening in my life, and particularly during those three or four years of trying to make it as a professional tennis player, there were a lot of, uh, challenging negative family things that were happening.
For example, my parents after 27 years of marriage went through a terribly emotional separation. and later divorce. I had a brother, Quentin, , who was a great tennis player, better than I was, or was [00:05:00] going to be better than I was. He was playing a tennis tournament in Spain, , at the time, and I was in the US, he was in Spain and he was struggling with the pressure, and he had a mental breakdown.
He came home and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. That was an incredibly traumatic time for him, but also the whole family to see him doing that. And also for me personally, because we were less than two years apart. We played tennis together. We grew up together and we were very, very close.
And so that was a challenging time. Whilst that was happening, I had and still have another brother, Craig, who had, , an intellectual disability, although at the time we didn't really know that. He had an IQ of 71 and below 70 is intellectually disabled, so he's right on the, on the cusp. So that caused him other challenging problems with life and later diagnosed with anxiety and depression.
So Craig was going through some challenging times. Another big challenging event at the time for us as a [00:06:00] family, my father's, uh, mother. , was living with us. So my, my grandmother was living with us for a number of years and she was in her early 80s. She was, uh, suffering from dementia. And sadly, she thought that my grandfather was out the window of our second story of our house.
And so she climbed out the window and, and fell to the ground and, uh, and my brother Quentin found her on the, on the ground and she, uh, she did die on the way to the hospital in an ambulance. And that was another incredibly traumatic, uh, episode in the family. All those things happened within about a two year period.
I felt helpless. I wanted to help. I didn't have any skills to help, but I wanted to help the family. I wanted to help repair some of these things. So I guess my interest in psychology came from both a sport and performance perspective, but also from a family that was going through challenges and my desire to help.
So the mental illness side and my need to help. So [00:07:00] my real passion for came from both of those. One thing I realised as I was working in those first five years juggling both the positive psychology side of sports psychology and the challenging side of working in drug and alcohol counselling and with people with mental health issues, and some broader counselling that I was doing, was that I really enjoyed the positive psychology side of helping people.
Normal or high functioning people be better. I found it really emotionally draining helping to work with Particularly drug and alcohol counseling where some people didn't really want to help themselves So trying to take people that are kind of struggling in life and just make them Okay, that's a worthy thing to do But it was too personal and too close to home.
So I thought What other area of psychology can I make a better living from than sports psychology that's positive? I kind of did a lot of deep reflection and I thought of organisational psychology. So I went back to university. I went to Monash University and I did a master's degree [00:08:00] in organisational psychology.
I did that degree and uh, that's what I've been doing since 1996. I've been an organisational psychologist. My first role as an organisational psychologist started in 1996 where I was a consultant at Coyne Didsbury. Coyne Didsbury was Australia's largest organisational psychology consulting firm and the first year was all about learning about assessment, psychological assessment for selection and development.
So I kind of became an expert in the, in the 90s in assessment and then from that it moved to development. coaching and development, in fact did a five day master coaching program in 1998 before coaching was kind of a thing. so I moved from assessment and development, uh, and then PDI, or Personnel Decisions International, who were the largest firm of organisational psychologists globally, with over a thousand psychologists across 32 countries in the world, they purchased Coin Didsbury over a three year period.
So I then learnt. [00:09:00] Many broader aspects of organisational psychology beyond assessment and development. Those five years were great learning for me. And then I decided to move into internal roles because my clients were HR people or, or CEOs or senior leaders in business. So I thought I need to go internally and have that experience.
So my first internal role was the head of HR or human resources for state trustees. State trustees looked after the finance of people with disabilities and also deceased estates. State trustees had about 500 people there at the time. I had a small HR team of five or six people at the time. That was a great experience for me to understand not only how to drive positive culture change, but how to understand the basics of human resources that are necessary to enable you to then drive a positive culture.
After three years in that role, I moved to a role as a General Manager of Estate Planning. So I ran a team of about a hundred people. They were [00:10:00] lawyers, financial planners, and accountants. And they were really focused on two main things, looking after development of and writing of wills for estates, and then the administration of estates.
And as part of that, there were trusts as well. That was my first role as a leader. Where I was not the expert, uh, you know, I wasn't a lawyer, I wasn't a financial planner, I wasn't an accountant. So, how do you drive performance when you're a general manager and a leader when you're not the knowledge expert?
And that was a great experience for me. After that role, for just under three years, I left SAIT Trustees and I went to Spotless as the head of, the global head of organisational development. So I went back into a functional role where I was the expert. The learning for me there was, Spotless had 33, 000 people.
and rather than driving change in a business with 500 people, how do you drive change within a business with 33, 000 people? The Spotless business, by [00:11:00] the way, was all around catering, cleaning. Laundry and property and facility management across Australia, New Zealand and a small team in the US as well.
So that was a fascinating experience for just over three years there. That was my last role as a paid employee. I set up Steeple or what was called Peoplescape in 2009, nearly 14 years later it's become Steople and grown from myself to a team of around 50 people across, right across Australia, uh, New Zealand and the US.
So very proud of the business that we've, uh, that we've developed and we have an amazing team of people that work in the business with incredible work with great clients across the globe. The core of kind of what we do is all around behaviour change, how do you drive change that sticks at an individual, team and organisational level.
We have an OE or Organisational Effectiveness Framework that helps us to [00:12:00] identify the kind of culture that organisations want to create to achieve their business strategy. And then a range of services to help drive towards the culture that you want to be successful.
So when I look back on my career, I reflect on two or three key things, and that's why I'm doing this podcast. I guess firstly around leadership and performance, they go together. It's initially performance from a sporting perspective, but then leaders that drive performance in a business sense is something that I'm really passionate about and how do we help leaders drive Successful business performance. But the other side of it is all around well being Which back 30 years ago wasn't called well being but I guess it comes from my passion around my brothers and my family and my desire to help and Support people and to enhance their own well being and really over the last I've seen a massive change in, uh, the concept of wellbeing in business.
But I've also been aware that leaders often don't [00:13:00] walk the talk. And leaders need help to drive performance, but also take care of themselves as well as others. And so the key word here is and. Leaders need to drive. Uh, performance and well being. And sometimes they struggle, they do one or the other particularly focusing more on performance than well being and so I'm passionate about helping to understand what the barriers are to doing that and then teaching leaders and businesses some skills and giving them some tools to actually be able to do that.
Because I fundamentally believe that driving performance is about long term sustainable performance, not short term. So if you want to drive long term sustainable performance you need to focus on performance and well being at the same time of yourself and of others. And so this podcast series, I guess, is a culmination of my 30 years of both business and personal experience of how do you do that.
There'll be lots of stories, anecdotes, evidence and research, and interviews with some key people to share the story and make it [00:14:00] all come alive and make it real. So I'm looking forward to, uh, putting the rest of the podcast series together and I hope this has intrigued you and interested you to listen in and tune in to the rest of the series.
