Episode 38 - Rob Briggs, CIIC, FRSA

It's evident that Rob and I haven't caught up in a while, as we delved deep into the distant past. But what struck me during our conversation was the incredible wealth of knowledge and experience this man possesses. Rob boasts an impressive resume: he's a certified member of the Institute of Internal Communication, a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Patron of the Royal Scottish Academy of Arts and Architecture.

In this episode, he generously shares insights from his remarkable 30+ years of working with major global organisations. Rob takes us on a journey through his extensive career, where he served as the head of internal communication and change functions for some of the world's top organisations. 

During our candid interview, Rob fearlessly shares both the highs and lows of his journey. He's not just an award winner and author, he's also a dedicated lifelong learner with multiple degrees under his belt. His latest publication, 'Organizational Trust: Culture, Context, and Communication,' can be found in the IABC Guide for Practical Business Communication.

In addition to his professional accomplishments, Rob has embarked on a new venture. He recently co-founded and now serves as the director of Greystone Gallery, a captivating new art destination in Edinburgh.

Transcript

Adrian Cropley: 0:13

Well, Hello, and welcome to another episode of A View From The Top. I'm Adrian Cropley. A View From The Top is a regular podcast from the Center for Strategic Communication Excellence, where I interview some of the world's leading communication professionals as we explore their career journey. Today I'm really excited to be chatting with Rob Briggs in Scotland. Rob is a certified member of the Institute of Internal Communication, a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, and a patron of the Royal Scottish Academy of Arts and Architecture. He has over 30 years of experience working with major global organizations and has a successful track record in developing and implementing international business transformation programs. Not only is he an author, with his latest publication being on Organisation Trust, Culture, Context and Communication in the IABC Guide for Practical Business Communication, he recently co founded and is director of Greystone Gallery, a brand new art destination in Edinburgh. Rob is also a past regional chair of IABC, which is where I met Rob, and it seems to be an eternity ago. So Rob, welcome!

Rob Briggs: 1:31

Thanks, Adrian. And thank you for the glowing introduction.

Adrian Cropley: 1:35

And I'll tell you what, I hate using words like an eternity ago, but it seems like a long time since we caught up last.

Rob Briggs: 1:42

Jeez, I can't remember exactly when it was, but I know that occasionally you, when I was based in London, you would be passing through on business or on social matters. And for me always a pleasure.

Adrian Cropley: 1:54

I always appreciate every time I am traveling, if I'm around and you can see I'm around, you always reach out and it's great to be able to catch up and chat. But I think we've been circling this profession of internal communication or communication as a whole for a great many years. I. Remember very fondly, our times at World Conference or meeting up with the regional events and so on. I can say is thank you for the amount of effort you've put into the communication profession over years as a whole.

Rob Briggs: 2:24

Thank you. I appreciate that, Adrian. It has been quite a lot, but I would say that I've learned a lot partly from experienced professionals such as yourself and partly from people who've been acting as mentors for me. The thing that I would like to commend the profession on is the degree to which the people I've met. have been so willing to share their skills, their knowledge, their experience, and their love for the craft that we do.

Adrian Cropley: 2:52

It's a very giving profession, I must admit, it was, you feel like there's a sense of home and comfort and nurturing when you're around communication professionals. And I'm not sure whether it's because we were often challenged with the same issues within organizations but certainly you don't feel alone and you feel like there's a real gift in the community, don't you?

Rob Briggs: 3:14

Oh, absolutely. I moved out to do a job in, and we'll come back to this, I'm sure, I moved out to do a job in Amsterdam in the Netherlands many years ago, and I didn't know very many people, and I was fortunate enough to be a member of IABC at the time, and found out there wasn't a functioning chapter in the Netherlands at that point in time, so I thought Why not set one up? I can build an instant group of friends. And what better way of doing that, as you're talking about nurturing, than by holding a cheese and wine evening? Went from strength to strength after that.

Adrian Cropley: 3:44

uncork a bottle, the communication professionals come out of the woodwork, don't they? Hey, but tell me a little bit about your the chapter in the book that you wrote. And, I have to admit, full disclosure to our listeners. Both Rob and I have written chapters in the same publication. So we, we were back and forth on, running things by each other and making sure that we're going to hit the mark on this book. But you did an amazing chapter on organization trust. And boy, is that a topic we're dealing with in today's world?

Rob Briggs: 4:18

Yeah, absolutely. And again, thank you for your kind words, Adrian. This isn't the first IABC handbook that that I've certainly contributed to. I did a chapter on what used to be called CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility many years ago in a in a previous edition. So I was both. I'm surprised and pleased to be asked to contribute to the the latest version of the handbook. On the topic of organizational trust, and this is something that I think is absolutely vital and as you've mentioned, even more vital today with the move from office-based working to more hybrid working and occasionally remote working. It's certainly a hot topic of conversation in businesses and one where the issue of trust comes firmly into play.

Adrian Cropley: 5:02

Oh, absolutely. Then if you think about the landscape in just a couple of years, I think that the book itself was launched in 2020 or 2021, even but if we think about the change in trust between then and now, we, things like the Edelman trust barometer was it this year that was talking about polarization and that we're moving into a world of polarization of opinion and so on. So there's a lot of challenges in this area of trust.

Rob Briggs: 5:31

Yeah, and I would say that a lot of them are facilitated and enabled by social media, whether it's public social media or internal social media within organizations. And the reason I say facilitated and not caused by is because these types of channels are echo chambers. They're ones that respond to the views that we like to hear. And within those environments, there becomes a degree, I would say, of groupthink. I'm going to sign up to channels that facilitate my interest. So if I'm interested in cats and dogs at work, and there's an internal social channel, maybe on Slack, or another type of social media, then I'm going to be interested. in that. I'm going to sign into that and I'm going to share stories about things that I like. That's an innocuous example. There are obviously many more examples, particularly with Twitter slash X with TikTok and concerns around security with the areas that people go to express their political opinions, but those political opinions are then reflected back to them. So I think there's a need from a trust perspective to be to be not to be wary but to be aware of the messaging and the context that is running through these channels. That's as they're used. I think there's a bigger point to be made about how much time we spend actually talking to each other face to face as humans.

Adrian Cropley: 7:00

And boy, do we need that face to face contact and has that challenged us over these last few years, big time, I think. But what we'll do is we'll, we should unpack this and we'll talk a little bit more about that in our podcast of vantage point, which we'll we'll talk to a little bit later. But I really want to explore your career, it's 30 year career. So where did it all start for you? What was some of the early jobs in your career?

Rob Briggs: 7:27

Yeah I think I'd go back slightly before before the jobs and say it started in the library and that I was interested in reading and writing, and when I was a kid, you literally could not keep me out of the out of the local library. I was there every week bringing more and more books home to read across a wide spectrum of interest. I just. devoured whatever knowledge I could find. And then when I was at school I became editor of the formal school magazine, and also editor of the informal school magazine. So I learned at an early stage how to present differing opinions. But in terms of jobs yeah, it was a difficult time when I graduated, which was about 1992. So like you say, quite a while ago. And I ended up working in insurance, just doing a temporary job. And somebody posted a notice on a wall saying, and get this wasn't really that computerized at the time. Write us a side of A4 paper explaining why you should be our new internal editor. So I did, and they hired me for that position. So I got my start through writing a letter saying, please give me a job.

Adrian Cropley: 8:34

oh, how cool is that? That's a story that you could absolutely share over and over again. Were you in that position where you really didn't know what it is that you wanted to do as you left school, but then you fell into this? Obviously, the calling was there, but you fell into this early work.

Rob Briggs: 8:51

It's a good point, and I think it still echoes today that I'm not sure I see an easy route into communications, particularly employee communications. I'd say this is something that is much better represented in academia in the United States, and there's more opportunities there, more, more developed industry. From a European perspective, it all grew out of the societies of what were then called industrial editors. So it's not an easy path to take. And it is one that you tend to, but to fall into rather than anything else. And yes, I was employed. by initially in my early career by marketing departments to write newsletters, internal newsletters and client magazines. That really did I had some great managers who were mentors to me at the time and showed me the ropes. It was very fortunate introduction. I did take a slight segue into providing financial advice which quite frankly, in a sales environment of that kind, I wasn't I wasn't the best, let's put it that way. I moved swiftly, realizing I was better off at writing things than trying to persuade people to take mortgages and insurance.

Adrian Cropley: 9:58

Yeah, the numbers often allude to the communication professionals, right? It's where the passion is. And obviously, the passion for you was in words early in the career. And that's where a lot of internal communication professionals started. Even today we're seeing internal comms people coming from the media side from journalists and so on. They're making that step into internal comms. So what were some of the jobs you did early in the piece and how did that then evolve in to? I'm going to call you one of the pioneers of internal communication because you and I share that same era of internal comms sat within the marketing department and basically wrote the newsletter, but then it evolved. So how did that evolve for you?

Rob Briggs: 10:43

Involved in a couple of ways. One was in terms of the breadth of what you were required to do from a media production perspective. So it evolved from purely writing to understanding more about the business and what the business was trying to do to try and get that context across initially as one way push communications into more when the concept of engagement was coming through, particularly in HR channels and HR got more human resources got more interested in how potentially they could influence colleagues in terms of what they wanted them to know, what they wanted them to feel and what they wanted them to do. So this is something that interested me, particularly as it started to delve more into the realms of both actual business needs and also psychology as well. For me this manifested in asking the question that has annoyed my mother for the past 50 plus years, which is why? Then repeated on numerous occasions and it's also something that's benefited my academic career as well because I studied philosophy for my first degree, which encouraged me to go around asking people why and encouraged me to shut up.

Adrian Cropley: 12:05

It's it's really funny that, that psychology was coming into this really early. And I bet you, you're really glad you studied psychology, the more you moved in your career, because I noticed change is a big element to your career as well.

Rob Briggs: 12:19

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that got more and more prevalent and more and more useful as I went along. I did a master's degree in change management, so change communications and reputation management back in the early 2000s. And a big part of that was what was then called industrial psychology, what we know as occupational psychology today. Again, this was wetting my appetite for understanding why people did things in a certain way. The communications element of that, to bring it back in a bit, the communications element of that is not just understanding the why, but how you can influence what type of behavior is happening in an organization now. This is where you start to tread into ethical considerations about, are you using your powers for good or for ill. That really depends, I think, on the ethics of the organization and what the communicator is charged with influencing.

Adrian Cropley: 13:18

Tell you what when you speak about that, it really resonates with me when you look at the context of today's world. I think we probably should have been asking these ethical questions much earlier. I I did an interview actually with one about our world. previous guests Fadi Ramzi around this whole issue of social media. When social media came along, communication professionals were a little bit late in adopting, and we really should have been upfront to, to ask some of those questions. Why? So we know we can do it, but why should we, and what is the outcome that we want to get from that? And are we saying the right things? And are we communicating in the right way? Because now we're in this world That has created this polarization, and a lot of it is through misinformation and pure disinformation which has really created this, so it's interesting as we explore that. But what's some of the roles that you did that really progressed your career?

Rob Briggs: 14:17

I'd say one of the earlier highlights was the time that I spent as a communications consultant with a company called Mercer. I was part of their communications practice, Mercer HR Consulting think the benefit that I got from that, one of the biggest benefits I got from that, was understanding how to work with clients. Rather than being purely internal within an organization, I'm understanding more about what the client was looking for, and then how I could bring to bear the resources of the organization or the consulting practice in order to support the client to meet their needs. In this case, it was pensions and benefits. That might sound a little dry to people. You're right, it is but there's a lot of practical perspectives, in some ways, certainly in the UK market pensions is free money, your employer is giving you a percentage of your salary, and for a large part of it, it's tax free, and what's not to you can't access it, appreciate that until it comes time to, to retire in most cases but you're getting free money and it was sometimes, Unusual that colleagues in different organizations didn't understand what they were getting or what the particular benefit was to them because the time horizon was too far away, and it was a complex subject. So helping organizations, helping employees to better understand that. But for myself, through my career, getting a better understanding of how to talk to clients, and also how to understand their language. So understanding the language of business, understanding what matters to them, being respectful for that and also being able to hold those conversations. So you've start to form a bond with different people. Just a slight segue, if I may, it's not all about the business I'd say as a communicator, if you're relatively new to the profession please, you probably do this already, read broadly and read broadly across a range of different topics so that whoever you come across, if you can tap into their passion, if you can understand more about what they're interested in on a personal level, you'll be able to build more trust with with that person. Might sound a little cynical, but it's enjoyable.

Adrian Cropley: 16:28

Oh, absolutely. And the reality is with that is understanding the person as well as the business and building those relationships is absolutely critical to getting the right outcomes. We see a lot of what I call superficial communications, and particularly now, as we're moving into the world of AI, where people can produce content without actually thinking about it. So that deep knowledge and understanding, particularly of relationships and communication is going to be critical moving forward, because a lot of people creating buzzers out there for being Eddie, the expert on things when really all they've done is typed a few sentences in chat GPT to get some content.

Rob Briggs: 17:10

Yeah, I think AI is a topic that I'd like us to get onto a bit more slightly later in this podcast because there was one other point that at this stage I wanted to make, Adrian, and that was around culture the reason I say that is, I love traveling. I know it's something you love too. I love traveling meeting different people from from different cultures. And I had, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to be the the chair of Mercers European Employee Forum back in the time that I was working with them. I know it's relatively junior employee, but this opportunity came up. It didn't seem like many people wanted to do it because there was a fair bit of administration involved, but I looked at this and the opportunity was As a fairly junior underling to travel Europe every six months, go to a different office, different culture, get exposure to working with the European and UK chairman managing directors and their respective HR directors, as well as meeting the office leaders in different locations, such as Germany or Finland. I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to easily get international experience. It was something that I wanted to do to broaden my own horizons and potentially employability in the future. So if you do get an opportunity like that, I'd thoroughly recommend taking it up.

Adrian Cropley: 18:29

that's a really good piece of advice, because I think for professionals that are developing their career is look for those opportunities, isn't it? And if you're working with an organization that gives you that, absolutely go for it, do it. So from the most, obviously, you got a little bit of that consulting background as well which I imagine came in real handy further in your career. What were some of the other jobs you did along the way that taught you the big lessons?

Rob Briggs: 18:56

I'd say that and I'll do one bad lesson a little bit later on, but I won't know, excuse me, I won't name the organization.

Adrian Cropley: 19:07

Good idea.

Rob Briggs: 19:10

But I'll talk about, I'll talk, I'll name the good ones. So I think, the formative experiences included working in Amsterdam. So again, the international angle, I had an opportunity to go and work in Amsterdam for a bank that was called ABN AMRO. And some of us with longer memories than the other may recall that it got broken up. The experience of living and working and in another culture of immersing oneself in that was wonderful. Another one I'd say that was formative was going out to Zurich. In Switzerland and working with Zurich insurance where I had the opportunity there a little bit further on in my career to work directly for the group general counsel and to work occasionally with the group CEO. So this was an opportunity not just to gain more international experience, but also to understand a bit more about working with people at the very top of business and what their priorities were. So I think those were formative experiences. The other one. I'd say was was really good for me was I spent a good six years working for the Royal Bank of Canada's Wealth Management business one of their businesses in the UK and one of their global businesses as well. And that was where I had a mandate and interestingly enough, a budget, which is not something that the communication functions tend to see much of today.

Adrian Cropley: 20:33

Everybody's jealous now, Rob.

Rob Briggs: 20:36

I had a half million pound budget and this is going back some years and I was able to maintain it year on year by becoming more efficient. But that experience was absolutely wonderful because my mandate was go out there and show us best practice and that was pretty much it. Do what best practice is. You are supposed to be the expert at this. Go out and deliver what we need. I was fortunate enough to have had a reasonable degree of experience by this time. I had access to great. We'd met by this time as well, so had access to advice and opinions from great mentors such as yourself. In fact, there, there's one person in particular that and this touches on both and this is a career. shaping story I would say, and this touches both on career and on IABC, as we've mentioned before, and it's my Ezra Carlebach story. Now, Ezra is a mutual friend of both Adrian and I wonderful, Very given and just all around decent human being, I would say, as well as being most knowledgeable people on the planet about communications now I happen to through through other people. I happened to join the the UK board for I A B C when Ezri was the the president and I was organizing events for them, which was yeah, a good experience. And after I've been doing this for a short while, Ezri asked me to stay behind after a board meeting. Now, I dunno about you, Adrian, but if anybody

Adrian Cropley: 22:00

Ask you to stay behind.

Rob Briggs: 22:03

if anybody who's been listening to to this podcast has worked in a corporate environment and been asked to stay behind after work or stay behind after a meeting, then normally your heart sinks

Adrian Cropley: 22:14

Yes.

Rob Briggs: 22:15

God, what have I done? I dunno. And and he took me one to, so Ezri took me to one side and he said, Rob, You've been doing a lot of hard work for us. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, fine. Would you mind, this is the way he phrased it and this has stuck with me for many years. Would you mind going to IABC's European conference for us? We can't cover everything for you, but we'll pay for your tickets and your flight and hotel, as long as it's not too expensive. And then come back. The only thing I want from you is a short report and a presentation back to the board. I was like, wow, that's the best. It's something I'm interested in. It's a gift. It's the best thing that anybody's done for me in my career to this day. So thank you, Ezri. What I've learned from that, I'd say, was humility not personally per se, but the power of humility and the power of being nice to people as well. We don't have to be critical all the time.

Adrian Cropley: 23:10

that energy that you get from that. Lovely relationship that nice and you're right, you couldn't get a nicer guy apart from yourself, of course, than Ezra. He is absolutely brilliant I think they're the big lessons that we get along the way, isn't it? When we have those people in our lives, it gives us that mentorship, but shows us in the actions that they do and that's how good leadership is built as well. So from the Royal Bank of Canada where did you go to next? What was the next part of your career journey?

Rob Briggs: 23:43

I had a number of different roles and perhaps I'll touch on the

Adrian Cropley: 23:47

The not so nice example, is that the?

Rob Briggs: 23:50

the not so nice example. So this is where I went to work for a very large global organization that was set up on a partnership structure. Now, I'm going to try and be quite discreet about this. Like I said, I don't want to open you up to potential litigation, Adrian. and then me

Adrian Cropley: 24:11

I got a tough hide, Rob, tough hide.

Rob Briggs: 24:15

What happened here was that when I interviewed for this particular role, there was a global role and required a team of five of whom four were in place when I joined the organization. Two of the four that were already there had been let go and the remaining posts, plus the two missing posts were on a hiring freeze. I was put in a situation where I had to basically work with 16. Global partners for this organization and six, their respective 16 marketing directors. It turned out that as you might imagine, this was an impossible task to fulfill with a relatively small team. And it got to the point where I was working a hundred hour plus weeks, and this was seen as normal within this particular organization, but I don't know about you, but my health couldn't cope with that. I ended up in a situation where I wasn't producing my best work. I was getting very stressed. I was getting physically ill. And it came to the point after six, seven months where I felt the need to resign from that position. What did I learn from that? I'd say, if you find yourself in a situation where you're not happy at your work, either try and change it, which I which I did try, and if that's not possible, your health isn't worth it. Go on one of Adrian's retreats. Go to Bali

Adrian Cropley: 25:41

come to Bali. Absolutely.

Rob Briggs: 25:46

Do something that you can't be a work machine 24 hours a day, take care of yourself, and if you find that and if you've tried and tried your best to resolve a difficult situation at work and it's not soluble, make plans to move, it's not worth it.

Adrian Cropley: 26:02

That's a real valuable lesson, Rob And thank you for sharing it because they're very, that's a very personal experience. And I know there's many communication professionals out there that just, they feel they need to hang in there to fix an organization. And I think the best advice there is try and change it. But if it's not going to change. Get the heck out of there. Your life, your health and your expertise is far too valuable to be hanging around in what I would call the toxic organization. There's many of them out there. And sadly we're seeing more and more these days. So thank you. That's a really good share, Rob. And a great lesson for you as well going through the career. And it's funny I'm sitting here and I'm almost, you get that melancholy feeling because I know I've been there as well in my career. The best thing you can do is move on and get out and you go, Oh, actually, I am good at something and as you start rebuilding your worth again, and it takes a little while to get back, doesn't it?

Rob Briggs: 27:01

That's a very good observation, Adrian. And it's true, if you are in a situation, whether it's a work relationship or a personal relationship, and somebody is gaslighting you, and by that I mean they're telling you things that that aren't true about yourself, in order to further their agenda, then get the hell out. It's it's really not worth your health. So good point.

Adrian Cropley: 27:23

I'm going to flip into talking about Greystone Gallery in a moment. But before we do that, I want you to or have the opportunity to share any other of those pearls of wisdom that you wanted to leave with communication professionals.

Rob Briggs: 27:39

So one of the things that I'd like to touch on briefly is working for yourself on something you've been immensely successful at Adrian. This is where we start to get into the consulting sphere. So I've had, a good 20 plus years working for other organizations. It came to the point in about early 2015, where I was casting round for for another job and an opportunity came up. Again, this is one of those by chance moments. An opportunity came up to do some contracting work. It's not something that I'd considered before. And communication professionals, if they move into this world, sometimes they move into working for themselves and running multiple projects at the same time, maybe one day a week here, two days a week there. Others, like myself, prefer to work on one specific client, full pelt for a set period of time. So I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to go and work for the Cooperative Bank in the UK, relatively shortly after it had gone through a major major scandal and was having to put in place a large redress and remuneration program. This particular challenge involved the bank having got itself into a pickle in terms of not following certain. legal and financial regulations, which meant that they were losing an insane amount of money every single day and needed to bring in a team of experts, quite a lot of experts actually, at the time to, to fix this. Sorry, I think I said remuneration earlier. That would have been nice. Redress and remediation rather than remunerate. So the.

Adrian Cropley: 29:22

Now, there's a slight difference, right?

Rob Briggs: 29:26

The bank did end up having to pay people,

Adrian Cropley: 29:28

I can imagine.

Rob Briggs: 29:29

the things that it had not done right. And I have to say they just be very clear about this for anybody who's listening from from the co operative bank or indeed work with back back in the day and has made massive strides to reassert itself as a, as an ethical organization, as one that is way better governed now. So hopefully that takes me out of any holes that I've just dug for myself.

Adrian Cropley: 29:53

The reality is many organizations go through cycles and they learn from the lesson. It's the ones that don't is the problem. We've seen many organizations come back from the brink from a disaster or a scare that that they've had. Full credit. We're very supportive of those types of organizations.

Rob Briggs: 30:11

yeah, and what I would say is that if you're going to move, if any communication colleagues are thinking about moving to working for themselves, certainly in the UK. The financial rewards can be substantially higher than than working for an employer, but you trade that off because you have zero zero benefits other than ones that you pay for yourself. I had no holiday, no pension, no nothing and your. level of job security is way lower as well, because you're a gun for hire. You're an expensive tech in this and you're being brought in to share your knowledge and expertise for a limited period of time. One piece of advice that I would give colleagues thinking about doing this and setting up their own companies, et cetera, is. You're not an employee, and I think it's very easy to get sucked into the company culture, and to a degree it's necessary to understand that, but you can become, you can get the feeling in my experience that you're part of the company, and that's great if you're accepted to that point, but bear in mind you're still contracting, you're still Effectively working for yourself or an umbrella company or an agency, whatever it is, and don't forget that because you are expendable. You're really expendable. Hopefully you won't get treated in that way. I certainly haven't. I've been lucky in that respect. But if you can go in, if you can demonstrate your value, if you can deliver, and I think this is the important part, finding the right kind of balance between. What you know and what you do and demonstrating what you do is important. And this is something I really want to ram home. Demonstrating what you do is important. Make sure that you have got a way of influencing or at least presenting to the people who are holding the purse strings. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, They are controlling your contract they're controlling what you're earning. They'll control your reputation to a degree, because you may need references from them in the future or work from them in the future as well. So make sure they fully understand what it is that you're delivering that helps to meet their business need, not just their communication need, but what's the business need that your role is helping them to deliver and how can you demonstrate the value in that?

Adrian Cropley: 32:26

Yeah, it's that whole return of the investment, isn't it? When we look at organizations that are bringing you in, they really want to get that return. And yes, you can develop those great relationships, but you really have to demonstrate that value. Fabulous advice, Rob. I'm going to have to ask you now, and switching gears entirely, Greystone Gallery, this is something you've set up with your wife, right?

Rob Briggs: 32:52

Yeah, that's correct. So my consulting business is called Greystone Communications. Grey being my middle name and stone demonstrating a degree of solidity and reliability. At least that's how it sounded in my head.

Adrian Cropley: 33:04

It does to me.

Rob Briggs: 33:06

Thank you my wife about five years ago decided to change careers. She'd had a long career in fashion, textiles specifically, traveled the world, but got a little bit jaded by some of her more recent work in that field and said to me, I'm fed up. I want to change careers. I said, fine. What are you interested in? And she said, art, I said, great. What do you know about art? To which the response came? So I said what do you know? I was studying at Verbeck College, University of London at the time. I said is a Evening University, so you could maybe see if they've got a course you'd be interested in. So she enrolled on a History of Art Masters degree, thoroughly enjoyed it, ended up doing some intern work at a place called the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, quite a prestigious public gallery, thoroughly enjoyed that. volunteered for a bit more. And then when we moved up to Scotland, she managed to land a job as a gallery manager in a local suburban gallery. Whilst I think she found that challenging initially, she learned on the job and learned a huge amount about dealing with clients and dealing with artists. After a year or so of doing that, it was time for her to really to strike up on, on her own. We set up Greystone Gallery and we moved into a lovely location an area called Leith, to the north of Edinburgh. Started taking art on consignment from local artists and primarily focusing on. Scottish artists, landscapes cityscapes, some abstract work and and things like that. And I have exciting news as well. And you are the first, Adrian, you are the first with your listeners. To hear this. We are on the move. We are going to be moving from our current location to a location that is more in the heart of Edinburgh. I can't give you all the details at this point in time because it's subject to lease negotiations. So my wife gets to run the gallery and talk to the artists and I get to do the legal and operational stuff in the background, which kind of happens, I have to say, just in case my current employers are listening. This happens. After working the weekends. For me So we're doing some lease negotiations for a fabulous. New site There was previously another gallery in a very upmarket part of town. So we are super excited to be able to share that we're building a new website. We've got a new brand coming in this is the stuff that I get to do on the side that that I really enjoy.

Adrian Cropley: 35:37

And look, that's that. That's a really good thing to end on. I'm going to share those links with our listeners. But it is about having things that you enjoy doing in your life. And obviously, you do that with your consulting and the work that you do with your clients and the companies that you work with. But I think having that multiple layer to life is it keeps you young, keeps you on top of things and keeps you learning by, by the sounds of it, Rob,

Rob Briggs: 36:05

I never stop learning. I've Just finished my third master's degree in creative writing and my wife had said, stop,

Adrian Cropley: 36:13

no more.

Rob Briggs: 36:15

I said, I want to do a doctorate. He said, no, wait till you retire.

Adrian Cropley: 36:21

That's right. That could be your pastime when you retire is doing a doctorate.

Rob Briggs: 36:24

Exactly. Go earn something first.

Adrian Cropley: 36:28

Rob, it's been absolutely brilliant talking to you on a view from the top. Thank you for joining me.

Rob Briggs: 36:34

Thank you, Adrian.

Adrian Cropley: 36:35

Okay, and thanks everyone for joining us on this episode of A View From The Top, and we look forward to connecting with you next time. Stay tuned for Rob's interview on Vantage Point, our member podcast, where he'll talk a lot about organization trust and dive into that topic a little bit more. Take care, everyone. Goodbye.