Dear Penny: How good is a good leader, really?
Dear Penny,
When I was studying design way back when, I worked for a women’s wear store in the mall to pay my rent. My main shifts were Thursday late nights and Saturdays. The store wasn’t huge, just five of us and our Regional Manager. She was formidable. Intimidating, actually. But as I got to know her, my respect grew. She worked hard, she cared, and she had an undying love for high heels. If you’ve ever worked retail, you’ll know that standing on tiled floors for eight hours in six-inch stilettos is a feat worthy of a gold medal.
A few months in, I had a bit of a wobble with my mental health and missed a shift. The next time I was in, she came in specifically to see me. She could have blissfully ignored it. She could have stuck to the KPIs and perfectly-placed-prongs conversation. But she didn’t. She checked in. She was open about her own family’s journey with mental health. She was vulnerable, direct, and incredibly caring.
That one conversation and moment of connection changed everything. I trusted her. And interestingly, she became more relaxed with me, too. Still fierce and formidable, but softer around the edges.
Years later, while studying psychology, I came across a clinical journal that stopped me in my tracks. It stated that if someone has a high level of support when they experience a difficult situation, they have a much stronger likelihood of navigating it successfully. My manager, unknowingly, had been a protective factor. She was an active intervention by simply opening the room for conversation and building trust.
Could we move that ambulance?
Recently, I was on a call with Kevin Gudmundsson, founder of HeyPenny, and Josh Darby from FENZ. Josh has done some incredible research in the first responder space that applies directly to the shop floor. He found that an employee’s perceived level of support within an organisation is a stronger predictor of a mental health event than the actual exposure to traumatic events.
The dots started connecting. When you trust your leader and they regularly check in, you feel seen. And that ‘feeling’ is actually your greatest health and safety asset.
In business we’re talking more and more about psychosocial risks. The things in the way we work that can cause psychological harm. In practice, these are things like high workload, lack of role clarity, or customer aggression. Usually, we wait for these to break someone before we act. We keep the ambulance parked firmly at the bottom of the cliff.
But what if we could move it to the top?
Fix the work, not the worker
If we can replicate that courageous conversation my manager had with me across an entire organisation, we wouldn’t just build better relationships, we’d likely build better data sets. Leading indicator data sets.
When we use a conversation-based approach as a tool for oversight, we start to see the leading indicators of risk. We hear when someone is stressed and we hear why.
Is it the new roster design?
Is it a lack of training for the new POS system?
Is it a spike in aggressive customers?
This is the shift from being reactive to being proactive. When we collect this data through regular, human-centred check-ins, we get ahead of the ‘wobbles’ that impact our people and organisations. We stop trying to fix the worker after they’ve burnt out and start fixing the work by design.
The relationship is the intervention
A McKinsey report recently highlighted that the relationship between a frontline worker and their immediate manager is the top indicator of whether they’ll stay or go. In the NZ retail sector, where the war for talent is real, that relationship becomes a core business risk mitigation tactic.
Using a tool (like HeyPenny) allows us to formalise this. It gives managers the courageous conversation prompts they need to be human-centred, while simultaneously allowing the organisation to see the high-level psychosocial trends across every store. It turns every manager into a safety sensor and active intervention.
So, what does this mean for us?
It means we can support our people by simply being human. It looks like:
Championing our leaders to move beyond task-management and into people-connection.
Widening check-in topics so that they aren't just about sales targets.
Using the insights from those chats to inform work design so it doesn't hurt people in the first place.
My manager in the stilettos didn't know she was practicing psychosocial risk mitigation. She just knew that I was a human being who needed to be seen. Imagine the power of an entire organisation that does the same…
Let’s move the ambulance.
— Penny