Will Metcalfe: 0:00

Music.

Host: 0:06

Hello and welcome to the IOSH podcast. IOSH president Stuart Hughes sits down with CBRE's managing director Will Metcalfe to discuss how the commercial real estate services and investment firm views the health and safety of its people.

Stuart Hughes: 0:26

Welcome to our CEO podcast series. Hopefully, you've been enjoying the episodes so far, and todaywill be no different. I've got with me Will, who's a VP for CBRE. Some people might be familiar with CBRE, but for those that aren't, maybe you could just give us a little bit of explanation as to your role within the organisation and what the organisation does?

Will Metcalfe: 0:50

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me. Great to be invited on. So, CBRE - we are a global real estate business, probably one of the world's largest, actually, operating right across the globe, doing real estate services in many different guises. The part of the business that I work in, which is the GWS, or global workplace solutions, primarily focuses on facilities management and project management. We work with customers and clients of all different sizes and different markets right across the UK and globally. But the part of the business I'm in is very much UK-focused. We've got around 7000 employees in the UK, and generally they are out on our client sites, delivering facilities management services for those individual clients. For those of you that are wondering, 'What is facilities management?' Because it's not something that I think anybody goes, 'I want a career in FM'. If you ask my wife, it would be bugs and boilers. This is the way she describes it. It's absolutely a lot more than that. You know, if you think about a building, it's everything which makes that building tick. It's the electrical infrastructure, the heating, the cooling, the toilets - making sure they work. And then it's making sure it's kept clean and secure, and there's no mice and rats running around inside it, and that the people inside the building are fed. Then moving on to things like decarbonisation and workplace experience - the experience that clients' teams have when they come to that building - we help curate that sort of thing. So, a really interesting profession, but one that sort of flies under the radar a little bit.

Stuart Hughes: 2:34

I think there's some parallels to safety in that as well, in terms of a lot of the things that you've just mentioned, there are things that people just assume will happen. So, I come to work, my workplace is clean. It's safe for me to enter. I have a good experience when I'm there. I'm fed. The showers, the toilets, everything works, all of that stuff. I talk about this with folk - very rarely do you ring up at the end of the day and say,'Congratulations, great day. Everything's worked as it should do'. You only get involved when there's an issue. Before we started recording, you mentioned that you're new-ish to the VP role, so I just wondered if you could give us a bit of background of your time with CBRE and journey to VP?

Will Metcalfe: 3:24

I've been with the business for 13 years. I started out running one of those contracts, so out on a client site, delivering engineering services to a customer here in the West End. I've had the privilege to run some iconic buildings, like the Gherkin. I led an engineering team in the Gherkin, which was incredibly cool and challenging. And then I've sort of stepped my way through the business, through more senior management roles, into leadership and, most recently, yes, into the into the VP role for the UK, which also runs a COO function for our business. So, I've got a lot of our SME functions - procurement, technical, ESG, and equally QHC(in our world, health and safety), that report directly into me. And that's been really interesting, quite a difference for me to be able to see how things work from the middle of the business, rather than being in the business. It's been a cool last five months, getting to get into grips with that.

Stuart Hughes: 4:26

Awesome. Well, I wish you very all the very best as you continue on that journey with them and as you transition into that leadership role. One of the things that I think is a very lazy trope, but you see it quite often on socials, and you sometimes hear it on the shop floor of organisations, and it's that the people at the top don't care about the people who are actually doing the work. And I just wonder, when you hear that, how do you react to it? Maybe you could talk about what CBRE do to demonstrate care for those 7000 people that are in their employment in the UK?

Will Metcalfe: 5:04

I guess I see the same things as you on social media or in the media sometimes. that pervade that view. I don't agree with it, if I'm honest. I think certainly within CBRE and in the industry that I work in, I think we understand. We're a service industry and it's our people, delivering those services right at the coalface, which matter. If we care and look after those people, they will look after the customers and, in turn, as a business, we will be successful. So, I think we place a lot of emphasis upon that as a business. And we really try to ensure that when we're talking about development and engagement, it's right down to the engineers and the administrators in our businesses, so that they understand, one, the business and what we're trying to achieve, but two, interpret that themselves and deliver great service, ultimately, for our clients,

Stuart Hughes: 6:02

Yeah. This feels to me to be quite a shift in in in the business world. And I think lots of things go around in circles of fashion, I suppose. But you could go back to organisations like Cadbury's, where they set up and they had a very village feel to them and there were schools for children of the workers and all of this kind of stuff. Now it feels like there's a genuine move towards a greater level of care to the employees, because not only is that like a correct thing to do, but there's a business benefit to it as well. And you've just articulated that - the better our people feel, the more likely we are to deliver a better service to our clients; the more likely we are to get more clients and grow.

Will Metcalfe: 6:53

It makes good business sense, as well as being the right thing to do. It does make good business sense. I think, if I wear my safety hat, if we've got our teams behaving in the right way, and they feel like they're looked after and their stress levels are less, and well-being is good, they're going to make good decisions at work. Often, as I'm sure you're well aware, an accident occurs because somebody looks at a shortcut, or they're stressed and don't make a good decision in the moment. If we can help that then, then we should.

Stuart Hughes: 7:25

I imagine - and this is an imagine, because I've not worked in in in the FM world- that your people are under quite a lot of pressure. Because whilst I'm sure there's a lot of proactive things that the organisation is doing, or there's a quite a lot of proactive elements to the job role, there's also quite a lot of reactive stuff. How do you help people deal with that, those kind of high pressure moments?

Will Metcalfe: 7:55

Yeah, that's a great observation. I think it absolutely is in those moments where our teams get tested. There's a certain amount of things that you can do to support them with that - we do training around working under pressure, we do scenario training and testing with them, so that you're almost in a safe space and allow them to be under that pressure. Then you can talk about things that went well in the moment, things that didn't, so that when the real thing happens, they've almost been through it before, and it's not new to them. I think that really helps. But equally, we know that all of our teams come to work to do a great job and making sure that they know that making a mistake is okay, I think, goes a

Stuart Hughes: 8:40

I think it's really powerful to hear, that long way as well. We're all going to make mistakes. We're human. And as long as those mistakes don't end up in something which could be a lot more serious, it's a good thing, it helps us learn. So I think having that culture where safety is really pushed right down to the ends of the organisation, and they know that they can make a mistake. I think that really helps. idea of being a learning organisation and having this growth mindset that says,'Actually, we accept some failures will occur because of the fallibility of the fact we're all human, but those are the moments where we get the opportunity to learn and improve and develop and ultimately evolve. You know how we operate'. So. I think that leadership voice, and that leadership shadow in that context, is important. I'm going to take you to up to the other end of the organisation now. One of the things I hear quite a lot from the safety profession is a demand or a request for OSH to be sat at the board level or in the C-suite and I just wondered what your what your thoughts are on that?

Will Metcalfe: 9:54

I think every organisation is structured differently. I whole-heartedly believe that that safety and risk management has to have a voice at the most senior levels in any organisation. I suppose I provide that a UK level for our organisation. I've got Adam, who reports into me directly, as the SME leader for the business, from a health and safety perspective. The model that we run within the business, we've got nine divisions, which are fairly big businesses in their own right. In every single one of those leadership teams is a mini board in the business, and there's a health and safety professional in each and every one of those teams. And that washes down through the business; that enables us to stay really close to our teams. We've got health and safety managers that report and work with them really closely. It's important to have a voice at the board level, absolutely, but it's also important to make sure that the voices at all points of the organisation are heard, because if you're not hearing those voices, then what you're hearing at board level isn't going to be correct anyway. Making sure you've got that ability to hear and understand what is happening, right at the coalface of the business and then translate that to the board, is probably the most important thing.

Stuart Hughes: 11:06

Cool. Maybe you can just talk to me about the mechanisms that you deploy to enable that collective voice of the organisation to come all the way up. And then how do you do that translation? Because sometimes our language in safety is a little bit impenetrable - acronyms and all of this good stuff. How do you decipher all of that to work out what's important to then discuss at board?

Will Metcalfe: 11:38

There's data points and data is important, but I think you can get a little bit lost in the data sometimes, and it can be a bit paralyzing if you don't interpret it in the right way. We've got some good governance in the business. Each and every one of our contracts has a monthly review, where health and safety and QHC is a topic which is actively talked about, and that goes all the way up through the business to the business group reviews that we would do on a global basis. So that's one of the ways that we translate some of that information. I think more important than that is our leaders within the business get out into the business and go and see the teams, and that doesn't mean walking around with a clipboard. That's pretty old school. It's going out and talking to the to the teams, letting them have a voice and ask you questions, and getting under the skin of what might be going on any given day or on any contract. I think those much more qualitative things, which then inform some of the challenges you might have in the business and some of the things you might want to think about doing differently, or some of the risks that might need managing. That's when you have the most powerful conversations in those board meetings, and probably the most animated conversations come from that topic.

Stuart Hughes: 12:57

Statistics are statistics, aren't they, at the end of the day, and they don't necessarily have an art behind them. But when you've actually gone and looked in the whites of somebody's eyes and they've told you where things that are happening within the organisation are causing them difficulty or distress, or whatever it might be, you can then translate that into a very human story. And it doesn't surprise me that that then generates animated discussion, because I know my view of the world is generally nobody in that leadership position is sat there wanting to make everybody else's life difficult. There's good friction in business that's designed to stop people from doing things that you don't want them to do, and there's bad friction that you want to get rid of, which is causing you to be inefficient or ineffective. You mentioned that you've got nine sub mini boards with OSH professionals on and then your OSH director is reporting into you. What information from them is useful or helpful as you go for those leadership conversations, when you're sat at the board?

Will Metcalfe: 14:08

As we touched on, data is important. So, we've got the lag indicators and leading indicators that you'd expect from any organisation, and it's important to review those and make sure that the trends are going in the right way. What our team do really well is pull out the insights from that data, interpret it in the right way, so that we can then have some meaningful conversation about what the data is telling us. We would like to think that we're well-connected with the business, and it's as much in those meetings the challenge that the OSH profession, or the OSH specialists in our business bring to us. We're a business which is very much based around growth, expanding what we do, and the health and safety professionals in our business are there to enable that. They are an integral part of allowing us to do that in a sustainable and safe way. But they are not the handbrake - they can help us push an accelerator. It's making sure that, when we're talking about these things, we're all aligned against that one vision.

Stuart Hughes: 15:16

Yeah, and I think that will be really inspiring for people listening, because that leadership position of safety being an integral part to sustainable growth, right? Because organisations can grow spectacularly and fail very well because the growth isn't sustainable. And I think that link of, 'Actually, if we do this with the right mechanisms that enable growth, and the boundary of risk tolerance, we can do it in a in a safe way'. If I was sat somewhere going,'Oh, that's what my leaders are talking about', I'd feel really inspired to be in that organisation. It's also messaging that we as a profession should be happy to champion ourselves, so that we are doing that self-promotion. What is it, day to day, that you need or want from your safety professionals in your organisation?

Will Metcalfe: 16:15

Making sure that they've bought into and understand the vision and the culture of the business is really important, because when you get that, then they can challenge you. We really want our SMEs across the board, not just from a health and safety perspective but all of them, to challenge us, to make sure that we're making the right business decisions - that we are looking at the right markets to go into, that we're looking to work with the right clients, that the work that we're taking on, from a project perspective, is the right type of stuff. There's lots of different viewpoints that come into that decision-making process. And without challenging, without people having a voice and speaking up, you can get to the wrong decision. So, really important to me and the other leaders in the business is making sure that the OSH guys now in our team speak up and have a voice and have an opinion. I think that's really important.

Stuart Hughes: 17:07

It's funny, actually, I was listening to a podcast on the way down here this morning. It was talking about how difficult it is for people socially to say no to other people - the social tax of saying no is higher than just saying yes and perhaps doing something that you might not really want to do. I hear a lot, and lots of organisations talk about it, we want people to speak up. It's quite a challenging thing. How do you foster that environment or culture within the organisation to enable not just the OSH specialists - as you mentioned, there's a lot of different voices in the room that you need to consider - but how do you bring those out of people into the fore?

Will Metcalfe: 17:54

I think it starts with the culture. You need to have a culture which allows that to be the case, and I think role-modelling it, making sure that me, Kevin, my boss, and other senior leaders in the business, role model that behaviour. Because if people see the right way of saying no or standing up for something, then they know that they can do it as well. As long as you're having those challenging conversations, with respect and integrity, they're the right thing to do. I firmly believe role modelling allows others to see that it's cool to do that.

Stuart Hughes: 18:26

And are you seeing that that's what's happening?

Will Metcalfe: 18:29

We have a lot of challenging conversations, for the right reasons. On a monthly basis, we'll get the senior team across the UK together, and we'll have some really in-depth, challenging discussions about the hot topics of the day but always with a great outcome and done with the right intent. As long as everybody understands that, those conversations are great - good fun to be in!

Stuart Hughes: 19:00

Yeah, a challenging conversation where you've got two very different sets of opinions coming together and the ability to dance around that, then come to some form of common ground in the middle, or some decision that needs to be made and a direction to go in, and then leave the room all still with your relationships intact. That stuff is quite an enjoyable part of the part of the challenge. So we've spoken about what you need and what you want from the safety professionals in the organisation and what you get, which seems to have quite a good alignment, which is really great to hear. What are the things that you worry about from a risk perspective within your organisation? And do they cause you concern?

Will Metcalfe: 19:53

The number one thing is the safety of our people. As I've said, we've got 7000 people across the UK and very often they're out on a client site, which is not as connected as it would be if you're all in a building together. So communicating with those teams and making sure that they understand the common vision, the way that we're all trying to work together. What is necessarily going on in the business and the strategy is sometimes tough to get that message right into the contract. I think we do well at it. We've got many different ways that we communicate with the teams, but making sure that those teams have that autonomy and empowerment and they understand that the contract manager looking after a site, it's their job to ensure the safety of the team as much as everybody else to look after their own safety. I think that works really well for us. That's part of the model that we've got, which pushes that accountability really downstream into the business. Another challenging area that we do have as well, we've got a big

Stuart Hughes: 20:49

I think it's interesting - not taking your supply chain which supports us right across the UK. Some real specialist people that deal with some really specialist kits in some of the environments that we work in, and making sure that they understand what we expect of them from a safety perspective and how they also support us in managing risk and delivering great service for our customers. That, again, is an area where we work really hard to manage and to communicate with them to understand that. That's another area where you can never take your foot off the gas. You've got to keep working hard at that to make sure that your supply chain are aligned as well. foot off the gas. Every safety professional that I've ever met is adept at spinning plates. You might find yourself throwing lots of attention at one and giving it an optimal spinning speed and then you've got to run back along all the others and see what's going on. I think that supply chain piece is really interesting. In essence, you've got a set of CBRE standards, principles, however you want to phrase them, and then you have a need for people to buy into those, because they're not just working on your site, are they? They're working on your client's site as well.

Will Metcalfe: 22:19

They're an extension of what we do, absolutely. And we have to view them as that. So, when they come to site, making sure that we're doing some of the basics, inducting them in the right way, and explaining to them the nuances of the sites that they're on. But equally, that starts from making sure that, at leadership level, those businesses are connected with our leaders. That there's a common understanding about levels of expectation, service standard, all that good stuff, which goes with working hard with supply chain. And then the procurement team within the business do a great job of working alongside the business and QHC to make sure that, collectively, we work with our supply chain to that end.

Stuart Hughes: 22:56

How would you pull learnings from people that aren't necessarily directly in your employment? So that supply chain, if they've got challenges or issues or safety concerns from their viewpoint, when they're on your sites working with you, how do you ensure that kind of knowledge doesn't just walk out the door when they disappear?

Will Metcalfe: 23:17

It's a good question. I guess that we leave that down to our contract teams in the most part, in that they're managing them on a day-to-day basis. A lot of these guys come into the sites repeatedly, so they get to know them, they do actually become part of the site team. And I think when you foster that sort of inclusiveness with with those partners, and make them feel like a partner, then you get that anyway. They will use the same processes that our team use to highlight risks and hazard spot and do all of that good stuff, which keeps people locally on a site safe. If they see and feel a good culture on site around safety and well-being, they generally will tend to follow that. That's how we overcome that.

Stuart Hughes: 24:04

Again, this is an outsider's view, so please feel free to tell me I'm completely wrong, and it wouldn't be the first time, but it feels to me like the built environment is changing and has a lot of challenge within it. You mentioned earlier decarbonisation. Global warming's a wicked problem and climate change is - we're living in a dream world if we don't think it's going to impact us. In the UK, you've got a lot of legislative changes to building regulations and those standards seem to increase and change at quite a rapid rate. How do you address some of those things? How challenging is it to be a leading organisation within the space?

Will Metcalfe: 24:55

We see ourselves as that. We feel obligated to help our customers and, ultimately, the planet, in that sense. The built environment is a huge carbon-producing aspect of what we do. So, we have a duty to look at how we - in every aspect of what we do - reduce that? There's different ways of looking at it. With our clients, it's how do we use the buildings differently? And there's lots of ways that we can do that. Or how do we alter the buildings to be more energy efficient and use less carbon and use less electricity. So we'll help them upgrade the buildings. We'll help them use them differently so that they're more efficient. I think if we do all of those things and we know that we are a big part of our clients' Scope 3 emissions. And so, again, data plays a big part in this. We map a lot of the data, all of the data in our supply chain, so we understand where some of those emissions are coming from. And that means we can be quite targeted about how we help our customers reduce their emissions. But it's a hugely growing topic, as you can imagine. I talked my senior clients - it's in their top three challenges. Lots of boards have declared 2030, 2040 net zero targets. Then the real estate and the facilities management teams have then got to go and play a big part in achieving those, so we can help in that.

Stuart Hughes: 26:26

Do you panic every time you hear some somebody stand up and announce a 2030 or a 2040? Do you think,'That's a lot of work coming our way!'?

Will Metcalfe: 26:34

I think sometimes people don't realise just how much work it is. We've got to completely cut out the use of natural gas in our buildings if we're going to achieve it. We've got to get to using electrification and then making as much green energy as possible to power that stuff. And there's a whole heap of other things that go alongside it. Electric vehicles is another big hot topic, as you can imagine. But it's all for the right reasons. I think the focus that it gets now is absolutely right. We've seen, within our own organisation, we had a team of maybe 10, three or four years ago. That team is over 200 now. It's hugely popular and that's led by the demand of our clients. So, we see it as a massively important aspect of what we do.

Stuart Hughes: 27:24

There's also the change in risk profile with that as well, isn't there? You see quite a lot - whether it's an EV battery fire, or whether it's solar panels or solar farms and things like that - where, yes, we're looking to solve one problem in one area, but we're introducing a new risk in another. And I suppose there's an interesting seesaw there of how you balance both of those elements. If you don't mind, I want to do a bit of time

Will Metcalfe: 27:50

There is, and I think making sure of the quality of the equipment that you're using is really important. Whenever you have something which becomes really popular, like this, then you get an influx of slightly inferior products. Our job is to make sure that we deliver our clients the best products, things that are going to work, work safely and have longevity. I think battery technology is interesting. We're going to see how that pans out into the future. I'm hearing that we're going to have vehicles in which travel and just go back to 2020. So, COVID. Massive shift, people you've got a thousand-mile range in the next couple of years, which will be cool. I think that'll be a game changer. Let's see where that tech gets us. are all at home, hardly anybody's in the office. The way in which businesses are using their built environment and their infrastructure shifts around, almost overnight How did you navigate through that? And what do you think is the biggest legacy from that, or the lasting impact that you're dealing with now? Certainly for the workplace, it changed everything, overnight as well. It's made everybody more proficient in the likes of using Teams and Zoom and all that sort of thing. There's some great benefits to that, particularly from an ESG perspective. People are traveling probably less but, ultimately, people still need to get together - we're humans; we need that interaction. Therefore the office is absolutely not dead. We're going have to continue to work at getting people back into the workplace. I think the legacy from it, though, from my perspective, is it made a lot more people understand how much work goes into running buildings. The hospitals - we do a lot in the NHS, in some of the acute hospitals, particularly London, and what those teams went through and delivered and achieved through the pandemic, to keep those hospitals up and running, to keep the oxygen systems flowing. That was immense. I'm super-proud of what those teams did. The cleaners that were in those in those spaces, putting themselves at risk. I think it's brought the facilities management profession a little bit further forward, hopefully, in the public view. And that, for me, is an amazing legacy.

Stuart Hughes: 30:25

What an amazing thing to have to have been part of, for those teams and people that were enabling those things to to continue. I think this is the key bit for me - this term'enabling'. You spoke about it earlier and how you view the profession. We've got an awful reputation, right? People feel OSH professionals just get in the way. Red tape this, red tape that. Health and safety says'no'. There's a billion different quotes I could go with. What's your perception, having been in and around built environment for the last 13 years, of where the profession was and where we are now, and how you see it?

Will Metcalfe: 31:05

I think that's a really outdated view. I absolutely see the health and safety professionals in our business as an enabler to sustainable growth. To grow, you have to take some risks. You're not going to grow if you don't take risks. And the key to it is that healthy tension, as you said, and the challenge that the function brings to the business leaders about how you deliver that growth sustainably and safely. Every OSH professional listening to this should understand that they play a crucial part in their organisation's ability to grow. They're not the handbrake; they're absolutely an enabler for growth. It's about working out how you plug yourself into that growth and understanding your role in it. For me, that is absolutely key and it's great that our team deliver that in our business.

Stuart Hughes: 31:54

This is a really nice segue, and we haven't planned this, so thank you very much! You've just spoken about this idea of plugging yourself into it and understanding and gaining the alignment and the healthy challenge and all of that stuff, which I think is super to hear. But there will be people that either aren't tuned into their senior leadership or don't have access, or may even be a bit intimidated about how they go about starting to build that relationship. I just wondered whether you've got any advice for our listeners on how to build good relationships with the senior leadership team? Or how to drive that influence that enables them to not be a handbrake and be all the great things you just mentioned?

Will Metcalfe: 32:42

It comes down to being visible and not being afraid to put themselves forward. Have a discussion with the leaders in the business. Ask them to come out to the sites that they work in, or wherever it may be. Be curious about having that interaction. Don't be afraid to do that. I think most leaders in any business want to get to know their business as much as they can. Yes, we've got busy, big jobs, but I think some of the most fun that I have within my role is still to go out and see the teams that are working on site. Get to meet them, hear about the great things they're doing, hear about some of the challenges they've got, then go away and actually do something about those challenges as well. Often, we only get that opportunity when we get invited out to go and see them. So, I would say, use that as an ability that gets you in front of those leaders. That will take you a long way.

Stuart Hughes: 33:42

There's something that you just mentioned there that I think's really interesting. Sometimes, people feel, 'Oh, okay, I've got this challenge, but surely I should be able to overcome this challenge'. And sometimes you're a little bit apprehensive about going and talking to the senior leadership, so they don't really know which direction to go in or how to do it. You've just said you love it, right? A fun bit for you is to take a problem off somebody else, think about it, and work out how you and your leadership group can address that challenge. How does that dialogue go for you? Other than actually going to fix people's problems and them seeing you kind of live your words, how have you fostered that kind of culture that you're getting that?

Will Metcalfe: 34:31

If you spoke to any of my team, particularly my new team around more central functions, there's three key things that I ask them to think about, when they're going about their day jobs. One is 'What are you doing to support the growth of the business?' Secondly, 'Is it making the lives of our teams easier and more efficient?' And thirdly, 'Is it helping to manage risk?' If the things that they're doing ARE doing those things, then they're doing the right thing, and if they're not, then they should be questioning if what they're doing is the right thing, There will be times where you just need to help - maybe a contract team, when you meet them, understand that it's within their gift to change something, to help with the challenge that they've got. And other times it might be, 'We've had this before. I'm not getting the right tools to do the job.' Then I take that back to the procurement team and say, 'Look, can you engage with our tool suppliers? These screwdrivers that we're getting are not up to what the team want. Can we look at something else?' Something as simple as that can change how easy or inhibiting a job is for one of our engineers to do. I think it's those sorts of things which make a difference.

Stuart Hughes: 35:42

Yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be a big, giant problem. I think that's interesting, isn't it? That leadership bit of being the conduit to know who to pull together, to make the connections, to generate the change that's needed. Let's do some quick-fire questions, if you're up for that. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Will Metcalfe: 36:03

This has come from our global CEO, when I first met him. He came out on a site visit and I was very much junior in my role. He said,'Look, if you just do a great job, you will get noticed.' And that has stuck with me and resonated continually. Knock it out of the park in the job that you're doing, and the next thing will will come.

Stuart Hughes: 36:23

I love that. 'Be too good to be ignored', is my translation of it! Awesome. On the flip of that, then, what's the worst bit of advice you've ever been given?

Will Metcalfe: 36:36

Somebody once told me, 'Look, if you're going to get on in your career, you need to be a serial networker.' And don't get me wrong, having a good network within the business is important, but if you're just networking and not doing a great job, that's all going to fall down at some point. So, it's not all about networking.

Stuart Hughes: 36:56

And do you have a book or maybe a podcast that you continuously return to or gift most often?

Will Metcalfe: 37:04

Yes, a book I've probably read the most in the last couple of years is Work Rules! by Laszlo Book, all about the culture at Google. Really interesting book. Would highly recommend it to anybody. The thing that resonates the most in it, though, for me, is to always hire people that are smarter than you. If you continually do that and you put a great team around you, you will be successful. Don't be afraid to hire people that are smarter and better than you are.

Stuart Hughes: 37:34

It's really interesting, isn't it, because you've got to be very comfortable with your abilities, whatever might be your limitations as well, but then to acknowledge that. Perhaps not everybody in the room needs to look, sound and think like you to do that. I've not read that book, so I'll take that away as one to go and dive into, so thanks for that. What failures provided you with your greatest learning?

Will Metcalfe: 38:03

Probably a combination of lots of failures led to me having a bit of an overload at a point in my career and almost a bit of a breakdown; everything got too much. I was trying to do everything myself. As you become a leader and have a bigger job, you just can't do everything yourself. So it leads, I suppose, back into the book. Make sure you've got the team around you, and you trust that team to get on and do it. They're going to make some mistakes, but so would you. It's enabling that team to be a super high performing team that ultimately makes you successful, not you doing it all yourself, because you can't.

Stuart Hughes: 38:38

I'm just going explore that a little bit, if you don't mind, because I'm interested in this piece. So, you have this great bit of advice, which is 'do your job to the best of your ability and that will help you progress'. If you've got the drive and that's what you want to do, you follow that, but you also then continually take on a lot. As a result of having that moment where you're like 'Crumbs! This is too much, and I can't do it all myself, and this could all come tumbling down if I don't make some changes!', other than hiring smart people, what are some of the other things that you've done to shift that?

Will Metcalfe: 39:25

If I'm really honest, I was letting my pride get in the way of me asking for help. Ultimately, how I got around that was that I asked my boss for help, but that took me a long time. It took some courage to do and I thought I was failing by asking for help, but when I did, it came. I would urge anybody to make sure if they are struggling, you've got to ask for help, because it will come.

Stuart Hughes: 39:52

That's a really lovely last bit of advice to leave people on. I really appreciate the candour and the openness. There's a lot of gold in the conversation for people to dive into. Really refreshing to hear a leadership view of the safety profession. I'm fortunate enough to know a few people that are in your team and know that they're doing a cracking job in representing the profession as a whole, so not surprised to hear it. But, for the listenership, it's quite an empowering thing for us to hear. So thank you very much for your time today. Really appreciate the fact that you've given us a bit of your time and definitely some great insights. And I look forward to seeing what you do and how CBRE progresses in the future.

Will Metcalfe: 40:35

Thank you so much for having me, and I really look forward to listening to the rest of the series. It's been great.

Host: 40:40

Thanks for listening. Tune in again soon for more conversations on all things health and safety.