Have you ever found yourself sitting in a meeting and feeling too afraid to speak up and voice your idea, only to realize later the outcome would have been ten times better if it's spoken up. For the last four years, Tim McKinnon has been the managing director of eBay Australia, and today he provides some practical tips on helping to find your voice, as well as how to have impact as a leader, and also why he felt like throwing up when his name was announced as the new leader
of eBay Australia. My name is doctor Amathe Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. On today is my favorite tip episode? Will you go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite
tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Tim McKinnon and this extract starts with Tim talking about how leaders need to find the right balance between being approachable and authentic but also having authority.
There's two dimensions. There's people who are leaders who struggle with being authentic. There's a balance in life between having authority and being approachable, And so there's people at both ends of the spectrum, and they're more senior leaders, and we get frustrated at our politicians and American CEOs is not being authentic.
Right.
The other side of the problem, which is more common, is people who are more themselves but actually don't know how to be a leader, and they don't know how to behave and to speak up and to take authority. And I'd say there's a core job of my job is not just to be authentic myself, but create the conditions for everyone at work to be authentic. And I know that people can't be one hundred percent say whatever
they think for one hundred percent. I can think that idea is, you know, we all we all have kind of versions of ourselves that we show to people, even to the people we're closest to. But I mean, like our job is to is to help people in their workplace actually their work self and their home self not be that different, like if there's a massive dichotomy between those as a real problem, and secondly, to help them
be leaders. Like I think everyone on my team are amazing leaders, and my job is to create the conditions where they feel comfortable speaking up and expressing their view. So I guess I'll start with it like practical tips for people. If the first case, if you're a leader and you're struggling with authenticity, or if you've been given that feedback, my first question you should ask yourself is is this an environment where I can I really feel
like it supports me for who I am? Or is there just too much it's just they're just too different. And if it's if it's not that environment, you don't feel like you can be yourself and you can see no way to being yourself because of the culture, it might not be the best environment for you. But the other part of it is, well, how do you change the environment to make it so that people can be
themselves more? And then what it starts with you? So, I mean the first thing to being authentic is being vulnerable. I think that's like the key. You know, it's just people admitting that they don't have it all under control, for people saying I don't know the answer to that,
I don't know what to do here, I'm struggling. If you start with that, people will reach out and that really builds trust and I mean anyone who's accused of being fake or not authentic, as someone who is not genuinely vulnerable about what's going wrong because nobody has got it all under control, like no one. And then obviously like as you develop that capability as developing your self awareness is really important and generally and self reflection can help.
And I'm still going to do a lot more of that. You know, while you're getting too that getting feedback from people, like there must be people you can trust it can just tell you just be honest with you and say, especially as you get more senior, people are less likely to tell you the truth, So you've got to seek it out, and you've got to find people who give it to you straight and talk to them a lot.
Whenever someone's leaving the company, I always try to chat to them and get feedback because you know they're going to be honest in that situation because they don't have to think about working with you in the future. And then the last thing is probably just you know, creating every opportunity to fuse your personal life and your work life. So talk about your life outside of work a lot at work so people understand that part of you and
that feels natural, and I think that really helps. And so incorporate talking about your family or your hobbies, or your fears, or your history, or your hopes or your holidays, and then you'll start to see that barrier breakdown for the second class of people that struggle to speak up to be leaders, people like an imposter syndrome. I think everyone suffers from that. I remember distinctly when I was
made the managing director of EBO Australia. We had an all hands and my then boss was about to announce my name and I was sitting there and I had this overwhelming feeling of wanting to vomit on the carpet, Like I just felt nausey that I'd never felt in my life before. And I stood up and I really really really had to had to contain myself from doing like a massive projectile vomit over everyone, which would have
done a really bad start. Because I'd never thought of myself, I'm not this guy, like, I'm not that kind of personal I've never had aspired to be a CEO. I grew up and my idea of who a leader is is completely different, and I had to remind myself, well, actually, like I've managed to do things and lead and achieve
notwithstanding that, notwithstanding I never fit this mold. And so to people who struggle, I'd say, you have to remember that what has got you to where you are is good like and you are a leader, and you kind of need to, you know, find people that believe in you. It might just be your parents, and just reinforce you and say you can do this and start to speak up.
There was a colleague at eBay who who wasn't comfortable speaking up when he wrote down every decision that was getting made in these meetings and what he would have decided, and he went back. He wrote this over like twelve months, and he went back and found that he was actually making the right decisions eighty percent of the time, but
he wasn't actually expressing his view. And if you don't know what to speak up about, you don't know how to have impact, Like, you know, get really good, I'd sort of say to people start at eBay, get really good to understand the data, or know the customers really well, talk to them more than anyone else, or really invest in the relationships across the company, and that will give you the authority and the confidence to speak up and let.
That is it for today's show. If you want to follow some of the work that I'm doing, you might want to reach out on some of the social media channels that I'm on, which is LinkedIn search for Amantha Inba, Twitter which is at Amantha, and Instagram which is at amantha I. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios and thank you tomt Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound amazing. See you next time.