Dave Kneeshaw On Creating A Culture Of Wellbeing Without Sacrificing Your Humanity

First it’d be great to understand what your journey has been like in education, training and mental health. 

I got here through what I would describe as a deliberate accident. The deliberate bit was my first proper career was a school teacher. And if you stand at the front when you’re teaching, although you say one thing, you don’t get one thing back. Very quickly, I got to a point where I could predict what would happen. 

So if I said to somebody, put your pens down, I would know that everybody in that little quarter sat together will put their pens down. That person will carry on writing, and the three or four at the back will start throwing stuff at each other. I understood I could make things happen, but not in the way I intended, unless I intimidated them, and I didn’t want to scare people. And so I started to mess around with language in my head to work out why people do what they do. I ended up going to see the head teacher and told him I wanted to work in special needs. He said, “I’ve never met a man ask to work in special needs in my entire career.”

In special needs, I spent all day with the kids and I got to know them really well. Part of that was seeing a lot of complicated issues that a lot of teachers don’t always get to see. There was lots of stuff going on at home, lots of court-related stuff, lots of challenges in terms of domestic relationships. I also had to write reports to the Local Education Authority to inform them about funding these children needed because of their conditions. 

Eventually, I got involved in working with children who were victims of sexual exploitation in Rotherham. As the kids got older, they got angrier because of what happened to them and they were caught up in the criminal justice system. They were viewed as criminals and not victims.

From there, I moved into offender rehabilitation which involved working to stop people going into prison or supporting them as they came out. That’s intense change work. You’re dealing with people who have been told who they are, have evidence to support that label, and are trying to figure out if they can be anything else. And during that time, another deliberate accident happened. Many of the people I was working with were using substances, and when I spoke to them as people, not labels, I realised I wanted to move into drug treatment and rehab.

That world is like life at 100x speed. You see deeply damaged lives, but you also see transformation happen quickly. It’s raw, it’s intense, and it teaches you a huge amount about human behaviour. That eventually led me to set up my own practice around 14 or 15 years ago, combining everything I’d learned into a way of working that focused on changing behaviour, identity, and strategy. From there, it naturally extended into the business world.

About fifteen years ago, I started my training company Better Minds. By that point, I’d worked with a lot of individuals, particularly around addiction, and one of the key insights was that addiction is evidence, not the root problem. If you removed the behaviour of things like alcohol, gambling or self-harm, the underlying issues wouldn’t disappear. People would realise that themselves once you walked them through it. So my early work was helping people manage those behaviours, but then I started mapping the deeper patterns underneath.

What surprised me was who started coming through the door, more professionals, more medics, even people with Professor in front of their name. That’s the only time I’ve really felt imposter syndrome. But when I asked why they were there, the answer was simple.What they were taught to do wasn’t working as well as what I was doing.

And ultimately, all of this comes back to philosophy. A lot of the trouble we get into is because of how we think about ourselves, about the world and about what things mean. That’s where my work sits now, particularly in business. Even something like time management. I tell people you can’t manage time. King Canute tried to control the tides and got wet feet. The clock keeps moving. The only things you can manage are the task and yourself. And when people realise that, something clicks.

So what I’ve built comes from that same curiosity that started everything. Why does this happen? How can I influence it? My approach is quite clinical in my head. I treat it like chess. If someone says this, what’s the move that stops them continuing to harm themselves? How do I interrupt that pattern? And when something doesn’t work, I deconstruct it. Was it the language, the timing, the body language? I refine constantly.

So there’s a thread through all of it, from teaching, to special needs, to trauma work, to addiction, to business, and it’s that we’re never the finished product, and there is always a better way. I’m relentless in that.

Thanks for sharing all that Dave. All of that is really valuable in terms of understanding the psychology behind why people make certain decisions and it’s got me thinking about workplace wellbeing programmes. 

It makes me wonder if there’s a hidden gap in wellbeing programmes, particularly around addiction recovery and awareness. Do you feel that addiction recovery training should be more widely discussed and included in programmes?

There is a massive cultural failing with a lot of stuff around mental health. One of the cultural failings is language. So if you have a physical health condition, the way that that is described is specific to what needs to change. So if I say I have a broken leg, you can work out in your mind’s eye, oh, as a lay person, I can work out what needs to happen. I don’t necessarily know how to do it, but I can work out logically, as a leader, as a manager, as support, that you need to rest it, you need to treat it in a certain way.

We have a series of topics like addiction, suicide, depression and if you pick those three words, they don’t tell you, as a lay person, what the opposite is. They don’t tell you what needs to change. So even at the most structural level, and up until around 2021 or 2022, the World Health Organisation acknowledged that the way we understood depression has been fundamentally wrong since the mid-sixties. Up until that point, there was this idea, still huge in pop culture, of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Four years ago they said we’ve got this completely wrong and we’re retracting this. So out in the culture, people don’t know how to help someone because they don’t know what it is they’re helping with.

I created a diagram that I use when I’m training practitioners, which explains that what is wrong with us is either trauma or self-esteem, and they’re interlinked. Trauma, in this context, is the stuff that happened in the past that informs the present. So even if it happened a second ago, if I was in a car crash and now my body isn’t okay, it’s traumatised because of something that’s previously happened.

In terms of the gap between our areas, we don’t necessarily know what it is that causes us to behave the way we do, but the way we do behave isn’t congruent with how we want to behave. We look at other people functioning and we feel dysfunctional. We don’t need to go that far back, we don’t need to know everything. We just need to see that currently you are saying that but you’re doing this. Once we do that, whether as a practitioner or a trainer, we can take something complicated and break it into little bits.

Then something really interesting happens. Somebody starts to like themselves. And if they like themselves, they lean into the challenge. What we find with everybody else, and this is when it comes to why we lose staff at work, is when people don’t lean into a challenge, they either go off sick because the fear of being found out makes them sick, or they exit the business. It’s a “I’m traumatised by being vulnerable. I’m traumatised by asking for help, I’m traumatized by being confused” kind of response. 

What we need to do as leaders is say it’s okay to be vulnerable. So if I’m going to treat all of that stuff, the starting point is to demonstrate, model, share and celebrate that we’re all wonky. It’s okay to be an individual. And leaders don’t always do that. They hide behind glass partitions, desks, time pressures and structures that remove the humanity from communication. Without that humanity, people don’t feel safe enough to say, I struggle with this.

Those are some great points. I’m also fascinated by the concept of wellbeing washing where a company is perceived to be doing good outwardly, but internally it’s a tick-box exercise

From your perspective, how can leaders be more aware of whether they are wellbeing washing, and what are the best practices to actually stop that?

It starts with asking the I word. It’s not a rude word, and paradoxically nothing to do with you and I. It’s impact. What impact do you want from this training? Regardless of what people say, how do you imagine that to work? And then the third question is, why isn’t it happening already?

One of the tragedies I’ve seen lots of times is an approach to wellbeing where we think we need to give wellbeing, a bit like medicine, to the team because people are going off sick, without understanding that wellbeing is universal. So the first thing I say to any company that wants to effect change is what is the pinnacle of that part of the organisation? Is it separate or is it integrated? Is it in the same building as everybody else?

If you’re not physically separate, you can’t start doing wellbeing unless it starts at the top. It just doesn’t make sense. Because we tell people, look after yourself whilst you deliver these thresholds. We’re asking you to do this, but we’re also giving you a beanbag. We’re asking you to do this, but we’re giving you a branded water bottle. We’re asking you to do this, and don’t forget to take your breaks. Unless the people at the top recognise there is a relationship between the way we do things and the way people operate at the bottom, days off are not useful. Culture is much more useful.

It’s better to have people in the building with a good culture than to say, work hard and I’ll give you a day off. If you’ve ever been sick, those days off often make people sicker, because they’re going back to a culture that made them sick. Unless that culture shifts, nothing changes.

The people who are made poorly by organisational failings are typically the most caring. They are the most giving until they can’t give anymore. They are the least competent at saying no. They feel uncomfortable saying no to incoming work, and uncomfortable delegating outgoing work. And they’re often not at the bottom. They’re often at the top.

If you’re running a business, it’s cheaper to maximise the potential of your team than to recruit or exit somebody. If you’ve got the right person, poor wellbeing is incredibly costly at a financial level. So instead of calling it wellbeing and treating it as something fluffy, upskill people and create a culture where people can say no.

To me that really ties into psychological safety. Do you think creating psychological safety is the right starting point, and if so, how can businesses introduce it more effectively?

You can condense it down to one word, and it’s a word that frightens people. Trust. The reason it frightens companies is it implies dishonesty. But trust isn’t about that. Trust is saying “I trust you to manage my vulnerability.” And that is a process, not an event. Having a nice day out doesn’t do it.

The magic of team building is building trust. Some magical stuff can happen over a coffee or a beer offsite, where two people make a connection and there is more trust. At that point, I can make a mistake in front of you.

If you want to make money in business, you have to do something that has the potential of failure. You put a product out that might not work, you deliver something in a new way. The only way that happens is if somebody feels safe enough to suggest it beforehand. I’ve got this idea, it might fail, but we try it.

We create trust by giving small pieces of risk. I give you a small vulnerability, and what you do with it governs whether I take a bigger risk. I might tell you something small, then something bigger, and if I feel safe, I keep going.

If leaders steal credit or punish failure, people stop risking. There is no reward, only blame. That’s where toxicity comes from. And at that point, it’s not the company that’s toxic, but the individual who needs addressing.

In other conversations we’ve talked about the benefits of philosophy for mental health and culture change. 

Some ideas I’ve been looking at lately are from the work of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his ideas of embodied learning and living that encourages us to think about how we used to learn and appreciate life as children.

What do you think of that in the context of creating organisational change?

You’ve taken me to a wonderful place. I was delivering training on neurodiversity recently, and one of the key concepts is masking, which is having something about you that you don’t want the world to see. In business, we don’t call it masking, but it’s the same thing. We call it professionalism.

There are certain things deemed professional like language, appearance and behaviour and it’s not about performance. It’s usually down to pretending to be something you’re not. That’s the polar opposite of embodied living.

I’m really comfortable being the idiot in the room. I echo something that’s said a lot. Be the idiot. Not because you are one, but because you want precision. If I don’t understand something, I’ll say I don’t understand it. And when I do that, other people think, I didn’t understand that either.

I train people to be idiots. If you ask for help, never imply you know anything. Say, I have absolutely no clue. Because someone might show you a shortcut you didn’t know. But that only works if there is psychological safety.

All of that magnifies effectiveness and imbues work with joy. People arrive at one-to-ones terrified, preparing to defend themselves. Why not just enjoy it? Why not say you’ve done this well, you’ve made a mistake there. Now, how do we solve it? 

What are your thoughts on AI and mental health, especially with how it’s being used right now?

About 12 years ago, I was telling everybody my job would be replaced by computers. And people said, it’s not possible because it’s too complicated. But my job, even inside my head, is logical. I’ve been stripping it down to its components for 20 years.

Ignoring the current hallucination issues with AI, it will eventually self-correct. I don’t see why my job can’t be replaced. It will democratise wellbeing. It’s not there yet, and it can be dangerous, but it will improve. I like AI. It’s a tool. Like a knife, it’s what people do with it determines the harm.

There will still be a place for high-end human service. Just like horses or sports cars. Maybe both are unnecessary when compared to regular cars, but they are desired all the same because of how they can make people feel. Other humans will always be able to do that better than AI in the long term. 

Finally, from everything you’ve said, what’s one simple step organizations can take to bridge the gap between learning and behavior change?

I’m going to steal a line from author and educator Stephen Covey. Start with the end in mind. Have a utopian vision of your organisation. There’s a tendency to focus our vision outward and ask what do we want to achieve out there? Why not focus it internally and ask how do we want this company to feel?

Because if we don’t have that, we’re just fixing bottlenecks and crises. We’re reacting instead of designing. Start with a vision where everybody is valued, encouraged to reach their potential and where failure is part of growth. And understand that individuals don’t need fixing. Individuals are individuals. They just need the right arena to operate. If you’ve got the right person in the right job, praise it. Don’t fix it. We’re all quirky, weird, beautiful and that deserves to be celebrated above all else.