Lead Under Pressure Without Burning Out with Heather Watt

When faced with the unimaginable, how do leaders navigate through the storm and avoid burnout?

This episode dives into Heather Watt's tenure as Chief of Staff to the Deputy Premier of Ontario and Minister of Health during the pandemic, showcasing the critical blend of resilience, strategic foresight, and adaptability required at the forefront of government during an unparalleled global health crisis. 

This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to strengthen their leadership skills and emerge stronger from adversity. We'll delve into practical strategies for avoiding burnout and prioritizing well-being amidst intense leadership demands. Heather also shares her profound belief in the power of daily discipline over fleeting motivation, offering a refreshing perspective on sustained leadership excellence.

What You'll Learn:

Strategies for Decision-Making Under Pressure: Discover how to master the art of making prompt, informed decisions when the stakes are highest.

Building Resilience Against Burnout: Uncover key strategies for maintaining well-being and preventing burnout, even under intense leadership demands. Heather shares her approach to stress management, effective delegation, and avoiding burnout. 

Navigating Complex Communication: Learn the importance of clear, empathetic communication for managing expectations and leading in crisis situations. Heather reveals her tactics for honest dialogue and building mutual trust.

Understanding the Dunning-Kruger Effect in Leadership: Delve into how recognizing and mitigating cognitive biases, like the Dunning-Kruger Effect, can enhance self-awareness and team performance, fostering a culture of continuous learning and humility.

Stay Connected!

• Follow Heather Watt on Instagram
• Connect with Heather on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Joining us today is Heather Watt. From 2018 to 2022, she served as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Premier of Ontario and Minister of Health.

Speaker 2: 0:11

The challenge was that if you were making decisions based on current circumstances, you were too late. She always had to be ahead.

Speaker 1: 0:20

In this episode we discuss the key lessons she's learned from leaving through a pandemic, explore strategies for avoiding burnout and delve into her core belief that daily discipline surpasses the pursuit of motivation any day. Let's get started. Welcome to the podcast everyone. Heather, thank you so much for joining us, my pleasure. Would you mind just giving us a bit of an arc of your professional career and some of the kind of leadership roles that you've held?

Speaker 2: 0:52

Yeah, I graduated university I had full intention of applying to medical school, so I decided to take some time to study for the MCAT and do applications and in that period I ended up being offered an opportunity to work as a legislative assistant at Queens Park. I ended up really falling in love with politics, worked on a couple of campaigns and coming out of that. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful. But I met an individual who suggested maybe my skills would be well-suited to consulting.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:31

So I ended up applying for a consulting job and that ended up working out. Really enjoyed that. But then fast forward about seven years and I had my first child and the industry is getting better now. But at the time there wasn't really a lot of options for remote work so at the time just decided it wasn't the best choice for my family. I was doing about 125 flights a year. Ended up, though. Then back in politics, got a phone call from Christine Elliott once she won her seat in New Market Aurora and she was appointed as Minister of Health, and the Premier and Christine both asked if I would serve as Chief of Staff.

Speaker 1: 2:22

On the timeline here. What year are we now in? We're in 2018. So you held that position for two years, four years? What is the day-to-day of the Chief of Staff?

Speaker 2: 2:31

Really, you're responsible for the entire portfolio for which your Minister is overseeing and you're the most senior advisor to that Minister. So in the case of health, when I joined the Ministry of Health in 2018, our budget was in the low $60 billion, which is about $0.43, $0.44 on every government dollar. It's obviously an important part of the spend. So you need a big office to oversee that kind of portfolio. And when I joined in 2018, I had no staff. It was a new government, so I had a big binder, a budget and a Minister and that's pretty much it.

Speaker 2: 3:16

So then it becomes a bit of hunger games of you know find the staff you want, to find your best staff. Starting with zero is a bit daunting. Once we got to steady state, that was a little bit more manageable, but it's a big HR. There's a big HR component to the job obviously making sure that everybody is not only performing well but also able to develop themselves. Then you know there's making sure that your Minister is ready for everything that she or he needs to be ready for, and if the house is sitting, that means question period in the morning, that means potentially cabinet committees, that means potentially cabinet meetings, depending on the day of the week, then that means stakeholder meetings that your boss is taking, and also media.

Speaker 1: 3:59

You have to manage dual stakeholders and appease multiple people at the same time who might not have the same opinion or views.

Speaker 2: 4:06

Rarely, yes, the same opinion or views yeah, I'm curious.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Let's just go back to the moment. How did life change for you the day before COVID and, like I think we all kind of remember that March timeline?

Speaker 2: 4:19

Yeah, absolutely life changed. I was quite pregnant when we had our first case in January 25th Wasn't clear exactly how pregnant women would be affected the immense feeling of responsibility. You know there are lives on the line and we needed to make decisions quickly, responsibly and that would benefit, you know, the greatest number of residents of Ontario. When you have over 14 million lives to think about, certainly I remember feeling that heaviness in the beginning. Luckily we had a lot of amazing experts. I think when you are faced with making those kinds of decisions, the challenge was that if you were making decisions based on current circumstances, you were too late, so you always had to be ahead and it's very difficult from a policy making perspective, but also from a communications to the public perspective, to explain why the decisions were being made and really bring the public along, because without that cooperation the whole thing falls apart.

Speaker 1: 5:41

Are there any sort of basic principles when you go back in time and you go? I really had to apply this skill in this moment to be able to do this.

Speaker 2: 5:49

Looking back, it's really important to rely on experts. You and I had been talking about the being aware of the cognitive biases that might creep in in the beginning and level of confidence on the Y axis. So you see, in the very beginning it's shooting up because you're learning about a topic and you say, oh my gosh, I know so much about it. Now I feel really comfortable, I feel really fluent, I feel prepared to make decisions, but in fact you actually don't know about the topic. And then, as you continue to learn more and more about it, you actually see the curve come down, because the more you learn about it, then the more questions you have and the more you realize you don't know.

Speaker 2: 6:32

And if you're in the beginning part of that curve, I think that's the really dangerous place to be, because you have a blind spot. I think if you're ever absolutely sure about the answer and you don't understand the opposing view, I think that's a signal that you have a problem, that you're not seeing the full picture. I'm all about picking sides. I think it's important in life to pick sides, but if you don't understand what the other side is saying, I think then you're in trouble.

Speaker 1: 7:02

For all of us. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of you. Have to come up with communications. That land clearly for 14 million people. What lessons do we learn from that moment in time, through your journey?

Speaker 2: 7:14

You have to think about it like distilling complex ideas into a governing thought and then really decide what you. The top three things that you need the public to understand at that time and really take away are and also being prepared to admit a level of uncertainty among the decision makers and preposition that things are going to change. It's not. They might change, they will change, and so let's prepare for that.

Speaker 1: 7:44

And how complicated was the behind the scenes in all of this, with multiple stakeholders, multiple different points of view and decision making through that landscape.

Speaker 2: 7:53

Very complicated, I would say. One lesson that I do reflect on quite often is that I did see the goodness in a lot of people, particularly, I would say, in the first year, willingness to work together and so on. So that, I think, is incredibly important in a crisis. But I will say that the key is open communication, constant communication. You would have seen government leaders of all jurisdictions out very consistently delivering messages, even though the substance would change from time to time, and then also it was up to staff to make sure that all stakeholders were well informed along the way. So that means daily meeting, sometimes of very large groups of stakeholders, to make sure that folks are being given the information that they need and that government is receiving the information that it needs.

Speaker 1: 8:58

The stamina to keep to that pace, to keep to that level of clarity of thinking, decision making and feeling that level of pressure. What did you have to lean on so that you could operate at that level?

Speaker 2: 9:13

Honestly, it was really just the enormity of the task. You do have to find ways to keep your energy up, make sure that you or yourself are not burning out. I mean, obviously we saw, particularly with healthcare workers, such a high level of burnout, incredibly challenging to deal with, yeah, so you can't rely on that kind of adrenaline. You just have to get up every day and say this is the job, we're going to get through the day. We're going to save as many lives as possible.

Speaker 1: 9:48

You talked a little bit about burnout in that chapter and this is coming up a lot in the culture right now today burnout I've been fascinated by just really trying to understand it a little bit better. Do you have any just thoughts on, you know, burnout as a whole for yourself, or what you have to do to just self-navigate a little differently?

Speaker 2: 10:09

In my recent years, I've become obsessed with learning about the importance of sleep. I was somebody who growing up never, and I am naturally a night person. I'm a night owl. I can work until 4 am and not get tired, but try to get me up at 7 am and and did you pride yourself? On that too A little bit, because I remember being that type of a person too.

Speaker 2: 10:30

Totally, I was like I don't really need sleep and this is fine and, honest to God, I don't know if it was getting a little bit older, having kids, you know pandemic pressure but I started having some very challenging sleep issues. Sleep is the basis for physical health, mental health, emotional health and so on. It is so important, yeah, and I know it's a real challenge for a lot of people. It's not, you know, I wasn't unique in having some sleep issues, especially women as they age and going through menopause, and it's something that people don't talk about very much. But it's so foundational and so incredibly important that I really have started to prioritize it, and I did so during the pandemic as well. So, of course, we were working late. Of course we were working early. That said, I think you need to be really disciplined about kind of getting as much sleep as you can. That's what's going to make your brain work properly. The studies are incredible that show, you know, cognitive impairment on the level of, you know, alcohol consumption from lack of sleep.

Speaker 1: 11:40

What you're bringing about is it's actually hitting the mainstream in a very different tone right now and the other thing that I'm noticing that's changing too. The grind culture is starting to question, like what we're thinking.

Speaker 2: 11:53

I think there is a shift going on in the broader conversation, probably a little bit propelled by the pandemic, I think for two reasons. Maybe one is just the perspective that I mentioned before. All of a sudden, people wake up and say, oh my gosh, we only get one life and it's not very long, and what am I doing? And then you know. I think the second reason is just because of COVID. It generated a lot of flexible types of work, and so not to say we should be working less or working less hard necessarily, but it's a bit more flexible. Yeah, it's difficult for me, as I guess I'm an elder millennial. We're just programmed to push away any notion of rest and relaxation, especially women. We're programmed that we're the generation that can have it all right, and so I do have an allergic reaction to that kind of notion. But it does start with sleep, it does start with getting there and exercise.

Speaker 1: 12:55

I will say Exercise too, but also continued to work hard, because no one's going to do that but you, we're putting pieces back together in a new way, and so when we think about this kind of architecting your future, I know you have a great deal of perspective as it relates to how to think about this within leadership. What would you mind speaking a little bit about that?

Speaker 2: 13:16

Yeah, I think what I've learned over time. So I'm an only child and I had a bit of a challenging. Some aspects of my childhood were pretty challenging and so from kind of very early on I really learned that I had to take the initiative if I wanted to be successful. So that meant, you know, studying for a test late at night when no one was telling me to do that. That meant, you know, I decided that I really wanted to apply to school in the United States. But finding, you know, the SAT prep course, finding the books, and those were all kind of decisions that I made and I kind of said to myself, like this is the goal, let's go get it. Not to say you can't be supported by family and you can't be supported by mentors and sponsors and people who are going to help you.

Speaker 1: 14:17

But I do think maybe it sounds a little bit harsh, but nobody is really going to help you get up that hill, but you yeah, and I think to your story because I think you know, foundationally it depends on the circumstances in which we grow up, but you had to find your voice for yourself early.

Speaker 1: 14:36

Like you had to access that. You had access. Hey, I want this for me. These are my goals, my ambitions, and I think that just harnesses a certain level of work ethic and self back to the discipline versus, you know, motivation, and it started there. Yeah, I can relate to your story like I had to do that for myself at 16 to. I talked to some people and they have great wisdom that you know they can lean on in their family, but for some it's not that case.

Speaker 2: 15:04

Yeah, it's not the case, yeah it's great to read a book or listen to something and say, okay, now, like I'm really motivated to go after and get it, but you'll see that like those are spurts over time. Yeah, like the way that you're really going to be successful is it's consistency, it's not these spurts of advancement. Really that's that's going to make you successful. It's showing up every day, putting in the work. It's not very glamorous, it's not.

Speaker 2: 15:36

I think we live in this culture now of such a desire for instant gratification that I think is actually detrimental to young people to expect and I see it in my kids sometimes too like they, they have Netflix right, so they will never know it's such, a such a small example, but they will never know the feeling of having to wait, to wait a week to watch your favorite show.

Speaker 2: 16:02

It's like everything's there, it's on Netflix, they get it right now, but that's not how life works. I think it's really important. You know, the reason most people fail is because they sacrifice what they want most for what they want now and and I am very aware of that, as I am, you know, parenting my own children have had it instill those values of just showing up every, every day, being consistent and, and of course, you're always going to hear about the one in a million, right, you're going to hear people who got lucky, or you know it's usually not, though it's usually not luck, it's usually you think it's luck, but it's actually hours and hours and hours and years, in fact, of hard work.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Listen, heather, we talked about so much kind of some unplanned topics here too, which were really fun. First of all, I just want to truly thank you for making all the tough calls and doing what you did through that pandemic, in the sense that all of us huge team, I know, but I'm speaking to you and you know them on behalf of the team, on behalf of everyone, yeah, and I think hopefully all we can do right now is learn from the hindsight of it and use this time and chapter to kind of really think about where we go from here, and so thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your wisdom. Great to chat with you, my pleasure. Well, that's a wrap. Thank you for joining us. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn, where we transform the wisdom from our podcast into practical tips, tools and takeaways for your leadership journey. Find us at gritgracepodcast. See you next week.