Gerrie Hawes — The HOPE Framework, Behaviour Change & Why Strategy Alone Never Sticks

Adam Walker:I'm Adam Walker, a biometrics consultant, and this is the Pharma Prescribed podcast, where leaders, innovators, and hidden voices in healthcare open up. No sound bites, no spin. Just raw insight, one prescription at a time. In an industry driven by data, protocols, and pressure, we rarely pause to ask the human questions.

What drives us? What breaks us? And what truths live behind the titles we wear?

Adam Walker:Gerrie Hawes is a corporate behavioural psychologist who spends her time in boardrooms and on stages, helping leaders turn strategy into behaviour people actually adopt. She works with senior teams on change leadership and culture across pharma, consulting firms, and global organisations, running sessions designed to shift how people behave once they're back at their desks.

Gerrie also coaches speakers one-to-one, drawing on the same psychology she applies to teams: confidence, clarity, and the ability to read a room.

She's UK-based and works across global time zones, and what interests her most is the space between people — the pauses and side conversations that shape how teams actually work together.

Gerrie, for those of our audience who aren't familiar with you, who are you, and what is the mission you're on?

Gerrie Hawes:You describe it as looking for the hidden people, and I'd probably describe myself as a hidden person. I've worked with pretty much most of the pharmaceutical companies you could name, but I am hidden — I'm behind the scenes. What do I do? I think it's best if I start with a story.

So, I was working with a new leader of a global IT team at a very large pharmaceutical company. She wanted to set out the strategy and what they needed to achieve together — and together is a whole other thing, 'cause you've got cultures of teams you have to merge. I was working with her on her opening speech.

Now, my experience with pharmaceutical companies is that there are normally more PhDs than there are people in the room, certainly at leadership level. You've got all these brains, and one of the things I often say to people — I said to her — is, "Why do you work here?" She was like, "Oh, because IT," blah, blah, blah. I said, "No, you could work anywhere. Any company would bite your hand off for you. Why do you choose here?" She looked at me and paused, because that isn't normal for an IT leader to do. She found her handbag, and out of her purse she brought a photograph — a family photo — and she said, "They're dead, and they're dead. We have lung cancer in our family, and I've promised the rest of the cousins that I'm going to do what I can."

For that reason she chose to work in pharma, and she specifically chose this company because she knew it was on the leading edge of treatments for that lung cancer.

I said, "That's what you need to tell the team." That's the difference between talking about strategy — we need to jump over these hurdles, knock through these barriers, make things happen — and going to the core of why we do things and why you're here. That's what's important to me.

Adam Walker:That's a tremendous example, Gerrie, thank you for sharing that, because so many people who come on this podcast do explain their "why." I can really empathise with that approach, because there was a time, at the beginning of the pandemic, when an opportunity came up to work in COVID vaccines for one of the providers. I jumped at the chance to work with that company, because I wanted to be involved and I wanted to feel like I was making a difference, in whatever capacity that was. That resonates with me so loudly, because what started off as a six-month contract became a four-year engagement and has absolutely transformed the way I look at healthcare and pharma ever since.

Gerrie Hawes:There used to be a bit of a trend for talking about purpose — do you remember that? I really struggled to find my purpose, to articulate it, and somebody said to me, "What's your anti-purpose?" I thought that was really useful, because I actually hate it when people hate their work. I find it really difficult to fathom. Now, I understand that not all of us are privileged enough to avoid it — most of us have worked just for the money at some point. But even if you're working just for the money, there's more that can happen in a work environment, in terms of what it's like to work there, and what you're working towards. We all know the cliché about the cleaner at NASA putting a man on the moon, but it's a cliché because there's some truth in it. If you know what you're building and working towards — and that may be in work, and also outside of work — you're not just working for money, you're working for something meaningful, and that makes an enormous difference.

I'm a little different from a lot of people in pharma, and I think part of why I ended up here is that working in business was a rebellion for me. I was brought up by a primary school teacher and a social worker, so I was destined to go into that world really — I decided to rebel and go and stick my nose into what was happening in business instead. So I've worked with a lot of companies: Heinz, Adidas, Clarks Shoes, in international roles. I found it fascinating, because in the end, people still have to engage with people, conversations need to happen, and leadership needs to provide an environment where people can do their work well. Wouldn't it be fascinating — what would happen if everybody enjoyed their work? Now, I realise that's completely bonkers as an idea, but it's something I hold onto: what would happen to stress? What would happen to how free we feel to be brave at work — about driving success, about relationships — if we were enjoying our work?

When I'm working in an organisation, part of that enjoyment is doing something meaningful and worthwhile. Part of it is team culture. But part of it is also how well you're led, and I do a lot of work with leadership.

Adam Walker:Yeah, I think that's a great point you make there.

Adam Walker:How accommodating are companies when you come in? Because you're independent — you're going into companies, and it's not always great behaviours you find the door open to, but you want to impart fantastic behaviours that you can leave with teams, a toolkit they can use to do better work around their purpose. How does that work for you?

Gerrie Hawes:So, as we said, I'm hidden — and also hidden is that underlying purpose of mine. We met at a Kindness conference, and kindness is one of my core values, it underpins me, but it's not something I'd wear on a T-shirt walking into a building. It's something I bring.

The starting point of the conversation is often, "We've got a top 100 meeting, help us develop the content." Then I ask: what do you want them to know? What are the objectives? People will always go to, "These are the things I want them to know — how we're doing, how we're doing against plan, what we need to do more of," and so on. We might want to present X, Y, and Z.

But the questions I like to get to — and for many people this might be familiar, but it's often forgotten — are: how do people feel now, and how do we want them to feel, so they can deliver the things you want? And, probably of equal importance: what do you want them to do differently? What are they doing now? What happens if we don't have the top 100 — if we take that away, if I take the toys away and we just carry on? That's when you start to get to a truth, and the truth is often the teams aren't working together, or we're not collaborating, or because we all work remotely, it's become highly transactional.

I like to spend more time in that — what are people really feeling now, what aren't you telling me? Outside of pharma I worked with a DIY company, and the culture was really odd. It finally came out, quite late in the day, that at a previous top 500 meeting, the CEO had apparently punched a member of the leadership team on stage. I still laugh, because it was like, "Oh, we're dealing with a culture where bullying has actually been ratified from on high." Now, that's an extreme example, but sometimes you have to get deeper into it — you've got amazing brains in your team, they all understand the strategy, so why isn't it working?

Then I move into barriers. I love barriers. I know visionary people often find them frustrating, but if your team can work with you to identify what's stopping the strategy happening, even if they only get that far, leadership can come back and say, "Great, we've identified the barriers, we now know what we need to work on." Rather than standing at the front saying, "We need more of this, more of this, more of this," it's actually, "What's stopping it happening, and how can we work together?" We might have to knock it down, climb around it, jump over it — but how do we work together to make the change we've now agreed is worthwhile?

Adam Walker:There's a cultural piece to that too, isn't there? It's the "elephant in the room" that Brits find very uncomfortable to call out, but other cultures are much more comfortable calling out.

Gerrie Hawes:Oh, bring out the elephant. Bring out the elephant, yeah — let's have a look at the elephant. If I can, I'd like to find the elephant beforehand. But I design experiences that enable people to have the conversations, rather than give a talk. I'd rather get people involved: let's open the door, let the elephant in, and paint it — make it interesting colours, adore it, and then say, "Okay, we've got an elephant, can everybody see it? It's covered in orange dots." Now let's work out how we move it, or how we work with it, whatever's needed.

So leadership needs to own the what and the why, but my work is to help leaders be open to listening to the how, and to help the people actually doing the work tell leaders, "This is how you can help me, and help us make this happen." They have to want to go there — but often there are obstacles, elephants of all different sizes, that leaders need to recognise: "Oh, I didn't realise we were doing that, behaving that way, putting things in place that stop the flow."

Adam Walker:So where are those relationships breaking down — what is it in organisations, not just at a high level but in some detail, that needs to change? We talked about the elephant in the room — I was thinking about Elmo, the coloured elephant we all told our kids stories about. When Elmo's in the room, different people see different colours, and certain things attract them or push them away, don't they? I'd love to know what some of those entrenched behaviours look like across different organisations.

Gerrie Hawes:We're human — we bring lots of stuff to work that we may or may not be aware of. I think we're educated to be managers. Our education system is rooted in the Industrial Revolution, not the tech revolution, so we're brought up to be part of the machine, rather than partnering with the machine. We're also taught to do well, to make it happen, to work hard. Pharma is full of these PhDs — more of them than there are people — lots of proactive, deep-thinking people, but we've also got to work together, and we bring all our baggage with us to work.

I love large, complex organisations — well, I'm not sure any large organisation isn't complex, because you lose that connection and become org charts. There's no reason why everybody in there doesn't want to elevate and make things happen, it's just that stuff gets in the way, and some of my work is looking at that stuff.

I talked about managers versus leaders. I sometimes do coaching — not just speaker coaching, but leadership coaching too. There's a group I've coached, people around 28 to 32, because that's often when they're stepping into leadership and have to let go of their management skills and step into leadership skills. That's really difficult, because school rewards management, work rewards managing — "Can you manage this?" "I can manage that." I can make it happen, I can push harder.

But leadership isn't about the doing, it's about enabling and getting out of the way — and being good at the why. Most pharmaceutical companies talk well about their North Star, and pharma is blessed with a clearer purpose. Working towards a treatment, a cure, or a prevention is an easier purpose to grasp than if you're in FMCG, working on toiletries and washing powders. So you've got an easier-to-reach purpose in pharma, but leading that is a whole other step.

Adam Walker:I think that follows on really well, because what makes someone good at their work doesn't necessarily give them the tools to be a good leader — to be comfortable delegating, to spot skills in others that maybe they don't see in themselves. It's a bit like being a good parent, isn't it — you let your kids take their first steps, you take away the stabilisers, and if they fall, you pick them up, and they keep going. Having led organisations myself in certain functions, there's a real discomfort around that delegation piece. I don't mind admitting I struggled with it in the past. Then, once I got good at delegating, I wanted to delegate everything. Then it became light-touch management, "show me, tell me," and eventually your team can walk — like teenagers, and then they become fully formed adults, don't they?

Gerrie Hawes:We talked about kindness — and you've done a recent podcast with Graham Allcott, whose great book, "Kind," is well worth a deep dive. There's a kindness in delegation too, if you allow it. Is kindness the same as niceness? I really don't think it is — being kind is actually quite hard on the organisational side of things. The reason I talk about delegation as a kindness is that if it's done well, with clarity and purpose and support as needed, it's a chance for the other person to shine. It's actually quite selfish to try and do it all yourself — there's a selfishness in believing you'll do it better. It might even be true, but the kindness is in helping other people rise, because it frees you up to do the things you really want to do, or the things somebody else in a large organisation needs you to do.

Kindness is part of the story I tell, but I don't necessarily talk about it directly — I find different ways to surface it, because there's a risk of being seen as too "hippie." Some people hate that word, some love it. We talk about kindness at work, but I rarely use those exact words when I'm working with a leader or a leadership team. We've got to find ways for people to feel comfortable bringing in that human connection, without it taking them so far out of their comfort zone that it doesn't feel like them, or their style.

Adam Walker:Coming back to the Kindness conference — one of the things I took away from it, and you're right, Graham was outstanding, and you hosted that panel beautifully — was the absolute humility of the guy. He leads with kindness. Whether or not he tells people the backstory of what brought him to where he is today, it was very clear to me, as a leader of an organisation himself, as someone who's written books on kindness, and as someone who stands up and talks about what we can all do better in our day-to-day lives, that his aura spoke to that point.

We can talk platitudes, we can talk principles, and plenty of scientists would be happy to tick that box. But actually, it's what happens when no one's watching, isn't it? It's the things you do when you're offline. Are you the guy checking emails at God knows what time of the day, setting behaviours for others?

Gerrie Hawes:Yeah.

Adam Walker:Are your people getting emails at two or three in the morning? Or are you the person in another time zone who's dumped a whole host of things on someone, so that when they open their inbox in the morning, there's a mountain to unearth before their day's even begun?

Gerrie Hawes:So I've worked with one leadership team on extreme role modelling. You can't just put the behaviours you want on a decal on the wall — there's some merit in aligning on "these are the things that are important to us," but ultimately organisations don't behave, people behave. Leaders have a lot of power to sabotage the culture, and they don't have to say very much. Sometimes, as you're transitioning up, you forget you're a leader — you want to be working with colleagues, but your words and actions carry a lot of weight.

So what we've been exploring is:if we want people in the office more, leaders have to be incredibly visible in the office — otherwise you're not role-modelling that the office matters. If you're shutting yourself away with meetings on the very days you want your team there, you need to plant yourself in the middle of it, in the canteen having coffee with people, be extremely present. That may not be forever, but that extreme role modelling — if there's a behaviour you really want to elevate in the organisation, it needs to be brought out. Extreme kindness might be another one. If you've read Graham's book and thought, "This is a bit of us," how do you as a leader dial that up, seriously dial it up, and demonstrate it in action? Because it's not until people notice — "Why did you do that rather than that?" — either out loud or in their own heads, that real change happens.

Adam Walker:Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with that.

Adam Walker:Something I came across researching you is the HOPE framework you speak about. I wonder if, for our audience, you'd elaborate on that, because I think it really connects the dots between behaviours, actions, and deeds.

Gerrie Hawes:Yeah. I'm a practitioner of behavioural science, but I keep my nose in the academic research too. A while ago there was a lot of work coming out of Harvard, and elsewhere, about happiness and its power at work — how it leads to better decisions in organisations, better outcomes. Happiness is really interesting, but for me it starts with self — it's important to explore happiness for yourself, and a lot of what gets talked about under happiness or contentment also counteracts burnout and builds resilience.

So happiness matters to me, but it wasn't enough on its own, because we can all individually be happy — I'm interested in the organisational dynamic. So I asked, what else do you need? You need to enjoy your work, you need some sense of why you're doing this, what the purpose is — we talk about visions, about North Stars. But what you really want is an optimistic belief — not blind optimism, but the belief that by working this hard and doing this stuff, we'll achieve something that's great for patients, great for us as an organisation, and genuinely rewarding. What will it feel like to get there? I worked for Adidas, where we were number two in the market behind Nike — being number two is an interesting position, because you can knock the number one off the top spot, and what it feels like when you get there is a real buzz, a real competition. So an optimistic view of what we're going to achieve, what success looks and feels like. So: Happiness. Optimism — my second letter of HOPE.

Then there's creativity at work, but I'm interested in the step beyond that, which I call Playfulness — my P. When I'm facilitating a group and I find the right kind of laughter — the tickle-spot laughter, just beyond the comfort zone, in the learning zone but before the panic zone — that's the laughter I look for. That playful engagement of, "Wouldn't it be amazing if...," "I hadn't thought about that, that's crazy" — laughter with some truth in it. That's the kind of playfulness I look for and work with in organisations.

Then the final step moves from self-centred happiness to how I help others — my final E is Empathy, how we connect to others. Empathetic leadership means understanding what motivates other people, rather than assuming what motivates you is universal. Understanding what drives people at work — for some it's fair pay and fair conditions, "I'm here to get the money and go home," and that's fine. For others it's higher purpose, succession planning, wanting to know where they're going and how they can contribute to wider society. Leaders need that empathy, and if we bring it to work, it works.

Gerrie Hawes:So: Happiness, Optimism, Playfulness, Empathy — HOPE. For me, those four things are a competitive advantage against AI. A machine isn't happy — it can be programmed to make funny noises and giggle, but it doesn't feel happiness, certainly not yet. It can give you lots of visions of the future, but you need humans to decide, "That's the one we're going to choose" — to weigh the pros and cons, to say, "This is the direction, and this is why it's going to be good."

On playfulness, we can write amazing prompts that make AI produce all kinds of laughable, unusual combinations, and it's brilliant at combinations — but humans are amazing at the weird, tangential connections, and that's what we need to elevate more. On empathy, AI coaching is quite interesting — it uses real technique — but there's also something in the empathy of silence, of spending time together. If we're a global team and, with a bit of luck and the travel budget, we come together once a year, some of that time isn't about what we're saying, it's about what we're not saying, and how we connect in the space in between.

Adam Walker:That's a rich insight, a really compelling observation.

Adam Walker:Some of the happiest places I've worked, where I've been at my happiest, have actually been Scandinavian organisations. I can think of two in particular — one in Copenhagen. Even though I was away from my family, commuting there weekly for two and a half years, on day one they gave me a bicycle and folded me straight into a wonderful team. Every Friday morning we'd have cake, and we'd sit around not talking about work, just getting to know one another — building those one-to-one connections, which is where the magic actually happened in the teams. Everyone showed up on a Friday morning, and the cake was extraordinary, of course, fresh, beautiful, beautifully presented, as you'd imagine in Denmark.

What struck me about that culture, and I keep coming back to it, was how much people respected one another's space and time, and put family at the centre of everything. I knew there was no point commuting there in July or August — there was no one there, or if there were, they were doing just enough, because everything shut down. You'd get no replies to emails, just an out-of-office: "I'm gone, here's my list, see you in three and a half weeks." So I'd take three and a half weeks off myself in the summer, and it was the happiest I've ever been — sometimes my family and I would spend the whole summer there, just to be around nature and that culture.

Gerrie Hawes:If anyone listening remembers this — I had a big conversation with the board of a smaller, fast-growing pharmaceutical company about whether happiness should be a value of the organisation. There was a huge debate — some people absolutely for it, some pushing back hard: "We can't push happiness, we can't expect our people to be happy." I think part of that is interpretation — happiness sometimes gets read as fun, whereas I see it as much deeper: contentment, reward. It can be fun too, but psychological safety sits with happiness as well — feeling seen, feeling like you're contributing, feeling rewarded, feeling able to be yourself. All of that sits within that happiness space.

For all the PhDs in the room, it's also about using your brain, using the effort you've put in to get where you are, and seeing that it's going somewhere, going where you want it to go — that's part of happiness too, and it's not the same as tipping your head back laughing like a muppet. That kind of laughter, for me, sits within playfulness — when we're exploring, thinking differently, finding the elephant, or Elmo. Happiness is much deeper than that — safety, bravery, courage all sit in there too.

Adam Walker:Yeah, I think happiness is something we aspire to, and many people never quite achieve it. But when I was in that environment, I felt it, I could see it demonstrated, and it wasn't just a platitude. That was the difference.

Gerrie Hawes:And the reason it's there, Adam, is that it's not just a nicer work environment — it's proven that we make better decisions when we're happy. Productivity goes up, delivery goes up. So when I'm working with a team on a new strategic direction, or merging two teams, or fast-tracking a therapeutic solution, if the individuals involved are supported to be happy, you get better outcomes.

Gerrie Hawes:And that's kind, too.

Adam Walker:Yeah, following on from that, I was reminded that happiness also comes from having shared boundaries — and respect for those boundaries. What I took into other companies I subsequently worked for as a consultant was clarity about what I was and wasn't prepared to do, and that built mutual respect between me and the hiring managers and teams I worked with. You don't want to be the only one bending over backwards to accommodate — as a consultant you can easily fall into that: will I get paid, will they want me back, do they like working with me, have I left it better? All those doubtful, imposter-type questions. But you also want people to respect you, and respect the value of the work you're doing — and that it's not open-ended.

Gerrie Hawes:My mind's going full circle back to that broad question — what would happen if everybody enjoyed their work? You talked about Copenhagen, but I'm sure you've also worked for organisations, and you don't need to name names, where happiness wasn't at the front. How hard it is just to get up in the morning. How hard it is to deliver groundbreaking outcomes when you feel it physically — in your shoulders, in your brain — because you don't have the freedom to work the way you know you can. I'm working with a very fast-growing startup outside of pharma at the moment, and there's a freedom to that, because lots of good things are happening for them. That's easier to see when you're 30 or 35 people who can see you're going places — with a large organisation it's harder to see those successes. That's part of the optimism piece: this is what we're achieving, this is what good will feel like. All of that is what I bring, overtly or covertly, into the organisations I work with.

Adam Walker:Yeah, it's an incredible power that you have.

Adam Walker:Listening to you talk about the happy experience, I was taken right back to my unhappiest one — a culture of bullying, coercion, unbelievably detailed micromanagement that resulted in burnout and sadness, and, dare I say it, I had a bad enough experience that I didn't work for 18 months. I had to walk away from that situation. I was mentally broken, and I had to rebuild from that point. This was a long time ago, but listening to you, I was thinking, I know what good looks like, and I definitely know what the other side looks like. I felt that physical manifestation — anxiety, sadness, low self-esteem, being undermined in a working setting, feeling low value, constantly under a spotlight where anything that could go wrong would go wrong, set up to fail. That mindset spirals very quickly, and those aren't organisations that bring out the best in people. I'm sure you've seen plenty of those too.

Gerrie Hawes:Yes — two things come to mind. One is why objectives matter so much to me: understanding how we got to here, before we work out where we want to go. The other thing I sometimes work on, more on an individual basis but sometimes with a team, is upward empathy — rather than pointing up and saying, "they," the leadership, are awful, why is that happening? We pass on the pressures and tensions we carry, sometimes from work, sometimes from outside work, from upbringing and experience, and I get involved in that too, sometimes individually. Someone might ask, "Could you work with this person?" and after a few conversations we realise there's something going on — they're not enjoying themselves, they're not enjoying work. That's why happiness is such an individual thing: if you're not happy yourself, leadership becomes really difficult. You have to work hard to help others be their best if you're struggling with your own contentment.

Adam Walker:I'm reminded of the All Blacks principle of leaving the shirt in a better place — the idea of legacy from James Kerr's book. He talks about exactly what you're describing: psychological safety lets us do better things, and lets us work beyond our own limitations.

Gerrie Hawes:Yeah. I find myself, in this conversation, really feeling for anyone listening who's thinking, "I'm not happy as a leader, I'm really struggling right now, I know I could be leading better, I know I'm micromanaging, I know I'm not handling my stress." The simplest thing I can say is: contact me, or contact Adam, and we'll talk — because sometimes this touches a nerve. These podcasts should touch nerves. But equally, I don't want anyone to feel bereft at that point.

Adam Walker:No — and I think the principle here is, if you need to uplift your workforce, Gerrie's the person to come to.

Adam Walker:But bring in the playfulness too — that's central to it, isn't it? When we talk about playfulness in the workplace, it might be something as simple as throwing an orange or a tennis ball around and wherever it lands, "Tell me something about yourself." I've also used an activity called the three Hs — Hero, Hardship, Highlight. Have you heard of that one?

Gerrie Hawes:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Walker:Tell me who your hero is and why, tell me about a hardship you've experienced, and the greatest thing that's happened to you, a highlight. In three sentences, you can understand someone's "why," their motivation, where they sit on the happiness scale — certainly what they're dealing with as a human being. I find it a really good way of cutting through the noise.

Gerrie Hawes:I'll counter that a little, because we got into a conversation about the worst places to work. If I walked into some of the tougher teams — organisations going through a genuinely hard time — and started using those techniques, people either wouldn't turn up, or they'd just go through the motions. What I'm trying to do is give people a safer environment to start saying how they're really feeling. If an organisation's been going through a tough time for a while, there'll be a lot of people further along what Nick Petrie — Dr Nick Petrie, I think he's a professor — calls degrees of burn. We talk about burnout too loosely, but there are degrees. Third-degree burn is when you need to step away for a considerable time and get real help — that burn is in full flow. Think of a petrol gauge: there's the green zone, then the yellow zone where we're burning, then the red zone, where you need to step away, get help, and a holiday won't cut it — you need proper support. If people are in the yellow zone, or the red zone if they're even still at work, playful activities won't land well. What you need is a way to help people start to open up.

So sometimes I do use playfulness for that. At one meeting I wore sequins and ran two rounds of bingo. On one side of the card, we played "spot your signs" — I dabbed through 12 signs you might feel when you're burning out. On the other side, actions you can take. That's for people who'd never turn up to a wellbeing conversation, but who are willing to say, "Let's go play bingo, sounds ridiculous, I might win a prize." By being playful, and a bit silly myself, it lets people admit, "Actually, I haven't been exercising, I'm not eating particularly well right now, I've moved into drinking too much, gambling too much" — whatever the sign is that tells them they need to start taking action to get back into the green zone.

Adam Walker:I agree with that, and it reminds me of one organisation I worked with that had "employee resource groups" and "safe spaces," where staff could get together around various topics — some mental health related, some women's health related. These were places where people could turn up as their honest selves. No recording, no cameras required. They could say as little or as much as they wanted. Over time, I felt psychologically safe enough within that organisation that I could translate it into the working setting, and be comfortable sharing things I wouldn't otherwise have shared. That speaks to your point about not always wanting to be playful — but if you know you're in a supportive environment, whether that's led top-down or grown bottom-up, with everyone supporting one another, you can just show up as an honest person. It wasn't about job titles or roles, it was, "How's your day going, tell us something you might not usually share."

Gerrie Hawes:That's why my business is called Remotely Human — I'd like leaders to be remotely human. It's a bit playful: "My boss isn't remotely human," "my work isn't remotely human" — how do we bring more humanity to work? Part of my approach is connecting people who work remotely.

During lockdown, a number of companies I worked with introduced coffee chats with no agenda, and a lot of that's gone now, because we can have coffee with friends again. But what I think we've lost a bit is taking time to connect remote teams, global teams, even UK teams who are mostly remote and might come into an office and not find their colleagues there. How do we connect on a human level, so we're not just barking instructions at each other? That takes a decision to spend the time — and I'm sometimes brought in because it's easier for an outside person to say, "Okay, this is how we're using this time," than for a leader to carve it out themselves.

The third part of Remotely Human is that work has become less human, so how do we dial up our human strengths, so machines can do what they're good at and humans can do what we're good at? That's very much a work in progress in a lot of organisations. That bravery, that psychological safety, matters, because a machine will tell you the answer is X — but that's only based on the data it's gathered so far. Psychological safety, and psychological bravery, is what lets someone say, "That's wrong." We're up against a machine that's a bit sycophantic too — a lot of AI will tell you what you want to hear. Being safe enough to say, "I don't think that's right, I don't think that's true," particularly when it's telling you something you want to hear, is something organisations still have to work on.

Adam Walker:I had a conversation yesterday with someone making a similar point — we can only get so far without technology and AI, but we need the right human in the loop, not just any human. A qualified, capable, honest, experienced person to validate decisions a machine might otherwise make. I say that because I don't want to be made redundant, and I'm sure you don't either — you don't want to be replaced by a chatbot, and I don't think you ever will be, because your personality, your aura, everything about you brings something a machine can't. I felt that deeply when we met.

Gerrie Hawes:Thank you.

Gerrie Hawes:You mentioned experience, but there's also curiosity, being inquisitive, willing to challenge, and willing to listen — and listening is something we're never actually taught.

Adam Walker:It's a skill. Podcasting isn't just talking — listening, and interviewing people, is a skill you improve with time. Communication is a massive differentiator, particularly in pharma, in healthcare, and the support services around it, because as you say, there are plenty of PhDs, and I don't have one — I'm the least qualified person in most rooms. But what I think I bring to a conversation is the ability to listen, to hear, and to play it back. That's what I think differentiates some of what I do. Is there anything we should have spoken about today that we haven't touched on?

Gerrie Hawes:I'll throw one more thing in — within listening, there's also introversion. Often, though not always, alongside that room full of deep-thinking PhDs, you find people with the underrated strength of introversion. It's an incredibly powerful thing, and it's not shyness — that's a different thing entirely. What we're talking about is people who can process complexity, listen, and then distil a killer summary. What matters to me, when I'm designing experiences, workshops, campaigns, or events, is how we surface that deep, reflective thought, and give people the space to actually think, rather than just shoot from the hip.

Adam Walker:At this point in the conversation, I always like to conclude with a quick-fire round. What's the one piece of advice you'd give your younger self?

Gerrie Hawes:I've thought about this too long. One thing I didn't realise until about five or six years ago was that I'd actually been discriminated against because I was a woman. Fairness is one of my core values, and I was good at using inclusive language, but in the sports industry, particularly on the footwear side, I was in a sea of blokes — little dogs think they're big dogs because they look around and see big dogs, or vice versa. I just thought I was one of the crew, and I was, but it wasn't until some time afterwards that one of my team, an intern of mine, said to me, "They didn't know what to do with you." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Because you're a woman." I hadn't realised it made a difference. So my message is: be aware of how you might be different — that's also a strength. You don't have to treat it as a disability, you can use it as one. Organisations may be more open to that now than they used to be, and if yours isn't, there are others that probably are.

Adam Walker:That definitely comes with wisdom. I recognise my own difference too, and it's not always the things you can see.

Gerrie Hawes:No, it's much deeper than that.

Adam Walker:What are the top three qualities you value most when building a team, or helping others build theirs?

Gerrie Hawes:That's a different question than I thought you were asking. Clarity of purpose — what are we actually trying to do, and is it worthwhile, so there's consensus on purpose too. A willingness to get to know each other — not each other's gossip, but how each person likes to communicate. I use a personality tool called See Me, and one of the reasons I like it is it opens up, "This is how I like to be communicated with, and this is how I really hate to be communicated with" — that helps a team gel. And connected to that, laughter's really underrated. If you can get a team to a point of laughter — not cynical laughter, though there's a role for that sometimes — you've got to a point of psychological safety, where "Wouldn't it be amazing if..." and "That'd be ridiculous," but finding the truth in it, becomes possible.

Adam Walker:It's clear — that openness to connect, to be yourself, to be vulnerable, to show your honesty.

Adam Walker:What's your favourite thing outside of work?

Gerrie Hawes:I have a camper van, and I love to travel in it. In reality that's because it fuels my curiosity about people — I love people, and their quirks, and their weirdness. The solar eclipse happened recently, and I was on a ferry coming back to England at the time — suddenly people were talking to each other, sharing eclipse glasses, or colanders where there weren't any glasses left. It was the humanity of it. The eclipse itself was awesome, but it was the big, burly blokes trying to watch it through their iPhones because nobody had offered them glasses, thinking they looked a bit too intimidating to ask. So I offered mine, and you could suddenly see them turn into six-year-olds, giggling at how amazing it was. That's my happy space — I love seeing the weirdness of humanity.

Adam Walker:Does your camper van have a name, by the way?

Gerrie Hawes:Strangely, not yet. The previous one was called Gina.

Adam Walker:You're not going to believe this, but when I was a kid learning to drive, we had an orange camper van called Orange Gina.

Gerrie Hawes:That's Orangina! Ours was Orangina too. What was it, a T25?

Adam Walker:No, it was a 1303, a 1974 camper van, with the pop top.

Gerrie Hawes:Yeah.

Adam Walker:We're going to have to take this conversation offline.

Finally, what's your number one golden rule in life and in business?

Gerrie Hawes:Listening is one of them, but the one I live by, and come back to often, is: you only remember living once. Within that is the idea that reincarnation might be possible, which I find quite amusing — I know I'll probably come back as a slug, because I really can't do with slugs. But that idea, that you only get this one chance, as far as we know, means: live simply so others can simply live. It means enjoy it, embrace it — but it also means, because of the potential of reincarnation, don't leave too much of a scar.

Adam Walker:Dare I say it, the analogy for me is: you never know when you're going to work with these people again, so you'd better leave it better than you found it, because they'll remember.

We've touched on so much today, Gerrie — from the name of your company, Remotely Human, which is tremendous and central to everything you do, to degrees of burnout, to the elephant in the room and dear old Elmo, to how we met at the Kindness Conference at the University of Sussex, and the wonderful Graham Allcott, who I'll link to in the show notes for this episode. The absolute openness with which you've entertained this conversation today has been brilliant — and the fact that we've both had campers with the same name is another slightly weird connection we're going to have to explore further.

I really can't thank you enough for being on Pharma Prescribed today, Gerrie. It's been a tremendous conversation, and I hope our audience have enjoyed it as much as I have.

Gerrie Hawes:It's been great to be here, and thanks for asking.