# How psychology shapes his leadership style

- **Episode:** [129](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/129.md) (2024-09-19)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** psychology, leadership-style, influence
- **Time:** 30:40–34:52 (start 1840s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/129?t=1840](https://truthliesandwork.com/129?t=1840)

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[30:40] Al Elliott: Yeah
[30:40] Harry Cramer: to, you know, to, to manage your psychological integrity as, as time goes on. And I want to try and repay that, and I want to try and repay that loyalty to everybody who's ever put faith in the next step of their career by, by joining SmartClinics
[30:56] Leanne Elliott: What I'm curious about is you said, you know, you've got a background in psychology. Has that had any influence on your approach to leadership, to people, to building culture, building your business?
[31:06] Harry Cramer: Yes, I think so. I think so. I think naturally studying psychology gives you a better understanding of mental health anyway, and at a time where mental health is becoming better understood and more talked about, I think it's given me a little bit of an advantage over someone that might not have studied psychology in terms of knowing a bit more about the subject matter and perhaps hopefully being able to recognize and spot the symptoms of poor mental health. Um, so I think there's all sorts of different ways, probably subconsciously, that psychology can help. Um, I never really thought about it though. It's a good question
[31:48] Leanne Elliott: It sounds so sincere, and I'm sure that goes a long way in terms of the culture of your business, the fulfillment of, of your people. I mean, describe the culture to me. Is it quite a mission-driven culture? How does, how does everyone interact?
[32:03] Harry Cramer: I think you've probably described it quite well there, actually. Um, I, I go, culture, you've always got to be a little bit careful, haven't you? Because you can't just decide what the culture is. You can't just say the culture of our business is this, so this is what it is. You know, it doesn't work like that. You know probably better than anyone, especially doing the podcast that you guys do. So The culture of the business is something that probably gets fostered over time, and it probably migrates over time. Probably, you know, some sort of cultural metamorphosis, I think, that goes on where, I mean, the culture on day one is certainly not the culture now. Some ways it probably was better on day one, some ways it's probably better now. It's just different. So I think probably at any given stage in our journey, if you'd have asked us that question, the answer probably would have been different. I think it goes back to that, you know, your 13th hire, Point that we made earlier. Right now, yes, I think it's very mission-driven. I'm quite proud of that. I think that's a good thing. I think people have to care. It's so much more pleasant to come to work every day if the thing that you're doing is something that you care about and enjoy, but naturally you probably will enjoy it if you care about it. So working for an organization that does something that you believe in is its own motivation. Um, so I hope that that would probably be a fairly significant factor of our culture, but in honesty, it's probably a question that our staff would maybe answer better than I can because they're the ones who work for it every day. All I can really kind of share is what I would like to think the culture is. Um, we also try to foster quite an empathetic culture. You know, in occupational health, sometimes we have to be Perhaps the bearer of bad news, or perhaps we just have to be quite robust in our opinions and our advice. But it's really difficult to do that and also remain empathetic at any given time. So when we're hiring, for example, we always try to identify people that seem to have good emotional intelligence and good empathy skills, because as we were talking about earlier, any given day that you talk to someone, the probability is that probably having a bad day. They're probably going through a difficult time in their life. So I think we try to foster a culture of empathy and understanding and probably being non-judgmental of the people that we work with as well. Obviously, that can be quite challenging when we have— we deal with people with some quite extreme views from time to time. But obviously, you have to remain understanding and non-judgmental of those views as well. But that's certainly— I hope that that's something that resonates within our culture. It's certainly something that personally I try to promote wherever possible