wavePod

Work For Grown-Ups: Escaping Parent-Child Leadership Dynamics at Work | Sammy Burt - Work For Humans | Wave AI Podcast Notes

Back to Work For Humans

Work For Grown-Ups: Escaping Parent-Child Leadership Dynamics at Work | Sammy Burt

Work For Humans

Tue Jan 07 2025

Summary

Work For Grown-Ups: Escaping Parent-Child Leadership Dynamics at Work

Podcast: Work For Humans
Host: Dart Lindsley
Guest: Sammy Burt
Date: January 7, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode explores how modern workplaces often unintentionally mirror parent-child dynamics, limiting autonomy and stifling innovation. Host Dart Lindsley is joined by Sammy Burt—facilitator, systems coach, leadership consultant, and author of the upcoming book What Is a Grown Up Anyway?—to discuss what it truly means to design workplaces for grown-ups. Their conversation moves from early experiences with “grown upness” to organizational cultures, the impacts of agency and trust, and practical frameworks for shifting from paternalistic to adult-adult relationships at work.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Parent-Child Paradigm in Organizations

Sammy sets the stage ([00:03]):
- Many organizations operate from a parent-child model: leaders dictate behavior, hours, attire, and even breaks, assuming they “know best.”
- Quote:
  
  “We are demanding accountability from people, having given them no agency or autonomy to feel like they own the thing that you’re now holding them accountable for.”
  (Sammy Burt, 00:38)
Dart underlines the problem ([00:45]):
- Parenting employees leads to undermined trust and blocked innovation.
- Reference to Spotify’s statement: “Our employees are not children. Spotify will continue working remotely.” ([02:32])

2. Distinction Between Adult and Grown-Up

Sammy’s quest for grown-upness ([03:21]):
- Started from feeling like she never truly “felt like a grown-up,” even as she tried to perform grown-upness.
- Early behaviors seeking validation from adults, not peers ([04:19]).
Adult vs. Grown-Up ([07:55], [08:38]):
- Adult: Defined externally—by law, culture, or biological milestones (driving, drinking age, etc.).
- Grown-Up: Defined internally—by mindset, qualities, and how one shows up in the world.
- Quote:
  
  “What started to come through for me was that when I spoke to people about being grown up, they talked much more about qualities, how they experienced themselves or other people, as opposed to what they were allowed to do.”
  (Sammy Burt, 11:07)

3. Kids’ Perspective on Grown-Ups

Children see being grown-up as not just privileges but burdens—responsibilities, paying taxes, fixing cars ([11:52]).
Memorable anecdote:

“I asked, when was a time when you didn’t think a grownup was acting like a grownup? And one kid wrote, when my dad shouted at the woman in the post office and it wasn’t her fault.”
(Sammy Burt, 12:24)
Grown-up as “a kid who got older—but hopefully like wine, not bananas!” ([13:13])

4. The Performance of Grown-Upness and Imposter Syndrome

Grown-Up as Performance ([07:41]):
- It’s often about being perceived as such.
- Quote:
  
  “To be a grown up was based on others’ perception of me. And I would be able to measure that by how much trust was given to me or responsibilities…it was very performative.”
  (Sammy Burt, 07:41)
Imposter Syndrome Reframed ([16:58]):
- The phrase may miss the environmental dynamics that create self-doubt.
- Quote:
  
  “If we call that imposter syndrome, we put the onus on the individual to feel differently as opposed to on the environment to say, how do we help anyone belong here?”
  (Sammy Burt, 18:39)

5. Culture, Stereotypes, and Belonging

Societal norms (e.g., girls dropping team sports) shape how grown-upness is performed ([16:58]).
Real grown-upness is about conscious authenticity and comfort with one’s whole self, not rigid roles ([19:26]).
Dart’s reference:
“Design for Belonging” by Susie Wise—belonging is an environmental attribute, not a personal flaw ([19:10]).

6. Transactional Analysis & Leadership Archetypes

Overview of Transactional Analysis ([21:59]):
- Three states: Parent, Child, and Adult (Eric Berne’s model).
- Many organizations are “parent-child” or have shifted to “parent-adolescent”—giving some autonomy but still setting controlling boundaries.
- Quote:
  
  “We are demanding accountability from people, having given them no agency or autonomy…”
  (Sammy Burt, 23:44)

7. Scandinavian Work Culture & Motivation

Comparison of Swedish (adult-to-adult) vs. UK (parental) management—trust, autonomy, and incentive structures ([24:10]).
Financial rewards may motivate simple tasks but fail to inspire or sustain complex, creative work ([25:40]).
Quote:

“Monetary incentives change behavior. They work. They just don’t work the way you want them to.”
(Dart Lindsley, 25:54)

8. Toward Grown-Up Relationships at Work

Striving for “grown-up” (adult to adult) relationships—mutual trust, candid communication, recognizing humanity regardless of hierarchy ([26:07], [26:23]).
Quote:

“The reality is we just sit down as two human beings trying to get a thing done well and we have a conversation that makes that happen. That’s a little utopian, but it’s my hope.”
(Sammy Burt, 26:23)

9. Joy at Work and Trust

Joy isn’t just happiness but a deep sense of trust, agency, and belonging ([27:06]).
Unlocking joy at work: being trusted, mistakes are seen as human, and feedback is constructive and safe ([28:21]).
Quote:

“It was about walking through the door. And the guys that ran the company…made a choice not to wait to trust me, but to trust the person they’d hired and to wait for me to let them down. That was an attitude that was then part of the culture.”
(Sammy Burt, 28:21)

10. Development and The Role of Grief, Discomfort, and Challenge

Growth happens in the stretch outside comfort; heat and challenge (even grief) are necessary for development ([33:14]).
Quote:

“There are rites of passage that people go through…in order for us to take that next leap of maturity…there’s likely been some discomfort, there’s likely been some heat.”
(Sammy Burt, 34:10)

11. Innovation, Playfulness, and Psychological Safety

Playfulness and childlike behavior (not childishness) are important for innovation ([35:29]).
Psychological safety, where it’s safe to fail, is the real foundation for creativity—playfulness signals this safety ([36:51]).

12. Frameworks for Adult Development

Bob Kegan’s “vertical development” and “self-authoring mind” ([37:21])—adults can collect new ways of being, advancing but not discarding past stages.
True grown-upness is having awareness of one’s choices and pausing to consciously select how to act ([40:31], [43:21]).
Quote:

“I can choose to pause and say Dart, I don’t know the answer to that question. That’s a conscious choice available to me.”
(Sammy Burt, 41:35)

Notable Quotes & Moments

On Company Culture

“If your culture is such that people are already well remunerated, then why do you need to offer them a bonus to perform better?”
(Sammy Burt, 24:23)

On Autonomy and Accountability

“We are demanding accountability from people, having given them no agency or autonomy to feel like they own the thing…”
(Sammy Burt, 23:44)

On Belonging

“It is not an attribute of the people, it is an attribute of the environment.”
(Dart Lindsley, 19:17)

On Joy at Work

“Having that trust in place and that belief that other people see who I am and that’s good enough, allows me to perpetuate that.”
(Sammy Burt, 29:53)

On Innovation and Safety

“What we’re really talking about is an environment that is safe to fail in. That’s what we’re talking about.”
(Sammy Burt, 36:38)

Timestamps for Key Segments

Organizational Parent-Child Model: 00:03–00:38
Spotify’s Statement and the Adult/Grown-Up distinction: 02:32–08:38
Transactional Analysis and Organizational Implications: 21:59–23:56
Scandinavian Culture and Motivation: 24:10–25:54
Joy at Work—Trust and Agency: 27:06–29:53
Heat and Growth/Role of Grief: 33:14–34:10
Innovation, Playfulness, and Psychological Safety: 35:29–36:51
Vertical Development Models: 37:21–43:21

Conclusion

Sammy Burt and Dart Lindsley advocate for a new vision of the workplace: one designed for grown-ups, where rules and roles are not reminders of inferiority but invitations to agency, trust, and collaborative adult-to-adult relationships. Unpacking legal, cultural, psychological, and practical theories, they illuminate a path beyond performance and compliance—toward real autonomy, growth, and joy at work.

Learn More

Sammy Burt on LinkedIn
farleyperformance.com for updates on her book, What Is a Grown Up Anyway?

For anyone seeking to build or join an organization where people are treated—and treat each other—as capable, creative adults, this episode is essential listening.

Loading summary...

Transcript

A (0:03)

The majority of organisations have been built on a parent child relationship model where we at the top are the parents, you underneath us are the children. We will tell you where to be, what to wear, what to do when you get there, when to go home, when you should rest. That will make you efficient and productive employees. And I as your boss, as the leader, as the parent, know best and I have high expectations of what you accomplish. We are demanding accountability from people, having given them no agency or autonomy to feel like they own the thing that you're now holding them accountable for.

B (0:45)

Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Companies sometimes fall into the habit of treating employees as less than adult, from micromanaging tasks to forcing people back into the office, all in the hopes of boosting productivity. The problem is that this approach sometimes undermines trust and stifles innovation, parenting employees instead of supporting them. Sammy Burt, author of what Is a Grown Up Anyway? Is working to shift this mindset. She helps organizations embrace a grown up approach that fosters autonomy, confidence and more empowered, innovative workplaces by treating employees as the adults they are. Sami is a professional facilitator, systems coach and leadership consultant at Farley Performance. Her upcoming book, what Is a Grown Up Anyway? Explores the complexities of adulthood and personal growth through insightful storytelling and practical guidance. In this episode, Sami and I talk about how companies sometimes parent employees, the importance of treating employees as independent adults, and the link between childlike behavior and innovation. We also discuss distinctions between adults and grownups, transactional analysis in the workplace, joy, grieving and empathy at work, as well as other topics. All right, to never miss an episode. Be sure to hit that subscribe button. And now I hope you enjoy my conversation with Sammy Burt. Sammy Burt, welcome to Work for Humans.

A (2:30)

Hi. Thanks for having me.

B (2:32)

We're going to be talking a lot today about your work around what is a grown up. Spotify recently released an ad and it was quote, our employees are not children. Spotify will continue working remotely.

A (2:47)

Yes, I saw it. I loved it.

B (2:49)

And the relationship between how we design work in the workplace. I know that you have a distinction between adulthood and grown upness, which we'll get into. And whether or not we treat people as adults is really important. And so I love that you've gone after this incredibly fundamental atomic idea of grown upness and have studied it. So how did you start down that path?

A (16:58)

Yeah, I think there are societal norms. I don't know if this is true around the world, but in the uk, I think there is a high occurrence of girls giving up team sports around 11, 12 years old. Right. It coincides with them starting secondary school with puberty with all this sort of stuff. And so although this is starting to shift, there's still a big trend of women not playing team sports. You know, you get women cyclists and runners, but there's far less of them that go out and play on a Saturday morning. Guys continue to play football or cricket or whatever their team sport may be. So I think the stereotype of what it is to be a grownup and the thing that I was aspiring to be when I was younger, the trap that we sometimes find ourselves in can be fed into by some of those things. So if I am a grown up woman, my house is in order, I dress a certain way, I probably wear makeup every day. I can walk in heels, I can't walk in heels, by the way. But the makeup of my life may be different to if I'm a guy and I'm trying to be perceived as a grownup, having a sport may be one of the things that's high on my list, whereas I don't think that would fit always for the stereotype of a woman being a grownup. You know, I run, but do I play football on a Sunday morning with my team? Less likely. So I think the stereotypes are different. How that then translates into how we see ourselves. I mean, of course, then we're into a big psychological, fun, beautiful mess that I probably am not equipped to talk about. But I think that will play into it too. How I understand myself. Even the phrase imposter syndrome that we've used earlier, and I use it, I have a colleague of mine who hates it because she thinks framing it as a syndrome is a bit of a cop out for just saying we need to have greater confidence in some rooms. In some rooms, well, I'm using rooms broadly. But in some situations, in some environments, some people don't feel like they belong now if we call that imposter syndrome, we put the onus on the individual to feel differently as opposed to on the environment to say, how do we help anyone belong here?

A (33:14)

Can I jump back a moment to the point you were making about grief? Because when we talk about human or adult development, there's a million models that we could draw upon. And I think they're all useful in different ways. But one that we use a lot at Farley is this idea that to develop we need to have some heat, we need to have some challenge, we need to have something uncomfortable. And we use that when we're working with leaders in organisations to say, actually, you know, we don't develop in our comfort zones, we need to be a little uncomfortable, a little in our stretch. And I think that feeds into and plays into this idea of grief and grownuppidness that there are rites of passage that people go through and they may not be culturally defined, but in order for us to take that next leap of maturity or grownuppedness or whatever we want to call it, there's likely been some discomfort, there's likely been some heat. And so I think when you often, you know, and I've certainly met people on the verge of retirement or in retirement who I wouldn't necessarily say very often embody a grown up. And oftentimes they've had a fairly easy life. And I don't want to judge them for that. Fantastic. But what they haven't had is the heatful moments or the grief or the challenge, the stretch that has made them vulnerable and have to look at themselves and consider who they are and who they want to be? And I think in lots of the conversations that I had and the interviews that are in the book, there are moments that are very uncomfortable that someone has gone through that has led to them then feeling more grown up. You know, if we bring this back to the workplace, you're speaking to an audience in organisation. Often, if people are looking to have more grownups in their organisation, I'd be saying, well, where's the heat here? Where's the challenge? Where's the stretch? Where's the tension? If we're making this all too easy without punishing people, I'm not getting into. That'd be horrible to everyone. But where do we encourage people to stretch and come out of their comfort zone and be vulnerable so that they can look at themselves and then try new things, try something different?

A (37:21)

Yeah, I'll do my best. I think it's sometimes called, yeah, Adult development theory or constructive development theory. Sometimes it's referred to vertical is another way of talking about it. So I'll just very quickly touch on vertical versus horizontal because I think the two get conflated. So when we talk about horizontal development, we're often talking about training or skills. It's the putting upon us. So it's the downloading of an app. When we're talking about vertical development, we are talking about the increasing of our capacity to hold those apps is a way that I like to think about it. So what Keegan and many others talk about is that vertical length, how do we increase our capacity to perform in this world or to be ourselves in this world? Perform is probably a bad choice of words. So Keegan talks about the childlike state of the impulsive mind. I'm sure we can picture that. You know, I have a two year old and a six year old and they are impulsive and they want a thing and they go after that thing and then you get into this. I think it's referred to as the imperial mind, which is a state of adolescence where you have gone from looking out at the world and almost not really being aware of yourself very much to. To looking very inward and wondering who am I and where do I fit in? And again, we can probably start to paint the caricatures of teenagers. And you know, I went through a real gothy grunger stage myself where I wanted to be the individual within the crowd of individuals. And then you start to move into this socialized mind where we start to look for the tribes that you belong to, the places that you can find belonging and a sense of that, which is where organisations are both so important and can throw a spanner in the works. Right. If you work somewhere that you don't have a great sense of belonging when that is what we are striving for in life. You can feel like you're really lacking, you know, you're lacking some of these key needs that you need to meet as a human. Now lots of people spend most of their lives in that state, if we were to call it this. And I'm also mindful that this is theory, not fact.

A (40:31)

Yeah, I think advance is good because what it doesn't say is you're moving away from the thing that you were. You're collecting the next thing. And so you would advance into this self authoring mind which moves us from. That's how the world works. This is how I am and therefore this is how we work with one another. To a space where you're starting to redefine the world as you understand it around you, you're starting to question how you interact with it and to redefine that in all sorts of ways which can be quite a confusing time and we might go to a caricature of someone having a midlife crisis. I always thought the world worked this way and now I wonder if it does. And I wonder what my role in that is going to be. And I wonder how I'm going to continue to respond to that which then leads us into or advances into this self transforming mind where we start to then redefine and feel comfortable in our difference from the way that we thought the world had to work. There's lots of different models and I have mentioned a few models in this conversation and I'm fairly model agnostic. I think they all in one way or another with different audiences are really useful and I think they are all the right amount of fiction that we don't get hooked on them and say good, so that's how the world works. I think what is really useful about all of these models and the many models out there is to go, ah, is that a useful way for me to translate what I'm experiencing. And if it is great, if it's not, fine, there'll be another one. And they all layer on top of each other. So Bob Keegan is a great one to look at. Transactional analysis is fantastic. And the drama triangle that sits within that and lots and lots of others. And it's just finding the one that resonates with you and you can see yourself in and then go, great, so now I feel like I have a greater level of consciousness about this thing. So what shall I do with that? And you start to identify the choices available to you. And I think that brings us back to the question of what it is to be a grownup. I think that having a greater awareness of the choices available to you is a quality of a grown up. I can choose to be an asshole in this moment, but I choose that it's not happening to me. I'm not being had by it. I can choose to pause and say dart. I don't know the answer to that question. That's a conscious choice available to me. But I think that so many of us, and I'm guilty of this still because I can't be a grown up all the time, but less so these days where I feel I have to respond in the way that the autopilot, the monkey brain, again, whatever we want to use tells me is the right way to respond in this. And actually now I pause more often and I go, hold on, I've got choice and I'm going to make a choice.

A (44:52)

I love this question. My work has to meet a few needs in me. We'll get the obvious one out of the way. It has to meet a financial need. Bills need to get paid. But that's fairly base level in my head. This is a Venn diagram, right? There's three circles here. One of them has financial need in it. Another one has interesting work. It has to be interesting work or there has to be a good amount of interesting work in it. And when I say that, I mean work that challenges me, that stretches me, that is complex, is gritty, is messy, or perhaps there might be times when there's less of that, but the people are fascinating. And so the what of what I'm doing is less challenging, but the people are really great that I'm doing it alongside. So interesting work is a really key component. So we've got this Venn diagram. We've got financial need needs to be met. It needs to be interesting and stretching work for me. There needs to be some heat in it. I need to feel like I'm developing. And the third one is purposeful. So I don't want to. And I will not work with an organization who want me to come in and do something to their people to increase profit. I will work with profitable organizations who want to be more profitable. But their intention has to be the joyfulness, the happiness, the safety, whatever that word is. There has to be some intention there around the quality of life of their people. And let's be really honest here, there'll be times when one piece of work is meeting more of a financial need for me and less of the other two. As long as it's not in conflict with the other two, then I'm okay. And there'll be other times when I'm working with a group of people on something purposeful and fascinating that doesn't pay the bills. But I can't hold back. I need to work with those people on that thing. And so I think how I make that work, this ever moving then, is trying to find a good balance across the three, which is why I love working in consultancy, because it gives me that permission and freedom of variety.