Episode 33 | The Emotional Intelligence Advantage: Mastering Change and Conflict with Amy Jacobson
You know when you’re trying to drive change in your organisation and no one’s buying into it, no one wants to do it, we’ve got difficult conversations that aren’t being had. We’ve got things that just are not flowing well. You’ve probably got some emotional hijacks happening. And I’m talking to, um, Amy Jacobson today around how we can master our, uh, emotional intelligence, help incorporate that into change intelligence and basically make good stuff happen about being unstoppable. So tune in.
Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast
Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trina, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our, uh, bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started. Today, I’m super excited to have Amy Jacobson chatting with me. She’s an emotional intelligence and human behaviour specialist, delivering EI programmes, keynotes and workshops across Australia and beyond and in all the places. And she talks about helping people own it, take control and be unstoppable. And she had me hooked and so I joined one of her programmes in the past and I highly recommend it. She’s an author of Emotional Intelligence, which is a, ah, simple and accountable guide to increasing performance, engagement, ownership and excitingly, she’s got a new book coming out which launches next week on the Emotional Intelligence Advantage. And I’m super excited to lean into that and talk more because it’s about mastering change, difficult conversations and it’s out next week, kids, so that’s awesome. So welcome, Amy. Let’s talk ei, uh, difficult conversations and HR reinvented. Hey.
Amy: Hello, lovely, how are you? Yes, very excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Trina Sunday: No problem.
What led you to focus on emotional intelligence and how that’s evolved
Maybe you can start a little bit for, uh, listeners that might not know you around a bit of your backstory and what led you to focus on emotional intelligence and how that’s kind of evolved into the writing and the workshops and all the great things you do on AI.
Amy: Yeah, absolutely. So I always had a fascination for the mind, so even if I go back to like early teenage years, it was just the minds always baffled me and to begin with it was more that that curiosity around how somebody’s mind could be so messed up to do such bad things. So I was really fascinated in the criminology side and the forensic side. And I quickly realised that I would not cope in an industry like that because I take all of that quite, uh, you know, quite a heart. I would probably be able to sleep at night. So I thought that’s probably not the right thing for me. But that interest still kind of laid there and I went into, I went into corporate world. I was in corporate world for over 19 years, absolutely loved it. I’m not one of those people that couldn’t wait to get out and I’m, uh, actually not one of those people that ever wanted to run my own business. But what I found as I was going through corporate world and is people just fascinate me and the mind just fascinates me. And the more I got to do, you know, courses and programmes around NLP and, um, you know, doing training programmes for the organisations I was working for, just seeing that everything that we do relies on how people respond and how well people can tap into their emotional intelligence. And you can have the best products in the world, but if you haven’t got the people with the right mindset, then those products are useless. So I spent a lot of time in insurance, actually out of the corporate world. And I finally got to the point where I thought, you know what, I want to help more people than just insurance. I want to tap in and, you know, meet some other amazing minds that are doing different things. And, um, always had that love of presenting and being on stage and the adrenaline kick of that. So took all my NLP studies and, you know, all of my experience of working so closely with people, which I’d done a lot of roles around, you know, helping parts of organisations increase their performance and underperforming teams and people in wrong jobs and, uh, went out on my own. And I thought, to be fair, like I said, you know, I’ll give it six months and see how it goes. And uh, yeah, apparently eight years later, here we are, two books and loving what I do.
Trina Sunday: That’s awesome.
Emotional intelligence is the measure of your emotional quotient
I think one, one thing that would be awesome to get your take on or to talk through. I’m a big fan of lay terms and I’m quite conscious of HR speaking. The work I do. I’ve been interested in terminology that shifted from say, EQ to ei. You mentioned nlp, so Neuro Linguistic Programming. I’d really curious to know how you talk to people.
Amy: Yep.
Trina Sunday: In a language that makes sense. Around what is nlp, what’s eq and how is it different to ei? Like talk us through the language a bit as you say it.
Amy: So there is, there is so many different ways to talk about it. Right. If I focus more on the EQ and the EI side, the EQ is what a lot of people call emotional intelligence. But when you dig deeper into it, the EQ is your emotional quotient. So that’s actually the measure of your emotional intelligence. So. So you still can use it. It’s absolutely like a valid term to be able to call emotional intelligence eq and it’s nice and easy and people find it relatable because you’ve got the IQ as well. So your IQ and EQ kind of goes hand in hand, but that is the actual measure of your intelligence. And then the measure of your emotional intelligence, the EI side, which is what I use probably because I’m lazy and just a believe in everything. But the emotional intelligence that I kind of simplify it down to is EI having that EQ in there that you can, you can measure your emotional intelligence. But when I’m speaking about emotional intelligence, it’s always ei and that’s just an abbreviated form of emotional, uh, intelligence.
Trina Sunday: You talk about EI being more than just a nice to have. So I’ve heard you talk about EI in terms of awareness and regulation and, and results that come from it. What is it about emotional intelligence? What is it that makes it a must have as opposed to a nice to have?
Amy: Look, emotional intelligence is a how and why behind what we do and why we do it. So I’m a big believer in it. And I would never say that emotional, uh, intelligence is more important than iq, because I honestly don’t believe that it is. I believe that both of them have a place. But I think that your IQ will only take you so far in life before your emotional intelligence needs to either kick in or whether your emotional intelligence will actually break your iq, break opportunities. But at the same time, your emotional intelligence will only take you so far before you need some IQ to back that up as well. So to me, it’s kind of when, when you take the mind and when you take the wirings of us as human beings, I would pretty much look and say while there is a lot of other, you know, quotient areas that they’re bringing up around, you know, like your social intelligence, like there’s so many of them out there. I would say the two core ones that every human being is broken down into IQ and EI or eq. You’ve got that side that is your logical side that really uses the technical parts of your mind, the analytical. It’s the stuff that’s very factual, uh, you know, hands on kind of stuff. And that’s where we specialise in what we do and that’s how we learn and become great at whatever it is that we decide to do with our careers and with our lives. But the emotional intelligence that sits with it, uh, determines how we actually deliver that, how we interact and the why behind why we do it. And that’s so important because when we know with the mind that every single time we do something, every time we make a decision, the mind is actually looking and weighing up, what do I send to gain versus what I said to lose from this? So the why that you’re doing it will determine how much effort you put in, how good you are at it, how much you enjoy it, how much it connects with somebody else. So you really can’t have one without the other. It’s one of those things where, you know, not so much these days because people are a lot more accepting and understanding of emotional intelligence. But if I went back, you know, maybe uh, like nine, ten years ago, people that I even heard say, oh, we don’t have time for emotional intelligence. And I would say to them, well, actually you don’t get to choose whether uh, you have emotional intelligence or not. Like it’s not about a matter of time. Emotional intelligence is going to come into play whether you like it or not. And that emotional intelligence, if it is a low level and you’re not leveraging that area, then that is really going to impact the outcome that you’re actually gaining. And at the same time, if you improve that emotional intelligence, then that’s going to lead you to a better outcome. Same as leadership. When people are involved, you can’t say, oh, we don’t have time for leadership. It’s the same with emotional intelligence. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not.
Trina Sunday: Noting people say that all the time, right? So, you know, as if it’s an add on as opposed to, you know, it’s the how we do it, right? So it’s the stylistic side of how we show up to do the things that we do. And when you talk about us being unstoppable, for example, and when it comes to emotional intelligence, then it really is around, you know, you’ve got to Own it, take control of it. Because as you say, you do have it. You’ve just got to figure out how good is it, how emotionally intelligent are you and get a bit real abou that, right? To then know what you need to do to level up in that space.
Amy: I think too, Trina, it’s like, I’m a big believer in that. I don’t actually believe that there is such a thing as an emotionally intelligent person. You know, the number of times where I’ve been asked, especially by media, you know, who is the most emotionally intelligent Prime Minister or whatever. And, um, I don’t think there is such a thing. And I teach this kind of stuff and I would never, ever call myself emotionally intelligent because I think emotional intelligence is a skill and a tool that we have. And in every situation we have a choice. We have a choice to either respond in an emotionally intelligent way or not. And sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. And, um, I think it’s accepting that fact that it’s always going to be there and we have to actively look into it and decide, you know, how we’re going to respond. And. And that comes down to the wiring of our mind because we do have, like, we’ve got our logical mind and we have our emotional mind. And the two of them overlap and work together as well. So it’s having the ability to control which part of your mind is actually driving what’s coming out of your mouth and your actions and being able to control those emotions.
Trina Sunday: And sometimes we have to take that pause, right, like that moment between the situation and our response, that moment of pause, to be conscious about what our response is likely to be. Because I talk about, and there’s a book, the Chimp Paradox, and, you know, we talk about the logical side of the brain. And, you know, I was going around for a while saying, well, I’d love to, but the chimp hijacked my brain and I couldn’t. But which was my cop out for not having responded in an emotionally intelligent way. I’m growing, I’m learning. I’m human, right? Yeah, don’t blame the chimp, everyone. But this is where our opportunity is. And I feel like from a HR perspective, what I’m seeing out there in the landscape as well is this growing use of the language around AI capability frameworks, competency profiles, all this HR speak that’s talking about emotional intelligence or talking about EQ in the wrong way, given it’s a measure as opposed to a, uh, state or skill, you know, that you could have. So I feel like we might be getting some things wrong in terms of how we talk about AI in organisations.
I’m curious where organisations should start if they want to improve emotional intelligence
And I’m curious to know where you think organisations should start if they’re wanting to intentionally improve emotional intelligence in their organisations. Where do they even start?
Amy: Look, I think when we need to start, and, you know, this might be a little bit controversial, I’m here for it. Uh, you love a controversial. So when it comes to hr, I think the mistake that we’ve made is that a lot of HR has become a ticker box. And I think that, you know, a lot of the organisations that I work in, when I go in and work with their HR departments, the HR departments are running not with people first, but with fear first, in the fact that we need to cover ourselves legally to make sure that we do everything by the book, that it’s done in order. And I get that, like you do, you do need to have that safety measure that’s in there. But I think that we start to lose the fact that human beings are so unique. And while you can put a guideline out there, it is not going to cover every situation and every person. So we cannot go out with a, uh, blank template and expect everyone to fit in there. The same as we can’t say that when this happens in the workplace, this is what we do, because each scenario is going to be slightly different and each person is going to be slightly different. Now, that doesn’t make it easy then, right? Because based on what I’m saying, like, well, what do we do then? Like, what choice have we got? So I think that, you know, um, what we really need to do is we need to take a step back from getting caught up in the processes and the policies. We need to remember why we have these amazing parts of organisation that have, you know, your hr, your L and D, your people and culture. And that is all about the fact that in every business where you have people working, whenever there is any time that human beings are interacting, it gets complicated, really complicated. And I think that while it’s okay to have, and it’s definitely not just okay, but you should definitely have those guidelines and those policies and procedures, I think what we need to do is work with our HR teams first to get them back focused in our original purpose. And that is understanding what makes human beings tick, understanding the differences that can happen when you’ve got people working together, understanding the emotions and what happens when emotions are driving those conversations. Because as you said, you know, in the mind that that pause that we really should be doing is actually giving the mind a chance for the logical brain to kick in over the top of the emotional brain. And I don’t think that we have enough of that at the moment. Now for organisations, I’d love to say read my book and you’ll be set, but it just doesn’t work like that. Do a course and you’ll be emotionally intelligent. It doesn’t work like that. I think that we need to embed it. It’s not a ticker box, it’s not a course. It is something that needs to become a focus area and something that’s actually leading what we’re doing and leading our HR team. So it should be something that finds its place within the strategic document for an organisation.
Emotional intelligence is one of the key levers in improving organisational effectiveness
Trina Sunday: And it’s interesting listening to that because I talk a lot around human centred design and where we are in terms of creation of programmes and how we show up, co created programmes as well in that mind. But I think there’s also this whole complexity which I’m sure you acknowledge, around the fact that we have culture of organisations which also may be avoidant and fear driven. And then you have HR teams who are a representative group within that culture who are responding to some of that. I see. And in listening to kind of the emotional intelligence lens being similar to where we’ve lost a lot of conceptual thinking and analytical thinking and that real time risk assessment because we’ve been so prescriptive. Right. Like in the policies as you talk about, we’ve kind of taking all the thinking out of it and then we wonder why leaders don’t make good decisions.
Amy: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And I think emotional intelligence is one of the key levers. If people understand it, know what it means, know how to harness it, name it, to tame it, uh, in terms of where they’re at, in terms of their emotional intelligence. And for us to have more visibility, we can then craft, you know, capability interventions. Terrible word but you know, be able to look at things that can help in that space. But it’s difficult, right, like because there are a lot of people that want the quick fix. They do just want to send people to your course or have you come in and do the workshops. I have no doubt. Or you know, spread the word and you know, get the book. But as you say, for me, there’s a skill and will thing in that. Right. Like you can give people the skills and the tools, but they’ve still got to want to use them. And I’m not sure where we get lost in that sometimes. I’m not sure if You’ve got any comment on that?
Amy: It’s something that I say quite often because I think, like, I’m an avid reader, I love reading and, uh, I think we, you know, we open ourselves up to so much information, especially in this world, we’ve got access to so much information, but you. Right. It’s what we choose to do with that information and that’s where we tend to fall down.
We definitely need to get more emotional intelligence in hr, Trina says
Coming back to, you know, hr, yes, we definitely need to get more emotional intelligence in hr. But you touched on something then, Trina, that I said is just so important, and that is that if we have leaders that don’t have emotional intelligence, what they’re doing is, instead of leading with emotional intelligence, they’re just letting things escalate straight to HR and just wanting a solution and not actually having the tough conversations, which is what the new book is about. Right. It’s about the fact that you have to be willing to do the things that you would usually avoid in order to stop it becoming a big problem, like making that whole mountain out of a molehill. And so if you bring the emotional intelligence in to the organisation, that’s why I say, you know, bring it in at that strategical level, it should be in hr, but it shouldn’t be reliant on just HR to be emotionally intelligent, it should be through every layer, your leadership. Leaders should be judged based on their emotional intelligence, because if their key role is leading people, how can you not? Because that’s how you lead people, right, is through emotional intelligence. And I think that’s the part we’re missing. But I will say we have come so far and I’m truly excited about how far some of the organisations have come in this space and just how much more they are open to it, even from that C suite level and even from the board level.
Trina Sunday: So for those that are doing it well and have come far in kind of their journey around AI at the board level and exec level, what does that look like? Like, if this is embedded at a strategic level, what does that look like if you’re doing it well compared to the places that are not?
Amy: So the first thing that I would say is massive ownership. So if I was to sum up emotional intelligence in two words, it would always be own it. Like, own who you are, own the values and beliefs that have brought you to where you are today, own how well you manage those emotions, own your impact on other people, own communication, on your motivation. Like, this is all about ownership. So the first thing that I see in organisations that are doing well, is that ownership and the ability to be able to first stand up and say when you got something wrong or when you’re not fully qualified to do something and you want to bring somebody else in for help. So it is around that level of awareness is so high and they’re always looking for ways to improve and do something about it. Nothing is swept under the carpet. The organisations that do it well have the tough conversations. You know, it’s that, uh, they’ve got a balance between being liked and being respected. And they know where that balance is. Because the last thing we want is people to tap right into emotional intelligence and not know when to flick from EI over to management or leadership into management and, you know, taking control. You don’t want to be a pushover. You still need to be decisive and you still need to be able to take the reins and take control. The other thing I’m finding in organisations where the emotional intelligence is working really well is empowerment is huge.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Amy: And that empowerment, I think, starts, uh, from the top that you are teaching people and empowering people to not just manage down, but also manage up. And that’s, that’s a big section in the new book, talks about managing up and the ability to be able to do that. Because too often when we’re not leveraging our emotional intelligence, as you said before, we’ll always look for the easiest and most simplest way to do things right. And if we haven’t got people who can manage up and have those tough conversations and build their own capability, then instead of managing up, uh, we just point the finger up and we just say, it’s not us, it’s them. Or they say, here’s a problem, you fix it.
Trina Sunday: And meanwhile they’re pointing down.
Amy: Exactly right. Exactly right. So all you’ve got is just a whole lot of fingers pointing at each other, no one taking ownership for it, but also getting caught up in that blame world and not actually looking and going, okay, so this is a problem. How do we fix it? Let’s not get caught up in, you know, whose fault it was or the blame or how it happened. Let’s talk about how we fix it and how we make sure it doesn’t happen again. So that communication is key and that’s drawing in all parts of those emotional intelligence. But it has to start at the top. It really has to start at the top. One of the things I say to everyone I work with, because there is a downfall to pockets of your business learning and building their emotional intelligence. Because if you have a pocket of your business that builds their emotional intelligence. As soon as you start to learn more about emotional intelligence, it becomes very obvious when people aren’t being emotionally intelligent. So if you don’t start at the top, you’re going to have people who build their emotional intelligence at different layers, but then they can quite easily look at the people they’re reporting to or at the people at the top thinking you are not being emotionally intelligent. And I don’t know if I want to be here anymore. So there’s actually a risk that you’ll lose quality people if you don’t make it an overall commitment for the organisation and everyone involved.
Trina Sunday: And I think at the end of the day, that’s what’s going to impact outcomes, right? Like, so if emotionally intelligent workforces, leadership groups, like, if we’re approaching, you know, any given situation with more heightened emotional intelligence than we otherwise might, then we’re more likely to be responding in the right ways, right? And not being avoidant.
Trina Ding’s new book about difficult conversations launches next week
You know, the new book, which I can’t believe launches next week, like, that is so super exciting. It’s going to be online, available everywhere. But this focus and what’s different from the first book is this is about the advantage, like competitive advantage at the end of the day, right, in terms of how you manage change, have the difficult conversations, because without that, you can’t innovate, you can’t iterate, you can’t evolve. And in such a disruptive economy, geopolitical climate, all of those things that are impacting organisations, you need to be able to bring your A game. And I’m curious, but why the hell can’t anyone have a difficult conversation? Now, I know the short answer to that is because they’re not emotionally intelligent, potentially, or they have low emotional intelligence. But, like, what is it that that’s like, is it a fear response? Is it like the just, you know, the discomfort, like, what are you seeing when you talk or look at it from an AI lens?
Amy: It’s the unknown. When you have that unknown, right? Like there’s probably about you know, five or six core fears that we have. And when you look at difficult conversations, pretty much all of those fears coming to one in that one conversation. So you’ve got the fear of the unknown in that you don’t know how they’re going to respond. So you don’t know whether they’re going to be okay with it. You don’t know whether they’re going to be upset, angry, like they could have any emotional response to this and you don’t know what that’s going to be. So it’s very hard to prepare for something that you don’t know. Then you’ve got the fear of failure coming in because all of a sudden when you’re in a confrontational situation, which no human beings like confrontation, right. So fear of judgement comes in because your ability as a leader and as a human being to be able to do this conversation well comes into play. So you’re fearing as well for yourself, like, because it’s kind of putting a question out there to go, how good are you at being a human being or a leader if you can’t do this conversation well? So that was a fear of failure and then the fear of judgement coming in too, in that you’re still a human being. So when you’re interacting with another person, naturally we don’t like being disliked and we don’t like being yelled at or causing other people to have emotions. So this whole just thought of going into a difficult conversation just freaks our mind out for so many different reasons. So what we tend to do is just avoid it and just hope that it kind of does its own thing and sweep it under the carpet. But then what happens is it just grows and grows and grows and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And you’ve probably known Trina, like sometimes we can put difficult conversations off for so long and we finally have them and they’re nowhere near as bad as we expected them to be. And as soon as it’s over and there’s so much change that instantly comes with it and we think, why didn’t I have that conversation two months ago? Like it’s taken up so much real estate in my head, it’s occupied so much for both of us. It’s damaged a relationship. So it really is that avoidance level that we add. And um, in the book, what I talk about more than anything is I think that with difficult conversations because of all of these fears coming at us, we tend to over prepare for them because we don’t know what’s going to happen. We go into this fear and this over preparation, um mode and we know that fear kicks in our mental or our fight or flight, right? So if you’ve got the person who’s supposed to be leading the conversation in fight or flight and they’re over preparing in that they’re going and getting all of the evidence and stats and details that they can so that they feel comfortable in this situation by the time they even walk into the conversation, they walk in. So obviously in an emotional hijack that they instantly cause a defence mechanism. So the defence mechanism between the two people having the difficult conversation, because the other person’s also going to be an emotional hijack because they feel like they’re about to be attacked, or their fear of failure or they’ve done wrong, or their fear of the unknown if they don’t know what the conversation is, their fear of judgement, all of this fear coming into it means that you’re putting two people in a room together in a really tough situation where both of their emotional brains are driving, both of them are in emotional hijacks at the moment, which means they’re both in defence mode. It is the equivalent of literally putting them into a boxing ring together and ringing the bell. Ding, ding, away you go. It’s not great. And the best way to take a difficult conversation, to have a, ah, difficult conversation, is about following the emotions. Because what we find with most difficult conversations is what we think the conversation is going to be about is very rarely what the conversation is actually about. You want to know the why behind it. You want to know how it got to this point. And the best way to do that is a. To go in as a human being, not as a robot who’s created a script and ready to just fire at someone, but to actually go in and ask questions. To ask questions to better understand, how do we get to this? What is driving it? Why are they feeling this way? Why is this impacting things? And be able to observe and actually say, okay, what is the emotion that this person is feeling right now? Because if you can work out the emotion and then respond in that conversation based on the emotion and follow the emotion the whole way through the conversation, that is emotional intelligence. And that is how you will get a good outcome out of a difficult conversation. And you’re not just solving the band aid that’s sitting on top. You’re actually talking about the real core problem that’s driven this to end up in a difficult conversation.
Trina Sunday: So much of that’s resonating because last podcast I was having a conversation with Dominique Thurbin, who’s doing a lot of work around truth telling. And you know, which I started with, why is everyone a liar?
Amy: Like.
Trina Sunday: But I think. And we. So we talked about fear response, but one of the things we talked about was feedback and performance, you know, and the avoidance of the conversation. And people thinking that if they’re not truthful, then, you know, they’re protecting the person. This, at its core is like, not emotionally intelligent.
Amy: Right.
Trina Sunday: Uh, like if we are tuning into what the emotion is. And if we’re following that, as you say, and if we go in with curiosity as opposed to a predetermined idea around. Oh, no, they are underperforming as opposed to, hey, so I noticed this thing. It doesn’t seem like where we thought we were going to go with it. I’d, uh, love to hear, kind of.
Amy: Talk to me about it.
Trina Sunday: What are you seeing? You know, just open it up, right. And then you can follow it to where it needs to go. And you’re more likely to be responding to where their emotional needs are, but still getting the outcome right. You discover what’s going on, you figure out if there’s a whole blind spot that you didn’t know was there and you can work with that. Uh, and then no one’s damaged in the process. But there is an element around us thinking. And tricking ourselves into thinking we’re being kind is stopping us from having difficult conversations where the kindest thing you can do is help give people feedback that sets them up for success so they can smash it. That’s kind, but I think so. There’s so much in that. And then I was just having a visceral response, just to share with you when you’re talking about scripting, because I see so much scripting. So with the HR teams I work with, it’s part of. We don’t trust the leaders to be emotionally intelligent, so we’ve got to script the conversation. We don’t trust management to be able to make the right decision, so we have to prescribe the policy in deep minutia so that they don’t get it wrong. Well, we get it wrong every time. Right. Because we predetermined something that can’t be predicted fully because we can’t drill it down that far. And so scripting is just. I was just having a massive physical reaction to it. I could forget, and even my watch started beeping at me that my blood pressure was going up. Yeah, my heart rate was going up. Because I see it all the time. And even last week, I. And it’s really interesting when you’re on the opposite side of the table as a support person, friend being made redundant, not allowed to talk and big organisation, massive, you know, and they had like, some, you know, I don’t mean the junior bit disrespectfully, but someone that’s obviously new into these conversations, so not a lot of lived and learned experience, I guess, to have seen how this can play. Literally read a script on teams so, you know, they were Forced to go into an office to then have someone read them the script over teams. It was the most barbaric kind of thing I’ve seen for a really long time.
You talk about change intelligence and emotional intelligence in your new book
And so there’s this scale, I can imagine when we talk about emotional intelligence, where we’ve got these extremes, like we’ve got extremes where we’ve got it so wrong and we’ve lost all line of sight over humans being at the core of conversation. That’s obviously impacting change as well. Right. And so we’ve got all of the processy stuff that goes with the mechanics of people working in organisations, not to diminish managing people or anything. Then we have these massive change agendas where you’re looking at behaviour change on a whole new level, where we’re taking people into potentially a space of discomfort in terms of broader change agendas. I’ve heard you more recently talk about change intelligence. I think that’s the language you used. What are you seeing in change specifically that can be leveraged differently when it comes to emotional intelligence.
Amy: So these two areas go hand in hand, hence why they’re both in the book in that anytime that anytime that you have change, you’re going to end up having difficult conversations as well. And the reason why I refer to it as change intelligence, because I think change management is we’ve got to a point where we’re doing it very poorly because again, it’s become that whole management side of managing a process. It’s become ticker box. And look, when I look at some of those processes, when I just look at them, I can look and go, okay, that right there that you’ve got there is the AI process, but there’s nothing authentic about it. It’s just, it’s become that, you know, do that ticket. Don’t worry about the response from it, don’t worry about the people in it, just m. Move on. Um, so the change intelligence is different in that what we find is the majority of time when change isn’t effective, it’s not because of the actual change that was introduced. It’s the inability for the people to buy into the change. So what change intelligence is, is really taking it that step back. You’ve got three steps to change intelligence and it lines in with the emotional, uh, intelligence process. So the first step of that change intelligence is all about owning and facing the actual loss. Because when you think about our mind, we have got, you know, billions and billions of neurons and neural pathways floating around in our mind. And those neural pathways tell us that when this trigger Happens. This is the process that follows it and this is how we feel about it. So when you bring change in, what you’re basically doing is introducing something in that goes against what the mind is telling us. So you’ve got people coming in and desperately wanting other people to love change, which is the problem in itself, which I’ll speak about in a minute. Uh, because you shouldn’t have to love change, but you’ve got people coming in with this change, kind of throwing it in their faces and saying, love it, love it, love it. It’s amazing. But in those people’s mind, the mind is saying, that’s not how it works. Like, I’ve got this embedded neural pathway in my mind that says we do it this way. And you’re telling all of a sudden, just like that, I need to change and do it that way. You’ve got to go through the process with your mind first to kind of like rattle that embedded pathway, start to create the new one. But you’re not going to create a new neural pathway until you’ve got the buy in. And the buy in’s got to come from the emotional intelligence side of it. Right? And if I look at that, not having to love change, we also, we do two things really poorly with change is that the first one is that we act like it’s perfect whenever we’re selling a change, especially in the workplace, we’re like, it’s amazing. You’re going to love it. It’s so much better than our existing one. And, um, the thing is, there is no change that is perfect. There’s no such thing as change that is perfect. Right. I talk about it in the book that even if you won lotto, there is still loss to that. Like, you know, you will lose relationships, you will lose the drive to get up in the morning because what do you need to work for anymore? You might lose some of your dreams and your goals because they’re all there in front of you. That every change that actually happens, there is going to be some imperfections in there. And when we bring this change in, we’ve got to also admit the fact that there’ll be some things in the old system, in the old process, in the old way that actually works better than the new way. But we bring changing because of the 8020 rule, right? And that 80% of it is better. So it’s a way up to go. Okay, is it overall, is it better than the old way? Yes, and that’s why we’re going with it. But then when we Go to the teams and sell it to them. We don’t talk about that part, we just talk about how amazing it is. So the other people who are fighting their mind, their neural pathways, they will find something and they will show you straight away when they find it what is wrong with that change and they’ll latch onto it. And the problem is, instead of just admitting it, we then fight it.
Trina Sunday: Uh, yeah, defensive, right.
Amy: Because it’s our baby. We’ve just spent so long on this change and we want everyone to love it, but we weren’t honest with it up front and we weren’t. We didn’t follow the mind’s process. And. And when we look at that minds process and people’s relationships with change, which is what I talk about a lot in the book, is that if you’re a leader or if you’re in an organisation, you actually do not want a team of people who all love change. Like that is massively unstable. If you had a team of people that all love, um, change, you would constantly have them looking for promotions, new jobs, something new to do, looking for that shiny new toy. Right? You need people in your team that love consistency. They come in every day and do the same thing over and over every day, and they do it really well and they enjoy doing it. Those people are not going to love change. That’s why they’re so good at their job. So you’ve got to have a balanced team there and you’ve got to stop fighting the change and actually come in knowing that some people are going to find it hard because that’s what makes them so good at their job, because they’re so consistent and they’re attached to that. Some people are going to love it. But much like emotional intelligence, everyone’s wiring is going to play into how well they embrace it and how long it takes them to get on board with it. But change intelligence is that, uh, we have to work with the wirings in the brain before we even get excited and start settling that new change. We have got to look at what’s going to happen. What are these people going to lose? What is that feeling that is going to hit them? What emotions are going to come up with this change? How do we get them involved in it? What is that void in the middle? I call it the liminal space. So what is that? Reminds me of Stranger Things. And in Stranger Things, how you’ve got, you know, the two worlds, kind of that space in between. So you’ve got that liminal space in the middle of change. Intelligence, where you’ve kind of left the old world but you’re not quite ready for the new world yet. And how do you get them involved? And that’s where your tough conversations come in. That is where you got to have that people side, that humanistic side driving. And then step three, that is when we sell the change, that is when we get excited and we bring out all the bells and whistles. But before you do that, you have to do step one or two or else you’re going to have people just instantly defence and push back on that change. And ultimately that’s what leads to changes failing.
A lot of change management problems stem from massive change transformation
Trina Sunday: And I think there’s a lot of massive change transformation and projects I’ve been involved with across, uh, organisations. Because one of the joys that you have of working as a strategic people and culture, you know, specialist, is the fact you get to see change across an entire enterprise. Like, it’s a privileged position to be in, to be able to see all the moving parts in an organisation. And I love that lens. Like, I just get excited because I nerd out on the people as well. But I also kind of immerse myself in the work, whether that’s the widgets or the, you know, whatever it is. I like to know kind of how things work and I like to know kind of where it sits. But I think that a lot of the problem is like, massive change transformation. The limbo land you’re talking about in Stranger Things, which I’m going to take and run with it. I think that because it’s so protracted, like, often we’ve spent so much time on our, uh, methodology for change management, whether it’s pro side or something else. But, like, we’ve spent so much time on the methodology that we haven’t factored in the human experience in processing it emotionally, like you talked about.
One of the things that I’ve taken from what you were sharing there is also loss
And one of the things that I’ve just taken from what you were sharing there is also, like, the loss. Like, I think one of the things that I don’t really hear people talk about and something I’m going to reflect on myself in terms of change agenda is at what point do we sit there and go, so what are they going to lose? Because we always focus on what people are going to gain, right? The sell the bells and whistles, marketing 101, the what’s in it for me? We craft all the messages, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, what could these people lose from us driving this change? And that’s not going to be one size fits all either. Like, we don’t have homogenous workforces. Right. We have really diverse occupational groups that do different stuff in different ways and that show up with, as you say, completely different neural pathways. And that’s just at an individual level, let alone a whole occupational group. So I think there’s something really powerful in looking at what’s the grieving process that might kick off here.
Amy: Like, ah, that’s absolutely what it is. Right.
Trina Sunday: And I’ve not really looked at it that way and I think that that’s part of, you know, where you can get a different prediction of people’s reactions. I think the blind sight in terms of a response or a reaction will often be a, ah, loss that you haven’t foreshadowed.
Amy: Right, that’s right. I mean, I’ll give you an example. Uh, there was an organisation that I was working with and one of their sites, the building was so run down. Like, they’d been in this building for like 20, 30 years, like a long time. Even to the point that when it rained, it leaked down one of the walls. So you can imagine, like, all of this stuff. Like, this is ridiculous. Like, this is. Oh, and s. We shouldn’t be in this building anymore. We need a new building. So the organisation went and built the most amazing, fantastic, beautiful new building. Like, it is beautiful. It’s got all the bells and whistles, all the technology in it. But what they didn’t take into account was some of the people in this organisation that are complaining about that old building. They’ve spent their whole career working there. They spent their whole career going to that same location every day, parking in the same spot, going to the same coffee shop, having the same routine day in, day out. So even though they were voicing, saying, we want a new flash building, we can’t wait for this new flash building, they underestimated the impact that it was going to be when they actually moved out. Because what happens with these people is that they struggled so much in that emotional mind of that loss of what they were losing. They were losing the memories. They were losing the fact that when they started in that organisation, they were so small and they’re growing so much and all of the adversity that they’d actually been through together, that when they brought these new people into Fandango amazing building, these people were like, pointing out the smallest, most menial things and complaining about it, because in their head, they just hadn’t acknowledged and processed a loss. They hadn’t created that closure for that building that they’d been in for 20, 30 years. So their mind didn’t have the capability of leaving the old behind yet to come to the new. And therefore they were stuck fighting it. And that’s how I walk into some organisations and you’ve still got people that are angry and hung up on something that happened three years ago or five years ago or 10 years ago, because they haven’t had that opportunity to take the mind through the process of change. They’ve just been forced from one change to the next and the mind just hasn’t coped. So all it’s done is just put up limitations and blockers and said, I’m not in. I’m, um, not here.
Trina Sunday: And it’s interesting because all of that storytelling around that grief from long ago becomes part of the fabric and the tapestry of what the culture is for. Even new people coming in that are emotionally picking up and absorbing what others are putting down, even though they haven’t lived it. And it’s like, you know, vicarious trauma kind of thing because, you know, we’ve lost that coffee shop and those memories. But I think it’s a really interesting example because I think everybody can relate to that in some way. You would be able to relate to that, whether that’s a move away from a family home and you’ve got this new flash house. But it’s not the same because the emotion and the memories are caught up in it. But I think, uh, there would be a lot of people that also don’t know that consciously. So they’ll be picking at those poor carpet choices or picking at the sink thing being wherever it was, they’d not necessarily consciously connecting that reaction and to the fact that they’ve had this loss. Right? And this is where I see from a HR perspective, if we are really levelled up in our emotional intelligence and we can take that into any change process, where we’ve got a people consideration on the table and we can get to be a part of that, then it is about. We would be tuned into. Okay, well, these reactions seem a bit odd. Wonder what’s going on there, like. And you lead in with some curiosity, you know, because it doesn’t make sense. And I think one of the things, as much as I was joking about the chimp paradox, but it is like, if you can go, there’s an emotional hijack happening. Like there’s an emotional. Even if you can call out that there seems to be an emotional hijack, we don’t get it, don’t understand, can’t relate, don’t know why knowing that there is an emotional response happening to what other people might be seeing as a logical situation means there’s something else at play, right? There’s something we don’t know. And so the opportunity is to lean into that and figure out what we don’t know.
What does reimagining HR look like to you
I’m curious, as we wrap up our chat, Amy, to ask you, what does reimagining HR look like to you? With your EI lens on, or all of you? You don’t have to limit yourself to ei, but what does reimagining HR look like to you? What’s different?
Amy: I think the reimagining HR has got to bring us back to putting the human being first again in knowing that we’re not. There is no textbook that we can create that’s going to give us the answer in every single situation. And instead of spending time trying to create more and more textbooks and more and more processes and templates and scripts, let’s spend that time actually educating people on understanding how their mind works, understanding how people work, understanding the best way to interact with people. And ultimately that is all our emotional intelligence. So if we can focus a little bit more there, then the reliance on HR is going to decrease as well and it’s going to become authentic, not just a ticker box.
Trina Sunday: Imagine that. Amy Jacobson, thank you for your time.
Amy: You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Trina Sunday: Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode. As we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organisations and community, reach out to us via our website at reimaginehr.com.au with your HR horror stories or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore. It’s all about people, purpose and impact. And when we are here for all of it.
Until next time, take care, team.
