On episode 83 of the High Performance Leadership Podcast upping your emotional intelligence with the response change how we choose that it is a choice how we choose to respond to our key moments is how we improve our emotional palette you’re listening to the high performance leadership podcast insights and information from world class leadership experts thanks for joining us I’m Randy lane on today’s episode I sit down for part two with Robert Grossman founder and CEO of black diamond leadership check out episode forty two for our first conversation about creating passionate teams on today’s podcast we talk about using the response chained to deal with stressful workplace moments we also talk about a recent workshop he put on in Poland with the mostly millennial workforce and now here’s my talk with Robert so Robert welcome back to the podcast we had you on episode forty two talking about creating passionate teams does a really good episode reviewed really well for those who want to not go back listen right this second can you kind of give us a quick background on who you are thank you Randi I’m really excited to be back creating another podcast I live in Los Angeles California I’ve been a strategic partner with three sixty solutions for over ten years and bite my specialty is working with small and medium sized companies to improve employee engagement them formats so that they are driving greater profits to the bottom line is so going to tell me about what you specifically work with companies with a lot of the work they do companies is around leadership and communication and emotional intelligence Shawn tells it seems to be a really hot thing right now in fact I was in Krakow Poland last month leading a two day session on emotional Telligent communication for a leadership team for high technology company of that’s gonna be interesting so tell me how is that different from other companies you’ve worked with here in the states it wasn’t that different other than it was a distributed workforce they gather once a year together other than that they all work from there their own countries and homes there is probably about %HESITATION ten different countries and languages represented that they are fortunately for me they all spoke English what was it was interesting is that they’re all the age of millennials right now and their concerns and wants and desires about being part of a business is identical to millennials in this country that’s very interesting so there and distribute work force how do you have affected leadership in a situation like that where they don’t really see each other face to face our our work you know in close proximity I’m sure they work very closely electronically how does that work yet they seem to be doing being very successful with that they have a very active slack channels they have channels that they’re on channels at the clients are on and it seems to be working for them think the one challenge that that they’re happy is when they’re working with US based project managers that are more drivers and being that most people are European and Latin good at what they do they’re very motivated but they don’t necessarily respond to the US managerial stock side of driving them out so what is a more European or Latin leadership style that you’re saying I don’t use the term laid back but it seems to be a little bit more laid back the people in this particular companies they’ve chosen to work for this company because of the lifestyle they could have for example I heard one guy decided that he wanted to go live in Thailand for six months so he moved off the Thailand had his laptop your work on the beach as long as the work gets done right while the work gets done this CEO does not care where it gets done consulting out I think that that part of their challenge is just responding most their clients are US large US companies so I think that’s one of the challenges is how do they interact with US companies that are still accustomed to working very traditional hours so I know you want to talk about emotional intelligence you have a weapon are coming up about that but while we’re on this topic I do want to talk about some of the differences you’ve seen with leading millennials versus leading people that are a little bit older the program that all the strategic partners have access to the high performance program seems to be really resonating with but when deals much more so than even older people so I had an opportunity to discuss this with a group of millennials and the things that they shared with me what they love about our programs and of social emotional allergens is they’re interested in transparency they don’t want to be put into a quarter of an office someplace and told to do their job and it’s not that they don’t understand how their role fits into the greater objectives of the company are they also want to note that the company is living breeding and eating their mission and vision statements or they don’t want that to be put on a wall someplace and forgotten about so they really liked the idea of leading from the balcony and interactive teams and people being able to come together to solve challenges and improve the processes of an organization I did not get from the millennials that I’ve spoken to doesn’t mean that doesn’t exist but I didn’t hear that they expect the company and you know one day one and and be on the executive committee of the executive team they just want to have a voice in the company so I have people coming to be old people my age people say Robert how do I deal with my mobile any of our way to get them to be like like the way that we’ve been doing business and without batting an eye I looked at them and say do not hurt you shouldn’t try to change the millennials you need to change the way you organize your organization and your work processes really focus on becoming high performance it’s really interesting you say that because one of the high performance leadership tenants is that people feel like they have ownership in the business and that they are leaders and and they’re not just cogs in the machine who don’t get to know what’s going on they need to fully understand the mission and that gives them a sense of purpose and that seems to be something that drives a lot of millennials these days absolutely absolutely that is what is most important to them and I think the sooner traditional business owners realize that and involve people at that level the sooner they’ll see even greater growth in their businesses yeah I don’t want to say that the older generation didn’t care about that but it seemed to be like well you got to get a job you got I’ve put your head down you got to get the work done and then maybe at some point you’ll understand the vision of the company but a lineal today just aren’t having that I think that the older generation really wanted the same thing that Billy Neill’s what I wanted it when I was younger and just entering the workforce we didn’t feel that we had a right to step up and ask for it I was raised by the greatest generation and generation that went to World War two in the depression and so I was always told you go to work you get your job put your head down work hard and you’ll get promoted over time so it never even dawned on me when I first entered the work force for me to say okay I want to I want to be part of what’s happening on a voice in the company do you think it has to do also with there’s kind of a greater variety of companies and you don’t hear as much of the company that has employees for thirty years so a lot of companies are trying to show their best value to the employees to make sure that they stick around and help them with their purpose yeah and I think that’s also we have the next generation of business owners to and they’re more tuned into a different way of doing business I think that the that the first high tech boom really change the way we were doing the work and as our access to technology has grown where we have things like slack channels and mobile phones you have to be tied to a desk anymore are it’s just snowballed and %HESITATION and I think that if you’re if you have a great management team that embraces the US then the productivity will go up that’s what I’ve seen out there even though some might be working from the beach in Thailand there so engaged in the process they’re compelled to do excellent or in the compelled to take care of the quiet not compelled to contribute to the overall health and well being of the organization I know that the very first time I spoke to one of our strategic partners and they were doing work in a company and they said man this company really solid growth that they saw a lot of their employees finding their purpose in their meaning then it became real to me and it made me want to work harder for the company so I’m guessing that’s the same feeling that is trying to be had by open them understand the purpose and the and the core values of the company exactly and this is where we run into trouble with the owner of the leadership team of a company they need to learn to let that letting go of control does it means letting go of their business and they don’t wanna let go of that control they they have this vision what a leader looks like and they’re pushing forward the living that that vision and the way that it gets translated to the work force is a lack of trust in him and once there’s a lack of trust or there’s even the assumption that there’s a lack of trust produktivnost guard plummet in organizations made up of millennials and that the new or even the next generation I like the illustration the chip uses about lifting a table so if you get everyone around the table and he lifted up in order to move it a you need to make sure that all sides are are lifting equally and if you’re one of those owners are leaders are managers that lifts one side too high because you don’t have the ability to to delegate to give control to other people your organization you could be affecting the overall mission of the company by tipping the table too far in the opposite direction yes I’m not to sure story yeah when I first joined three sixty solutions as a strategic partner I still had my intent production business running and it was fascinating to go through the certification process while still managing very large projects one of the largest meetings I ever produced I fully embraced our high performance work system model in producing this meeting and the first thing that I did was I hired a core team of managers to run this project and I empowered them to run this project and to work together and my job was to ensure that that the mission and the vision of what we are creating for this meeting was was clearly communicated to my core team of managers at one point my technical director asked me if he could hire his own team of people to run the meeting and that was a big cult record because I always do the hiring and I said yes if you know how you like you have a team that you love to work with that you trust go for higher than what the meeting was fantastic except that in the beginning of the meeting we had all kinds of special effects that we’re supposed to go off and they worked flawlessly during the rehearsals but at the beginning of the actual meeting some of the pyro didn’t go off in not only a handful of people knew that they were supposed to be pyro none the less I knew my client was gonna be upset and I was really bad but I stayed in the main room it’s all my CDL or the studio is done with this presentation I walked back to where my technical director’s desk was in the ballroom and there I saw my core team huddled together and as I walked up I swear to god it was greetings Feyerabend austral one of them turned around and said Robert Robert not gonna believe this but we wrote a brand new ending for the meeting and we even wrote a script for the studio and we already got the car company to contribute all the Cairo for free in the fire marshal RB approved the plans wow unbelievable right so when I finally when I walked outside and see your copy came up to me at using some very colorful language like what happens our pyro I said look it happens sometimes look at what my team created read it he looked at me and he said we couldn’t have created a better ending for this meeting so that that was the benefit of creating a high performance team even though it was a temporary team only work together for about six months and then the meeting was over a routine dissolved so how do you in a situation like that if you’re a leader who has trouble giving up control how do you start that process of really trusting in delegating to the people you’re in charge of one of the ways might sound a little self serving but one of the ways is to work with an executive coach that specializes in this area and that that is one of my my my my four cases working with owners of companies and CEOs whoever very difficult time getting up trust and it takes a deep exploration about why you don’t want to give a class I went to the same process that was going to certification so everybody work with Robert but in the meantime for our listeners at home what are some quick tips you can give for somebody who says you know that pegged me I’m totally that kind of leader I have a team but I don’t fully trust them and I don’t delegate enough to them Sir so one of the ways is to work on emotional intelligence yeah and and we happen to have a beautiful model in our curriculum that makes that brings no motion intelligence process to life word makes it useable not so theoretical and you know what our model we start off with what’s called a key moments yeah the key moment is something that happens that occurs to us that demands a response stores confrontation so when the CEO chance to give up some control things might not go exactly perfectly right the first time just like your explanation with the pyrotechnics that’s that key moment you were upset and they were probably looking at that same key moment thinking we need to make this better right right right exactly so when I work with the CEO we look at their key moments then we start exploring their paradigms or how they view the world now in that situation the paradigm that I was seen at events through was that of sheer and this year was I stepped out on the skinny branches I took on a bad bigger than if I’d done before and exhales and I was afraid I was gonna get fired right on the spot this fact that it is the meeting that had to be the last meeting that I would produce for this company any reputation as well my reputation and our our model continues down what we call a response straight we give it meaning that we have feelings about it and then we have behaviors and how we behave either takes us down the road of self mastery or pictures down the road of survival if we go down the road of survival typically sets up more key moments so we spent a lot of time working on this model we talk about interrupting strategies the first thing we have to do is courses recognize were happy to keep moments the overriding objective if you will is to teach people kept a possible just for a second if the pause button understand or have any key moments and out you enter the moment of choice so you have these feelings you have these emotions that you want to do certain things but that’s the opportunity that we have to really improve our emotional intelligence by choosing a different way of responding to and there is nothing more powerful I think in a work environment than having its leaders be able to improve their emotional intelligence sexual way that degenerates trusted generates communication and generates teamwork so you’re not saying specifically it’s valid to get angry you can say you know this does anger me or upsets me but it’s important to take that pause in really evaluate the whole scenario so you know the best way to take care of it oh yeah that’s situation there is nothing wrong with however spotted it was a big deal that it didn’t work right but I I had my response to be talked about having her feelings I had my feelings about it if I can keep you down that path we would not have generated the results that we get those I would walk back there I probably would shut down my team by yelling that it may have tried to get me to calm down and communicate and what they’re doing but they could easily have said you know you’re yelling at us we have a great solution where dot I was gonna go finish up the panini right we will re reactor respond to situations it’s what we do next that really demonstrate our level of emotional intelligence how we choose that it is a choice how we choose to respond to our key moments is how we improve our emotional palette I had to explain this to my nine year old this morning because he had a situation where the favorite jacket he wanted to wear had a stain on it so we couldn’t wear it that he he went out he was already running behind he went out to get his bike and his bike had a flat tire his whole day is already kind of thrown out of whack and he had a discipline issue at school and he said well I was already angry because of this and I chose to act out because of that and I explained to him you know what there are lots of days I think for most people they don’t want to go to work or they come into work in their little bit upset but it takes an emotionally mature person to say I’m not going to let those feelings sabotage my day or what I do next right exactly and going back to Poland on day one we talked about communication and emotional Telligent for them I date to we talked about and we did some work on what do you do when your client or one of your colleagues is having the chemo how can you help that person through that by recognizing that that they’re in the middle of the key moments and that they have more intense feelings about what’s going on so how do you do that what we came to it I Jack I facilitated a two wasn’t straight lecture right so what they what they came up with I thought was was brilliant is stacked to slow things down if they sense that their client is having a key moment slow it down and just ask them what’s going on you’ll tell me more about why this isn’t working for you I really want to understand what’s going on over there and get them talking about it so you can’t necessarily I didn’t I don’t recommend that you try to explain what a key moment isn’t working in feelings behavior self mastery I don’t suggest we do take that approach with somebody doesn’t have a distinct sense but you can always recognize that and not be trigger so in other words Randy were having a conversation and I sense that you’re having a key moments what would naturally occur between two human beings is your key moment with a trick or a key moment me and I truly wanted you and communication breaks down and there’s no trust and we get off the call and say I got the guy’s a jerk right so when you improve your emotional intelligence you’re now in a position to be the person that can help push this process through and get the other person moving forward and off of their email it’s definitely true that if you’re in a situation where one person is is triggered having a key moment is angry or frustrated or having any sort of extreme emotion that if you can be more even keeled on the other side of that you have a better chance of de escalating even in a situation where you feel like maybe your right and this person’s over reacting and then you react to them and kind of mirror their frustrations then it gets out of control right yeah you know radio was flying back from Mexico a couple of years ago add up the walk to do that to that terminal was that ticket agents work and I I realized immediately that there was a problem with the flights because everybody was yelling at the ticket agents works very upset that always happens always happens right we waited in line and we got up to the ticket counter a look at the women across the counter and I said well you’re having a really rough day Archie and she says you have no idea what’s going on either one really sorry that us that you’re a passengers are Archie you guys this way because I I know that you’re doing everything you can do to help us and a lot of this is just completely out of your control so here’s the thing I’m fine I’m I’m gonna go stand over there and and when you’re ready to work with me all come back and she said one minute cigar and she doesn’t typing on a keyboard and all of a sudden I was upgraded to first class on the plane that’s already scheduled a yeah I had no idea that was going to be the outcome but I think that that one of the ways to think about emotional intelligence it also goes back to what your core values are so one of my core values that I want to leave every single person I interact with a little better off than before I met and I treated that person like a human being who was committed to helping us and in return I got an unexpected guest the best place to kind of practice building up this emotional maturity where you take time and pause when you feel an extreme emotion is with somebody you trust where you can honestly say like I’m really upset right now I’m gonna take a second to kind of calm down before we have this discussion but another easy place to practice would probably be with people like you’re talking about people who are stressed out and it’s not their fault and you could just be a little bit nice to them and maybe show them that they don’t have to be a stressed out or that not everyone’s out to to be mad at them yeah and also recognize that sitting across from you is another human being effective date they have their own issues in life and and even somebody you come across who might seem like they’re completely stone face might be able to find a little crack in that stone and and make their day better man in turn I would submit that your day will be better and you’ll feel more power so along with being emotionally mature I’m sure you know and I’m sure everyone else has had an opportunity or situation where they work with somebody who no matter how emotionally mature you are and everyone else is they tend to fly off the handle get mad get rude and it’s just no reaching them how do you work with an employee like that how do you fix a workplace like that that is probably one of the more challenging work environments I think that a lot of us thought of the strategic partners will share the same kind of war story when we walk into an organization and the leadership says the problem is out there with employees it’s not here in the C. suite and at at that point I will look at them and say well then you’re going to be wasting money on me as until you embrace high performance into you embrace trust until you embrace a motional intelligence anything we do on the floor if you will and the general population will be short lived go get it they’ll love it and in a week you’ll be gone because their supervisor will not be managing or leading from high performance and so in those situations what I tend to do is to help the employee recognize that it’s not about that leadership style to management style but I have to walk very delicately because I can’t make their leader supervisor look bad either right I sort of fire their own emotional intelligence and help them be more empathetic about with their leader our supervisors coming from Mosul intelligence seems to be gaining a lot of momentum now becoming very important in organizations it is not true food stuff you’re right not it’s not something that’s not come by ya it is it is real and it will make a tremendous difference in an organization you’ll improves performance and will dramatically improve employee engagement and I want to share a statistic that’s a little bit alarming and then then I’ll I’ll come back in and just shortly address how to improve this button to thousand seventeen Gallup did a very comprehensive survey of the American workforce and one of the things that they found that only thirty three percent of the US work force is actively engaged in their job or sat there also compared it to you global statistics and companies outside of the US have a seventy percent employee engagement out the one way to improve our playing games next year yes to developing leaders and supervisors and ensuring that there is trust and communication and to get there you need a high degree of emotional talents I think something else that might help I feel like when you’re a worker bee you don’t really have any say in the overall direction of the company it’s hard for you to feel like you want to engage and so giving ownership to people and saying you know this is a task that I’m putting you fully in charge of whatever the outcome is I want you to take ownership of that will help drive that engagement absolutely and as a leader you have to tolerate or be willing for them to fail a little bit that’s hard it’s your job as a leader to make sure it’s not a catastrophic failure right anything like that but they don’t they’ll split and all those slips are are learning opportunities you’re just another opportunity for you as a leader to train and develop your employees with millennials if they think that they’re being trained and developed to do their job better and to be better employees they’ll stay with you for a long time if you don’t they don’t feel that way there are looking for the next opportunity what they’ll get that great point well Robert if people wanna get in touch with you what’s the best way to others a couple ways number one my phone number is eight one eight two three one five two three eight are they can send me an email my email is Roberts act black diamond leadership dot com and then black diamond leadership dot com is are you are real and you’re primarily working with any kind of company any specific types of companies work best with a focus on small and medium sized companies I seem to be getting a lot of work in the manufacturing sector I also really enjoy professional services and healthcare and you will travel because you went to Poland I will travel alright Robert thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and I hope everyone learn a little something today basically ready I learned from you don’t have the court’s senior so thanks for listening to the high performance leadership podcast be sure to subscribe rate and review S. every little bit helps our website is H. B. leadership podcast dot com like us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash H. P. leadership podcast follow us on Twitter at HDL underscore podcast and she doesn’t email at podcast at three sixty solutions dot com until next time thanks for listening