Empathy and Leadership in Action: Nurturing Growth and Creativity

Unlock the secrets to becoming a more effective and empathetic leader with insights from Emme Devenish, an executive and leadership coach. This episode unpacks the transformative role of emotional intelligence in leadership, as Emme shares her expertise on ethical stewardship, community service, and continuous education. Learn how a growth mindset, akin to the resilient rings of a tree, can help you navigate challenges and stress, thus boosting your leadership capabilities.

Discover practical strategies to foster creativity, proactivity, and open communication within your teams. Emme and Jami discuss the importance of recognizing and nurturing team members' potential, emphasizing how leaders who create a psychologically safe environment can enhance both productivity and job satisfaction. We delve into the intersection of emotional intelligence and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, exploring how leaders can inspire and motivate their teams through a coaching mindset and by encouraging diverse perspectives.

Gain insights on how visionary leaders from small communities tackle global issues with collaboration and humility. Learn about the power of empathy in leadership and how effective leaders can guide their teams through continuous improvement. The episode concludes with practical tips on managing emotions using Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ) reps, offering additional resources and a recommended TED Talk for those eager to dive deeper into the topic. This is an episode packed with valuable takeaways for leaders at any stage of their journey.

Show Notes:
Dr. Emme Devonish
Website: www.emmedevonish.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmedevonish
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/emmedevonish/whale-and-ocean-haikus/
Podcast Episode: Solve It for Kids Episode 206: Why are Whales Important? https://www.emmedevonish.com/creative/solve-it-for-kids

TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/fields_wicker_miurin_learning_from_leadership_s_missing_manual?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

Transcript

Jami: 0:06

Hello and welcome to the podcast Emotional Intelligence your greatest asset and key to success. I'm your host, Dr Jami Carlacio, coming to you from the Greater New Haven, Connecticut area. As a positive intelligence, or PQ, coach, I'm committed to helping people develop both emotional intelligence and mental fitness. That is, you'll come to regard problems as situations that help you learn and grow. PQ is a way of being and doing in the world that enables you to develop and sustain a positive relationship with yourself and others, at home, at work and everywhere in between. Please subscribe to this podcast and tap the like button so more people can enjoy the benefits of PQ. And now here's the show. Hello everybody and welcome.

Jami: 0:58

Today we are going to talk about leadership, and I am so glad you're here because leadership seems to be a very hot topic. If you are on LinkedIn or if you read the internet-- read stuff on the internet-- you know that people are talking about leadership because people are agreeing that there needs to be some changes in the way that we think about leadership and the way that we lead. And I have a fabulous guest here whose specialty is leadership. Her name is Emme Devonish, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about Emme and then we'll launch into the episode. So Emme is an author, s he's an executive coach, consultant, and educator who cares deeply about ethical stewardship of the environment (yay) and service to her community. She is a certified executive coach, a certified leadership coach, a certified North Star coach (sister, how long do these certifications go?). She's a certified culture coach, mindset coach, an emotional intelligence coach (yes), and a compliance and ethics professional and a human resources management certified professional, an international coaching federation professional, and she's licensed to practice law in the state of New York, which I think is amazing. I don't know when you sleep and you must be about 80 years old by now, but I know you're not.

Jami: 2:32

She is the principal of Creative Compliance Communication Services at LLC, and I'm going to put my glasses on so I can see the rest. She specializes in ethics, compliance, culture and leadership, with a focus on teaching clients the importance of emotional intelligence to ignite behavioral change and develop visionary leaders and goodness knows we need visionary leaders. Her coaching and consulting services incorporate creative and analytical thinking, compliance with industry standards, communication of diverse ideas and ethical decision-making to help individuals and organizations branch out to reach their highest potential. And I will put all of Em's information in the show notes. In case you want to reach out to her, she's on LinkedIn, she has a website, she has a Pinterest site and she has a really wonderful show called Solve it For Kids. And this particular one is why Are Whales Important? And I think whales are pretty awesome and they are important. So welcome Em. Thanks for being here today.

Emme: 3:43

Jami, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here today to talk about emotional intelligence and leadership. I just want to give a shout out to Jennifer Swanson and Jeff from the Solve it For Kids podcast. It's their podcast and they were lucky enough to share time, all three of us together talking about whales. So in Florida we have the North Atlantic White whale, so we talked about that extensively. So I'm just happy to be here and I look forward to our conversation. And you know, and thanks for reading all that long certification list, but I will tell you, as anyone who knows me, I say as a North Star coach, that education is my North Star, and so you know, first and foremost, I'm an educator, so in coaching, that helps immensely. So I'm always looking to learn something new as well as to educate my clients at the same time.

Jami: 4:39

Excellent, and actually that's important because I'm also an educator, a career educator and sadly for my son who gets tired of it, I'm always trying to give him information and explain things. And one of the things I like about the education thing is educators are lifelong learners and I don't know an educator who-- I mean I hope I don't know anyone who-- thinks they know everything already. I remember when I first started teaching I thought I had to know everything, and when I just relaxed and realized that my students had a lot to teach me, I learned way more. And now that I'm older I know that I don't know a lot of stuff. So I love having an educational mindset because it's a growth mindset, right

Emme: 5:27

It is. It is a growth mindset, and it's also of intelligence, right, because you you can develop your emotional intelligence, and so you know that's an educative process. So you know, just as you said, teaching is a two- way process; we're learning and growing while we're helping others to learn and grow, and the same can be said for coaching

Jami: 5:51

Absolutely. And one thing I think about in terms of growth and I thought I was original in saying this, but apparently Einstein said it first and that is if we're not learning and growing, we're dying.

Jami: 6:05

I think of a tree, and if you cut a tree, you know, saw a tree and you see all the rings. What I think is that all of those rings represent growth and development, but the rings are not perfectly concentric circles. They have little curves in them because trees have had to withstand a lot of stress with changes in the weather, the climate, or whatever and especially if they've been transplanted and I think of my growth process like that too, as these concentric circles, but that are uneven, because there are times in my life where the stresses were greater, but that's where I learned more, that's where the learning was stronger. So the rings are stronger there. And I'm wondering, since you are a leadership coach, I think about this a lot.

Jami: 6:57

There've been a lot of changes and there's a lot of talk on LinkedIn and in industry in general about the kinds of leaders that are more successful and the kinds of leaders that are less successful. Now we need leaders, whether they lead a company or CFO, whatever but ultimately leaders also help other people and bring them up and sort of crowdsource knowledge. Right, everybody has the knowledge.

Jami: 7:31

I was watching some TED Talks and thinking about leadership and I'm going to show a clip from a TED Talk later, but this one guy is a composer, and so his TED Talk was about how composers can teach us what good leadership is, and the one that he highlighted as the best was the one in which the conductor was certainly leading the orchestra with his thing, but ultimately it was the musicians themselves looking at each other and listening to each other's instruments and coming together as a group. They were not individual people and the conductor wasn't just doing his thing and telling everybody everything, but the whole orchestra came together in this beautiful, harmonious, synchronous sound.

Emme: 8:31

Yeah, what you just described is how the conductor is able to inspire, correct, motivate and lift the orchestra up, right, so the individual members of that orchestra. And that's just the same as in leadership. You need to have the emotional intelligence where you can control your own emotions. You can, you know, stand in a room and be able to sense what's happening with other people on your team and be sensitive to that, know when to step in and to give instruction, like the conductor. Know when to pull back and you know, know when quiet moments are necessary, because the audience is just listening to what you're delivering as the conductor. So it's the same thing in terms of leadership. The orchestra would not be successful without both that symbiotic relationship between a leader who has qualities like self-control, self-confidence, self-knowing, self-regulation, but also so he or she can manage their own emotions, while at the same time having qualities like empathy, relationship skills, and straightforwardness, so that he can direct or she can direct members of the orchestra on what to do, but also understanding the what's happening with individual people within that orchestra. And then also having parts of, you know, emotional intelligence that involve responding to how the audience is responding, which is the same with leadership. You have to respond to how your customers are responding, your clients are responding, your vendors are responding, teammates are responding, the board of directors, you know, responding on different level, and for that you need, you know, qualities from emotional intelligence like adaptability.

Emme: 10:25

Right, you need to have optimism when things don't go your way, so that you can still be there and keep a positive momentum forward and to help, to lead, up-lead, and I mean that up- lead (I just made up that word) but to, like you know, move things upward, raise it up to a higher level when things are low, as well as to uplift people on the team.

Emme: 10:48

And you know, and part of that is also self-actualization. So, which is what I'm all about, right, branching out to reach your highest potential, being that fully formed, you know, individual in your professional and personal development and growth, so that you are comfortable and confident in your skin, in your vision of who you are, where you are today, where you want to go in the future, how do you want to grow? How do you want to use your skills to help humanity? How do you want to use your skills to help your community. How do you want to use your skills to help the environment? Because it just it goes beyond the self, and in order to do that, you have to have that emotional intelligence, and that's what visionary leaders do.

Jami: 11:34

Yeah, yeah. There's so much that you said in that I want to just pull a couple of things out. One of them is there is a book called Leading Up and I read that book cover to cover, and the reason I read it is I was a managing editor of an academic journal and I have a lot of great editorial skills and writing skills. But the subject matter of this academic journal was not familiar to me, and so the editor-in-chief was overall the selector of which articles would go in each issue. But I was the editor who edited all the articles, communicated with the writers and managed the entire marketing and distribution process. But the editor-in-chief was also a professor and the leader of this department at an Ivy League university where I worked, and she didn't really know what I did. And she didn't really need to know. She just needed to know I did a good job. But what I did was I read this book because I thought you know what? She doesn't understand how much time it takes and if I'm late with something, why, or if there's a glitch. So I read this book Leading Up and I started sending her progress reports on every journal issue so that she knew what the whole process was and how many people were involved, and she was like, "oh, I didn't even know. And it made the relationship better and we started working together more as a team because she wasn't just telling me what to do and I wasn't just kind of some lemming that was just taking directions, and that actually made a huge difference in our relationship.

Jami: 13:19

But going into positive intelligence, which is connected to emotional intelligence, is you talked about, you know, this sort of a top-down approach or managing your emotions? One of the saboteurs is the stickler, and the stickler is the perfectionist and the controller, highly related to the stickler, wants to have his or her finger in every single piece of the pie. So people don't feel empowered and they don't feel motivated and they don't feel inspired to think outside the box. And what I'm hearing you saying is the good leaders are visionaries but they help other people when they need help, but they also give them the space to be creative and proactive.

Emme: 14:07

Yes, 100%. I mean if we start with the premise that every person that gets hired to do a job, the hiring partner, the HR person, the CEO who hires that individual, is hiring him or her because they think you have the right skills and qualifications, you have the technical knowledge and you have a reasonable amount of intelligence, right. So you have the IQ, let's say, you know, in order to perform the job, and you might have some experience. You can get some on- the- job training and experience, but once you get to the office-- whether you're a Gen Z or millennial or generation Xer, or you're a baby boomer who's still in the workforce-- basically, once you get to the office, that's going to help you meet the minimum standards, even for yourself as a team member, you know. So what you need, then, is the emotional intelligence as a team member, so that you can, you know, navigate, meeting new people, talking to you know clients and vendors, going to your boss, like you did with that article. I f you notice a need, how do you translate that into "hi supervisor? I've noticed this issue. Is it okay for me to talk to you about it? Or should I just send them articles, like you did, and figuring out the right way of communicating with that person so that you can influence positive change which improves productivity. You get a higher work product. You feel some satisfaction that you've added value and contributed. Your supervisor appreciates you and the good leader you know who has that strong emotional intelligence will recognize this is great because this person took the initiative. I can give him or her more responsibility. Or you know we made a great profit this year. Or you know we made a great profit this year and it's also thanks to you know, contributions in terms of helping to manage the team or resolve a difficult issue or problem solve, and this is someone that I can trust further. Here's someone that I also want to develop further. So I'm also going to pay attention and notice things and you know, ask them and talk to them about where do you want to grow in the organization. Or you know, ask them and talk to them about where do you want to grow in the organization. Or you know what stage are you in your career development and planning. Is there anything that we can do better in our company? Or do you see any other gaps in any skills where you can help fulfill that need." You know those are.

Emme: 16:35

Those are conversations that are really important because a lot of times people leave organizations not, you know because it's either it's a relationship issue and that is definitely a leadership issue, you know where there is an open dialogue and open communication, or they feel frustrated and stifled, that there's either no room to grow or they're stuck in a situation where the job itself has become boring and they don't see that there may be other roles within the organization where they can use their skills and to learn and to grow, you know, but the strong leaders will look at their team and say, hey, I've got a team of diverse people with different skill sets. We're all working together well here, but how can we continue to develop the team? How can we continue to educate them and have them be invested in our long-term growth? And in order to do that, you have to invest in their long-term growth and potential. And that requires, you know, having that emotional intelligence to spot that and to initiate those conversations and to recognize why that is important.

Jami: 17:42

Yes, yes and yes and yes, yes, yes. I wanted to pull out a couple of things again. When we talk about positive intelligence, we're talking about compassion and empathy, so the ability to feel psychologically safe to make mistakes and to grow and to know that the mistakes are what lead to the growth. But also, you had talked about navigating, so navigating change right. Or when you make a mistake, that's a time to take a step back, take some inventory and wonder, like, "what did we do and what might we do differently. And then to pivot, not to dwell on the mistake and blame somebody for it and you know whatever, or take sole responsibility for it, like it's your company, it's your mistake, it's everybody involved. And then talking about exploring, like what are some alternatives? Or exploring what your employees want and how you can make them grow, because when people feel heard and seen, they're going to want to do more, they want to contribute.

Jami: 18:48

And I know the quiet quitting phenomenon was about people feeling really invisible and feeling like they were overworked, underpaid and underappreciated. And I know, for me, the best bosses I've had appreciated me. They told me what I was doing right as well as what I needed to improve on, and they use the word "growing edges, which I like because they're just growing edges. That doesn't mean I'm a failure or whatever. It just means these are areas where we want you to grow and here's how you're, we want you to do it, or here's how we can help you. Or do you have any ideas? for how you think you need to grow?" and really putting it on me to think about it and not just be told.

Emme: 19:37

That's right. That's right. Because, you know, even with advances in technology and the onslaught of AI, people have not morphed into robots, right? We're not pre-programmed and automated just to execute a function. We have thoughts, feelings, emotions. You know our life changes every second right? It's not just a daily thing, it's a second thing. Things happen all the time and there, a lot of it is largely beyond our control. So, you know, we need to understand that every person that you meet, every person in the workplace, has his or her own story. They have his or her own seconds of ups and downs and other things that they're thinking about. You know.

Emme: 20:25

But to keep people focused on the work and on creating great products and services, you have to band together in that human community, right? So it's an interpersonal relationship, it's the relationship skills, it's having empathy for one another, understanding the other person's perspective, and that's where the exchange of diverse ideas comes into play. And sometimes, you know, in some hierarchies, there are hierarchies in organizations where someone might have a great idea but that person doesn't raise his or her hand because it's like "oh, I'm not high enough in the ranking to raise my hand or if I speak up, my boss is going to be upset because I didn't pass it by the boss first, you know. And so there are all sorts of things that control and constrain and limit that creativity and that innovation and the bettering of the products and the services. Because people are concerned about levels of hierarchy, they're concerned about social status, you know, and they're concerned about competition on a different level rather than being more open, Right and engaging.

Emme: 21:40

But in order to do that, you have to have a very strong sense of self, know what your worth is and your value and how you feel. You know, as a human, your self-esteem, your confidence and having a leader who also gives you feedback that affirms you as an individual person, not just as a worker, but as a human. I recognize the person in front of me as a human who is doing something fantastic. You know, it's just, it's just wonderful. And that helps that person feel like, "yeah, I want to get up and go to the office today, you know, because I have great colleagues, I have things to do, people are counting on me, you know. I wonder what we're going to do, oh, yeah.

Emme: 22:24

And then there's the social aspect, right, and I just don't mean the water cooler conversation, which some people like, some people don't like. But there are other aspects that you get from having conversations with people on you know, a regular basis and not being isolated from others. You learn and you grow. You find out things about, you know, babysitting that you didn't know, that that if you need a babysitter, that just comes up in conversations, even casual conversations, and those things help you to become closer to your colleagues and to think about them and to see them as people and not just like the dreaded HR director: " oh my God, it's HR. Well, hr has a role to play and they have a job to do, but that person is also a human with wants, needs, desires, families, friendships and all of those things.

Jami: 23:15

Yeah, I love that you talked about that, because we're all such multidimensional people and if all you see is a title or an outfit or whatever, then they're just simply somebody that you've pigeonholed and made assumptions about. But maybe the HR director's having a bad day because her kid is sick and she would rather be home, but she knew she had to come in so she had to get a babysitter (like we're talking about babysitters). But the other thing is transparent communication is key. When management talks to staff and staff talk to each other and teams talk to each other, then there's less opportunity for misunderstanding.

Jami: 24:03

And the other thing you mentioned in, say, going to a meeting and being afraid to speak up, in positive intelligence there's a strategy called the "90-10 rule and the yes and rule. So if everybody's in a meeting and you all are coming together to solve a problem or do whatever, come together to create something new. If there are seven or eight or 10 people in the meeting, not everybody is as comfortable speaking up. Some people are just quiet or introverted or they process information at a different speed. But if everybody gets a chance to talk and everybody goes in with the mindset of you may disagree with 90% of what they said, but 10% of it you can use and run with. And then you can say yes, I like what you said about X, that's really good, and let's consider this.

Jami: 24:59

And so if you have a lot of "yes ands in the room, all of a sudden everybody had a voice, nobody was shut down. A voice. Nobody was shut down, nobody felt excluded or less than, and so that's a way that management or leaders can cultivate their teams too. I did a DEI certification course and one of the leaders of the course gave us an example, a case study. Campbell's Soup has very happy employees, and one of the reasons is that the owner or the manager or the president or whatever would walk around every day and say hi to the employees and how are you? And what's going on. So everybody knew this person, he knew everybody, he knew their names, he cared about them as people and they felt valued and wanted to do the work that they were hired to do.

Emme: 25:56

Yeah, and that definitely makes sense to me, because each individual is autonomous, and if leaders remember that, then they can think about it in the context of "this is a whole and complete individual who I've hired to perform a function, but is all you know, and that this person is a human as well, like in front of me, not just not this person that I've hired, that I see as a worker, but is you know which is a label right, it's another type of labeling thing, but as this person is, this is the human that I hired, this fully autonomous human that I hired, that I can say hello to. You know, I don't have to walk down the hall because I'm the VP or the SVP or the CEO and look at the wall because I can't say hello to someone in my company that I have not met or that is on another team or something. You know, something like that. It's more as you look at the person, because that's that human connection, that's part of being seen right, is to be acknowledged, like your existence as a human being acknowledged. And so, you know, when we talk about emotional intelligence, it's also another way of um thinking about in the workplace, if you remember my maslow's hierarchy of needs. So there's such a thing, as you know, maslow's hierarchy of needs in the workplace. And so when I do culture work and we talk about leading with culture, you know there's the same tiers that go all the way up.

Emme: 27:34

But when you get to the higher levels, where the leadership is involved, it's what do the employees need to grow and develop themselves at that self-actualization, you know. Third level of hierarchy what do they need? What do those employees need? And they need the same thing you've been talking about they need to be seen and to be heard. And to do that, that means that leadership has to develop a coaching mindset, to coach their employees so that they can advance to the next level, to take on more responsibility, to lead by role modeling and being the example in the workplace of what it is like to be that person who is ethical, engaging, open, curious, inviting of diverse views.

Emme: 28:22

You know, work product improves when you get diverse input from it, because every good leader knows that he or she doesn't have all the answers.

Emme: 28:33

If not, you could do everything yourself, you know, and your product will be okay, but it's not going to be the best product. I mean even when you think about some of the top performing companies out there. They all have teams of people who contribute to their success and in order to do that, you have to lead by inspiring, by role modeling, by giving people the space to take on challenges and recognizing that if it doesn't go as well as planned or predicted, that's a learning opportunity, that's a growth opportunity, that's a way to reset, re-evaluate, re-commit, refine, come up with a better solution that's great for everyone. You have to think about the inputs from customers. You know the workforce, your board of directors, a lot of different stakeholders to come up with the best product and service that actually adds value and that is a benefit to everyone. And that's what great leaders think about, you know, and they and they're okay with people giving them that feedback.

Jami: 29:47

Well, we're out of time, but a couple of things I want to leave people with, and I'm going to show this clip. It's about a minute long and then you and I can say goodbye, but listening and knowing that giving credit where credit is due is also important. I'm thinking of, like Apple. You know, Steve Jobs didn't just invent stuff by himself. He had engineers and other people figuring things out. But this clip that I'm going to show is really evidence of people recognizing that the problem is way bigger than anything that they could solve or do something about

Jami: 30:29

Speaker 3 (TED speaker): And they inspire me because they show us what is possible passable when you change the way you look at the world, change the way you look at your place in the world. They looked outside and then they changed what was on the inside. They didn't go to business school. They didn't read a manual how to be a good leader in 10 easy steps but they have qualities we'd all recognize. They have drive, passion, commitment. They've gone away from what they did before and they've gone to something they didn't know. They've tried to connect worlds they didn't know existed before. They've built bridges and they've walked across them.

Jami: 31:14

They have a sense of the great arc of time and their tiny place in it. They know people have come before them and will follow them, and they know that they're part of a whole, that they depend on other people. It's not about them. They know that, but it has to start with them. And they have humility. It just happens, but we know it doesn't just happen, don't we? We know it takes a lot to make it happen and we know the direction the world is going in. So I think we need succession planning on a global basis.

Jami: 31:50

That was a little longer, but I really like what she had to say. She's talking about three people who were visionaries in their very small villages, in remote places, that saw a huge need. They saw that their way of life was threatened from environmental degradation or over, you know, over processing or logging or whatever, depending on where they were. And instead of saying all right, you know, too bad for us, or I'm going to try to solve this, they went out into the larger world and asked questions and listened and came back with new knowledge and shared it and said we need to do something together. And they didn't have an ego invested in it. And that's one thing I hear you saying is you put your ego at the door and then you come to work knowing you're part of a larger thing.

Emme: 32:47

Yes, I definitely agree, and I think the essence of what she said echoes with what we've been talking about, and that is that, you know, strong leaders with high levels of emotional intelligence don't come to the office and tell their employees what to do. They already hired qualified, autonomous individuals. Their job as a leader is to inspire, role model and coach so that the employees will follow them anywhere and will step up and contribute and give more.

Jami: 33:23

Yes, yes, thank you so much for all of your great insights and, again, Emme's information will be in the show notes and I'll put in a link also to the TED Talk, because it's about 15 minutes and worth watching every minute of it and if you want to find out more about emotional intelligence and how it can help you and your workplace, my information is in the show notes and I would love to hear from you, and remember, when you feel an emotion, you don't have to stay stuck in it, but you can do some PQ reps and interrupt it and then maybe pivot to a new direction, and so, on that note, thank you very much. Thank you, Emme, again, and we'll see you at the PQ gym.

Emme: 34:07

Thank you, Jami, Thank you everyone. Have a great day Bye.