On this episode of Career Club Live, Dan Hill, PhD explores the power of emotional intelligence. He defines core emotions like happiness, anger, and fear, highlighting the importance of recognizing negative emotions like sadness as valuable signals for improvement in the workplace. Hill introduces facial coding, emphasizing the face's unique role in conveying emotions and the significance of genuine listening, where silence often holds the key.
In the digital age, online interactions amplify the importance of facial expressions, making them a genuine showcase of one's emotions. Dan Hill's insights aren't just theoretical; they have practical applications in job searches and the role of community support for executives grappling with fear and uncertainty. His wisdom offers a roadmap to navigate the complexities of modern workplaces effectively
On this episode of Career Club Live, Dan Hill, PhD explores the power of emotional intelligence. He defines core emotions like happiness, anger, and fear, highlighting the importance of recognizing negative emotions like sadness as valuable signals for improvement in the workplace. Hill introduces facial coding, emphasizing the face's unique role in conveying emotions and the significance of genuine listening, where silence often holds the key.
In the digital age, online interactions amplify the importance of facial expressions, making them a genuine showcase of one's emotions. Dan Hill's insights aren't just theoretical; they have practical applications in job searches and the role of community support for executives grappling with fear and uncertainty. His wisdom offers a roadmap to navigate the complexities of modern workplaces effectively
I know you're gonna find it. You gotta keep on at it. Hey everybody, this is Bob Goodwin, and welcome to another episode of Career Club Live. Before we get started, I wanted to do a couple things. One is if you're watching this on YouTube, please feel free to subscribe, comment and like. It really helps If you're listening to this on your favorite podcast platform. Ratings and reviews are great and we appreciate you taking just a moment to do that. The second thing I wanted to let folks know is we've got some new free resources for job seekers at Career Club Things like how to answer what's your greatest weakness, identify the three things that might be holding you back in your job search, and some tips on networking. So go check that out at Career Club under the four job seekers section. Let's get started with our program.
Speaker 1:I'm really pleased to introduce Dan Hill. I've known Dan for probably longer than either one of us care to admit. I'm gonna read a little bit of his official bio and then we'll get started. There's a lot here too, by the way. He's extremely talented. So Dan Hill, PhD, is an internationally recognized expert on the role of emotions in business, politics, sports and pop culture.
Speaker 1:He's given keynote speeches in over 25 countries. He's the founder and president of Sensory Logic, which pioneered the use of facial coding, which we'll talk about, to scientifically capture and quantify emotions in businesses, starting back in 1998. And he's continued doing this work for over 100 of the top business to consumer oriented clients. He's also the author of nine books, including one that we'll talk some about, Emotionomics, which at age said was one of their top 10 must reads in the year that it was published. He's also the recipient of seven US patents and, lastly, Dan's appeared on a number of programs you would know, in channels including Good Morning America, Bloomberg TV, CNN, ESPN Fox, MSNBC, the Today Show, PBS and, of course, the Tennis Channel. So, with that said, Dan, welcome. It's such a pleasure to have you join me today.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Looking forward to the conversation, Bob.
Speaker 1:Dude, I'm out of breath reading all that. That was amazing.
Speaker 2:I try to stay busy. What can I say?
Speaker 1:Yes, you do, so let's. Let's do give people the opportunity to get to know you a little bit better, and as is our want to do. Just a few icebreaker questions First. One's pretty easy when were you born and raised?
Speaker 2:I was born in Minot, north Dakota, and I was primarily raised in the Midwest, except I spent two probably seminal years in Italy, living on the Italian Riviera, tough Brace. My father was managing a film plant for the 3M Company and that's why we were there.
Speaker 1:Excellent. And then you mentioned your father, so just a little bit about your family then and now.
Speaker 2:Sure, my mom was actually wanted to be an interior designer but realized that meant she helped people hang their drapes and couldn't talk them out of their hideous color scheme. So she ended up working for our college administration instead my father's career. Eventually, he left the Dynacolor division because they were always chasing Kodak and he became the person in charge of three imprinted posted notes production, sales and marketing. So a pretty good career. I have one sister and she has managed Taco John's fast food restaurants, putting up with the foibles of not only customers but her staff, which consists of a lot of teenagers.
Speaker 1:And where do we find you today? Where are you calling in from?
Speaker 2:I'm in St Paul, Minnesota, and about to go to California for the winter months. Guess what Minnesota winters beg that choice.
Speaker 1:No well, your PhD is well-earned. So, speaking of PhDs, where'd you go to school, st Louis?
Speaker 2:College, then to Oxford University, brown University and a PhD from Rutgers. So way too many days in school.
Speaker 1:That is a lot of school. Do you mind just painting a little bit of a picture, Dan, of your career art from when you left school and all the way to what led to the founding of Sensory Logic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, tremendously unplanned one, I must say. My dad always thought I should just find a good corporate job, like he did, and stick with it for half a century. But after the PhD I was actually a lawyer for Consumer Affairs the only non-lawyer they'd ever hired into the position. Then I jumped to a major utility, pseng, in New Jersey. I worked for the executive on executive communications, branding task force and other things. Then I got a lucky break. I worked for a firm that was looking at the customer experience, and in doing that I was supposed to be ghostwriting a book for the company president. He knew someone at IBM who sent over a Cornell University article about the breakthroughs in brain science and the implications for marketing and market research, and particularly the role of emotions, and with that I was off to the races and I started Sensory Logic, as you said, in 1998.
Speaker 1:No, that's awesome. And then, lastly, and then we'll get started to the heart of our conversation today. What do we find Dan Hill doing when he is not doing Keynote addresses and speaking on TV and writing books? What do you like to do in your off time?
Speaker 2:I love to play tennis. Some bicycling is nice. I'm a movie fan galore Foreign, domestic documentaries, whatever it might take, and then just hanging out with friends having a nice conversation over a ball of wine there you go. Very nice way to end the day.
Speaker 1:I know tennis was gonna come up, but the movie thing. What's a one, two, three movies that people may not know? That you're like, oh my gosh, you got to go see this movie my all-time favorite is starlog 17 with William Holden.
Speaker 2:It was actually the inspiration for Hogan's Heroes, which is a much-debased version of this wonderful movie. I also think network from 1977, in all of its glorious cynicism About where the society is headed, is proven to be very similar. So that would be probably my top two.
Speaker 1:No, that's awesome. I've been just made my weekend.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm gonna go so on to our topic.
Speaker 1:So you know you mentioned market researcher earlier. That's the context that you and I first got acquainted in some number of years ago and I think we're both fascinated with human behavior, why people do the crazy things that people do. The the term emotional intelligence has been around for quite a while, but could you ground us just in not kind of the pop definition, but what's the real definition of emotional intelligence is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that you take emotions into account in terms of what you are observing from other people, which is where my facial coding expertise reading facial expressions is very handy. Beyond that, you also want to then know what emotions actually mean. I would argue that people are incredibly emotionally illiterate, including myself before I started my company. We all know about anger management, so we kind of some sense of what anger means and happiness, but there's a lot more going on and then, of course, actually plugging it into the you know behavior, the interactions, the coaching that you might give. So it's Reading others, because you got. You got your solipsistic self. It's knowing what this all means and then applying it. So, yeah, we won two, three.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, but but it really has come to the. You know the four and I think even in the current workplace you know where people are air quote, bringing their whole self to work. People are coming out of the pandemic and the economic strain and people just seem to be more emotionally on edge, and so a lot of what we talk about a career club, different podcasts that I do with Johnny Taylor from sherm is just that the workforce Seems to be on edge these days and there's a lot of pressure on frontline managers, who are not trained in this, to help actually kind of Support, understand, empathize with a stressed out workforce. How do you see that?
Speaker 2:Oh, Absolutely what you're saying. I mean, I think one is yes, the managers are not trained for this. They're unlikely to get it from HR. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases they're really caught up in the health care benefits or other things that take up their day. You know, you cannot simply do this by saying I have a weekly meeting with staff and, yeah, we go around the table and everyone says what they're working on it's not so much what they're doing, it's how they feel about what they're doing and how what they're feeling causes them to either do or not do things well.
Speaker 2:And so you really need the, the offline conversations. You need to be a prize at what's going on. You need an open office environment. You need to, even for the moment of onboarding them. You need a much more emotionally intelligent Version of that, rather than just a menu of tasks, and here's how you file the paperwork. So I agree with you it's become really important to having a cohesive staff and we can get into the horrible statistics on engagement levels that companies but we they all need to go much higher. Otherwise you're basically running your factory half empty.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, well, one thing I just want to like wind the tape way back, because this was such a key learning that you gave me back in the Day, which is just even on the core emotions. Do you mind just explain to people what the core emotions are first, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, in facial coding, but it really applies pretty well beyond that. We only have two approach emotions. They are hugely important and they happen all the time, and that's happiness and anger. You either approach them one to hug them, in effect, or to hit them, and I'm afraid that very often what happens in business is Happiness. Seems like it's superfluous that you know that if that happens, fine. But we just need to knuckle down and get the work done, which makes anger the default emotion that's most often expressed. So people feel like they're getting, you know, abused Hopefully not physically, although I'm sure that happens in some cases but certainly emotionally they end up bruised.
Speaker 2:Anger does have its purposes and means that you are trying to achieve goals. You're trying to break through barriers, including unfair barriers, but that's a bad place to hang out exclusively. Happiness means that you can be more inclusive, you are more Open to brainstorming and arriving at superior solutions more quickly. So those are two real mainstays that are both approach emotions and their core emotions. Another core emotion is sadness. Yeah, it's a little bit more ambivalent. You'd like to approach, but you may not. In other words, you long to be hugged, and then there are. There are a few more If you want me to go into them.
Speaker 1:No, I really do want you to, because if the portfolio of emotions is sort of the bedrock of this whole thing, so yeah, if you in mind sure.
Speaker 2:So we've covered two approach emotions and an ambivalent semi approach emotion. Then we have two averse of emotions Disgust, where, for instance, your nose wrinkles, your upper lip curls, there's a bad taste of, bad smell, you want to get away from something. I found that this is a emotion that correlates strongly to people who, frankly, do not have EQ skills. They tend to be bullies that tend to be Tyrants in the office. In other words, they distance themselves from other people rather than Constructively interacting with them. Also, in the kind of averse of camp, is contempt, which is a really interesting emotion. It's a little smirk on the corner of the mouth. It can mean that you feel superior to others, you're above them. Obviously, that's very corrosive. On the other hand, if it's combined with a smile and you'll see this in quarterbacks, for instance, successful ones they're confident, they're doing well, they're enjoying being in the moment and making it happen. So it's a bit ambivalent, like sadness. But if it shows up on its own or with anger, oh my god, then you've got real problems. Now you got a hothead who doesn't show you any respect, and you can imagine how well that plays in the office.
Speaker 2:Finally, two others which are really intertwined, and that is surprise and fear. They show almost identically on the face and the reason why they're so linked is because human nature is such that we don't really welcome surprises. We love the wow, the good moment, where it's a delightful gift we didn't expect. But most cases surprise means that the status quo is changing and human nature is such that we tend to Expect a threat rather than an opportunity. So we tend to be on guard. So that kind of gives you the portfolio. But there's one really important angle that's come to my mind in the last few years is, if you chart it differently, fear and anger are both emotions about control and we're talking about the office and what kind of dynamics we're gonna have.
Speaker 2:If you got a lot of anger going on and a lot of fear going on, then you're really operating in the control dimension and that may be good at times, but I think over the long haul it becomes very toxic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is. This is why I'm so excited to have you come on, because what one of the things and again, if I'm getting this wrong, I've been a poor student, you know, correct us. But Happiness seems to be pretty positive. Surprise is kind of neutral, it could go either way. Surprise, I wrecked my car. Surprise, I won the lottery.
Speaker 1:But I'm still surprised, sure, and then we kind of go down sadness, anger, fear, contempt, disgust this don't sound very joyful to me and is there sort of this basic skewing that might even kind of speak to self-preservation and and you know, trying to to not be hurt with with a lot of those emotions, and we're one of them. Only it's explicitly positive.
Speaker 2:Actually that's a fantastic question. So one of the things we have in society is, you know, just be happy. You know whistle, so you know we kind of defaulted that because that's what the advertising that thing tells us to do. I think in the office what we often default to, sadly, is no emotion at all, because we don't expect emotion, happiness, we can't hold on to it for very long and in fact, what a yelling one said that happiness makes up in height but it lacks in length. So it doesn't, it doesn't prolong itself. So I think very often the default is we just try to get to no emotion, we don't feel threatened, we don't feel stressed, we don't get into a bruising argument with somebody and we try to move through our day. But each of these emotions, even when they're negative, do potentially have a benefit.
Speaker 2:I want to go to one in particular which I just glossed over earlier, which is sadness, because sadness means you, for instance, might feel forlorn. I Well, my god, if you have someone who feels for Lauren in the office, one of the things that happens, and I know this from my work in pro sports it means you have a low performer. Typically their cognitive abilities, even their physical attributes are going to go down. Because sadness is almost like nature's way of saying you made a mistake or you found yourself in a bad situation and don't plunge into the next problem, don't go over the cliff like a limbing. So we slow down and guess what? Our productivity slows down.
Speaker 2:So sadness can indicate disappointment, a sense of feeling for Lauren, a sense of feeling hopeless. You can think of all the implications this has for the team at work. But the other thing is it also ties in pretty well to regrets. And if you hold onto regret really strongly like Daniel Pink's written a whole book on this and I interviewed him and it's a wonderful book and, as he points out, if you can identify key regrets, that means there was sadness, there was disappointment, but if you hold onto it because it was something that was meaningful to you and I think you and I both know that one of the things we're seeking in our work life besides the pay is the appreciation and a sense of meaningfulness that makes us holding pay off in a much richer sense.
Speaker 2:So sometimes I think actually a good manager really processing EQ would look out for the sadness. The corners of the mouth droop, the inner eyebrows pinched together and raised. Those are signs that something's going wrong and rather than ignoring it, I think you just step into it because there's a chance to make a significant difference on behalf of that person and therefore your office dynamics.
Speaker 1:So let's touch on what you just alluded to with facial coding. Basically, the face is an amazing emotional canvas. Can you explain to folks just why that is, and just maybe I know you've got a book on this and we can recommend that to people. But just sort of broadly, why is it that the face is this canvas? If you know what you're looking for, Sure.
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing I think is kind of intriguing is that the face is the only place in the body where some of the muscles attach right to the skin, particularly around the eyes.
Speaker 2:So we just give away how we're feeling, whether we want to adopt a poker face or not.
Speaker 2:On the mouth, we can engage in some sort of fused a bit more, because we like to eat and we talk and the words don't always come out with the truth. The more important thing, I think, even beyond that little fun tidbit, is that we have more facial muscles than any other species on the planet, and it's also because we have a larger brain. Typically, I mean, whales give us a good run for the money, but if you look at most species, we have a larger brain. And the reason we do? Because through the course of human evolution, when we moved from being nomads into villages, guess what we now had to practice EQ? We now had to keep track of all sorts of different social relations and our brain literally grew larger at that point in human civilization. And I think it corresponds very strongly to why we have such a sensitive face with all these muscles giving away all these expressions. So the core of facial coding is that there are 23 expressions that go to the seven emotions that I covered earlier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what's fascinating to me, if I'm remembering against some of my reading properly, basically, there's no filter, there's no cognitive filter from the emotional center of the brain to the facial muscles. It's like you can't hide it if you wanted to, because there's not anything in between the two.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really quick path. We can do something afterwards. We can have a fear expression and then we try to cover it up with a smile. I mean, going deadpan or a smile is the most common ways in which people try to, on their face, throw you off the trail. The other way, of course, is that they lie to you. As I say to people, if you've never been lied to in life, congratulations. You're either really lucky or you're not paying attention To your point. We lie to ourselves. Probably most of all we want to feel good about ourselves and we want to attract allies.
Speaker 2:Evolution is not about being a truth machine. So the face is a pretty good approximation of getting toward the truth, because it is unfiltered and it does happen really quickly, and that's one of the reasons why I found it so intriguing. But it probably even goes back to the fact that I lived in Italy and I didn't know the language at first, and I went to Italian first grade in the fishing village and I waited all day for the math unit. So, unlike body gestures, which change by cultures, facial expressions are essentially universal. The strength of them and what causes them can vary by culture and context, but I've traveled the world and I've seen these expressions many times. So if you've got a job that has an international capacity to it, or even just the rich mosaic that we have racially and ethically in America, and immigrants and so forth, there's all sorts of reasons why facial coding is a good play to get a richer sense of what's going on.
Speaker 1:So going back to the workplace and being more emotionally intelligent and being able. Do I need to be a PhD in facial coding to be able to start to see that Sally might be feeling a little bit sad.
Speaker 2:No, I mean these are 23 expressions. Now, dr Paul Ekman's manual is God forbid 500 pages long with all sorts of arcane details and rules, but the essence of it is much simpler. I just took the whole manual and kind of like what Jefferson did with some documents, thomas Jefferson, that is, I just cut out the essential parts and pasted them together and studied them over a weekend and I was up and rolling in 72 hours with facial coding. Did I get better over time? Through practice, sure, but the essence of it wasn't that impossible if you're willing to knuckle down and focus for a bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've got a pretty small readable book, kind of for facial coding for the layperson.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did a book called Famous Faces to Code it and I wanted to make it more fun for people so I did it in the context of people in movies and Hollywood and TV and athletes and you know rock musicians and so forth, country stars, you know people we could relate to. And then what kind of expressions they show in their face, because people have signature expressions. Very often they have go-to expressions. It's muscle memory and it's a tremendous way to understand someone rather quickly. In a lot of cases, as George Orwell said, by the age of 50, a man is the face he deserves. So we go there, we have certain expressions and they can give away a lot. I mean, they really do. What is your default? You know, and I see it all the time. I mean I've been in grocery stores on dates where in four or five minutes I have a sense of the person. Even less often and it holds up over time.
Speaker 1:Well, actually. So I wanted to pick up on that Now in the context of a lot of our core listener and definitely career club clients, is thinking about interactions like networking and interesting and interviewing. So typically these are going to be situations where I don't know this person and you know hopefully quickly I can start to draw a bead on kind of how they're feeling, what makes them tick, how can somebody do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just like when I do interviews and market research. You would think that the answer is the answer. First of all, there never is an answer in life. As Gertrude Stein said, the answer is there's never been an answer and there never will be an answer. But actually the great parts come from the gaps, the silences, the moments in between, because they've stopped talking, and what expression might happen to trail under their face in response to the answer you just gave in the interview, the question you asked them, and how they showed on their face how they felt about the question before they told you.
Speaker 2:Imagine, for instance, you're saying well, what kind of culture do you have here in your apartment? What have you cultivated? What are you most proud of? And they have a fear. Look in their face, my God, that might tell you a lot that they don't feel particularly proud of anything. And cultural attributes of the office is way down on their list. And if it's high on your list, you're not a good fit, you're not a good match. So I think you start to look for those kinds of things, the off moments, as much as when you're in the in the verbiage.
Speaker 1:Now, that's a great insight, dan. I was speaking with somebody not too long ago. He's a listening expert out of Australia and that was the counterintuitive thing was the real listening happens in the silence, yeah, yeah. And now we're listening with our eyes, basically, and just like really trying to dial in on. What was the expression? What can I sense, what can I either skillfully or even intuit from the expression? That I'm not sure she believed what she just said to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I call it the safe field gap, and it happens all the time, much more often than people's words and their emotions aligning. It's probably one of the reasons why Joan Didi and the journalist who's no longer with us said her main go to in interviews was to ask a question and then fall silent. And even if the person stopped talking, she'd stay silent to see what else spilled out of their mouth. If you're the one doing the interviewer, I suggest you might want to follow that, because we all know people come in with canned answer. Can you get them past the canned answer? Can you figure out what's really going on for them? Just like, if you're trying to detect a liar, you make them tell their story in reverse chronological order because the liar can't keep track of it very well. Same thing with the interview. In a way, I don't want the manufactured part, I want the authentic part, and so I got to scramble the script.
Speaker 1:So I want people to really take note of that which you just said is really, really important, which is letting a question hang yeah and then letting the answer hang yeah, because what you'll find is somewhere around three, five, maybe up to seven seconds becomes very uncomfortable. It feels like three, five, seven minutes to the other person and we don't like that silence. And so somebody is going to run in to go fill the gap of that silence and oftentimes you get the real answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You get the question behind the question and that's a very powerful thing that you're saying. And then one way that people screw that up is when they ask a question, they start to do multiple choice. You give the person a multiple choice. It's like stop Ask the question, be quiet and get very comfortable with the silence, because the other person will react to that silence and you'll start to be able to plum out some of the truth that's hidden behind, as you say, the canned answer or even the formulaic question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, and I think you can do it with a smile. You don't have to act like you're being a meanie, so you can put a smile on your face. But yeah, don't step into it. Let's see what happens.
Speaker 1:How is any of the ability to pick up on some of these nuances changed in this remote, zoom-driven world that we find, versus being in the same room with somebody and getting more kind of emotional cues?
Speaker 2:Actually it's a godsend, because what you see in the zoom call is the face. It's taking the body language, part of it, out of the equation. In many ways that's a good thing, because body language like the hand gestures my God. We've all watched presidential debates and we see the manufactured gesture that they were told to do by the consultant yeah, the thumbs up, the hands out, the open palm, all these things. You can fake that a whole lot more easily than you can. The face for the reasons we've already discussed, it takes that out. It takes out sometimes where you're sitting and who's sitting by whom. So dynamics of that are a little bit different. Instead you get the face a lot, and then if they're at home, there's some real richness sometimes in what's their setting, do they?
Speaker 2:have a terribly messy desk. I actually have one person I talked to who said yeah, I was talking to my boss from home after COVID-19 struck and I realized he had a bong behind him on the desk. And she said I learned a whole lot about my boss that I didn't know previously. So context matters.
Speaker 1:Context does. That's funny. That's interesting because the intuitive, at least for me, peace on body language would have been. That would be very instructive and you're saying actually, no, those can kind of be a head fake to the real emotions and much more manufactured than again, where we don't have nearly the filtering capabilities that we might have in some other aspects.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's really, it's a nice showcase.
Speaker 1:So we're from a practical application, though, dan, what I'm really trying to understand because a lot of our audience also are people in HR leadership roles and the well we can agree on the need for this, for the reality of it. First of all, the very emotional critters that we are emoting, a lot more than maybe people understand ourselves, included Organizationally. Are these the kinds of skills that can be learned at scale, and taught at scale and employed at scale?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I said I took a weekend. I mean you know it didn't take that long.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not the dumbest guy on this call.
Speaker 2:Well, whatever and I did have a our history minor background so I'm fairly visually oriented but it's 23 variables, 23 different expressions and seven emotions. I mean, compare that to the 10 billion neurons we have in our brain, it's a lot easier lift. So, yes, I wanted to. I liked about it, it was practical, you can do it, you can implement it, you can take it to scale with an organization. I mean I can't imagine why you wouldn't have your sales force in addition to your HR. People understand HR. I mean understand facial coding. It certainly helped me land clients, yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know also, a lot of people are freaked out and again I'm speaking maybe specifically to HR folks, but not exclusively with the threat that people feel from artificial intelligence and you know, is AI going to put me out of a job? Well, if you're an HR professional and you sort of have reduced the scope of what you do to policies, procedures, manuals and stuff like that, yeah, you probably should be a little bit worried. But if your real talent is understanding people and the ability to shape the culture through your understanding of people in a way that you know there's not a lot of other folks at the company that have this skill I mean going back to your point, dan, which is really well made on productivity and engagement. If you know the unlock on that and one can identify what's the real issue, therefore we can apply the real prescription. That is a superpower.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll give you an example from ProSport. So I was working with the general manager of the Timberwolves. He was a lawyer, he was a smart guy, but he had no EQ. So at one point he takes a guy from the New York Knicks and he says it's wonderful, he's six foot six, he can play all the positions that were maybe you know point guard. And I'm looking at the guy going, oh my God, you just made the worst choice in the world. The guy has got the saddest face I've seen since Chief Reign in the face, who was a you know fellow chief, along with Sitting Bull, and the guy proved to be locker room poison.
Speaker 2:He didn't perform on the court in the locker room he was negative all the time a real downer, and the lawyer was blind to that, and so, yes, I you know, and he didn't keep in the job that long, for that matter.
Speaker 2:He also failed to draft Stephen Curry when he could have, which is about the biggest sin you could possibly have outside of maybe LeBron James lately, but at any rate, that just points to the fact that, yes, if you're going on a reason basis alone, or I know the facts, ma'am, or I know the procedures I don't think that's a safeguard going into an AI future. The richness is being able to be improvisational, to be able to respond in the moment, outside of something that's programmed, to see where the slippage is, the disconnects, the opportunities, the missed potential, and to plug it in. And so that's why I love the face, because it's immediate and it can be done through the words or whatever else it's going to be. But the richness that you can bring as a informed person is a lot better, I think, down the road. It's still the best safeguard with this technological future we face.
Speaker 1:So maybe, maybe starting to wrap up a little bit, but it feels like it can tie into basically the thesis of your book Emotionomics, which is this is actually a hard skill that ties into business results and you make the case if there's sort of two currencies dollars and emotions. Can you explain that a little bit for people? And I want to get to the point of why this isn't a nice to have interesting parlor trick, but this is a real skill that ultimately benefits the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's. The most incredible thing about it is that some people think it's just a soft skill or auxiliary or nice to have sometime next week. My God, go back to all the basics of business Customer satisfaction. Well, satisfaction is a form of happiness. It is really important. What is loyalty? Loyalty is a feeling.
Speaker 2:Engagement in most companies depends on the survey and the mechanism, but you might find it's 20 to 40% when your emotions turn on. Then you're engaged. Sometimes you have to allow that it could be negative emotions. Maybe they're disgusted because a certain procedure you have stinks, because it's really stupid and can be improved upon. Maybe they're disappointed because the last meeting didn't really bring the team together. You know there are people who are feeling like they're outliers and their skills aren't being really drawn upon. So you have to be prepared to go there as well. But all the things we care about in business really have an emotional component and it's what the payoff is. Everybody can meet to any other product or service you offer out there. What you cannot replicate readily is the spirit in which you deliver it, the experiences we have, and that's why emotions and EQ and facial coding is as central. It is the heart of business and if it's done right, there really actually is a heart of business. It's not just a ledger sheet.
Speaker 1:No, that's well said, and so I want to start to wrap this up a little bit. Where we're starting to get at time. Is there anything, dan, as you think about this, whether from a leader perspective or again? A lot of my bias is for people that are in job search right now, how they can think about learning more about emotional intelligence than to how to activate against it.
Speaker 2:Well, I think something that's really important to me that we haven't gotten to yet necessarily straight on is inclusivity, because if you're going to get to happiness which is really the nice payoff long term then you've got to feel like you belong. And so I think, whether you are the person in the job hunt and trying to say, is this the right place for me? Or the interviewer, or someone who is in the clubhouse of senior management, what kind of ambiance are you actually creating? There are studies out there that indicate that the head person in a company can create as much as 50% of the emotional climate within the company. So that is a tremendously important role that you're playing, over and above the revenue stream thing, which is very important, I'm not denying that. But can you make people feel like they belong, they have a purpose, you're being honest with them, that they trust you? I mean, we always talk about trust is the emotion of business, but sometimes the trust has to be and, by the way, trust is the opposite of contempt. Contempt means I don't trust you, I don't respect you. So that's why contempt can be a real worrisome sign. But if you're doing the right thing, then you're finding a climate where there is trust and the trust actually involves the inclusivity of others, by cognitive skills, by background, by race and color and gender. But it can also mean, I think, diversity in terms of the emotions that are allowed for.
Speaker 2:Right now, I think we are very close to having two emotions in business, only officially. One is no emotion at all, not particularly engaged, I'll keep a flat face, I don't want to get hurt by anybody here and the other one is anger, like we got to get things done, we got to move forward. I'm impatient, I'm irritated, make this happen. And yet there are so many other things going on. There are obviously people who dropped out and feeling sad.
Speaker 2:There is fear, I mean, I think, one reason you don't have more innovation in companies because everyone's afraid of getting their head lopped off for either cannibalizing some existing, you know business offer or daring to say we could and should and better do something different and quickly. So you've got other emotions going on and you need emotional diversity in your company. You need emotional inclusivity in your company and I think if you're looking for a job, you're going to be so much better off, not just what your official duties are, because we both know they can change three days after you take the job, but the people you're sitting across the desk from, they're unlikely to change actually. They will have that George Orwell signature expression kind of thing going on. There will be an emotional current in that department and the better you can fair that out and, on the flip side, the better you can create a positive one, better off everybody is.
Speaker 1:I want to just build on that for just a moment, which is back to inclusivity. So, thank you. You know there's a lot of talk around diversity, and then it goes to equity, and then it goes to inclusion, and diversity without inclusion is kind of worthless. I mean, demographically, that's fine, we can play bingo with. You know, we've got enough of each one of these and so I filled up my bingo card.
Speaker 1:But if people do not feel and I think the other word people use is belonging that you know, I feel like I'm a part of this group, part of this tribe, which kind of leads me to the second piece, which is how important I believe community is. We are very to our kind of main point. We're very emotional creatures, yeah, and we need each other. We need the emotional support, because nobody's going to be in a happy state 24, seven, right, yeah. But sometimes I'm encouraging you, I'm listening to you, I'm understanding what you're feeling, I'm helping you get some of that sadness out and you know, maybe, just maybe, that's all you needed, was just to be able to express some of it, and now you can kind of get back into, you know, a more healthy, productive, kind of a mindset, emotional state that you can move forward.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I'm thinking, sometimes I need the encouragement I need to. Just, dan, will you listen to me for a little bit? Yeah, hey, bob, you look like there's something on your mind. What's going on? Well, you know my son just blah, blah, blah, right and then. But I think community is really a core piece. I can't be included to something it's a party of one. Yeah, so can you talk about the role of community in all of this?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, go back to you. Know how our brain evolved and why we probably have all these facial muscles. We were suddenly in a community and we are in de facto community. Sometimes they're kind of moribund, but you know, jack Welch, I think, did a good job in that he had these endless town halls and people could throw out questions and he dared to take them on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how many executives and in fact I worked for one who, when we had the annual meeting, someone stood up and said you know, you need to just get out of your corner office and walk around and talk to people. You need to know what's going on. Basically, what she was saying is there is a community out there if you'll just foster it and acknowledge it and involve yourself in it. I think a lot of executives think they're really courageous and I think they're scaredy cats. I think they're actually afraid of knowing what's going on and if they're afraid of it, then they won't encounter it and they won't fix it and improve it. Yeah, so that's kind of where I take, that is, have the guts to admit you're vulnerable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, gosh. I mean, we're touching on so many important things. There's empathy.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:There's vulnerability and what I love about vulnerability. We had the chief human resources officer for Kroger, tim Massa, on a few weeks ago and that was a big piece of what Tim was sharing was modeling vulnerability and basically giving people permission. To hear earlier point about fear and being able to say well, this is actually something that's bothering me. This is a oh wow my boss just said that that's something that she struggles with as well or just fact that we can even talk about it. To your point about being emotionally neutral, it doesn't mean the emotions aren't there. I'm trying to portray emotional neutrality. I'm actually belying the vulnerability that I feel by trying to put a mask on, and when a leader takes their mask off, it gives other people, and that's sort of the paradox, right Is?
Speaker 2:I'm afraid that I like it in you.
Speaker 1:I say I admire you for being so honest, but I'm scared to death. Yeah, to just like being myself, because I'm afraid that it's going to make me look weak.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I think really what's important is sometimes it may look quote, unquote, unproductive, but it's that 10 minute conversation that happens where and I think it's typically one-on-one it might be larger groups, but you're able to disclose what's going on for you and then they feel listened to and there'll be a huge payoff down the road. It's a little bit similar. You know so much of the work is now done in teams. So we're talking about diversity and inclusivity. We need to talk about the team structure. You need, you know, people with different personalities, different skills. You also need a group that's not too big. Actually, because you get lost. There's too many connections to keep track of.
Speaker 2:Tom Peters has this wonderful thing. He says the average team size should be about five or six people, in other words, no bigger than what could be. You know, if you had two large pizzas, they can be eaten by six people. You know, if no one has enough pizza to eat, then you got a problem. So keep it smaller, keep it more intimate and draw on people and really bring them into the team.
Speaker 2:And I think, if you're going to do diversity, yes, don't make it tokenism. Don't have the loan, say female, for instance, or African American. There was a wonderful company that I talked to in England and they said we realize we needed to diverse our senior management and get more, in their case, women, in. And he said we realized, based on the studies we looked at, doing groups and drabs, bringing one woman now and incrementally, another one three years from now. They all feel like they're isolated. He said what we decided to do is just parachute in like five or 10 people into the senior management ranks. So there was, you know, some internal combustion and critical mass and that changed the culture and that made the culture more open, because we signal we were really going to make a change and they tied it into EQ in this case.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm going to go ahead and let you get on with your day, Dan this is.
Speaker 1:I mean because I can talk to you about this literally all day long, because this is the most interesting topic, which is people, yes, and what makes us tick and why we do what we do. I love the case that you made for you know this is business, loyalty, satisfaction, engagement. I mean, aren't these some of the most important KPIs of a business? Because without those, there is no return to shareholders, because there's no customers, there's no employees. We don't have a business. And, as you said, the easiest thing to clone is the tangible stuff. The hardest piece, the most elusive piece is the, really the emotional intelligence, the collective emotional intelligence of the organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's a human to human enterprise and at best, I think it actually even rises to the level of soul to soul that you're actually making a very meaningful moral connection.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, dan, again, I love this topic. You've taught me so much. If people want to learn more about emotions, facial coding, things like that, where would you point them?
Speaker 2:Well, if you go to Amazon, you know there's famous faces Dakota, which I alluded to earlier, which is really a guidebook to facial expressions and EQ, and then just fun to read about the celebrity's backstories. If you want a hard and fast business book, I would still say it's Emotionomics. So I think those two. Obviously you got a personal question. My emails Dhill at sensorylogiccom and I'll actually even respond to it, so yeah.
Speaker 1:And in post production, we'll put all those things up so people can know exactly where to go and maybe even do a couple of QR codes. There's your email address right there. So, dan, a pleasure. You've been a great friend and you've taught me a ton, and I really appreciate you taking a few minutes today to share your expertise with our listening audience. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. Our friendship has meant everything to me.
Speaker 1:Likewise and for everyone who's taken a few minutes out of your day, thank you so much. And again, you're welcome to like, comment, share on YouTube and rate and review on your favorite podcast platform. And with that, Dan, I wish you well. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you In the next騙 rotary test video.