1656 – The Power Skills with ELF Solutions’ Erin Thorp

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0:58with us right now it's aaron thorpe aaron you're a keynote speaker you're the author of inside out empathy which we're going to talk about you're a leadership consultant and you are the founder of elf solutions your website is aaron thorpe.ca we've got that link and other links in the show notes to our friend that's listening, just click around in your podcast app, swipe left, right, click on the information, whatever, whatever app you're using, and you can find all those links. Erin, it is so great to have you. Thank you, Josh. It's great to be here. Yeah. So share a little bit more about your work and impact in the world today.

1:37Yeah. Thank you. So I like to call myself kind of a recovering engineer that talks about feelings. So the two things tend not to go together when you first look at them. But having spent around 25 years in the construction and engineering industry, ran into a lot of different types of leadership. I'm sure you can use your imagination and don't have to dig very far as to what that might have been like. And, you know, just that experience has led me to where I am today. It led to the publishing, the writing of the book, the publishing of the book, the moving into the speaking about the experience, and then really wanting to make a difference in the industry as a whole, which led to starting this company and now doing, you know, leadership development, training, coaching, facilitation, and just trying to equip the leaders of today with, you know, people like to refer to them as the soft skills.

2:35That might be what your audience knows them as, but I like to call them the power skills because they're the hardest to do, but the most effective. Construction doesn't seem to be an industry that is filled to the brim with empathy. That's just my kind of my outsider observation. So talk more about like, what was the spark? Like, how did you get to a point where you're like, you know what? I keep seeing this problem over and over and over again. And I, here's my idea for how to address that. What was that evolution or that kind of transformation for you personally? Yeah. Well, what's interesting is, is, you know, when you first think about the construction industry, you're right.

3:16You don't think about, oh my gosh, there's a very empathetic, you know, group of people or, or work, you know, situation. What's interesting is, is when we're dealing with clients, we have to be very empathetic because we have to get into the shoes of our clients. We have to, you know, if we're building you a house or a building or fitting out an office space, we have to know what you want. So we have to listen to understand. We have to practice all these skills of empathy to be able to deliver the project that you want. But when it comes to like living inside the construction team, we forget all those skills.

3:50And we don't use them to the, you know, to the benefit of the actual team pulling together the project. and so that's that was sort of the first spark is like I noticed we can do this with the clients and we can do it when we're external facing but we don't do it with each other inside of our our project groups and our companies and I think the second piece that really kind of sparked this this you know you know mission or movement or whatever you want to call it that I'm on is around kind of the 10 to 15 year mark in my own career I started to get pulled into a lot of conversations and I was I was internally battling with do I stay in this career or do I leave and I was starting to get pulled into a lot of conversations that were like why are we losing mid-career technical women specifically out of the you know the engineering and construction world and this is when the two pieces kind of came together and I went you know we spend all this time getting to know our clients and customers so we can deliver the very best project project and product to them.

4:56And we spend no time trying to get to know our own internal teams and trying to figure out how do we make this an environment where everyone can thrive? You know, I love this, Aaron, you know, on the topic of empathy, a number of years ago, see, this was back in, oh, I'm not seeing that it was, I went to six years ago, I went to the Army Navy game, 2016. I'm a Navy guy. So that was the one year that we did not win after I think it was like a 14-year winning streak. So I haven't gone back because I think I jinxed it for him for the Naval Academy. I had the opportunity to interview Boo Corrigan, who at the time was athletic director for West Point.

5:36And so I wanted to pick his brain, you know, in terms of leadership, because obviously, you know, he's in a pretty demanding environment. Now, obviously, he has a very demanding role. But he said, you know, it comes down to three things that his three, you know, kind of three pronged approach with the cadets and, you know, what, you know, his approach to kind of working in that environment, you know, again, just kind of his style of leadership characters, incredibly important, but that third leg of the stool was empathy. And, you know, I had this whole interview all planned, but when the athletic director of West Point expressed that empathy was one of the three most important things that he could convey, I was like, it was like a, what's that one sound effect where it's like, you know, like a brake stop or something like, wait a minute, what?

6:23Because I was in the military and empathy, again, wasn't, you know, something that was discussed about. Could you do it? Could you maybe define your, you know, what empathy means to you and why this should be a cornerstone to all of us who are in leadership? And why is it so critical and important? Absolutely. Well, to me, you know, empathy is about understanding and accepting other people's perspective, emotions, feelings, opinions, you know, so we kind of work at the cognitive level, like what are they thinking? So we understand and accept this is maybe what's true for them at the emotional level, you know, whatever they're experiencing and being able to communicate about that, we understand and accept.

7:15And then we behave in a way that demonstrates that understanding and acceptance. Where I think we get hung up and we start to kind of diverge from this definition of empathy is we try to add in agreement into the definition. And we want to reach agreement on things, right? So we want to reach agreement on how we feel about a particular topic or issue. We want to reach agreement about how we feel about, you know, whatever change is happening in the organization. And that is not a part of the definition of empathy. And we bypass understanding and acceptance to get to agreement. And when we do that, that's when people feel isolated, other, you know, put in a box over here because we didn't, we don't agree.

8:11That is amazing. In fact, I think I just shared something on social media was not too long ago. Understanding is what I posted. Understanding is more important than agreement. I think with agreement, sometimes we feel this pressure that I have to convince you to believe like me, or somehow like I have to change my perspective and we have to meet in the middle. When I agree with you, I think it's the diversity of backgrounds and sensitivities. And, you know, it's like with my team, they have a perspective I don't have. If I feel like I've got the be all end all and, you know, for decisions or, you know, how we respond to certain things, I think that's incredibly arrogant.

8:59And I think that's kind of a pride coming before the fall kind of situation from my perspective. But I can imagine, I love this. I love this in kind of thinking about empathy. Empathy is not agreement. It's understanding compassion. It is, you know, and it's really that accepting of your lived experience. You know, I'll go back to like a construction example. If I'm building you, let's just use a really easy one. If I'm building you a house and you want the bathroom set up in a certain way, because that's what works for you. but I don't agree with you and I try to build the bathroom the way I want the bathroom built, you're not going to be a very happy customer, right?

9:37And in fact, we're probably not going to ever work together again. And so if I've got my business interests at heart and I want repeat clients and good feedback and, you know, raving fans, I am going to understand and accept the way you want the bathroom built and build it that way. Even if it's not how I would build my own bathroom, you know, but we, and then we fail to do that same exercise and that same practice inside our teams. Yeah. Erin, talk about what engagement looks like. What are you doing when you're working today with clients or individuals? What does that practice look like? around like building empathy practice?

10:22Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like if someone wants to hire you, how does that look? What does that work look? So it can be as simple as, you know, a lunch and learn or a workshop just to kind of introduce the topics. So some seeds of thought throughout the organization. And it can look as involved as, you know, a six to 12 month container of time where we're doing some periodic training in terms of embedding new skills. And then we're also working one-on-one and in group different coaching environments to really help embed the skills that we're teaching in the training environment. So very scalable, depending on what the organization is looking for in terms of their level of maturity, what their objectives and outcomes are.

11:10Yeah. Yeah. Your book, Aaron, is called Inside Out Empathy. What's inside out empathy mean? Yeah, great question. So what I what I discovered throughout this journey was myself, I don't I think we first of all, I think we always teach what we need to learn. And so I I kind of started out in my corporate career as a very like black and white command and control. You know, there's only one way to get this done. And it's usually my way. a type of leader, which didn't get me very far and, you know, was trying to model this, this, this type of leadership that I was seeing in the construction world.

11:48And it wasn't until I started to kind of lean into understanding my own emotions and what was coming up in the situations that allowed me to then lean into what other people might be feeling and what, and thinking and experiencing in these situations that were happening. And when that started to happen, I would say that's kind of like when things unlocked and we were like, oh, we can actually get further faster if we take time to understand where each of us are coming from. And so the inside piece is this call to action to really get to understand our own emotions and feelings. Because what I witnessed in the engineering and construction world is we have a lot of logical, rational people that aren't in touch with how they're feeling and the emotions that come up in certain situations.

12:37and they want to hide them. They want to push them down and hide them. And when we do that, it kind of creates this like pressure cooker situation, right? They go under pressure and they erupt at the worst possible time. For me, my eruption of emotion usually meant I was crying. You can imagine how that went over in a construction site trailer. There's no crying in construction? Honestly. Like that scene from a league of their own, right? There's no crying in baseball? Exactly. But in my male colleagues and in some of my other colleagues that I was working with, their emotion came up in terms of like they throw a hammer across the wall and embed it in the wall or they would, you know, pick up a chair and throw it or pound on the table or slam doors.

13:22So it just looked different in terms of how our emotion came out. So the inside piece is like, you got to get in touch with what's really going on with you first, because if you don't have the capacity to hold your own emotion, you'll never have the capacity to hold the emotion of anyone else. So it starts inside and then it goes outside. I love it. Erin, your website is erinthorpe.ca. hey, let's kind of share maybe, you know, where folks could go from here and how they might be able to engage with you. Or if there's, you know, maybe some other pillar content, obviously, aside from the book, that you'd recommend, that would be great ways that you can start to have impact for them in their leadership style in their workplace.

14:09Yeah, absolutely. So on the website, you will find the blog, I tend to talk about, you know, different leadership topics and how empathy is kind of woven throughout those. I do a lot of keynote speaking at corporate, corporate and kind of association events. So that can be a great way to, to again, introduce the topic of empathy. And, you know, usually, I'd say right now, the two, the two most requested topics are around feedback and engagement. How do we bring empathy to these conversations? And then how do we bring empathy just to tough conversations, you know, whether it's performance reviews, or just general types of tough conversations.

14:51And the third way would be just to book a call. You know, there's a link there on the website to book a call. We can just talk about what it is you're trying to achieve and where you'd like to go and how myself and my team might be able to support that. Yeah. Again, your website, erinthorp.ca, E-R-I-N-T-H-O-R-P.ca. One thing in particular that you had mentioned, And I was actually thinking about this earlier. And you have a blog post that addresses this about feedback across generations. So, you know, you're boomers, you're Gen Xers, you're millennials, now you're Gen Zs. there are absolutely just, I'd say, you know, cultural considerations when you're working with folks in those categories.

15:39Some of them are just absolutely, you know, based on where they are professionally. But other things are just like, no, you know, millennials are a little bit more sensitive to XYZ than say the boomers are. What are some of the maybe some of the biggest observations you've had as it revolves around feedback, which is really, I'd say, from my observation is a big one. You better get that right. Otherwise, you're going to have problems. What are your high level observations on that? I think first and foremost, it's the mode of the communication that we tend to, so we always tend to default to the mode that we feel the most comfortable with as leaders.

16:19So if you are a boomer, you're going to feel most comfortable, usually with face-to-face. You have no problem walking into someone's office, booking a lunch, you know, you want that face-to-face, real, live, in-person action. If you go to those Gen Zers, which are my kids right now, that would absolutely terrify them if somebody just walked in and said, I need to give you some feedback, right? Because they're like, their preferred method, I mean, they grew up behind screens, right? And so their preferred method is they want, they don't want an email, that's probably the Gen Xers, they want like a text message or an IM.

16:59And they would probably prefer to have this conversation virtually, like you and I are talking now, that's where they're going to feel safest. And so it's, you know, feedback across generations is you've really got to, again, put yourself into understanding and accepting what did they grow up with? What is their preferred method of communication, how are they going to feel most comfortable so that they can receive the information that you have to give them? You don't want them hung up in the mode of the communication and totally stressed out where they can't even hear you. That's fascinating. You know, I didn't even think about that, but that would, that might come across, even if it's delivered in a way that I think would be totally appropriate, it might feel a little confrontational.

17:45It's like, whoa, we're in person. Yikes. This is really serious kind of thing. And I'm like, no, no, no, it's not, but still, wow. Great point. Great point, Aaron. So I just want to kind of leave folks with, you know, call to action. And again, aaronthorpe.ca. You can also, again, grab your book Inside Out Empathy. But, you know, again, at your website, Aaron, there's a button right there. You're right. Your blog is very good. And then there's a button right there. It says book, a call, grab some time with Aaron and talk about what's going on. And Aaron, I'm sure you can help with some great direction and some great ideas.

18:23So Aaron Thorpe, it's been a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

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