2190 - The Essential Role of Empathy and Emotional Intelligence in Leadership Success with Doug Noll

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

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1:05With us right now, it is my good friend, Doug Knoll. And I mean that very sincerely, Doug, you and I not only have had a great relationship for many years, we've had the opportunity to do some great work together. I love the impact that you have in the world. I am a staunch advocate of your message in the world. But all that said, Doug, if I try to introduce you, I feel like I'm going to miss some very key components of your impact other than you've written multiple books. you are an attorney, but can I let you explain a little bit more about your impact and what you do? Hi, Josh. Sure. I can't be put in a simple box.

1:50But today, I think I could describe myself as I am a non-practicing lawyer. I was a trial lawyer for 22 years, quit in 2000, went back to school in the mid-90s and earned my master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies and have devoted my life since 2000 to helping people deal with conflict. And I am a full-time professional mediator and arbitrator. And in addition to that, and probably most importantly, is that I teach people how to stop fights and arguments in their lives forever. And I'm the co-founder of the Prison at Peace Project with my dear friend, Laurel Coffer, which trains people in prison how to stop prison violence through a series of skills that we've developed.

2:32And that project is now International in scope. And I'm working on my fifth book, all about leadership empathy. Oh, we're going to get into that because I know you're in the editing stages of that. So I'm so excited to talk about that. Before we do, Doug, what are you currently doing for fun or watching, listening to? What are you into lately? We're on the shoulder season here. I live in the central California, Sierra Nevada, just south of Yosemite National Park. Ski season is over with. from november until now uh i ski at least once a week this year i think i got 16 or 17 days of skiing in now um we'll wait for it to warm up and then i got a i've got a little like a hobie cat it's not a hobie cat but it's like a hobie cat and we'll be taking it up to the lake up above we got a great sailing lake up at 7 000 feet and we'll we'll we'll dock the dock the hobie cat up there probably after Memorial Day and begin sailing in June and do that.

3:32But I'm a jazz violinist. And so I'm learning, I'm learning jazz, studying jazz as a violinist. And I would train five, six, seven days a week. I walk through miles every day, do Pilates twice a week, strength training once a week. I'm 74 years old. Yeah. You don't look at my friend. You got the you got the energy of a 24 year old. Right. Exactly. So by the way, I'm just looking up a Hobie cat. So just for folks who don't know, so it's kind of like a little catamaran. It's got, you know, a tarp that goes across the two pontoons. You've got a sail in the middle. So I think describing that people are still, Oh yeah.

4:15One of those. And it looks like there's some variations on that. Yeah. This, this is not a Hobie cat. What happened was the guy that invented these kinds of catarams and Hobie split ways in orange county back in the 1960s and he went off and developed more of a racing cat and and hoby stuck with a more recreational cat and these this cat was built in 19 i'm looking out of my window and it was built in 1988 and it was given to us and i completely rebuilt it last summer so it's kind of an athletic boat it's not something you just go out and cruise and have a beer on we're in wetsuits and helmets and the whole nine yards out there at huntington lake where the wind is blowing typically blowing 17 to 22 knots all day long um white caps and so you're gonna know what you're doing and it's like i said it's athletic so but it's a blast you haul ass in the thing i bet no kidding do you have you do you ever get you have a wreck if i make yeah if i goof i the biggest problem with the with these cats is is you can do a you the the bow of The cats go in and you flip the whole thing over.

5:21And it doesn't happen very often, but I have done it. And that's why you wear a wetsuit and a helmet.

5:31Water's cold. Yeah. Deer flying all around you, so you don't want to get bopped in the head. I'm so excited to talk about this topic, about empathic leadership. And, Doug, I think, you know, as we get into this topic, would you mind maybe just approaching this maybe historically or sociologically? Like, what do we know from history around leadership types? Because, you know, obviously, you know, you've got the kind of the strong man authoritarian type leadership type. That is a choice. then, you know, there's more of a unifying, you know, listening kind of approach. Do you mind kind of stepping into this?

6:18Maybe just, I don't know, historically or fundamentally start from a broad base and we'll kind of hone in. You know, whenever you write a book, you learn a lot. And what I learned is that empathy has been hardwired into human beings for over a million years. and leadership empathy has been a part of us for as long as we have been associated in clans and families. Most people don't know this, but the Homo sapiens developed the ability to have language and vocabulary only 230 ,000 years ago, and it was less than 50 ,000 years ago that language evolved. Well, how did the hominids communicate and work with each other for the millions of years before a couple of things happened that allowed us to start developing a capacity for language and vocabulary.

7:05It's empathy and through nonverbal communication and the ability to read emotions. Unfortunately, after vocabulary was developed and people started able to think abstractly, you know, and the concept of philosophy started to develop, people began, people many, many thousands of years ago, when they looked at emotions, all they saw was chaos. And so they started to argue that reasoning is what makes us human. Well, neuroscience today says that's wrong. What makes us human today is our emotions. And empathy, strictly defined, is the ability to read, assimilate, interpret, and reflect back the emotional experience of another person.

7:44But if we live in a society that considers emotions to be bad or weak or vulnerable or irrational or feminine. We deny our own human nature and we deny the ability to react to each other at an emotional level with efficiency. And that's part of the reason why we have so many problems today, not only socially, but in the corporate world and employment world. I mean, you've got all this upset, all unnecessary, but it's all caused because we are ignoring emotions. And when we start paying attention to emotions and recognize you cannot solve an emotional problem with reasoning or logic, you can only solve an emotional problem with emotional tools, all of a sudden everything changes.

8:32And there's this massive transformation that occurs. And I've watched it happen thousands and thousands of times. Yeah. Well, there may be some who say, well, yeah, but that's not really what's selling right now. we we want you know someone to come in and knock heads and you know uh you know and kind of go based on gut instinct instead and i don't know you're shaking your head no yeah well i i teach a graduate course in decision making under stress and uncertainty yeah and and one of the most important points that i try to get my graduate students to understand is that you never ever ever make an important decision on gut instinct.

9:16It is the worst way to make a decision for all kinds of different reasons. All our gut is, is it's pattern recognition. And we can be fooled into thinking that we understand the pattern when we really don't. And when the stakes are high and the uncertainty is high, the last thing you want to do is have a leader who relies on gut instinct. Horrible way to lead, horrible way to make decisions, guaranteed disaster, absolutely guaranteed. And there is just tons of science out there that supports this proposition. So the strong authoritarian gut instinct leader who shoots from the hip because he's intellectually too lazy to think things through and to do the hard work of assessing the risk, it's just a recipe for disaster.

10:00And that strong authoritarian leader is a total myth. The best leaders in the world are the ones that are fully rounded. They can be appropriately vulnerable. They understand emotions, they have empathy, and they work with the human as the human is, not as how they think the human should be. I mean, you know, this guy, Franklin, General Franklin, in the 1960s and 70s, in the U.S. Army Training Command, recognized that leadership empathy was the most important tool for a battle space commander, far more important than being able to shoot a rifle or drive a tank. And that was long before the term emotional intelligence was coined.

10:40That term didn't arise until 1989. And, you know, it completely changed how the army goes about training its leaders. And that gave rise, unfortunately, to the word soft skills to distinguish them from hard skills of driving a tank or shooting a rifle. But I call them success skills. And these are the intangible skills a leader has to have to motivate, inspire, engender trust and essentially modify human behavior because the toughest job of a leader is to change human behavior it's the toughest job and the only way you can do that is by addressing the emotions of the people underneath you and recognize them and working with them you fight it you lose as a leader you work with it you win because people will follow you anywhere once you have these skills mastered?

11:33You know, I interviewed some time ago, Boo Corrigan. And I don't know, I know he's done a lot of stuff in sports, and I don't have that attribution at the ready. But at the time, I believe he was the director for the Army Academy's football team. And I got to interview him. And he went through and it was, you know, I was in the military in the early 90s, right? It was not what I'm about to explain. And he said, listen, you know, there's three kind of principles that we really focus on. And I actually don't remember what the first two was, you know, leadership, discipline. And the third one, I'm almost certain he said was empathy.

12:19And I got to tell you, this was about eight years ago, maybe nine years ago, I did this interview. And if I had coffee in my mouth, I would have spit it out. I would have never expected a US military leader to talk about the virtues of empathy. And I really pushed him on that. Like the rest of my interview was off. I'm like, wait a minute, we're going to talk about what you just said right there. I completely trashed my interview. you and i immediately went to that and i was so stunned and you know and he said listen you know and i know you have way more experience than that can you take what what i heard and what i was so stunned with and and talk about oh no this what he said is absolutely correct this is what people don't get about the military the military has the most sophisticated leadership the u.s military has the most sophisticated leadership training in the world they start training privates how to be leaders and if you want if you're a corporal and you want to become up move up in enlisted rank to sergeant you have to take a 90-day self-study leadership course before you can even get into the school that teaches you how to be a leader they are teaching their people to be leaders from day one and they're teaching their people how to be leaders by learning how human beings actually operate and so yes it's empty now the military doesn't coddle people yeah i mean you go through You go through training, especially if you're a field soldier or airman or Navy personnel, and it's rigorous physical training because battlefield demands that.

13:52So it's not that it's soft. It's that when you're working with a team, you have to understand how a team works together. And it's all about emotion. And the military gets that. And that's what their training is all about. How do you get somebody who doesn't want to do something to do it? You can yell at them. You can command them, but they are not going to be motivated to do what you want to do. You have to inspire them. And they have to trust you. And the only way you do that is through empathy. There's no other way to do it. And the problem is, I think, that so many people do not understand what empathy is.

14:27They mischaracterize it for something that it isn't. And as a consequence, they cry what they think is empathy, for example, sympathy, and they get a bad result. And they say, oh, that empathy crap, it's worthless. And it's just, it's ignorance more than anything else. But the military, man, I hand it to those guys. They, they've got this nailed down. Yep. Leadership, I found the YouTube video. I'm going to put it in the chat window here for you and I privately. To our listeners that are listening, I'll put this YouTube video in the, in the description too, so you can see it. But I'd love your take on this.

15:00But yeah, leadership character and empathy with Booth Corrigan, athletic director of West Point, who then went on to be a very, very esteemed coach in college sports. So, Doug, your book is not out yet, the one that you're working on right now. Any tea leaves on when we can expect that to you? And by the way, I do want to point out that your book, Deescalate, is a phenomenal book and it is such a powerful skill imagine gaining the skill of how to calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less that's the subtitle for de-escalate I can tell you Doug you and I have worked together what you talk about absolutely true it absolutely works uh and I gotta tell you for someone like me and my personality style I love it I love having that superpower because I can then get on to solution-focused type stuff.

15:58But do you mind talking about de-escalate? And then kind of - Yeah, so de-escalate came about from the prison project. All my, I taught thousands and thousands from 2010 until the pandemic, we were in person doing programming in California and Connecticut. And inmate after inmate said, could you please write a book on this so that we can share it with our families? And so finally I said, yeah, I'll do it. And so the book came out in 2017, Simon & Schuster. And now it's in four languages. and it's done well. And basically the proposition of the book is that if there's a skill called affect labeling, A-F-F-E-C-T, labeling, labeling emotional validation is the way we describe it.

16:38And brain scanning studies show that when you engage in this practice of listening to and reflecting back somebody's emotional experience, that it has the immediate effect of quieting the emotional centers of the brain and activating a part of the brain called the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. So in essence, what you're doing is lending your brain to this upset, angry person for the 90 seconds it takes for them to process their emotions, and they immediately calm down. And I've taught this skill, as I said, in maximum security prisons. For three years, I was working at Corcoran State Prison, training guys coming out of gangs, 100 feet from Charles Manson's cell, and I was really in the belly of the beast.

17:20And I've also trained senior analysts at the Congressional Budget Office, how to de-escalate members of Congress and staff. It is a universal skill. Every human brain on the planet will respond to it. And it works under all conditions, dementia, Alzheimer's, autism, Asperger's, other types of brain disorders. It is, because it's hardwired. That's the thing that makes it work so well. So that's the concept of de-escalate. And I spent the years before I wrote the book and after I've written the book to spending and training people how to do this skill it's it's not hard but it's like riding a bike it takes some practice and it's a little counterintuitive and counter normative and it's in the beginning it seems very weird but once you learn how to do it and you overcome your initial trepidation about telling somebody what they feel people are in deep gratitude because you've taken the time to hear them and I call it listening other people into existence.

18:21So with that skill and then watching all of the, all of these transformations that I've seen in tens of thousands of people and thinking about leadership, because I've done a lot of leadership training, I'm thinking, you know, this is a skill that leaders need to develop. And so the whole foundation of leadership empathy is learning how to affect label, learning how to read the emotions in the room and label the emotions of the people that are there to get them calmed down. So to your point, we can start solving problems. You can't solve problems with emotionally activated people. You just can't do it.

18:51And so for leaders, this is like the go-to foundational skills. So the book, I'm in the final stages of editing and it goes off to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, probably in May. It'll take them nine months to do their thing. And hopefully it'll be out in sometime mid-2020. This is 2025, mid-2026. Doug Knoll, your website, Right. DougKnoll.com. That's N-O-L-L.com. I want to promote this too. You are a great LinkedIn follow. If you want to learn more about empathy in the workplace, empathy as a leadership skill, please follow the work that Doug does. I'm a big fan. I think, again, an empathy-directed leadership style is the way to go.

19:40We actually just had an internal conversation on this topic yesterday, in fact. So I'm a fan of your work, Doug. Thank you so much for joining us. You bet. Thank you.

19:56Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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