224. Elevate Your Leadership Skills with Emotional Intelligence - Patrick Veroneau

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy you're here. I'm Sandee Sgarlata. I was born in Virginia and raised in the Baltimore Annapolis area and had very humble and tragic beginnings. And as a result, my life was a hot mess.

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Thankfully, 33 years ago, I got my act together, and since that time, I have dedicated my life to serving others and raising awareness that no matter what you've been through, you can choose happiness and live the life of your dreams. Happiness Solved is dedicated to giving you content that is empowering, motivational, inspirational, and, of course, a dose of happiness. It's my way to give back to the world and share other people's stories. This thing called life can be challenging, and my guests share their amazing stories, wisdom, and life lessons that demonstrate anyone can choose happiness. You see, happiness is a choice, and the choice is yours.

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Today's episode is amazing, and I am so grateful for you. Thank you for listening and don't forget to leave a review and follow me on social media at Coach. Sandee Sgarlata. Enjoy the show.

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Patrick, so excited to be talking with you today, and I love everything that you're doing. So happy to have you here. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to come on. I've been looking forward to this. So, again, thank you for the invite.

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Oh, of course. Oh, my gosh. You are a leadership consultant, speaker, and author of the best selling book The Leadership Bridge how to Engage Your Employees and Drive Organizational Excellence. That's incredible because it's so needed, right, in today's world. Yeah, and it's interesting to me, I look at leadership as the reason it's a leadership bridge is, if you think about it, every interaction we have with somebody else, we're essentially building a bridge with that person.

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Right. So the leadership bridge is just behaving figuring out the behaviors that we need to model consistently. And when we do that, we build stronger bridges with other individuals. So the analogy that I will often use is the Golden Gate Bridge. And if you're familiar with that, you know that that's one cable, that major cable that runs from tower to tower is about 3ft in diameter, but if you do a cross section of it, you find out that it's, I think, about 23 to 27,000 individually wrapped cables that make that up to me.

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It's the same if we look at our relationships, right. The more we behave in ways that are positive and beneficial to the other person, the stronger that cable, the thicker that cable becomes and the stronger the relationship is. So just like the Golden Gate Bridge, if I were to cut 100 of those cables, nothing is going to happen to that bridge. Right. Those hundred cables need to be repaired, but the bridge will be fine, right?

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We don't need to shut the bridge down or anything like that. We'll just repair it. And I think with our relationships, when we've demonstrated positive behaviors long enough, we're going to make mistakes, we're going to disappoint people, we're going to do the wrong things. But if we've demonstrated positive behaviors long enough and built a strong enough bridge that's repairable, we're going to be able to overcome that. And that's really what the Leadership bridge is all about.

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What a great analogy. And when you were talking, my ex husband is a construction litigator, and a lot of his cases were those cable stayed bridges. And I'm like, oh, think about 21 years of being married to somebody. I'm like, oh, that's a cable state bridge. And that's interesting.

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Yeah, it is pretty fascinating, too. Some of the statistics around the Golden Gate Bridge, again, the one that I use most often is if you look at some of the things that they on their website, the bridge, I believe, can go up or down in the center by about 16ft, and it can sway left to right, I think a little over 20ft. It has that ability to sort of be flexible that way. And again, it's very similar to our relationships. The stronger they are, the more flex that we have in terms of being able to deal with stresses that come into those relationships.

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One of the unique things. So I live up in Maine, and there are a lot of rural bridges that have gross vehicle weights that you might find, like this bridge can't handle any more than 5000 gross vehicle weight, 5000 pounds, or whatever the number is. And again, when I go in and work with organizations, I see a lot of teams along those lines. There's a gross vehicle weight, there's a bridge that's been built there that we're good up to a certain point. But I was just thinking that I'm like, relationships are the same way, and then you just sort of relate it to that.

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I'm like that's. So true. For most relationships, they can only handle so much. Exactly. And the stronger the more you add to the strength of this bridge right.

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The deeper we can go in terms of the type of relationship we have. Right. It's not just a surface. This is a rope bridge that we get to cross. But if a vehicle can't handle this, it's the same thing with our relationships.

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Yeah, so true. Oh my gosh, I love that. Okay, so we started diving right into that. And I normally want to get your backstory, but we're just going to go with the flow here. How did you get into this?

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What was the point in your life that led you into this? And talk a little bit about your background as well. Sure. Well, I mean, I think it goes way back to growing up. I'm the youngest of ten, right?

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Oh, my gosh. I was in an environment where we're a family. We didn't have many means. Well, how could you with ten children? My mother stayed home.

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My dad was an automobile salesman. And it's interesting, right, because when we often think of car salesmen, it's not the most positive of images that we think about. And I remember both my parents passed away one when I was a junior in high school, and my dad died my freshman year, about a year and a half apart when I was in college to cancer. And I think that certainly weighed in heavily to what I do now, to the work that I do now in some ways. But my dad's middle name was Emery, and my company is Emery Leadership Group.

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And it speaks to even though he was never a leader by title, he was always somebody that in terms of the behaviors and the character that he embodied to me, he was truly a leader. Oh, my gosh. Integrity and inspiration. And I think about that now in terms of the impact that both of my parents had, but certainly my dad in that regard. And when I got a school, I was in some sales roles myself and then went into biotech, and I spent about 15 years in biotech.

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And when I was in that industry, I was always involved. I was in sales. I was in sales training. I was in leadership development. There was always research that we would fall back on to ask clinicians or other therapists to do certain things, right, but it always had to be backed up with research.

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I knew that I wanted to go off. I always enjoyed developing people and being involved in seeing other people a potential that was there. And I knew that when I went out and started doing leadership and team development that I was going to use that same fallback of what's the research that demonstrates why these behaviors are more than likely going to work or be important in creating the environment that we want. And that's really how I built the leadership bridge. And the model that I use in that called Cables is all is all based around six research behaviors that I have found to be the most impactful in terms of creating those leadership bridges that we need with those around us.

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And whether it's in a work setting or in a personal setting, whether it's significant other or kids or siblings or anybody else you have a relationship with, that cables model is appropriate and does the same thing. I love it. Yeah. The whole analogy that you use there is actually really brilliant. I love that.

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So what are some of the challenges that organizations come to you for, and how do you help them resolve those challenges? So most of the time I'm brought in because either the owner of a smaller company is saying something is not right here, right. Our teams aren't getting along, or we're sort of struggling to keep people larger companies the same thing I'm brought in. When there's an engagement survey that's done and the results aren't that favorable and they realize that something needs to happen depending on what the issues are. There are a number of different tools that I will sort of draw on, but the main one really comes down to this umbrella of cables.

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I find that a lot of the issues or challenges that are dealt with all come back to behaviors within an organization. So cables is where I start. But there's another model that I have leaned more heavily on, especially since COVID and it's a model called Scarf, and it was developed by a neuroscientist out of Australia, a gentleman named David Rock. And it's based on these five social needs that he had identified that we all have. And Scarf is an acronym for these five domains.

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And what he talked about was that we have an avoid and a response to either when these are satisfied in us or we feel like they're being met. Then there's a reward response, which means we're more collaborative, we're more engaged, we move toward something. But when they're either absent or violated or neglected, we have an avoidant response. We become disengaged, we move away from that, and we can see that in organizations, right? So the first social need is around status.

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And status is about my level of feeling valued here or respected. And when we don't have that right, if I'm in an organization where I don't feel as though I have a sense of value here, I'm appreciated for what I'm doing, then there's an avoid response that happens. Right? So the next one is around certainty. And it's our need for order, for things to understand, like what are the rules of the road?

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And if we think about through COVID, right, there's probably been anything but certainty for a lot of individuals, like remote work versus I'm now being called to come back into work. Do I even have a job? Is my company stable? Right, those things. The next one is autonomy is around the belief that you want to feel as though you have some control over your destiny.

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Right? I don't want to feel as though every day I come in, I'm just micromanaged. I want to feel as though I've got some control over how I do my job potentially, or if there are better or opportunities for me to improve what I do to be able to talk about how that can be done here. The next one is around relatedness. That's the R and the scarf model.

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And that's about our need to feel connected, to feel part of something. And if you think about it from a standpoint of, again, COVID, where there's been so much isolation in terms of organizations and people working remotely, that becomes challenged, not feeling as though you're connected to the organization. And then the last one is around fairness, okay, is a need for equitable treatment. Do we all play by the same rules here? If we think about those five social needs, those domains, most of the time when I'm doing my work, I can come back to at least one of those social needs that's not being met, and then talk about how the behaviors of cables, how each one of those somehow can wrap back around to addressing the social needs that are probably absent within the organization.

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Wow. Is there any one of those? Those are really great. I love that. So it's the status, certainty, autonomy relatedness.

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Yeah, relatedness and then fairness. I love that. Do you find that there's one thing that stands out more than others when you're looking at that model? I think two to me that stand out. One is certainty.

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And that goes back to a lot of times when I'm involved in organizations where there's conflict, oftentimes it comes back to not having clear expectations. We don't know what we need or want from each other. To me, that falls into certainty. And when that happens, I think oftentimes our own level of status is impacted because of that. We start to feel as though either our reputation, our worth is being challenged because of the situation we're in.

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So those are the two, but I think they all can play in. Yeah, for sure. And I love that you said that the expectations aren't being met. And what I find just in my own personal relationships, when there are situations where there's a disagreement or you're not seeing eye to eye or whatnot, many times it comes back to somebody's placing expectations on you that you weren't even aware of. Totally.

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If you expect me to do that, then you need to tell me because I don't know. Well, you should just know. Well, no.

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Without question. And I think that's the real benefit here is those are now opportunities for us to get a clear understanding of what is this relationship going to need to look like if it's going to be positive. What do you need from me? What do I need from you? There's a form that I've used in the past and it's called the Best of US form.

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And on this form, there are four questions. It says, you get the best of me when you get the worst of me when this is what I need from you, and this is what you can expect from me. And to me, that provides almost a working manual for each of us. That if I give that to somebody else and say, look it, I've filled this thing out and I'd love to have the one that you filled out on you and let's sit down and let's talk about that, about what does that look like? Because even within that, there can be a lack of clarity that if somebody says, you get the worst of me, when I feel that I'm being micromanaged.

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So I might then say, okay, tell me about a time when you were micromanaged. What does that mean to you? Because.

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Your perception of being micromanaged in mine could be different, and the only way that I'm going to know what you perceive as being micromanaged is to dig a little deeper and understand what is it that that means to you. I love that because when you become a parent, when you get married, there's no instruction manual. Right? Yeah. And I know for my husband and I were both on our second marriage for both, and we were both married to somebody else for 20 years.

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Over 20 years.

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We've got that down pretty well. Right. Because we learned from our past mistakes, and we know how you need to communicate in a relationship, but that's a really hard thing for most people. And I feel like that's why our divorce rate is so high in the United States, because there's no communication happening. Yeah.

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So I'm one of those as well.

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My oldest, who's 25, I was divorced when he was ten months old, and I had primary custody of him at that point. And I learned a lot going through that divorce in terms of what I was going to do differently if I were ever to get married again. And I think that's the important thing. Right. As you said you did.

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Right. You learn and then you grow from that and you say, what is this going to look like going forward? And I would say that the challenge for many is that they don't learn from that, or they just sort of think, well, the environment will be different the next time, so it will change. But if you don't do the work on yourself, you're going to enter the same thing all over again most of the time. Yeah.

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And I think in a lot of times in relationships, people are so quick to blame the other person and not take responsibility for their part in it. Without question. We could talk about this for hours. Yeah. So it's interesting, though, because the leadership bridge starts out not talking about how to build a bridge with other people.

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It starts out with how to build a bridge with yourself, because if you don't understand yourself, you really can't be there for anybody else. So the first part of the book really is around building self awareness, and my early work was heavily involved in emotional intelligence and getting trained in that, in a model that's used in Australia, a company called Genos that built a workplace model for emotional intelligence. It's a validated model that I think goes a long way toward helping people understand, like, what are my values and how do my values trigger my emotions and my behaviors? And when you start to do that work and start to connect the dots, you're able to slow things down and you show up differently. You don't get hijacked in situations as much because you start to recognize patterns either in yourself or in the environment that you're in.

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I think that's so important. Well, yeah, I mean, when I'm coaching my clients, it's all about well, I have, like, a formula. Self awareness, self love, and spirituality, like, those three things is what's going to help you keep your vibrational frequency at a higher level. Because when you're I call it your zone of genius. Many people have talked about that and written about it, but that's ultimately where we want to get to, and we really need that in our leaders as well.

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Yeah, without question. I think that's oftentimes, especially when you have individuals that are moving into new positions of authority, that I think if you're not comfortable with who you are internally, I think you run the risk of at times being heavy handed in terms of how you lead other people. You do it more authoritatively because you're not confident enough in your own ability to be flexible with other people. Yeah, for sure. And you said it, too.

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When you are aware of yourself and you're able to really live and breathe, that everything in your life shows up differently. Yeah, without question. And that really are those behaviors that I talk about. Those six cables really help to create that space where we do that. Yeah, I love it.

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This has been such an amazing conversation. What else, or is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you would like to share with the audience before we wrap up? No, you know what? I would say that with anything, that there's an intellectual component to this, that if people understand Scarf or look at cables and the model that's out there, that intellectually. We understand those things.

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That's not the breakdown, it's in the application. Right. That this takes doing for us to change, and that requires patience. I think, as well, that we don't build habits overnight, that as you look at these things and you think, boy, this seems like a lot of work. The outcome, or down the road, what can happen when you do these things?

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It's beneficial to you to put the time in now, but just do it incrementally a piece at a time, and all of a sudden you end up in a better place that you didn't even know that it was happening because it's just in small pieces. Oh, for sure. It's a practice. Yeah, without question, it's a practice. Love it.

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All right, well, Patrick, thank you so much for joining me today. How can people get in touch with you? So the best way is certainly through LinkedIn. Patrick Veroneau on LinkedIn, and I love getting new requests, so please feel free to do it that way. My website is emeryleadership Group and it's emerroup.com.

00:21:18
Those are probably the two best ways to reach out to me, and most of my content filters through LinkedIn. All right, fantastic. I think that's how we connected. It is? Yeah, it is.

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LinkedIn is a beautiful place. It really is. It's incredible. I will make sure your website is in the show notes as well, folks, so you can go to the show notes if you didn't have a chance to jot that down and reach out to Patrick. Great stuff here.

00:21:45
Great. Thanks so much. I appreciate the time. Thank you, Patrick. Take care.

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Best wishes.

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I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care, everyone.