It’s only the end of January, and I think we can all clearly see that 2021 will be another challenging year. So what can TA leaders do to motivate and build resilience in their teams during these incredibly stressful times?
My guest this week is Jen Thornton, a former Global Director of HR Operations who is now founder and CEO of 304 Coaching. Jen is an expert in conversational intelligence, something that can help everyone improve the quality and outcomes of their communication.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ What is Conversational Intelligence
▪ Applying neuroscience to workplace communication
▪ Having better conversations
▪ Motivating Talent Acquisition teams in tough times
▪ The importance of resilience and coping with change
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:18]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 327 of the Recruiting Future podcast. So it’s only the end of January, and I think we can all clearly see that 2021 is going to be another challenging year. So what can talent acquisition leaders do to motivate and build resilience in their teams during these incredibly stressful times? My guest this week is Jen Thornton, a former Global Director of HR Operations. He’s now founder and CEO of 304 coaching. Jen is an expert in conversational intelligence, something that can help everyone improve the quality and outcomes of their communication. Hi, Jen, and welcome to the podcast.
Jen Thornton [00:02:08]:
Good morning and thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:09]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us all what you do?
Jen Thornton [00:02:15]:
Sure. So I am the CEO and founder of 304 coaching. And what we do here at 304 coaching is we help people with talent strategies. And, you know, in. In my career and my background, I was actually in the retail industry for years, and I recognized really quickly that companies failed or succeeded based on talent strategy. And everyone spent hours and days and months getting these business plans approved, but they never talked about how we might actually execute those and what’s that talent strategy? And so that’s kind of where my passion came in. And what we do today is we help organizations think about where their business is going. And so what does that mean for the talent and how do we strateg plan for that and make sure your talent’s ready for its growth?
Matt Alder [00:03:02]:
Now, one of the things that you write about is conversational intelligence, which has kind of really intrigued me. What is it? Tell us about it.
Jen Thornton [00:03:11]:
So conversation intelligence, it’s one of those things I wish I would have known earlier in my career, and I’ve learned so much from it. And there was this brilliant woman, Judith Glaser, and she spent over 40 years studying the neuroscience of the mind, how it took in conversations in the workplace, and then how did that impact business results? And I had the pleasure of studying underneath her for several years, and I learned so much. But when we look at conversation intelligence, it’s really about learning how to be really honest and truthful in the workplace. And, you know, every workplace needs a little bit more honesty and truthfulness, because that’s how we get to the real problems and make real change. But it’s starting to teach people and to teach leaders that the way we were taught to lead and some of the ways we were taught to talk to people actually creates fear. And when that fear chemical kicks in, your prefront or your primitive brain kicks in. And when that primitive brain is working, all its only focus is to keep you safe and alive. So your prefrontal cortex shuts down, which is where learning and innovation and excitement and collaboration, all the stuff you’re looking for in the workplace actually gets turned off when you install fear in your employees. And our language often installs fear.
Matt Alder [00:04:26]:
Break it down for us a little bit. How does it work? How can people have better conversations?
Jen Thornton [00:04:31]:
And so when you think about going into a meeting, so one of the things that we talk about is how do we create environments where people can be really honest about the business and not be scared to tell their boss the truth? So I’m sure many of your listeners have at one point in their career. I know I’ve been there many times where I knew the truth and I knew why we were struggling, but I wasn’t allowed to tell the truth because it might upset the boss. And so when you think about that environment, we want to make sure that our teams are telling the truth. And so some of the simple techniques that we can teach you or we teach is asking someone to say, okay, if we’re going to bring people in for a brainstorming meeting, right? So how many times have we all been called into a brainstorming meeting? It actually creates fear. And the reason why is we immediately worry about being judged. And so when we tell people, hey, come join me. We’re going to work on this, and we use terms that make people feel judged, we’re closing down their creative process. What if we just turn it on its head? And we said, all right, Tuesday at 2:00. Meet me in the boardroom. I’m Product x. We’re down 5%. What I want you to do is I want you to bring me the most ridiculous, insane, crazy, impossible ideas that you can think of on how to turn that business around. And in fact, I’m going to reward the person who has the most ridiculous idea, because I want us to think in a way we’ve never thought before. And by doing that, you tell people, hey, we’re not going to judge you because your idea is wrong. We’re going to judge you because we want you to think big or we want you to come with crazy ideas. And that starts to open up ideas and something as simple as changing how we bring people into the quote, unquote, brainstorming meeting, that type of language opens.
Matt Alder [00:06:36]:
Up that prefrontal cortex in terms of leadership. Obviously, there are lots of TA leaders listening who are having to motivate their teams in the most difficult times and the most difficult circumstances. How. What kind of approaches could they use to build team resilience and really help people feel motivated in what are very difficult times?
Jen Thornton [00:07:00]:
I’m so glad you asked that question. So, you know, I’ve led a TA team in the past and, you know, we understand that pressure. You know, there’s so many wrecks open, you’re balancing a ton of racks. You know, the hiring managers are all banging on your door. You know, where. Where’s this perfect unicorn candidate that I want? And, you know, that instills fear. And when we’re in fear, again, we can’t be creative. And so if you’re a leader of a TA team and you’re under, you know, some pressure and say there’s a position that you’re really struggling with, or you’re struggling with volume, you know, instead of, you know, leading out of fear, because often we lead out of fear. And what that could sound like was, how many calls did you make today? And. And why haven’t you been able to do this? And did you do this and did you do that? You know, because we’re leading out of fear. So we may go into that kind of mode of, you know, highly directive conversation. And then again, we add fear onto the fear that’s already there, and we’re losing everything we’re looking for, which is creativity. So instead, bring the team in or that one person and say, you know what? Let’s call a spade a spade. This position’s been difficult, or it’s difficult handling this type of volume. What I’d like to do today is talk about what we haven’t done and how we might look at that differently. What could we do? I want to throw out all the ideas we currently have and play with new ideas because it’s about opening up that conversation. But so often we go into that, you know, we’re just going to hound you, we’re going to ride you, we’re going to stay on you until you do it. But it really closes down the fear. We’ve got to say things like, what is working? How can I help you make it work better? What’s the one thing you’re struggling with that I could help you with? It’s very important to say, what’s that one thing you’re struggling with that I can help you with? Because it tells that person on your team, I have to give you one thing. Because if just like, hey, you need any help? They’re like, oh, no, no, I’ve got it. Because they don’t want to be judged from their boss. And so when you say, what’s that one thing? They’ll likely tell you one thing because they’ve been required to. You can help them with that one thing. And then that conversation starts to open up and they’re likely to tell you more and more. And so we’ve got to go in it with exploratory conversations. We have to go in it knowing that we’ve got to move people out of fear and into a place of trust and curiosity so we can get the ideas to the table that get the results and get the candidates in the door.
Matt Alder [00:09:34]:
So we’re moving into a new year, 2021. What do you think we can expect from a business perspective in 2021? And what would your advice be for helping us cope with the massive amount of change that’s still, still going to be going on?
Jen Thornton [00:09:51]:
So I think that over the next 18 to 24 months, we’re going to see. See our talent acquisition specialists be incredibly busy. And I think that many people will be looking for new jobs and there’s a lot of reasons why the job they’ve had for years may be different after 2020. They may have to do it different and they don’t really like how they do it, or they may have been in a situation where there is a large riff. And so with all those redundancies, maybe their job load isn’t right, but there’s going to be a lot of stuff going on. So I think when I look 2021 and I think about all of our fantastic talent acquisition people, out there. I think getting really clear on your objectives with your organization is going to be important. I think that getting clarity, even when there’s not clarity. So one of the things that’s really hard to do right, is share clarity with a candidate when the company doesn’t have clarity. And so thinking about how to do that and one of the ways we can do that is just say, based on our information we have today, this is where we’re based on where we see things heading in the new year. This is what we see. Being really transparent and honest with that candidate is important. I also think that we have to find candidates who are very resilient in the future for organizations and asking questions that help us identify resilience. And that could be tell us about a project that took you three or four times to get right. What did you learn from it? I love that question. As a recruiter, I ask that question every interview. What did you learn? Because what we want to really find out is, is this candidate going to be able to handle what’s coming up in 2021? Because guess what? None of us know. None of us have that crystal ball. And so resilience is going to be important. I think we’re going to be really busy, but I think it’s going to open up some incredible conversations and allow people get into some really fantastic jobs that they love.
Matt Alder [00:11:57]:
So, final question. Where can people find you and how can they find out more about conversation intelligence?
Jen Thornton [00:12:04]:
So you can find me at 304coaching.com we have an entire page on conversation intelligence and a lot of free resources that you can download and techniques you can use with your team. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn at Jen Thornton, ACC and we can continue the conversation there.
Matt Alder [00:12:23]:
Jen, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jen Thornton [00:12:24]:
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:12:26]:
My thanks to Jen Thornton. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
