Roderick Jefferson on Emotional Intelligence, AI, and Servant Leadership

Transcript

0:02 Yeah, we have another episode of Tailwind. Today we're joined by Roderdick Jefferson. Roderick, tell us a little bit more about yourself.

0:08 Yeah, first of all, awesome. Thanks so much for having me on, man. I appreciate it. I've been looking forward to this conversation. And note I say conversation, right? Because I have no

0:16 doubt after us chatting before, this thing will go with no problems at all.

0:20 So, my background is in sales. Started out as a BDR way back AT&T days. Carried a bag there. Did really well. got

0:27 promoted to um a to ae outside and went to work there. Did really well again.

0:34 Went to president's club a couple of times and then got promoted to what do you know sales manager. I actually turned it down because I realized I

0:42 loved the process more than I did taking down big deals. And I never really wanted to run a team at that point. I just kind of wanted to be an individual

0:50 and do my thing, get in and get out. And so I went to my sales leader and I said, "Hey, what if I could do two things?

0:56 one, I could get people ramped up faster and higher quota by using some basic rudimentary templates that I had created

1:04 that worked for me. And secondly, what if I got so many people to president club, you didn't have enough budget.

1:11 It was like then you've got a job. And so I took on my first sales training job and loved it because I got a chance to

1:19 stay close to sales, but I didn't have a quota.

1:22 End of the month, it was just Tuesday to me. I kind of liked it, right? And so from there, really quickly, um, fast forward, I then jumped from sales

1:31 training to sales enablement. Well, sales training. And then 18 years ago, I'm actually the person that created the nomenclature, sales enablement. Oh, wow.

1:38 Yeah. It started here. I got the book to prove it. [laughter] Nice.

1:43 Right. And so, fast forward again, I've been blessed to have an incredible

1:49 um run at things. I was at uh eBay, Sei, AT&T, HP, Oracle, Salesforce, Marquetto,

1:58 etc. Now, that and seven bucks will get you a latte. If you're listening, right, you're like, "That's great. He's got a great background." I think the best thing that came out of that is I learned

2:07 how to and how not to be a manager, but how to actually become a leader throughout that time. And that's what I like talking about, right? Because

2:16 anybody can become a manager. That's just someone that has a big title, right? But a leader to me is someone that stands in front of the team that's

2:24 there by example and then someone that's behind them that knows how to nudge them and when to kick if if needed be proverbally of course, [laughter] right?

2:34 And then most importantly, someone that has enough EQ to actually know that you don't have trainers, you don't have

2:43 sales people, you don't have marketing people, you have people on your team. Mhm.

2:48 And I think that's probably the best part of the run of all of those is I'd say 90% of the people that were on my

2:56 teams over the last 30 years I'm still in contact with. Nice.

3:00 Whether it be socially, email, talk, text, whatever it is. That means more to me than any award or accolade that I've ever gotten.

3:10 Yeah, it's the right focus, right? If you're working with people. So, so before we hit record, you know, you you got my eyebrows to raise when you said

3:19 IQ, EQ, and AI. Um, because all those are fascinating to me and, uh, especially when you use the term EQ and

3:27 you obviously have a f focus on that based on, you know, your priorities around people. Tell me a little bit more about that trifecta, if you will.

3:35 Yeah, I think that, you know, that is literally the three-legged stool to success these days. It's the IQ piece.

3:43 obviously all of your your background, your experience, your schooling, your uh

3:50 professional background. The EQ piece is all of your personal background, how you

3:57 interact with people, why you do certain things, how you go about it. And the most important thing is when people walk

4:04 away from you, they won't remember you for your IQ. They'll remember you for the EQ and the way that you interacted with them and the way you made them feel.

4:13 Then that third leg of the stool is the obvious. It's the content with AI. AI

4:20 will give us content beyond all the years that both you and I combined on this earth will have, right? But it's the first two, the the IQ and the EQ.

4:30 That's what gives you context to go with the content with the a the AI. Right

4:37 now, the problem is it gets out of whack at times and I've been just as guilty of

4:44 doing it. Right? The IQ in the that excuse me, the IQ and the AI go go. It's the EQ that like we talked about says,

4:53 "Hey, you need to slow down a little bit. You got to take a break. You got to recharge your batteries. You got to step away

4:59 from work. You've got to become present at home with your friends, your family, your significant other, your

5:07 your goldfish, whatever you may have at home, right? Yeah.

5:10 And that's the difference to me between a good leader and excuse me, a good manager and a great leader. Leaders operate in all three of those spaces.

5:21 And they're so intertwined that you don't ever see them when they change hats from one to the other, right? They they always seem to have the

5:30 the right answers, but they also have phenomenal questions. And they also don't pretend that they know everything.

5:39 And I love that because I think that the biggest three words on the planet besides I love you are I don't know. M

5:48 but with managers, they have a hard time saying I don't know. I was one of those because you're in that title, you're in that organization, you're in that

5:56 company for a reason. And am I allowed to say I don't know? What happens to my credibility if I say I don't know? I've

6:05 learned now at this age and stage of life that when you say I don't know, first of all, it builds an enormous amount of credibility because you don't

6:14 you're not pretending. You're actually being real. You're taking the mask off and you're saying I'm human. I I don't claim to know everything. Right? And the

6:23 other thing it also says which is extremely important to me is I'm coachable and I'm teachable.

6:30 And I don't mean just from someone that's a peer or someone that's in the hierarchy of org charts that's above me.

6:37 I mean anyone that I talk to. I don't care if it's the janitor. I don't care if it's the CEO. It also teaches you to

6:46 not be focused on titles. I think 80 to 90% of the titles I've had in my career

6:54 I created out of the blue. So titles mean nothing.

6:58 Yeah. Yeah. Um man there's so much good stuff in there especially around like the emotional intelligence part. I think

7:06 you know for my understanding of it and the there studying I've done and I won't present myself as an expert but you know an imperfect practitioner um but I think

7:15 the nice thing about you know working on your own emotional intelligence is that part of it is every time you stumble in

7:23 order to get better at emotional intelligence you can sit down and forgive yourself and then analyze what happened and think about your emotions and the other people's emotions that

7:30 were part of it and that just by doing that process C you will become better over time. And so is a self-healing loop

7:39 in some ways to allow you to continue to get better at that process without being like, well, you didn't pass the test.

7:44 Well, the test is really what did you do after you make the mistake. It's not what you did before you made the mistake in my opinion at times.

7:51 I couldn't agree with you more and I wish that more people understood that.

7:54 It's not it's the old adage of it's not about falling eight times, it's about getting up nine, right? And you said something that really struck a nerve with me and that

8:03 is I call it grace. We give grace for everyone but ourselves. Yeah.

8:11 We talk to ourselves internally in ways and in words that we would never say to anybody else and get away with it

8:20 without probably getting socked or or you know [laughter] something, right? But we make it okay to do it with ourselves.

8:29 And I think a part of that is a learn a learned behavior because we're expected especially in the corporate space where

8:38 I was before before starting my um company eight years ago where you're expected to be perfect in an imperfect

8:47 world but you're constantly striving for that.

8:50 So you do one of two things. You either assimilate or you realize that you're not built for that. And sometimes it requires both.

8:59 Now I tried so hard to assimilate into corporate so much to the point where I created an alter ego, an avatar if you

9:08 will. It was when I got my I remember when I got my first VP slot and first VP title. I created this this character I

9:16 called R.J. R.J. was the consumate executive. had the right look, the right words, drove the Mercedes, lived in the

9:24 right neighborhood, kids went to the right school, but I wasn't happy. Yeah.

9:30 And that's the other piece is is find happiness where you can in small moments because they are fleeting and so far between.

9:40 And that's where I want to go back to where we were talking a little bit earlier about AI. Mhm.

9:45 It is the ultimate equalizer, if you will, for those that know how to

9:52 use it properly. I look at AI no different than Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And what I mean is they're

10:00 all productivity tools and they're only as good as what you put in, what you get out, right? And I used to say it

10:07 behooves you to become a great prompt engineer. You don't even have to be that anymore. I found this thing called Prompt Cowboy. It actually creates

10:16 prompts for you that you can now drop into GPT and boom, you don't even have to do what we used to do, right, of how do I want to say this? What's the tone?

10:25 Who's the audience? All that stuff, right?

10:29 Which leads us to why I think that AI is amazingly terrifying

10:36 at the same time. amazing and terrifying should I say because it will give you tons of information and it can write

10:44 things for you and and do other and I think a lot of folks use it for either research or as a content creator tool.

10:52 I don't I use it as a business partner.

10:55 I talk to it the same way that I talk to my business partner. It just happens to be smarter than all of us. Right. Yeah.

11:02 And here's the interesting scary and terrifying part. As you know, I don't believe that there is a definition for

11:09 the word real anymore because and why I say that Austin is I can take you and I right now put us in

11:18 any situation, any country, any beach with your avatar and a clone of your

11:26 voice. How can you say what's real and what isn't? Yeah, that's where I I believe we've still got a long way to go when it comes to

11:34 governance because if we don't put guide rails around it and a deeper level of governance, it can get really ugly. It's

11:42 like any other tool, right? It can be amazing or in the wrong hands, it can be terrifying, right? And so are you talking about

11:51 governance just from like a general societal level of governance and not you know an internal AI policy or something like that? I'm talking about both.

12:00 Yeah.

12:00 I'm talking about the expectation of of us and how we use it and how we actually govern each other and ourselves and the

12:09 tools as well. But then there's also a higher level of organizations and all

12:17 the way up to the the governmental pieces. I'm not going down that road, don't worry. Right. But but there's

12:24 expectations of both. And I think that on both sides, we've kind of missed that mark because I think there there's a lot of

12:32 things going on right now that could be so much better than where we are if we would stop just using those first two

12:39 legs of the stool of AI and IQ and we really infused a bit more EQ. And why I

12:47 say that is who's how's this going to help? How could it possibly hurt? How could we at least mitigate some of that

12:55 pain that it's going to create? And if we're going to expand it, how do we ensure that unilaterally

13:03 these tools are not only rolled out, but they're also accessible to all? And I think that that's the biggest piece that

13:10 that is my concern. I I work and sorry, I run a workshop and it's a baseline

13:18 AI work and it's an exposure. So, hands-on um experimental and and of some sort, but

13:26 then on the other side, it's really about giving people access to the tools, taking away from the fear, showing how it actually works and how they can

13:35 actually enhance their livelihood and their lives simultaneously, and most importantly, how you can feed your family, but also still feed your soul.

13:46 Yeah. Yeah. I spend most of my time with AI being very technical.

13:52 I don't take a lot of time to think about the context of it. In fact, if anything, I uh I spend more time

14:00 thinking about how I need to intervene with how it's being used and saying, "Okay, my application of maybe is

14:07 helping me brainstorm some reasons I want to reach out to somebody or it's helping me do research for something I'm going to do." And then I set aside uh

14:15 time to then go, okay, now how do I contextualize this? Make it me, bring in emotions, think about how I'm going to present this, and then make it, you

14:23 know, more of a rep making myself be like the human in the loop at that moment more.

14:29 Now, I'm I'm kind of picking up that you're saying maybe even be more integrated with the EQ, the context within the usage of the AI. Is that correct?

14:39 Absolutely. And I'll give you an example. Yeah. So I I wrote two books.

14:43 The sales enablement book and I also wrote another book called stroke of success which outlines me going through my journey of success through the fall

14:52 down and the rise back after I had a massive stroke. I wrote the book and when it was done I knew something was

15:01 missing but I just couldn't put my finger on it.

15:03 So what [clears throat] I did was instead of having it right I wrote the whole book just to let people know, right? As a point of clarity. But when I was done, I took the manuscript and I

15:12 dropped it into Claude and I said, "Review this as though you were the audience reading this book

15:20 and tell me what's missing." Yeah. Well, what it did, Austin, was it went [snorts] through and of course it did its analysis and its review, but it

15:27 said that I was missing a critical component to the book and that was resources for people that have gone through

15:35 situations physically, whether it be heart or cancer or, you know, stroke or whatever. And then it had an a specific

15:43 chapter on um caregivers and I went, "Oh, wow.

15:50 They are, talk about the unsung heroes, right? They're the people that are doing these things that no one ever signed up for, but you don't have a choice as to

15:59 walk out. So, it gave me some amazing resources. And then it also gave me that I was a able to then massage and put it

16:07 into my words of essentially a a ode or a thank you to the caregivers that they

16:14 may never get from people that people may not be capable of saying physically, right? or or um auditorially,

16:23 but it was my way of saying, "Wow, to all of those unsung heroes that you may never hear these words on behalf of all

16:31 of us globally, thank you." Yeah.

16:34 And to me, when people come and talk to me about the book after they've read it, that always comes up. Hey, my my wife

16:41 had my grandma had my my dad had my cousin had th this issue and

16:49 now I feel like and I can see where it was all worth it.

16:54 Yeah, that's cool.

16:56 And to me that's one of the great ways that you can use the tool. I mean there's a million different to right and simple. Another one not nearly as deep

17:05 is so every [clears throat] year my neighborhood we do Monday revolving Monday night football, right? My wife

17:14 puts it all together. We put the the schedule together. We sign up on the 4th of July and then we go house to house with um heavy ordurves. This time I

17:23 said, "Okay, Claude, I've been doing all this work for five years now." So I dropped my spreadsheet in and I said, "Create the spreadsheet. Here are the

17:32 headers. Here's what I want. The times, the games, all those week by week. What I would have taken an hour to do, that thing did it in about 40 seconds.

17:42 That's great.

17:43 And I just went, guess what? Now I can go and enjoy my Saturday and not have to worry about building things out.

17:51 Yeah. Yeah. You know, um I love that approach to like using that for helping with the the EQ on it. I I would say

18:00 that in my experience with AI, one of the big things is that you kind of have to already have some skill or at least

18:07 some intent around being able to get your end goal out of it. So for an individual that you know, let's say has

18:15 never seriously thought about improving their emotional intelligence or even putting together a practice around it.

18:20 you know, what would you be like what would be like some first steps that you would have for that individual to begin the journey which is I think we've kind

18:27 of established a ongoing journey that never really ends.

18:31 Um I I think it's first of all I I'm going to step back on what you said and I think it's actually easier than people think. Right. Yeah.

18:39 If you go in and you say here's what I don't know how to fill in the blank or here's the type of person I am. this is

18:47 my approach to things or this is the kind of leader I am. Yeah.

18:50 My goal is to enhance or increase my level of EQ. Give me some small incremental things that I can do that can help me show share more empathy.

19:04 Right. And and I always say write this in my voice and keep it human. Yeah.

19:10 And I think that that tag right there is what changes any everything.

19:15 And so once that happens, it now gives you a bunch of stuff. And now this is where you start saying, "Hey, ask me questions. What have I not thought

19:24 about? What else could be added in here?" And before you know it, you've got a whole, you know, framework that

19:33 you can move forward. And then at the end of it, say, you know what, thank you for all the help. turn this into a framework for me that I can now work on

19:40 week over week and give me specific personal and professional goals where I can increase my level of EQ done.

19:49 Yeah, that's great. I think the emphasis on empathy is a really big, right? Because that's the force behind it.

19:59 Very cool. Um, so I'm thinking through this and it's uh it's interesting thinking about all three pillars now. Is

20:06 this something where you would say, you know, you have to work on all three at once? Is there a leading one that you should prioritize that kind of steers

20:14 the ship? Like how how is one to think about there's three different things I might need to start putting into practice?

20:21 You know, what's a good way to think that through?

20:23 My approach to to learning has always been this. If I've got three things like this, IQ, EQ, AI, I always ask myself a

20:32 simple question. And you got to be honest with yourself on this. Where am I the weakest in those three?

20:40 Because we all want to go to enhancing what we're already good at, right? Yeah.

20:45 Because dopamine hits and all the other things where we don't want to have to deal with the failures. I look at it and go,

20:53 what's where am I the weakest of the three? if I'm honest with myself, right?

20:59 And when you figure that out, that's where you go back to that prompt that I was saying earlier. If it's IQ, what can

21:07 I read? What can I learn? There's so many mediums. I can go get audio books.

21:11 I can go get podcasts, right? I can watch this. I can learn here. I can join groups.

21:18 If it's EQ, now that's where you ask yourself, what's missing? How can I strengthen AI?

21:26 There is no shortage of how you can increase your AI fluency. That's for certain.

21:31 Yeah. I mean, just even having fun with it and coming up with any sort of project and just say, "Hey, why not?" Like, one of the things that I do, um,

21:40 which I haven't heard too many other people do, but maybe I just haven't the wrong folks, is I help learn how to cook better. I I sit down, I go, "Here's some

21:49 recipes I'm thinking about working on. I I think I'm going to sub this." are like, "You know what? I really want to make a cuisine local to Brazil. Like,

21:57 give me some ideas, like, you know, treatment, all that kind of stuff." And I think, you know, it can be this thing where you can still learn how it functions without

22:04 doing like doesn't have to be only apply it to sales and only apply it to proving my professional life, but you can still

22:12 learn lessons from, you know, applying it for other interests that you might have.

22:17 Absolutely. I was talking to my dad my son-in-law is a phenomenal cook and he went to his GPT and he said,

22:25 "Here's the the leftovers that we have in the refrigerator and he listed it out.

22:30 What can I create for dinner with what we have?" And I was like, I would have never thought of that. Not in a million

22:39 years, right? He's got all these different things going on. So, we're looking for something new for tonight.

22:45 What could we do? or I've got this big thing of pasta left over. What else could I now add to this to pair with it

22:54 beyond just, you know, the standard salad, garlic bread, those kind of things. But it's the small things like that that people overlook because you

23:03 said something earlier, you take it from a primarily from a technical perspective, right?

23:09 To hit that EQ piece, start using it for your recipes, right? and and have it

23:15 build out like a two week or or a month-long calendar for you where you're trying new

23:24 things two three times a week and say from this particular region what could I try whether it's Brazilian

23:33 it's Italian whatever it is and before you know it you'll realize there's so much more to that particular g

23:40 geographic um location and area than you may even know exists.

23:46 Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've been I've been exploring the world with it. My friends and I have like a cooking club. I know we're diverging a little bit, but it's relevant. It's [laughter]

23:53 talking about bringing the human aspect into the AI that gets dropped so often.

23:57 uh we have a cooking club and we get together and I mean it's let's identify a cuisine we've never tried before and then just interacting

24:06 with [clears throat] AI and being like well what are some techniques that are unique to this cuisine that I could learn to expand my skill set and being able to then I think you know if I'm

24:14 going to make this tangent come all the way back it's it's the human context and then be you know a little bit more emotional and be able to like practice that with it.

24:23 Well well back to the professional coaching piece.

24:26 Yeah. Let's say you've got a team, right? And before you go into your one-on- ones with your team, put it into

24:34 your favorite GPT and say, "Hey, meeting with this person. Here's their qualities. Here's their strengths, and here's some areas for growth. So that I

24:43 don't approach this [snorts] one-on-one with my personal assumptions. How would you recommend that I approach this

24:51 meeting?" Yeah.

24:53 Think about what you're saying. one, you're open to learning things differently and you're not going at this based on what you know and it takes I

25:02 think I feel out of things. That's the great thing about AI. I think I feel does not matter. At the end of the day,

25:11 what can I do to be a better manager for this individual and then broadly for the team based upon the types of personalities

25:19 that I have on my team? Yeah, talk about building out an individual coaching and learning plan for each person.

25:30 You will be a a absolute superstar leader if you can embrace that and follow it consistently.

25:38 Yeah. I mean, would you say it's like I mean, you know, when you're we're talking about this, it sounds like the term servant lead leadership just through and through and this being a

25:47 great way to be able to really help make sure you're practicing it, put some guard rails on yourselves to to be yourself to be able to constantly do

25:54 that and at the same time, you know, being able to say, I don't know, as a servant leader is great because like as your job isn't to know things, your job

26:01 is to help them succeed, but then AI can come in and help you not necessarily know everything, but start to know more and start to be able to be outside or

26:10 expand your impact for those individuals.

26:13 No, I I absolutely agree with that and it all starts with servant leadership and and the thing that I love about that approach because I've actually used that

26:21 approach before. Um, one it takes away like I said the the think feel it also

26:28 stops you from assuming that every approach and every meeting oh I already know how this person's going to act. I already know what they're going to say.

26:36 I know how it's going to go. So, you got that excuse already. You know what? Talk to me about your funnel. Why? Why not?

26:42 Instead of those things, sit back, ask those questions, and then it's listen, learn, then lead.

26:50 Yeah.

26:51 Right. In in that order, and it's amazing what will happen. You will not only be able to listen to your team, but you will hear them as well.

27:02 Yeah. I think lead servant leadership makes it a lot easier because it just takes that you don't need to be the

27:10 source of truth. You don't need to already have a plan in place. If you're just simply like, "Look, my job is to make you succeed or to help you succeed.

27:18 Now, help me figure out how to help you." Now, you can have a a continually working relationship to refine and to be able to make it targeted. And then also,

27:27 you don't have to be right the entire time. Like you can have the grace of the other you know give me a couple days let me figure it out for you.

27:35 Bingo. And the other thing is it all always ensures that you are you have determined the end state of what success

27:44 looks like for each of those individuals again or for the team broadly. Now it can help you it being AI can help you

27:52 reverse engineer how to get to that success in state. Yeah.

27:58 All right, so we're approaching the half hour mark. Really really appreciated this. Um, but before we wrap, you know, what it would be somebody if somebody's

28:06 listening in and you want them to walk away with, you know, one big thing or, you know, something that they should really be like, I need to apply this to my own business, my own, you know,

28:14 leadership, what would be that one major thing you'd want them to walk away with?

28:18 To me, it would be a statement of the hardest thing to live with

28:28 is regret of what you didn't focus on because you were afraid to get out of your comfort zone.

28:37 I like that a lot.

28:38 Growth doesn't happen in comfortable spaces. Go out there, do things differently, and get away from and help

28:45 me kill. This is the way we've always done it because that world doesn't exist anymore. It's moving too fast at this point.

28:54 All right. Absolutely.

28:55 So, if you haven't learned anything from AI, go learn something. If you haven't, you know, worked on your emotional intelligence, go do that. Focus on your weaknesses. Make sure you're you're

29:04 improving yourself. Um, now, one question for you before we sign off on that. Do you think you should always try

29:12 to have them all in balance or just bring them all to a benchmark and say, "Hey, at least I have this going, but I can at least specialize in this aspect

29:19 of it." It is dependent upon a few things. What your age and stage is because it's very

29:27 different early in your career than later.

29:30 And and secondly, it's never going to be balanced. It's not meant to be balanced.

29:35 It's supposed to be there as a lever, not a crutch. I like it. Constant work in progress.

29:43 Constant. Yeah.

29:45 Only thing consistent is change, right? [laughter] That's right. Well, Rodick, I really appreciate this. This is a great

29:53 conversation. Really making me think a lot more about emotional intelligence and AI and how those come together. I've been lost in the uh the technical aspect

30:02 of using AI and hadn't considered this other one. So now I got a lot to think about and a lot of, you know, trying to be trying to bring things back into balance at this point.

30:11 Mission accomplished. Yeah.

30:13 Thanks for the opportunity today. Really appreciate it. has fun.