Dean Hallett on Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Development

Thanks Laura, I’m excited to be here.

Sure, I don’t know that there’s a typical path to doing what I do today, but I think mine is relatively unique. And I have to tell you about my journey, I need to go back quite a ways initially because what you’ll find when I talk about transformative leadership is what for me, I went through a transformation myself.

I go all the way back and start talking about when I was four years old because there was a significant event that happened back then, which is, and you hear a lot about it today and I don’t minimise it because it’s so popular. I think everybody’s individual experience makes it significant. I had a bully for a big brother. And they had this game, the next door neighbour, my brother, they thought it was a lot of fun, but my brother stepped into those shoes and became a bully to me. And I formed a lot of beliefs about the world. I didn’t intellectually think about it like that at the time, but I formed some beliefs that the world’s not a safe place. It’s better to be seen and not heard, maybe not to be seen at all. I knew I was smart.

And so over time, as the bullying went on, I told myself that I could get by on just my intellect alone and I didn’t have to open up or anything. And it was realising when I would do a transformative emotional intelligence training workshop when I was in my early twenties. And I got to take a look at how much of who I am, I had shut down. And through that journey, I was able to realise all the parts of me that I had held back.

all the ability I had to connect with people, how much on life I was missing out on. And I then took all of those learnings and tried to figure out how do I apply that in business? How do I build teams? How do I get people to connect and trust each other and so on? And so I went to work. I started in public accounting for seven and a half years. Then I worked at a small company, Anthony Industries, getting some private industry experience.

And then I made a jump to Disney and at Disney, I realised I had to work with marketing folks. I got a job as the director of finance and motion picture marketing. I grew up in Southern California, never dreamt of being in Hollywood. And suddenly that’s where I was. I was dealing with creatives, dealing with promotions and publicity people. And I had to find a way to really connect with them and not just be the finance police. And so.

And that part of my journey, I learned to really explore all those parts of me that I could use to develop trust, to work with people collaboratively and so forth. And then I continued to take those lessons and apply them to my teams. But when I went from Disney to Fox, Fox did not have all the infrastructure that Disney had.

And there was a, I’d say a gaping hole in terms of leadership development. So I was able to step in there, establish a connection with the human resources department. And over the course of several years, we developed a program that essentially is the same program I bring to companies today called the accelerated leadership program, which is a nine month program where we go into a company and we work with a team to build trust, teach them how to give and receive feedback and have them really develop a bond where they get beyond the politics. And it’s really about service, serving each other to be their best and having the whole team elevate. So I guess it was 2019 when I formally launched my company and that’s the main training I do. And I also do executive coaching along with that.

You know, there’s, are some examples of, we do transformative leadership. We really do. And you hear about transformation. It feels like such an overused term. I think a lot of companies give it lip service. I can, I can give you an example of what it is. And what I stand for is I want people to learn the lessons I learned way younger, way earlier than I learned them, because there’s so much on life that’s available that people miss out on because they have their authentic self. Let me just do this for a second. I think it’ll help. Because you hear again, authentic leadership. What is that? Well, if you think about a young toddler, they’re spontaneous, loving, caring, courageous, powerful. They get what they want even before they learn how to talk. All these wonderful qualities.

And we tend to form beliefs that it’s not safe to exhibit those characteristics in our lives, at least outside of our little private circle. And so we start forming beliefs that, again, like I did, the world’s not safe, and we then form behaviours that reinforce those beliefs. So if I was hanging around some people and they lashed out at me for some reason, I could go, see, I’m right, the world’s not a safe place, I’m just gonna shut down again and protect myself.

And so transformative leadership is interrupting those fixed beliefs and fixed behaviours that most of us believe are just fact and realising how they’re getting in the way of bringing out and bringing forward those parts of us that are wonderful characteristics that we tend to shut down. So for me, it’s about being a catalyst for people to truly go through that transformation in real time and be able to have experiences of those parts of them that they’ve denied, and then be able to bring those to the workplace, to build trust, to build collaboration, and have mutual trust and respect so that you create a safe place for the whole team to come forward with their ideas and share ideas without worries about being shut down, without being worried about retribution for saying the wrong thing because that’s when teams really shift into high performance.

It is, it is. I use the word interruption. My job as a coach is to interrupt fixed beliefs and fixed behaviours. Yeah.

Well, I think there’s three different types of coaching. I think there’s a lot of great coaches out there. The initial stage is what I call grow coaching, which is really, if I were working with you, let’s sit down, let’s come up with some goals that we agree on. And then I’m going to hold you accountable to those goals. And if you’re off target, if you’re not hitting those goals, let’s talk about some adjustments that you can make. And I find a lot of coaches giving advice when they do that.

Why don’t you try this? Okay, this interaction didn’t work. Why don’t you try this? The problem with that is you’re not getting to the source. The next level of coaching involves a little more. They’ve got behavioural analyses, Myers -Briggs, disc, we do those. But it still is just taking that general feedback and then trying to come up with a game plan on how to go forward. The transformation piece, I think, is what makes us unique, especially in the group work that we do.

We do a lot of interactive discovery model exercises where I don’t just give a PowerPoint of a 20 page PowerPoint on how to show up authentically. We do exercises where people get a deep experience of those parts of themselves that they have shut down for a while and realise that it’s a conscious choice they can make to bring those forward anytime they want. They can be walking into a meeting that they know is going to be contentious and they can choose to show up in the best way possible by summoning forth those parts of them that they usually keep on the back burner and working with everything that they can to make that meeting a success. We use affirmations to me. I can tell you when I first had an affirmation, I’m like, it’s just words. It doesn’t mean anything.

But I’ve now had the same affirmation for business that I’ve used for 40 years, 40 plus years which is that I’m a powerful, compassionate, open leader. And when I walk into a room, I know there’s gonna be a bunch of type A personalities jumping down my throat in that meeting, I can either choose to be on the defence or I can choose to show up as that leader that I just described and take my place in the room and use the, when I say powerful in my affirmation, that’s about the ability to connect and influence people.

It’s not about controlling people. And so I can summon those parts of me forward so I can walk in and give it my best to connect with these people and make something productive happen.

Yeah, there is. To me as a coach, people will say, I didn’t realise I was coming in for a therapy session. There are similarities for sure.

Yeah.
Yeah, let me give you an example. I was working recently with a senior leader in the finance industry. And he was previously practising as an attorney, now he’s a general counsel. And we got into a discussion and he said, Dean, goes, I just have to win every argument. And I said, well, why? He said, well, because if I don’t win, then I lose.

And we went through a series of questions. And if you lose, what happens? And ultimately it got down to, I don’t win every argument, then I’m not good enough as a person. We had to get to that belief because if all I said was, you know, stop arguing so much. Just hold it back. We wouldn’t be getting to the source. And then it becomes like whack -a -mole. So he’s not going to argue in that environment, but his behaviour is going to show up somewhere else. But if you get to the source, he had such an aha moment.

That he actually realises the value he was missing, not letting people convey their perspective. He was shutting off, looking at things any other way. So now he’s able to take in a lot more inputs before he addresses a problem.

My most effective marketing strategy is word of mouth. Honestly, I’d say 80 % of my work comes from word of mouth. People that I’ve worked with before, people that were at Fox when I was doing the leadership programs that know the nature of the work that I do. And those people, you never know when they’re going to come out of the woodwork. One referral leads to another referral and so forth.

After that, I’ve had some success with doing some social media, doing email campaigns and having a presence on social media on LinkedIn, where people will be searching for a coach and come across me and reach out and send me a note and say, hey, here’s my situation, interested in finding out more about you. And so roughly 20 % of my work comes from that.

But I would say, as you might expect of the people that reach out to me, there’s probably a 5 % conversion ratio. And I think whether it’s word of mouth or whether it’s the social media, I give a lot of people to come out and say, hey, we can boost your leads. We can help your conversion. We can do this. We can do that. And I believe there’s a lot of truth in that. At the same time, what I’m selling is very different than a software package.

You know, people let me come in and either deal with them personally at such a deep level or with what I refer to as the company’s greatest asset, it’s people. We have to spend time developing trust because if they’re going to entrust their people to me, then they have to know truly where I’m coming from. So takes time.

Yeah, I know.

I think, well, the first challenge I had was I launched the company in early 2019 and I had a friend who had me coaching two of his lieutenants to become CEOs. They were, that was going to be their next step because up to that point I had no clients. I was starting from scratch. People knew me, but nobody knew Hallett leadership, nobody knew what it was. And, and then, so I was slowly doing that build and then.

Obviously a year later, we got into COVID. And COVID was a mixed bag for me because on the one hand, it closed things off in terms of, I find, I do a lot of coaching through virtual, but I always, wherever I can, even if they’re on the East Coast and I’m on the West Coast, I want to meet my clients at some point. I want to have that connection with them.

And it was harder to do during COVID. So on the one hand, I felt more restricted and I had to learn to use all the video conference tools and all that. But at the same time, it opened up the possibilities of coaching people anywhere. And so I think geographically, prior to COVID, I would have been restricted much more to Los Angeles, where now I coach people all over the country. I coach virtual companies that really don’t even have a headquarters.

And sometimes they’ll get together in a retreat and we have the opportunity to meet in person. So I think COVID was a big challenge. I think the other challenge is, imagine this, you and I are working together and we’re gonna talk about your fixed beliefs and fixed behaviours, but you believe that your fixed beliefs are the truth.

Because most people, the beliefs people don’t want to get rid of are the ones that make them right. You have to be willing to realise that your beliefs have been wrong and you’re getting in your own way. And some people, it’s a fight to get there. It can be confronted where people are taking a deep look at themselves like that. Other people will have an aha moment. And then the coaching experience is on autopilot almost because we get together in every session and talk about everything. But the challenges are those that are

Let me put it this way. I’ve had clients come to me in order to become better versed in the nature of what I do with the interest of finding a way to make everybody else wrong. And that’s not what we do. Then they’re going to go tell everybody else your beliefs are wrong. You got to listen to me. And they’re not willing to, if somebody’s not, this is the biggest lesson for me. This is the best way to say it.

The biggest lesson for me was realising that I can’t force anybody to change. It’s not up to me. I can give them all the tools. We can spend all the time together. But unless they’re willing to be at least 1 % open, that there’s something there for them to learn and to grow from, then we’re not going to make any progress. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think it’s important to realise the perspective. I had my long corporate career. This is something I do now because I love doing it. And like I said earlier, my goal is for people to learn the lessons that I learned at a much younger time in their career and be able to show up more authentically in everything that they do, personal life and professional life.

So my vision is Even though I’m not looking to franchise, I’m not looking to take this to a much larger scale that’s going to be some 80 hour a week job or anything like that. But at the same time, my vision is to bring this to as many companies as I can, or as many individuals as I can, so that they can learn those lessons. When I started the company, when I chose to start the company, What I said was, I want to do what I love doing the most. I had been a CFO for 25 years, but what I was loving was the human development side. I said, I want to do what I love the most and do it where it’s embraced. So my vision is to bring this into organisations where a CEO is totally behind the growth and development of their team. And they’re all in for the kind of change that we’re bringing.

And right now I’m working with a company that is exactly that. We did a nine month program with them in one of their divisions. now doing their emerging leaders across the overall organisation. We’re going to do a program that we’re launching for nine months and you know, my vision, it’s not like this vision that we’ve got to get to a certain point. The vision of as much as I can that my bandwidth can handle. And I don’t do this alone.

I have people that I bring in during these programs, but our whole thing is we just love doing this and love watching the transformation. Let’s take it to as many as we can.

Thanks Laura, it’s been a pleasure talking with you and being able to share it.