NAB Digital Next
Emotional Intelligence (EI) in the AI era with Stephanie Tranquille
In the latest episode of NAB Digital Next, host Brad Carr, NAB’s Executive Innovation & Partnerships, speaks with Stephanie Tranquille, an expert in Emotional Intelligence (EI). Formerly of NAB, realestate.com.au and Amazon, Steph managed internal training at AWS APAC, and created the Amazon Ads global speaker coaching program whilst working in the US. Back in Australia, Steph now runs her own business, working with organisations to increase EI awareness and effectiveness in the workplace.
The podcast dives into:
• The importance of EI in business strategy and work culture.
• Making space for curiosity and creativity.
• The concept of having a generalist mindset, with a specialised skill set
• Empathy in leadership.
• Adding to your toolkit with upskilling and continuous learning.
Listen to the full episode on SoundCloud, Spotify or Apple Podcast
- Duration:
- 26m
- Broadcast on:
- 01 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Today on Knapp Digital Next, we're looking at the human and AI interaction and the elevated importance of EQ in the Brave New World. I'm Brad Carr from Knapp's Innovation and Partnerships team, and our expert guest in this field today is Steph Tranquill, formerly of Amazon in Seattle, and now back here in Melbourne with her business speaker, Steph Speaks. I'm gonna speak with Steph, and then at the end of this episode, Jay Ha, Knapp's Head of Data Ethics, is gonna help me break down our top learnings from Steph. Steph and I are recording at Knapp's Melbourne offices on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, recording actually just after the recent NAIDOC week, which gave us another great opportunity to recognise our traditional owners. Steph, thanks for joining me, and welcome to Knapp Digital Next. - Thank you very much for having me. - Steph, before we jump into emotional intelligence, emotional quotient, EQ as opposed to IQ and how the human skills fit with AI, can we firstly start with you? And you've had a fascinating career journey, once upon a time here at Knapp, but also at REA Group, I know it's been one of the really progressive firms in the way that they're faced into things like digital ID, and then in the US with Amazon. And I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about the Steph Tranquill journey, and what's led you to making EQ your space? - Yes, thank you. Right, absolutely correct. I started my corporate journey at Knapp, and I wanna say that EI started then, but it actually started a little younger than that. I'll come back to that. So seven years at Knapp, seven years at realestate.com, and then seven years at AWS and then Amazon ads. I came back to Australia, and I'll be honest, I was tired for a little while, because that was a very fast and prolific journey for me. The thing that I want to start off with, Knapp was the start of my journey in resilience building. I came from the only experience I had was at JB High Fine, and for customer yelled, I yelled back. That was my customer service. - That's not what we should have meant to add. - And I started out my customer contact center here, and quickly learned that that was not how we dealt with customers, and that actually, I was a customer in my spare time. So it was important that I learnt the right way, and that servicing the customer not only meant greatness for them, but greatness for us as well as an organization. My EI journey, however, didn't start there. I was born with osteoporosis, and from a young age, I was sitting in a wheelchair for most of the time, but I recognize that there were moments in time where people would assume that I wouldn't participate. They would assume that I felt a certain way. And actually, life felt very vibrant. I was always in charge. Well, at least that's what I thought. Very bossy to my older brother, but I had a brilliant childhood. I never felt like I missed out. So from a young age, I realized that emotions and how we work with them, rather than against them, can either cause us in a moment of time, or move us forward with an ability to see and be curious. As I worked through my adult career, I realized that many jobs would offer me that. So I studied to be a teacher, decided not to be a teacher, and then entered into the world of adult education. After the customer service spout at NAB, I moved into banking, I moved into off-shoring, and I had a lot of opportunities to meet different internal and external customers. That journey moved to realestate.com, where I understood the necessity to sell the dream of buying a house. I understood the need to adopt the digital landscape, which was starting to progress and get faster and faster. And then I landed a role as internal training manager at AWS with no tech skills. And that was a huge change for me, but the greatest moment of my life. And that's kind of where I realized that the necessity of EI in a landscape that was moving so fast and so excitingly innovative was necessary. It was needed, and I would become that lifelong advocate. - It's an inspiring tale that you describe. And I think that notion of awareness and human empathy is probably the standout feature or the thread that kind of nits through each of those stages of your career. I'm glad you bring in the point there about adult education, and it's one that I'd like us to get to a little later in the conversation. I guess if we look into the EI-led world, if I can call it that, and taking the view that EI will augment or supersede or subsume depending on who you talk to, one of those things, a lot of the cognitive abilities that we might think of as being IQ, it kind of stands that EQ and EI and the awareness and that empathy that you've brought, that that's going to be an increasingly important differentiator and a genuine part of the value add that a human can bring. Can we delve into a few things off that? And perhaps firstly, am I thinking about that the right way? And is that how you'd suggest that individuals and companies should be thinking of the era that we're embarking into? - Yes, you bring up a great point, distinguishing technical skills with the soft skills. So Daniel Goldman that wrote the book on emotional intelligence talks about technical skills as almost a business as usual. It will get you into the door, but what doors it opens in future is all dependent on what he calls distinguishing skills. So it's things like collaboration, leadership, empathy, communication. Through my journey, specifically real estate and AWS, I got the opportunity to work with a lot of tech leaders. Let me quickly say here, I by no means was always or am a perfect leader, but you learn from people, you learn the right way, you learn the wrong way, you learn a different way, a different approach. I saw some tech leaders ask for professional development. They might have been 10 years in their career, moved into tech roles, data scientist roles, and then all of a sudden became the leader of an organization. Now, I noticed that unless they asked for it, it wasn't really a point where we stopped and said, oh yes, Sarah, lead in our let's give them soft skills training. So I feel like as we move into this, business as usual context where AI is just helping us with process driven tasks, removing some of the, what we might say, menial tasks, but are actually quite satisfying to some people to tick the box on. We need to work on soft skills like empathy, like leadership, collaboration. What does a collaboration model look like when AI has now allowed us to have a global team? Whereas previously that team was only local. How do we work with AI when internally, we may not have created a learning module or given awareness to our people that have been here 20 years, but people that are doing orientation training are getting that new. And what happens when customers know more than us about the AI services we're bringing forward? NAB's done a few changes and I don't really know about it. I just got emails keeping me up today and I ended up having to read five just to bring me across. If I could ring up, and I'm not specifically talking about NAB 'cause I haven't rung up, but if I could ring up a contact centre and know that the person or ring up my business manager, my business development contact, and know that whatever I'm asking about, the new features, the new services, the new ways of making me feel happier, they're also on that journey. What a great story that would be. What a great experience that would be. - Yeah. And I think the point of empathy and leadership, my own approach in leadership has been, I guess that the point of empathy has always been there and always been important, but it just became really blindingly obvious to me during the COVID era that that empathy was really the single attribute that you most needed to double down on as a leader. - Empathy is an interesting one. Brene Brown talks about it a lot and she says that sometimes we misuse the idea of empathy. Empathy does not mean that we must give people, if someone's having a bad day, take the day off, have no issues of leaving your work behind. Empathy doesn't mean that if you're tired, you just stop. Empathy means that I want to understand what's happening in your world. I want to help you through it and I want to make sure that you feel like our workplace is fair and equitable to be part of, that you have voice. Ways that empathy is being misused, can be misused is when someone has a problem solving it for them. Or when I had that experience, so there's a concept in emotional intelligence called attunement. And attunement means it's far more impactful than active listening. Attunement means that when we're speaking to someone, much in the same way that we're speaking to each other, we're tuned into their frequency, we're on their algorithm. So that busy thoughts in our very busy mind, slow down, and that everything that they're talking about we're receiving. So that at the end, the questions that come are not what you've already preconceived, but they're to clarify understanding, they're to make sure you understood the perspective of the other person. And that takes a lot of work and a lot of practice to remove all of the barriers to listening from your brain. And also just investing the efforts to-- - The effort, yeah, the energy. - So I think if we can perhaps bring that more to how we see the future workforce evolving. And as AI and automation potentially move more tasks outside of the human domain, and AI becomes the key differentiator that we've been touching on, how do you see the future workforce evolving? - So many things. The first one is induction programs and orientation. How do we evolve that? I mentioned this before, I think a lot about this. When someone comes into the organisation, they get the latest and the greatest piece of this is where we're at. In order to understand the five generations that are currently working in the workplace, the people that have been there for 10 years, for two years, for eight years, for 20 years, new hires need to have the legacy and the history of what the business was and why we came to be. So that they can have empathy when their peers may not be thinking as fast and as succinct on topics of AI, communication needs to change. So in the past, there's been discs, strength finder, Maya Briggs, all of that training to help us understand how not to change people, but how to work with them. But emotional intelligence is, I feel like it, it sits in a nicer space because we're actually not labelling anyone with anything. Emotional intelligence at us core is about how we create self-awareness for ourselves and how we work with others. So if I bring that into the workplace, how we lead as teams, so are we supervising? Are we managing or are we leading? How are we creating aspirational leadership? How are we giving people space to be curious and creative? So I was thinking about if I was working in corporate in the job that I had, which was a speaker program, I managed speakers, looked after their speaker coaching. What would AI look like for me in that role? Well, a lot of content would probably be derived from AI and there wouldn't be a content creator. How do we make sure that the tone of the speaker is captured in the AI as an example? So I think about, when we think communication, we still have kinesthetic visual and auditory ways of learning. AI can't change that. We still have hearts and minds connecting. So empathy, how do we lead? Time to experiment is a huge one. At Knab@realestate.com, at Amazon, I had the absolute privilege of seeing this happen. When Oculus Rift came, we learned how to use it. When there was new technologies, we had it to play with an experiment. I don't know that all organisations have that, but if we're removing menial or manual or process-driven tasks and saying, "Hey, this is a new world, go forth and prosper," nurture creativity. At Amazon, they had a principal learner be curious and I think it sits really nicely here where we don't expect you to know everything, but we expect you to be hungry to learn, to want to continuously improve. And the last one is change management. How do we bring people on the journey of new changes? We've not just messaging, but making sure that they're getting a chance to experience it in their everyday work world. Sometimes we're very far removed from decisions that are made. Change management and how we use whether it's Six Sigma Lean or we use different methodologies is important. So that, the story is shared. I'm all about the story. I'm all about the story. - I love the emphasis that you put on being curious. And I'm confident it takes some validation there in that internally within Knab's digital innovation and design teams, actually having a major internal summit at the moment and the specific theme is the one word, curiosity. - Oh, I love that. - So I'll take some validation that we're thinking about it the right way. And that guidance of being curious and encouraging curiosity is probably a really good segue to talking a bit about training and advice for people at a couple of different levels. And I want to pick up the theme you mentioned, the outset around adult education as an area of focus. I think we're moving into such a new world in which the structure of employment and the types of jobs of tomorrow are going to be so different from what we have today that there are some different sets of challenges both for mid-career professionals who may be highly skilled in one space and need to perhaps retrain in another. And at times that is difficult or challenging or involves a degree of personal risk around if you're at a point where you've got family commitments and a mortgage and you're less likely to make a significant leap perhaps. And then on the other hand, we've got young people coming through, including our kids and I frequently get asked a question, you know, what do you tell your kids to study? If we perhaps sort of separate those two groups for a moment and I think they are distinct cohorts interested in how you see it, you know, are there particular points of advice you'd have firstly for mid-career professionals? If I call them that of how they should be thinking about this environment of change? - Yeah, the first thing I'll say is we have a part of our brain called the amygdala and it creates lots of great things. It's responsible for keeping us safe. Before we gifted with the modern brain, it was purely there to make sure that we were alerted when there was danger. In the modern world, we're still dealing with that age and architecture, but we're in a position where we've got so much happening around us. And one of the things that happens with this amygdala is a negativity bias. Prehistoric times it kept us safe. If there was a woolly mammoth, we would run or if we needed dinner, we would run towards it. But in the modern age, the negativity bias is what makes us remember to not do it again. Now, I can only speak to my corporate career. I don't know about others, but I never like to get in trouble. And I never like to make a mistake and that's how we learn and grow. So you've made a mistake or you've had maybe a lesson, wonderful experience with a stakeholder. Without you realizing it, it's been imprinted into the negativity bias. If you've made a mistake, if you submitted a report that was inaccurate and you got feedback, the next time you meet with that stakeholder, the next time you have that task, inevitably, the negativity bias is going to remind you. Remember, remember, remember, this is what happened. If you have a terrible conversation with someone in your personal life or at home and you didn't make it right, the next time you see them, whether you realize the brain goes, hang on, alert, this is that person, let's release a little bit of cortisol to keep you in a stress mode. So why I mention this is when we're sitting in the middle of our career, we have a lot of experiences of where we even put ourselves in that position, do better, learn more, advocate for yourself, try harder, which is great. Sometimes we don't pause to think about all of the great things that we have done, that we've become, and in our midlife, now with AI, I look to the future and go, what does that mean for me? Are my skills still enough? Do I need to reskill? Yes, but what I will say is there's an opportunity, I think, that has not yet been spoken about enough, which is the age of innovating in your own career, owning your individual development plan, and thinking, there's no box now, it's what could be, you could come up with a job that never existed, if you can talk about why it's important, this could be the dream job that you never thought about. So I would say, remove the parameter of what you think is successful, and dream big and think what could success look like. What have I always wanted to do but never thought possible? Because we are now in that point in life where almost anything is possible in the career space, up skill and be vocal about it, ask, is there professional development? Is there learning pathways available? If not, is there a conference? Networking with people, it's amazing how much we learn. You mentioned adult education, at its core, adult education is all about what's in it for me. We know a lot, we're rich in experience, what else can we bring to nourish people? Don't sit there and tell me about the beginning of time, 'cause chances are I know a bit about it, but if you as an organisation have identified in this group, there's three things that are probably really important and front of mind to them. It's important to give them that time, that curiosity space and that time to innovate. I will also say I'm in the mid category of career. Don't stop and think about all of the learning and all of the growth you've already had to do. So reframe, it's not what I had to do, it's what I had the opportunity to do. The experiences I had the opportunity to step into and what new opportunities emerged. So reframing what success looks like is one, being open and asking for professional development and owning your individual development plan are the key ones. - One of the pieces I'm excited about here and our Chief Risk Officer, Sean Dooley, is probably the best exemplar of having that commitment to lifelong learning. And we're actually kind of melding together probably some of the technical skill development and the human element in that Sean's led a few of us into the space of a chat GPT prompt engineering course, we now have actually mobilized a group of us as a study group learning on an online module on quantum computing. And so I think that's probably an example of not only putting your hand up and taking that commitment around a technical space that you can learn, but doing it together with a bunch of like-minded and similarly motivated people that think probably appeals a lot to the human side as well. Steph, can we pivot to the younger generation as well? And I think probably in line with you earlier points that we both emphasized on curiosity. You know, I've probably taken the view that it's very hard to predict what the jobs of the future for our kids might be. And it's probably, as digital natives, they are probably well positioned from a technical side. But the most important piece is probably learning that resilience, another thing that you talked about earlier, resilience and adaptability is, and having that, you know, I guess from that I'm inferring versatility. Probably the attributes that are going to be most crucial, more so than any particular technical space that I would push my kids into or that I would advise to other young people. I'm just curious whether that's a framing that resonates with you or other advice that you would bring. It does, and I'm actually coming back to NAB to quote this. I had a really great leader at the start of my career. He sat with me to listen to me in the call center, speak to a customer, and then said to me, I've got five more minutes with you. What do you want to tell me about yourself? I said, I want to create legacy. I'm not here for mediocrity, I want to create legacy. He said, my advice to you is that you need to think generalist with specialist in some spaces. And I only just remembered that he'd said that. At the end of my seven years at NAB, I saw him and he said, where are you going? I said realestate.com. He said, why are you going there? And I said, to create my legacy. And he remembered that conversation. At AWS, I saw the need at my initial point of people becoming specialists. They spent a lot of time dividing your AI, your ML, lots of different things. And then halfway through that journey, they realized that if we are going to be aligned with what a customer needs, we need to be generalist. And that's what I want to say to our future workforce. Be a generalist. Know a little about a lot. Know enough so that your skills can move into different roles. Traditionally, there's been some roles like analyst roles, learning and development that can move into different organizations. But that generalist, think of that as the opening of the door and the specialist role as you walking into that house or into that building and saying, these are the two rooms I want to spend the most amount of time in. But I know the structure of the house. I know the foundation. I know what makes this the electricity move. And I know the people in here. But the two doors that I walk into are the spaces I want to spend most amount of time in. That allows for flexibility. That allows for curiosity and self-reflecting for myself. It also removes a need to be seen as the expert in just this. But to know about what the world is doing, where it's going and how your business is progressing is a far more prolific way of thinking. There's a book called Grit and Angela Duckworth wrote this book. And Grit is what I think all generations need, but specifically this younger workforce. And respectfully, I say they're coming in at a time where we're instant everything. Generations ahead of that. I mean, I had a typewriter when I was younger. That's where I started. And I've now stopped to iPhone 10. That's as far as I've gotten to with mobile technology. But having Grit means, yes, you're resilient and you can deal with the highs and the lows of the workforce. But Grit means having passion and sustained persistence towards a goal. Saving for a house, saving for a car, saving for a holiday. We're so good at watching what we're spending to get to that. We should be doing the same with our career. Seeing that there's something that may not be completely identified at this point, but something great that's sitting in front of us, steering with positive intent. Working towards that, knowing that as I feel up my toolkit, I'm getting attributes, I'm getting skills, I'm getting knowledge that will one day serve me. But being complacent, sitting back and going life-straight because we live in an instant world, you'll get left behind very quickly. - Very lively energetic discussion there with Steph with a lot of great insights. - And I've asked my dev colleague, Jade Hart, to join me in extracting the top takeaways. Jade, firstly, what most about for you and Steph's comments? - Thanks so much, Brad, for inviting me. I think anytime someone in a corporate setting uses the words like hearts and minds. It really makes me sit up and listen in. Her viewpoint on the importance of E2 for business was just very genuine and convincing to me. And for me personally, her point on the new role, I guess, of the future of that being a generalist, that really resonated as well. The idea that your own real skills is what's bringing you into the house, so to speak, and your specialities as letting you sort of play in specific rooms. I really like that idea because I do think a few people probably are in that stage of wondering like have I specialised too much? With all this new change, how do I cope? But I love that idea of your E2, et cetera, that really helps with your generalised skills that you're bringing to the table. I thought it was one of the really, really great points that landed and it reminded me a bit of what's called In Good Company. Nikolai, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern Wealth Fund, he hosted Citadel CEO and they picked up this point of generalists and specialists. And Steph, I thought sort of gave this notion of, I guess, being enough of a specialist or having enough of a core capability that wins you that credibility that then probably enabled some of those generalist skills to really be fully recognised and utilised. And I think probably on a similar vein, the thing that the other one that really landed for me was about empathy. And I think this just becomes all the more crucial with the really accelerated rate of change and the way that we find ourselves in our jobs, helping to coach our people through that period of change, that's just gonna be more widespread as well. - Definitely, I was thinking about, you know, let's say like death in Texas, certain why they change as we add into that list. And I sure someone else has already thought of that one. But I do think the biggest point of change when it comes to new technologies or any change really is how does it impact your people? So in an organisation, how's it affecting your colleagues? How's it gonna impact your customers? You know, having new technology and new skills will be required, often quite technical skills. So we will need to think about how we lift and how we deal with that change. But speaker, Steph's point, I like how she talked about adding to your toolkit. So it's not the fact that you've got these skills which become outdated, your soft skills, they're actually the really important stuff which machines cannot replace. And I really love the idea of just seeing like, as things go on, yes, there's gonna be change, it's gonna be constant, but knowing that you can add to what you've got, that's the viewpoint. - Jamie and I talked before about one of my favourite quotes when I heard Katie and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speak at the G20 a few years ago. And he talked about how his comment was that the world has never changed as fast as it does now. And it will never change this slowly ever again. And I think that's just a great cue for the point you make about how we invest in ourselves and upskill ourselves. But also that we look at it for the people around us and ensure that we're encouraging them to future-proof themselves and be on that journey. - Exactly. - So you leave data ethics here at NAB, and that's an increasingly vital part of our business. How do you see EI and EQ in that particular context? - Well, I definitely see EQ and EI focusing in data ethics. And I see our teams role really to provide their social dimensions lens to how NAB is just making decisions on how to use its customer or colleague information. The team gets to call out impacts and consequences that perhaps this aren't always as front of mind, or maybe it's obvious to others when you've got a different lens, like a social dimension lens. And so, yeah, hearing the focus from Steph on EQ just really encourages me, I guess, for lack of a different word that makes me feel like we're on the right track and that governance can be, you know, not just thinking about the traditional models, but also thinking about other things, like the soft side of things, like empathy and emotional intelligence. - Yeah, really felt Steph kind of inspired but also validated us a bit at the same time. - I agree. - Yeah. Well, thank you, Joe. And also a big thank you to Steph Tranquil, our special guest who's really opened our eyes. Looking ahead on that digital next, we're gonna shortly jump into a series of short episodes that are gonna pick up on the specific trends and looming disruptions that we in the navigation team can see coming. But I'm also gonna head over to Adelaide and I'm gonna speak with Stephen Marshall, the former Premier of South Australia. And since leading politics, Stephen has continued to be a great ambassador for the space and satellite industry there. It's gonna be great to have him open our eyes around some of the innovation happening locally in that sector. So please join us again soon and thanks for listening on that digital next. (upbeat music) (gentle music) You