David Cory joins Doug Sandler on Nice Guys on Business podcast

Have you been using the automatic settings on your camera? Have you ever wanted to learn to use the manual settings? In this interview with Doug Sandler, from the Nice Guys on Business Podcast, David Cory explains how we can all learn to use the manual settings when it comes to our emotional operating system.

From moving away from command and control, to having a successful meeting with investors, David and Doug discuss the benefits of developing our emotional intelligence skills in business, and in life.

Doug Sandler has over 30 years of business experience, is the author of Nice Guys Finish First, and is committed to the human element in business.

Transcript of interview

[00:00:00] David Cory: Emotions are intended to help us navigate our environment more effectively. And so if we disregard our emotions, we are not paying attention to a whole bunch of data that’s designed to help us to be better. And so we have to, in some cases challenge some of those notions, but in order to move from the automatic setting, which most of us are on to the manual setting, we have to learn what the manual settings do.

You’re not going to switch over from automatic to manual in your, in your camera on your phone, or, or if you have a digital SLR or something like that, you’re not going to switch to manual unless you know what the manual settings do. So we have to know. What the skills are, what are those emotional skills that help us be more effective?

Oh, they play both kinds of music country and western The nice guys on business. Go from where you are now to where you could be. Get expert tips to grow your business, to be more productive and more efficient. Whether you’re trying to build influence, grow your community or make it rain. Best selling author of Nice Guys Finish First, Doug Sandler can lead the way.

The nice guys on business is produced by turnkey podcast productions. Now, here’s your host, Doug Sandler. 

[00:01:19] Doug Sandler: Nice guy community. Welcome back to another exciting episode. Now, today we’re going to meet the extraordinary guest. Now I call him extraordinary because he’s a guy that is right now. You’re a, you’re battling with snow and you’re not even home.

What, what happened? You just got stuck. David, is that you get stuck somewhere 

[00:01:34] David Cory: we couldn’t fly home because of the snow back home. And so it’s like, stay right where you are. We’ll go when up to the airport. 

[00:01:40] Doug Sandler: All right. Well, that’s perfect for us because now I have him for a six hour interview.

He can’t complain about this. Actually it’ll just be the same length episode as every other. He is a trailblazing leadership development coach, renowned for applying emotional intelligence. We’re going to explain exactly what that is to transform performance from founding one of North America’s first.

Focus companies and emotional intelligence to captivating experiences, like being a guest of the Sultan of, is it Brunei Brunei Brunei. Okay. There’s some cool things. He keynoted at Harvard medical school. David’s journey is nothing short of remarkable. We’re going to join today with David from Canada, snowbound, Canada, riveting episode, exploring leadership, emotional intelligence, and the thrilling adventures that have shaped David’s own unique perspective.

We’re here to talk to him today. Welcome David to the nice guys on 

[00:02:27] David Cory: business podcast. Thank you so much, Doug. It’s great to be here. 

[00:02:30] Doug Sandler: I am happy to have you here. And this is one of those subjects that is fascinating to me, which means it’s probably uniquely fascinating to those in my community as well.

Emotional intelligence. Can we start with a one Oh one on what emotional intelligence is and why we would even need to think about it?

[00:02:45] David Cory: The problem with people learning more about emotional intelligence is the name people hear emotional and they think, Oh, this is warm and fuzzy. This is about group hugs.

I don’t want to have anything to do with this. And, and we have to shift that perspective to understand that because of the neuroscience research. From the last part of the 20th century, we now know that the, that emotions play a far bigger role in human behavior than we ever thought possible. And so this is actually about human effectiveness.

And I know a lot of your listeners are you know, trying to work hard and, and, you know, get their companies going and. And and get those companies out there and get teams together and get teams working effectively together. And the answer is not working harder. It’s working smarter and to work smarter.

We need to understand more about emotion our own emotions and the emotions of others. So, you know, that’s, that’s what we’ll get into. 

[00:03:44] Doug Sandler: All right. Well, let’s, let’s start there. Tell, tell me what is in, what do we do? I guess start, let’s, let’s start with a positive. What are we doing? Right. And then what could we use some help in being more efficient or productive at within our either teams or ourselves or relationships?

[00:03:57] David Cory: There are 15 emotional skills that we all learn in spite of ourselves from birth. Some people say even from before birth and and I learned this analogy the other day and ever since I learned it, I’m crazy about it. It’s like there’s an automatic setting for us humans. And there’s a manual setting now.

Do you take pictures with your phone? Do you use the automatic setting or the manual setting? Oh, 

[00:04:24] Doug Sandler: Automatic is so much easier.

[00:04:28] David Cory: But so, so most of us human beings are on automatic. We take, you know, what we’ve learned through osmosis by, through the culture, by virtue in some cases of our gender.

I mean, you and I, because we’re men, we probably learned that big boys don’t cry. And when you learn that as a young kid, you learn, okay, so to be a man, I got to be tough. I got to be strong and I got to disregard what my emotions are telling me. Now, emotions are intended to help us navigate our environment more effectively.

And so if we disregard our emotions, we are not paying attention to a whole bunch of data that’s designed to help us to be better. And so we have to, in some cases challenge some of those notions, but in order to move from the automatic setting, which most of us are on to the manual setting, we have to learn what the manual settings do.

You’re not going to switch over from automatic to manual in your, in your camera on your phone, or, or if you have a digital SLR or something like that, you’re not going to switch to manual unless you know what the manual settings do. So we have to know. What the skills are, what are those emotional skills that help us be more effective?

[00:05:40] Doug Sandler: Now you said there’s 15 of them. Are there, are there ones that are more priority driven than, than others, you know, and can you give us a couple of examples of, of a few of those? 

[00:05:49] David Cory: Some run in the background. And some are right out in front. So some of the ones that run in the background are things like self regard.

We all regard ourselves in a certain way and, and we regard ourselves that way because of all the messages that have ever been sent to us since the time that we were old enough to hear messages. And those messages tell us that we belong, that we’re important, that we’re worthy, that we’re deserving.

Those, those messages tell us whether we should feel like imposters for doing what we’re doing or whether we feel like we should be where we are doing what we’re doing and really owning our strengths and some people don’t feel very good about themselves, and that’s a problem with our self regard, how we view ourselves.

Then there are others which are kind of front and center and those are emotional self awareness and emotional expression. We all have emotions going on all the time. And we create those emotions based on how we view stimuli in our environment. And then it’s that interpretation that creates the emotional response in us.

But unless we pay attention to it. We could miss important data, emotions, or data for us, data that’s telling us about this situation. If we’re getting a group of investors together and we’re there’s a whole bunch of emotions going on there. People aren’t going to invest in you if they feel cautious about investing with you.

If they, if they don’t trust you, and this is where emotional expression comes in, because we don’t trust what we don’t know. And if you don’t express your emotions to me, I don’t really know you. I don’t know what you’d like. I don’t know what you don’t like. I need to know what you stand for. I need to know what you’re all about before I can trust you.

And you’re a nice guy. So I feel like I can trust you. But I, but again, you know, we, we only just met and I don’t really know you until you. Tell me more about what’s going on beneath your surface. And again, if, if we, as men you know, get told that we are, that our emotion, that we shouldn’t express emotions, that expressing emotions are the sign of weakness, then we shy away from it.

We’re not good at it. We’re not practiced at it. And then as we you know, we, we work with a lot of leaders. Leaders of small companies, leaders of large companies and and, and we coach them one to one and we we tell them that you have to share your emotions with your employees and they say, why do I have to share my emotions?

And it’s again to be known. So to let people in, to let people get to know you, because in the absence of doing that, we guess. I’m going to look at your face and try to guess what’s going on. And I could get that 

[00:08:19] Doug Sandler: wrong. You know, I, I love everything that you say. And I think that one of the areas that I want to go back to just for a quick second, because the first thing that you said is, is not really one that I’ve put into play anywhere near as much as, as I could, maybe because I have.

A pretty decent amount of self regard without being egotistical. I think that that’s probably part of it too, is that what’s the expression? You, you can’t love others before you love yourself. And it’s like, if you don’t, if you don’t show the proper emotions to yourself, how can you possibly show the proper emotions to the world that is looking at you?

If you don’t trust yourself to make good decisions, how could you expect other people to trust you? And I want to talk about that for a second, because I think that that is a understated and, and and, but, but a highly valued side of, of doing well in business and doing well in relationships, what, what are your, what are your thoughts on that?

[00:09:12] David Cory: Some of your listeners might have heard of a, of a guy named Patrick Lencioni. He wrote a great book called the five dysfunctions of a team, and he has a little pyramid model of team functionality. And the bait, the base of the pyramid is trust. If, if we can’t build trust we are really limited in our effectiveness at whatever it is that we’re trying to do in life.

And worth noting, because you circled back on the self regard idea is that we, and we have an online assessment for this. We have one where people can assess themselves and, you know, get an EQ score. And we have one where they rate themselves and other people rate them. Your listeners might be familiar with 360.

So this is a multi rater. And so we use these tools in our, in our leadership development work with individuals within organizations, but, but some people have the mistaken belief that higher is always Well, imagine someone with very high self regard who is, is not very humble they can come across as arrogant and egotistical, and that’s not good for anyone.

And so it’s about having the right balance, for a particular situation. 

[00:10:24] Doug Sandler: So what typically, because this is a really sophisticated subject matter, what typically are people coming to you with the problem of like, I have this hurt or this wound and I need this wound fixed and David, I know your company is the right one to do it because I was referred to you, but, but I don’t even know the questions to ask you.

What should be the question someone should be asking themselves in order for them to know whether they need to step forward or want to step forward to talk to you and your company. 

[00:10:50] David Cory: People come to us in a variety of ways. But and so I’ll tell you what a couple of those ways are one, which is is probably the least frequent way that that the clients come to us is a company will call us and say, We’ve got this senior person.

They’re extremely valuable for their technical skills and knowledge and experience that we can’t afford to lose them. But we can’t afford to keep them with the way they keep treating people. And so, so that is a lack of self awareness. And so what we do with my first question always is, is that person open to coaching?

And if they say yes, then we’ll work with them. And one of the first things that we do is this multi rater assessment where they rate themselves. And then we get people around them to also rate them and compare the perceptions. And sometimes that is enough for someone to go, OMG, I had no idea that I was having that kind of negative impact on people.

My intention was to motivate the staff by yelling at them. Turns out the staff are not motivated by the yelling. They’re demotivated. They’re humiliated and embarrassed. You know, 

[00:12:02] Doug Sandler: it’s funny you say that. I just yesterday had a conversation with with Stephen Covey, Stephen Covey’s son, Stephen Covey also.

And he’s talking about this command and control burst versus inspire you know, someone to, to make a change or to make decisions. Would you rather be controlled or would you rather be inspired? And I a hundred percent can relate to so many people that. I’ve run into in my career that have had either a negative attitude or an iron rule at the leadership helm.

And I think it, I think from a leadership perspective, understanding EQ is probably because isn’t that is, is a emotional intelligence EQ. What’s 

[00:12:41] David Cory: the key part? Yeah. EQ is the measure of how well you’re using your emotional intelligence. So it is the measure, but we use them interchangeably all the time. I, I met the Stephen Covey senior that we were both speaking at the same conference together years ago, and I happened to meet him before he unfortunately passed away.

And, and so this idea of command and control. We are evolving as a society over all over the world. We’re evolving away from command and control leadership because you know how old we are when, when we realize we don’t like to be told what to do, do you know how old that is? 

[00:13:17] Doug Sandler: Well, probably as a two year old when you don’t want to, when you want to do something, right.

That’s why 

[00:13:22] David Cory: we call it the terrible twos. That’s when we realized we don’t like to be told what to do. So we’re, so some people are trying to run whole companies like this by telling people what to do. And the first thing you’re going to get is resistance. So we’re evolving away from command and control.

Towards a participative, collaborative collaborative style of leadership, which is, which involves people, which says, Hey, you’re valuable to me. I’m going to share, I’m going to be transparent with you. I’m going to share information with you. People feel like they belong, like they’re valuable. They’re going to work hard.

They’re not going to go anywhere. And you know, employee engagement is a measure of the emotions of employees. 

[00:13:59] Doug Sandler: You know, what’s really, what’s really interesting about it, and there is such a crossover between your message and, and Covey’s message and so many messages of organizations that are out there in the world.

I think sometimes, and again, I’d love to hear your, your feedback on this. I think sometimes people feel like the emotional component of a business is so touchy feely and it’s so. This is, this is showing, oh, I have to be my lovey dovey phase in order for you to, to, to follow me. It’s such a 2023 or 2024 thing.

I don’t think that’s the case. I’d much rather be inspired somebody than, than commanded to do something. And I just think that Old school, old business was we’re going to lead from, from, you know, from behind the scenes, we’re going to tell you what to do and you’re going to carry it out. What do you say to someone that feels like getting in touch with your emotional roots or understanding your EQ?

is irrelevant or it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s just too esoteric. I don’t feel that way, but what do you say to say, because you’ve got to run that into that all the time, especially in dealing with corporate America. 

[00:15:07] David Cory: Yes! A famous neuroanatomist named Jill Bolte Taylor said Prior to the neuroscience research of the past 20 of the past century.

We thought that we human beings were thinking creatures who felt she’s, she says, now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, we’re feeling creatures that think so if someone thinks that they’re going to leave emotion out of it, and you may have heard that before right? Let’s leave emotion out of this.

Let’s use cold, hard logic. It’s not physiologically possible. And so what you do if you try to do that is you do that at your peril, you are going to negatively impact people emotionally and and they’re not going to want to do business with you. They’re going to go somewhere else. Now, given the choice between the, the, the, the person who’s solely focused on business and the person who is a nice guy and focused on business.

You’re going to go to the nice guy. You know that because you named your podcast after that idea. I 

[00:16:06] Doug Sandler: would, I would think so, but I look at it from that standpoint. You know, I was raised by a single mom. I feel like I was raised with a, probably a more sensitive ear. I listened to every signal that I get. I think with two ears, how can I serve this person?

You know, if I lead with the value of how can I serve you better? I always think that you’re going to on the other side of it, receive the other ear benefit from. From the message that they’re sharing with you. And if you look at everything as opportunity, and this is going to be great, I think that that’s, you know, law of attraction just, just shows that if you, if you look at things from that perspective, I think that you’ll, you’ll win every time.

And I don’t understand how a company can’t be led with understanding, even if you don’t know a nice guy community, if you’ve never heard the term emotional intelligence, or don’t know EQ. Don’t you know that it’s happening all around you right now? It is, isn’t it, David? Is that right? It’s 

[00:16:59] David Cory: happening.

Just think about some of the things that we value. Brand loyalty. What’s brand loyalty? It’s how you feel about the brand. Employee engagement. It’s simply how you feel about the work you’re doing. And why do people leave companies? Why do people have retention issues? They don’t leave a company.

They’re leaving a person who treats them poorly. We do this exercise and we’ve done it with hundreds of times all over the world, where we ask groups of people to, to identify the qualities of the best leader they ever had in their career and the worst leader they ever had in their career.

And I’ve got, I’ve got hundreds of photographs of these flip charts from these training rooms and and you would not be surprised at what people say. And the impact on them. So, for example, how they describe the best leader they ever had are the ones who treated them like a human being versus just an employee.

They’re the ones who shared information with them. They’re the ones who challenged them to do more, who believed in them, who, who treated them like a person, like a human being. This is, this is not rocket science. And then, The worst leaders were all focused on the bottom line. We’re all about the, the the, the end result.

And, and, and some of those worst leaders, I mean, the list gets ridiculous, you, you probably will believe it because maybe you’ve had some of these leaders, people who were never around. Right. People who didn’t even show up people who kept everything to themselves, never shared information, created chaos and disorganization lowered morale and on and on and on.

And these people were kept around because of their technical skills. And we often promote people into positions of management based on their technical skills, assuming that they’re going to understand and something, a switch is going to flip and they’re going to get it on how to inspire people. But in the, in the absence of training, To that end, they, we, we don’t cover this stuff in school, as you know, it’s not in our, in our elementary school, high school, professional schools, college, university.

We don’t teach people about emotion, which is what this is all about. 

[00:19:11] Doug Sandler: I want to make a right turn for just a quick second, because as I’m listening to you talk and share your your perspective on this, I, I feel the The genuine nature of the message that you are sharing. When did you discover that this was your, your gift, your thing, your desire to bring out to the, to the 

[00:19:32] David Cory: world.

Yeah. Great question. I I have always taught people stuff ever since I was a little kid. I taught people things and you know, I, I taught guitar all through high school at a local music store. I, it’s. I graduated high school and I taught downhill skiing in the Canadian Rockies and over in, in the European Alps.

And it was only natural for me to go into education. And but then looking at the school system, I thought, wow, what a place to spend one’s career. And I became interested in learning in the workplace. Well, how do people learn in the workplace? So I got a master’s degree in education and I was teaching leadership courses for a post secondary institution.

And I thought it was interesting that we assumed. That the managers coming to these courses where we were teaching them barely sophisticated skills, like conflict resolution, we were assuming that they had basic personal and interpersonal skills. And as you know there’s a wide range of personal and interpersonal skills out in the world.

And, you know, we all know people who are, are just going to have trouble with a concept like conflict resolution either because they don’t know how to have empathy for others, or even how to understand the way that they act or talk to people, how it impacts people and and so giving skills to someone without a basic foundational level of emotional intelligence skills is really money wasted.

I think about it, 

[00:20:58] Doug Sandler: you know, the more that you’re providing information and sharing your, your wisdom in this subject, I think about the, the roles that emotional intelligence plays within an organization, whether it’s selling, negotiating Human resources, customer service, customer support, engineering every, is there a, there is not a department within an organization that would not benefit from at least getting in touch with the understanding of what We’re dealing with.

Is that 

[00:21:29] David Cory: how you feel? And a fascinating phenomenon is that the more technical the field, the more it tends to attract people who have a preference or a tendency to not want to be with people. We sometimes call them introverts and . And introverts think that they’re gonna go into nuclear medicine or, or whatever field so that, or programming so that they can, they can get away from working with people, but you can’t, you can’t avoid it.

You’re going to be working in teams, you’re going to be addressing customers, you’re going to be client facing, you’re going to have to talk about difficult issues, you’re going to have to build relationships, and we don’t learn in school how to build relationships. 

[00:22:14] Doug Sandler: I want to do two things. I want to share with my community.

I know we talked about this before I hit the record button. I wanted to give them access, you know, easiest way to reach out to your company, or at least to get more information. And then the more you were talking, the more I’m thinking, I’d love to send people directly to that. Is it like an evaluation or or an, an app?

What did you call it again? How they 

[00:22:30] David Cory: can do it’s called, it’s called the emotional quotient inventory. The EQI it’s in its 2. 0 version. And, and that requires a review of your results with a qualified professional. And I’m happy to send information to anyone who reaches out to me through our website more information about the costs involved because it requires sitting down with a professional coach.

And reviewing the information, talking about what you want to do. What do you want to do with it? If, if it was the kind of thing where you just went through it and you’re, and you read it, there would be probably very little change that would come from that. So, so we couple that with coaching and that’s where we, where we see the possibility of change.

[00:23:10] Doug Sandler: That’s great. Well, I appreciate you telling me that and giving me that information into our community as well. So the first, your starting point, if you’re in our community and you are captivated and encouraged by the conversation that you’re, that you aren’t alone in the world, if you’re feeling a little bit like, Hey, I need to get in touch with that part of me so that I can be a better leader, if I could be a better team member, if I could be a better customer, if I could be a better support agent, a better engineer, anything that involves your organization or your career, I think this is a good starting point.

So head over to the show notes. You’ll see in the show notes, there’s a there’s a link for eitc. ca. That is David’s website head over there. I’ll put a link in there. So if you didn’t get the spelling of it, that’s fine. Just head over to the show notes. And then if you do want to take advantage of going a step further, like David just said, there’ll be some contact information and a way for you to get in touch with with David.

[00:24:00] David Cory: Can I, can I tell your listeners about a simple and free. Emotional intelligence test. Please do it. It’s one question. Do you do you make a room better by entering it or leaving it? That 

[00:24:13] Doug Sandler: is a great question. I mean I want to say Without any ego. I really want to say that I I enter a room Knowing that when I leave the room people will feel better than when I got there Is that is that did I shape the the question properly that you ask?

[00:24:30] David Cory: Absolutely.

[00:24:32] Doug Sandler: Well, and it’s not just I that’s what happens It’s what I want to happen also. And I think that there is, there’s a difference between, look, if that’s always my goal, how can I get, and I’m not saying, saying this about me, I’m saying that about people in general. Why would you ever want to go into a room making the room feel the same or worse or not having any impact in the room, don’t you?

Unless you are being pulled into that event, that party, that social scene, that networking event and you don’t even wanna be there. Which sometimes is the case. But why wouldn’t you want to if you are there? Why wouldn’t you want to leave that room better than when you came in? How can anybody say no to that, David?

Some people do. All right. Well, I’m sorry. They’re not my listeners then. So if you’re in our community and you want to be that, answer that question and you want to if you don’t feel like that’s the case, or if you feel like that’s the case, but you want to get a further analysis of why you are doing that or why you are making the room feel better or how you can multiply that even more EITC.

Dot c a and get the beginning phase of information from from david’s organization any questions I’m supposed to ask you david that i’m not asking you that you would be encouraged to answer 

[00:25:48] David Cory: That’s a that’s a good question. I mean, in a very short period of time we covered a lot of ground but of course there’s a whole lot more to cover 

[00:25:57] Doug Sandler: All right.

And then finally, just let me ask you a personal question or two, because you said something before I hit record and then you mentioned it during the interview itself. So you are a musician. Were you ever a professional musician aside from doing 

[00:26:08] David Cory: the lessons? I have been a professional musician. I have recorded an album of original music.

I, I, it’s, it’s an outlet for me. It’s my creative outlets. I’m passionate about it. And I occasionally bring my guitar with me to a keynote presentation and and leave people with a song at the end. 

[00:26:26] Doug Sandler: Oh, that is, that is so great. I love that. And that definitely shows a part of the creative side of you, which I’m sure goes into the framework of your program creation as well.

So thank you, David, for sharing. Thanks for being on the show and sharing your your message with my community. 

[00:26:40] David Cory: Thanks so much, Doug. Really appreciate the opportunity. 

[00:26:42] Doug Sandler: Hey, Nice Guy community, never underestimate the power of nice or the power of actually understanding what your EQ is. Special thanks to David Corey.

All of his information, including access to his website, will be right there in the show notes. Steve O’Brien, go ahead and take us out of here. 

[00:26:57] David Cory: For the Nice Guys on Business, I’m Steve O’Brien. Seriously, it’ll only hurt for a minute and don’t worry, I’ll be fine.

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