Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And today, it's not really so much about the management of change, which I believe has come a very long way since I sat down with that technology leader and his three-step process that no one would adopt. It's come a long way, but the piece that is still a huge gap and a struggle for so many leaders is the leadership aspect of that change. How on earth do you get people to come along?
How do you get your peers who you're not the boss of to come along? How do you influence the leaders above you to support and embrace and get on board with the change? And at the most deeply personal level, how do you bring yourself through change? Tough stuff.
Absolutely, yes. A leader is at the center of any project that we're working on, and we're working closely with that leader. We're often working with that leadership team that reports to them, and even sometimes all the way down to the individual contributor level to help all of them embrace and enable a critical change.
I think it's a great question. Technology has changed a great deal across time. For example, one of the biggest problems that we had in the past was the technology didn't always work that well. And so a lot of resistance to change was founded and it's not working better than what's already there. And in some ways it's worse. But today technology actually works pretty darn well.
And so that's no longer at the root of the challenge. Initially, we worked most closely with IT functions because that's what I'd come out of. And that's who was really driving some of the initial change that had to come across an organization that had to change who people worked with and who they trusted and had to involve people letting go of a certain amount of control.
And so that is really where we initially were working. But across time, because our practice has grown entirely by referrals and repeat business, we would have business leaders who would go, I need to lead a lot of change in my business. For example, perhaps we've acquired another firm and the two leadership teams have not formed into one.
And so they're struggling with that change of integration and being more part of one and moving as one. And so now I would be working with the business leaders. Across time, IT split off. And so today we have information security or cybersecurity as typically a separate practice from IT in many organizations. And we also have digital transformation, which again is
It can be part of the IT leader's role, the CIO, or it can be a separate role depending on how the company is organized. One of the more recent areas that we've gotten more deeply into is that aspect of technology that drives the user experience across both consumer, business, both ends of the spectrum. That's been a real interesting space for us to work in because
Those chief experience officers have often end-to-end processes that include a great deal of technology driving the change, but it's all about getting the people to change how they work, how they think. In some cases, it radically alters and uplevels jobs.
such that a whole new set of soft and personal skills are required for people who used to spend all day making magic with the Excel spreadsheets. We really cut across the spectrum of leaders who are leading something that either is directly technical or technology has become a huge component of the business that they lead or the part of the business that they lead.
So it's a great question. The answer is yes, absolutely. And when I began coaching, it just barely existed. As they say, it wasn't a thing. There was a very small number of coaches in the world.
And many of the great ones worked at an organization called the Center for Creative Leadership, still in existence today, originally focused on helping leaders of nonprofits come together and grow as leaders and then expanded beyond into business. And my last boss in a real job, as I jokingly say, said, I need you to go off to this leadership school because we report up to HR every
You have a career trajectory upward here, but frankly, you don't get along well enough with HR people and you need to work on that. And so I'm sending you there to work on that. And it was an absolutely eye opening week. And so the coach who led our group was a coach of Olympic champions. She was a sports psychologist.
To this day, I still incorporate a great deal of sports psychology or what's now called performance psychology into my practice because athletes engage a coach because they want to win and leaders engage a coach because they want to win. Both of these people want high performance in themselves and in others. And that's why the coach is there, right?
Yes, coaching has a little bit of a therapeutic feel to it, but a coach is not a therapist paid for by the company. The coach is there to help you win at your goals. And in our case, those are largely goals that revolve around their capacity to continue to lead and change and transform businesses. So that coaching was absolutely instrumental to me. It was eye-opening.
because a good coach helps you face yourself and look at those flat sides and not just the ways in which you're great when you think about it it's largely high performers and people who are successful who get sponsored for coaching and so it becomes super important that the coach helps you see that what got you here won't necessarily get you where you want to be next and to really face yourself
And how you might be caught up or getting in your own way of that. And by extension, getting in others ways. Another type of coaching that's been extremely valuable to me because I had absolutely no background running a business or having a small business was hiring a business coach. Someone who was more of an advisor in their style coach.
and who specializes in small practices that are advisory and coaching, such as my own. So they have tremendous depth. And I think part of my takeaway from that is to some extent, a good coach can cross a lot of different areas from life coaching to leadership to specialized industries. It is helpful when your coach
has experience relevant to what it is you're trying to do and where you're trying to do it. Because that particular organization's ability to specialize in the type of business I lead has been enormously helpful to me. And it was one of the reasons that I decided to continue staying focused on leaders and particularly leaders who are leading change often
change that exists in part because technology is now available that enable things that couldn't happen before. It is very helpful to have your coach be specialized. Great.
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