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
who was having a highly unpopular initiative and frankly wasn't doing it in a very effective way and was triggering people all around him. And my client really, truly put himself in that person's shoes. In one meeting, I even had him speak as that individual to me so that he was completely in that guy's shoes and he was able to make his case
and build his argument in a way that was compassionate, right? That was not competitive. That wasn't even about this other guy. The end result was that my client was much happier day in and day out. He was much more successful.
Not only was he able to fend off this drive to cut costs, he was able to get the several million dollars additional funding that he needed to do that, the higher level headcount that he needed to add. He was able to slow his attrition
a great deal and get that under control and this is not something that would have come for him so quickly with such success he becomes the guy who has the boss's ear where he becomes the guy whose organization is turning around and performing how did he not really face that judge and that talk with saboteur and weaken them by calling them out
And then in this case, calling forth his empathy for someone who was, in his mind, incompetent. And to really deeply have empathy so that he's not trying to compete against this guy, but to just get the right thing done.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And we've had a couple of those. One that comes to mind had such a surprising conclusion in that what I came to recognize was that this leader fundamentally did not want to change and grow. And as a result, we would make a few steps forward and then a few steps back. Interestingly, that particular leader was very strong in some other areas.
And the individual that person reported to, I guess you could say, was my core client. actually concluded that he needed to go find a better opportunity for this guy. Because this guy was absolutely not going to change in his own style to what was needed there. And he wasn't going to change in his fundamental beliefs about what the strategy should be of that division.
And I learned a lot from that, from watching him, because he was an extraordinary role model of... not letting that judge and that hyperachiever neural network drive you to do something stupid, right? Instead of trying to force this guy to go along or to try to butt heads with him endlessly, he saw that he had tried that and it didn't work.
He actually went and advocated that this other man should head one of the most exciting new divisions that the company was creating. And this man did go over and do that. And he did lead that division in its early days quite well, because in part, he didn't need to change to lead that. He was already established. kind of reasonably well suited to it.
And so it was extremely enlightening to me because until my client made that decision and that commitment, we struggled. We really struggled. That team had been brought together through two acquisitions. That team was so far behind Vince.
They actually had worked very hard on two software releases that they had to literally cast aside because they fell so far behind because they did not move as one that the other technology leapfrogged it and it no longer was appropriate, right? It no longer fit with the company's other technology. So this was an organization that was in crisis and it was when
He was able to just recognize, hey, this is a failed exercise, right? We cannot bring this guy along to where we need to. And I'm going to stop trying. This was, by the way, about 20 years ago. And so I found myself really admiring and recognizing the joy of learning something about change from one of my own clients. Whereas usually I'm the one in the teacher's seat.
And I really learned deeply from that experience because me on that idealist, I never want to give up on anybody. And so it was so helpful for me to see someone willing to say, I think we need to give up on this.
this is not succeeding and we need to not judge the efforts that we made to make it succeed we need to find a totally different path here totally and completely different it was fantastic and so i eye-opening for me so eye-opening earlier you mentioned the do's and the domes when going through change
yes i think that there are a lot of parallels to bill bridge's model but something that you said there about his third his is you know unfreeze again his third and final stage is that you emerge with a new identity and i think that this is so vital for us as leaders to understand that when we are asking our people to make a significant change
they often do have a change in their fundamental identity or how they see themselves and it can be hard to recognize because often in the leadership role we already see them in that way if we didn't see that they had the potential collectively and individually
to make this change successful, we probably wouldn't have started down that path or we wouldn't have brought in some different people to lead them. So it is so vital to understand that change management is about hitting the target, right? Implementing the change on time, within budget, to a set standard.
But this can actually be much more profound for others than we recognize because they can come out of it with a new identity. Think of, for example, my clients who are financial analysts. Today, even just as recently as three years ago, the technology didn't really exist for them to spend the bulk of their time Truly advising senior business leaders on what they should be doing in the business.
They had very little time to say things like, hey, here's a market force that I see going on in Japan. And I think we need to focus 40% more of our sales effort there on this product line. No way. They were too busy being Excel jockeys, right? Today, that technology has come a very long way.
But what happens to someone who for 10 years has been spending most of their time, maybe not real happily, but spending most of their time just getting those numbers accurate? And now suddenly you are telling them that within a matter of months, those leaders are going to be able to press a button and see the data that you used to have put together for them.
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