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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Now, people who suffer from that problem often aren't aware that they're suffering from it, but also do not respond to coaching. And the politics that they drive are from a whole different place. And it is going to be extremely difficult in that environment to manage your way through the politics and to drive change. And that is one whole animal that is
It is just beyond the scope, I think, of what we could cover in this particular episode of the podcast. But the other driver, which I find much, much more common, is that politics exists because people have different needs and because people have different skill levels. And so someone who is particularly good at recognizing the needs of the people who wield the most power
is going to be better at figuring out how to get those people on board with the change, right? And so it becomes, so again, it's so funny that politics triggers our saboteurs make us want to defend ourselves, right? They are all about survival. But in fact, we circle right back to empathy because being able to understand
and empathize the competing needs of the many stakeholders involved in a change is the path forward. It is the path forward. You cannot move through the creative process that you need to have to construct that change in such a way that it meets multiple needs. You will not, without empathy, be able to bring together leaders who need to come together and who don't especially want to.
So, that, again, is the foundation. Above and beyond that, multiple steps, and maybe that's the subject for another podcast, but you will want to defend yourself against politics, but...
Opening yourself up to really putting yourself in the shoes of all of these people who seem to have power that perhaps you think they don't deserve is the foundation to understanding what's going on and to being able to navigate or, as I like to think of it, surf your way through those political waves and those choppy waters.
I always say my practice and the focus of this coaching practice was not something that I determined. It found me. And by that, I became an accidental change manager in the early nineties when I was just Jennifer from the IT training department. And I would get contacted because someone would want some technical training. And the very first project that I did at this company.
I was so excited because they said they're not adopting storing their work on the servers and they need some training. So I showed up ready with my pencil sharpened and I was waiting to hear the process and the manager driving that project listed the first three steps, which I wrote down and then he stopped. because that was the whole process. Vincent was three steps long.
Anyone with an engineering degree can execute a three-step process. And training really only helps you with learning how to do things that you can't do. And so with that, my colleague and I began digging into why on earth are they not executing this simple three-step process? And that was really the first change management type of project that found me.
Now, over the years, as I shifted back into my primary interest, which is really around people and organizations and the development of those, I kept finding that the change-related challenges kept finding me. And they were exhausting and I didn't want to do them because I didn't like conflict and change always involves some conflict.
And I wanted to get on a trajectory of doing something very stable and steady. And yet the things that came my way were all challenging changes where people were mad at each other, where people were feeling blue, where millions of dollars were sitting on the sidelines because large systems had not been implemented properly and were not really being adopted. And so it just kept coming at me.
And somewhere along the line, I came to recognize I've now been coaching leaders on change for so long that it's actually my specialty. And so the whole firm aligned around that. And that is really where we have our attention now. We always say our motto is we help leaders win at change.
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 had 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 flexible. 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,
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.
Showing 161–180 of 698 · page 9 of 35
← Previous
Next →