Episode 28: Leading With Emotional Intelligence, Feat. Shannon Cohen – Part 1

Andrew: Hey, everybody. Welcome to “Ten Thousand Feet.” Today, OST’s president and CEO, Meredith Bronk interviews entrepreneur and innovator, Shannon Cohen in the first of a two-episode series. This first episode focuses on emotional intelligence in a pandemic and what that means for leaders right now.

Shannon is an entrepreneur, online retailer, author of “Tough Skin, Soft Heart,” a gifted innovator and advisor, who helps leaders thrive at the intersection of joy and purpose. She has a unique way of not speaking to leaders, but instead speaking into them. We’re very excited to welcome Shannon on to “Ten Thousand Feet,” and we know you’ll get a lot out of it. Enjoy.

Meredith: So good morning to you, Ms. Shannon Cohen. I’m so glad you’re here.

Shannon: Good morning, Meredith. It’s a joy to be with you this morning.

Meredith: So, hey, first I want to ask you, as you prompted in one of your podcasts, how are you really? How are you today?

Shannon: I love that you said that, you know, we talk often about the fact that leaders don’t get asked “how are you?” Very often we ask that of others, but we don’t ask ourselves that, so being asked how are you as a—is a vulnerable question if you think about it. It is an emotional health and mental health diagnostic question. It invites us to do a head to heart assessment, head to toe, and to go depth—into the depth of ourselves to ask how we’re doing. So I think when I do a head to heart assessment of where I am a kind of like a circling in and a checking in, I think I woke up today with joy in my heart.

Meredith: Absolutely.

Shannon : I think sunshine just helps with that. I woke up with some questions about some of the things that we are looking to pilot. There’s some strategic initiatives we’re considering as an organization. And then I also still woke up with some sadness connected to inequities and disparities, racial inequities and disparities that aren’t in front of us, and how we’re thinking from a system’s perspective of response.

Meredith: Yeah. The coexistence of sadness and joy, right?

Shannon: Absolutely.

Meredith: That lives in us.

Shannon: In the same space.

Meredith: All at the same time. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and it’s funny that you say that, ‘cause when I think about that as leaders, right, we are both wives and mothers and daughters and sisters and leaders, and I think about that with each hat that we wear, it’s impossible to remove the others. We are whole beings, right? I bring my whole self to work, whether I’m presenting as the CEO or presenting as a mother to one of my teenage daughters, I am a whole being, and just as it’s impossible for us to kind of take off those hats, right, it’s same as true for the people that were called to lead. So paying attention and kind of serving the whole is, right now, is imperative as ever, right? COVID-19 has like prompted new work styles and juggling the home and work aspects, it’s highlight a huge spectrum of individual needs. It’s remarkable to me when you talk to folks where they live on a spectrum of, you know, hey, I’m good. I’m just doing my thing. This—I was made for, you know, I was made for being at home for 90 days versus I’m really, really struggling. I’ve been personally impacted. I haven’t been personally impacted. There’s this just the slew, and as leaders, given that huge disparity, we are called even more to kind of tune in to the overall needs of our teams.

You do a lot of work in the kind of emotional intelligence space and talk about speaking into leaders. As you talk to leaders right now, kind of what’s been happening out there, what are you seeing, kind of where are the gaps? What are you seeing as it relates to that kind of overall emotional intelligence that we’re called to bring right now?

Shannon: I love something that you just said, Meredith, you said, “I am a whole being,” and that resonates with me, because many of the client organizations that I’m serving right now, they’re talking about safe reopening, right? That’s the buzzword.

Meredith: Yes.

Shannon: How do we open back our work environments in a safe way? But when we think about safety, when we dive deeper to think about how folks are thinking about that, much of our conversation has been rooted in PPE kits.

Meredith: Yeah.

Shannon: So we see these, you know, companies that are passing out hand sanitizer kits. Cushman & Wakefield did something that was really interesting, probably in like April, they started to share these 3D holographic videos of a redesigned workspace with six feet of distance and redesigning cubicles and what it would look like if you come off the elevator and going into different spaces and having markers on the floor and, you know, plastic protection around, you know, around workspaces, and so there’s been a lot of focus on the physical redesign to promote safety, but the gap is no one’s talking about whole person health—

Meredith: Right.

Shannon: and what it means to build a safe space when you think about psychological safety. There’s been this almost assumption that people are going to return to our workplaces in June, July, August, September, as they were when they left in March.

Meredith: Right.

Shannon: And we are not the same. We are not the same. You know, we have homeschooled our children this year, we have gone through funerals by Facebook and Zoom or in our cars. You know, we’ve seen people battle isolation and loneliness. There’s racial battle fatigue. There is now more attention to invisible illnesses when we’re thinking about folks that may not be ready to return to the office and the vulnerability of having to disclose having an invisible illness or predisposed condition. We’re starting to see people navigating the realities of being cut off from coping strategies, whether that was their favorite barbershop to their favorite restaurant or brewery. You know, we have coworkers that are still navigating the fact that we’ve had to connect via Zoom, and so we’ve had to invite our coworkers into our sacred spaces.

Meredith: Right.

Shannon: And we have college students, which, you know, these college students that are, you know, these adults that have had to come home and their lives disrupted, right? And so all of these nuances are all around us. We’re still having in reality, you know, furlough, and many client organizations that are understanding that maybe furloughs will be more permanent than they expected going in.

Meredith: Yup.

Shannon: And even the reality of people, you know, there’s data that says that 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, but this COVID experience has also taught us that there were businesses living, quote unquote—

Meredith: Yeah.

Shannon: paycheck to paycheck.

Meredith: Absolutely.

Shannon: And so we believe businesses close. We’re going to see a rise in evictions. We’re not done and we’re not out of the woods with this yet. And all of that is going to converge in our offices. So the one thing that I’ve been helping the clients that I serve to think about is creating safe spaces is not just in the physical landscape that you design, but we need to look at our policies, our practices, our procedures, and our systems behavior through a psychological safety lens and an equity lens to reimagine what your staff, what your team is going to need in order to be productive in pandemic, because we’re not out of pandemic yet.

Meredith: Right. And we’re likely not going to be for quite some time. You know, one of the things that’s interesting that I think about is, in some ways, it’s a privilege to be able to work from home. It’s a privilege to be able to have maintained employment, and so our team, you know, we don’t take that for granted, but it also creates this then I must never walk away from my computer or laptop, then I must, like, I hold almost white knuckled onto that reality either it’s, you know, guilt or gratitude or loyalty or whatever that creates also it’s like, I think that’s another dynamic that we’re trying to navigate in saying, take time if you need the time, but people aren’t taking it, they don’t know how, they don’t really feel like they can, even though when you tell them that they can. So trying to change systems that give even greater permission is something that we’ve been trying to get creative with.

Shannon: Absolutely. I think more and more we see people that are navigating performance anxiety, right? Like I need to prove that I’m working—

Meredith: Yeah.

Shannon: to prove, because there is so much uncertainty around job security. There’s so much uncertainty, so it’s like I let me over-function—

Meredith: Yeah.

Shannon: overproduce, so that I can position myself as an indispensable part of this team, so that I’m not let go.

Meredith: Yes.

Shannon: You know, it’s the many ways that anxiety and fear, which are natural responses in seasons of uncertainty, it’s we are all in some way, in some area, real and perceived, visible or invisible operating in the fog.

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : Right?

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : We don’t know what’s going wrong, and what we’ve been through has scared us.

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : Right?

Meredith : Yeah.

Shannon : And so we’re trying to marry those two together.

10:16 Meredith : It’s crazy. And the uncertainty is—can be difficult to manage. You know, we set out and kind of told our teams that we’re not going to look at, hey, we really probably need to figure out how to get back all together until the fall. And we made that decision a little while ago, a lot because we have parents of small children who have been homeschooling and wearing, you know, lots of hats and it’s like I didn’t—we didn’t want the additional anxiety of at what point in time am I going to have to figure out how to differently manage these places and spaces in my life? And so to give a little bit of space kind of to that consideration, which feedback says was a little bit helpful, but there’s still this, okay, so what happens in September? So what happens—what happens next? What’s that going to look like? We don’t know yet what schools are gonna look like. We don’t know yet. We don’t—we don’t know yet.

Shannon : We don’t, we don’t, and I think that’s the reality. I think that many of us are used to navigating crisis risk and disruption just not everywhere. It’s like the dam broke—

Meredith : Yeah.

Shannon : and it used to be, it’s like I can handle crisis risk and disruption at work, but I need stability at home, and that happens maybe through my children going to school or, you know, it happens because I have someone that helps me to give care to an elder in my life. You know, we can compartmentalize. There is no compartmentalizing. Emotional tucking is gone—

Meredith : Yeah.

Shannon : Right, I am showing up with everything that I carry and my whole being at work, even the messy places, and it’s messy, right?

Meredith : Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is.

Shannon : It’s messy.

Meredith : What do you see—one of the things as we open our homes, if you will, every—our life via Zoom or Teams or whatever that, you know, virtual presences that we’re bringing, there’s also some risk that comes with, you know, hey, I have dogs at home. I have kids that want my attention. How do you see that impacting people’s choice in how they work and what they choose to do? There’s potentially, I think, some built-in inequities in some of that as well, as we have different outside pressures. Each of us have kind of a difference there. What’s some of the—what do you see in there? What’s your take kind of on that?

Shannon : Yeah. You know, I think that some of the things that I see, I remember there was a care circle that I was doing for an organization, a client organization, and someone said this very candidly, they said, “You know, before March 9th, now they’re calling us heroes, and essential workers”—

Meredith : Yeah.

Shannon : but she said, “Before March 9th, I was a sacrificial worker. You know, I was paid like a sacrificial worker. I was under insured, so I was insured like the sacrificial worker, and now they’re reframing it as if I’m an I’m a hero, but it feels like a PR.” And that’s something we’ve had to wrestle with, because we never would have, you know, society is not set up to call the person that checks us out at the grocery store or the person that is over nutrition services at a hospital heroes.

Meredith : Right.

Shannon : Right? And I think that I hope that we carry that cognizance with us into this new future of work. And you talked about choice and I think that is one of those things where I honor and I recognize that, in some ways, we have to, as a system, as a human system, honor and acknowledge the ways that, for some of us, our privilege bumps up against someone else’s oppression.

Meredith : Absolutely.

Shannon : Right? It is not lost on me that we—that some of us get to work from home and we have flexible work agreements. That’s not everybody’s reality or situation. So even though it’s uncertain, that’s not everyone’s reality. You know, I think about the fact that I’m a transplant to West Michigan, so I don’t have family close by. I don’t have grandparents that can, you know, step in or siblings, I don’t have that reality as part of my family reality. And so I think that one of the things that emotional intelligence helps us to do is, first, to be self-aware, but then once we’re self-aware, it allows us to apply that same lens of empathy towards others, and to begin to use some design thinking to design for the different ways people are situated in pandemic. And so I think that’s righteous that you’re thinking that through to say, okay, we know there’s still some uncertainties, we see that in our community of OST in one predominant way through working parents, so we’re going to maybe give you the early weeks of September, which are crazy anyway, you know—

Meredith : Right.

Shannon : adjusting back from a summer schedule to a school schedule. We’re going to give some grace in that space to help you figure it out, right?

Meredith : Right.

Shannon : I think that’s the type of marrying of psychological safety with emotional intelligence with equity, and I think that’s the type of thinking that those companies and systems that are going to remain visible, valuable, and vocal into the near future, that’s going to make you the best place to work.

Meredith : Yeah. Yeah. And it’s maintaining that and in the middle of all that, the thing that’s running through my mind is choice. It’s like if there’s a sense of empowerment that even in you have till September, but we also have a large part of our workforce who live alone, who are single with no kids, so it’s like, we also want to provide the opportunity, so we opened our doors. We’re available to come into the office for folks who want to just in the last week or two, but creating that choice is also empowering and helps to take away some of that uncertainty that I think has been liberating. But interestingly, I’ll tell you this, for me, I was a—I’m a work in the office as CEO. I live, love to see and feel, and just kinda keep a finger on the pulse of what’s happening around us, and connect with people in and around OST. It’s probably the part of my job that I love the most. And so being separated has been hard for me as a leader, and it’s like, you balance this—you—I’m trying to navigate the I need to be confidently talking about where we’re going and what we’re doing and how we’re handling this, at the same time authentically acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers, so balancing all of that when my normal kind of bucket filling being around people is also not possible. So my energy is drained, it’s sapped, and it’s like, whoa, man, trying to find a way to navigate all of that. And you get through it. I’m coming back to work, which I love, and then I decided last week, Thursday, I had like three or four hours in my calendar that meetings had canceled and I was working from home. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and I’m like, I’m going to go sit outside, I’m going to take some stuff to read, and to think, and to just consume, and I’m going to go sit outside in this warm, beautiful Michigan sunshine that we don’t get very often, and I’m going to go just kind of take a break and do that. And I sat for probably two and a half hours, and while I sat—guilt, about should I be next to my computer? What if somebody needs me? Are people gonna think that I’m not doing, pulling my part? And I’m like, I’m a CEO and it’s like that tug is real at even through this pandemic, when I feel like how do we give the grace that we would want to give someone else to be able to also take that for us and take good care of ourselves? It’s hard.

Shannon : But I think you said something, Meredith, that is powerful. I think one of the things that I’ve been saying starting with myself, but saying this to client organizations is that even in pandemic, we are still being tasked to innovate, to create, to strategize, to imagine, right? And you can’t do that on an empty well.

Meredith : Yeah.

Shannon : And so one of the things that I have been doing in my own life is I recognize that I need to ingest nutritional information—

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : resources, content that inspires—

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : the creative and the innovator in me. So you talked about a little bit about COVID and the impact, and I remember when all of the, you know, there were federal PPP loans coming out and some grants coming out, and then there started to be stats that came out that talked about that, you know, many of the, you known, businesses that were owned by people of color we’re not getting those dollars. I remember saying to myself, “I’m done applying.” I got applied to like one or two, and then I said, “I’m done.” And I called our team together and I said, “We’re going to use the innovation and the creativity of this team to make sure that no one on this team is furloughed and to create our own wind.” And my team is all women, 80% of whom are women of color, and there’s family connected there, and I know you carry that weight, too. And that’s what we decided to do. So in order to do that, I recognize like, okay, I said it, then I’m like, “Oh dear. How do you do this?” And so every day I make sure that I ingest three things, something that is inspirational, something that is aspirational, and something that is instructional. Doing that every day fuels the creator, the innovator, the strategist, and the business thinker in me. So it could look like idle time, but it’s not—

Meredith : Right.

Shannon : because the more that I feed that part of me, I’m able to imagine, create, and ideate. And so when you describe what you did, I’m like, that’s righteous work, because you are tasked to be a strategist, an innovator—

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : an ideator, and people are still coming to you for that, even though you’re in pandemic, right?

Meredith : Yeah.

Shannon : And so I think that that is—we have to give ourselves grace and space to continue to be learners, to be inspired, and to see something that we can aspire to, and we need all of that.

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : Other piece is just recognizing that even the most basic behaviors and activities feel different in pandemic. And the way I’ve been explaining this is I have, you know, I have a six year old son and he loves to download apps on and games onto my cell phone.

Meredith : Yup.

Shannon : So he has this one soccer game that he loves to play and I can give him my phone and it will be at 80% battery life. After 30 minutes of playing the soccer game, I promise you, my phone is at like 16%, and I’m like, “How does this one little game drain so much battery life?” And I think that’s what’s happening with us, you know, just this—the constant pressures of what’s happening environmentally in our communities, in our world, and the constant pressures that come with that, depending on how we’re positioned, it drains our battery faster.

Meredith : Yes. Indeed.

Shannon : And so it’s like, man, I’m—some things I’m still doing that I did before, but geez, I’m tired. It’s like 1:30 and I’m exhausted, right?

Meredith : Already.

Shannon : We’re doing—we’re not just being productive, we’re being productive in pandemic. And I think we have to constantly keep those three words together, because we have to recognize then that I need to recharge my battery more. And we carry laptop chargers and phone chargers—

Meredith : Right.

Shannon : with us all the time. And I remember probably about maybe three weeks ago, I said, “Man, I’ve been keeping this laptop way more charged than I’ve been keeping this human’s soul,” and I need to rethink that. So I think what you did, you just kind of tapped into so many emotional intelligence truth, like, I need to reenergize, I need to acknowledge that it’s one o’clock and I’m exhausted—

Meredith : Yes.

Shannon : and I could keep looking at this screen, but I won’t be productive, right? And if I recharge, maybe I can come back fired up and ready to go.

Meredith : Absolutely. Absolutely. I was way more prepared for what was in store the rest of the afternoon than I would have been if I had stayed sitting in the office, hands down, hands down, which I think is interesting, because we laid out our strategies. Our fiscal year starts April 1st, and we kicked off our fiscal year kind of mid pandemic. And so we’ve been talking about what are the strategies that we thought we were going to come into this year with and execute this year versus what are the strategies that are now kind of front and center for us? What changes, how do you reprioritize, where are you going to focus your resources, right? We’re asking ourselves all those questions and needing to innovate and move and ideate and manage organizational change from afar and in a distributed environment. I’m curious for you, as a business leader, what—how has your business kind of moved or changed in this pandemic world? Have you had an impact and had that kind of get creative in how you survive?

Shannon : We’ve actually grown, which has been—

Meredith : Yay!

Shannon : interesting, and I’m thankful for that. I think that day that we drew the line in the sand and we said we are not—I could use—’cause those—the grant and loan applications are exhausting. They’re exhausting. And I just said, “No. Mm-mm. We’re not going to do this.” Now, I have to preface this by saying that one of the things that I’ve always had as a practice is I’ve always kept an innovations folder where there are sometimes I get ideas, and I’m pretty sure you and your team as well, where you get ideas and you’re like, mm, you may not have the capacity right now, but not now doesn’t mean never—

Meredith : Right.

Shannon : you know, and so it may be a not now or not yet, but how do we put this idea into an innovation queue to explore what’s possible?

And probably about two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, I just said that, you don’t have to be the size of an Apple to have a research and development arm to what you do. I think small businesses need to have an R&D arm, too, some ways that you’re tinkering. You know, we need a tinkering lab, a way that we’re tinkering with our own ideas, our own concepts, because we don’t know when we will have the opportunity when opportunity will meet ideation, and we can put this out into the market.

Meredith : Yup.

Shannon : So March 9th, I think everybody has a day where COVID got real to them. March 9th was my day, because that was the last day of school. And, so I remember March 9th happening and with the, specifically, the retail line of our business, which is the greeting cards that we do, the portable affirmation side, we’ve historically grown that through wholesale retail partnerships. Well, all, but two, of our partners closed on March 9th.

Meredith : Wow.

Shannon : So that was a drastic impact to that line of our business. And so there had been an idea that we have been cultivating. We serve busy people. So much of our clientele are typically women that are in high visible roles, high visibility roles, they are women that are always on the go in their homes, their marketplaces, and in their communities, and so we’re always thinking as one of the problems that we saw of how do we make their load light? And so one of the ideas that we had was to come out with—we were playing around with is it a stationary subscription service or is it a letter writing service? Like, these women want to show up for birthdays and celebrations and retirements and anniversaries or, you know, when someone has a loss, but they will be so busy that it’s like, I don’t have the time to go find the card, put the right words in the card, go purchase stamps, and go mail it. So either I’m not sending something at all and then I’m feeling bad about it or it’s so late, it’s so belated that I feel bad anyway. And so that was an idea that we had in the queue that we just didn’t think we had the human capacity to do at the time. And we pulled that idea out, because with COVID we were distanced, and we said, how do we help our clients go from being, you know, we’re distanced, but we don’t have to be disconnected. So we launched our “Affirmailtions” service, which is what we called it. You just send us a name and an address, and we would do the rest. We pick the car for you, we craft the message for you, we send it for you, we send you the photo, you get the credit, you get to love, we do the work, and we launched that on March 23rd. So in 14—

Meredith : Wow.

Shannon : days from having all of our partners close just with two stores, and those two stores had such limited foot traffic, and people were afraid—

Meredith : Right.

Shannon : that people weren’t shopping, and if you were going shopping, you were not shopping for greeting cards, you were getting bathroom tissue and Lysol, you know, you are not getting cards, and it revolutionized everything. We started to get so many more corporate orders is corporations wanted to send notes of care to their staff teams, and people would reach out and say, “I cried. I wept when I got this.” So I have, you know, family that lives away or I have someone that was diagnosed with COVID or I can’t go to this funeral and I want to send love, I mean, or birthdays, I mean, think about how many birthdays we couldn’t—

Meredith : Yeah.

Shannon : we’ve just weren’t able to participate in. And so I think for me, that experience has taught me the power of, you know, believing in our ideas, creating space for ideation no matter what size you are, whether you’re an individual to incorporation, and having an innovations folder somewhere that you have your own lab or you’re cultivating ideas—

Meredith : Yup.

Shannon : because we just never know when the market will meet an idea. And who knows, you know, now, stores are reopening. Many of our partners are reopening and the “Affirmailtions” component of what we do has slowed down, but I—that will always be something that I take from this experience.

Meredith : Yeah, I love the discipline, even in the innovations folder that you’ve had that discipline going into this pandemic situation that we’re in, allowed you to grow, allowed you to kind of to reach into that. We’re seeing that same thing with some of our clients and their strategies. The ones who had good discipline ahead of time are doing a pretty good job, kind of, they’ve got a strong foundation to go back to, and the ones who are like, “Oh, we should innovate,” like, yeah, innovating in the middle of a crisis, if you haven’t—if you don’t have the muscle for it is hard thing to do. So that’s a fun story and I love your “Affirmailtions,” by the way.

Lizzie Williams: OST, changing how the world connects together.