Change Leadership vs Management: What Humans Do Best

00:00:07 Mark Smith
Welcome to AI Unfiltered, the show that cuts through the hype and brings you the authentic side of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, Mark Smith, and in each episode, I sit down one-on-one with AI innovators and industry leaders from around the world. Together, we explore real-world AI applications, share practical insights, and discuss how businesses are implementing responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI. Let's dive into the conversation and see how AI can transform your business today. Welcome back to the AI Unfiltered Show. Today's guests are joining me from San Francisco, California in the United States. It's a lovely city. Let's get started. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

00:00:54 Jennifer Selby Long
Thank you very much, Mari. Glad to be here.

00:00:56 Mark Smith
Good to be talking to you. It's been a while since I've been in San Francisco. Is it still as beautiful as ever?

00:01:01 Jennifer Selby Long
It is quite beautiful. And today we have very gusty winds. So I'm happily looking at the view from inside my home, not walking around in it.

00:01:12 Mark Smith
Yeah. So do you have a view of the harbor or anything?

00:01:16 Jennifer Selby Long
We do We have a view of the bay and it's just a beautiful thing to wake up to. Very serene to wake up and look out at that bay every morning. Love it. Yeah, we feel very lucky.

00:01:29 Mark Smith
Can you see Alcatraz?

00:01:31 Jennifer Selby Long
Oh yeah, it's right in front of our apartment. Yeah, it's kind of the centerpiece of the view. Yeah, and then Angel Island rising up behind it. So pretty.

00:01:40 Mark Smith
Yeah. Lovely. Makes me nostalgic.

00:01:44 Mark Smith
All the most recent times I've been there is always just to touch down through the airport because being based in New Zealand, our connecting point is San Francisco or LA. And because I'm generally going to Seattle, it's San Francisco generally wins.

00:02:00 Jennifer Selby Long
So you touch down and then change planes and go right back up.

00:02:05 Mark Smith
Yeah. Too bad. I don't get out on those times, but I have a friend from when I was young, before I was married, and we're flatmates, and he went and he moved to San Fran and lived there illegally for a long, time. And then he married a lovely local lady, and they've got two girls that are probably just about to turn 20. So, and He's all legal now through all that. But he's been there for like maybe 25, 30 years. Wow.

00:02:43 Jennifer Selby Long
Oh, so cool.

00:02:44 Mark Smith
Yeah, I love San Francisco.

00:02:45 Jennifer Selby Long
So cool. Glad to hear it.

00:02:47 Mark Smith
Tell me about food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:02:51 Jennifer Selby Long
Oh my gosh. Well, food is so central to our existence. My husband and I are those people who are relishing the meal that we're eating. as we're discussing the next meal. So at breakfast, we're talking about lunch. And at lunch, we're talking about dinner.And at dinner, we're looking ahead to breakfast or, you know, who we're going to have over and what we're going to feed them. And one of our favorite phrases is a total non-sequitur, no matter what we're talking about, one of us will go, so speaking of food, start talking about food.

00:03:28 Mark Smith
I love it. I love it. I love it.

00:03:30 Jennifer Selby Long
Yeah. Family is relatively small. On my dad's side, our entire family reunion fits into less than one hotel. So the next one is going to be in Sonoma and the town, there's a town of Sonoma within the county of Sonoma. So that'll be a ton of fun for everyone. We're really looking forward to that. I'm lucky we have some family here. We have others up the coast and down the coast. So And then my extended family is a little more far-flung, but luckily, we're able to spend a lot of time with family because of that relatively close distance.

00:04:08 Mark Smith
Nice, And I take it with Sonoma that wine's on the menu then as well.

00:04:13 Jennifer Selby Long
Yeah, I think it will be. Yeah, I think so. I'm pretty optimistic about that.

00:04:19 Mark Smith
I think that's a pretty important ingredient.

00:04:21 Jennifer Selby Long
I agree wholeheartedly, and it'll be fun.

00:04:25 Mark Smith
We're three months into 2026, the world seems to be racing at breakneck speed. What's top of mind for you at the moment? What are you working on? What's your focus?

00:04:35 Jennifer Selby Long
What we're working on a lot today that cuts as a shared theme is really around emotional resilience from a lot of different angles. We spend most of our time working with leaders and leadership teams. And if they're not emotionally sound and solid, then the people who work for them, it's contagious. The emotional state of the leader is highly contagious to the team. And so we are spending quite a bit of time in that space from a lot of different angles. We also spend a lot of time, and this is current, but has been going on for probably all 29 years that I've had this practice, which is stakeholders.influencing stakeholders, aligning stakeholders, getting people on board. Our clients are almost all leaders, what I call leaders in technology, which is to say either they lead a large technical function, or they work for a technology firm, or they lead the technical function within a completely non-technical environment. And so they're driving a lot of change. And you can't really drive it by pushing it, right? You really need to understand those stakeholders and get those folks aligned. And let's face it, they're going through their own emotional journeys too. And so being able to connect with them where they are and get them to come to agreement and alignment with one another, that's a whole epic undertaking and an extremely important skill. And so those are probably the two areas where we spend the most time right now. Which is funny because I say our tagline is, we help leaders win at change and transformation. And yet those are the two parts that we work on more than anything lately and far less on the actual transformation strategy.

00:06:31 Mark Smith
Wow. Interesting, Some things that jumped out to me there. One was the leader's emotional state is contagious to the team. I feel that's so important. spent three years working at IBM recently. And what I noticed in big corporate organizations is that there doesn't seem to be any leadership anymore at any level. It seems to all be management. And management and leadership, I feel, are definitely not mutually exclusive. They're way different. And they're So how do you tackle that and how do you define leadership inside a corporate environment? Because it's not a title.

00:07:17 Jennifer Selby Long
It's definitely not a title for sure. And it is not management. And I say that to not disparage management. So when I think about management. So since we work in change a lot, let's look at change management, change leadership. Change management is about things like ensuring that whatever is new is completed by a certain date to a certain standard, that the people who will use it know how to use it. So it is the practical, factual side, and it's ensuring completion to a standard. And that is really important. If you cannot pull that off, Good luck to you on making your business successful, right? That is absolutely vital. And so I never want to sound like I'm disparaging how hard change management is or somehow trying to say it's easy. It's super, super hard even today. And I tell you, it has come a very long way since I became an accidental change manager as an IT training person. And I kept finding myself managing changes, but not because it was my job description. It was because as a trainer, I would go in there, and they would say, yeah, Selby, we need you on 27 to go meet with Ang about that new storage system. They're rolling it out. They need some training. Okay, got it. Up I would go, only to learn that the entire process was three steps. Now, come on, engineers can do any three-step process. So I would have to start reverse engineering this and going, if I give them training, nothing will change. And then they're going to think, who is that ding-a-ling from the training department? Why did anybody hire her? And so I had to dig a little and find out what was missing or what had not happened in the rollout that was causing engineers to not execute a woo, three-step process. And so I really would come back or I would be writing the training and I'd go, now, what does the user do Where does the user go to do this next task? And they go, oh crap, we didn't code for that. We'll be back. So it's my way of saying change management is really hard and it's super important. And so someone who wants to be a better leader, you're not even remotely off the hook for all of the responsibilities of change management as well and doing that well. When I look at leadership, this is the part where I still see the biggest gap. And it's why for many years now, we just kind of faded away with assisting organizations with managing change. We found that even though they work hard on themselves, our change management sucks. I go, oh, you haven't seen sucks. You're better than you think. Yes, can you do better? Of course, but you're better than you think. The gap that we were continuing to see that was significant, which is change leadership. So it's keeping people hopeful, inspired, right? Focused on the future while feeling some confidence that they have what it takes to get there and that the organization has what it takes to get there. It's being able to deal with massive, massive conflict and resistance. That goes with change leadership. It's being able to help people forge new relationships. Because when you're talking about business transformation or operational transformation, in many cases, multiple changes and transformations going on, that changes who you work with, right? That changes the people you have to now suddenly trust, who you hardly know. Or maybe in the past, they were part of that other group over there that you never liked much anyway, or thought much of, or thought were a bunch of incompetent ding-dongs. And so These are, this is the hard work of change leadership. It's the people side of it. And you and I were chatting earlier about, I think we both share the belief that as we go forward, the leadership element is what the human brings. Because the bot can do all the thinking faster than we can. And that's going to include an awful lot of elements of managing change. But leading, Your bot can't leave.

00:11:36 Mark Smith
Yeah. And that's what's, I feel, I've spent last year, my wife and I actually, and she's a change practitioner with Prosci, and I've been implementing software for 25 years. And when I learned about change, which was after 15 years of implementation, a light bulb came on so clearly for me, I can remember exactly where I was when I understood it. And then going into projects, that were incredibly complex. And getting that leader inside that organization onboarded as we're going to do a massive software transformation inside the organization, I noticed was the most critical element to affect massive change inside the organization. And I often tell us that it's a success story as three train companies, major train companies coming together under acquisition and then trying to get everybody to agree on who's right, who's wrong, whose definition of anything was a phenomenal process. And it's one of my stories that stands out. But I want to highlight that in the last year, I've been thinking a lot about what are the human skills that we have perhaps not leant into enough, that in the age of intelligence that we are moving headlong into, there are going to be key skills. And I think of one of them is critical thinking is going to be extremely important just to, not take everything that comes. But the other one is emotional intelligence in the, age of AI. Like how do we, that very, human element of us that connects with other humans that I don't see AI being able to do it in a hurry. I do believe it could ultimately get there. But how do you talk about that with the leaders that are looking at AI in the workforce? And part of that is understanding the fears that their workforce may have in regards to AI. You know, there's a lot of dystopian views around AI for all the utopian views and all the hype around it. What do you see?

00:13:55 Jennifer Selby Lon
So it's a big question. I think that There are several different elements at play here. One thing in terms of emotional intelligence that I think we're coming to understand better that has been really underemphasized over the years, interestingly, is calm, consistency, and stability in leaders. And it's funny because, you know, for years, Mark, years, We worked so hard to get leaders to themselves get more comfortable with change, was shaking things up, right? And that was a pretty colossal undertaking. Now, the technology world or universe in particular has over rotated toward disruption, change, it's just inherently good, change everything. Okay, there's going to be a lot changing in your people's lives. And one of the things that you can do as a leader that is actually now most helpful is to make sure you find your own grounding, your own stability, because they need you to be consistent. And by consistent, I don't mean consistent to one particular standard. Let me give an example. I have one client who is a stickler for details. I mean, if you have not really thought through it before you bring it to her and you are a director or a VP, oh, honey, I don't want to be in your shoes because she's going to find it right. And she's now what she does is she makes everybody better as a result of that. Her discernment is astounding. The thing that matters is that it's consistent. It's consistent. You know if you bring her something that's half baked, you better start with this is my initial thinking. I'm looking for your discernment. Now, by contrast, I have another client who is so big picture. The guy is so fast. The ideas just like come out of him to where I'm going. Let me hit record because I cannot even remotely keep up with this. And this is also very consistent. These people couldn't be more different, but what they bring to their organizations is personally. if you're going to go in to see that guy, it's going to be like, boom, an explosion of ideas, most of them brilliant, and it's like popcorn coming out. And as someone reporting to him, you're just looking to catch the best kernel and go, oh, that's the one, boss. That's the one right there. So It's that personal consistency and stability that's so important. Also cultivating inner calm. Now, I have to admit, I'm usually above petty jealousy, but I am, Mark, I am a little bit jealous of people who are born with the gift of calm. They've just got it. They come out as calm babies. They don't cry much. They sleep all night. They go on through life to be calm adults. They're calm leaders. Everyone knows it's like when I'm around this person, I'm going to feel calmer no matter how insane it is. That's not most of us. That's maybe less than 10% of the population. The rest of us have to learn how to cultivate that calm and that stability. Because again, the leader's emotions are very, very contagious. They're very leaky. Even when you think you're hiding them, ha ha ha, joke's on you. You're not. They can read you, right? And at the very least, they can read that you are feeling negative emotions, no matter how much you try to hide that. So cultivating that inner calm, if you're not just gifted with it, is a surprisingly vital foundational skill for leaders today. I don't know that I would have said that 10 or even 50, certainly not 15 years ago, because I felt like an awful lot of leaders were already pretty steady and pretty calm. They were meeting people's needs in that regard. The gap was there wasn't enough push for the changes that were needed. And usually I was in there because there was a competitor coming up on their heels or starting to eat their lunch. Sorry, I use a lot of metaphors. And so there was a recognition, right? Gosh, we have to get a lot more comfortable with large-scale change and with making big changes and embracing that. doing that big acquisition and then having to integrate those two leadership teams into one and all those things that were big changes. Today, I would say the change is coming at you, even if you didn't initiate it. And so the best thing you can do for your team and actually also for your peers who are also your team, every bit as much as those who report to you, it's to cultivate that calm and that stability. And would you like a couple of tips or thoughts on that?

00:18:53 Mark Smith
There's 2 things in what you said. One was Groundedness.

00:18:58 Jennifer Selby Long
Yes.

00:18:59 Mark Smith
And I would like to know how you take somebody on a journey to groundedness. Because it's almost like, I feel like it's not something you learn, it's something you be. And I don't know, I assume there's learning in it, but, and then, and then let's take that one first. And then the second one is the calmness. How do you take somebody that probably we seem to see a lot of ADHD in the workforce these days, a lot of, people that are full on. And I definitely know what you mean about when you encounter somebody that's calm and not bothered.They are even keeled, to use the metaphors, right? As in, but how do you cultivate that? What's the advice? And I assume it's a habit building process that it's not a, I'll just learn this bit of knowledge and you're done, you've got it. What's the journey you take people on?

00:19:57 Jennifer Selby Long
So we use a couple of different frameworks that we found very helpful for that. And by the way, if you have any executive coaches listening, I'm going to say the biggest mistake most coaches make is they try to go straight to something like grounding, calm. But you actually have to start with what's the business goal, because that's what matters to the individual. Most of these leaders are not reading emotional intelligence books very often. They're not working in that space very much. So this is often kind of the first time that they've really taken that, stuck their big toes in the deep end of what we would broadly call self-awareness. So one framework that we like a lot, if you've ever done the Myers-Briggs type indicator, you'll recognize a version of that framework, which is union psychology, and also temperament theory, which is a complementary piece. It helps people get some clarity around what is likely to stress them out and to come to recognize that that's not a universal stressor. right? That's unique to them and people who are similar to them. But to understand that and to understand the techniques to calm your own stress and to recognize it when it's coming and to recognize it in others who are different from you, to pick up those different signals, right? To adapt the way you interact with them, to adapt the way you involve them in a conversation is a very practical tool. And it's also not something that feels so heavy to leaders who don't usually work in this space a lot. So I think that's a really solid one. We see tremendous improvement and results with people just really focusing in on that. And that is particularly true when you do that with a group of leaders, right? It is really powerful with a group because they're living examples for one another. And they can talk live with the coach in the room and say, oh, yeah, So that's what stresses you out. And this is why. So here are the things I can do. And so you're spending time essentially working on the problem of leadership team effectiveness or optimization. And you just happen to be using this framework that, oh, by the way, it gives you insights into yourself. But it isn't so scary. it isn't so woo-woo, it isn't so strangely out there. And so I find it's particularly with technology leaders, it's easier for you folks to embrace that one than some of the other things. Now, that's a nurture model. If you're at all familiar with Jung, he said, essentially, you're probably born with certain preferences, certain neural networks that light up first, and the others get developed throughout your lifetime. But the preferences kind of come first. And so that's more of a, it's a nature model. Correspondingly, there's a nurture model that we find extremely helpful. We look at sports psychology meets neuroscience meets positive psychology. And so what do I mean by that? You have certain neural networks and everybody has these, right? They are called saboteur neural networks, so nicknamed by Dr. Sherzad Shamin. And he really did us all a great favor by coming up with these little snappy nicknames for these neural networks. So if I tell you, sounds like your avoider neural network is lighting up in this conversation, you know what I mean by that. I don't have to show you a photo of the neural network and explain how it works. You just know, oh, I am avoiding, aren't I? And by separating out this idea of your neural networks and naming them, you begin to be able to sort of step back and more objectively assess your behavior. So you can say, oh, that's my judge. My judge is not helpful here. My judge is telling me he's tremendously helpful and that I can't survive without him, but that's a lie. And so by getting more aware of what is essentially negative self-talk, you become increasingly calm because we teach you how to break that. that cycle to break those thoughts. And then we teach you how to leverage what Dr. Chameen calls your sage neural networks, which are the ones that help you more with exploration, curiosity, empathy, decisive action, all of these things that are actually more helpful in leadership and in leading change.

00:24:39 Mark Smith
Have you got any, without naming names, examples of where you've taken a leader on this journey and kind of what were the timelines, timeframes, what were the touch points that were involved?

00:24:52 Jennifer Selby Long
Sure, So one of my all-time favorites some was now, I guess, three years ago, brand new CISO. First time CISO, he was so excited to be a CISO. He changed industries to do it. He went from a heavily regulated industry, banking, to a very lightly regulated industry, to say the least, media, media, journalism, entertainment. Two ends of the spectrum. And he shows up on the scene and he knew that cyber was not in good shape when he took the job. He didn't really realize how bad it was. First and foremost, he had a 40% attrition rate that he was walking into. Not 14, 4-0. 4-0.That's a huge problem. It's a huge problem. Those that were there were largely scrambling to take orders from the business. There was no coherent strategy. Okay, got it. Okay, it's worse than I thought, but this is still something that I think I can handle. When I started working with him, it was when he learned that his group, Cyber, which reported up to technology, but had nothing to do with end particularly. He learned that this group had been swept up in a massive cost cutting initiative led by a major global consultancy. And he was supposed to cut 20% of his budget. And he's saying, I need 40% more because I have to replace all these people who have left, well, not all, but I have to replace some of them in key roles. And the reasons a lot of them left is that they weren't actually skilled to do the job as it now demands and will demand. So I'm going to have to replace them with higher skilled people. And oh, by the way, this company's been really underpaying anyway. So he had this huge problem. He hardly knew anyone. He had no relationships there. And guess who triggered him? The guy who'd been hired in full time as a peer from the consultancy that was driving this cost cutting project. So we started working from day one on recognizing the saboteur. What's the saboteur telling you? Taking him through exercises to break that saboteur, stop the thoughts, and activate his sage, including a pretty long visualization for the sage in which he saw himself In the future, in the backyard, flipping burgers wearing a Hawaiian shirt. And so that might seem like it has nothing to do with this. But in fact, getting centered through that process allowed him to do something that we both agreed was absolutely vital. You cannot let this guy trigger you. Otherwise, it's going to be you against him. And guess who's been there longer? Guess who has the relationships? You're going to lose. And this whole thing is going to go down the drain. You cannot lead an effective function with a 20% budget cut. It's not going to happen. And so he knew that. And so we went through these exercises over about two months. We met about every other week. And he went from the threat of this to actually getting the full budget that he wanted. So the payoff of his investment in this emotional intelligence was millions of dollars. literally millions of dollars for the function. He was able to do then what he needed to do in the function. And sort of the cherry on the sundae was that the guy who'd been leading the cost-cutting initiative left or was asked to leave, and so the thorn in the side left. Now, if he had gone head-to-head and tried to compete, very competitive guy, if he'd gone head-to-head and tried to compete with this guy, it wouldn't have gone well. And I could see that from where I sat. It was going to be Sabateur Neuro Network against Sabateur Neuro Network. No one wins. That's just ugly. And certainly no one was going to win, but he was going to lose a lot worse than the other guy. And so over a couple months time, because he was game to just dive in and do it, we were able to do that turnaround. So does that help?

00:29:19 Mark Smith  
Yeah, definitely, Tell me. Because we're at time.

00:29:22 Jennifer Selby Long
Oh my God.

00:29:23 Mark Smith
What is the, yeah, it goes so quick, right? What books do you recommend if leaders are listening to this and go, you know what, this is something that I've identified in myself that I need to work on? Is there any key things, you know, recommendations to redo on the back of this?

00:29:46 Jennifer Selby Long
On the reading front, one of the books that I have liked quite a lot, I've got it right up here, Ashley Goodall's book, The Problem with Change. I found it very refreshing that someone would write about the problems of change versus yet another book going, Disrupt, how to change, be successful. We know how to change. It's a big, rough journey, right? I like that someone wrote a book calling out the problems, right? The problem. Along with a few suggestions, particularly around nurturing your stability and consistency. There are a number of studies that I've come across. They're not books, but we are seeing more evidence around the need for leaders to maintain their own grounding and calm. But I haven't found any books that are specific to that or would show you evidence of that at this point in time. I think Shirzad Shamin's book, Positive Intelligence, it's pretty good. It certainly captures This model that I've been talking about, where you have saboteur neural networks and sage neural networks, and I think that it's pretty solid for that. So, those would be probably a couple that I would start with, if you're looking to read, and also to plug our little website, I have about 120 blog posts up. So you can just search by your change-related subject. And it's not a book, but you can get a little, tight little blog post with some very specific concrete tips for what to do if you find yourself in a given situation. To this day, my most popular post in history was how to handle an ineffective boss. And doesn't that tell us a lot?

00:31:35 Mark Smith
Yeah, wow, wow. We're going to get all those in the show notes. We'll put links to the two books and also your site. And even let's highlight that most successful post because it just triggered me on a whole bunch of history. I think that it's been brilliant talking to you, Jennifer. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights.

00:32:00 Jennifer Selby Long
My pleasure. Thanks so much, Mark. Appreciate it.

00:32:03 Mark Smith
You've been listening to AI Unfiltered with me, Mark Smith. If you enjoyed this episode and want to share a little kindness, please leave a review. To learn more or connect with today's guest, check out the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next time, where we'll continue to uncover AI's true potential one conversation at a time.