Transcript: From Jerk Stresser to Emotional Intelligence Guru for Construction

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number six. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. My name is Brittany Campbell-Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. My goal is to help property owners foster trusting relationships with your design and construction team. To ensure risk in your construction project be under budget and unscheduled and ensure that your end user's desires are exceeded.

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me today. I'm so excited to bring to you this interview I had at the Lean Construction Institute Congress in Boston. Get a sense of Brent Darnell's journey to becoming a coach to get construction project teams to have less stress, better life balance, lose weight, have productivity go up, and get people working at peak level performance mentally, physically, and emotionally. Without further ado, here's my interview with Brent Darnell.

So I'm at the LCI, Lean Construction Institute Congress in Boston right now and I'm pretty excited about this interview with Brent Darnell. He completed a presentation a little bit earlier but I wanted to have the opportunity to just speak to him and ask him a little bit about what he's doing to have this profit of connection. He is the international bestseller of the People Profit Connection, president of Brent where he is providing training and consulting in a very incredible way. He helps technical minded people understand and better utilize emotional intelligence to reach their highest potential.

Without further ado, welcome Brent Darnell to the Constructor Podcast. Thanks Brittany. It's good to be here. Great. So to begin with, could you tell me a little bit about how you started in your journey to becoming the emotional intelligence guru for technically minded people?

Well I grew up in the construction business and I'm a mechanical engineer by education and I guess the biggest part of this journey for me has been a personal one because I think I'm sort of a recovering jerk. Like sort of had that engineer got to be right about everything, condescend, put people down kind of an attitude which is really prevalent in the industry I think. That sort of that alpha male domination thing and it was a journey on my own that I kept seeing that the really successful people were the ones that didn't do that, were the ones that really had great people skills and could motivate and could connect in different ways.

And so I had this opportunity to do a leadership development program for Skanska and did it and loved it and saw that there was a huge need out there for these technical guys to really cultivate more of the people skills and soft skills and that was what the differentiator was for really successful people. So I did that for a couple of years with Skanska and then started my own business and that was 13 years ago. So it's been a great journey for me and I think I've improved.

My wife might disagree. Maybe she has some other opinions about that but I think I've improved the way I interact with people and that's been great on every level, personal, professional. It just helps in every way. How do you feel that that training impacted the people that you actually brought through the program? Did you see the same change in them that you saw in yourself?

It's amazing. It's life changing for many and just as much personal as professional but they not only become better leaders but they're better wives and they're better fathers and husbands and they're better human beings and to be able to, the first question I had in my mind was can you teach this stuff and you absolutely can. These emotional competencies are teachable, learnable skills but it's more like learning to play a musical instrument or learning a language. It takes a lot of time and repetition. You can't just do an afternoon and be totally done with your emotional work.

It's a lifelong learning. It's a lifelong process. I think that gives a lot of hope to those of us who come up through the engineering or technical side of the industry and I think it speaks a lot to just how we can move away somewhat from just the traditional approach for doing things. There's a lot of talking down silo mentality, a lot of barking and expecting production to come out of that. Great efficiency and you're finding that that's not the case.

Well it's the short term case. The short term is yeah, if you kick people hard enough they'll work harder for a time but then they stop or they leave or they become disillusioned or they're not engaged. It's about tapping into more of the human side of that equation and that command and control and if you kick harder you get better results. It certainly works for a while but look where the industry's going. It's more toward collaborative project delivery methods and why is that?

It's because the pain of these horrible design, bid, build projects, they're saying there's got to be a better way because this sucks. This is the most horrible process we could ever imagine. The pain of that is outweighing the fear of changing to something new so we're changing to something new because I think owners are tired of projects going crazy and contractors are certainly have a lot of risk and are losing money on those projects and everything seems to end up in court and the only people that make money or are satisfied are the lawyers.

So it's changing and thank goodness it's changing. It needed to change but I think before the pain wasn't as great as the change and now the pain is great. So we're changing. We've got IPD and ILPD and design, build, design assist and those design, bid, build projects are becoming less and less I think. Even the colleges and universities and states and local municipalities who have these requirements for just low bid are changing.

They're going to more value based project decision making so I think it's really starting to shift and change. So tell me how you deal with the skeptics, the tough guys. Well, here's the thing. It used to freak me out like I thought, well okay this isn't working, they don't like this, they're not engaging, they won't do this and now it's just part of the process because there's always initial resistance, always. I have a video on my website called For the Skeptics and everybody that's ever done this work ever with few exceptions, they say I was skeptical in the beginning.

I didn't believe it, I thought I am who I am, I can't change this and the after, when we say okay after they've been through the program what did you get out of it, it's amazing, life changing. I'm better with people, I'm better with clients, I'm better with relationships, our projects are better. We're a relationship driven company now. It's all these massive shifts in behaviors and cultures that happen but there's always that initial skepticism. So how do you tend to break that skepticism?

Is there a process that you kind of approach this with? Well, first of all, I always let people be wherever they are. I don't try to convince because it's not up to me. I think they appreciate that. So I just let them figure it out on their own with some just gentle nudges and help but never dictatorial or mandatory, you have to do this, it's more about the mantra we have is wherever you are that's where you need to be.

And if you're skeptical, just be skeptical, it's okay. Just trust the, I ask them to trust the process, that's all I ask. Be here for the process, be engaged, put some energy into it and you get out of it whatever you get out of it. And some people get more out of it than others. But that's true of everything.

So what are the, I mean, give us some specifics of what are the kind of specific tests that you know people have to take, assessments? We do not only an emotional evaluation called the EQI 2.0 which measures 16 different emotional competencies but we do a physical evaluation based on physical symptoms. So then we, so we, it's this whole holistic mind-body connection which is, which there's lots of research coming down the pike with that as well. So we work with the whole human being so we can tell not only what their emotional competence is but what their physical states are.

So and then we can see correlations between the emotional and the physical which is quite interesting for us. So for instance whenever we, we'll see somebody in burnout. They'll have really low stress tolerance, low relationship skills, low self-actualization, just a total burnout profile. It'll show up in them physically. Their adrenals will be fried.

And so we have to address both the emotional and the physical part of those two equations to be able to get the best results. Because if we just focused on the emotional part, we could probably make some headway. Or if we just focused on physical and said, you know, sleep and rest and get good nutrition, we'd probably get some results. But when we do both, the results are amazing. They're life-changing.

They're people are, it's like they're at this peak level of mental, physical, and emotional performance. So, so what are the results of having that peak level performance capability? Well, there's, there's less stress and burnout because we teach them how to deal with that. There's more, they tend to have better life balance, which helps them at work and at home. They tend to be physically better.

People lose weight and get in shape and they're sleeping better. So they're, I mean, we haven't like got metrics to prove, but we're pretty in, I mean, most companies tell us it makes sense that their productivity is going to go up and they're going to be better problem solvers because they're sort of working at a peak level of performance on all these different levels, all these different areas of their body and mind and spirit and all that is working together. And it makes, like I said, they're not, one real simple thing, they're not exhausted at the end of the day because they're eating better nutrition and they're getting their rest and they're taking breaks and we're teaching them how to deal with stress through things like meditation and mindfulness.

And so at the end of the day, they're not exhausted. So they go home and have a nice evening with their families. So I gotta ask you. The leadership that you started, leadership training that you started doing at Skans Good, that transitioned, I'm imagining, to more of an emotional intelligence focus. Yes.

Because I'm hearing mindfulness, I'm hearing Deepak Chopra. That's definitely different than what I would understand a typical leadership training to be. True. And we sort of pride ourselves on that because it's about results and we deal with results. And when people come to us and say, I was like on antidepressants and sleeping aids and all these drugs because I was just in total burnout and now I'm not on any drugs and I'm sleeping well at night and I feel good and I have energy.

I mean, you know, whatever works. And so, and we give people a variety of things to do and try and we tell them, you know, that might not be for you but here's some other cool things to try. So how did you encounter the emotional intelligence piece in order to start incorporating that into your training? Well, here, this is an interesting story. In Skanska, we did the first year, I did two years there, and the first year we did something called UGL, which is, there's Swedish words for it, it's the Swedish Military Personal Development Training.

Very good training. But the second year, we figured out that over half the guys had already been through UGL and it's kind of a one-off. You do it once and you've done it because it's all these real revelatory things and so it wouldn't be as impactful the second time. So we were looking for what do we do instead of UGL? So we looked at Myers-Briggs, we looked at 16-PF, we looked at DISC, and we looked at emotional intelligence and we did a lot of research and a lot of, you know, and we set upon emotional intelligence.

That was the decision we made. And when we did that for that second year, it was amazing and really cool. So I thought, wow, this is really good stuff. And I was the skeptic in the beginning. I thought, this is, you know, how do you teach emotional things and I don't know if this is really true.

That was when you were still in your jerk phase. Yeah, that was at the very end of the jerk phase probably. A typical engineer, you know, show me, prove it to me. And there's a lot more research now than there was 15 years ago on emotional intelligence, these neuroscience-based studies that they do. I tell people, this isn't kumbaya, this isn't touchy-feely, this isn't being nice, this isn't giving in.

This is neuroscience. It is neuroscience. It's neuroscience and physics. It's about energy and it's about how your brain works. And if you know more about how your brain works and how emotions affect everything else in your body, then you function better.

You get better outcomes with other people. I mean, it's just, it's really cool stuff. So basically, then you did an analysis of what would be the best training. The emotional intelligence just glaringly came up and said, this is much better than the other options at this point. Okay, very interesting.

I mean, lots of people rely on those other assessments. Yeah, and I'm not knocking those other assessments. Anything that raises your level of who you are and how you interact with others is valuable. All I'm saying is, those are very static. Body tests are very static and they're very limited.

Basically, the whole concept is you're a quadrant or an animal or a color or a letter and they're going to teach you how to get along with the other three quadrants of colors, animals, or letters. And there's some cool stuff in that. With emotional intelligence, it's very dynamic. It shifts and changes based on what's going on in your life, based on what's going on in your work, based on how you're working, based on external circumstances. So it's very dynamic.

It shifts and changes, which to me is more valuable information because most of the people I work with, they've done DISC. They've done Myers-Briggs. And sort of the whole, the question they ask is, okay, that's me, so what? Like, what do I do with that? If I'm an ENFJ, do I want to be an INTP or what do I do with this information?

And there's some cool things with team building with Myers-Briggs. I get that and that's some really cool stuff. But the other thing I think with personality test is I think people are far more complicated than being a quadrant or a particular type. And I think those things are a little bit more dynamic than they would want us to believe them to be. So again, I think the emotional intelligence work actually gets at a more fundamental level.

Because if you have good balanced emotional profile that, you know, with good healthy numbers in the sort of normal ranges, then you can get along with anybody in any situation and manage yourself for the best outcomes for health and wellness and for energy and for all of those things. Hi Constructor listeners, Brittany here, founder of Constructor. Wanted to take the opportunity to tell you about Brent's online training program called the Total Leadership Library. It's going to help you specifically with creating a positive lasting change in your life.

And hopefully a positive cultural change in your company and construction project teams. If you've been struggling with needing better collaboration in your work environments or simply with just stress management, then you need this training program because among other things the course reveals how to improve stress management, achieve peak work performance and improve time management also using lean principles. So you can find the TLL course link in the show notes. Brent has offered a special discount for all of the Constructor listeners. The discount code is Constructor.

Again that is Constructor, C-O-N-S-T-R-U-C-T-R-R. Don't wait. You'll have the link to purchase the program in the show notes and the discount code will also be listed there. I believe in what Brent is doing and I wouldn't be sharing this unless I thought it would greatly benefit you guys. So now we'll jump back into the interview.

So kind of segueing a little bit into dealing well with anybody. You know you have a transition kind of in your business taking place and you're going to be releasing Connex. Right now you're at change-u.com right? Yes, change-u.com is basically an online version of our program and it's self-paced and you can evaluate yourself through the physical, the emotional, go through our workbook, create development plans. There's lots of resources to improve.

There's our resource book, there's videos, there's podcasts, there's written resources, all kind of stuff. Alright so tell us a little bit about Connex. Well Connex, here's the thing that Connex came out of. We had these leadership programs and we had natural project teams within these leadership programs. So after the program was over, I approached the project teams and asked them, did this process make you a better project team?

And they all said yes. We trust each other more, we learned about each other more, we communicate better, we relationships with each other, therefore we collaborate more readily. So I thought wow, what if we could do these programs that we do, which is a year-long process, it could be longer, but we do it in the context of a project. So we're actually building the people while we build the project. So you're looking at extreme performance for the people and extreme performance for the project.

So we have our own development plans for your physically, emotionally, personally, professionally, for you personally, and we have metrics that measure those things. Then we also have metrics for the project that everybody agrees to, and we track both. So what is the metrics for the project that you're tracking? Well it'll vary per project, but it'll be things like, basically it'll be a lean process actually. We'll have pull planning, we'll have milestones for schedule stuff, we'll have, does it add value, do we plan due check act, are we continuously improving, have we pushed the, making more value-based decisions.

So all of those will be metrified and tracked, and everybody will agree to those, and I'm sure they'll be dynamic and they'll shift and change as the project goes, but the whole thing is you're getting everybody to work at their peak level of performance mentally, physically, emotionally, and getting the metrics and doing the lean process and hopefully some integrated project delivery stuff thrown into that. So we're really bringing out all the tools for maximum performance for everybody on that project. Not only maximum performance, but for every aspect of the necessary growth that should be aspired at this point.

I mean not just obviously, I mean we're at the Lean Conference, obviously people are talking tactics, how to utilize lean, and even the mindset of just thinking lean, and there's so many dynamics to that. But you're including the emotional intelligence piece where you can be more effective at living and literally putting these approaches in place. So I think that's excellent. I, well we previously talked, you know, before the interview, I mean when you mentioned it, I was like, whoa, mind blown. I mean it's, who does this?

I'm trying to think like, who combines those aspects of building a person and truly, you know, execute, I mean I'm really looking forward to seeing what the results of this will be. We're looking on some, doing some pilot projects, at least one, maybe two pilot projects in 2016, starting them. So we'll have some data, we'll get some data behind it and see if it really does work. But we feel, intuitively we think it's just going to be phenomenal. And see here's the thing that's most exciting to me.

My mission statement is to help transform the industry. Same mission statement as LCI basically. But here's, so if you're building the capacity and the performance of everybody on that project, you're building the capacity for the whole industry. So every time we take a whole project team, architects, designers, owners, everybody through this process, they're going to be better for the next project and then the next project. And so we're building a way to create highly successful projects and expanding the capacity of everybody so that that trickles to every part of the industry eventually when we get everybody on board with this.

Trying to get every corner of it. Yeah, that's right. No, I love the concepts and you know, after the project is up and running, maybe we can do another interview. Oh, I'd love that. Yeah, to update the constructor audience at this point.

Sure. Yeah. So kind of off topic, curious, what is your favorite book? Whew, that's so hard. I mean, you can give a couple if you can't decide.

Business book or novel? Any book? Any book. Any book. Okay, I'm going to do one business book and one novel.

Sure. All right. Favorite novel, gotta be To Kill a Mockingbird. Why is that? It's just, I'm very southern.

I was born in Mobile, Alabama and now very southern roots and it's a very southern book and there's some really good life lessons in that book. A lot of empathy lessons in that book that I didn't learn till later in life, I guess. And then my favorite business book, the one that's had a really big impact on me and I read, I read a lot. I read like a book a week. Really the fifth discipline, which is a guy from MIT Sloan School of Management, Peter Senge is his name.

Great book. Really taught me about systems thinking and leadership and that was one of the things that sort of influenced me to, that this sort of servant based softer side of leadership, you know, that really reached me. And there's tons of great books out there. But I'd say that was initially something that really helped me with this direction I went in. And then To Kill a Mockingbird, and I love southern writers, any southern writers.

And I'm a playwright as well. Are you really? Yeah, I write plays and Tennessee Williams has got to be my favorite playwright. And he's that southern gothic, like, you know, really these really dark southern characters and just really complex people. And I grew up in that environment.

I mean, I have these crazy aunts and crazy relatives that, I mean, were really crazy. I mean, really certifiably crazy. Like I have this great aunt who used to ride a, this tricycle. She was in her 80s and she would ride this giant tricycle in her neighborhood around the streets. Aunt Cora, yeah, she was bizarre.

Just a bizarre woman. Is she written into one of your plays? She is, actually. Actually, yeah, she is. And it's a story of her riding her tricycle and she gets hit by a golden flake potato chip truck.

Oh my goodness. Wow. You are quite dynamic in your interest levels. And I think it's wonderful. Well, thanks.

I do a lot of weird things, so yes. Yeah, as do I. I think that's really cool. And I particularly want to check out the business book you mentioned, The Fifth Discipline, was it? Mm-hmm.

By Peter Stenghe. So I'll put that in the show notes as well so people can remember. That's definitely a recommendation from you. Also, really quick, did want to ask you about your app. Oh yeah.

The Tao of Emotional Intelligence, T-A-O, Tao of Emotional Intelligence. I thought, okay, I'm working with a lot of younger people. They like stuff appified. They like the technology. So I made this app and it was based on a book of mine called The Tao of Emotional Intelligence.

And basically what it does is it takes sayings from the Yi Jing, which is the book of changes, it's called. It's a cool book of wisdom on just really fundamental philosophic approaches to life. And I learned a lot from that book and I read from the Yi Jing every morning. So I saw these correlations between these emotional competencies and these sayings from the Yi Jing. So the app is, say you're working on empathy.

You pull up the app and you get a saying each day that relates to empathy from the Yi Jing. So you can make that the focus of your day or you can also just pull up a random saying. There's 82 different sayings and you can just use that as the focus of your day and see which competencies that it relates to. And it's really a good way to sort of set the tone for the day. Well that's what I was going to say.

How much better could you start your day with the particular intention in mind that you're hoping to carry throughout that particular day? And improve the area that you're working on. I'd do it. All the guys in the programs, I recommend that. And they love it because it lets them start their day in a good way.

It gives them that focus. And then say they're working on empathy and then they have a difficult situation. They'll start thinking, okay, I need to be listening. I need to really get this person's point of view and understand how they're feeling about this. Whereas if they didn't have that focus, maybe that would devolve into some other horrible mess.

Yeah, it's all about that continuous improvement. And lifelong learning. With these programs we do with companies, we recommend that we come in once a year, reevaluate, say where am I now? Where do I want to be a year from now? And tweak plans.

What's changed in my life and work? And it becomes this lifelong learning process instead of a program that's done and you're just done. Well, with that, I'd like to ask you, what do you want to leave us with? Do you have one particular piece of advice that you'd like to share so that we can... I know it's hard to narrow it down, but...

I would say it's important to become a lifelong learner. I tell young people when I teach them about, like they say, I want to move up fast. I want to like, I got to make money. I got to pay back student loans. How do I do that?

And I'll say two things. You got to network and create relationships continuously. That needs to be a focus and set aside time for it. And learn. Read a lot.

Read a book a week. If you read a book a week in five years, you're going to be three levels above where you could have been if you didn't do that. So read and learn. Lifelong learn to be curious about everything and create those networks. Those are the two things that are going to make you highly successful.

And I didn't learn that until I was 40. So it was almost like too late for me. But it's not if you're young. So start doing those two things now. Well, it's not too late at any age.

I will say that. But no, I completely concur with that. I've been trying to implement a lot of that actually in my own life. So hopefully the audience can benefit from that advice there. I think they will absolutely.

So thank you so much for doing this interview. It's a pleasure to talk with you about your journey and what you're currently doing and about your future plans with Connex. I'm looking forward to those results. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.

This has been a pleasure. And if you want to do more in the future, let's do it. Great. Just before we go, could I ask what's the best way to get in contact with you? Website probably.

BrentDarnell.com. 2L is in Darnell. And that's got all my contact information. You can sign up. We have a newsletter that goes out mostly weekly, but sometimes I get busy and it's every two or three weeks.

But it's a great newsletter. It's got articles to help with your development and then another great information to be able to apply to your life and work. And then just some stuff coming up that if you want to do some sessions with me and these programs that are open enrollment. And then just my speaking and teaching schedule. It's a real short, simple newsletter with great links.

What I do is I surf and try to find the best articles, best videos, most impactful things, cool TED Talks. And so I do all that work for you and you know it's going to be good if it's in the newsletter. Oh, that's awesome. I'm definitely actually going to sign up. Yeah.

There's a button that says sign up or something on the homepage. Perfect. I'll put it in the show notes. Okay, good. All right.

Well, thank you very much, Brent.

Brent has an excellent approach to uplifting a team through emotional intelligence. I hope you guys enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Don't forget to check out the show notes about the training program, Total Leadership Library, that will help you create positive change in your life and positive cultural change in your company. You can also find the additional resource links and this podcast at constructor.com slash zero six.