Emotional Intelligence: Sympathy Is Blocking Your Empathy with Dr. Andreas E. Wagner

First of all, big thanks, and also directly jumping straight forward to, uh, to the topic which is closest to my heart.

And the question is always why? Why jumping into the people component? And, uh, what I see in a lot of organizations, I, I first of all ask the people, "Do you wanna be successful?" And I get mostly them kind of looking into me and saying, "Okay, it's irony." No, I'm not...

I'm serious.

Do you wanna be successful? And people all saying, "Yeah, for sure, I wanna be successful." And then I say, "Okay, you wanna drive innovation?" "Yes, we wanna drive innovation." And then I also take a look into, and try to simplify things, and saying, okay, we all agree on technology matters.

We are in the age of AI, agentic AI, generative AI, people using it, try to implement it, try to lavish upon it this.

The technology is foundational.

The second ingredient is you have to have a proper process.

If you're looking into innovation, how to, to do the, uh...

To gather ideas, how to, to, uh, probe, experiment with ideas, and getting to a prototype, so you need certain process for it.

Or if you're not, uh, talking directly about innovation, it's about change, how to adapt to change.

You need a certain process to walk it through.

And then I see people then saying, "Okay, it's does not work for us," as for this company or for this company.

And then they are saying, "Oh, it's a different organization." And then I say, "Okay, who's the organization? Who's the company? You are the company." So that means it is a people thing, and the people wanna be successful, getting back to drive innovation success, transformation success.

And therefore, we have to center more about the people, how to enable the people, how to empower the people, that the people can be successful.

I, I like the way you've kind of got that thread and, and weaved it back full circle from the organization to the individual, and the individual is the organization, essentially, and, and, you know, that's how you kind of build the foundation.

But w- when you were talking, though, the, the one thing that was kind of coming into back of my mind was, uh, do we fundamentally misunderstand how innovation happens in the workplace in, in that case? If we, if we look to the technology elements as kind of the, the driver, introduction of capability, and then the people process aspect falls in underneath it, but not necessarily is at the forefront.

First of all, I wanna say I have no doubt about the intelligence of the people when I'm working with.

I see so many smart people around me.

However, the people then fear how to drive innovation forward.

They fear how to drive transformation.

And what does it mean? What you wanna create, you wanna create something different.

Different from, you're saying, okay, the current state, you wanna move to a future state, or you have a current, uh, set of, of portfolio elements, and you wanna shape it more c- closely to the customer demands and needs.

And that means we are looking after value, and the value piece is that you wanna have something different, and that means for some people th- thinking about it must be a very disruptive, big thing.

Sometimes these are the minor things which have a, a big, uh, impact because there is a ripple in- effect going through an organization if you're driving innovation.

And the question is how to get started, and that's what I get often from the, uh, the customers or people I'm working with back and saying, "You have to take action.