Culture & Compliance Chronicles: Emotionally Charged Leadership with Dina Denham Smith

At a glance: Click the links below to advance directly to the corresponding sections of the transcript:

• [2:25] About Dina
• [5:00] Strategies for Leaders
• [8:30] Emotional Contagion
• [11:35] How to Maximize Awareness (As a Leader)
• [17:10] How to Use Empathy in the Workplace
• [22:35] Preparing for an Emotionally Charged Discussions
• [25:30] How to Get Your Team to Open Up
• [30:35] Key Takeaways

Nitish Upadhyaya: Welcome back to the Culture & Compliance Chronicles, the podcast that gives you new perspectives on legal, compliance and regulatory challenges faced by organizations and individuals worldwide. The clue is in the title—culture is at th

Richard Bistrong: Hi, Nitish. Hi, Amanda. Very excited about our podcast today. It was wonderful to hear from Alexandra Belmonte about Maersk and their compliance ambassador network. Today, we are joined by Dina Denham Smith, and I am so excited to explore her new book, Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work. Welcome to the show, Dina.

Dina Denham Smith: Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be here.

Richard Bistrong: Dina, before turning it over to Nitish for some icebreaker questions, I am going to allow myself the honor of introducing you. Dina is an accomplished leader and executive coach with a 25-year proven track record of helping people and teams excel. Leveraging her executive experience and expertise in organizational psychology, Dina coaches senior leaders and teams, world-leading brands such as Adobe, Netflix, and Stripe, just among a few of her numerous high-growth clients. Dina has written over 60 articles on leadership and career success for publications like the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and is frequently featured in international media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the BBC. I have had the pleasure of co-authoring two articles with Dina and Ron Carucci, one in the Harvard Business Review and another in Fast Company, so we’ll be sure to put those links in the show notes.

[2:25] About Dina

Nitish Upadhyaya: As a fellow coach, I am intrigued about bringing that world to all of the leaders out there and what it means for compliance and culture more generally. It’s useful for our audience to get to know you in your own words, even with Richard’s amazing introduction, so give us three things we should know about you.

Dina Denham Smith: My parents were both teachers, but I had a very unique experience of growing up on the campus of a boarding school—and not just any boarding school but an all-boys boarding school. So, I was very comfortable heading into the working world, being like a 50-to-1 ratio—it did not strike me as abnormal at all. And to have that comfort and ease in a roomful of men was a real asset to me at the beginning of my career. That would be one thing. I am a hard-core foodie. I love enjoying great food and wine with friends and with family. I actually cofounded a dinner club in San Francisco in the year 2000, and we’re celebrating our 25th anniversary this year. It’s a monthly dinner club. I have been having great meals with great people for a really long time, which I love. And the last thing I suppose I would share is outside of work, I am a very passionate equestrian, so I train and compete in dressage. I feel lucky every single day to have that in my life.

Amanda Raad: I did not know that about you. I am a major equestrian who grew up riding horses and competing, and then, didn’t ride for almost my whole life, and then, re-found my love last year and have started riding again with my daughter, which is amazing.

Nitish Upadhyaya: You’ve piqued our curiosity on lots of topics, but what are you curious about?

Dina Denham Smith: I have been endlessly curious really for as long as I can remember just about our amazing bodies and our amazing brains, and the way that they’re connected. I probably should have been a doctor, but next lifetime.

Nitish Upadhyaya: There’s always time. Multiple careers. And because all of our guests are human and can be surprised, even though they know lots and lots of things, what’s the last thing that surprised you?

Dina Denham Smith: What I learned recently, which is more of a fun fact, is: Do you know that animals can be allergic to their people? We always are talking about dog allergies and cat allergies, but we have dander too apparently, which is just dead skin cells, so, your pets might be allergic to you.

[5:00] Strategies for Leaders

Nitish Upadhyaya: Going from relationships with your pets to relationships of leaders and the workplace, what brought about your amazing book? What was lacking or where did you see a gap that you’ve tried to provide some solutions for?

Dina Denham Smith: As a coach, you really do have this first-row seat to the challenges and the strains of leaders—and as a former leader myself, I have a tremendous amount of empathy for that. But it was that coupled with seeing that work world has changed in ways that fundamentally increase the emotional demands on leaders—those have just heightened tremendously, especially during and since the pandemic. Realizing that all of these emotional demands that leaders face in their roles, they really go unacknowledged, and so, they go unaddressed. There’s this huge gap that really existed in terms of providing leaders with resources and science-backed strategies for handling all of the emotional demands that they face today, so—my co-author, who is the head of organizational psychology at Penn State, Alicia Grandey—we set forth to really write a book that solved for this big gap, that offered to leaders proven strategies, proven tools, proven techniques to handle all of the emotional demands so they can both lead more effectively in today’s changed workplace as well as maintain their well-being.

Nitish Upadhyaya: Give us some of those strategies. What are your favorite pieces of insights from the book that you can share with our readers today?

Dina Denham Smith: The book is chock full of insights and strategies, so let me just tell you how the book is somewhat laid out, and then we can dive in wherever you want to go. The first section of the book, really the first third, is about setting the record straight on emotions. There are all of these myths and misconceptions that still exist about emotions and their value at work despite decades of evidence. First, equip people with actual facts so they can understand the importance of emotions and the way that they can be used for their benefit and when ignored, or hidden, or suppressed, it has enormous costs for performance, for relationships, for health. The second part of the book is all about, “How can leaders understand and manage all of their emotions in this much more charged workplace that they need to lead in?” And the last section of the book is really taking these different, specific use cases where leaders need to do really hard things as part of their role, and how to do them well. What are some of the techniques from the science of emotions that they can employ in these situations, like having to let somebody go? That’s really, really hard. Or supporting an employee who comes to you with a personal struggle, which is something that happens now that didn’t used to. We have an increasingly diverse and polarized workforce—you’re going to have more conflict on teams like that. How do you manage that kind of interpersonal conflict? It’s hard to just give you one strategy, because the book is all strategies.

[8:30] Emotional Contagion

Richard Bistrong: Dina, I think I’d like to explore part three, about doing hard things well, which is something I think we can all relate to, especially what to do when your job makes people feel bad, which I think a lot of ethics and compliance leaders can relate to. What you share is the interpersonal skills that are needed to do that, and you talk about one pathway to that skill set is emotional contagion. So, what is emotional contagion?

Dina Denham Smith: Emotional contagion is the process by which people catch each other’s emotions. Emotions work kind of like the common cold. I’m sure you can all relate to the situation where you’re in a meeting with some super gloomy person who just sucks the air out of the room, and you leave that meeting feeling worse than you arrived. Then, conversely, there are those people who have that contagious laugh, or you just can’t help but smile when you’re around them. That’s literally emotional contagion at work. The reason why it’s so important for people to understand this, especially leaders, is their power magnifies the effect of their emotional expressions or their lack thereof. Leaders have this outsized impact on team culture and team performance—they literally bring the weather—and so, understanding that there are pathways by which they are influencing people’s emotions subconsciously, the emotional contagion, and then, understanding that people are also trying to read the tea leaves on their emotions, so there’s this other pathway of inference. Again, it’s because of this power differential—like people are wondering, “Is now a good time to ask my boss for a raise?” “Should I share this bad news now?” “Are things okay?” “Am I okay?” People are always asking these questions, and they’re reading leaders’ emotions to try to figure out, “What’s the best strategy for me here?” So, leaders understanding the importance of their emotions, and developing the skills to understand and regulate their emotions in themselves and others is paramount.

Amanda Raad: I love that you have not only normalized, but really put on center stage, the importance of the fact that emotions come to work—that you can’t just park your emotions at the door, come into the office, and pick them up when you leave. I also love that you’re highlighting the reality, which I experience all the time. I’m very easily influenced by other people’s emotions. I have personally struggled with being aware enough sometimes of where I am emotionally in order to direct the change, so that I am sharing the right contagion, if you will. Can you talk a little bit about any specific tips you have for how you land in a room to be aware enough in the first place?

[11:35] How to Maximize Awareness (As a Leader)

Dina Denham Smith: There are a couple things there—some of them are really more tactical. It’s really important for leaders to, first off, have enough space in their calendar that they can take a beat before and after a meeting. And this gets at the emotional labor of being a leader, is there is a lot of, “How do I need to show up in this meeting to be optimally effective with this audience?” They’re bouncing between audiences, and so, there are multiple instances in the day where thinking about, “How am I really doing right now? What’s my weather status? Is a storm brewing, or am I all sunshine and smiles?” This is not to say that leaders should be inauthentic with their emotion—there’s a distinction here I do want to make. Checking in with yourself is really important given the impact of your emotions on others and creating those buffer times in your schedule to have a moment to do that is critical. That’s what I’d say on a tactical element. There’s a self-awareness element and dialing into your emotions, because this is something most of us haven’t been trained in ever. That’s also in the book. How do you start to understand, really, what’s going on? We all know you need to start with yourself to affect the change you want to see.

Nitish Upadhyaya: I think the risk with some of this—the weather piece—is that leaders put themselves under so much pressure. If they are self-aware enough, they realize that they are the bellwether for the team, and so, you have almost “on” smiles. You have to be positive—you have to go there. You raised this point about authenticity, and how do leaders balance showing up but also being able to be vulnerable and say, “You know, actually, I feel rubbish today.” That’s okay, but how does that affect the rest of the team, productivity, and where you go?

Dina Denham Smith: There are so many things here, because leaders are influenced by the culture that they exist in, and this is why these myths and misconceptions about emotions are so nefarious, because they create these unwritten expectations that fall on everybody’s shoulders about how they’re supposed to show up, what emotions are okay, in what dosages, and by whom. So, leaders can feel this pressure to be optimistic and upbeat even when they’ve had a garbage morning, they are super toast from all the work expectations, and so, it’s a lot to handle. But where you were specifically asking, Nitish, was about this authenticity. The authenticity is critical. And, again, it gets at this tension point for leaders, because a certain amount of authenticity can be really beneficial, but then too much authenticity, and it ends up eroding their credibility.

There’s this Goldilocks principle that exists for leaders today where they need to be just the right amount of human in different situations, so I just have so much compassion for these tensions and what we ask of our leaders. But if we go straight to your question at this point, Nitish, being vulnerable with your team is important, because what it does is it opens the door for others on your team to feel safe with sharing their challenges or how they’re really feeling. What we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt from the research, is teams where we have a broader expression of emotions, where if you’re genuinely happy, awesome, be happy, but if you’re having a bad day, you’re feeling sad, or you’re feeling fatigued, that’s also okay to feel and share. Those teams are more cohesive, there are higher levels of creativity and innovation, and performance is higher. So, what I’d encourage leaders to do: If you are a very private person who feels like some sharing is incredibly risky, think about, “What are low-risk ways I can start to dip my toes into this?” Because you can really unleash some incredible benefits for your team.

Nitish Upadhyaya: That advice scales not just from leaders, but I’ve seen that in the compliance space more generally, working with the business. There is this view that everything is clean-cut: you have a rule, you have a procedure, you know what’s going on. In the complexity in which modern organizations need to grow and thrive, that is often not the case—multiple gray areas. I have seen repeatedly honest and sincere admissions by legal, by compliance, by CEOs, by the board that say, “This is just really tough. We need to have these conversations.” But “Here’s a story of a time where I was trying to figure out if I should pay a bribe because someone’s life was under threat.” I don’t know what to do about those, but it’s a real conversation. “Here’s a time I had to let a client down because it didn’t work with our code of ethics.” And, again, that vulnerability not just from a leadership perspective but more generally with the business, lands, and it showcases that decisions can be made better together and opens up for the business to come to compliance and have those difficult conversations.

[17:10] How to Use Empathy in the Workplace

Richard Bistrong: Dina, I know we both share a passion from our writing together for counterintuitive statements. One that came up—and I read one of your high-profile pieces about this, so I was even happier to read more detail about it in the book—is compassionate detachment. That just sounds counterintuitive. How is that even possible? Is it trying to avoid compassion fatigue? Tell us more.

Dina Denham Smith: Leaders, by nature of their role, oftentimes, need to make decisions for the collective good but that result in them actually hurting individuals. At the low end of this spectrum, we’ve got delivering really tough feedback, letting an underperformer go, announcing yet another restructuring for your very fatigued team, or conducting layoffs. These are things that leaders have to do, but making these decisions can be both cognitively and emotionally very taxing, and it requires this balancing act of being objective and direct but at the same time compassionate. There are two common failure modes. None of us likes to hurt people, and so, it’s very common to disengage, and that protects you emotionally—but then, your insensitivity makes a bad situation even worse.

The other failure mode is you’re more of an empath, and you just sponge up all of the pain and the negativity in the situation. And this has other detrimental effects, including, as you mentioned, compassion fatigue, which is a close cousin of burnout (if people haven’t heard of it before), and just depletion. Compassionate detachment is actually a technique that helps you strike this balancing act between being direct while being compassionate and protecting yourself from some of that emotional collateral damage. It’s something that doctors, therapists, and other people in the medical field are constantly facing, like pain, trauma, and other people’s stress. How do they make it through the day, the week, the month, the years, and the career? It’s through learning this technique that you mentioned, Richard, this idea of compassionate detachment.

In brief, there’s one thing that’s really important to understand, which is there’s different kinds of empathy. Most of us think of empathy as just one thing, but there’s actually three different kinds of empathy. There’s emotional empathy, which is that absorbing other people’s emotions, really feeling what they feel. There’s also cognitive empathy, and that is when you, just in a more detached way, try to understand the perspective or the experiences of people—you’re really engaging with it from an understanding as opposed to a feeling way. And then, there’s compassionate empathy or empathic concern, which is taking compassionate action to ease the suffering of others. One of the things that can really happen is too much of this emotional empathy, which, unchecked, can have this collateral damage. And so, compassionate detachment is about dialing up these other two forms of empathy. If you think about when you go to the doctor, they’re asking you all about your symptoms, your experiences, and “Tell me more about that.” They’re really engaging with it so they can solve your problem. Well, a leader can engage in that way too, and it gives some really useful information that then allows them to engage with that more compassionate form of empathy, so easing somebody’s suffering. “What are the things I can do in the midst of this terrible layoff to make things better for people that will also help me recover my sense of self?” It’s a loaded situation for leaders, they’re just doing their jobs, and compassionate detachment is a way to do your job really well while protecting yourself.

Amanda Raad: That is so helpful, and I’m really glad you broke it down into those three different areas. Taking this and applying it to compliance and ethics but also to investigations, when you are going in and leading an interview for an investigation, it’s really challenging, because the people that you’re speaking to, if you’re the questioner and you’re interviewing somebody—whether they have potentially done something wrong, they have information about someone else doing something wrong, or wherever they are in the spectrum—there’s a question of how things are going. And it’s a highly stressful situation for everyone. It’s a stressful situation for the interviewer, because you’re asking hard questions that you know are going to likely cause a response of the person you’re asking the questions of, and it’s also a stressful situation for the person that is participating in the process, because maybe it’s never happened before, and maybe they feel accused of something. Thinking about these different buckets—emotional, cognitive, and compassionate—for the person leading that discussion is really helpful context. Is there a tip as you’re actually preparing for the discussion for how you frame that—how you, one, prepare for it, and then, how, when you’re in it, you make sure you don’t dive off the wrong end of the cliff?

[22:35] Preparing for an Emotionally Charged Discussion

Dina Denham Smith: We actually have a whole chapter which shares proven strategies for preparing for situations that will be emotionally charged, and there’s a few different things you can do there. One technique that’s been proven super effective in athletics but also work contexts, is visualization, thinking about, “What does this meeting going well look like,” and really creating a mental movie of how you want to show up. What is the empathy you want to bring? What’s the composure you want to bring? What’s that level of inquiry? What do you do if you’re met with defensiveness? What do you do if you’re met with anger? Playing through some of those places where the conversation could go off the rails in ways that specifically stress you out. Visualization is a wonderful way to get more prepared for a conversation like that. There’s also a technique called “situation modification,” which is where we have to go into this very stressful situation, but there’s ways that we can specifically modify it to reduce the intensity of the emotions for ourselves or for others. Thinking specifically about the who, what, why, where, and when of a meeting can help it both go more smoothly as well as ease your tension, because you’ve really thought it through using a more emotional lens. So, those are things you can do before the meeting.

In the meeting, this is where building a practice around reflection and self-awareness will pay dividends over, and over, and over again. Our bodies don’t lie, and if you start to pay more attention to your body, you’ll understand where it is that you feel emotions first. One thing I know about myself is if I’m in an intense situation and I can feel my gut and my core start to tighten, this is a sure sign that I’m getting angry, and I need to take a couple deep breaths or take a break. I was not born with this awareness, but by paying attention over time to, “Where am I feeling certain things in my body,” I have been able to develop what I consider my personal warning system. We all feel things differently—other people might feel anger in their shoulders clenching, a tightness of breath, a racing heart, or they see their fists clenching. It can show up in a bunch of different ways, but we all have a fingerprint for our emotions, and starting to understand what those are allows you to get ahead of them before the train leaves the station in the meeting.

[25:30] How to Get Your Team to Open Up

Nitish Upadhyaya: Absolutely. I think that self-awareness, for me, has also been something around listening, because the flip side of creating the space and doing all that sort of stuff is, “Can you ask the questions that allow the other person the open space to bring to the meeting or to the situation their ideas or their opinions without, as the leader, saying, ‘This is how things are going to be done, or, ‘We’re in a rush—this is where we go’?” And so, building that capacity in your team to guide and to mentor rather than override. Do you have any questions or forms of questions that you like to ask, or you think leaders might ask with their teams to get to that level of opening up?

Dina Denham Smith: I think I have one overriding piece of advice, which is make your questions open, and then pause after asking them. I think about this exchange that many of us have multiple times a day—“How are you?” “Fine. How are you?” “Fine”—and then you dive into the task at hand. Just saying, “How are you, really?” and pausing, this is going to unleash such a different response than the “How are you?” “Fine. How are you?” “Fine,” little dance we all do. And so, pausing, giving space for people to answer, double clicking, keeping your questions open—“Tell me more.” “What’s that like for you?” “Wow, huh. How does that actually feel?”—you can go on and on with these very short questions that ask people to just expand on their experience.

Nitish Upadhyaya: In the compliance space, if you’re doing an interview, if you are having a conversation with someone about a risk, those similar questions can just allow you to get to the heart of the matter and what’s really underlying the situation rather than the “computer says no” approach or sticking rigorously to a checklist.

Richard Bistrong: Dina, in the book, you talk about sharing your own mental health story. If you talk to whether it’s business leaders or compliance leaders and say, “Sharing your mental health story could really be important and helpful to establishing emotional connections,” I think there’d be a lot of pushback on that. So, can you share, again, counterintuitively, what that might mean? What is the value of sharing your own personal mental health story?

Dina Denham Smith: The overriding point is to normalize emotional sharing on your team, because we know, as I’ve already mentioned, when we have this broader range of emotions and challenges experienced on a team, what you do is you’re creating psychological safety, which unleashes much higher team cohesion and team performance. Sharing your mental health story, if you have one, is just one example of doing that. Sharing challenges that you’ve experienced, whether it’s within the realm of mental health or other places, doesn’t have to be about baring your soul—you don’t need to share all of the details of your situation. That’s just one way. When you share a challenge that you’ve experienced, you also need to be in a place where you maybe have a little bit of distance from that challenge, or you’re not so enmeshed in it emotionally still that it’s hard for you to talk about. But sharing your mental health story, it can allow other people on your team to be vulnerable with theirs—it’s about creating an open door for those conversations.

Richard Bistrong: I’d like to give an example of that, because I completely agree with this. Very often in compliance training, you’ll have a CEO message, which is very aspirational. You could probably pull it down from the company’s website. Nothing very detailed other than, “Do the right thing. Why this is important.” And one of my clients, the CEO, talked about the trauma he experienced growing up being bullied, and that is why ethics and integrity are so important to him.

Dina Denham Smith: That is going to connect people so much more to the message and to him as a human. It is a wonderful example of the ripple effects of good that can happen, especially when it’s happening at the top. If all of these ideas could be implemented by CEOs, there would be less problems for everybody that reports to them, and the people who report to the C-suite, and so on, and so forth, because the tone really is set at the top.

[30:35] Key Takeaways

Nitish Upadhyaya: There’s been lots of wisdom shared today, and I’m going to come to you, Dina, for one or two things in a second that our listeners can do in their own day to day to put some of this into practice. But before I do, Amanda, what’s your key takeaway today?

Amanda Raad: My biggest key takeaway is how not only okay it is, but important it is, to bring your whole self to work, to normalize emotional sharing, and that it’s a form of connection—it enables people to share ideas with each other, it enables people to come up with better solutions, and it enables us to help each other. I have had a real struggle with public speaking, and I have started to talk about it more openly with people. The amount of support and encouragement I’ve gotten, it’s over the top. And it’s getting better, and it’s only because I admitted that it was really something that I was struggling with. I love us normalizing things so we can help each other. It doesn’t have to be so hard all the time. I love it—thank you so much.

Nitish Upadhyaya: Richard, what about you?

Richard Bistrong: Nitish, I have a passion for taking works like Dina’s, which are not necessarily written for ethics and compliance leaders but are so relevant to what they do. So, number one, I’m so excited that we’re able to take these issues and bring them into our field. I think if we made a movie from this book, it would be called Tightrope because so many of these issues have to really be carefully thread, from over-compassion to just looking like you don’t care. The nuance here is really what I took away, and how we have to be so intentional about how we think of these issues.

Nitish Upadhyaya: Some ideas then for walking the tightrope in people’s day to day. What could our listeners do? Just a few things to think about.

Dina Denham Smith: There’s a huge theme that’s not come up yet, and so, I’m going to take your question and a little poetic license. I want to talk about the recovery paradox, because, to Richard’s point, it is a tightrope, like leadership. There are so many tensions, so many strains, so many emotional demands, and it’s a lot. It’s why we’ve got these epic levels of stress and burnout in our leader population—it’s because of these demands and because of the lack of resources they’ve been given. The recovery paradox is the people who need a break the most are the least likely to take it—that is often our very well-meaning, hardworking leaders. It’s very easy to get stuck in a stress spiral where you are never taking these moments to recover your internal resources. When you catch yourself eating lunch at your desk, working until 10:00 at night, putting in the hours on the weekend, and this is going on and on, you are stuck in that stress spiral—you are a victim of this recovery paradox. And so, leaders understanding that you can get caught up in this cycle and that ultimately there’s going to be really enormous cost to your health and to your performance in terms of burnout and lashing out at others, I think, is really important. It is super cliché in a way, but leaders do need to put on their own oxygen mask first. Self-care—the term itself doesn’t have the best connotations—I think people equate it with bubble baths. It’s not that. It’s whatever brings you relaxation and restoration. There are proven ways that can restore all of us. For me, it’s riding a horse. It can look like a bunch of different things, but understanding the weight of all of these demands and that you really do need to take time to refuel your tank both for your own health as well as your performance and your ability to create those same circumstances for people on your own team is super important. So, leaders especially, these people walking the tightrope, I would want them to leave with that message.

Nitish Upadhyaya: Thank you for sharing all of your top tips and ideas and making them so actionable and relevant to our listeners. And I’m excited to catch up again and chat about coaching and all sorts of other wonderful things.

Dina Denham Smith: I would love that. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the time.

Nitish Upadhyaya: Thank you all for tuning in to the latest episode in our Culture & Compliance Chronicles series. For more information about our series and any of the ideas discussed today, take a look at the links in our show notes. You can also subscribe to the series wherever you regularly listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Amanda, Richard and I will be back very soon for our next chapter. If you have topics you’d like us to cover or novel perspectives you want everyone else to hear about, get in touch. Thanks again for listening. Have a wonderful day and stay curious.e heart of everything. It’s the endlessly shifting patterns that govern our environment and behaviors. The magic is in amplifying certain patterns and dampening others. Let’s see if we can pique your curiosity, get you to challenge some of your perceptions and give you space to think differently about some of your own challenges. I’m Nitish Upadhyaya, and I’m joined by Amanda Raad and Richard Bistrong. We’re back. Hello, Richard and Amanda. 

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Show Notes:

• Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work (Grandey, Smith)
• Harvard Business Review, “4 Warning Signs of Ethical Burnout on Your Team” (Bistrong, Carucci, Smith)
• Fast Company, “Research shows high performing employees are more prone to unethical mistakes” (Bistrong, Carucci, Smith)
• Dina Denham Smith, Cognitas: https://www.dinadsmith.com
• Dina Denham Smith, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dina-denham-smith