Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:00:05] What really drives success in today’s workplace and are we focusing on the wrong things? Professor Darius Pfitzner, academic dean at the Australian Institute of Business, joins us to share insights he’s learned throughout his fascinating career, from aircraft engineer to leading business academic. He highlights the value of failure, humility and focusing on the customer. We then hear from emotional intelligence specialist Amy Jacobson, who explains how emotional intelligence or EQ can transform teams. Amy offers five practical steps to build a more empathetic, accountable and high performing workplace together. Darius and Amy reveal why great leadership is both learned and deeply human from Sound Cartel. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
Fail often, stay humble: Lessons from a business academic
Our first guest is Darius Pfitzner, academic dean at the Australian Institute of Business. He’s one of Australia’s leading business academics, but it’s been a long and deeply interesting journey to get where he is today. From serving in the Navy as an aircraft engineer to selling fudge in his family’s regional gift shop to becoming a computer whiz and business developer. In this interview, Darius shares some of the key lessons he’s learned along his journey from cockpit to campus, including the value of failing often and learning humility to get things started. Darius describes his current role to Jeff Waters.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:01:32] I’m the academic dean for the Australian Institute of Business, and I basically manage everything about our courses and ensure that we’re accredited, that all of our staff are happy and performing well, that all of our students are very happy and having a great learning experience. It doesn’t matter where in the world they are and that everything runs smoothly.
Jeff Waters: [00:01:55] And your institute specialises in business subjects and business degrees, is that right?
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:02:01] It does. We we deliver online MBAs with actually the largest online MBA delivery in Australia. We also deliver business research qualifications, Masters of management and DBAs.
Jeff Waters: [00:02:16] So that’s a fairly high level academic job. I believe you come from Charles Darwin University before this, but, um, you didn’t actually start off as an academic, did you? Darius, you’re, uh, you’re actually an engineer.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:02:32] Well, yes. As with all people we have, we follow various roads and paths and and life pushes and pulls us in many different directions. In my professional career, I started off in the Royal Australian Navy as a helicopter mechanic and called an aircraft engineer, if you will. I wouldn’t use the word engineering in the university space because that’s a very different engineer. Ah, um, but certainly well qualified four year qualification there just to work on, on helicopters in the Navy and did that for eight years.
Jeff Waters: [00:03:05] I see. And how did you get to where you are now from the position of fixing helicopters?
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:03:12] I think helicopters, you know, aircraft engineer, if you will, was a sideline for me, an interest from a young fella that loved cars and engines and working on machinery back in the day. But really, I think the writing was on the wall from, from birth, you know, because my mother, you know, often would tell the story to all friends and family and often to my own chagrin, their embarrassment in front of people that, you know, I was I was born and not too many days later, I was under the front counter of of the hardware store there in Darwin, and she was busy doing doing business, if you will, in one of the first businesses they opened. And of course, after that they opened many different businesses. So I was sort of soaked in this environment of, of business and management and entrepreneurship, both very entrepreneurial parents. And so as I say, you know, maybe the mechanic thing was a bit of a sideline until eventually I realized, well, actually, this is this is a little boring because in aircraft engineering everything’s documented. You don’t want anything new.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:04:18] So everything’s well understood. So it’s a little bit, you know, open the book. What do we do now? And and my style of my personally, I was looking for a lot of interest. So I ended up leaving the Navy after eight years and and going and working with mum and dad and and opening up a number of stores with them. Started out doing very well, believe it or not, selling stained glass and making stained glass in Brisbane there, not too long after that I, I got a feel for the sort of the business area and opened up my own renovations business, where we sold retail business, where we sold staircases and banister rails and decorative cornices and doorknobs and all that sort of thing. And and that went fairly well. Eventually my parents said, look, we’re going to open up a chain of tourist locations in Queensland. And that was very interesting for me. So I said, well, count me in. I started out as the baker ended up as the business developer in Montville on the Sunshine Coast there.
Jeff Waters: [00:05:19] Beautiful spot. No, it was lovely.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:05:22] We were at Yandina initially there at the Ginger factory in Yandina, and then we moved up to Montville. Well, opened another shop in Montville. Explosive success there. Just, you know, some of the days of of just absolutely pounding the cash register and restocking the shelves and all that sort of thing, you know, buses turning up and really flogging all the stuff to death, but very great success. We opened up in Mount Tamborine, and Mount Tamborine was just the next step again in terms of busyness.
Jeff Waters: [00:05:54] So you’ve got fairly wide experience there in small business, by the sounds of it. Where did the penny drop and and you decided that an academic life was going to suit you so well.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:06:07] Again, more of an evolution, I guess, personally, rather than the decision. Yes, there was a decision made, but I found myself in Mount Tambourine. We installed some fudge making equipment there. We’d made fudges fudge in the other locations, but we installed it there, and we we started selling fudge. And I ended up in this situation where we could not keep up with the sale of the fudge as fast as all truth, as fast as I could make it. It was walking out the door. We had, you know, 15 different flavors, everything from peppermint all the way to the traditional chocolate and, you know, cappuccino and all this sort of thing. And we just couldn’t keep up with it. And so I was thinking there was a process solution there. Being an engineer, there’s always a procedure or a process. You know, the Navy’s speaking a little bit as well. It did a little bit of research.
Jeff Waters: [00:07:00] You needed to become the model T Ford of Fudge.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:07:04] Apparently, yes. You describe it like that? Indeed. Yes. Uh, although we had more colors than the model T Ford did.
Jeff Waters: [00:07:12] Yes. You wouldn’t want black fudge.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:07:16] But they were in the days, and they’re probably showing my age now. They were in the days where we didn’t have computers for research. We had to use libraries and read books and a lot of reading and a lot of research. But I eventually stumbled on this, this concept of price elasticity of demand. And it wasn’t really that it was it was just this suggestion that you can regulate demand with price. And so I went out and and started playing with, with price. And at one point, you know, I’d almost doubled the price of the fudge that we were selling it at. And we still didn’t realize any drop off in sales. And of course, my dad found out about this. He says, oh, you can’t sell it for that much. I said, yeah, but our sales haven’t gone down. We’re still breaking records, dad. Oh, well, that’s probably a good thing, then. But I think that was the start. And and so it really it showed me that, uh, the inquiring mind as an individual really drove me from there. And I started looking at what else there was. And I eventually found myself going, well, if I was going to go back to study, because I’d already done literally four years of, of study and, and qualification in the Navy, and I didn’t stop qualifying while I was in the Navy as well. What would I like? I’d already done some business with my brother in law, and we had a cookie making factory.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:08:37] We sold Shortbreads macadamia shortbreads and we we marketed that into Hong Kong and Taiwan, and that went fairly well. And that’s where the bakery experience came from. And the natural extension into what mum and dad was doing there. And so I sort of went, well, I’d like to do international business. So I bit the bullet and said, see you all later. I’m going to go back and study. And it really it didn’t stop from there. Business was the first point of call their business qualification. I studied at Flinders University. I finished that I realized that computers were starting to come on and that really the future was going to be in computers. I better learn something about that. I did a, um, a graduate degree in computer science and did so well. I just naturally fell into that, did so well, ended up falling into a master’s of information technology. And while I was doing that, I published a paper on on user interface optimization just out of because I was interested and and my head of the AI department at Flinders there spotted this and said, why don’t you do a PhD? And well, it was all a fait accompli from there. Finished the PhD, got headhunted by CDU and here we are today, many years later, having an interview.
Jeff Waters: [00:09:55] That’s fantastic story. You clearly bring a lot of experience to this position in teaching other people about business. What are the key things? It’s a hard question, I know, but what are the key things that you take away from your life that you’ve learnt as a result of of being at the coalface, if you like.
Prof Darius Pfitzner: [00:10:16] At a personal level, I would suggest it’s humility. You know, being able to put your ego away, listen to other people. Recognise when your own assumptions are driving a decision rather than than having, you know, data driven decisions and really learn from the customer. Learn from other businesses, if you will. I mean, the the best form of research is look at your competition that’s successful and look at what they’re doing. And of course, in terms of operationally, there’s a number of key things, skills that an individual needs. You need to master your finances. You need to put the customer first. You know, these are these are well recognised facts in business. You need to build great teams. You need to have teams that are confident in what they do, authorized to make decisions on the spot supported by the organization itself. And I guess something that many people wouldn’t like to admit to, but being willing to fail, you know, turn failure into the art of learning. And from that point of view, be willing to fail. Fail often fail for as cheap, if not for free, and use that as the learning as part of your learning process. You know, test, test and test again. And if you do that, you’ll do no less than offer a product that the customer wants in the same time period that they want it at the right price and you’ll make money.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:11:47] That was Darius Pfitzner, academic dean at the Australian Institute of Business.
How to build emotional intelligence in your business
Now to emotional intelligence and how it can transform teams. How emotionally intelligent is your workplace and could toxic or unproductive relationships be holding you back? Emotional intelligence specialist Amy Jacobson believes EQ is a skill anyone can develop, and that it has the power to completely transform businesses. Amy shares her top tips to build an emotionally intelligent workplace. She focuses on self-awareness, emotional accountability, empathy, effective communication, and decisive action. She starts by telling Jeff Waters what role emotions tend to play in workplace conflict. Today.
Amy Jacobson: [00:12:34] Our emotions come from our subconscious mind, and when we’re surrounded by people, even when we’re around one person, it is the impact that we have on each other that will determine the success of that interaction. And it’s our emotional brain or our emotional mind that’s actually driving that interaction that comes into play. So when you have people in a workplace that have either different emotional responses or they have different values and beliefs, they have different neural pathways in their mind. When things happen, you’re going to get different emotional responses. And when those different emotional responses come into play, it is very hard for our mind to accept that we are responding one way and they are responding another way. It comes with that fact that our mind has the need to be right, and we’ve kind of we’ve wired ourselves that way, right? Like if you look at our whole upbringing, we’re rewarded for being right or for getting the right answer. So when we are around people who have a different answer or a different response or a different emotional reaction, that is what tends to cause that conflict. And that is when our mind is saying, why.
Jeff Waters: [00:13:45] Yeah, we react badly. They react badly. Oh my God, that’s right.
Amy Jacobson: [00:13:50] And I think, you know, Jeff, one of the biggest mistakes that we make is that we tend to think that a situation or a person can make us feel a certain way, but they actually can’t. They, you know, a situation happens and people happen, but the way we respond is a choice. And that choice is based on the neural pathway, the wiring in our mind due to our values and beliefs.
Jeff Waters: [00:14:11] And yeah, they’re just speaking up, not necessarily meaning to make you angry.
Amy Jacobson: [00:14:17] That’s exactly right. And the reason why we know this is that you can grab you can have ten people in a situation, ten people from across the world, and the exact same situation happens. And you can have ten different emotional responses. And that shows us that it’s not the situation that’s causing the emotional response. The situation happens, but based on the values and beliefs that they have embedded and how they’ve wired their neural pathways in their mind that lead to an emotional response. That’s what happens. And that’s why, you know, if you’re in the same country and in very similar values and beliefs and cultures, then you might have very similar emotional responses, but it’s not the situation that’s causing it. It is just the fact that your values and beliefs are aligned. So at some point in time, you’re going to come across people that have different values, that have different beliefs, that have different wiring in their mind. And when that happens, that is where there is a disconnect between the emotional response and what leads to conflict.
Jeff Waters: [00:15:18] Okay, so I spot this in my workplace. There’s conflict between me and a colleague, me and a partner, me and an employee. How can I stop this from happening?
Amy Jacobson: [00:15:30] Okay, so if we have a look at it, the first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to own the fact that you’re playing a role in it. So we get stuck in our own head and we often think it’s not me, it’s them. And that’s the first thing we’ve got to accept is the fact that they might not be wrong. You might not be right. There might not be a right or wrong in the situation. You’ve got to get out of your own head and you’ve got to start to understand, okay, why is this person responding in this way? What is the clash that’s actually happening? And what is it that you know is underlying those values and beliefs that are differing? And it’s being able to accept the Except the fact that every single one of us is different and we’re going to bring different approaches and and we can’t control, we cannot control and we cannot change anyone else in this world. All we can choose to do is control how we choose to respond. So you’ve got to have a look at that conflict and understand what is driving the conflict, what are the emotions that are coming from it, what is the outcome that I want here? Because ultimately, if you both work together and neither of you plan to go anywhere, you’ve got to make this work. So how can you actually make this work? And it’s not about changing you or changing them. It’s about understanding and working together. So leveraging the fact that, okay, I might be a highly detailed, top level summary person, they might be a really analytical question reporting kind of person. So how do we leverage those skills together? How do we work together rather than just thinking they need to be a clone of me, or you know, that they’re a failed version of me. You’ve got to be open to actually finding the crossover. The way that you work together, rather than trying to change them or force them to be you.
Jeff Waters: [00:17:21] All right. Are there any other things that I need to know? If in the hypothetical situation where I spot conflict between two people I’m managing, as opposed to me being involved, and I see this conflict obviously, to shortcut, you know, you put yourself in their position or you think the way they’re thinking, or try to put yourself in their position and rationalize the source of what’s going on. But are there any specific differences in approach that you need?
Amy Jacobson: [00:17:55] There absolutely is. So as somebody on the outside, as a leader or a, you know, another colleague that’s looking at this happening, you’ve got to actually understand the situation from every angle. And it is about understanding. It’s about being able to listen, to find out what is the emotion that each person is actually feeling and coming to it from that humanistic side. Now, the steps that I would say to coming into any difficult conversation like that, or any clash or conflict that you have, the first thing you should be doing is asking open questions. You shouldn’t be going in with any assumptions or any facts. Going and asking open questions. And with those open questions, just listen and pause. Just pause for yourself and listen to the actual emotions and the answers that are coming with it.
Jeff Waters: [00:18:43] Take it slowly and think about things because you’ve got your own emotional reaction to the situation. You might be really annoyed with these people.
Amy Jacobson: [00:18:50] That’s exactly right. And there are very few of us out there that, like any form of conflict or like having to deal with other people’s forms of conflict. So our amygdala is really alert at that point in time because it’s looking for, you know, we might be feeling that fear of confrontation, that fear of the unknown that we’re going in. So you’ve got to be careful not to make assumptions and to overprepare before you even get yourself involved in this situation, you’ve got to go in with an open mind and just ask the right questions to understand, listen and pause to them. And then it’s that key skill of empathy. It’s that key skill of not just chasing or following the situation and the words that they are saying, but actually follow the emotion that they are feeling. Because quite often, what is causing a conflict between two people, the surface problem that you’re seeing is not the real problem. The real problem is actually a lot deeper than that. And if you just fix that surface problem, you’re just putting a bandaid on it and something else will come up to cause that conflict. You’ve got to understand deep down, why is it that these two people are not seeing eye to eye? And what is the learning for both of them in order to be able to work together? And this is where this next question of how do we fix this comes in. And it’s such a powerful question because and sometimes we have to ask at 4 or 5 times because we’ve got to get the people to get out of their own head and get into that kind of that forward thinking solution mode.
Amy Jacobson: [00:20:22] So the first couple of times you ask, how do we fix this between the two people? You might still get a lot of emotion that comes out and says, well, it’s their fault and they shouldn’t have said this. And if they stopped doing that and really coming out with those accusations. But if you repeat that question to them to say, how do we fix this? How do we fix this, then it forces them to look at that reality, to own that reality, to own their emotions, and then for them to move forward and go into that understanding of how the other person is feeling. And if if neither of us are going anywhere, then how do we make this work? How do we bring that humanistic side back into relationships and accept the fact that we are different people? We are going to have different opinions and that’s okay. But maybe it’s the way in which we communicate. Maybe it’s the level of respect. Maybe it’s the trust element. There’s got to be something in. There’s got to be some clear actions in there. In order for you to be able to pick it up and move into that solution mode rather than getting stuck in the he said she said side.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:21:29] That was emotional intelligence specialist Amy Jacobson. Thanks for joining us on this week’s episode. Follow Business Essentials Podcast across social media and head to www.BusinessEssentialsPodcast.au for more. Business Essentials is a SoundCartel podcast. Producers are Nick Schildberger, Nicole Goodman and myself. Technical production is by Pete Letts. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist thanks for listening. We’ll bring you more business essentials next week.
