In the News: At Edmundson Berry, EQ is as big as balance sheet
- August 14, 2024
- Posted by: Luke Herman
- Category: News
Ken Edmundson (left) and Shad Berry — outside their East Memphis office — are partners in the Edmundson Berry Group. (Patrick Lantrip/The Daily Memphian)
From The Daily Memphian:
The computer chip was invented in 1959 and by the early 1960s social scientists were predicting it would outstrip human capacity in terms of laws and values.
By 2010, Ken Edmundson had been running his mid-market business consulting firm for a decade and was noticing a rising uptick in client anxiety.
“Historically, it has taken human beings 15 years to adapt to change,” he said. “Today, you’ve got about nine months to adjust to significant changes in your life.”
The unspoken issue in consulting, he said, was not how well top-level leaders were managing the pressure, but whether they had the capacity to manage it at all.
Until 2019, he tried to avoid the topic.
Then he added partner Shad Berry, CEO of the Kardia Collective, who spoke the anxiety language and knew the cost of buried trauma.
Today, about 50% of clients at the Edmundson Berry Group are paying extra to improve their emotional intelligence, also called emotional quotient or EQ. They work on traits like self-awareness, the quality of their self-talk and how they relate to another’s joy or pain.
“We’re leading leaders through a process of connecting with their own emotional state and well-being while simultaneously tackling the economy and really important issues that are facing their businesses,” Berry said.
“We’re bringing all that into the same conversation as opposed to keeping them very detached.”
About 40% score in the anxious category — intense, emotional worriers who don’t quickly get over things.
“If you lump all those traits together, it’s called anxiety,” Edmundson said. “If you’re one of those, you’ve got to deal with it.”
The cost of avoidance, Berry said, is running a business in a perpetually reactive environment.
Two years ago, Chris Hogue was the new president at NexTech Solutions, a company he’d worked in for two decades. Being the boss felt scary and lonely.
He also was processing the grief of a sudden death in his family.
One day, he noticed his response to an employee was inconsistent with what the situation merited.
“I was still processing one emotion and struggling to process a different situation,” he said.
When he talked it over with Edmundson and Berry, “I had more awareness. ‘Let me come back and handle this in the context of this situation and not the compounding effect of multiple things.’
“It’s almost like I can hit the pause button and realize my reaction was not about what was in front of me,” Hogue said.
He is one of several dozen clients who have signed on for Next Level, coaching beyond the core business advising Edmundson Berry specializes in. Hogue meets two times a month with other business leaders working on EQ issues at firm.
“The biggest thing I get is the counsel of others,” Hogue said, “and just the ability to share what’s going on within the business and with me personally.”
He calls it the emotional intelligence conversation.
“Part of what happens in an ecosystem that’s defined by anxiety is everything needs to be a quick fix. So, there’s no time to let processes develop, or for systems to develop or even for people to mature and develop,” Berry said.
“All anxiety wants is relief.”
A chronically anxious culture becomes dependent on its bosses to deliver relief — not the goal of the organization, he points out — instead of employees rising on their own level of empowerment.
“What we are trying to aim toward is that the leader can become more emotionally intelligent and less reactive because reactivity spawns more anxiety.”
Berry has some personal experience here. He sought counseling for his own anxiety when he left his family’s business – Memphis Communications Corp. — under less- than-optimal conditions. He also had to come to terms with why he valued working hours and hours over what is normal — at a cost to his family.
“And then, there was the failed adoption,” he said quietly.
“In Tennessee, the birth mother has the right to revoke her surrender 10 days after leaving the hospital.”
The new baby had lived nine days with the Berrys. They had been present for his birth. Berry’s wife stayed with young mother while she recovered from a C-section.
“I tell people I didn’t walk into counseling voluntarily, I got pushed into it,” he said. “That began my journey of really pursuing more of myself.”
In 2014, Berry and licensed counselor Tim Holler opened Kardia Collective (Kardia is Greek for heart), hoping to help other anxious people. Berry is certified in emotional intelligence counseling by Sage Hill Counseling in Nashville and in the series of emotional intelligence assessments the business uses to analyze where their clients are on the continuum.
Kardia still exists, but Berry has combined his work to serve both Kardia’s private customers and the business clients he and Edmundson have in the next-door suite at 6363 Poplar.
Russ Sneed owns Michael Hatcher & Associates. The assessments Edmundson and Berry did for him were “spot on.
“They combine them together to give you a full view of how you are hard-wired, and that really doesn’t change. All the other leaders in my Next Level group had the same opinion, that it was spot on.”
Hatcher came wanting to be better rounded as a boss but also a husband and father.
He discovered much of his anxiety was caused by making decisions that did not align with his personal values.
“Hey, I’m saying, ‘here are my core values, and here’s the person I am.’ A lot of your stressors come from not being able to make decisions that align with that.”
Edmundson has spent his life in the mid-market sector, working for Dunavant Enteprises, Willard Sparks and then as head of LEDIC Management Group, a company he formed here with Scott Ledbetter and expanded to 14 cities. They sold it in the late 1990s.
He is seeing anxiety levels in clients that in the 1950s, would have been reason to be institutionalized.
“It’s what I call functionally depressed. We’re walking around, ‘I’m okay. I’m fine. I’m fine. But really, deep down inside, I’m struggling.’ And when you run a business, whether it’s a family business or you’re an independent operator, treating the entire person is so important,” he said.
“Our market niche is typically privately held companies, which means that the founder, the owners, are still working and the majority of their net worth is tied up in the business.”
“We’ve got them up to $400 million or $500 million, but the sweet spot is generally $20 to $50 million in sales. They could have 800 employees, but on average, they’ll have 100 – 150.”
Almost all the major functions in these firms are different than the way they play out in enterprise firms, including how leadership is developed.
“The Fortune 500 company is going to have a 20-year developmental process; a mid-market company is going to have about a year.
“Everything our clients are doing, they’re often doing for the first time,” Edmundson said.
The complexity is heightened by the fact that many mid-market firms are family-owned, which adds deep dimensions around family wealth, family dynamics and legacy.
“We’re trying to optimize the energy of the mid-market leader. They often have relied heavily on intuition to get them where they are. Intuition is not scalable,” Berry said.
“You can’t teach it to somebody else. When you hit that limit, that’s usually where you see these leaders burn out and fade.”
But people can learn to be more emotionally intelligent, Edmundson says.
“You can’t change your natural wiring, and you won’t change your nurtured wiring, but learning emotional intelligence can be the bridge that connects all that.”
Greg Boller, a business professor at the University of Memphis, launched an emotional intelligence training session this spring “because we know people are very interested in it.”
It’s part of the university’s larger Center for Arts Integration in Business Performance, a way of merging the spontaneity –even improvisation – of art into business practices.
“Why would you need to learn that? Well, people need to think quickly on their feet, and there is actually a methodology to learning improvisation,” Boller says.
The same skillset is “super, super helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas.”
The center offers uses dance to help people move more intentionally in public speaking situations “instead of pacing around like a nervous cat,” said Boller, who acts on Memphis stages in his free time.
“We can take you through some steps that will improve your emotional awareness or improve your ability to manage your emotions in relationships, but you have to work on this.”
Hogue, a member of a peer alumni group at Edmundson Berry, finds being in a group with a shared vocabulary is significant.
“When you are around leaders who have had emotional intelligence training, the issues are much easier to identify.
“Your feelings are like warning lights on your dashboard; they are telling you what’s going on under the hood.”