In the latest episode of Fraud Talk, the ACFE’s monthly podcast, Dr. Lisa Walker, leadership psychologist and executive coach, shares the value of practicing emotional intelligence to grow professionally, manage teams and move ahead. Also, in honor of International Women's Day on March 8, she discusses tips for women in the anti-fraud profession who are building and leading teams.

Additionally, stay tuned until the very end for a special announcement from the ACFE.

Below is an excerpt from the full transcript of the discussion, which you can download in PDF form or listen to at the bottom of this post.

Mandy: It’s almost two halves or two sides of a coin. Being able to do the job, like you said acumen, but also the relationship part of it and the self-awareness. Do you have an example of a time where you were working with someone where you really saw that it worked? They actually got it. Like, “Aha, I see where this was a tool and something I needed to learn and I need to change.”

Lisa: Absolutely. There’s so many examples that I have. I’m fortunate I get called in a lot to work with brilliant individuals. I mean they are so good at what they do from a technical perspective, and they’re striving to get to the next level in the next level in their organization, but something is holding them back. When we investigate and take a closer look, it generally is that “people” side of it.

I’m thinking of an amazing leader of mine. We’ll call her Sam, Samantha. Samantha is this go-getter. She’s known as this person in her organization in the department in which she works, give her the hardest task and she is going to push through that wall and ensure that they’re getting amazing results. The challenge is any wall that Samantha comes up against — meaning people and others — she tended to bulldoze them.

Interestingly enough, because she was rewarded for the business result year after year after year and no one was really coaching or paying a lot of attention to the damage that was being caused to personnel, she continued on that path. As she was now setting her eye on… She’s thinking, “I’ve been in this place for such a long time. I need to be further along in the organization.”

Now, she started asking questions around why she wasn’t being promoted. This is when she started getting answers about well, people fall when they’re around you. People who work with you report you tend to be abrasive. You tend to be highly competitive, and you don’t really care much about others’ feelings. When she got this feedback, it was crushing.

She was crushed, yet she’s a very ambitious, hard-working person. She saw this as a challenge. There’s a part of her that doubted whether or not she could learn these people skills, but then the other side of her that was so competitive made her stand up to the challenge. We were working together for almost a year and a half. We finished her work about a year and a half ago.

To watch her grow through this process. First, she had to start with understanding who she is as a person, how she shows up. Then understanding the gaps in how she navigated relationships and what she needed to manage in order to show up differently. Samantha sort of buckled down to do this work, to develop deep self-awareness, because as I always say to my leaders, you cannot effectively manage what you’re not aware of.

She had to be willing to ask and answer some really tough questions about herself. As she navigated that and she developed this deeper awareness of herself, then she could start figuring out how do I manage more effectively so I’m not bruising or hurting or damaging folks and my team in the way that I had been. As she improved in her self-management, then absolutely she started noticing additional ways in the environment how she could enhance relationship with her peers and with other stakeholders.

Part of how we set this up is that she was constantly getting feedback from others around her. She shared with them the specifics of what she was working on. She was working on being less abrasive. She was working on asking questions that were more open-ended and more inviting and inclusive. She was working on not cutting folks off in conversation. These were all things that folks reported that they couldn’t stand about Samantha.They gave her feedback as they observed her over time, and even gave her suggestions on what we call feed-forward about how to continue on this path.

Here is a wonderful thing about this, Mandy. Over time Samantha became this almost example to her people of what this work can do. There were individuals that I had interviewed on her behalf who didn’t trust her and they wanted her to know that because of how she treated them over time. To see her do the work, to build trust with these folks that now these are people who want to collaborate with her, who feel good about being in meetings with her.

We hear in the sales world that you buy things from people who you like and trust. Well, the same thing happens in the workplace on a team. We want to collaborate more with people who we trust. The work that she did first on self-awareness and then on managing herself more effectively, then noticing how she was impacting others around her, and again, manage even more, that allowed her to build stronger relationships, relationships that were now founded on trust.

That allowed her work to be more effective, so not only is she more productive, her team members are more productive. Of course, that impacts the bottom line for the organization in a positive way. She’s a great example for me of when somebody takes this seriously and leans in and does the work around building emotional intelligence.