158 - The Power of Empathetic Listening in Business Success with Banzai International's Joe Davy

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Kyo Davey, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and co-founder of Banzai, which is an interesting webinar marketing platform and can be found at Banzai, B-A-N-Z-A-I, .io. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. Appreciate you having me.

Yeah, you know, I interviewed you on Authority Magazine and I really, I probably less than half the people I interview I want to have on my podcast, but you, we really flagged you because you have such an interesting story. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Well, I grew up on the East Coast in North Carolina, grew up in a really small kind of rural town there and moved to the big city of Durham when I was about 15. Went to school at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And my first job out of high school was working at IBM as a software developer, kind of, you know, over the summer before I started college, and then I stayed on for a while. So for a while there, I was, you know, working at IBM during the day and going to class in the morning and then going to work after class and then coming home and trying to study. And so all of that got to be a little overwhelming, and I really got interested in entrepreneurship and decided that that was a path I wanted to pursue. And I originally became aware of that, you know, just aware of the concept because both my parents were teachers, you know, so I had never heard the word entrepreneurship and they're both English teachers even for that matter. So although they're both, you know, very, very, you know, smart people and very accomplished people in their own right, you know, I always just assumed I was gonna go be a professor in some college somewhere. I wasn't really aware that there was a second option, you know. And so I, when I was in school, actually, I had a class, an economics class, which incidentally became my major when I was at Carolina. And in that economics class, the professor brought in two entrepreneurs to talk to the class about entrepreneurship. And I, it was the first time I became familiar with the concept.. And I love the concept. And so I actually became friends with both of those speakers in later years. Both of them were still close friends of mine, and I actually spoke to one of them just yesterday. But there's, you know, for me, that was, you know, after I got out of high school, I went and tried the kind of traditional, you know, thing, my, the thing my parents thought of as a good job and a good career, which was go work at IBM and you can stay there your whole career and they'll pay you really well and it's a safe business. And I came in at a time when IBM was going through a lot of transition. They were, they had just sold off their ThinkPad division, but everybody was still using ThinkPads, you know, MacBooks were still kind of verboten and And, you know, they had, but they still owned their server business and they were kind of going through this transition from being a maker of machines to do calculations, which was their original business to really more of a, and really being a product innovation led company because that's what IBM was for many, many years. And they were going through a transition from being a product innovation led company to being a customer solutions oriented company and focusing more on consulting, putting solutions together, you know, working with enterprises to develop, you know, hardware, software, customized approaches to their problems. And so it was an interesting time to be there and I learned a lot, but the main thing that I learned was that I really just wasn't in love with the idea of being a software engineer. And I loved working on software, I loved writing code, but I really was much more interested in what was going on in the business. And it felt like there was a bit of a wall there. And I think that's not just true at IBM, I think that's true, you know, pretty much anywhere. And so, you know, I felt like if I want to be able to kind of do both, then I probably need to, you know, be in a smaller organization where I can have more direct impact. And that was my, you know, 19-year-old thinking at the time. So, yeah, so anyways, I end up starting a company in my, while I was at Carolina, and it kind of took off a little bit and we raised some venture capital money and kind of got off to the races and I ended up dropping out of Carolina in my senior year. And so I've been kind of working as an entrepreneur ever since then. And I had to go through the very tough process that a lot of founders have to go through of, you know, transitioning from being somebody who's probably a pretty decent software engineer or pretty decent salesperson or whatever skill set they happen to bring to to being somebody who's, you know, actually got more of a leadership skill set. And that transition was a pretty painful one for me and, you know, stubbed my toe a number of times along the way.

But let's stop right there because that's something that I think everybody's interested in. What made transitioning from being a doer to being, or a producer, to being a leader? What were the challenges that you faced there?

Well, the main challenge I think that I faced and a lot of entrepreneurs face is, you know, you could call it something friendly, but basically it boils down to arrogance. You know, you believe that nobody can do it as good as you, right? And so what ends up happening is, you know, you end up feeling like you either have to do it or you have to micromanage it. And eventually you either burn yourself out or you burn your team out or you make enough mistakes that, you know, you burn the company out. And so, you know, for me, it was, you know, I've been really fortunate to work with some really great mentors over my career. And the probably the, you know, person that had the biggest impact on my career was a guy named Kevin Riegelsberger, who was the president at Avalara. So when I was, I think, maybe 22 or 23, we sold the assets of that first company that I started. And I eventually ended up going to work with Kevin when I was 24 as a general manager of a business at Avalara that they had acquired. And really what at the time was like the first general manager in the company. And so we were trying to build the framework for how do we do this well, but also how do we grow the business quickly. And it was, you know, a bit chaotic at times, but ultimately, you know, the lessons I learned from Kevin were, you know, Kevin had this amazing ability to manage things that he didn't know that much about by trying to figure out you know, just 1 or 2 details that you would have to have done right if you were doing the job right. And, you know, Kevin's approach was, I'm not going to focus on trying to figure out every single thing that needs to be in your plan and do it all for you. Kevin's approach was, I'm going to figure out the 1 or 2 things that, you know, that, that, you know, you would have had to have thought of if you were going to do this right, or you would have to know, or you would have to be at this milestone and I'm gonna make sure that you've thought about those things. And it was really, you know, it was this really incredible kind of high leverage approach to management. And then eventually I read a book while I was at Avalara by Andy Grove, former, you know, CEO of Intel called High Output Management. And that book completely changed my perspective on on, you know, working with people. So, you know, I would say beyond that, I've had probably a litany of coaches and, you know, 360 reviews and all the horrible things you can do to yourself. But over time, you know, I think I developed a better sense of how to be an effective leader. But It definitely wasn't something that came naturally to me in the, in the early days. And I don't think it comes naturally to a lot of entrepreneurs. I think it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a skill set. It's a muscle that you have to build. And if you don't, you know, if you don't exercise that muscle, you know, you shouldn't expect to be great at it, I think.

I mean, you think about, think about the military. I mean, the US Army starts leadership training right at the very beginning. And, and, you know, if you're a corporal and you want to go to sergeant school, you've got to do a 30-day basic leadership course before you can even qualify to apply for the sergeant school.

I didn't know that. That's interesting.

Um, what's interesting to me is that the military has really figured out how to develop leaders that work for its mission, but the business world has not. And people like you are, uh, exceptions to the rule, I think, where, where, uh, Many people never really learn how to be a leader. And that creates real challenges for them.

I think that's a really good point. You know, there's a— we like the saying around here, figure out what works and do it.

Right.

So eventually, you know, if you try what doesn't work enough times, you know, you hopefully have some blind luck and you figure out something that will work. And that's basically what happened In my case, when it came to leadership, I just kind of kept, you know, kept at it until I figured out how to stop screwing it up. But I think it's a really good point, you know, when you're in the military, you know, there's kind of a path for you. There's resources for you and a lot of big companies have that as well, you know, like at IBM, you know, if you want to go into management at IBM, it's probably a similar thing, you know, you have to, you know, go through different trainings and different classes and, you know, they kind of teach you how to do it over time. Entrepreneurship is really like, like, you know, packing yourself into a cannon and then reaching out and setting the fuse, you know, and jumping into the deep end of the pool without really knowing how to swim. That's right. Yeah. And so, you know, there's not as many resources for entrepreneurs out there. One resource I was really lucky to find although I wish I'd found it a lot sooner, was the Entrepreneurial Master's Program that EO does. They do it in partnership, they host at MIT, and it's, I've been in it for 2 years now. So this upcoming May, that'll be my 3rd year, and it's a 3-year program, but it's basically, they get a bunch of entrepreneurs together from all over the world And then they bring in people to talk about leadership and you kind of sit there for 4 days and just get crammed full of information. And then you have to go back with your groups and, and you have to, you get to talk about it once a month and kind of talk about how you're applying it. And I, you know, I found that to be just really super beneficial for me as somebody who, you know, I never got an MBA and I never went through the, you know, sergeant school or through the IBM executive training program, you know.

So you've got, you're with Bonsai now. It's a, it's from what I can tell looking at the website, you guys have a sophisticated webinar video production platform. Would that be correct?

Well, largely that's what we are today, but our vision is a little bit bigger than that. So essentially, you know, with Bonsai, what we're building is a platform business to fill in the gaps around marketing automation. So you have a company like HubSpot that has 145,000 customers, whatever the number is, and they're very, you know, they're very firmly cemented as the leader in marketing automation. They're, you know, they own the emails and the landing pages and a little bit of the reporting in the workflow. But But really, you know, that's a fairly essential and mission-critical piece of businesses, and they're going to own that. But there's a lot of things around HubSpot that are also essential mission-critical things that HubSpot doesn't do and most likely never will. So we think about those things in 3 categories. One is lead acquisition. So basically, how do you get leads into HubSpot? Two is engagement. So basically, once they're in there, what do you do with them? You know, yeah, you can send them emails, but what are you sending them emails about? And, you know, so that's things like webinars and content and all of that. And then, you know, 3 is that is the analytics reporting and the data kind of plumbing. So things like, you know, marketing ETL or, you know, CDP, attribution, you know, ROI tracking, things where, you know, moving data between systems, you know, workflow automation, all of that. And all of that's essential in a typical, you know, marketing stack. And the average enterprise today uses 120 different marketing SaaS products. So HubSpot might be one of them, but that means that there's another 119 around it that are also mission-critical that aren't HubSpot. And so So our view is we want to own those pieces of the puzzle. So webinar is an interesting one. We got into webinar because we originally had a great business in audience acquisition. That's where we started. So basically helping people get butts in seats for their events and webinars. Then we said, well, that makes sense to own the webinar platform. Then we launched Boost last year, which was a, which is a social sharing tool. That help people get more attendees to webinars using the existing attendees to share it, you know, helping them make it easy to share it. And now we're looking at what are the other things around that. So we just announced an acquisition a couple of weeks ago of a company called IG Leads, which is a lead generation platform that uses interests and kind of social graph, social signals to help companies find the right, you know, prospects. That's a really interesting tie-in to the existing product base that we have. And we're looking at, you know, we're looking at other options as well. So we ended up taking Banzai public last month in December.

Wow, congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah, and we did that mainly so that we could shore up our capital base So we'd be in a better position to go out and do more of these kind of acquisitions. And so, you know, we plan to do more of them this year. We're looking at a bunch of different companies in different categories. But the super high-level thinking is everything that, you know, we, we want to own strategically, we want it to be something that is a missing piece of HubSpot so we can go after, you know, the HubSpot customers and they're— HubSpot's been a great partner to us, been super supportive of us. And so ultimately, you know, we want to basically build the products that are the complementary products to that and then, you know, work with that customer base to help them solve more and more of their problems. And we want our products to all essentially share the same customer base because then, you know, for us it's all about customer expansion, focusing on You know, how do we help customers solve one problem, but then how do we help them solve the second, third, fourth, fifth problem using additional solutions that we have?

What do you think is unique about you that has allowed you and Bonsai to be so successful? I mean, you started the company in 2016, so you've been going on, you know, almost 10 years now or 8 years. What is it about you as a leader or as a person that you think you bring to the table that has been important?

That's a good question. You know, sometimes I think not that much. I would say, you know, maybe one small thing is I think if you're gonna be in a business like this where you're gonna go try to do a roll-up, you have to be good at working with people, you have to find, you have to be able to find deals, you have to be able to make deals with people. So you have to be able to walk into a room with somebody and find a win-win where you can both, you know, where you can both walk out and feel like you're getting a good bargain. And you have to be able to do that in a way that, you know, it turns out that the company actually is getting a good deal. Because, you know, a lot of companies, the mistake they make and why most of the time these types of, you know, it's very hard to execute on businesses like this is people over-optimize on one thing or the other. They over-optimize on, I'm going to only, I'm going to only make sure that I get a really great deal and therefore I'm going to screw the other guy. But then you only end up buying companies where for whatever reason the founder is in a position to, you know, to be willing to be screwed just to get out of it. And that really doesn't work very well for you or you end up saying, yeah, sure, I'll just pay whatever they want or I'll just do whatever they want. And, you know, that puts you in a position to really, for things to not work out financially. So you have to be able to find a balance where, you know, things can work for you financially and where you can end up getting high-quality assets. At the end of the day, like, that's the only way that this business works. So I think, I think being able to, to, you know, work constructively with people has been really important. I mean, early on I thought it was, you know, if you can write really good code, that would be the most important thing. And, you know, I still like writing code sometimes, but although they don't really let me do it anymore over here, I'm an amateur now. But yeah, more about people.

The title of this show is Listening with Leaders. And I think you've probably done your, a little due diligence on me. So you know that I teach people how to listen at a very deep level. How important has listening been to you in your career trajectory?

That's a great question. I think I would like to take a step back and I would say, communication is not what's said, communication is what's heard, right? You know, a lot of people think that they've said something and therefore they've communicated it. But making sure that you've been heard is actually not about what you say. It's about listening to the person to make sure that, you know, that they understand you and vice versa, that you understand them, right? So I think, you know, In this type of business, if you, if you're having to negotiate with people, understanding their motivations is very important. Sometimes people will come out and tell you that directly. Sometimes they will kind of hint at it. Sometimes you have to guess a couple of times before they'll tell you. But basically it all comes down to communication. And I think that listening is probably like by a factor of 4 or 5 more important part of communication than what is being said. I think that a lot of people sit around and focus on wordsmithing the right message, right? When in reality, what you need to do first is, you know, is listen. The other thing I would say is I think listening is an essential part of making sure that people are receptive to what you have to say. In other words, you know, I'm not going to call out any specific Middle East conflicts that are going on right now, but basically a lot of them are the result of an inability to listen to or empathize with the other side in any way. Now, absolutely, you know, I think I won't get into why I think that has happened or why that breakdown has occurred. But what I will say, because that's frankly above my pay grade and I don't get paid to make political statements. But what I will say is that, you know, you have— if the other side doesn't feel that they've been heard, then they're not going to listen to what you have to say in any kind of negotiation, especially in a business negotiation.

And in any kind of relationship.

That's right.

It's not just business. It's in every relationship.

And the more they feel unheard, the more they're going to stop listening to you. And that's where communication breaks down. And at that point, you can wordsmith whatever you want, but it's not gonna make a difference. You know, the most perfectly articulated thing in the world won't make a difference if nobody's listening to it.

So I think that, I think you have, you've got a lot of wisdom there. Knowing how to listen so the speaker feels heard from the speaker's frame of reference. Is really the key to all of this. So when, when I'm listening to you, how do I make sure that you know that I'm really hearing you, that you're really being listened to and validated? And yeah, to your point, until that happens, communicate— true communication is not going to occur.

So in any kind of change management process, you know, one thing that I've observed is if you come in, um, with, you know, let me explain the situation. Let me explain what the problem was. Let me explain what we did about it. Let me explain why you should be happy about this. You'll get about, you know, 10% of people will be happy about it. About, you know, 50% of people will be indifferent about it. You know, they'll throw up their hands and be like, okay, well, whatever, just another day of somebody that's not listening to me. And about 40% of people will be pissed off about it. Right. You know, you're never gonna make 100% of people happy, but the way that you can get closer is by starting off with coming in and saying, well, what do you think the problem is? You know, what do you think some solutions could be? How do you think we got into this situation?

What would you— Or is something even, tell me what's going on.

Yeah. What would you do if you were in my situation? Tell me how you feel about this, you know?

Right.

And, and I think, you know, usually I try to avoid the tell me how you feels by trying to not get into a position where people have extreme negative feelings to begin with. And you can usually do that by, you know, usually, usually if you're in a situation where you're, where you're saying tell me how you feel, that means that something already went wrong further up the creek, you know, in terms of, in terms of a breakdown of communication. And not always, you know, there's definitely, there's always situations that might be outside of your control or or outside of someone else's control. But if you find yourself, you know, uh, needing to do that too often, you might want to stop and say, am I, am I really engaging early enough in the process?

Right. And, and what I've learned and what I teach is instead of asking the question, tell me how you feel, make it much more open-ended. Tell me what's going on. Tell me what's going on. And then if they are inclined, whether or not they tell you how they feel or not, if they are emotionally aroused, those emotions will surface. And then I teach people how to listen to emotions instead of words. And so now you've got the opportunity to start listening to these emotions. And as you reflect back the emotional experience, people feel deeply validated and they feel heard. And very quickly they're on board with whatever it is that you want them to be on board with.

What's, uh, what's an example of that that you might do? That's really interesting because You know, we've had a couple of these situations here, like I won't pretend to be perfect and, you know, from time to time we end up in—

Give me an example of where somebody came in and they, something was going sideways and I'll show you how.

I'll give you an example that I saw the other day that wasn't related to Bonsai, but it was pretty public. So it might be relevant to your audience. There was a woman, I think her name was Brittany Peach, who worked at Cloudflare as a software or as a salesperson, account executive. Their software company, and she was let go by the HR team, you know, over Zoom call. Her manager wasn't on the call and she filmed it, put it on TikTok. And, you know, obviously it was just really ugly reflection on both, really for both sides, I think. Who knows what will end up happening, who the winners of this thing will be. But I think the scenario was, you know, she, it was actually a perfect example of what we were just talking about where, you know, they get 15 seconds into the conversation and she says, you know, let me stop you right there. Like, let me explain to you why I shouldn't be let go. And, you know, it turned into this, you know, 10-minute back and forth and argument. I don't know if you've been able to watch the video or not.

No, I haven't. But let's just suppose that I'm her and I've got some HR people here who I don't even know. Who are trying to explain to me that they're going to let me go. And so I would say something like, I'd be listening and I'd say, so you guys are really anxious and you're really, you're worried and concerned and you're really afraid that this is going to be upsetting and you're distressed over this. And the idea that somebody like me might become reactive is a little scary to you. And, you know, you basically feel disrespected by your superiors because you've been put in a position that you don't want to be in, and you've been ignored and unappreciated, unsupported, and yet you still have to do this work, and it's really upsetting to you and really frustrating to you, and you wish you weren't sitting here across in a Zoom call with me on this call. Now imagine how would they feel if she said something like that, validated all the upset that they are obviously having. What do you think they would do?

I think that's a good question. I mean, I think that reminds me of the biblical proverb of, you know, cast the first stone, right?

I think that in that situation, one of two things is going to happen. Either they're going to continue with their mandate to fire the woman and she would have grace enough to accept it and, and make sure that the people on the other side felt validated. But they would leave on terms where they, those people would walk out of the room saying, we just really screwed up. We lost one of our best employees. That was really stupid. Maybe we need to rethink this. Or they would say, you know, in listening to you on this, maybe we need to rethink this. Tell you what, we're gonna cancel, we're gonna close out the call. We'll get back to you.

Right.

Um, because so rarely do human beings really listen to each other. And when one human being listens to another and validates them, it completely changes the relationship.

Yeah.

When I teach leaders this stuff, this is how leaders can build trust and loyalty on their teams, is by instead of listening to the words, listen to the emotions.

I think like one thing I've always tried to, um, keep in mind, you know, personally, and also just advice that I would always give to anybody who asked, you know, is, you know, in most companies you're gonna have a last day, right?

Right.

People remember your first day, but they really remember your last day, right? You know, all the days in between can kind of be blurry. And, you know, I've had people that have left the company and I felt like, you know, man, I would love to work with that person again, you know, yeah, had to let this person go. But maybe it was just a bad fit here. Maybe it just didn't work out this time. Maybe there's something going on in their personal life. Let's check back in, in a couple of years and see where they're at and let's see if we can do it again. And in some cases we've done that. We've had a lot of people that have come back to Bonsai actually. We've had probably, I don't know, I can think of probably like 4 or 5, 6 people off the top of my head that have left and come back. And then there's other people that leave and on the way out you're like, geez, I hope I never have to see that person again. Exactly correct.

You know, you're, you're You're right.

I mean, you know, the reaction in the moment in that case, I think— I don't know that it would have changed the outcome for her. It may or may not have. But it would have changed the aftermath, I think. Right. You know, now, I mean, obviously, this thing went viral. And we'll see whether that was— ends up being a good or bad thing for her career. I don't know.

But probably not. Anyways, one more question. I'll let you go.

Oh, please.

So Joe, what's one thing about yourself that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh gosh. Well, you know, I'm a pretty public person, so I don't know, that's a little tricky. I'll actually use this to plug kind of a passion project of mine. So you may or may not know about this about me, but it's not the thing that usually comes up in the headlines. So my night job is I'm the vice chairman of the Seattle Symphony. And I was a kid. That's right. When I was a kid, I used to play violin and I was very— yeah. And I got into this because when I was in like 4th or 5th grade, the North Carolina Symphony came and they played in a little auditorium in the small town that I lived in. I mean, I lived in a town of like 2,400 people, but they came and performed and it was really a cool experience. And I got to go backstage and see the musicians and all that. And, you know, that encouraged me, and ultimately I ended up playing violin. And, and so, you know, now I work with the symphony. I've been on the board for, I think this is my 3rd year, and I lead the committee that's responsible for, we call it community engagement. About half of that is working with, you know, cultural groups, so indigenous groups or Asian Americans, groups like that, to, you know, engage them to either come to Beneroya Hall, perform at Beneroya Hall, or us to go out into their communities or whatever. Um, but then the other half of it is working with kids in education, and, um, we bring a lot of kids. I think this year we plan to bring, you know, 7,000, 8,000 kids to Beneroya Hall, uh, for Link Up. We actually just did this really neat thing a couple of, uh, the, the documentary came out a few weeks ago, um, and you can go, uh, search for it. It's called Young Composers and with Seattle Symphony. And what we did is we had 10 kids that were in middle school or high school. I think the oldest was in high school, maybe, maybe early, early college, but basically all teenagers. And they got to compose pieces that to then have them performed by the Seattle Symphony live.

How cool is that?

Which is, which is incredible. So Jeremy Jolly, who's the guy that runs the education department at the symphony, who's kind of the guy I work with the most closely on that committee, you know, he has a, a, a post, uh, postgrad, you know, a master's degree or a PhD or something in, in, um, music composition, I think it is. And, you know, he, he was saying in the, in his interview, I was speaking to him about this, that, you know, he went to school and spent 3 years writing a dissertation, which was essentially a big piece of music to have compose, and it never even got performed because it's very, very hard to get a piece of music performed that you've composed. And so the ability to give these kids, you know, one of the top symphony orchestras in the country is actually going to play the piece that you composed. It's such a cool thing. And when you watch the documentary, you get to see these kids talking about it, going through their process, like sitting at home writing music after, you know, after they've done their chores or whatever. It's just really the coolest thing. That's right. Yeah, I love doing stuff like that.

You wouldn't know it, but I'm a jazz violinist.

Oh, okay. Well, that's great.

Yeah, I play jazz.

You should come to the symphony sometime. Next time you're in Seattle, let's go.

There you go.

There you go.

Well, this has been a great conversation, Joe. Thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, Doug, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews Your reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.