Jeremy Darroch, CEO of Sky, talks with Martyn Newman about how emotional intelligence and mindfulness have shaped his leadership. He credits EQ practices with better business decisions, less internal tension, and a healthier workplace where people actually put their phones down.
Hello, I'm Martin Newman, and here at Roche Martin, we're all about emotional intelligence, EQ and mindfulness. We provide companies like Sky, Argos, investech with the tools to help their people improve creativity, productivity, and innovation. What are some of the key points that bringing emotional intelligence into sky are where it's made a difference?
I think we just are making better business decisions. We're drawing more from the difference in breadth of the organization. Well, managing tensions, I think much better today than in the past. But secondly, I also think it's had a big effect in just the internal dynamic of the business. It's a better place to work, I think now. I think when you put those two things together, it starts to sustain and repeat.
I had the opportunity of teaching some of your senior guys how to quiet their mind and develop a more peaceful mind so they could focus. Have you noticed, among any of them, changes that have caught your attention?
The team understand that you just can't keep going at a certain level the whole time and that you actually have to quieten the mind and also get physical recovery. Even in business, being present in conversations, the ability to put your phone or your iPad away to the side and actually enable the mind to focus on the thing that we're discussing and which is in hand. I think those things you can see repeat many times.
Numbers are important to you. And as you know, Roche Martin is very committed to science. And so there was some uncertainty about bringing a tool like the Emotional Capital Report to try to make measure some of these skills. How does that work, do you think, in the organization?
I think one of the great things about the report and the tool is it sort of puts a lot of these concepts into the language of business. And so a lot of people will respond. They respond very well to direct feedback. They're often very hungry for that. They typically like to see things rated and scaled because it's very easy to get your head around that. And it goes very easy then to establish a base from which we can look at progress. So actually, I think it fits very well with a course or a program that's very much focused on some of the softer skills. It can be a little bit hard for people to get their hands around. So it complements, I think, that very well. Sam.
