In March 2020, Cassandra Worthy’s consulting business was undergoing a rebrand. Just days before Covid-19 shut down the world, she was hoping to take her change consultancy, Change Enthusiasm Global, to the next level—the irony of running such a business amid radical change wasn’t lost on Worthy.
“[The] mess was bleak,” she told HR Brew, but it was also “serendipitous and fortuitous.”
Worthy, who is also the author of Change Enthusiasm: How to Harness the Power of Emotion for Leadership and Success, shared with HR Brew what led her to start a change consulting business and why every people leader should know how to embrace change in the workplace.
Path to change. Worthy started speaking engagements as a side hustle in 2017, after beginning her journey of sobriety.
“My journey of sobriety is what led me to start pursuing curiosity, because I had already had this intuition that had been, like whispering to me all through corporate…‘There’s something better you need to be doing with your gifts and your talents,’” Worthy said. “I drowned it out in my alcoholism, but after I got sober, the whisper became a shout, and I couldn’t ignore it.”
She started with small sessions helping individuals through times of personal change. But, after a few events, Worthy said she was advised by Reid Tracy, a mentor and president and CEO of self-help publisher Hay House, to expand her business and go at it full-time.
Worthy, on top of her full-time job, worked nights and weekends crafting a business plan. It was around this time that she realized how much experience she had overseeing change in the workplace. Not only did she help lead Duracell’s engineering employees through the business’s 2016 Berkshire Hathaway acquisition, but she’d also worked on several teams within former parent company Procter & Gamble.
By 2018, Worthy had expanded into consulting. She envisioned bringing her change expertise to companies, where she could help managers, learning and development (L&D), and HR pros guide employees through tumultuous times. In February 2019, she got her first paid consulting gig, so she left her full-time job as a chemical engineer at Duracell to go all-in as the CEO of Change Enthusiasm Global.
Her mission? To help leaders learn how to foster emotions at work and channel empathy in times of change. “The next step in my path of curiosity…was leaving corporate as I’d known it,” she said.
Helping HR and business leaders navigate change. One year later, with a devastating pandemic, the world “came crumbling down," she said. "I had such high hopes for what [2020] would be…Not only did I launch my new website, but March is also when I signed my book deal."
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Worthy experienced regret, fear, and anxiety, questioning if quitting her job had been worth it. But she knew there was value in change consulting, especially at a time like this, so she offered free, virtual consulting to get her business going, and when momentum picked up, she charged for her expertise.
During the pandemic, Worthy said she mainly consulted HR and business leaders on how to navigate the emotional toll associated with public safety changes and protocols, especially in healthcare. She also helped them to express their fears and anxieties, in an effort to make their employees feel less alone in how they were feeling.
“For the first time, they were hearing their colleagues talk about these same emotions that they, themselves, were experiencing…that was one of the biggest gifts for them,” she said. Helping leaders express their emotions in the workplace—and empathize with emotions—has continued to be a pillar of Worthy’s consulting practice. “If you employ people, you employ emotional beings. It’s not just human capital…We can’t just leave emotions at the door business.”
What change looks like today. Fast-forward to today, and Worthy has clients in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Asia, including Johnson & Johnson and her former employer, Procter & Gamble. They may be on the other side of the pandemic, but she said there’s more work to do.
Many of the HR and business leaders she consults work in volatile industries, or at companies experiencing M&A or leadership changes. She helps HR pros develop the skills they need to effectively navigate and discuss change with employees, and adopt a “change enthusiasm mindset,” which, she said, is infectious.
“As HR professionals, they have empathy in spades…but they don’t see that same level of empathetic leadership, perhaps from other stakeholders and leaders across the organization,” she said. “In going through [my] program, they’re then armed with some tools, some strategies…they can bring back to their organization about the power of…all of the leaders embracing this type of a mindset.”
Worthy now has two full-time employees—a chief operating officer and a VP of L&D—and several contractors for other areas of the business, and she hopes to continue growing her team.
“I want to bring this methodology, this language, these tools, to every corner of the world, and that’s my laser focus for the next five to 10 years,” she said.