Distinction: EQ is not drama. (things becoming more emotional)  It is the opposite.

 

We are all draining some amount of revenue because of a less than perfect score on our emotional intelligence.

 

Oh, man, here she goes again with the fluffy stuff.  Emotional Intelligence?  You’ve got to be kidding.  I have a deadline to meet…no time for touchy-feely talk here.

 

Hang on a moment…hear me out:

First of all: Today’s accepted definition: “EQ is the ability to sense, understand and effectively apply the power of acumen of emotions to facilitate high levels of collaboration and productivity.” (Cooper & Sawaff, 1998) 

 

A little history of how EQ came to become mainstream: EQ has been being studied since the 1930’s, so it’s not new, but when Daniel Goleman, a Harvard PHD who was the senior editor of “Psychology Today” magazine, and covered the Behavioral and brain sciences for the “New York Times” wrote  his ground-breaking book called “Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ” , he brought it into the mainstream.  That was in 1995.   He turned a whole lot of heads in the corporate and business world, who began to think about the cost of what we call emotional illiteracy. In 1998, the Harvard Business Review published an article Goleman wrote called “What makes a Leader?” on EQ and it was one of the most widely-read article in the history of the publication.  Since then people have really been standing at attention. 

 

The April 2003 issues of Harvard Business Review featured an article that stated the importance of EQ this way:“In hard times the soft stuff often goes away.  But emotional intelligence, it turns out, isn’t so soft.  If emotional obliviousness jeopardizes your ability to perform, fend off aggressors, or be compassionate in a crisis, no amount e of attention to your bottom line will protect our career. Emotional intelligence isn’t a luxury tool you can dispense with in good times.It’s a basic tool that, deployed with finesse, is the key to professional success.   

 

So, let’s step backward and look at your employees.  Your human capital, if you will.  Each person who works for or with you has these 3 components that show up in the workplace: behavior, intelligence, and emotional intelligence.  For your decision-making employees, it’s pretty difficult to change behavior more than a few points, and there’s not much you can do about their IQ.  EQ, on the other hand, is the most easily changeable of the three parts that make up any individual.  And only within the last year or so,  there have developed validated instruments to test for EQ, so it can now be measured, and coached to, which makes life so much better for executive coaches like me.  Before we could accurately measure for EQ, I’d have to tell people with rather large egos that they needed to work on their empathy.  Now I can give them a test, and show them where they stand in comparison to the average EQ. The numbers speak for themselves, and I get yelled at less often.

 

Over half of performance in any job is emotional intelligence.  (Similar to knowing that over half of all communication is non-verbal, once you know the power of EQ, you realize that even if you have all the rest of the recipe, if EQ is too low, the outcome will be unsuccessful)  Goleman’s work has shown that 90% of the difference between start performers and average performers is EQ. There are only 7 Basic emotions *; but having the power to control these will trump all abilities and skills every time. 

Here’s the thing: the speed and power of emotional reaction is infinitely faster than  rational thought.  So, controlling quick, impulsive reactions is very important.  The emotional brain responds more quickly to an event than the thinking brain. The amygdala, which is the trigger point for the emotional flight or fight response, perceives an emotional emergency, and takes over the rest of the brain, including the thinking brain, (also known as the neo-cortex).  The neo cortex hasn’t even had time to analyze the events and decide what to do.  So the amygdala is already in control.  (Fight or flight, adrenalin flowing) It’s a leftover survival mechanism from our ancestors.  So, emotions always precede behavior.  We feel good, then we smile, not the other way around.  Think about this:  something bad happens first thing in the morning at work.  Sometone yells at you .  The average negative experience produces chemicals, thanks to your amygdala, at the time of the unpleasant experience.  Those chemicals remain in your body for an average of 4 hours. I was listening to Dr. Izzy Justice recently at a conference of professional behavior analysts, and he was referring to the average round of golf lasting 4 hrs and 25 minutes.  So something happense in the first 5 minutes of the game, you can kiss your golf game good-bye, and some of you know exactly what I’m talking about.  The same with other professional sports.  Think about someone really really good.  It is their ability to manage their emotions on the course, rather than their skills, if their skills are approximately equal to their opponents’, that will win the game. 

 

 

The bottom line is that, making better decisions starts with understanding your own EQ.  Your EQ is important because it helps you leverage your awareness of emotions for effectiveness in the workplace.  And here’s the scary thing: CEOs and other senior executives, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace.

 

So, testing for EQ is critical for decision makers in any industry, because if an employee can understand their own EQ, they can avoid making high-risk decisions without understanding how their emotions are influencing their choice.  Instead they can make educated, sound decisions with their head, instead of just their heart.

 

HOW EQ WORKS 

EQ consists of two separate categories, and 5 sub-categories:

The two main categories are :

1. Interpersonal: the ability to understand other people and relate to them.  The ability to understand how others work, what makes them tick, and how to best work with them.
   1. Empathy – The ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people
   2. Social Skills – A proficiency in managing relationships and building networks
2. Intrapersonal: the ability to understand yourself and what makes you tick.  Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (Bradberry & Greaves)states only 36% of the people they tested were accurately able to identify their emotions as they happened.
   1. Self Awareness – The ability to recognize nad understand your moods, emotions, and drives, as well as their effect on others
   2. Self-regulation – The ability to control or re-direct disruptive impulses and moods and the propensity to suspend judgment and think before acting
   3. Motivation – A passion to work for reasons that go beyond money and status and a propensity to pursue goals with energy and enthusiasm.

 

Interesting EQ trivia: the 25% of the population of China with the highest IQs is greater than the population of North America. But here’s what’s scarier: American executives averaged significantly lower than Chinese executives in both self-management and relationship management.

 

EQ does seem to increase with age….we tested people of different generations, and the traditionalist generation (62 to80) had the highest scores, the baby boomers(43-61) were next, then Gen X (31-43) and lowest on the scale was Gen Y (18-30).  We generally only deliver the instrument to people over the age of 21 who are gainfully employed, otherwise the gaps are just too huge, they barely register. Biggest category gap was in self-management.

 

*The Seven emotions:

1. Love
2. Fear
3. Hope
4. Anger
5. Joy
6. Sadness
7. Envy

 

Let’s just talk about the bottom line for a moment, then, shall we?  Because this might all sound really interesting, but it may still sound too “soft” to take seriously when we have goals to achieve and deadlines to meet, and we don’t really have time to stop and think about our feelings and all that.   Well, here’s what to look at regarding the bottom line: How would it affect your bottom line if your employees and you could be 10% more productive, 10% more empowered, 10% happier, stay 10% longer at your company than they were planning?

Things to consider:

• Did you know that 56% of current employees are expected NOT to be retained n their current jobs within 2 years?
• 39% of executives become dissatisfied because of lack of personal growth.
• By age 38, the average employee will have had 10-14 jobs. 
• There are 78 million Baby Boomers in the workplace today (your most emotionally intelligent group of workers) and every 8 seconds on of them is retiring. 
• We are spending $140Billion dollars each year in employee turnover costs. 
• People like  my friend Terry Kabachnik are getting rich writing books like “I Quit But I Forgot To Tell You” because the rate of employee disengagement is so high.
• Emotions are like a virus; they spread from one to two people, and then next thing you know they have affected many more. Disengaged workers become that way because of EQ issues, their productivity goes down by approximately 50%, they spread a virus and eventually end up quitting or getting fired.   

I know I kind of just did a brain dump here, but hopefully you picked up a few things that you can tie together.  

 

“CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise - and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence” - Daniel Goleman 

 

Resources for more info:

1. Daniel Goleman’s book: Emotional Intelligence

2. New book out called “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves.  Caveat; slightly different assessments that only cover 4 areas, being self awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.  (I like Dr. Goleman’s and Dr. Justice’s work better, but this little book Bradberry and Greaves just came out with, if you are not already familiar with EQ, is a good little primer and has some very practical information in it.)

3. EQ Mentor.  www.EQMentor.com  Dr. Justice’s website has lots of information on it.  He actually has a program for companies you can look into. 

4. The reprint of the Harvard Business Review article by Dr. Goleman called “What Makes a Leader?”.  You can go to www.hbr.org  or 800-988-0866

5. OnYouTube you can search Izzy Justice and listen to a couple of his podcasts on EQ

 

Some Next steps:

 

1. Get your own EQ tested. If you are interested in seeing your own report results you can do two things: You can email me julia@mentaliron.com and I will set you up to take the assessment and provide a 5 page report with specific instructions on how to increase your emotional intelligence in any of the 5 areas. The assessment itself takes 15 minutes and is done on line and is the only validated assessment available I know of that measure the 5 areas of EQ. There is a fee.
2. Make an action plan on how you are going to increase your own EQ, by jotting down the areas you learned today on this show, and implementing one improvement action per month.  Tell someone what you’re working on and ask them to monitor your progress.  This costs nothing, and at the end of 5 months, you have covered each of your five areas by consciously working on improving them and getting feedback from someone who will be honest with you.  Caveat: if you are a tyrant, low on empathy, do not ask an employee, they will not tell you the truth!! Ask a colleague, or your boss, or the person you answer to.
3. Take your report to your spouse and ask them for ideas on how you can work on the different areas, and implement one of their ideas.  An interesting thing on gender differences we’ve noticed in the hundreds of thousands of EQ test that have been completed, men’s scores are most often lower on empathy than women’s and women’s scores are most often lower than men’s on self–regulation.
4. For those of you who are serious, and want to start growing your company’s emotional intelligence, let me know by either emailing me or calling me. about delivering this test to your company and coming in and doing a customized in-house workshop on EQ, so you can start everyone improving their EQ all at the same time.  If you have a big company, we would do a half-day workshop at a very reasonable cost, and all the assessments would be included.  If you have a small company, we might want to do a Web Session on line, where people have already received there reports and a de-brief, and then we do up to 15 people on an intimate web session showing them how to take their next step.
5. So, you see, if you serve by example first, by exploring your own EQ, you can begin a culture of self-development in this area of Emotional Intelligence.  Emotional Intelligence is the Number One Predictor of Professional Success and Personal Excellence., so that your company can manage, adapt, and get ahead of the pack.

Tags: Emotional Intelligence, EQ, EQ Coach, EQ Mentor, Executive Coach

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Behavioral assessments, EQ, Emotional Intelligence, Executive Coach, Executive Performance Coach, Executive pERFORMANCE cOACHING, Intelligence, Mental Iron, Motivation, Self-Improvement, Success, executive coaching, pumping mental iron, self developmeny, wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.