Ask yourself – Am I intelligent? Yes. No. When I get enough sleep. All of these? Ask yourself again, am I emotionally intelligent? In general people respond in the positive to both of these questions – ‘of course I am intelligent’ (think about overconfidence). While basic intelligence may be more measurable, emotional intelligence is more imprecise. After all what does it mean to be emotionally intelligent?
On July 30th, CFA Society Chicago’s Professional Development Advisory Group invited Lee H. Eisenstaedt of the Leading With Courage® Academy to guide a sold out audience through what emotional intelligence is, how to improve it, and how to apply emotional intelligence to be a better leader.
Eisenstaedt focuses on helping individuals and teams realize peace of mind and confidence from being more effective leaders who are able to make a bigger impact and create higher-performing organizations. He uses workshops, assessments, and executive coaching offered through the Leading with Courage® Academy which is based on his Amazon best-seller Being A Leader With Courage: How To Succeed In Your C-Level Position In 18 Months Or Less. He is also the co-author of the book Wallet Share: Grow Your Practice Without Adding Clients, and is a frequent speaker at national and regional conferences on the topics of leadership and client loyalty.
Eisenstaedt began by providing three takeaways of the presentation. They were:
- Authority, position and title do not equal leadership
- Leadership is about what you do, not where you’re seated
- Authority can compel others to take action, but it does little to inspire belief
- Leadership is about relationships and influence
- Leadership happens when your influence causes people to work towards a shared vision
- Influence and significance come from caring about and growing others
- Leadership is about inspiring / motivating ourselves and others to create high-performing teams and engaged organizations
- Being self-aware is a never-ending journey
- Have the courage to seek feedback
- Self-awareness keeps you relevant
Eisenstaedt explained that emotional intelligence is the ability to, Perceive, Understand, Express, Reason with, and Manage emotions within oneself and others. In a work setting, emotional intelligence is about how intelligently you use emotions to get positive results. Good to know but how is emotional intelligence important in the workplace? Eisenstaedt provided the following data:
- 90% of what moves people up the ladder when IQ and technical skills are similar is emotional intelligence – Harvard Business Review
- The World Economic Forum predicts emotional intelligence will be one of the top 10 employment skills of the immediate future
- Skills like persuasion, social understanding, and empathy are going to become differentiators as artificial intelligence and machine learning take over other tasks – Harvard Business Review
- TalentSmart found that 90% of top performers are high in emotional intelligence while just 20% of the bottom performers are high in it.
Eisenstaedt asked the audience to participate in an interactive phone app-based exercise. The audience was instructed to think about the best and worst boss they had worked for, rate them based on how those bosses made you feel, along with three words describing them. Once completed, Eisenstaedt put the results into a real-time word-cloud. Popular words describing best bosses included supportive, inclusive, and listener, while the adjectives describing the worst bosses were distant, self-serving and aloof.
Eisenstaedt provided a model of emotional intelligence applied to leadership qualities. There are six competencies that emotionally intelligent leaders exhibit.
- Inspiring Performance: Facilitating high performance in others through problem solving, promoting, recognizing and supporting others’ work. Leaders that exhibit a more inspiring style often empower others to perform above and beyond what is expected of them.
- Self-Management: Managing one’s own mood, emotions, time and behavior, and continuously improving oneself. Leaders high in self-management are often described as resilient rather than it’s opposite of being temperamental. Self-Management is important in leadership because a leader’s mood can be infectious and can therefore be a powerful force in the workplace.
- Emotional Reasoning: Using emotional information from yourself and others and combining it with other facts and information when decision-making. Leaders high in this skill make expansive decisions whereas leaders low in the skill make more limited decisions based on facts and technical data only. Emotional reasoning is important in leadership because feelings and emotions contain important information.
- Authenticity: Openly and effectively expressing oneself, honouring commitments and encouraging this behavior in others. Leaders low in this skill might be described as untrustworthy. Authenticity is important in leadership because it helps leaders create understanding, openness and feelings of trust in others.
- Awareness of Others: Noticing and acknowledging others, ensuring others feel valued and adjusting your leadership style to best fit with others. Leaders high in this skill are said to be empathetic rather than insensitive. Awareness of others is important because leadership is fundamentally about facilitating performance and the way others feel is directly linked to the way they perform.
- Present/Self-aware: Being aware of the behavior you demonstrate, your strengths and limitations, and the impact you have on others. This trait is important because a leader’s behavior can positively or negatively impact the performance and engagement of others. The opposite of self-awareness is to be disconnected.
Eisenstaedt returned to the best boss / worst boss exercise explaining the point of this was to confirm that better bosses exhibited high emotional intelligence, while the poorly rated bosses exhibited low emotional intelligence. Most of the words chosen by the audience could be directly related to the six competencies listed above. Eisenstaedt also pointed out that the way a boss or colleague makes you feel has a tremendous impact on your productivity.
Eisenstaedt shifted to explain basic neuroscience behind emotional intelligence and engaging with others. There is a base reptilian brain – this keeps you alive, controlling breathing, heart beating, saving you from threats. These include social oriented threats (loss of control over situations, lack of certainty in your daily life, etc.). While other parts of the brain control higher functions, the reptilian brain’s main function is to minimize danger or maximize rewards.
There are triggers that our reptilian brain reacts to. Feelings of trust, certainty, approval, sense of belonging, and fairness are rewarded in the brain with Oxytocin (a hormone associated with boosting trust and empathy and reducing anxiety and stress). On the negative side diminished approval or status, fear of being conned or tricked, lack of security, loss of control, unfairness, feelings of danger all cause the brain to release Cortisol (a hormone released by the body in stressful situations). Eisenstaedt gave suggestions on how to avoid triggers that lead to stressful situations. He used the SCARF method to identify and reduce those situations of stress.
- Status: Represents your importance relative to others. An increase in status generates a larger neural response than money does.
- Certainty: Humans are certainty seeking machines where any ambiguity triggers a threat response.
- Autonomy: When we experience stressors the threat response is dramatically higher if we feel we have no control. Work on providing a feeling of choice, of control, of autonomy in every situation – try to offer alternatives and some sense of choice.
- Relatedness: New or different people can trigger a threat response. Build trust and a sense of what we have in common by bringing people together socially, in teams, with shared goals.
- Fairness: Unfair interactions or systems generate a threat response. Be more than fair and be generous with all, and in so doing so all must feel they are being treated fairly.
Eisenstaedt wrapped up with a suggestion to evaluate all your relationships (in particular the ones where tension exists). Use SCARF to help identify problem areas. Consider what those problems are in terms of SCARF and seek out ways to address and improve them.