Let’s play a little word association with people in your life. I give you the person; you provide a short, pithy description:
Your boss: Is she bossy, domineering, decisive, brusque, inspiring, optimistic or a milquetoast?
Your co-worker (cubicle on the left): friendly, supportive, loud, obnoxious, unkempt, pleasant, vanilla, team player, independent?
Your spouse: On second thought, let’s not go there.
Your answers have one thing in common, even though they may be worlds apart in meaning. Your instant description nearly always is a summary of the person’s behavior in the setting you share.
Only occasionally will people answer “brilliant,” or “intellectual” as their dominant impression. While cognitive or technical expertise often is necessary to qualify for a job in the middle to upper reaches of the organizational chart it is usually not what leads to overall effectiveness.
While Intelligence Quotient (IQ) measures a person’s ability to assess, analyze and effective absorb information, it’s emotional intelligence (known as EQ) that summarizes a person’s ability to impart their unique humanness to others.
Its development or lack of it will tell volumes about your potential success in your chosen career and, eventually, as a leader.
“As you develop yourself, as you grow into your career, developing your emotional intelligence should be a high leverage activity,” California-based business and workforce consultant Bonita Patterson told an executive group recently.
Often the need to develop emotional intelligence does not become apparent until a person is promoted into management where effectively influencing and motivating others is primary to the job. How many of us have seen a technically superior or highly skilled worker promoted to supervisor only top fail miserably because they lack important social skills?
“We all know people who look like they ‘have it,’ but just don’t ‘get it,’” Joseph Mancusi, former clinical psychologist and founder of the Virginia-based Center for Organizational Excellence said in a 2003 presentation on emotional intelligence.
According to a Psychology Today study, the top flaws of failed managers were:
* Being insensitive, abrasive and intimidating when communicating;
* Showing coldness, aloofness and arrogance;
* Betraying trust;
* Being obsessed with ambition and organizational political power, and
* Failing to solve specific business performance problems.
Changing is not easy. Brian DesRoches, a Seattle consulting psychologist, once told me a poorly developed sense of self often stems from failure to fully develop effective relationships as children even within the family.
“Any patterns they (failed executives) learned in their original family in dealing with emotional discomfort will be repeated in any organization they join.” Psychological counseling may be required to effect change.
Since it deals with changing behaviors and habits, “emotional learning is far harder than cognitive learning,” she said.
For example, think about quitting a cigarette habit. The evidence is so pervasive, it’s well-known that smoking is a potentially lethal habit. Yet anybody who has tried knows it’s much harder to quit.
“You really have to want to change and focus on changing without reverting to the old behavior, Patterson said. “You can count on lapses and setbacks. But if you are highly motivated and receive a great deal of guidance and support, you can change many disturbing behaviors.”
Researchers don’t completely agree what makes up fully developed emotional intelligence, and there is no scientific measures of EQ. Main EQ components include a fully developed self-awareness (what am I feeling?), self-management, social awareness (what’s the morale among the troops?), and relationship management.
Patterson said people can have over- or underdeveloped EQ components, and without a balance get into trouble. For instance, former President Clinton generally was regarded as having a high EQ threshold but “definitely had a problem with a lack of impulse control,” she said.
When the U.S. Air Force studied members accused of spousal abuse, “researchers discovered the group had high levels of self-regard but a seriously low level of impulse control,” Patterson said.
Organizations can work to develop emotional intelligence among all their employees but must proceed only with trained counselors or consultants. The development can be focused on individuals or groups as long as everybody in a group is working on similar EQ components, she said.
The results can be transforming. Developing an organization’s EQ creates “a climate of trust, information sharing and willingness to take risks that energizes the entire work force from top to bottom,” she said.
Write Eric Zoeckler c/o The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98119 or e-mail mrscribe@aol.com.
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