communEQation (eBook)

Chapter 1

Understanding
Emotional Intelligence
In Action

Among the more intriguing drama series on TV are those depicting the heavy hitters of the business world. Such shows give viewers a window into the heady realms of wealth, high-stakes deal-making and powerful influence. Two outstanding examples of the genre, both set in New York City, each feature a strong and resourceful character whose key role is to enhance the performance of those around them.

Suits is a legal drama about a firm of high-powered attorneys who broker big-business deals, as they steward the legal and financial interests of their wealthy and powerful clients. The Chief Operating Officer of the firm is Donna Paulsen, a wise, serene and savvy ‘people whisperer’. She sees all, knows all and tells it like it is. A few words from the ethereal Donna—on any issue, from a romantic impasse to a full-blown argument between partners in the firm—soothes, illuminates and resets context, to the benefit of all involved. Donna’s calming, healing influence creates the conditions for warring parties to reach a rapid resolution. Everyone then quickly returns to more productive pursuits.

Billions is set in the morally murky world of hedge fund Axe Capital, run by brutally pragmatic billionaire Bobby Axelrod. He presides over a pumped, ambitious team of opportunistic, often predatory traders. They all make millions through hot market intel, shrewd deduction and a keen nose for a good deal. It’s a competitive but finely balanced milieu and Bobby relies on his head of Human Resources, Wendy Rhoades—who is also AxeCap’s in-house ‘performance coach’—to manage the mercurial mindsets of his team.

Wendy is a qualified psychiatrist with a reassuringly practical, low-key approach backed by a shrewd, penetrating intelligence. She counsels anyone on the team, including boss Bobby, whenever they suffer a setback or loss of confidence triggered by personal or professional reversals. Wendy is highly skilled at deftly sorting out peoples’ heads. After a session, her ‘patients’ invariably come bounding out of her office brimming with confidence, keen to conquer new and bigger worlds.

What Donna and Wendy have in common—apart from both being smart, strong and compassionate individuals—is an exceptionally high level of Emotional Intelligence. It’s a quality that seems to come more naturally to women than to men. In season 2 of Billions, Wendy left Axe Capital. She was replaced by Doctor Gus, a bombastic, in-your-face ex-military macho man. He dispensed tough love with profanities and yelled a lot as he did it. But Doctor Gus had only patchy success with the Axe Cap team. He simply lacked Wendy’s warmth and people skills. Her return was inevitable.

The most interesting and authentic drama reflects real life. In the corporate and commercial spheres over the past quarter-century, more and more firms have realised that their star performers operate less on IQ and more on EQ. The higher up the managerial chain, the more important interpersonal skills become. People with EQ are adept at building positive relationships, influencing every individual with whom they come into contact. Often, they bring all into alignment to focus on effective team-driven outcomes. This is why companies pay a premium for Emotional Intelligence skills. Many now formally test candidates for EQ and even train key employees in it.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a Swiss-based global organisation that brings together business and political leaders from around the world to discuss major economic issues. In 2016 the WEF declared Emotional Intelligence to be an essential work skill for the Fourth Industrial Revolution7. This is the era that integrates the technologies driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as machine learning, biotechnology, nanotechnology and other developments in the physical, digital and biological spaces. In a world increasingly reliant on technology, emotionally based competencies are now more valued than ever for planning, creating and managing this burgeoning new era of technical achievement.

Of course there’s a difference between simple ‘people skills’ and the higher observational, deductive and reasoning awareness required for Emotional Intelligence. The thing about EQ though is that the more you learn about it, the more you realise how much you don’t know. That’s because although there are feelings and responses in human nature and behaviour that are common to us all, everyone is different—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Each person is complex in their own way. Each has their own peculiar value sets, triggers, motivations, world views and ways of expressing, according to how their life journey has conditioned them. So in order to get good at EQ, you need to become a lifetime student of human nature, with all its variables, intricacies and idiosyncrasies.

At its core, Emotional Intelligence simply involves being astute (okay, intelligent) about recognising and correctly labelling emotions, as drivers of behaviour, when they arise in yourself and you observe them in others. Then shaping what you say and do to neutralise, manage or productively channel those emotions. Intrinsic in calculating all of that is the sensitivity to be able to establish trusting relationships with each person you wish to influence. Each connection you forge must signal unequivocally that you have a genuine interest in that person’s welfare and want the best for them, in their work and in their life generally. Expressing honest, constructive and pragmatic good will for each individual is a key part of the process in building relationships of this quality.

Some people, like Donna and Wendy, are blessed with a natural warmth, empathy and compassion that makes winning the trust of others seem effortless. Yet the effective application of Emotional Intelligence is more complex, because it has synchronous dual dimensions: on one hand, EQ demands the ability to quickly and accurately understand the values, emotional states and hierarchy of concerns of individuals in specific situations; while it also requires an acute awareness of how those individuals actually experience you in the engagement process. And how you consciously manage your own carriage and communicative outputs to support your aims and agenda.

It’s the ability of the skilled EQ exponent to understand this two-way interaction and consciously control the signals they send that wins trust and deepens connections, by building empathy and understanding. So in the exercise of Emotional Intelligence, awareness of the outward self is just as important as the awareness of any other person’s state. Often, in this self-absorbed Digital Age, even more so.

But constant engagement with screens draws our attention inwards, away from others. So perception, cognition and self-awareness often take a back seat. Acuity, focus and, ultimately, productivity are all challenged by both the behavioural norms and the beguiling cultural or environmental influences of the Digital Age. The autonomous, addictive nature of constant screen activity depletes our capacity—even our inclination—to exercise outward-focused empathy. All this makes the conscious consideration of others more challenging today than at any other time in history.

At this point, to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, I want to clarify my precise working definitions of all those ‘awareness’ qualities. Perception is being able to observe, identify, interpret and organise all information received through the senses. Cognition is the accurate functioning of the mind or intellect in reasoning and understanding the meaning of this sensory information. Acuity is the sharpness or keenness not only of the senses, but of any thought associated with information received through the senses. Focus of course is the ability to resist distraction in order to remain unwaveringly concentrated on a single process until its satisfactory completion.

Most importantly the human brain, like any computer, is a mechanical processing centre and as such it is non-judgemental about what it processes and actions. But of course the brain hosts the mind, which is conscious of itself and highly evaluative of all that it experiences—if it is focused. The mind can be directed to make conscious choices, which instruct the brain and condition it to fixed patterns of behaviour… until those choices are dimmed, reprioritised or corrupted by the mind losing its productive focus to distraction.

The aim of this book is not so much to teach the finer operational points of Emotional Intelligence—there are many more dedicated books and specialists far better qualified than me to do that. What this book will do though is equip your mind to direct your brain to be more ‘match-fit’ for EQ’s processes, at a time of unprecedented attention diversion. This chapter starts by helping you understand Emotional Intelligence in action, while appreciating what it takes to create it. And what might be achieved through its application. Throughout the book, I have woven into the narrative an idea of the challenges of exercising EQ in often distractive Digital Age settings.

What follows now is the consolidation of a proper understanding of Emotional...