What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

We've covered the crash course in stress, disruption, and the pressures on ongoing change management. Now, we're moving into my favorite part of the CML Workshop, emotional intelligence (EQ). The ongoing impact of stress on individuals and company cultures is why Fast Company calls EQ the fastest‐growing, must‐have skill for leaders.¹ This is also why the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report lists EQ as one of the top 10 job skills for 2020.²

EQ Is the New IQ, Only Better. Every leader, organization, and family works in a constant state of change. When it comes to helping individuals and company culture, mindfulness and EQ training help create a tectonic shift in the norms of how you do business.

At Whil, we talk about this shift as moving from the ordinary to the extraordinary. According to the research I've shared so far, the ordinary is the state of affairs that most individuals live in and that most companies tolerate. It's the negativity, gossip, politics, and lack of clarity and trust that drags leaders, teams, and company cultures down.

The following table can help you determine what percentage of your time is spent in each set of behaviors. Attention and awareness training helps you to be more present. Once you're focused and aware, you can't help but shoot for being extraordinary.

According to the leaders in our CML Workshops, Ordinary is…

Extraordinary is…

We all slip into the ordinary several times a day. Mindfulness improves the ability to know when you've slipped (when you're distracted) as a leader and it gives you an anchor to come back to a point of focus to lead with specific intentions and values.

It's not easy to be a leader and even harder to be extraordinary. But making it a lifelong pursuit, a lifestyle, changes the way you think about yourself, your employees, and your mission.

Next, we'll cover what EQ is, why it's necessary, and how to begin learning the skills yourself. The nature of today's complex work requires leaders who value employee wellbeing, identify and mentor emerging leaders, and who model effective business and interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. Only then can organizations establish a strong foundation for sustainable success.

Emotional Intelligence Defined

Although Daniel Goleman brought EQ into public consciousness, the concept is attributed to Professors Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. Professor Salovey is provost of Yale University, and the Chris Argyris professor of psychology. John Mayer was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and is a professor of psychology at the University New Hampshire. They define EQ as “The ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.”³ Let's look at three aspects of this definition.

1. Monitor means being aware and clear about your own feelings and emotions. That alone is a tall order. Too many leaders run through their day on autopilot. They're not in touch with their own thoughts and emotions; forget about monitoring others.
2. Being able to discriminate, or separate, your own perspectives and emotions from those you're interacting with. That's another superpower. Too many leaders get drawn into emotional battles and pick a side without understanding what's going on. Humans are tribal. When things get heated or we get challenged, we like to enroll others to help prove we're right.
3. Using this information to guide your thinking and actions gets to the heart of leadership; using data (not emotions) to make informed decisions.

Being mindful, present, and aware is the key building block for EQ. We'll cover five other aspects of EQ, building on this foundation.

First, let's cover the need for emotional intelligence. When we hire leaders, we expect them to show up prepared. Luke Skywalker, ready for anything. A Jedi Master calm, cool, and collected. Great hair. Ready for battle. The Force Is Strong in This One.

Slipping to the Dark Side

After a few decades of dealing with constant change and disruption, it's easy for leaders to slip into the dark side. We can become Darth Vader without even realizing it. Over time, we wear it. Do not piss me off. I'm in a bad mood. I'm hot. I'm tired. I'm wearing black. I'm just looking for an opportunity to take someone out. I live on the Dark Side, man.

After 10 or 20 years it's not hard to see why so many slip into being angry, frustrated, and competitive. You live and die by the quarterly numbers. You occasionally feel like killing someone. It just happens. “Disease states” like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease result from decades of micro traumas to the body (over‐eating, binge drinking, smoking, and so on). Years of physical stressors take their toll. We find the same tends to happen in what we call “career states.” Most professionals have analogous and ongoing micro traumas in their work. In sales, that may be managing constant rejection. In healthcare, it's compassion fatigue from dealing with daily patient crises or death. In manufacturing or construction, it may be ongoing pain management, and so on. Years of stressors take their toll on mental wellbeing. A tipping point moves us to the Dark Side; a line we cross when our coping skills and resilience have worn too thin. It's often imperceptible because we adapt to stress levels over time, but it happens in every career.

This happened to me. I had sh*t to do. My back hurt. I wasn't sleeping. After years of the same old routine, I wasn't trained to care much about others' feelings along the way. I had numbers to hit.

As it turns out, the Dark Side isn't much fun. On the way to and from the Death Star every day, things can get heavy. Leaders tend to feel the weight of their team, projects, decisions, and sometimes of the full company. It can feel lonely. It can destroy your health and mental wellbeing. Remember, Darth Vader had a wicked case of asthma and some major skin issues. Oh, and no friends.

On the Front Lines

Leaders are corporate warriors and more companies are using the acronym “VUCA” to describe the global business landscape. This term was introduced by the U.S. Army War College in the 1990s to describe the more Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world that resulted from the end of the Cold War. VUCA has also found a fitting home in describing the current work experience. Change happens rapidly and on a large scale. The future cannot be predicted with precision. Challenges are complicated by many factors and there's little clarity on both problems and solutions. Welcome to work!

So, this is our work life. But a VUCA existence is also impacting our home life in a bigger way with global warming, politics, terrorism, data hacking, identity theft, and more.

It's hard being a leader. It's hard being an entrepreneur, parent, or just being a human. Our brains are wired with a negativity bias—a quirky survival characteristic. We're primed to constantly scan for danger in our surroundings. It's necessary for survival under harsh conditions but quite a nuisance in contemporary life. It fuels our inner critic. Ongoing stress can result in a growing perception that the demands in life exceed our ability to cope. We're also the only creatures born knowing that we're going to die. That's another bummer.

For many companies, the world is changing faster than they can reasonably adapt. As a global COO, I recall the onslaught of 300‐plus daily email messages coming in from 115 offices around the world. I'd clear them every day and 200 more would be waiting for me the next morning. I remember starting too many days thinking, “You have got to be frickin' kidding me.” Most of us aren't dealing with just our own companies. We're operating in ecosystems that include clients, vendors, regulators, and family members who are all operating in their own global, connected VUCA worlds that are constantly bumping into ours. Just thinking about it can trigger anxiety, back pain, and insomnia.

The Playing Field Has Been Leveled

All of this makes sense. Internet search engines have leveled the IQ playing field. We expect employees to be smart when we hire them. You could walk into a conference with 500 other people and know nothing about the topics being discussed. Within 10 minutes, you could Google yourself into having a quick understanding of the top issues, pros and cons, recognized research, best practices, and so forth. You'd be at some threshold to perform.

This is the primary reason that EQ skills are in such high demand. Does your company hire dummies? No? What if you could hire dummies for 30% less than smart employees? Still no? Of course not. We expect our leaders to be smart. There's an abundance of IQ. But we need leaders to possess the wide array of emotional intelligence skills to move beyond basic performance to be able to lead under pressure, understand and cooperate with others, be good listeners and open to feedback, make thoughtful decisions, and inspire by example. As Bill George covered in his book, Discover Your True North, there's been a tremendous shift in the types of leaders we needed from the twentieth century to what we need in the twenty‐first century (Figure 13.2).

Given the state of the world, there is a demand for leaders who are self‐aware, more skilled in managing their emotions, motivating teams, and relating to others as valued human beings. The bad news is we have a shortage of supply today. The good news is EQ skills are trainable.

Change Your Attention to Change Your Life

The British philosopher Alan Watts once said, “This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” This a lovely way of saying stay curious—treat each moment as though it will never occur again. Too many of us see the stars every night and take them for granted. We do the same with our experiences, partners, and colleagues. Each and every day human beings try to connect, they cry for help, and reveal their souls. And we look away to check our phones. What if we could train ourselves to live in the moment, be a bit more curious, and experience things fully as they are happening? As Albert Einstein wrote, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.”⁸ Mindfulness and EQ skills allow us to do just that, a little bit each day…

Looking at something with a curious, childlike mind can help you experience it anew each time. You can look at your hand right now and notice things you've never seen in it before. Perhaps that you're aging, or injured. Now, imagine a different single point of focus. Your child is trying to share they were bullied at school. A coworker had a miscarriage. A teammate is worried about his or her job. If you're not in the moment, these things come and go. People in our lives suffer without help or connection. Or worse, they remember that you weren't there for them; your interaction is like a hundred others where you couldn't wait to shift your attention back to your phone or some other distraction versus what is happening in the moment. As leaders, we have constant opportunities to send the message that we care, we're here for you, we hear you, and want to help. But how often do we step out of automaton mode, or mindlessness, to really connect with co‐workers?

Developing EQ skills radially shifts the moment‐to‐moment meaning of our lives and more importantly, what we can mean to others.

Noticing the Wandering Mind

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist. Before his death in 1910, he was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century. Some even call him the Father of American Psychology.

James explored mental processes imperative to understanding how the mind works. One of his key areas of focus was on “attention.” He described it as “taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form.”¹⁰ This is beautiful imagery. Too often, the mind is like a broncing bull taking us wherever it wants to go.

He also explored the idea of “meta‐attention.” This is the “Attention of attention; the ability to know when your attention has wandered.” Meta‐attention is the secret to concentration. When you develop the ability to recover a wandering mind, you create and strengthen neural pathways to improve your ability to sustain your attention anytime. You become good at concentration. The more you practice, the better you become.

Being aware of our attention helps settle the mind and keeps us relaxed and alert. Otherwise, our default is a wandering mind. Once again, the refrigerator door is left open. The equipment keeps running and what's inside isn't very good.

Catching ourselves when we're distracted is equivalent to closing the refrigerator door so that its motor isn't working so hard. We cool our emotions while conserving energy. This ability to calm and focus the mind and to choose your thoughts is key to your health and happiness. As James said, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

Personally, my biggest enjoyment from mindfulness and EQ training is actually enjoying each day more as it unfolds. Walking and enjoying a walk. Being in nature and enjoying it. Completely giving myself to play when I'm with my kids. Or actually connecting with work colleagues; listening, and giving my full attention to the interaction. All of this becomes easier, natural even, when you're able to focus on one thing at a time.

Five Key Things

There are five key areas to Goleman's famous research on emotional intelligence.¹¹ We'll explore each of the following with specific exercises and applications for business and life.

1. Self‐awareness
2. Self‐regulation
3. Motivation
4. Empathy
5. Social skills

These five elements build on mindfulness, the foundation to being present, focused, and ready to perform. Each is like a step up the stairs to a healthier life (Figure 13.3), with self‐awareness being the next step. As you develop skills in the other steps, you become a more complete leader.

While each of these steps can impact all aspects of your life, I like to think of the first three steps as EQ to benefit yourself and the last two as EQ to benefit others. In other words, clients, colleagues, your direct reports, and friends and family will benefit most from improvements in your empathy and social skills.

Notes