A**holes and S**theads: Emotional Intelligence in Corporate America
You may have heard of emotional intelligence, but I guarantee you haven’t read an article that so perfectly captures what it is, why it’s important, and how to become more emotionally intelligent…
…unless you’ve previously read this article, in which case: thank you for reading.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
A 1990 paper by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer (no relation to ‘Crash in to Me’) set the stage for defining what emotional intelligence is. The exact definition they created is:
The subset of social intelligence that involves 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 (Salovey and Mayer, 1990)
From a high level, the pattern used in this definition of emotional intelligence is information gathering (monitor emotion), analyzing (discriminate different emotions), and decision making (guide actions). You may notice that this pattern very much parallel’s the pattern of most data analyses: gather data, find insights, use insight to do something; this probably has something to do with the fact that our brains are very complicated computers, but I digress. I actually prefer this snippet from the paper as a simple definition of emotional intelligence:
The recognition and use of one’s own and others’ emotional states to solve problems and regulate behavior (Salovey and Mayer, 1990)
Going a level deeper, there are four main buckets of emotional intelligence that loosely follow the first definition above:
- Self emotional appraisal (SEA): How well can one sense, acknowledge, and understand their own emotions. Those who excel at SEA will know their emotions before other people notice them.
- Others’ emotional appraisal (OEA): How well can one sense, acknowledge, and understand the emotions of others. Those who excel at OEA will be able to read others’ emotions before those people even notice their own emotions.
- Regulation of emotion (ROE): How well can one control their emotional state, either through moderation of emotion or exacerbation of emotion.
- Use of emotion (UOE): How well can one channel their emotions towards positive support of their performance or goals
People who are emotionally intelligent do well at understanding both their own emotions and the emotions of others, can control those emotions to prevent them from overwhelming themselves, and can channel the emotions to positive uses. Sounds like a pretty useful skill to have in the workplace!
The Benefits of Emotional Intelligence at Work
There have been quite a few studies and reports about the effect of emotional intelligence on all aspects of work performance, satisfaction, turnover, etc.
Chi-Sum Wong and Kenneth Law in 2002 found a complicated yet positive relationship between emotional intelligence and job outcomes, factoring in the emotional labor required for each job (emotional labor is the effort required to present a specific emotion at work; think of a flight attendant being nice all the time compared to an assembly line worker):
- Job performance is significantly correlated with emotional intelligence and moderated by emotional labor
- Emotional intelligence has a strong positive effect on job satisfaction regardless of the emotional labor required of the job.
- Emotional intelligence might only have a desirable effect on organizational commitment and turnover intention in jobs that require high emotional labor while the effect is undesirable in jobs that require low emotional labor (may be explained by the fact that highly emotionally intelligent employees may be put off by a lack of emotional labor required at their job)
The Emotional Intelligence Consortium (a real thing, believe it or not) published 19 examples of emotional intelligence financially benefitting businesses - some highlights:
- Experienced partners in a multinational consulting firm were assessed on the emotional intelligence competencies plus three others. Partners who scored above the median on 9 or more of the 20 competencies delivered $1.2 million more profit from their accounts than did other partners – a 139 percent incremental gain
- In a national insurance company, insurance sales agents who were weak in emotional competencies such as self-confidence, initiative, and empathy sold policies with an average premium of $54,000. Those who were very strong in at least 5 of 8 key emotional competencies sold policies worth $114,000
- The Air Force found that by using emotional intelligence to select recruiters, they increased their ability to predict successful recruiters by nearly three-fold. The immediate gain was a saving of $3 million annually. These gains resulted in the Government Accounting Office submitting a report to Congress, which led to a request that the Secretary of Defense order all branches of the armed forces to adopt this procedure in recruitment and selection
A 2012 study by Reza Gharoie Ahangar examined the relationship between emotional intelligence and job performance for 200 Iranian executives and found significant relationships between higher emotional intelligence and better performance.
And a 2020 study of 400 secondary school leaders in Pakistan found a strong correlation between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction (Suleman, Ali Syed, Mahmood, Hussain)
Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, wrote a memoir of his company’s journey from founding to IPO (Shoe Dog, a great read) and almost every problem described within was an emotional problem: his emotions, his family’s emotions, his team’s emotions, the athlete’s emotions. This is why emotional intelligence is strongly related to success: the ability to sense emotions (yours and others), understand the causes, and channel those emotions in a positive direction is immensely powerful in moving an organization forward. It’s often not the problems that prevent progress, it’s people’s emotion-driven objections with the solutions.
There are likely hundreds of other studies, reports, publications supporting the link between emotional intelligence and job outcomes (performance, satisfaction, turnover, etc.), and outside of work emotional intelligence is obviously an invaluable skill as well. If these studies are true, what can be done to get better?
How to Become More Emotionally Intelligent:
Stop viewing people as a**holes and s**theads. Raise your hand if you’ve seen this cartoon before:
While juvenile, the cartoon represents a culture of distrust and a lack of empathy that exists at many companies. Managers often view their teams as incompetent, and direct reports only see the worst of their managers. With this in mind, let me propose a more empathetic way of viewing one another:
- You are a manager. You try not to let busy work get to your team and handle many simple incoming requests. You do your best to shield them from meetings and represent your division at important cross-divisional meetings. You are frustrated because your direct reports seem to not understand the business problems, and take too long to turn around the things you ask them.
- An empathetic view: could it be the case that your direct reports feel like they are left in the dark on direction/priority because they do not get to hear the important conversations that occur in the meetings? Or that they don’t get the chance to work on their skills because all of the simple requests are filtered out before they get to them; the only requests they get are the most challenging, which they are underprepared for due to lack of practice?
- You look at your manager and think about the day you get to them her you quit. All they do is keep you in the dark then dump huge projects on you with no context and a tight timeline. Then, they take your work and present it to leadership and get all the credit
- An empathetic view: could it be the case that your manager actually shields you from a lot of really terrible work, and the stuff that is left over may be the best of the worst? Or that they have advocated for you to be able to present your projects to leadership, but leadership has such tight timelines that the ‘presentation’ becomes a 10-minute grilling session that would seriously affect the motivation of an individual contributor?
So how do we bridge the gap between current state (a**holes and s**theads) and a more empathetic view? Feedback loops and a commitment to understanding.
Feedback loops are an immensely powerful tool for change. Organizations without feedback loops are doomed to remain stationary, whereas ones with feedback loops will inevitable evolve over time (not all feedback loops cause positive change, but that is a different conversation).
How do feedback loops build emotional intelligence? Consider this snippet from the first section of this post:
From a high level, the pattern used in this definition of emotional intelligence is information gathering (monitor emotion), analyzing (discriminate different emotions), and decision making (guide actions). You may notice that this pattern very much parallel’s the pattern of most data analyses: gather data, find insights, use insight to do something; this probably has something to do with the fact that our brains are very complicated computers, but I digress. - Me, 1,000 words ago
Feedback loops are the unavoidable first step in this pattern: information gathering. People will not evolve unless they receive feedback that evolution is necessary; your manager will not change unless they receive feedback that their current method is causing problems; your team will not get better unless you start the hard conversation about performance.
With a feedback loop in place, there also must be a concerted effort towards understanding the feedback. The feedback you receive must not be discarded or ignored; you must make an effort to understand why the feedback exists, which requires an exercise in reconciling perspectives and worldviews. Some of these reconciliations may be:
- Why does your manager think you are underperforming (their perspective) when you are the rockstar of the team (your perspective)
- Why does your report think your management style is suffocating (their perspective) when you do your best to give them room (your perspective)
To reconcile the perspectives you must put yourself in other people’s shoes to understand where their perspective and your perspective differ. Reality is likely somewhere in the middle (it almost always is), but the process of evaluating someone else’s worldview will cause you to better understand their emotions in future situations.
Over time the process of feedback loop → worldview reconciliation → understanding other perspective will become second nature, and considering others’ perspectives and emotions will become a subconscious part of your interactions at work…making you a more emotionally intelligent person.