You may be first in your
Post-graduate class and have the smartness of best of leaders combined. However
to have brightest future in business you may still have a few things to learn.
Most of us during our school
years have got a fallacious understanding that only how well one do
academically is going to matter in life. As per Daniel Goleman, a best known
writer and researcher on the subject of leadership, “once you get into a business particularly if you are an entrepreneur
you know that’s nonsense. Lots of people with consistent A grades wind up
working for people who were B graders.” Thus the assumption of how well you
do in school determines how well you do in business goes for a toss.
Then what does determine how well you do?
Researcher Goleman has spent three decades finding this out and has written and
co-written many books. Through a compelling blend of research and scientific
analysis he has made that what sets up top businesspeople apart is “Emotional Intelligence” which he describes
as the sum of self-awareness, self-management, empathy and social skills.
A higher proportion of the
competencies that distinguish the stars among leaders turn out to be based on
emotional intelligence rather than just IQ abilities. That does not mean that
IQ is irrelevant. IQ is important in
sorting people into jobs they can do but once you are in the game you are
competing with people as smart as you and you are competing with how well you
can manage yourself and lead other people.
Also emotional and social
abilities does not come with birth, with consistent practice you can rewire
your brain to push your emotional intelligence to genius levels.
So how to go about building your
emotional intelligence. Few steps:
1.
Take
Stock
To figure out
which aspects of emotional intelligence need work, Goleman’s book “What makes a leader” suggests “imagining
your ideal self” five to ten years from now i.e. live your life backwards.
You can ask yourself questions like:
a)
How would you like your day to be?
b)
Who all would be there with you?
c)
What kind/nature of relationship would you have
with them?
d)
Consider your deepest values and biggest dreams:
how would these be part of your daily life?
Next: Learn how
your ideal self compares with your current self. Goleman recommends answering
such questions as:
i)
Are you usually aware of your feelings and why
you feel that way?
ii)
Can you manage your distressing emotions well –
e.g. recover quickly when you get upset or stressed?
iii)
Can you usually sense the feelings of the people
you interact with and understand their way of seeing things?
iv)
Do you have a knack for persuasion and using
your influence effectively?
Do not just
introspect, you also need to find out how you make others feel and how they see
your leadership style. This can be tough to know but you can always solicit
anonymous written feedback which gives you frank opinions about your behavior.
Once you have the feedback, do not just concentrate on you Emotional
Intelligence shortcomings, it is equally important for you to understand your
strengths too. This feedback would help understand where your real
self-overlaps with your ideal self and give you positive energy you need to
move forward to the next step in the process and work on bridging the gaps.
2.
Praise,
Pay Attention, Practice
One gap which is
seen in most entrepreneurs is “Poor listening”. Very often we want people to
keep it short, which often means we cut them off and take over the conversation
to get them out of the door quickly. But if you want to be a good listener,
then you have to actually take time to hear what they have to say and be sure
you understand them. Another common shortcomings which is a big problem for
entrepreneurs is “Entrepreneurs are
typically people who drive themselves harder than most others and who have a
very high internal standard of excellence. They do things very well, and that
can become a pattern of perfectionism, where you tend to look only at what was
wrong rather than what was right.” The problem in leadership is when people
who have driven themselves to the top that way become managers or leaders and
use the same lens with their teams and if they give failing grades and not
passing grades, that demotivates people.
To overcome such
weaknesses, Goleman proposes drawing up an action plan. Pick a list of few
changes you can make and set a target for each. E.g. to boost your listening
skills, you may plan to meet each of your colleagues or employees for lunch,
away from office distractions. Also at home try not to take over conversations
and relax into just listening, being sure you understand before responding. To
become less critical, constantly remind yourself to notice what others in your
life do well. Praise them and do not just attack them and make it a genuine. One powerful conversation with the person
away from work about what they want from their life, their career and this job,
will give you sound grounds for giving them feedback in terms of where they
want to go. A personal angle builds great loyalty, and a sense that you care
about people.
For this changes
to get implemented you should work at it daily and consciously. The neurology
of habit tell us you need to become mindful of the old way, what you are trying
to change, intentionally replace it with a new habit and do it at every
naturally occurring opportunity. It might be with your kids, your spouse or
your colleagues. All of those are
learning opportunities and you are trying to build new circuitry in the brain –
a foundation of the better way. As the
research suggests if you practice anything consistently for 66 days (Ref:
Martin Seligman), we find that one day you will do the new thing in the right
way at the right time without having to think about it. It will become
spontaneous which means this action has moved from your conscious mind to a
sub-conscious mind where all of our habits live.
3. Open your eyes and Close Them
As you continue your daily practice,
Goleman says, you can speed your progress by shadowing leaders known for their
empathy and social skills. Observe how they stay cool under stress and adapt.
See how they strike a balance between listening and effectively communicating,
how in a group they help move everyone toward a joint goal, acknowledge others’
contributions and encourage everyone’s strengths. As you keep observing,
you quickly start emulating these role models and mirror them in your day to
day workings. Similarly, even imaginary feelings and visualization could raise
your emotional intelligence. When you picture a happy scenario in detail, it
fires the same brain cells actually involved in doing that activity. Another
key to emotional intelligence is daily meditation. Focus on your breath and
bring your mind back to it when it wanders. Essentially it’s training
attentional skill. One of Goleman’s favorite things about mindfulness is that
you take it everywhere. Say one of your shortcomings is anxiety or a quick
temper. When you are starting to get really mad or overly worried, mindfulness
can help you notice that’s happening to you. You can short-circuit the episode.
Meditation is vital over the long run,
its fundamental, the ability to stay focused on the task at hand or keep going
to reach your goal.
4.
Savor
Face Time
Emotional
intelligence is under severe attack now, more than ever. Technology fragments the attention we pay each other with every text
message beep and social media alert. With technology, information flow is very
fast and there is no time zone restrictions thus making it harder to feel
empathy or use your social skills to advantage. The brain actually was
built for face to face interactions, that’s always best, but however simply
being in the same room as someone else may not be enough, as instead of paying
attention to each other we are being pulled away from a person by a thing i.e.
a phone or some other tool. In such situation, one should ask oneself, can I
afford this? Is this the best thing to do now? You have two options, either say this is a
really important text; you have to look at it or the other option is to say I
care more about the person in front of me, generally caring about those in
front of you will prevail. Chemistry
happens when we pay full attention to each other, never when we are distracted.
This is true for any relationship. So whenever possible , let that go to voice
mail, close that chat window and start spreading your emotional intelligence
one rich face to face moment at a time.
Source: Emotional Intelligence by Daniel
Goleman
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