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The Power of EQ
After 24 years of being a CEO, a chief executive officer, I came to realize that I’m actually a chief emotions officer. And I know that sounds trite and and overly cute but let me explain for a moment. Daniel Goleman proved that emotional intelligence was more important than IQ, that in fact, two thirds of the success of business leaders had to do with their EQ and only one third was their IQ or their level of experience. We know that.
We also know that emotions are contagious. In the Petri dish of an organization that means that when someone’s feeling fear or anxious it affects other people around them just like if they’re feeling happiness. Thirdly, we also know that when people make a decision when they’re emotionally reactive, so you’re making a decision when you’re anxious, angry, jealous and you make the decision from that reactive place. Matt Lieberman, a neuroscientist from UCLA, has proven that we lose 10 to 15 IQ points when we make decisions from that emotionally reactive place, and some of us in the world can’t afford to lose 10 to 15 IQ points.
So, what does this tell us? It tells us that understanding our emotions and being able to not just teach other people about emotions but being able to read someone else’s emotions and understanding that what that person in front of me, I think they’re feeling regret right now, and let’s look at how we can help them reframe the regret into not feeling so much like they’re going to beat themselves up for that responsibility that they feel about the decision that was made. So it’s to me, not just a great way to live life, but it’s also a great way to manage people and work with people and help inspire them.
The Best EQ Strategy for the Worst of Times
What you need to do is create the kind of environment where somehow, whether it’s with how you speak to your spouse or whether it’s how you create good psycho hygiene in your organization, such that people start believing in themselves. Because the biggest problem that tends to happen in the opposite of a thriving scenario is that people start losing faith in themselves or confidence in themselves.
We had an executive committee meeting and we would meet every week, and during the worst of times those two-hour meetings were depressing. We’d all leave the meeting feeling like, oh my God, we’re still trying to solve so much. So I said, let’s end the meetings with 10 minutes of recognition. Let’s recognize people out there in the field who deserve some attention. So it was a little bit of a way to help shift the energy as we left the meeting. So it could be the vice president of operations raising his hand and saying I want to say congratulations and thank you to the bellman at the Hotel Rex. The hotel had its one elevator go down and so we had a seven-story hotel with no elevator. So the bellman there worked double shifts 16 hours a day, two days in a row, while he had family in town in order to help out. So then someone else would say thank you to that bellman.
Well, three things came out of this. Number one, we ended our meetings on a positive note. So we sort of at the worst of times, you have to remind yourselves that there’s some good things happening out there. Number two is the bellman actually got some recognition, and there’s a bit of a stone in the pond kind of effect. There’s a ripple effect that happened when people get some positive recognition. And thirdly, the fact that it came from a different person from a different department. It wasn’t the head of operations who went to the bellman, it was the head of IT or marketing who went to the bellman. And that meant you started creating some cross-fertilization because in bad times, we tend to finger point between different departments.
So just remember that we have a tendency to hold onto the negative and to actually let go of the positive, and negative things that are said to us have about twice the effect on us as positive things. What we need to do is create an environment where we help ourselves remember the positive that’s going on as well, because if you do that, you can create a much more thriving kind of organization.