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Hiring for Emotional Intelligence

We’ve all seen bright and technically competent people fail in managerial/leadership roles because of poor or non-existent people skills. The study of this phenomena finds that success in a leadership role is strongly correlated with above average people skills or what has come to be known as, high emotional intelligence. Indeed, at the top levels of any organization, where most people are bright and technically competent, the only variable that reliably predicts success is emotional intelligence (not book smarts or “expertise”).

The trouble is, hiring decisions are often made on the basis of cognitive ability (smarts) and technical expertise (competence). If you are hiring for a mid-level technical role, an emphasis on smarts and competence is fine. But, if you are hiring a future manager or executive, you had better be evaluating the candidate’s emotional intelligence. If you don’t, you miss a read on the most important predictor of their success.

How do you assess emotional intelligence and the leadership potential of a candidate? You focus on their self-awareness, their ability to manage their feelings, their awareness of the feelings of others AND their history of managing their relationships with others.

Ask about times when they were frustrated or angry. Why did they feel that way? What did they do about it? Ask about conflict with others. Did they deal with it or ignore it? How did they resolve the conflict if they did? What did they think about how the other person felt (the one who they had conflict with)? What did they say/do to move beyond the conflict? How do they approach motivating others? What is their primary leadership style (the way they approach the task of getting others working)?

This is just a sample of the questions you might use to assess for emotional intelligence. The idea is to evaluate how the person navigates the emotional world of self and others.

Ignoring how the person navigates this emotional world leaves you at a huge disadvantage when the time comes to judge how the candidate will lead or manage others.

Contact us if you have questions, feedback or want some help assessing emotional intelligence.

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Backroom Politics

It is normal to seek support from those around us who are more likely to agree than disagree. This is the desire that fuels most backroom politics or those meetings among well-meaning but like-minded people. We all want to hear more cheers than boos when it comes to our ideas and plans.

The trouble is, vigorous debate is productive. It results in better ideas and better plans almost without exception. It is not what happens in backrooms where support and freedom from debate are what people look for.

What this means for your organization is that you should be alarmed when people don’t embrace vigorous debate and take refuge among those most likely to see things the way they do. Taking refuge reduces the quality of debate, makes for poorer ideas and planning and can be destructive if agendas hatched in backrooms (I like to say, “in the dark”) start to collide with other agendas (agendas arrived at through vigorous debate or in other backrooms).

So, fight the very human tendency to avoid vigorous debate and discourage backroom politics. Your organization’s ideas, plans and ultimately execution will be better for it.

Contact us if you have questions or other feedback.

 

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From Doer to Leader

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. ~Jack Welch

Many of the owners and executives we work with are making the transition from Doer to Leader. They are going from being the best in the room at what they do to being good at letting others being the best in the room.

In his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith lists 20 habits that effective Doers NEED TO DROP to become effective Leaders. What these 20 habits have in common is the way the person views his or her role. The Doer sees himself as the central figure in solving every problem or need and isn’t afraid to put people in their place if they challenge this view. The leader, in contrast, sees herself as the facilitator of other people being central figures in meeting challenges. This usually means wrestling with the habits that have kept them as the central figure in the past.

In other words, the challenge of going from Doer to Leader is giving-up everything that has made you successful and turning into someone who promotes other’s success.

Easier said than done.

Goldsmith’s book is a great place to start if you are trying to make a transition from Doer to Leader. Other resources/tools are:

  • Join a group to help you make the transition (see here for more information about a group we sponsor).
  • Use WordRapport™ Email, our exclusive tool, to get feedback on how you are coming across to others in your email. See here for more information. 
  • Hire a coach who has made the transition so they can help you navigate it. 

Making the transition from Doer to Leader has many rewards. First is you become a more effective executive for your organization. Both you and your organization benefit from that. Also, if you do it well, you will be more relaxed and productive AND your work environment will be more rewarding for everyone!

Contact us if you have questions or other feedback.

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The Real Challenge in Delegating

One of the things most coaches tell the managers they work with is to delegate. The speech goes something like this: You’ve got to learn to delegate because:

  • It frees you up to do more important things (you save time and get more done),
  • it helps develop the skills of subordinates (they learn new skills and take on more responsibility) and
  • it gives subordinates a path for growth (making their job more compelling).

There are two traps for those trying to delegate. The first is obvious and is most often cited when someone has trouble delegating: They just can’t give up the tasks to others. The hazards of this for the manager who cannot delegate are numerous and include:

  • Burnout,
  • inability to take on a greater role,
  • no development of subordinates leading to low morale, turnover and particularly harsh, the loss of the best people (who are always looking to grow and won’t tolerate never being asked to do more).

The second trap is less obvious but just as debilitating. That is the challenge of “letting go” when delegating. This means not only turning over a task to someone else (getting past trap one), it also means tolerating their doing it differently and perhaps not as well (at least at first).

The most effective managers understand that there are always multiple ways to do something well and that it takes time to perfect any of those ways. In a word, effective managers are more tolerant of how something gets done (as long as it does get done). They appreciate diversity in how someone else takes on a task and also seem to enjoy watching a new approach bloom. In other words, they “let go” when they delegate.

Like most of what is written here, it is easier to say, “delegate and watch with appreciation what happens next,” than to do it. Let us know if you would like to some help with it. You’ll be glad you did.

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What Your Growing Company Can Learn from Deflategate

Deflategate has captured many people’s attention over the last three months. Some of those people, like me, will look for the lessons in how to handle everything from procedures to grievances. The issue that keeps rising to the surface for me, because I see it frequently in the growing companies I work in, is how to handle the breaking of some rule or policy.

What I see from the NFL, is their making it up as they go along. Now I may be biased (I admit to being a fan of the Patriots). But it seems inescapable that there is no consistent and well thought out procedure for handling the breaking of a rule. The NFL is consistent at penalizing offsides and too many players on the field. They are inconsistent when it comes to tampering with a football (if the Patriots even did that). See the Panthers and Vikings tampering incident from this past season, for comparison.  This is where the charge that they make it up as they go along comes from.

Learn from the NFL’s mistake. As your company grows, develop a process for handling misbehavior in all its human forms. Deliberate on what the process should be. Wait until the dust settles from the emotional upheaval of a transgression to do so. Write the process or procedure down. Be consistent in applying the process across the organization. Differentiate between levels of rule breaking and have ranges of consequences (make the punishment fit the crime). Have steps in punishment making it worse for repeat offenders. Don’t worry about getting it perfect. Things change and both rules and consequences change. But having a narrow range of responses and thoughtful precedents helps.

If your organization is growing, it is only a matter of time before someone breaks a rule. Don’t make it up as you go. At least not after the first time.

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Power at Work

A big part of what we offer the leaders of organizations is greater self-awareness about how they come across to those around them. Indeed, organizational health and its benefits (improved productivity, retention of key people and problem solving) are impossible without some degree of self-awareness about how a leader’s behavior impacts others.

One of the things that’s easy to overlook, if you’re a leader, is just how powerful you are in the eyes of your employees. Indeed, we’ve watched entire teams pivot in reaction to the body language of the leader. This is normal and natural in organizations. What we’re pointing out is that leaders should be aware of their power and use it wisely.

What does that mean? Well, imagine you are a superhero and that every time you point your finger, a bolt of lightning strikes whatever or whomever you’re pointing at. If this was true, our bet is you’d be very careful about where you point your finger.

So, the next time you are displeased with the effort of your employee, consider the power you use in expressing your displeasure. A little bit goes a long way and makes it easier to have a corrective conversation unburdened by strong emotion (fear or resentment for starters).

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Why is it Always About You?: A Threat to Organizational Health

In her book, Why is is Always About You?, Sandy Hotchkiss talks about how certain people put their needs above everyone else’s and ultimately abuse their power. Although we have not spoken with her about it, we expect she would agree with the statement that these same people undermine organizational health and are prime contributors to organizational ill-health and its symptoms: poor morale, poor alignment, poor execution, poor retention and the like.

So, what is it about these people that make them toxic to organizational health? Mostly, it’s about their need to see themselves as powerful and what they do to protect their power–whether they have real power, like a CEO or Senior Executive, or little power, like a first time supervisor. Whatever their level in the organization, their need for power is likely to show up in one or more of the following behaviors.

Please note: These behaviors are based on the book, Why is it Always About You? They may be conscious behaviors but more often are unconscious or something people don’t realize they are doing in the moment.

A Tendency to Scapegoat – These individuals don’t tolerate failure well and blame is consistently shifted to others. This can appear as extreme defensiveness or a failure to acknowledge mistakes.

Work/Life Imbalance – These individuals often directly or indirectly ask others to go “above and beyond” to ensure their own success. That people are often willing to sacrifice their own work/life balance to serve a leader is something these individuals will all too eagerly exploit.

Importance of Admiration – The need for admiration for these individuals will manifest in a couple of ways: always needing to be the one with the final word, with the best idea/plan OR dejection when there are setbacks or challenges to his or her ideas and plans. It is the intensity of emotion that is the telltale sign of the importance of admiration: success brings intense joy while setbacks bring intense self-doubt.

Unusual Levels of Unprofessional Behavior – Unprofessional behavior like blurring the boundary between one’s personal and professional life or expressing emotions intensely, varies in degree from very minor to extreme. A red flag should go up when you feel too much personal information is being asked for or when there are frequent and unpredictable strong outbursts of emotions. Both of these “unprofessional” behaviors are signs of trouble that inevitably undermine healthy interaction and boundary setting in a workplace.

At Vital Growth we work hard to help organizations maximize their organizational health. We know improving organizational health is a huge competitive advantage for any business. Sometimes it’s a matter of making a team more functional. Sometimes its a matter of finding out and working with a power abusing individual who is eroding organizational health in his or her department or throughout the organization.

Give us a call if you think you’ve got a power monger in your workplace. We can coach you through your choices.

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What Successful Companies Can Learn From A Lean Startup

You may not have heard of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It’s a book that’s spoken of a lot in the startup world but less so in the mainstream business world. That’s a shame. Not only is it an interesting business book in its own right but it also has some important lessons for businesses that are beyond the startup stage.

Indeed, in the competitive world of business, unless you are consistently getting better, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes market share away from you. Which is to say, even established, successful businesses will benefit from the practices mentioned in The Lean Startup as they work to remain competitive in their market(s).

We think there are two particularly important practices that are relevant to post-startup businesses (from local to multinational). The first of these is “getting out of the building” to speak with customers about the pain/gain your product/service provides for them.

The details of how to do this are well beyond the scope of this short write-up but at the 30,000 foot level, it means gaining a better understanding of what your customers value and why they’re willing to part with cash to buy from you.

If you do this well, you may be surprised to find a variety of different reasons customers buy from you. Cataloging the different reasons why people buy will help you start to “archetype” your customers and, in turn, customize your interaction with them so as to maximize meeting their specific needs. If you can achieve even modest success at archetyping your customers accurately, you will take a huge step toward maximizing both your income and your customer loyalty.

The trick is that just asking your customers is probably not good enough to figure out what they really value. Which brings up the second practice: forming hypotheses about what they value and then rigorously testing each hypothesis.

For example, you may think your customers value your great service (your hypothesis) when some value your pricing alone, while others value the convenience of buying from you, while still others value the status of saying they bought from you or their relationship with a particular sales agent. You can test your hypothesis by altering the level of service, for example, and see if doing so changes buying behavior. While most customers have multiple factors influencing their buying decisions, buying behavior is the gold standard (no pun intended) for evaluating what value they hold above all others.

Testing hypotheses is the best way to really understand your customers better. It’s hard work to do it well. But it can take most of the guesswork out of your marketing efforts and will give you the best chance of staying competitive in your market(s).

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Double Your Bottom Line!

Doubling your bottom line is no easy task. You know that, or you wouldn’t be reading this. We get that.

What we see in the marketplace is that most all organizations work on being smart. They work hard in technology, operations, marketing, finance, etc. Using skills learned while getting an MBA.

Many of us gravitated to areas where we could calculate improvements. Figure something out. We work hard to be smart. Being smart may well drive your current bottom line.

There is another tool CEOs can help their organizations employ, beyond smart. That is becoming healthy. What does that mean? What do healthy organizations look like?

They’re places where morale and productivity are high and politics are low. People enjoy coming to work 9 out of 10 days.  Employees are passionate about the organization’s purpose and share a core set of values. It’s where priorities and expectations are crystal clear, for everyone.

Since these are the items can’t be calculated, we tend to shy away from them. There’s the rub. One way to approaching doubling your bottom line is to ensure your management team is a healthy, high functioning one. We all want to think that’s the case, but we must be brutally honest which is best for the organization.

So where do you start?  We believe the CEO is responsible to make sure that the right people are around the management table. We define “right” as meaning they share the core values, they have the right experience and skills. They are okay with being wrong, and only want what is best for the organization.

An effective management team provides the most leverage to achieve organizational goals.

Top managers set the pace of the organization. You know that. They beat the drum within the organization. We must work actively to develop the management team. No doubt they are good people; they have the right background the necessary skills. But few have been trained, really trained to work well together.

We often take teams though Pat Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This is an effective way to get folks working better together. It provides concepts, tools and language to use to improve team functioning.

Back to the CEOs, it’s her job to manage the management team. One of the CEO’s main responsible is to bring good decision-making unit to the table. One CEO we know sees himself as just one other vote around the table. Letting the team identify and passionately debate the big issues.

This CEO does hold a veto, which is seldom used. The process itself, however, is part of team development.  Drawing people out to get a more robust perspective and engages more minds. Better decisions result.

So in closing, promote, develop and ensure the health and effectiveness of your entire team. Double your bottom line by being both smart AND HEALTHY.

For more information and a gratis discussion please contact us at www.vitalgrowthllc.com. Thank you.