S1E6 Let's Get Emotional, Emotional

Welcome to Everything Is A People Problem; a podcast that explores the connections between business, culture, and community, uncovering how every business problem has a people-centric solution with host Dia Zafer-Joyce. 

In this episode, Dia shares the fundamentals of Emotional Intelligence and what it takes to be a leader in a post-COVID business landscape.

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Transcript

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Hi there. Welcome to Everything is a People Problem, a podcast that explores the connections between business, culture, and community, uncovering how every business problem has a people centric solution. I'm your host, Dia Zafer-Joyce. Let's talk about people. 

Hi there. I'm Dia, and I'm your host for Everything is a People Problem. I'm so glad to be back after my trip to India, although it was a fantastic and productive trip. I don't know if you missed me but I definitely missed you. Before I get started with today's episode about Emotional Intelligence and the post COVID manager, I want to say thank you to a couple of folks.

Number one, my beautiful and brilliant friend, Mary Sheehan. She's a leader in product marketing and author of the bestselling book, “The Pocket Guide to Product Launches: Get Confident, Go to Market, and Win.” She recently posted a short list of her favorite women hosted podcasts and mine was one of them, and that's definitely an honor since she herself is the host of the podcast, “Women in Product Marketing.” So thank you, Mary, for posting about me on LinkedIn.  I also want to say thank you to Grace Windsor, who I've never met in my life, but who also made a post on LinkedIn about two weeks ago about my last episode, “It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint,” where I talked about the 85 percent capacity rule. I loved her vulnerability; she shared how she herself has an opportunity to pace better and presented her top three takeaways from the podcast. So thank you so much, Grace, for taking the time to listen to the episode! 

If you're listening along to the podcast and you have thoughts or questions on some of the topics I've been covering, I've decided to make the final episode of this season a call-in. So pretty soon on my website, I'll open up an opportunity for you to submit questions or voice recordings if you want to be on the air, so stay tuned.  

Does anyone remember what it was like to manage before the pandemic?  So much has changed in such a short period of time and I think mostly for the better. Our focus on people and their wellness has amplified compared to where we were before we had to work from home and grapple with balancing home and work life in such an extreme manner.  When I think back to those first couple of weeks managing my team remotely in March of 2020,  that was terrifying. There were some elements of being a manager that were completely untested for many of us, and they were psychological, they were emotional, because we all had two priorities: one, our people, making sure they felt safe and supported, and number two, our work, our products, and ensuring that we delivered on what we committed to from a product perspective. 

Balancing the needs of your team alongside the needs of the business can be wrapped up in the term Emotional Intelligence. Now, terms like that become popular and maybe are thrown around a bit without understanding its origins or definition, so let me give you a quick rundown on what Emotional Intelligence is before I go much further.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your personal emotions, as well as the emotions of others. This is a crucial element of effective leadership. Leaders need to manage their own emotions while simultaneously empathizing with those of their team. The pandemic truly put this to the test. Now, the term of Emotional Intelligence or social intelligence has been percolating since the early 1900s, but it was in 1990 that John Mayer, the professor from the University of New Hampshire, not the music artist, and Peter Salovey from Yale, first published a serious academic inquiry of the term Emotional Intelligence, and this is in the journal “Imagination, Cognition, and Personality.” What a great journal.  In their article, they magnified a set of abilities over traits that made someone emotionally intelligent.  About five years later, the New York Times science writer Daniel Goleman wrote and published his first of two books on the topic, and this first book was called “Emotional Intelligence, Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.”

And this leveraged Mayer and Salovey's work to build a four component framework to follow when building Emotional Intelligence.  Those four components were one, self awareness, two, self management, three, social awareness, and four, relationship management. So self awareness and self regulation are really interesting because there's an element of psychological revelation that you need as an individual in order to be aware of how you feel and to control those feelings. Not everyone, manager or not, has that ability and that takes some practice to get there. But being a manager today calls for a high level of Emotional Intelligence, so that also means that there's a call to action here for us as managers to invest in our own self identification and exploration in order to be better managers.

That might be uncomfortable. That might be difficult for managers to do if that's not something that you've explored before, but we need to do that not only for ourselves, but for our people.  Let's talk about why and the business relevance to self awareness. In an article from Forbes, employees who recognized that their individuality, well being, and mental health are supported by their manager tend to have higher job satisfaction, which in turn increased retention. This came from managers themselves being open and honest about their own feelings and challenges, so this created a relationship and this sharing culture between manager and employee.  The American Psychological Association corroborated this experience by sharing that 89 percent of workers at companies that support well being initiatives are more likely to recommend their company as a good place to work, further reducing the potential of turnover.

And turnover is expensive. In a work human study from March of 2023, an engaged workforce in a 10,000 person organization, for example, can save a company up to 16. 1 million dollars  annually due to reduced employee turnover. Those savings are nice, but on the flip side,  PricewaterhouseCoopers found that turnover costs can represent more than 12 percent of pre tax income for the average company. And for those who have higher than average turnover, costs can be nearly 40 percent of earnings. 

I'm pausing for a moment for a friendly PSA to all of my fellow managers out there because self awareness and self exploration, like we said earlier, can be really uncomfortable. Vulnerability can be very scary. Take advantage of the same wellness programs that we offer to our employees for yourself. And I'm going to say something that you might not want to hear: if this is too uncomfortable for you, if you're leveraging these wellness resources and having a conversation with a therapist and working on your ability to be vulnerable and it is not how you want to be in the workplace, maybe people leadership in a post COVID world isn't for you.

Vulnerability is not telling everyone everything about you.  Vulnerability is strategic. It's telling very targeted and specific truths that will help further understanding, comprehension, and collaboration. So don't be fearful of vulnerability but, like I said, explore how to be vulnerable within your comfort zone.

Let me come back to those four capabilities, because we've covered the first two, but the second two are really about others instead of self. There's social awareness, so understanding the emotions and needs of others, along with empathizing with diverse perspectives, and relationship management, so building strong relationships, communicating effectively, and managing conflicts. When looking at relationships and the power of relationships in the workplace, there's a fantastic article by Rob Cross in the journal “Organizational Dynamics,” where he shares a technique called Organizational Network Analysis, and it's used to study how a network of employee relationships inside an organization impacts retention. This is done by conducting social network surveys to employees at large and then asking each employee to identify colleagues in their organization with whom they work closely.  This data is compared with attrition and revenue metrics and bada bing, bada boom, relationships at work are demystified and quantified.

So what did Rob find when doing this organizational network analysis?  He found that bigger networks were not better networks. Isn't that interesting? Large networks were actually correlated with high turnover and the leaders that were leveraging their emotionally intelligent social skills to evolve their networks over time ended up keeping employees and themselves engaged, motivated, and committed. So it wasn't a benefit to just know everyone as a leader and to make relationships with everyone. It was beneficial to make strategic ones and leverage those as appropriate within the business.  

Now, just a short while ago, I did say that if you are uncomfortable with the idea of being vulnerable, that you should reconsider being a manager. Please don't go out and quit your job, at least not yet, and instead, let's talk about how you can build the skills of an emotionally intelligent leader and then you can consider quitting your job. 

So first up, self awareness. How do we build that?  You start by taking time to reflect on your emotions and try to identify behavioral patterns. You can do this through keeping a journal or using a mindfulness app, basically anything that will help you become more aware of your personal thoughts and feelings will then help improve your ability to be self aware. 

Next, empathy. You develop empathy by actively listening to other people. Make eye contact. Don't prepare the next thing you're going to say when someone else is talking. Truly listen and try to see things from their perspective. Practice empathy by putting yourself in someone else's shoes. Imagine how they might be feeling in the same situation that you're in.  

Emotional regulation is a tough one because that's your ability to control your own emotions and respond to situations in a calm and rational manner. In order to develop this skill, you need to learn techniques for managing stress and anxiety like mindfulness meditation, deep breathing, or even exercise.  Ultimately, practicing a delayed response, finding something else to do in the moment that takes you away from the situation will allow you to process your emotions and respond in a much more intentional and thoughtful way so to build emotional regulation means to create space and boundaries before participating in what could be an emotional situation. 

These keep getting spicier because the next one is social skills. This one revolves around networking. Building your network is how you exercise your social skills. J. Kelly Hoey, she's an excellent author and speaker. She has a great book called “Build Your Dream Network,” and I loved hearing her talk in person at Grace Hopper in 2019  about networking because she said, asking somebody how they're doing in the hallway is networking. Chatting with someone while you're getting a coffee in the break room is networking. Networking does not have to be a dirty word or something that takes a lot of energy. It's purely connecting with people. Networking is building relationships with people from diverse backgrounds. That way you can develop a broader perspective and in turn, grow your empathy for other people who are unlike yourself.

I'd like to bring us home with a pop culture reference. Pop culture always helps us conceptualize big topics, like Emotional Intelligence and, clearly, I'm deriving many of my business learnings from The Godfather because you're about to have my second reference in this podcast series, in season one alone, to The Godfather. A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on LinkedIn exploring whether or not Don Corleone was a good people leader. Spoilers: I said he was, but you can go on LinkedIn and read it for yourself. I would like to talk about that opening scene, though, because Don Corleone is leveraging Emotional Intelligence in his leadership. And at the beginning of the movie, Bonasera is coming to him in a transactional way. He seeks justice for his daughter's disfiguration and the Don responds by communicating the importance of maintaining genuine relationships. He gives Bonasera in the moment feedback, sharing that he's not aligned with the Don's business mission, which ultimately focuses on negotiation or discussion before taking any kind of adverse action. 

Don Corleone has an immutable set of people centric values that are built on mutual respect and collaborative goal achievement and that's Emotional Intelligence. He's self aware. He's empathetic. And he's building relationships and leveraging those strategically for his team. So,  I guess be like the Don?  Maybe that's not the best way to end this, but take inspiration from Don Corleone. Leverage Emotional Intelligence to further whatever business industry that you're managing people in today.

You've just finished the latest installment of everything is A People Problem. You can find episode transcripts with work cited on diazaferjoyce.com/podcast. Find me on Instagram @EverythingIsAPeopleProblem, and tell me what you thought of the episode.  If you like what you heard, please subscribe so that you're notified when new weekly episodes become available. Once again, I'm your host, Dia Zafer-Joyce, thanks for joining me and see you next week.

Today’s episode was written and produced by Dia Zafer-Joyce. It featured insights and statistics from the American Psychological Association, Forbes, Indeed.com, Mental Health America, Science Direct, Semaphore, Socialigence, and Workhuman, and Royalty-free music provided by Sarah, the Instrumentalist from Epidemic Sound.