Alps Seminar I

Jun 30th, 2021

Emotional intelligence can lead to psychological resilience by encouraging and recognizing people (employees) need to manage emotions.
Two views from HR:
- Gives a business an edge over others that lack EI.
- EI is too hard to quantify and vague, EI is a misnomer.
Pyramid of EI
- Personal Sphere
  - Self Awareness / Knowing emotions
  - Self Management / Managing emotions
- Social Sphere
  - Social Awareness / Understand Others Emotions
  - Relationship Management
Usually easier to manage others over self, making self management the end goal.
“He who has conquered himself has conquered the world!”

In a digital world, physical, manual, and cognitive skills are less impactful.
Stress affects brain chemistry resulting in organizational costs.
Steps to take
- Reduce barriers for connection.
- Seek feedback and contribution at every junction.
- Reinforce org. values.
- Foster a learning culture.
Culture of empathy, support and connection that is resilient starts with leaders.
Leaders need to start engaging and interacting more with teams, Time must be allocated for genuine connection.
Good side effect is increased perspective when strategy planning and making difficult decisions.

Hallmarks of Emotionally Intelligent Org
Strong sense of trust	People can have difficult conversations
Teams unafraid to take initiative	People active in diversity and inclusion
Committed to goals and values	Curiosity is common.

Outcomes of incomplete collaboration:
- Failure to meet elevated expectations.
- Higher operating costs and reduced efficiencies.
Word 1 - Professional
- Engineering professional training based on theory and detailed design while operators professional training based on practical experience.
- Need to merge these perspectives to get to sweet spot.
Word 2 - Respect
- Day to day challenges can de-prioritize acceptance of feedback.
- Ignoring perspectives will manifest in negative outcomes.
- Respect Cycle:
  - Inviting Conversation -> Deep Listening -> Considering Feedback -> Create Buy-In -> Repeat
  - Buy-In is critical whether or not it was accepted, stakeholders should know they were heard and know the basis of decision making.
Word 3 - Grace
- Attitude of generosity and goodwill.
- Step back from pressure and high-performance environments to focus on uniting values.

Limiting element for capturing the value of innovation is the ability to translate ideas in to connections with people.
Innovative ideas pass through a prism of emotional intelligence, taking white light and translating it for regulators (red), financiers (orange), operations (yellow), etc..,
- Self Awareness
  
  Allows for vulnerability and acceptance of feedback, foundational.
- Emotional Management
  
  Outgrowth of self awareness, depersonalization and authenticity drive to produce an outcome beyond self-interest.
- Emotional Connection
  
  Highest skill level, using empathy, listening, communication, and mentoring to produce tangible results.
Innovative organizations are produced by hiring/developing leaders who posses trifecta of technical skills, professional experience, and emotional intelligence.
Career tracks should be defined and separate for technical leadership and emotionally intelligent leadership.

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman

Building emotional awareness requires a bit of solitude.
Keep and emotion log/emotion diary to become more aware of incidents of thoughts that trigger your emotions.
Writing down and naming these can help define and contain the feelings.

Employee performance optimization is not enough in a growing team based, global, and complex business environment.
Groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly, and find better solutions.
Project Aristotle studied 180 teams at google looking for various factors tht determine group performance. Almost no patters were found based on typical metrics (hobbies, gender, backgrounds, extroverts/introverts).
Group Norm

Traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather.
Group norms typically override individual proclivities.
The ‘right’ group norms can raise the collective intelligence, ‘wrong’ norms can hobble a group of otherwise exceptionally bright members.
Of various norms successful groups had similar attributes:
- Equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.
- High average social sensitivity.
- Psychological safety
  
  A sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. Interpersonal trust and mutual respect where people are comfortable with being themselves.
- All Google’s intense data collection and number crunching led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known: In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
- Follow your gut.

More resources, incentives will not fix all issues.
EI protects leaders and management from derailment from deficits in handling change, teamwork, and interpersonal relations.
Leaders with EI have a solid level of self-awareness about the link between their behavior and how it makes others feel and perform.
Three abilities that high EI leaders demonstrate:
- Able to admit mistakes
- Listen without jumping to conclusions
- Not avoiding difficult conversations and able to hold people accountable
Employees more willing to give extra effort when managers exhibit high EI.
Training managers in EI leads to reduced turnover, absenteeism, and increased engagement, sales performance, and productivity.

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