Beyond the Buzzword: Building Real Emotional Intelligence
The EI Advantage: Self-Awareness
I have been writing several newsletters and creating videos about the need for Emotional Intelligence (EI) more than ever, with the onslaught of AI.
When AI is the Giant, EI Chooses the Battlefield
When Efficiency Becomes Dangerous
EI must direct AI. It decides where automation belongs and where it doesn’t. It recognises when efficiency creates risk. It protects trust, psychological safety, and human dignity.
However, I know from experience that when the term emotional intelligence
is used, it is met with eye-rolling.
“Yeah, yeah, we heard it all before. Tell us something we don't know.” You hear them say.
If this is happening to you, I suggest using the simple exercise deployed by Senior Master Sergeant Winsome L. Culley, Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Air Force.
In his article “How Emotional Intelligence Is Reshaping Leadership In The U.S. Air Force,” Kevin Kruse reveals a simple but powerful exercise.
“When Culley speaks to Air Force audiences, he often opens with a deceptively simple exercise. “How many of you rated yourselves highly on emotional intelligence in your performance brief?” he asks. Almost every hand goes up. Then comes the follow-up: “Without Googling, name the four core skills of emotional intelligence.” The room usually falls silent as very few can answer.”
You do not have to refer to a performance brief. You can ask, “Put your hand up if you believe you have emotional intelligence?” Ask those with their hands up the question, “Keep your hand up if you can tell me what the four components of emotional intelligence are?”
Let's see how many hands are in the air now!
May the force be with you
If it is good enough for the U.S. Air Force, then it should be good enough for you. Culley has taken what was a niche concept and elevated it to an expected leadership quality in the performance area of “Leading People” for Air Force personnel worldwide. The results speak for themselves. As Kruse explains,
“Data tracked by installation prevention statisticians shows that units participating in the EQ workshops consistently report improvements in self-awareness, communication, empathy, and conflict management. Breakdowns in communication and toxic dynamics decrease, while feedback, trust, and team cohesion strengthen. The results are clear: when units and teams embrace emotional intelligence, they avoid repeat problems and build lasting camaraderie.”
The four components
If anyone was able to answer the question correctly, the four components of EI are:
· Self-awareness
· Self-management
· Social awareness
· Relationship management
In this series of four newsletters, I will explore each of the components, as despite extensive research and numerous writings about the benefits, they are being sorely overlooked. Hopefully, I can bring it to life.
Self-awareness
This is the place to start and end before addressing any of the other components. It is the foundation of EQ.
As Culley explained, “As a leader, how can you expect to lead others if you cannot master the ability to lead yourself first?”
Self-awareness is the ability to recognise and understand your own emotions and their impact on others. The other components of EI depend on this self-awareness.
Margaret Andrews is a Master of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches “Emotional Intelligence in Leadership.”
“We are all having emotions all the time, the question is whether you are aware of these emotions and the impact they have on your behaviour - and other people”, she said in an article for the Harvard Division of Continuing Education.
Research by organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich, found that while most people believe they are self-aware, 85-90 per cent of people at all levels are not.
Why?
Self-awareness means you know who you are. Understanding yourself is foundational to other leadership competencies, including self-control, empathy, collaboration, effective decision-making and building trust.
If you are self-aware, you understand your strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, you can build on your strengths and work to overcome your weaknesses. When you know your weaknesses, you can work with others who may have different strengths than you do and accept the idea that another person may have better ideas, skills or competencies than you do.
When you lack self-awareness, you can inadvertently alienate others by failing to understand your impact on them.
How?
Becoming self-aware is an ongoing process. It is a lifetime of reflection and self-examination to see where you stand and how others perceive you.
It is a continual process of striving to become the best you can be.
In “Emotional Intelligence 2.0,” authors Travis Bradbury and Richard Boyatzis provide 15 self-awareness strategies. Reproduced from getstoryshots.com.
1. Quit treating your feelings as good or bad. Judging your emotions prevents you from understanding them, adds more emotions to the mix, and keeps you from seeing the original cause of the feeling. Understand, don’t judge
2. Observe the ripple effect from your emotions. Recognise that when you act out of your feelings, the effects can be long-term, and on more than the person at whom you directed the emotion.
3. Lean into your discomfort. We tend to try to ignore or minimise unpleasant emotions, but this prevents us from understanding those emotions.
4. Feel your emotions physically. Learn to spot the physical changes that come with your different emotions, and you’ll be able to understand better what you’re feeling.
5. Know who and what pushes your buttons. This needs to be specific – identify the exact people, situations, and environments that trigger your emotions and rub you the wrong way, and make a list. This will then allow you to determine the source of your reaction to these things.
6. Watch yourself like a hawk. Develop a more objective understanding of your behaviour by taking notice of your emotions and behaviours as a situation unfolds.
7. Keep a journal about your emotions. Because emotions are such an intangible subject, you’ll need to write things down to understand them better, identify patterns, and track progress. It will also help you remember your tendencies in the moment, later on.
8. Don’t be fooled by a bad mood. A bad mood can overshadow all your emotions. Hence, you need to recognise when it’s the emotional state that’s affecting you rather than an individual emotion and go through the same process to identify what caused the mood.
9. Don’t be fooled by a good mood, either. You should also seek to understand why your good moods happen, both for the sake of understanding your emotions better and to avoid the harm that can come from a good mood (irrational exuberance, for example).
10. Stop and ask yourself why you do the things you do. Your emotions will alert you to things you never would know otherwise.
11. Visit your values. Contrasting your values with the way your emotions compel you to act is a helpful exercise to increase your self-awareness. Take a piece of paper and write down your values in one column, and anything you’ve done recently that you’re not proud of in a second column. The authors suggest doing this somewhere between daily and monthly to keep it in mind before you react in a way you’d regret.
12. Check yourself. Your physical appearance often provides valuable clues about how you feel. Observe your facial expressions, body language, clothing, and other aspects.
13. Spot your emotions in books, movies, and music. Art that you identify with can offer further clues about your feelings. Consider which of these things grabs your attention and ask yourself why.
14. Seek feedback. Because your understanding of your emotions is limited by your one perspective, getting input from others is invaluable. Ask others for specific examples and look for similarities in the answers of different people.
15. Get to know yourself under stress. Learn to recognise your personal physiological and emotional signs of stress, and take the time to rest or recharge before the tension builds up.
Making it real
The secret to building self-awareness in others is to make it a reality. It will not be achieved in a one-hour off-the-shelf presentation. It is a continuous process achieved through a structured program of behavioural change. It is a mix of assessments, coaching, and application of learning in the real world.
It is essential that the results can be measured. In the U.S. Air Force, the results of participating teams are higher levels of communication, empathy and trust, while toxic dynamics and miscommunication steadily decline.
When you can demonstrate the results, the eye-rolling ceases. Culley invites the sceptical leaders to observe his classes, engage in assessments with their teams, and witness the impact of the sessions for themselves.
Kruse says that the sceptics walk away not only convinced but requesting additional sessions from Culley’s growing catalogue of EQ Impact offerings.