There’s something Dickensian about e-Learning production: It can be the best of times and it can be the worst of times. You have to deal with wildly divergent personality types, from introverted, focused programmers to arm-waving, big-picture marketing people, with mercurial customers, with moving-target technologies, and, often, with your own personal great expectations.
As a producer, the point person, keeping your cool and keeping everyone motivated to follow your vision is both an art and a science. A tool that may prove indispensable is emotional intelligence or EQ. Ever the skeptic, I took a break from making modules in order to quiz subject matter expert Joshua Freedman, Director of Six Seconds’ Institute for Organizational Performance, on this potential solution to production woes.
Freedman is one of a handful of people in the world to have worked fulltime for nearly a decade in the area of emotional intelligence development. He has helped launch emotional intelligence programs around the world for clients that include the US Navy and Marine Corps, Schlumberger, Pfizer, FedEx, and Morgan Stanley. During our interview, he discussed the basics of emotional intelligence, the business case for its use, and provided examples of how these concepts provide a valuable advantage for today’s organizations and for e-Learning producers.
The basics of emotional intelligence
In the heat of e-Learning production, I’m dealing with multiple generations of people: from 20-something Flash programmers to 60-something SMEs. What’s the best way to connect with this wide range of colleagues and motivate them to follow my directions?
One of the virtue-vices of our
highly mobile and distributed work world is a true diversity of talent. I relate
to this question because I work with some programmers in
Even via email and Skype™, though, my experience is that at a fundamental level, people are people. The same kinds of primal forces engage them. While each of us is unique, there is a huge common ground, and we all have to learn to leverage the shared space. Emotional literacy is a language that works in that space: it’s compelling, incisive, and universal.
I recently led a course for 15 sales execs from Schlumberger, the leading oilfield and information services provider. The executives came from 13 different countries on five continents, and none of them spoke English as their first language. At the start of the course, I had doubts. Would these high-tech, non-western, young, successful people relate to becoming more aware of emotions?
They did. But at the start of every training I ask myself, “Will it work for them?” Moreover, clients ask me, “Will it work for this unique population?” It seems we’re all pretty focused on the differences.
Yet everywhere I go, people are motivated by belonging, by being understood, by having a voice in something worthwhile. They want to be seen, heard, and valued. They want leaders to listen, to understand, and to put the issues on the table. They want transparency and authenticity – they want to see the leader as a real person who is open and honest.
So what to do is pretty simple. How to do it is an art. (See Figure 1) My experience is that developing emotional intelligence is invaluable because it gives you the insights into yourself and others that you need to connect on a human-to-human level.
Figure 1 The basics of emotional intelligence application involve action, intention, and purpose
My customers often change priorities, or new people who have new demands come into the mix. This can require shifting milestones and deliverables. How do I stay diplomatic and avoid the blame game?
I see two issues here. On the surface, you’re talking about managing the contracting process and keeping expectations clear. That’s an essential, a business basic that should be a prerequisite for all managers. Get a clear contract, and make lots of change orders. But, beneath the surface there are some bigger emotional issues. One is about vision; the other is about fear.
Vision is about keeping your eyes on the prize. What’s the real goal for you in your work? For me, the "real goal” is much bigger than the project. It’s about how you want to be in the world, about how you put your vision into action each day. It’s so easy to get caught up in short-term thinking, and then you get into reaction with all these stressors.
Let me explain that. There is a part of your brain called the thalamus, and it’s like a "danger radar,” always on the lookout for risks and threats. When you perceive a threat, the thalamus kicks your brain into "orange alert,” and your hypothalamus and amygdala start pumping out a mix of chemicals to suit. The hypothalamus is like a mini-emotion-chemical factory synthesizing strings of proteins into unique structures that function as "keys” delivering messages to the "locks” studding the cells of your brain and body. The amygdala is a small almondshaped organelle responsible for the "startle response.” It stores patterned reactions critical to survival.
When aroused, the amygdala triggers the release of a flood of those "key-signals” arousing you to fight, flee, or freeze.
You go into "survival mode,” a primal reaction where you’re primed to live through bodily danger. It takes a quarter-second for this mechanism to kick in, it runs for about six seconds, and each time it’s triggered you stay on alert for 20 minutes. This whole system is hard-wired into the very core of your brain, and it is totally short-term.
So when you think, "This clown’s ideas are going to slow the whole project down, I’m going to lose time and money, and I’m stuck with it…,” your brain survival system kicks in and you’re on alert. In that state you’re driven to fight ("Look, bub, who’s running this project?"), flee ("Where’s my resume?") or freeze ("I can’t think of a thing to say!"). But you didn’t ask yourself the big question: What do we each really want?
If you get honest with yourself about this question, it opens up a completely new realm of possibility, and suddenly the short-term crud becomes less urgent. You notice the possible threat, but it doesn’t interest you so much, so you don’t go to orange alert. This is the power of holding a clear vision – it’s a skill called “Pursuing a Noble Goal,” and it’s invaluable.
I mentioned fear, and you can see how fear plays into your reaction system – it makes the threats even bigger. Fear is a badly misunderstood emotion: It’s a blunt and over-protective body guard, but it’s on your side. When you walk into a meeting where you’re hit with a bunch of change orders, for example, fear steps in and says, “Hey! Tell these guys to back off, they’re getting on our turf.” Because people regard fear so poorly, and because most people are so afraid of acknowledging their fear, we cover it up with lots of other feelings and make the situation even more confusing.
What is EQ or whatever you call it?
In 1990 two professors named Peter Salovey and John Mayer wrote a paper about emotional intelligence. They described the human ability to perceive and use emotional data for decision-making, and showed how this ability is akin to the intelligences with which we process other data. This ability model is often abbreviated "EI,” respecting the high academic standard qualifying this concept as an intelligence.
My colleagues and I use the term "EQ,” a play on "IQ,” to describe a set of skills you need to put head and heart together so people can be both wise and effective. Our definition is: Emotional intelligence is the capacity to use thinking and feeling to make optimal decisions.
To make it practical and easier to apply the basics of emotional intelligence shown in Figure 1 (Action, Intention, and Purpose), the team at Six Seconds developed an EQ-in-Action model (see Figure 2) – three steps you can follow to live and lead with emotional intelligence:
- Know Yourself — become more aware of your feelings and reactions. (Action)
- Choose Yourself — use your feelings intentionally and carefully rather than reacting. (Intention)
- Give Yourself — harness your sense of purpose and your connections with others to become more powerful and to truly lead. (Purpose)
Within these three areas, there are eight specific measurable competencies defined in the model that people can learn to use.
