This post is the first in a series highlighting emotional intelligence (EQ) in the workplace. If you’re curious to learn how we incorporate EQ in our work just contact us.
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You’ve worked all week long, after work and late nights too, completing a new report your boss asked for. Friday morning, you walk into her office and present the results. She takes one glance at the report, and puts it aside. Or worse, she quickly flips through it skipping over the gems of insight you know you put in there and then says, “I need something different from you…”

What do you do? How do you react?

Scenarios like this happen all the time. Two people have an exchange but something critical gets missed. A reporter asks a CEO a detailed question about a merger and the CEO responds with a 100,000 foot answer about his company’s vision. A super-angel asks an entrepreneur what they’re passionate about and the entrepreneur goes deeper into the details of his new product. You ask your manager to actually read the report you prepared, and you hear “Oh, I’m sure it’s fine, but…” These aren’t just altitude errors in communication, but moments when the CEO, the entrepreneur and your boss jeopardize the trust between themselves and the listener.

If your business doesn’t require trust to succeed, you can stop reading now

Trust is the lifeblood of business. If it’s lost, the reporter’s skepticism towards the CEO increases, the super-angel doesn’t fund the entrepreneur, and your commitment to your boss’ next request might drop. Whether trust increases or decreases in these scenarios depends on what you do next. But what you do next depends on your ability to clearly detect what you sense, feel, think, and want in the moment. To do that you need emotional intelligence (EQ).

What is EQ? Danial Goleman coined the expression in his 1996 book of the same name. While it has many factors, in real terms EQ is the practicable skill of doing two things at once:

1	2
Accurately detect, differentiate, identify, report and manage your thoughts, wants, and feelings.	Develop accurate hunches about the thoughts, wants, and feelings of the other person, and respond selectively to them.

In fast-paced chaotic critical thinking environments it can be tough to do just the first part. We’ve seen some team cultures that so actively suppress the full range of human responses that staff report difficulty sensing their inner state even when outside the office. That’s like losing your thermoception, and being unable to tell with your hand that a kettle is hot. If that sounds like your experience after spending eight hours five days each week in such environments, then your development path for emotional intelligence might start with regaining your ability to sense and process your inner responses to outer stimuli (for that’s all that emotions are, response to stimuli).

Doing the second part requires sufficient empathy and compassion for the other person. These are two skills our earliest care-givers modeled for us when we were young. That suggests a simple test for this aspect of EQ. If you’re experiencing trust issues with a colleague, ask yourself if you really care about them? If your answer is ‘no’ and you’ve settled on a dim view of them, that’s normal. We often judge others behavior negatively while judging our intentions positively. But if the relationship is important, than bringing more EQ to it might start with regaining your empathy and compassion for the other person’s intentions, wants, thoughts, and feelings.

The real test of EQ, however, comes in those relationship moments when we are under stress and trying to do both activities simultaneously. That’s a hard balancing act to sustain, especially when stakes are high. The more we can balance tending to ourselves and tending to others while under stress, the more choices we have for how to respond.

If your work doesn’t cause you stress, you can stop reading now

Our reptilian ancestors have four responses to stress: fight, flight, eat and mate. Humans have a wider range of responses, but that ancient simplified response mechanism remains codified in the amaygdala structure at the base of our brain. When its triggered we experience an ‘amygdala hijack‘. The amygdala floods our sensory, motor, circulatory, digestive and other bodily systems directly with response signals, bypassing the neo-cortex (the ‘new’ brain that reptiles lack). These signals prime us to act. But act how? In response to a tiger appearing on the savannah, running might be the right immediate response behavior. But when a client notifies you that, despite prior assurance, you’re not getting a new contract with them, bolting from the room might be inappropriate.

A key nuance of the amygdala response mechanism is that it stimulates our sensory and motor systems, but suppresses some of our other systems not needed for the four basic reptilian responses. That includes reducing oxygen and blood flow to the neo-cortex, the ‘thinking’ brain we otherwise rely on so much at work. Developing our emotional intelligence, therefore, includes ways to manage that amygdala response long enough for our neo-cortext to catch-up and re-engage. We can feel the impulse to run from the room, but we don’t have to express the impulse in the same way.

Emotional intelligence enables you to endure relationship stress so you can increase trust

If we can extend the time between the emergence of an amygdala response and what we do next, we increase our response flexibility.  The complex environments in which we work, and the diverse relationships we have each day can cause a lot of stress. That’s why increasing response flexibility, enabled by our emotional intelligence, is so important.  In 1999, Cary Cherniss, PhD produced what I believe is a key research paper for the skeptical-minded The Business Case for Emotional Intelligence. It explores the organization outcomes (increased sales, decreased attrition, higher performance) that arise when emotional intelligence assessments are used in hiring and promotion decisions. Depending on how deep your doubt & curiosity goes, you might also explore the impact emotional intelligence has on decision making. Molly Ellis has also pulled together a fantastic reading list exploring neurobiology during interpersonal conflict. So if you want to dig deeper into what happens inside the brain of the your boss, that CEO, and the entrepreneur, start there.

Our friends at Gimbal Systems raise some good questions to help locate your own use of emotional intelligence at work in their recent post Check Your Emotions At The Door – Are you Old School or New School?

We’re curious if you’re actively using and developing emotional intelligence in your work, and what your experiences have been like. Please let us know in the comments below. And if you’ve got an EQ trophy-story to share, we’d love to hear that too.