 Many believe EQ is a "you've got it or you don't" trait like height or eye colour but that view is false. Emotional intelligence is teachable like any other skill and buildable like any other strength. However, it comes with the same limitations and caveats, individuals start from different levels and it takes effort, it requires changing thought patterns and being outside of your comfort zone.
Below I outline my approach which works consistently. It is simple - but that doesn't mean easy. Like physical fitness, it takes consistent effort over time.  Companies driven by adherence to budgets and data and looking for upticks in shareholder value - in the absence of context - have the tail wagging the dog. You end up with quality people stressed, frustrated and disillusioned from spending all their time producing ever more detailed information for the owners, instead of actual production. It's also a nice analogy for personal leadership under stress.
 Researchers go to great lengths to prevent the known and mysterious placebo effect. The weird phenomenon that occurs when people gain a benefit from pretend medicine (eg sugar pill). Little is known about the placebo effect - it ought not work - but it does and this is seen as a problem.
 I am largely a sceptic of all personality trait profiling. There are so many, all claiming to be 'scientifically robust'. However, they tend to only tell you what you could've worked out yourself from a 5 minute conversation with the person. Most of them have about as much validity as a horoscope, dripping with confirmation bias.
 Once again research proves what we probably already know. Amazingly, repeating an action leads to habituation! Who'd have thought?
 How do you maintain high performance under pressure? This is the question the High Performance Thinking Project I've been leading at Moly-Cop has been seeking to answer. Helping the workforce understand the influence of various non-optimal mind states on decision making; the goal to improve decision making, safety performance and problem solving in key moments when it matters. Mind states such as frustration, stress, fear, distraction, complacency, and rushing to name just a few reduce our ability to make good decisions, limit our ability to accurately perceive risk and be pro-active. The goal is to reduce safety incidents but also to improve decision making and leadership across the plant, at all levels.  Lining up for his 12th Bathurst 1000 start, David Reynolds and his Erebus Motorsport team didn’t expect to offer a text book case study on how our own thinking and physiology affect our ability to perform. But an excellent one he did (sorry David) and it was the perfect opportunity for us to to learn a little about how High Performance Thinking (the role the mind and various mind states play in our ability to make good decisions in the moment when it matters) can drastically change the course of our day.
First, some background (and no - you don’t have to be a Bathurst fan to keep reading)... The Western model of success under which we all live is a ‘meritocracy’. That is a society that says ‘anyone who wants to achieve can, and those who progress furthest do so on the basis of talent and merit’ (hence merit-ocracy).
A few hundred years ago, there was no such arrangement. If you were a blacksmith’s son, you became a blacksmith. If you were a blacksmith’s daughter, your best hope would be to marry the baker’s son. There was no guilt or expectation for anything higher in the social hierarchy.  Why is it so difficult to change people's minds about important ideas? Why do people believe things in spite of evidence? How can you get people to see what is right before their eyes, but that they fail to see?
There are several neural and psychological findings we could draw upon to answer this incredibly frustrating phenomenon, but to put it simply - it is both too risky and too much effort to change one's mind about things the mind considers foundational and important, especially when important in a social context.  Many of us spend our day largely ignoring our physical health, until there is a crisis.
Many of us delay controlling our personal budgets and delaying purchase gratification, until there is a crisis. Many businesses put off training, process improvement, and capacity building – because there are usually, and legitimately, more urgent things to deal with, until there is a crisis. Workplace culture is much the same. Organisations shouldn't wait until everything else falls over before doing something about their culture. |