[MUSIC] Welcome back. In this module, we're going to look at the effect of competencies, in particular, emotional intelligence, social intelligence and to some extent cognitive intelligence competencies on performance. What are the elemental building blocks that enable you to do the things that we talked about in earlier modules that help you build these effective resonant leadership relationships? What I'd like to do is parallel to the very first module, is start with an exercise. And again, please do the exercise. It will help you understand the rest of what we talked about a lot differently. For this exercise, I'd like you to think of one of your subordinates who you think is fantastic. You wished you could clone them. You wished you had a whole cadre of that particular individual. And it really helps to think of one individual. And If none of your current subordinates are like that, then think of an earlier one. But think of somebody that was such a star that you wished you had a whole bunch of them. Then think of a subordinate who you wished would disappear. They would just fade away so you wouldn't have to go through all the trouble of firing them, and you wouldn't have to do all the paper work and all that kind of stuff. But somebody who just doesn't help, doesn't deliver, doesn't add to the whole experience. Thinking about the two of them, and you might want to put their names down or at least code names to be delicate, on a piece of paper, and start to think about what is it they do in their actions? What do they typically say? How did they make other people feel when they're performing their work, or not, as the case might be? So, I'll ask you to hit the pause button briefly and write down some notes, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about it. Welcome back. It wouldn't be surprising to me if under the person that you wished you could clone, you talked about somebody who engaged people, who challenged people, who listened to people. Somebody who made people feel a part of what was going on, somebody who kept you informed. Somebody who included you when appropriate, but didn't always run to you for little things or on every one of the issues. Somebody who felt some ownership in the organization, felt pride, and involved a lot of other people in discussions. It wouldn't surprise me if the person that you wished would just disappear either was very mechanical, they didn't listen, they didn't involve people, maybe they were very negative, they didn't smile, the kind of person who won't accept any faults or blame. Kind of person who takes credit from others. The kind of person who is very narrow. Or sometimes, even if they have subordinates, micromanages their people. Many of the characteristics that we talked about in the first module between a leader who brought the best in you and the one who didn't, are the same ones we're talking about here. Except in this module we're going to look at these characteristics as they emerge with the labels of emotional and social intelligence competencies. Now, what is a competency? A competency is a set of behaviors that a person is able to do organized around in an underlying or unconscious intent that produces more effective performance. As a result, the research on such competencies doesn't start with questionnaires. Anywhere in the world that I and colleagues do this kind of research, we start with performance. We look at identifying outstanding performers, average performers, poor performers. And we go in and watch them. We interview them about what's happening. We don't ask them a question like what do you think your competencies are. We want to know how they're acting and watch them. And then we assess it. In later stages once we understand the competency, we may even develop questionnaires and have what's called a 360, where a boss fills it out, peers, subordinates, customers, clients, friends, spouse, partner. This way what we're getting is a behavioral view. So the very important issue about competencies and it's not just the skill. So for example, one emotional intelligence competency that predicts effectiveness in leadership and management in many occupations and has been studied in over 94 countries in public sector, private sector, and the non-profit sector is emotional self-awareness. People who are in touch with what's going on inside of them who are able to somehow be consistent in their behavior. Another one is adaptability. Somebody who doesn't see uncertainty as fearful but in fact can roll with the punches and juggle multiple demands. Emotional self-control is another one that continues to predict effectiveness in leadership and management. Positive outlook is a very important one. And achievement orientation, being driven towards always wanting to do something better. This cluster, we call emotional intelligence and distinguishes outstanding performers. At all levels of leadership and management. Another cluster is the social intelligence cluster and this involves empathy. Do you understand another person? Do you seek to understand them? Do you understand what excites them? And that also involves behaviors like sometimes listening. But empathy is a good example of a competency that is so much more than the skill, because there is a skill called listening, or active listening. But empathy involves doing that with the intent of wanting to understand the other person. There are times in which you could use listening but in a way that serves another competency, influence. The way sometimes a prosecutor will listen to a testimony of a witness in a case in court and they are trying to find out information or catch the person in a lie. It's a very different intent, therefore, a different competency. Besides empathy, some of the typical competencies that come out in these studies of effectiveness include inspirational leadership, include influence, include conflict management, include coaching and mentoring, and teamwork. Again, this is a cluster of the social intelligence competencies. And then of course there are always two cognitive competencies that come out in every study, is very powerful in predicting effective performance, system syncing, seeing the world through multiple cause and effect relationships, and pattern recognition, being able to sense what's going on in seemingly random data. These three clusters are all competencies that distinguish outstanding performance. There are competencies that are more threshold competencies. These are ones you need to be average. You need, as a minimum, and part of that is knowledge. We need to understand the knowledge, the regulations, the knowledge about a particular function, to be a player. Interestingly enough, for threshold competencies, having more of them does not increase the quality of one's performance. Another threshold competency are a set of cognitive competencies that have to do with memory and deductive reasoning. And occasionally there are others, especially in certain domain specific areas of particular work. But the difference between the threshold competencies are these are the ones you have to have to even get the job. Or, you should have or you shouldn't have been offered the job. These are the ones that are the minimum point of entry. But the ones that we aspire to are the distinguishing competencies, because these are the ones that will move us from being an average performer, or performing as expected, or meets expectations, to being somebody who's walking on water, is lighting fires, is igniting passion and motivation and energy in people, is an inspirational leader. And again, these studies have been done in many, many arenas of life. Just as one example, I'd like to use a study that was done on senior partners in a major international consultancy. And in this study, we had the senior partners fill out this 360 assessment. We discarded the self-assessment. Self assessment is a bit delusional. Very often professional women are under-estimaters, always underestimate how effective they are and their behavior they use, and professional men tend to be over-estimaters. So we discard self-assessment during the research process. We use it in coaching. So we use the views of others about these senior partners' behavior. And then we followed the financial performance of their units. This is one of these companies that hit 65,000 accountants working for them worldwide. And what we are able to show as the graph illustrates, is that those senior partners demonstrating the clusters of competencies above the tipping point were delivering significantly more operating profit, both in terms of revenue and profit margin to the company than the other senior partners who weren't using these abilities, these competencies. The first two sets of columns on the chart represent a way to break up and look at components of emotional intelligence. The third is social intelligence, and the fourth are some of the cognitive competencies. Just to be clear, our approach to emotional and social intelligence, and cognitive intelligence competencies is not the only way people look at emotional intelligence. But all of us who do this kind of work, do the academic work, do the research, pretty much agree that there are multiple levels. That emotional intelligence is a characteristic that can exist deep inside. Very often as what psychologist call a performance trait, or in terms of our self-image and our self-schema, self-perception and at the behavioral level. The approach we've been discussing is the behavioral approach to emotional intelligence, and therefore emerges as the competencies. The other very well researched and used in numerous programs around the world take some alternate approaches. For example, Peter Salovey, Jack Mayer, and David Caruso's MSCEIT really looks at emotional intelligence as a deeper trait, as a performance trait. They try to test it in terms of how does a person process their inner emotions with their test, the MSCEIT. Reuven Bar-On has one of the most widely used measures of emotional intelligence which is based on a self-assessment predominantly, and it's looking at how does a person sense and look at some of these characteristics about what emotional intelligence both means to them and how they experience it. The other measures on the whole aren't as popular in their use or have as many research studies on them, but there are a number of others out there which are very good. And in the readings, both the required readings, I summarize some of those and list them. And in the recommended readings you'll see some of the source documents for these other approaches. Most of them, if not all of them are based on self-assessment of one model or another. So as we close this module, let me point you towards the personal learning assignment is to look at YouTube video, we have one listed, that's great one of Dan Goleman talking about emotional intelligence. In the next module we'll move on to look at a number of other studies that have looked at how these characteristics affect performance in a variety of occupations. [MUSIC]
