Don’t Neglect the Sunshine Factor

When I come across someone with a high EQ, it’s almost as if I have known that person for a long time. Communication between us becomes effortless. Depending on what’s going on, you can usually say less and mean more. Matters you discuss are understood by default, without lengthy explanations. If high EQ people are empathetic about people, the team, and the team’s success, as they often are, then that caring radiates from their communications and interactions like sunshine on a clear day. As managers, we can talk at great length about high performing teams and their characteristics, their processes, their talents, and all the rest, but the factor that is most often missing from the conversation is the one that provides the most pronounced lift – the sunshine factor.

I was lucky enough to have a talented mentor in my younger days. Marty always made a point of identifying and applying the individuals with the sunshine factor to the hardest projects. I didn’t fully understand why he insisted on it. Senility, I joked. Sentiment, someone else suggested. But I knew he always had a good reason for the things he did. So, I paid Attention. Capital A.

As projects unfolded, I noticed a marked increase in overall performance between those with the sunshine factor and those without. I had to dig a bit to grasp why the factor made such a clear difference.

To understand the root cause of such successes, I’ll rewind a couple of steps to earlier writings. If you’ve been reading my articles, you know one of my favorite sayings is “All problems are people problems.” That’s my shorthand for indicating that no matter what obstacles a team confronts, all solutions are people solutions. Even the most impossible technical conundrum is a people problem, because ill-advised people tasked a team with doing the impossible, and the people at every level who should have pushed back, ill-advisedly signed up to take it on. 

And that leads to another one of my favorite sayings: “The single greatest threat to any reasonable outcome is the concealment of problems.” 

Hiding problems? You might protest that companies have solutions for that. We have standups, 1:1s, retros, sprint plannings, ticketing systems, and all these processes to lubricate communication within the team so that concealment doesn’t happen. Sure, sure. And when an engineer reports in standup for two days in a row that his task, estimated at less than a day, is still unfinished, what do you do? You accept it, usually. Or you ask if he needs help, perhaps. But if he’s got some shame for getting stuck on a technical problem, or his spouse has split from him and asked for a divorce, or he helped some other team with their work, or he decided he needed to learn Elm in order to complete the task, or any of a hundred other things, is he likely to offer any of those less pretty details? Probably not. He’ll say, “I’ve got a handle on it. It will be done tomorrow.” 

This happens all the time. Unless there is some team habit surrounding admitting mistakes and confessing inadequacies in front of their boss, like psychological safety, most won’t tell the full truth. 

So, if problems are rooted in people, and people hiding their problems is the biggest threat to your team’s success, you as an alert leader should be doubling down, as Marty always did, on stellar communication. And that’s what I witnessed. When encountering a thorny people problem, Marty would send in one of his empaths, like Beth, who would swoop in and use her empathetic approach to get results others simply could not.

I watched her operate on a project I managed. How she did it wasn’t always obvious, but she always knew what was going on. Paul, for example, claimed he could handle the C# tasks but was actually trying to upskill his C# on the fly – Beth tipped me off about it. Carmela was interviewing for a new job – Beth helped me understand that the work we were doing just wasn’t challenging enough for Carmela, so I swapped her to another project. Carmela stayed with the company.

Beth’s natural ease with people, the trust she engendered, and her compassionate manner in helping to mitigate or eliminate problems, meant that any project with Beth on it had an improved likelihood of success. The bottom line is, simply by being herself, Beth made everyone around her better. This included me and her other managers.

Identifying people like Beth is a challenge to which there is no simple answer. I learned how to do that over time, but I couldn’t prescribe a detailed method to it. At the beginning of this article, I made reference to one of the factors I stay alert to, which is the high EQ connection. It’s a good initial sign, but it’s not infallible.  I’ll just say that giving people a chance to help others for the team’s overall benefit tends to reveal the Beths that may already be right there in front of you.