The Kung Fu of EQ

Bob was a genius and he knew it. He was the most respected engineer in the company, and the company was full of whipsmart engineers. I was brought into Bob’s company to diagnose and resolve its recurring failures to meet its goals. Their war chest was draining faster than sales could fill it. The products they built were solving complex issues, but smart as they were, they were not doing a good job of it. They couldn’t deliver critical improvements or new functionality, and competitors were gobbling up their market. My sponsor, the CEO, was at his wit’s end. He’d hired the smartest people he could find and gave full control to Bob to ensure the products came out correctly. And they were dying.

So what was wrong? I watched the process Bob put in place to direct their work. They held daily technical decision-making meetings that would go four or five hours at a time, with Bob at the whiteboard. Then they would all execute afterward. I kept track of how many times these meetings concluded with actual decisions. The answer was, very few of them. If clarity was the goal, they were utter failures.

Bob’s voice was the only voice sounding off 90 percent of the time. He corrected or refuted every other opinion. He controlled the discussion. Conversations with Bob convinced me he had no awareness that he was orchestrating his own dominance. He truly believed that he was helping everyone understand the technical landscape. He told me that without alignment on all of these concerns, people would go off and implement stuff that would be flawed or simply wrong. And then he’d have to work his ass off for months to fix it all.

But the company was dying. What would you do? 

A step back

I began my career as a technical writer and engineer. I worked my tail off, and enjoyed it, but in particular I paid attention to the people around me. It’s just something I have always done. Through some miracle or curse my boss happened to notice that my teammates performed better when I was in the mix, even though I was not even close to being in the same league as my teammates in technical matters. So he promoted me to manager far too young. That set me on a path that led to many crushing moments of learning on the job, but also helped open the door to my lifelong obsession.

Focusing on my obsession, I came to regard technical matters as less challenging than the human issues that I confronted. Perhaps that’s naive of me. I didn’t get that much opportunity to plumb the bitter depths of the worst technical challenges. But if you’ve read this article I wrote a few weeks back, you already know that I see people at the root of most problems at work, so perhaps my stance shouldn’t be surprising. Either way, as I unraveled the role of managing people, I found deeper dimensions that complicated everything. Consider what we often face in the workplace:

• We are pushed into finite roles with changing success factors, whether we delight in that or not.
• Our warring motivations are hidden. This is a big deal. You may not have been aware, but you’ve likely had people on your team who would rather embarrass that arrogant dork Hank, for example, than see his team meet its goals. What lies in the hearts of all of us that drives our behavior? Sometimes not even we are certain of our own motivations.
• We’re rolling along fine and suddenly leadership ratchets up the pressure to perform. Truncated schedules, multiple assignments landing on the best performers without deadlines changing. Then it’s scramble time, and you may be tempted to skip key steps like testing your product. You’ve all seen this.
• Because we’re human we compare ourselves to those around us doing similar things. This provokes competition between us. But much of the time those of us competing couldn’t tell you what we’re competing for.
• The fact is, our work is inexorably tied to our livelihoods. If we fail, there’s a chance the next round of layoffs will remember that.
• We have opportunities for momentary glory, which is great, but many are more commonly trying to avoid the enduring public shame that comes with being wrong.

Given the above, it’s miraculous that we can ever get anything done at all. Leaping in, and struggling for success, I convinced myself through these experiences that EQ (which I think of as our “empathy quotient”, not our “emotional quotient”) is a muscle, one which can atrophy or undergo intentional training to become strong and flexible and ultimately Kung fu battle-ready. When I leveraged EQ well, the teams did better.

But what about Bob?

Back to Bob. The question was, what would you do? Force the team into Agile? Silence Bob? Fire Bob? Sideline Bob? Put yourself in charge of those meetings and facilitate them better than Bob did? 

What I did: I began working out my EQ muscle. I investigated Bob’s background. It turns out he was a lifelong friend of the CEO, and through his heroics and brilliance the products were created from scratch. There’d be no company without Bob. Other factors: Bob had rejected the Agile methodology a few times already. He saw nothing wrong with his approach. And without his endorsement there was no way to move engineering anywhere useful.

I considered what Bob’s true motivation must be, given the choices he made. He was constantly demonstrating that his self-worth was tied up in receiving the respect and high regard of his peers. Our actions reveal our values. He loved being the hero for the admiration it delivered to him. He loved being in the spotlight. He loved being above others technically. Intelligence and ability were the currency in engineering, and he was the richest guy in the company in that sense. 

It grew crystal clear to me that my job depended upon me finding a positive path to a productive engineering group, without impairing Bob’s stature or those things that sustained him. I didn’t blame Bob. Some of us, given free reign, would build worse situations and give in to counter-productive desires. Bob wasn’t bad, and his approach had carried the company for literally decades. 

Knowing what I now knew about Bob, I asked myself: What paths were open to me? Could I change what Bob valued? No. Could I change the automatic deference the rest of the engineers awarded Bob so that they could make their own risky decisions? No. Did Bob need to dominate every decision and line of code to get that respect? No. Could I force him to trust others with his technical decisions? No. Could I give him more important work than directing every nit and detail in a massive codebase? Yes!!

The solution

I told Bob he was far too valuable to be wasting his time in long meetings each day. I told him that the other engineers, if they couldn’t be trusted with the difficult work, would be fired by me according to a three-strikes rule, or they would need to receive more appropriate assignments from their engineering managers. Bob could mark up their work products in design reviews, a compacted moment to consider both the details and the bigger picture. This would save him several hours, which could be spent producing software improvements that would make the software sell better. Just as important, the CEO had other ideas from his time in the field that would require innovation, and we had no one better than Bob at that. Should our future wait while he holds everyone’s hands through decisions they should be properly equipped to make on their own? And if everything goes to hell with these adjustments, then we’ll just snap right back into place.

Does it sound like I was blowing sunshine? I wasn’t. My above-prescribed changes aligned with one cardinal rule of EQ that I had merely intuited up until this point. But the stakes of failing with Bob brought me the clarity to honor the rule: 

If I had bullshitted Bob, he’d have seen right through me and would have taken apart my plans at his convenience. I did not bullshit him. I believed in each of my suggestions as the right things for Bob, for the company, and for the engineers. 

Can you guess the outcome of the adjustments we put into place? I’ll give you a hint: we did eventually adopt the Agile methodology, with Bob’s blessing.

Conclusion

As my EQ workouts improved I paid attention to the managers around me. It was saddening to find that many leaders around me weren’t often employing EQ intentionally, or using the Truth with a capital T to bolster alignment. For example, I saw these outcomes, and others equally disappointing:

• When you unwittingly undermine your own ability to guide a team to success, and scratch your head at the disappointing results. (EQ opens up a full spectrum of hidden choices with a stronger likelihood of effective results.)
• When you fail to identify the course of action that would rescue success from the jaws of defeat, and you go down with the ship. (EQ helped me see what needed to happen with Bob – keep him, channel him safely, and free engineers to be engineers.)
• When you lose yourself within the ebb and flow of group perceptions on the correct actions to take, which usually leads to popular but ineffective management. (If you’re not certain as a manager/leader of the correct path, others will rally to influence you, and EQ can aid you in knowing the right answer when you hear it – you might even catch the resonance of truth.)
• When you struggle to get a team marching forward, in the same direction, at the same time, in healthy accord with each other, and each one uplifting the others any time someone stumbles. (To achieve in the workplace there are so many factors that need to align. Understanding and helping to align motivations of team members with the overall goal brings a lot of factors into the same cadence.)

More than anyone else, a manager is in a position to make everyone around her better. She can improve her outcomes through the insight and clarity she gains through EQ. If you’re a manager, consider that maybe it is time to go exercise that muscle. 

Ken Furie is a seasoned leader in the technology industry with 35 years dedicated to managing people. Much of his time has been in startups where small movements can have a big impact, and with the diversity of challenges in that arena he has enjoyed making extraordinary teams a lifelong passion and study. In the course of his career, and through empathic leadership techniques, he has won the Project Management Institute's (PMI's) "Project of the Year" award, Inc. Magazine's "500 Fastest Growing Companies" award, and helped save two companies from bankruptcy. When his busy work/life balance permits he loves teaching and mentoring, giving him opportunities to pass along his career learnings.