Pump Up Your EQ

Bob struggled in a tough situation. Our company was circling the drain. As a consequence, stress and shrillness accompanied every interaction with leadership. The forceful urging for workers to do more, way faster, way better, and with fewer resources, correctly made no sense to Bob, who managed an engineering team. Yet it was the constant theme of leadership’s messaging. The agitation created among the execution teams resulted in many terrible interactions between contributors, sometimes involving elevated emotions, blame-casting, threats, and disrespectful exchanges. Bob’s boss, Barry, sent him an email – a flaming missile – castigating Bob and his team for not completing their assignments quickly enough. As you might guess, Bob spent hours marinating in hot lava while developing an email response in kind. 

I led Product. I had no authority over Bob or his team, but I’d taken a liking to Bob because he was almost always right and had a dry sense of humor that made me laugh. We’d had several good talks about the situation at work, and at some point I dropped a bit of advice on him from an EQ (Emotional Quotient) perspective. I explained that there is no worse form of communication for important matters than email. Any single word you type could be interpreted as mocking, or joyous, or inflammatory, or compliant, or resentful… I could go on and on. Pulling accurate context from an email takes careful reading, and that is not common in business, let alone in a pressurized heat dome like we had at our company. I suggested that email’s greatest and hopefully only use was to confirm agreements and commitments. I asked him to come see me whenever he felt an irrational need to hit Send. 

When Bob received the blistering email from Barry, and eventually got a lot of swearing and fuming out of his system, my words came back to him. He sought me out. Bob told me he wanted to fire off his response in the worst way. He wanted to turn Barry into a smoking pile of ash. I took him for a walk. We got a coffee. We sat together outside with mild sunshine brightening the day and a nice breeze taking the edge off of the heat. Then I started asking questions.

“Do you really want Barry dead?” 

Bob admitted he did not. He just wanted him punished for that email. 

“Do you think Barry really meant what he said? Doesn’t he know your situation and understand your team’s limitations?” 

Bob reluctantly allowed it was possible Barry didn’t actually mean what he said. Barry knew in great detail the challenges the team faced. 

“So it follows that Barry might be reacting (very poorly) to someone raining hellfire on his own head. Is that possible?” 

Bob agreed, now that he thought about it, since Barry had always been fair and supportive.

“Is Barry under an intolerable amount of stress with the entire company’s survival riding on his shoulders?” 

Bob nodded, and admitted that this was likely. 

I made two suggestions. First, I advised him to address that scathing email retort to me and hit Send. Next, I suggested he go talk to Barry. Not to challenge anything in the email, because I characterized that email as a momentary lapse of reason and not anything to worry about. I suggested he share with Barry how he felt when he received that email. Just be honest, I told him. Don’t blame, don’t posture, don’t get dramatic, just say how it made you feel and ask if he meant it. 

Bob thanked me years later for that advice. He and Barry had taken a leap forward as friends and as work partners from that incident and had formed a startup together. Now that he was leading a company, Bob wanted to know more about how I somehow intuited what to do in that situation. Why hit Send? 

“Because,” I replied. “I can always use a good laugh. But more importantly, hitting Send gives you closure. There was no way to rid yourself of Barry’s email without closure on your side, and it didn’t much matter who you sent it to, so long as the recipient could be trusted to keep it exclusively between you. Just hitting Send did the trick, right?”

He laughed and agreed it felt really good. But how about all the other things you told me?

I explained to him that in my view EQ is a muscle that can be developed. And it’s something anyone can improve if they decide to be deliberate about it, even if they don’t have a natural inclination toward it. To start pumping up your EQ, focus first on you.

• Don’t permit yourself to simply react to everything that comes at you. Take a deep breath. Go get some coffee. Call a trusted friend. Prepare a global thermonuclear response and send it to someone you trust instead of the target recipient. Go work on another assignment. But most importantly, understand that your instincts are probably primitive and not going to get you the results you might want. 
• I subscribe to the notion that we all have two personalities. One that is dominant when we are calm, easy, and safe. And the other that hijacks our brain when we are stressed or threatened. Letting our stress-brains make our decisions feels really good but is likely disastrous. 
• Every action has a reaction. In that moment when you are considering what to do, make an effort to trace down the path of consequences. If I do x, then y is the most likely response, and keep going from there. What would Barry have done if Bob had sent him a blistering retort?
• Consider the source and tie on that person’s shoes for a quick walk. Ask yourself why would that person say this, what could be going on that led to it, what does this person really need from me? You’ll be surprised how often people who have caused an initial, stress-brain reaction in you actually just need your support and understanding. This was the case with Barry. When Bob confronted him, Barry felt truly horrible and Bob ended up offering help, support, and suggestions. 

There’s plenty more, of course, but being mindful of the above will give anyone a running start. Just keep in mind that the benefits of strengthening your EQ will help you through tough situations both at work and everywhere else, make finding better resolutions easier and clearer, and help you help others, which is after all the true definition of a leader.