Dateline: April 11, 2014
Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.
Do your IT leaders have a high level of emotional intelligence (EI)? Recently Sanjog Aul, founder and host of CIO Talk Radio recently interviewed consultant and former CIO Scot Berkey. Scot is also a long time facilitator at the SIM Regional Leadership Forum in Chicago and an expert in emotional intelligence in IT teams.
While the entire radio show is worth listening to, one of the interesting ideas was that 20-30 years ago, we would train people to be managers or leaders then give them that role. But today we see companies putting people into manager or leader roles with very little formal training and let them grow into that role. It’s a very different way to develop leaders and sometimes the learning curve, particularly the development of emotional intelligence as a leader, is much longer. They don’t always have the tools to create and manage the best team dynamics and that can be costly in terms of productivity and, potentially, departure of valuable team members. It’s a cost of the way we develop leaders today.
Scot commented that knowing about EI and having the ability to put it into action are two different things. Just knowing about it is useful, since EI is a language and way to know yourself and how others react to you, but the big win comes from exhibiting EI in day to day activities. That’s when it propagates throughout the team.
Daniel Goldman, in his popular work on EI, defined EI as a wide array of skills and competencies that make leaders successful, including self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy and motivation.
What do you do to develop the emotional intelligence of your team? of your future leaders?
That’s a WRAP! Have a nice weekend!
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