I was recently talking with a private equity investor about leveraging emotional Intelligence coaching in one of his companies. He predicted his CFO’s response, “Why is that important? You hit your numbers or you don’t.”
Yes, there is still educational work to do for those of us who’ve experienced the power of emotional intelligence development. Although many studies have proven the ROI on using emotional intelligence development to improve performance, many have yet to see the value.
Nonetheless, it’s still humans who are required to produce numbers and humans come with emotions. Learning how to master them is a key skill used by the most successful professionals and leaders.
My conversation made me think about the ways I’ve seen emotional intelligence impact the numbers recently. Here are 7 non-quantified but real examples of how emotional intelligence has impacted the bottom line of a company like yours in 2019.
- A CEO’s addiction to activity causes them to over-extend their team, preventing any real progress on the core activities that drive long-term business value.
- A business owner’s personal need for certainty causes them to avoid a critical risk their business needs to take, missing a time-sensitive opportunity.
- A manager’s need to please people causes them to withhold negative information critical to making a key decision, allowing a team to waste time and money pursuing the wrong actions.
- A high-performer’s desire for autonomy causes them to passive-aggressively rebel against the right decision because of whose idea it was and how they were asked to do it.
- An executive’s need to feel significant causes them to take the recognition for an idea when they really needed to affirm someone else with it, demotivating that person and causing them to want to take their ideas elsewhere.
- A CEO’s desire to be seen as smart leads them to avoid owning a bad hiring decision, causing their team to waste energy working around the person because they’re too prideful to make it right.
- An executive’s need to feel connected and supported keeps them from engaging in necessary conflict with a peer, creating resentment and passive aggressive resistance to fueling growth through that person’s organization.
The list goes on and on.
The good news is emotional awareness and intelligence can be developed and improved with the use of proper assessments, training and coaching. This is why it has become one of the most important components of my executive coaching practice.
Application Exercise:
So often, we read content on blogs like this and quickly move on to the next email or item in our feed.
Can I challenge you to do something else, instead?
If you want to get a jump on 2020 spend the next five minutes writing down your answers to questions below. Taking the time to do so will help you create real change.
1) How have you seen your own emotional intelligence impact your business results in 2019?
2) How have you seen the emotional intelligence of your team impact your results?
3) What would your team say about how they’ve seen emotional intelligence impact your results?
Lastly, what are you willing to do to improve your results in 2020?
Bob Willumsen
Bob has worked with leaders across a variety of organizations and business types for over 20 years. With a depth of executive experience in private, publicly traded and non-profit organizations Bob lives out his calling and passion as an executive coach, leadership consultant and speaker in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 corporations. He and his wife Christie have also developed relationship coaching programs that have helped 100s of couples create better marriages. His passion is people and he carries a burden for anyone living a life that feels “less than” the life they were designed to live. Learn more about him at potential2results.com
