Introduction by Richard Farson Oct 14, 2007
It is a pleasure to introduce our leader for this conference, Susan de la Vergne. The hot new topic, Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace, is best addressed by someone who has extensive experience in management coupled with an education in the humanities and a particular interest in the human relations aspect of organizational life. Susan brings all of that. After twenty-five years of management experience in the information technology industry, Susan shifted her interests to the development of innovative education and training methods. She now teaches such courses for major companies, gives lectures, and has a new book coming out next month, "You Can't Manage Time." We are fortunate to have someone with her credentials to lead us through this emotional maze. Welcome, Susan.

Response 58 : 1 Susan de la Vergne Oct 14, 2007
I'm pleased to be a part of this discussion because I'm fascinated by this topic. I came across Emotional Intelligence a few years ago, just as I was getting ready to make a break from my 25-year career in management, where I'd worked primarily leading Information Technology departments in large companies. When I began to read about Emotional Intelligence, the ability to not only read and understand emotions but also to use them in decision-making, I realized what a shortcoming it was in every business setting I’d ever been in.

Emotional realities in the workplace have long been downplayed, even denied. It's considered "professional" to be matter-of-fact, dispassionate, left-brained, unsmiling. These are characteristics we encourage on the job. How people feel about work about co-workers, clients, goals, process, and all the rest, we don't examine very often, and when we do, it's usually to put them in their proper place: In the background.

When conflict erupts at work, management's advice is "Get over it" and "Don't go there," meaning "Whatever you do, stay out of the emotional fray." "You just pay attention to what you need to do and don't worry about them," is another misguided attempt to help employees address whatever emotional currents are obviously in play.

And then there's my personal favorite: "What's wrong?" When something is obviously wrong and the inevitable answer: "Nothing."

Managers steer employees away from emotions because emotions can't be predicted, contained or manipulated (for very long). In short, they can't be controlled. Yet they are powerful forces in the workplace. Even professions that are thought to be dispassionate, left-brained, sober bastions of unsmiling, rational thinkers (engineers, for example, or financial analysts) are, in fact, very much not so.

So then along comes Emotional Intelligence (EI), a collection of interesting discoveries about the emotional functioning of the brain as different from its cognitive function. Neuroscientists and psychologists have linked their findings in this area to recognizable aspects of behavior and interaction, aspects like self control and trustworthiness, initiative, optimism, empathy and collaboration. Dr. Daniel Goleman, whose books popularized EI, has an EI model that includes personal and social characteristics: Resilience, Influence, a Service Orientation, the ability to Build Bonds, Understand Others, be Adaptable, Conscientious, to Manage Conflict and Leverage Diversity. These qualities, and others like them, have been deemed the "competencies" that comprise Emotional Intelligence.

EI researchers have examined aspects of brain chemistry directly related to how we process emotions and have learned, among other things, that the emotional part of the brain "learns differently from the thinking brain," says Dr. Goleman. It grows and develops in us more as we age. Good news, finally, for anyone facing nearsightedness and back pain. At least your Emotional Intelligence can improve with age, even if other biological systems do not!

But more seriously, in a world of business leadership that's dealt with powerful, uncontainable emotions ineptly for about as long as anyone can remember, Emotional Intelligence (EI) has come along to lend credence to the role of emotions in the workplace. It's attempting to be the hard science behind the soft skills.

Of course now there's a bandwagon with eager consultants aboard who claim to have methods for instilling EI in the ranks. It's the latest remedy for what ails corporate culture.

But is it possible to instill elements of character in others? Can we, in fact, train others to be compassionate or trustworthy or innovative? Should we expect to instill in others adaptability or a sense of commitment or to teach others to be influential?

Or do we even need to? Some might argue we've created quite a thriving economy without any of these elements playing a significant role.

How do these ideas and objectives resonate with your experience in leadership?

Response 58 : 2 Raymond Alden Oct 14, 2007 16:43

Thank you for being here, Susan. I'm delighted to have us discussing this topic, and in particular to having it defined so clearly yet succinctly -- "The ability to not only read and understand emotions but also to use them in decision-making". I've heard the term "Emotional Intelligence" recently, and also something called the "EQ" (as distinct from "IQ") which I take to be the same thing, and have wondered what they actually mean.

I do take partial exception with the idea that engineers are a good example of the problem, as it doesn't quite match my own experience. <g> The problem is all around us, and we've known about it for years. WHAT we've known about it, however, is mostly nonsense! We have thought of it as requiring the magic touch of an artist to handle deftly, rather than something to be understood as associated with a rational brain, behaving as it was designed to behave.

So much that we have learned recently about the way the brain works is making sense out of classical mysteries.

Can we "train others to be compassionate or trustworthy or innovative"? I don't know, yet, but I hope so. In the meantime, I think we can achieve some of the same results by teaching others HOW the brain works, and any intelligent person who knows HOW something works, will be better able to achieve good results by using that knowledge.

Response 58 : 3 Richard Farson Oct 14, 2007
Ray, in the area of human affairs we can know a lot about how something works, but that doesn't seem to mean that we will then know how to work it. If that were the case, we psychologists would be really good at human relations, but if you know many psychologists you probably know that we are pretty bad at that. Indeed, it could be argued that knowing gets in the way.

That's probably why you engineers have such good marriages.

Response 58 : 4 Susan de la Vergne Oct 14, 2007
I think we're in agreement, Ray, about engineers. While their reputation pegs them as emotionally detached work beings, I've found them often to be openly passionate professionals, although sometimes better and sometimes worse at wielding those emotions well on the job.

I'm with you in the hope it's somehow possible to "train" others in some of these characteristics, even if it's accomplished only through leading by example, which is perhaps not the shortcut that management hopes comes to them from EI.

Do you think there are some "kinds" of people, people who perhaps end up in certain types of jobs, say, or departments or who come from particular backgrounds, who might be more successful at inspiring such qualities in others? Or is it really pretty much unfathomable how some people do this well and some don't?

Response 58 : 5 Gary Hinkle Oct 14, 2007
Susan, regarding "kinds" of people who might be more successful at inspiring such qualities in others, one thing I’ve noticed in the workplace is that there are many people who appear to care much more about "things" than they do about people.

For example, some people seem to be focused primarily on money and material things. Others seem to place aspects of their job such as the technology, mental or physical challenges, or the fun factor above connecting with people. People who don’t appear to value human relationships probably aren’t the best candidates to improve their EI, even though they may be physiologically capable.

Is there any data that roughly indicates the percentage of people, globally, who value human relationships above other benefits of working?

Response 58 : 6 Richard Farson Oct 14, 2007
Welcome to Gary Hinkle, a professional associate of Susan's, and thanks for your comments. All of psychology was built on the basis of individual differences, but in recent decades we are paying much more attention to the power of situations, group composition and the like. If you measure the amount of talking individuals do in small discussion groups, and then take all those who said almost nothing in their groups and make a small group out of them, they all talk so you can't tell the difference between that group and the other groups.

I suspect that increasingly we will see design or social architecture emerge as a major interest in management.

Response 58 : 7 Richard Farson Oct 14, 2007
The American way is to technologize everything. When we hear about some new evidence showing how something may work, we immediately want to apply it, work it, technologize it. But it often is impossible to translate our knowledge into actionable programs. We know a great deal about how children grow, for example, but nobody knows how to grow one. So we may be learning a lot about kinds of intelligence that we have ignored before, and it will surely make us wiser as we consider these new dimensions of ourselves and our human environment, but our rush to immediately translate it into training applications is the problem, not the solution.

We need to fix situations, not people.

Response 58 : 8 Douglass Carmichael Oct 14, 2007
What an interesting and timely topic!

"Emotional Intelligence:, Starting with the book (disclaimer: I wrote my doctoral dissertation in the Berkeley Psych Department on "irony" in 1965, looking at rhetoric for its blend of the emotional and logical before they split (Descartes, etc)) Goleman looked at the long forgotten emotional life of humans, but treated emotions as things we needed to know about because the interfered with projects.

But for me the question is not emotions as the negative to 'rational" but the ability to live an aesthetic and emotional life, positively, as an act of choice.

The tendency of our culture to replace relationships between people (truth is the same as troth) with relationships between people and things, and then thing to thing relationships only, is part of our technoid economy. (see Mirowski: Machine Dreams: How economics became a cyborg science).

The cognitive rational types in the academy have been operating with the following logic: humans are rational, rational is logical, logic is mathematical; math can be programmed. hence the human machine interface problem is really a machine interface problem.

Rational for the Greeks meant thinking in the service of life. Rational now means logical connections of means with means, often in the service of anti-life.

The resurrection of the emotional life is a great project.

Response 58 : 9 Richard Farson Oct 14, 2007
Emotion has always had a bad name, especially in management and decision making, but that's of course because we associate it with the interference that Doug mentioned. But if we could embrace emotionality in its many salutary forms, appreciating the aesthetics of leadership, for example, we might legitimize the appearance of highly effective dimensions of human interaction.

Hear, hear, Doug.