How Much Does Your EQ Cost You? (part 2)

If you don’t have any skills to manage your EQ, every one of your responses will be knee-jerk without thought for the repercussions.

Clay Kirkland

Clay Kirkland: EQ is a concept that plays off the idea of your IQ, right? How smart are you academically? Can you answer these questions and get this number? So now there’s this idea of an EQ, your emotional quotient, and it’s really how aware are you of what’s going on inside of you and how that is going to impact the management of yourself and the management of other people? 

And that’s where most of the time we don’t know how to manage those internal factors well. And so we make a bullish mistake, or we say the thing that we wish we didn’t say, or we just clam up when we’re under pressure, etc. And past failures, especially interpersonal failures or bad mistakes that you’ve made are just repeated failures.

 You can only explain so much because you weren’t able to identify what was pushing you forward in that. And it’s an emotion. And then if you didn’t have any skills on how to manage that, it’s going to be whatever comes out. 

Josh: What is the appropriate way for me to communicate and try to learn a little better?

Clay: Emotional intelligence is when you assess yourself and you get that understanding of where you are. But then it’s completely dynamic. It’s never static. So if you’re really good in an area that doesn’t mean that you’ll always stay good in that area. You have to apply yourself and maintain the skills. If you’re really bad in an area, that doesn’t mean that you’ll always be bad. It just means that you’ve got a lot of work to do to improve and grow. 

But the great part about emotional intelligence is that it is a series or a set of skills that you learn.

It says emotionally, from an intelligence standpoint, this is where you are. Here’s what you need to do in order to get better. Or here’s what you could do. If you do this, then you’ll get worse. It will show you both paths that you get to take. And then it’s just a choice.

Chad: So as a business owner and I’m learning and I’m researching these things, I’m seeing the numbers and the credibility and the percentage of behind it. Do I use these to manage, to hire, do I need to fix myself before I start communicating with my team on these things? Where do you start? What are the uses in the business world? 

Clay: Yes to all that. If you draw four quadrants: the top left quadrant, would be self-awareness. It’s ‘do you know what’s happening on the inside of you?’ Really what that means is, do you know what’s happening in your brain, in your limbic system? Do you have language for it because it’s happening? Most of us don’t have the answers for that. And so that’s step one, self awareness. 

Then top right quadrant would be self management. Do you have the skills to manage what’s happening inside your brain to be effective?

That’s the easy part. That’s all about yourself. Mindfulness. Slowing down. If you were to just slow down your speech before you answer. Anything like that slows your brain down in order to think. 

So the bottom bottom left is the third quadrant and that would be social awareness. Do you know what’s happening on the insides of other people? Can you pick that up? Can you determine that through speech? Can you determine that through behavior? 

Lastly bottom right would be social management. So three out of the four quadrants, self awareness, self management and social awareness are skills that you learn and you have complete control over those. It’s the joystick that you get to hold.

The bottom right quadrant is the only one you don’t have control over. You can just have influence there. So, because humans are humans and they can make their own decisions, you can do everything right, set everything up right, and be perfect. And still that person reacts poorly. You just can’t control that, but you can control yourself and you can become aware. 

So when it comes to business, starting with yourself, absolutely knowing how you manage, knowing your management style, but also knowing where emotional intelligence comes in and impacts you both in the positive light and in the negative light is a game changer.

Because then you can begin to really accentuate the areas where you’re already intelligent. Then you can begin to strengthen the areas where you’re not, and you will see immediate results.

It’s going to be in how people respond to you, the efficiency that you’re going to get. 

Josh: Is there one of these quadrants that tends to be more problematic in the workforce than another? 

Clay: It would be the social awareness. And again, it sounds so slippery, right? So how are you going to figure all that out?

When I first was assessed on emotional intelligence, I was really poor in empathy. And I just started to do the things that I was told to do by my coach at the time and it rapidly improved. 

So yeah, empathy is a big one. In the easiest definition, it’s being able to understand someone.

What I started to do, and one of the exercises I had to do was take three instances in my life every day in an interaction and write down that interaction. After the fact, how I thought that other person was feeling during that moment. When I first started, I was like, I have no idea, no clue. How am I supposed to know this?

And so it was clunky at first, but I started to try to write down three interactions and in one of those, I had to do it with someone that I knew. And so my wife was normally one. So I would take in the conversation, write down what I thought. And then later that day, I’d say, “Hey, when we were having this conversation, I felt like you might’ve been feeling this way. Was it right?”

And usually I was wrong. And she’d say, “No, not at all. Why would you think that?”

But what starts to train your brain is that you’re looking for things in someone else, how they talk, how they look, how they feel so on and so forth, beyond what would be good for you.

So then I would become an active listener in order to get that knowledge. After I gain empathy, then they’re talking to me about their problems and I say, “Hey, it seems like you you’re feeling this way. Is that, did I get that right?” I wouldn’t do it in a journal, I’d just say it out loud.

And I would just meet them where they were. And this is a key part. I understand that if that was happening to me, I’d feel the same way. And at that point they felt understood.

It used to be in psychology that we thought the power of being loved was the most powerful thing that could happen to a human brain. They would test the brain and put all the nodes on people’s heads. When the subject talked about being loved or experienced being loved, that’s when the brain lit up the most. 

And there have been two studies in the past eight years where psychologists have done the same thing, but they would give them different emotions to see the other responses. And one of the things they studied is the feeling of being understood. It lit up the same way as when you felt being loved.

And so what these scientists have come to understand is that the power of being understood as is as synonymous and as powerful as being loved.

Josh: Based on your experience, when you practiced empathy, did the answers change or was it just your choosing first to understand context?

Clay: I became much more effective when I changed my packaging and became connected to them. And it is game changer. But the answer didn’t change.

Chad: So when people are coming to you with a problem or coming to any of us with a problem, we can summarize all this by saying that the problem is really: they don’t feel understood.

Let’s bring this back to a business perspective for a second. If I have to listen and understand all their problems, I can give them some direction or solutions to their problems. That seems like 20 hours of wasted time a week for me as a business owner. How is there a balance here? 

Clay: The key there is if you can get everyone on that page, moving towards that, then it doesn’t rely on one person. So if you’re the only person that’s going to grow in emotional intelligence, then yes, you’re going to have to carry the weight of that. 

Chad: So I can’t just train myself. I got to train my entire team.

Clay: What’s going to happen is your personal understanding of your emotional intelligence and how to be emotionally intelligent is going to go up. But then the culture is going to start rising to that place as well. And it’s going to become an environment, and you’ll start hiring people that can do that. It becomes a measurement of, “Hey, I want to find out how emotionally intelligent these people are because we are striving to be this way. We’re striving to have this kind of culture. And if they can’t get into that culture, we know that they’re immediately going to be behind.

Chad: Can you win with somebody that’s way on the lower scale of the spectrum of emotional intelligence?

I know this guy who has a manager and very talented in what they do, but extremely emotionally unstable. One day things are great. The next day, he may cuss everybody out in an hour, slam the door and leave me in the car and go home. Can that person adapt or are they so hard wired in such a low end of the spectrum? 

Clay: That’s a great question. And I would not say, “Oh, it’s the magic bullet. It fixes everybody.”

Because one, as a business owner, you’re going to have to invest the time to do it. Those types of people take time.

Two is that the person who’s going to be involved in it is going to have to be willing to change. And so if there’s a willingness to change and there’s a willingness to invest the time, then the answer would be yes.

Chad: Here’s where I was leading with that question. The second time I saw you speak, you talked about emotional intelligence and it was the most eye-opening thing I’ve heard in a really long time. I came back to my business partner. I said, “Hey, here’s the problem with our manager. Here’s what I just learned. I think we can fix it.” And we started meeting twice a week, focusing on emotional intelligence, functional changes in those things.

And ultimately after six months, they just weren’t willing to change. We put in the time and put it in the skills and we saw an impact with other people and other people started changing, but this one person did not.

So we ended up making a change, but I came away from one session with you at a 30 minute presentation. And it changed the way I approached that entire business. And now we have a culture and an environment and a set of staff and team that’s at such a higher level because we do have that stability and emotional intelligence.

It changed everything. We were so hung up on the technical side of what this person could do or that skill they had, but it was so toxic and cancerous to the culture. It was just a horrible environment for the team, for the customer, for us as owners. And now it’s by far a more pleasant, enjoyable, successful, profitable place than it was before. 

Clay: A huge piece of emotional intelligence is how you deal with stress. How you deal with change. And there are skills for that.

That’s such a huge piece of business, right? When things are changing and the economy’s changing, and there’s now a pandemic that we just throw in there on top of everything else, right? How are you dealing with those types of things? 

People get disrupted and nervous when things are gonna change, right? Because they’ve settled into a norm and norms are good. That again goes back to your brain.

But if your brain does that in order to inhibit change, then you just have to use your brain in order to fix it. You have that part in your brain. That’s a pleasure center that wants to release those endorphins through your body to make your body feel good. And it’s going to do that when there’s something that is satisfying.

Understanding what’s going to satisfy a person, what’s going to motivate a person, if you can get that understanding, then you can begin to set wins up in the process of change, where people are gonna actually now want it. And it’s a game changer.

Josh: So from the companies that you’ve consulted with the last several years, I’m sure you’ve come in to some companies and looked at them like, man, they just culture-wide lack emotional intelligence. How do you address that?

Clay: You have to have buy-in from the key people. And if you don’t, it’s not going to go anywhere. So if I were to work with an employee of a company for a couple of times and she’s like, “Oh, my company needs this. This would change our company. But my boss would hate this.” It’s not time then. I mean, there’s this no way to get the traction for change.

You have to start at the top. It just can’t stay at the top. But the people that can move the needle or shift the needle, that’s what you’ve got to get in. 

And then at that point, it’s got to become something that, um, can move past that initial momentum. Right? Cause we can do a team thing all day and people will say it’s amazing. But we did an offsite. We did that with a bunch of food and snacks. And we did that with a cool game in between it. And that’s not your day to day business. 

I’m not against off-sites. I think they’re great and refreshing. But if there’s not a strategy to implement this in the day to day over the course of your business, and that usually is in small changes over the course of time, then there will never be traction. 

Josh: We’re talking 80/20 rule, right? This is what people need to address and change. And I don’t think people know it. Everything is systems, which again, we would recognize systems are invaluable. You gotta have systems, but you can’t always fix people with systems.

Chad: I want to know how you create a culture of emotional intelligence growth, where people are consistently focused and leveling up on their emotional intelligence.

Clay: A big part of that would be when people see what it can do.

So again, you’re at an offsite and you’re speaking this huge vision about this company or that company and how it’s all going to be. That’s great. But then it’s still personal because every single person has to play a part in it in order to do it.

It matters in sales because sales is nothing but people. Then it matters in systems because if your system is not going to promote those things that you want, then your system is going to work against your culture. It has to work in profits because what are we going to do with those profits and how are we going to do it?

In every level of your business, you’re going to have to have a plan for how this works, but then show whoever is in place, how they can contribute to it. Cause most people will talk themselves out of it.

Chad: So from a dollars and cents standpoint, it’s easy for me to see. I build efficiency where you can do a service to more clients. You make X more money, I’ll make X more money. 

Clay: The opportunity of implementing these things has shown across the board in studies and Harvard reviews and everything for research, your company is more successful. Your people are more successful. It’s all there on the board of win all the way. 

Chad: So how would you sell your product? At some point, there’s a CFO somewhere who’s got to create a budget line item for this, with an amount. And he’s going to want to know why they should invest in this. What’s going to be the return on our investment? How do you sell somebody on investing in emotional intelligence for their culture?

Clay: I’m gonna say, Hey, tell me about your problems. If you wanted to make this place better, how would you do it? And if you had a magic wand, what would you touch? You can’t touch the bank, you have to only something within your business that you’ve created, what would you touch?

It’s always going to come around to some form of, “I can’t find the right people to sell my product,” or, “I thought that I hired this person,” or, “I had this person for 10 years and they just about killed me.” And then as they’re talking I just finish their sentence and say, I can explain that to you. And that usually works.

Josh: So I look at my team often and ask what this person is good at and how we can shift their job towards their strengths. Do you ever find where that’s the issue, or do you feel like it comes back more often than not actually an emotional intelligence issue?

Clay: Sometimes people are just in the wrong position and they’re frustrated and you put them in another position and the problem is fixed. That’s great. I find more that people who are the trouble in the business have already been shifted around. It can happen that their strengths aren’t aligned with their job, but more often than not there’s something wrong with the person.

They don’t know how to function in a certain area of the culture and they can’t handle it. And so they just pass them around. It’s like, maybe you can fix them. Maybe you can handle them. Maybe you’ll get along with them. So on and so forth. 

Josh: Do you see where most often it is people that are valuable to the company? 

Clay: I hear that all the time. “He does a great job, but…” And then they say the but. “But God is he terrible to work with,” or, “no one wants to be around him,” or whatever else. What if we could work on that part? Would you be willing, would you be interested? 

Josh: So in that scenario, do you train the CEO how to work with that toxic rockstar or do you go one on one? 

Clay: I’ll go with the rockstar first. I love that challenge. I think that I’ll win. Just because I’m convinced of the effectiveness of learning these skills and how it translates into business success. 

Chad: As a consultant, have you had any people where you’re going with the challenge, trying to fix this person, that you haven’t been able to? 

Clay: Sure. When I look at people who these things don’t work on, it’s always one of two things.

Either they were unwilling to change or there was no system in place for it to continue. They didn’t put mechanisms in place for this to be a lasting change.

Chad: Is there a certain level you reach in business before these things matter? Or is it everything from a startup all the way to a hundred million dollar company? 

Clay: Immediately from startup, no matter how young you are, how green you are, it matters because your business will be going and talking to people, trying to convince people with something, trying to sell them something.

It matters because you’re bringing your brain into every meeting, into every idea, into every process that you create. And so if you don’t know how to manage what’s happening in your brain, then it’s going to impact you negatively. And if you do, it’s going to impact your boss.

Chad: Where do you start to become more educated in this?

Clay: There’s several books on it. Anything by Daniel Goleman, he’s put it on the map the past 20 years so I would start with him. There’s “Emotional Intelligence 2.0.” And then there’s several assessments that you can take. I prefer the EQI assessment, it measures 15 sub-scales and emotional intelligence and has a 360 option. 

Josh: What question are we not asking that you think we need to hear the answer? Is there anything that comes to mind? 

Clay: I would just reemphasize this. You listen to podcasts all the time and you hear these people tell their stories, like really famous people. And you hear these highlights, right? And they’ll say, “you know, I, I started this and then three years later it was 125% of what I had. Then two years later it’s a thousand percent.” And that guy or girl just summarized five years in a sentence and a half. 

It’s easy to think, well, that should be easy for me, or that should happen that fast. What they really described was nearly 2000 days.

I can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent in front of white boards by myself, trying to learn skills on how to read people and how to understand people and how to take their assessments. And now I can sit there and talk to you about your strengths and tell you everything that you could imagine about your strengths. 

But the point is that it didn’t happen at a course over a week or two. It happened because I wanted to be excellent and I wasn’t going to stop until I put in the work.

Everything you hear is a really brief shining story of years of energy and effort and trial and error and wins and losses.