Mark Peterson, LeaderSmart Blog

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Power Principles for a New Generation

In the movie "Twelve Angry Men," Henry Fonda plays the role of an informal jury leader who flawlessly practices the art of building power between a group and himself.  As the movie unfolds with the jury deliberating over a murder trial, eleven jurors all voting "guilty" quickly gang up on Fonda and his single vote of "innocent."  The remainder of the movie is a textbook case of Fonda using both facilitative leadership and empowerment skills to build his power and influence within the group, eventually achieving a unanimous vote of innocent for the once condemned defendant.  Watching Fonda's ability to increase his power within this group is a great case study and example for leaders to learn from.  However, although building power can be simple to understand from case studies, it is usually more challenging for leaders to put into practice in the real world.  In this blog post I will explain two practical methods essential to a leader's ability to build power.   

The first of these skills, which is described in my August 6th, 2009 blog post, is practicing the facilitative style of leadership.  Not difficult to understand theoretically, facilitative leadership can be challenging to practice without an over-arching management model to guide one's behaviors.  One such model is the theory of Appreciative Inquiry, which is more commonly referred to as AI.  AI, which can be applied to a number of core management practices such as strategic planning or performance management, empowers a new inter-organizational dialogue that is centered around building on what works as opposed to fixing what doesn't.  As this dialogue evolves, the creative element within an organization, which often is oppressed by the command-and-control model, is enlivened and empowered, therefore enhancing the individual's and/or organization's capacity for collaboration and change.  Over time, many organizations realize increased innovation and focus by implementing the AI platform.     

The second of these skills is learning to lead one's staff from the bottom up.  In the simplest of terms, this means motivating your people with empowerment and getting them to think for themselves.  Again, this is not a difficult body of theory to understand but can be challenging to practice without a few overarching models to guide one's behaviors.  One of these models that should be considered is the entire body of research commonly referred to as "Personal Strength Theory".  After identifying our strengths and our weaknesses, modern strength theory compels us to place the majority of our effort toward developing our strengths, therefore, debunking the past notion of "well-rounded" development for all.  Once we focus more fully on our strengths we continue to gain confidence, fulfillment and inner motivation as we move toward a more natural state of being, commonly referred to as "Flow."  Once establishing our strengths and unique intelligence, the last resource helps us to place this knowledge into our natural personality style.   

Another model to enliven one's empowerment and motivational strategy is the use of psychometric assessments, particularly the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).  The MBTI allows us to plumb the depths of established personality theory further identifying who we are via one of sixteen personalities.  Once claiming one of the validated personality styles, we learn what behavioral and attitudinal tendencies are central to that personality and how best to express this central persona in our work and life.  This practice allows us to express our most skillful tendencies in most work-related and personal situations, therefore allowing us to reach a heightened state of self-confidence and individual accomplishment. 

Today's leaders will be more successful, as will the organizations they lead, if they are empowered to achieve the agendas they are charged with.  These skills and models are just a few of the many available to help a leader increase their power and achieve their goals. 

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Three Leadership Competencies for the Future- Part III

In my last blog post, part two of a three part series on leadership skills for a new and evolving workplace, I discussed conflict resolution as a contemporary leadership competency.  In this final blog post of the series I will discuss the last of the three competencies, strategic communication.

As I think about the topic of strategic communication, I am drawn to the dark-side of leadership behavior where professionalism and neutrality give way to disparagement and adult tantrum.  This happens when a leader reacts defensively by either lashing out or being passive aggressive with an employee or a peer who takes a challenging or conflicting tone with them.  As a leadership coach, I see this behavior all too often when leaders take their eyes off the strategic target they really desire and allow themselves to get sucked into the muck and mire of emotional perceptions.  What results is the opposite of strategic communication. 

As Ron Heifetz states in his book, "Leadership Without Easy Answers," leaders must maintain the metaphorical "high ground" and not get emotionally embroiled in the day-to-day verbal spats and/or overly critical behavior common to the workplace.  As the tendency is for people to take overtly critical behavior personally, this can be a challenge for any new leader to practice.  However, when leaders don't remain strategic in their communication and do give up the high ground they also give up the trust and credibility essential to achieve their goals and jeopardize the strategic direction and mission of the organization they are leading."

Today's leader can prevent this fall from the high ground by remembering three simple axioms.  First, most emotional statements are made from a place of conflict or discomfort within the other party.  The realization that the person making the emotional statement is oftentimes feeling more discomfort than you are can prevent a leader from taking it personally.  Second, provocative and challenging viewpoints are offered to a leader because the necessary trust or relationship exists.  If neither of these two connections existed, the tendency for the other party to share their viewpoint would diminish.  Lastly, conflict is a sign that both facilitative leadership and workforce engagement exist within an organization.  These, both essential behaviors that effective leaders try to engender, are easily lost when giving up the higher ground.

Strategic communication is a mode that doesn't rely on inflammatory statements or emotional responses, but seeks to get at the real interests of all parties involved in the effort of achieving the goals of the organization.  Today's leader should labor to perfect this competency.    

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Three Leadership Competencies for the Future- Part II

In my last blog post I discussed how leaders in today's organizations need to adapt their skill sets to the needs of a new and evolving workplace.  I identified three leadership competencies essential to this evolving workplace: facilitative leadership, conflict resolution, and strategic communication, and discussed the first of these in last week's blog.  In this blog post I will discuss the second of these, conflict resolution. 

As power and decision-making continue migrating to the front-line of contemporary organizations, leaders have increased opportunities to prevent and mediate unhealthy conflict between newly empowered co-workers and overly-competitive teams.  But this is certainly not an opportunity that is sought after, considering the tendency for most organizational leaders within the United States to eschew conflict, leaving employees disconnected and disgruntled.  Leaders who continue to adopt a "conflict averse" persona, developing the conflict resolution skills neither within themselves nor their subordinates, become wholly destructive barriers to increased communication, innovation, and teamwork within their respective organizations.  The first of two leadership development tactics for improving conflict resolutions skill is understanding the common approaches toward conflict.   

The Thomas-Kilman Conflict Mode Instrument has long established the five foundational approaches toward conflict that we see in organizations today.  The approaches are: Competing (assertive, uncooperative), Avoiding (unassertive, uncooperative), Accommodating (unassertive, uncooperative), Collaborating (assertive, cooperative), and Compromising (intermediate assertiveness and cooperativeness).  Leaders first start their development by understanding their preferred approach toward conflict in the workplace and their preferred approach out of the workplace.  Once this understanding is in place, the leader will know which approach they are drawn to and which approach is their least preferred.  With this realization in place, they can then turn their attention toward others with the same understanding and increased empathy.  As these approaches all have situational utility, the last leadership development tactic is to increase one's ability to behaviorally shift into each style as appropriate and proactively attend to conflict when it arises.

Learning to shift into each conflict approach is based on development in two areas: situational understanding and behavioral practice.  Situational understanding is the strategic awareness and accurate choice of applying the correct style to the correct situation in an organizational context.  For instance, a team working through the process of making a series of quick decisions in rapid succession that were of moderate importance to the future of their organization would be out of line choosing the time and energy intensive collaborative approach toward conflict when the compromise approach would certainly do.  Furthermore, behavioral practice comes from a deeper understanding of the central behaviors and characteristics for each approach (such as direct communication style and sarcasm being appropriate behaviors for the competing approach).  Further development in this area can be had by reading the book, "The Conflict Resolution Toolbox" by Gary Furlong and by seeking out the assistance of a certified and experienced coach.  

In my next blog post I will discuss the last of our three contemporary leadership competencies, strategic communication.              

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Three Leadership Competencies for the Future- Part I

Korva Coleman caught my attention this morning during her NPR newscast when she discussed the overwhelming international reaction to the recent attack on Twitter and Facebook.  While listening to Corva, I was not only reminded of the global masses who depend on these technological platforms as part of their everyday workplace functioning, but I was also reminded of how significantly these and other technological platforms have changed the workplace over the past five to seven years.  As a leadership development consultant I am regularly asked how leaders in today's organizations should adapt their skill sets to the needs of this new and evolving workplace.  My next three blog posts are dedicated to answering this question. 

In my next three blog posts I will identify and describe three important competencies that leaders in any type of contemporary organization need to embrace and develop to be taken seriously and, if not, should fear becoming irrelevant and obsolete.  These competencies are: facilitative leadership, conflict resolution, and strategic communication.   

Facilitative leadership requires a change of mindset for many, as it fundamentally differs from other models, such as traditional leadership, primarily in a political sense.  Traditional leadership centers attention on one's ability to amass and maintain power by achieving a repetition of short term individual successes in the forms of status improvement and/or personal accomplishment.  This traditional perspective views power in a zero-sum way where we regularly have to replenish an ever-depleting "political status-tank" normally at others expense.  Facilitative leadership views this political perspective differently, seeing power as an inexhaustible force for group interdependence that can be accessed by anyone at anytime...and the more this powerbase is relied upon the more powerful it becomes. 

The three primary strategies that leaders execute while practicing the facilitative style are practical empathy, shared expectations, and empowering communication.  The first, using practical empathy, is the practice of understanding the personality, communication, and situational positions of others in a non-judgmental way.  Increasing one's empathetic capacity and awareness is an ongoing process that can be accomplished through the use of validated and reliable self-assessment tools, such as the MBTI and/or DiSC, combined with effective coaching by an experienced and certified business coach.  As leaders engage in this developmental process and increase their empathetic understanding of others, they learn the various differences in communication style, motivation, and workplace orientation, and the methods to modify their own behavior appropriately.  This practical skill-set, allowing one to gain an understanding and appreciation for the many various perspectives that exist around them, is then leveraged by the leader to increase motivation between themselves and others toward the accomplishment of shared goals...which is the next function, creating shared expectations.

Creating shared expectations, or shared goals, is a natural process where two or more individuals come together and establish their positions on a subject, their needs underlying these positions, and leverage overlapping needs of all involved to establish objectives for mutual gain...aka shared expectations.  This validated process, developed formally by Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project, is commonly referred to as "Interest Based Negotiation."  This process for developing shared expectations suggests that when people come together with somewhat differing viewpoints they can reach more effective solutions more quickly by digging down through their supportive reasoning to their core needs that support their viewpoint.  Once all parties involved gain an understanding of these core needs, they can then look for their overlapping points of shared need which almost always exist, out of which shared solutions and goals can be drawn.  This process, heavily focused on the trust-building communication styles that rely on inquiry over advocacy, leads us to our final facilitative function, empowering communication.

Empowering communication is a two-part process that uses both effective listening skills and appropriate conversational practices to create a safe and effectual dialogue.  in this sense, effective listening skills are best described as a process where one seeks to understand what a person is saying, why they are saying it, and why their chosen subject is important to them.  Listening at this level guides one into further inquiry of the driving depths of ones intention rather than the shallow surface of of their literal words.  This type of dialogical behavior, where the conversation places more weight on understanding the other rather than advocating for your point, tends not only to be infectious in most conversations, it tends to build trust between people as they feel more listened to and understood.  A current and helpful resource of further study on this topic is the book, "Crucial Conversations" by Patterson et al.

In my next blog post I will discuss the second of our three contemporary leadership competencies, conflict resolution.              

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Trueblood's Bill Compton on Leadership

In a recent episode of the break through HBO series, "True Blood," leading humanist vampire Bill Compton defends his nature to his human love interest, Sookie Stackhouse, by saying, "but I'm a vampire...I'm supposed to be tormented."  Relying solely on his limited self-understanding and worldview, Bill is obviously seeing himself as incapable of a more emotionally rich and pleasurable life...a phenomenon many of us are all too familiar with.  Watching Bill's plight play out during this episode I reflected on what other inconceivable possibilities that, over his 173 years of vampire experience, he might be well suited for?  Tenured history professor?  Award-winning author?  Executive at The Red Cross?  OK, maybe that one is a bit of a stretch but my point is this, how often do we, like Bill Compton, limit our possibilities in life because of our own bounded rationality?  In other words, how often do we see ourselves as having a lack of intelligence or ability and, therefore, limit our possibilities?  

When coaching leaders I often witness similar examples of bounded rationality in my clients, most commonly from perceiving themselves as lacking in ability or intelligence.  However, in almost all cases nothing could be further from the truth.  While people do vary in their intellectual capacities and have differing abilities and personality types, in my 22 years of professional experience I have yet to find someone who can't expand their pie of possibility and overcome these limiting perceptions of themselves.  By committing to a process of self-exploration using a few well validated resources, most can overcome these limiting perceptions.  Three of the resources that I normally use when coaching a person through these limiting perceptions are:     

The first is the theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner.  Gardner's theory expands our understanding beyond IQ as the only measure of one's intelligence to more than eight validated forms of human intelligence all prevalent in society today.  Understanding our unique intelligence allows us to understand that, what we once thought of as barriers or limitations, are actually weaker forms of intelligence within us.  This understanding empowers us to shift our focus away from weaker forms of intelligence toward our preferred intelligence(s) increasing personal effectiveness and motivation.  Once we realize what our intelligence(s) are and what they aren't, we can use the next resource to put this knowledge into strategic practice.  

The next resource that should be considered is the entire body of research commonly referred to as "Personal Strength Theory".  After identifying our strengths and our weaknesses, modern strength theory compels us to place the majority of our effort toward developing our strengths, therefore, debunking the past notion of "well-rounded" development for all.  Once we focus more fully on our strengths we continue to gain confidence, fulfillment and inner motivation as we move toward a more natural state of being commonly referred to as "Flow."  Once establishing our strengths and unique intelligence, the last resources helps us to place this knowledge into our natural personality style.   

The last resources to consider as part of this triune strategy are psychometric assessments, particularly the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).  The MBTI allows us to plumb the depths of established personality theory further identifying who we are via one of sixteen personalities.  Once claiming one of the validated personality styles, we learn what behavioral and attitudinal tendencies are central to that personality and how best to express this central persona in our work and life.  This practice allows us to express our most skillful tendencies in most work-related and personal situations therefore reaching a heightened state of self-confidence and individual accomplishment. 

Rather than casting ourselves into a life of torment such as Bill Compton, the use of these resources can introduce us to the possibility that exists within us all and, therefore, help us to reach a life of confidence and fulfillment.   

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What We Can Learn About Values and Leadership from AIG

The headline, "AIG Plans Millions More in Bonuses...Troubled Insurer Is In Talks With U.S. Over $250 Million" stared back at me as I viewed the front page of today's Washington Post this morning.  After reading this article's portrayal of the insurance giant's alleged plan to, for the second time, pay hundreds of millions of dollars to its executive team prior to paying back the $180 billion Federal bailout, I found myself more than a little incensed.  I mean look, why should we reward the leadership team of a primary contributor to one of the largest financial disasters in U.S. history before they have rectified the problem they helped to manufacture?  Isn't using this insatiable degree of financial reward the same motivational platform that got us into this mess to begin with?  And how long can we continue to operate where the chief motivational factor on Wall Street is financial remuneration on the scale of alcoholism and kleptomania?  If you're wondering what the leadership topic of my blog posting is this week, it's individual and collective values.

OK, so don't stereotype me as a radical whose feet haven't touched the ground since the Bretton Woods Agreement.  I've studied the economic models of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek and knew that we lost a brilliant economic mind when Milton Friedman passed away three years ago.  I'm absolutely a social and political moderate who believes that within any field of study, deeper understanding of the topic's complexity grows out of rich and rational analysis of competing theories.  Still, I don't think that Adam Smith's original portrayal of the invisible hand included unbridled gluttony by the wealthy and inadvertent sadism upon the poor.  So, if the problem is one of values how do we sort this out?           

One of the factors contributing most to this problem is the individual adoption of alien values to the detriment of one's own.  In other words, we disown (or never claim) our own values in pursuit of collective values and encounter difficulty maturing intellectually and morally.  The result: lower order thinking, loss of broad rational thought and abuse to self and to others.  Leaders in today's workforce contribute to this phenomenon by not supporting values development through effective application of sound leadership and management principles...but I'll get to this later.  For now I want to make my point more clearly by using a long established psychological model, Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (additional link).

The first four levels of Maslow's hierarchy contend with human beings meeting some basic human requirements (food, safety, love, respect).  These needs, pursued and attained to avoid psychological or physical pain, are commonly referred to as deficiency needs because during the process of attaining them we see ourselves as deficient in comparison to those around us. Once these needs are met, we naturally begin pursing Maslow's fifth level, self-actualization.  Dissimilar from the first four needs, a person pursuing self-actualization (and the sixth level Maslow later added termed self-transcendence) is less concerned about other's opinions of them and more concerned with their own authenticity, potential and compassion for others.  Pursuing this level of needs, which Maslow referred to as growth needs, allows an individual to become more aware of self and appreciative of others. 

Understanding that one has to satisfy the prior level of need to move upward to the next, it's common knowledge today that supporting the masses as they move through the deficiency phases helps both the individual and collective society.  But what if one, or more, never moves past the first four levels of pain-avoidant needs toward the upper growth-oriented levels?  What if organizational and societal norms reward competition and status more than human development and appreciation?  What if graduate schools start measuring success through the yardstick of first-year salary and health-care institution's care for those who are healthy and can pay while refusing service to the destitute and the dying?  And, of course, what if I can get a job as an economist on Wall Street and rationalize almost any strategy to become wealthy even at the expense of those who are supposed to benefit from my economic toils? 

Exploration of our values includes the delicate process of intentional deliberation, practice and reflection, a process that needs to be understood and supported.  Workforce leaders are responsible for choosing sustainable and humane practices in support of value development and they have ample resources to help them.  Theory based resources, such as classic theories from Frederick Herzberg and Douglas McGregor and more current theories such as Appreciative Inquiry and Emotional Intelligence can help them to understand these practices.  Cultural shaping resources such as modern performance management theory, 360 degree assessments and personality assessments can help enliven the necessary environmental trust and curiosity that are essential to the process.  Leaders in today's workforce need to then be held accountable through a peer-enforced system of professional ethics similar to the professions of medicine and law, a system which sadly does not exist today.

Today's leaders, whether in the financial sector, the not for profit sector or the federal sector can support value development by seeking their own self-development and deciding to support the value development of those around them.  These practices have yielded indisputable results in the form of improved ethical outcomes and increased bottom-line earnings and have been adopted by the most profitable and ethically aware organizations around the globe.  The only reason a leader wouldn't support these practices would be, well, developmental in nature.

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I Just Don't Understand...Why Should I Twitter?

Why Twitter?  Why should I consider picking up yet another piece of technology and adding it to my already bulging technological repertoire?  I see how technological platforms fit into my professional life but how can these enrich my friendship with those I care about?  I often hear these and similar questions asked by Baby-boomers and Gen. X'ers from across the United States and, as a new Twitterer, have asked these questions myself.  Many times these questions come from a place of personal frustration or belief that these technologies are just a passing fad.  Although I don't believe that I have all of the answers to these questions, what I do believe about Twitter (and Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) is that these platforms, or future evolutions of them, are here to stay and are fundamentally changing the way we work, learn, make new friends, and stay in touch with each other.  In this Blog post I'll be discussing reasons why these platforms are not going anywhere and why we should begin to use them.

Recently I spent a few weeks working on a project in Seoul, South Korea.  Although the project that took me to Korea and the trip itself were both a bit exciting, what was not exciting was saying goodbye to my family for almost three weeks.  Upon returning and catching up with my wife, Laura, I asked her if she missed me while I was gone.  She said yes (of course) but then informed me that friends from her Facebook and Twitter accounts kept her company while I was away.  Interesting.  The notion that people can use technology platforms to bridge geographic expanses seems fine for passing information in support of professional endeavors but can these platforms provide my wife with enough bandwidth to feel the connection and support of friends from across the country?  The answer is yes but probably not in the way that she, or us, are accustomed to.

I'm reminded of the old joke about the man who's home is caught in a flash flood and he begins to pray to God for help.  As he prays, someone wading through the water passes by and asks him if he needs help.  The man irritably responds "no, I'm praying to God for help, I'll be just fine."  Well this dynamic repeats itself twice more with both a rowboat and a helicopter until finally the old man drowns.  After death, the man reaches the "pearly gates" and asks God why he didn't answer any of his prayers.  God answers by stating, "I did-- I sent you a man, a rowboat, and a helicopter."  You get the point...but just in case you didn't here it is.  As the world has gotten smaller the geographic expanse between us and those we love and care about has gotten larger, lessening our opportunities to connect.  Additionally, the new and ever shortening attention span resulting from the noticeable increase of available information sometimes decreases the quality of human interaction.  The result?  Less physical connection, in both quantity and quality, with the ones we care about.  So, making a statement such as, "I don't really get why I should tweet on Twitter or build a profile on Facebook" while feeling disconnected from friends and family seems, well, a bit illogical.

Technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are becoming a new medium that is not only replacing the way we find a job, learn, and share knowledge, but how we connect with friends and find a mate as well as .  Unconvinced?  Look at the facts.  The number of "Twitterers" has increased from February 2008 to February of 2009 by 1,382%.  Facebook currently supports more than 200 million actives users throughout the world...and growing at a rate of 228% per year .   Twitter recently provided a platform that helped dissolve the Govt. of Iran's attempts to barricade the media from covering it's violent reaction to recent election protests.  Could blogging, RSS feed platforms (like Twine or Delicious), and Twitter become our new central mode of communication?  We are already seeing a number of major newspapers go bankrupt and fail as the global population turns to their I-phones, Blackberries, and computers to get their weekly news. 

Foundational changes to the way we work, the way we communicate and the way we bond are here to stay.  I certainly don't want to be unfamiliar with these technological platforms if and when the the "old ways" of accomplishing these activities are no longer available.

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Practical Application of Emotional Intelligence- Part II

My last blog post was part one in a two-part series highlighting practical methods at increasing one's emotional intelligence.  I introduced the Johari Window, as it is a helpful construct for understanding current practices of coaching, self-assessment, and meta-cognition, and then spent time describing multi-rater and psychometric assessments.  In this blog post I'll discuss two other methods for increasing one's emotional intelligence: meta-cognition and coaching.   

One of the most important skills developed during the self-assessment process is thinking meta-cognitively.  Meta-cognition very simply means thinking about our thinking or operating with multiple levels of awareness.  Here is an example: you are in a conversation with a co-worker and you notice that the co-worker increases her direct eye-contact, raises her voice, and crosses her arms.  You may pick up on these cues and begin an internal inquiry seeking to understand if there might be anything that you've done or said that could have caused this person to become defensive or angry.  During the course of this inner inquiry, you may also ask yourself if the cues your picking up on are relevant to the current situation or are based on a memory of a previous yet similar conversation with someone else.  This internal dialogue taking place while you remain engaged in the external conversation is meta-cognitive thinking.

Meta-cognitive thought is essential to the development of one's capabilities for being emotionally intelligent as it provides the real-time reflection and action-learning methods used for experimentation and learning.  Without meta-cognition, one follows their usual routine for human interaction without paying attention to the affects their behavior might be having on others.  However, when thinking meta-cognitively, one is both in the conversation as well as outside of the conversation, operating...adjusting...learning.  If the Johari Window allows one to gather a deeper awareness of possible blind spots affecting their performance and interpersonal effectiveness, meta-cognition adds real-time awareness to this process, therefore speeding one's development.         

Lastly, business coaching is a resource that can combine the use of various assessments, advanced meta-cognitive thinking, and individualized learning in a Johari-esque model of development.  Contemporary business coaching takes place in a humanistic yet goal-directed environment that many find renewing, deeply developmental, and enlightening.  An experienced and ICF certified coach normally assists the candidate from two orientations.  First, the coach and candidate complete an in-depth assessment of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses to be used as a foundation for the development of holistic goals.  Secondly, while the candidate works toward goal attainment the coach continues the developmental relationship providing a forum for both accountability and trustful disclosure, further reinforcing practical application of new skills.          

For more information on applying these four practices, or questions about any other leadership oriented subjects, please contact me through my website: www.leadersmartconsulting.com

Practical Application of Emotional Intelligence- Part I

"Self-reverance, self-knowledge, self-control.  These three alone lead life to sovereign power" (Lord Tennyson- circa 1870).  "Know Thyself" (Thales of Miletus- 624 - 546 BCE, estimate).  Rooted throughout antiquity, the portrayal of self-knowledge as being a primary stepping-stone to enlightened thought is both hollow hyperbole and practical proverb.  That is, this is a concept that is easily understood intellectually but is more difficult to practically apply.  As a consultant charged with engaging thousands of people on this workplace topic annually, my recommendation is that the entire workforce become practically familiar with the current workplace research around knowing thyself, known as Emotional Intelligence (EI).               

In my last blog post I defined emotional intelligence, per Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, as “the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.”  As with any other endeavor that combines learning with the emotional sciences (psychology, counseling, etc.), self-development in the EI sense can be challenging and time-consuming.  Coaching, self-assessment, and meta-cognitive thought development are practices that can certainly help.  In this blog post I'll discuss using self-assessments for the purpose of increasing emotional intelligence. 

In 1955, cognitive psychologists within the United States developed a tool commonly known today within the fields of I/O psychology and OD consulting as the "Johari Window."  This somewhat simplistic tool improves individuals' interpersonal relationships through the process of both receiving and disclosing previously hidden characterizations of their personality. Through the ongoing process of genuine feedback and disclosure, the subject becomes aware of blind spots not previously known to him or herself while allowing others to know him or her at a deeper level.  This process, quite common in today's workplace, is partially responsible for the increased organizational use of multi-rater and psychometric assessments.

Multi-rater assessments, such as CCL's Assessment Suite®, are designed to collect qualitative feedback from one's peers, superiors, and subordinates concerning one's performance against a number of performance categories commonly referred to as competencies or characteristics.  More sophisticated methods seek feedback from beyond the immediate workplace to include suppliers and customers as well as family and friends.  When facilitated properly, this process allows for the candidate receiving the feedback to broaden their understanding of their performance in targeted areas (such as leadership skill and effective communication) while increasing their awareness of the interpersonal affects they have on those around them.  Through this process, the candidate receiving the feedback normally achieves heightened awareness of their interpersonal and performance effectiveness, consequently increasing their emotional intelligence over time.

Psychometric assessments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)®, offer similar methods for increasing self-awareness and empathy.  Instead of obtaining performance and interpersonal feedback from individuals who work closely with you, these assessments provide a validated description of your personality tendencies, preferred behaviors, etc. based on psychometric research.  These assessments normally split the testing population between four and sixteen categories of preferences depending on the test, landing each test taker into a category they are then asked to become familiar with.  When using assessments with higher than average measures of validity and reliability, this process can be as, if not more, enlightening than multi-rater assessment feedback as it provides the test-taker with an understanding of the motivations, preferences, and tendencies that drive their behavior and decision making.  This information becomes even more useful when combined with the other categories of preferences as it increases empathy and deepens one's understanding for interpersonal dynamics. 

As assessments have been found to develop emotional intelligence over time, other tools compound these results even further.  In my next blog post I will discuss some of these other tools and techniques.