Bishop House Consulting, Inc.

Your Team’s Emotional Strength

Recently, I delivered a speech on emotional intelligence – the ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships – to an audience of senior executives and provided them with insight regarding how they can assess and grow their emotional intelligence (EI).  For leaders a key aspect of EI is the opportunity and challenge to harmonize emotions and thought and then manage behavior.  The investment of energy to understand/assess your EI can be doable at 9:30 in the morning but much more difficult at 2:30 pm after 4 back-to-back meetings and no lunch.

A really interesting aspect of EI is to then ponder your team’s EI.  And further, how does the team’s cumulative EI impact team performance?

Try this non-scientific approach:  At your next team huddle, ask each person to describe the 1 or 2 things which scare them today.  As team members respond, look for their level of vulnerability, for their trust in the group, for their confidence in managing their emotion regarding the issue/item and maybe most importantly their capability to articulate their message.

Need a primer on EI?  Wikipedia has a decent summary:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

How’s the Street View

Have you used Google Maps Street View in the past?  What a great way to drop in and see the actual destination of your trip.  You can see the building, the street, parking even what restaurants might be close by.

A professional roadmap helps you to document where you’d like to head in the future prompting you to develop a target, areas of focus, goals and broad actions to layout your professional trip.  Maybe you’re just taking a small trip to expand your skills a bit or possibly a once in a lifetime, cross country trip taking you on a 2 year adventure to reach that next rung in the ladder.

You should check in on your progress just as Google Maps let’s you drill down from a broad, global view to the street view.

• Regional View – you can see your starting point, your ending point and the organizational terrain you’ll cross.
• Neighborhood View – you can see more details regarding bends in the road, turns that will need to be made, special navigational opportunities (shortcuts, country roads, highways) all with pros and cons.
• Street View – The real deal!  What is actually around you at the moment in time when the snapshot is taken?

To Think About:

• Where are you on your roadmap?
• Is the highway really your best choice or might the country road with all its scenery build more leadership wisdom?
• What feedback might a passer-by at street level be able to provide?