Rethinking Leadership: Getting to Know the Chief Emotions Officer
Business is a numbers game. Emotions are a sign of weakness. Real leadership demands unflagging certainty and intellect. Conventional wisdom, it would seem, expects a superhuman CEO. But Joie de Vivre founder and best-selling author Chip Conley argues that perhaps we're thinking about leadership all wrong. What really defines a successful CEO, he says, is emotional intelligence, or EQ.
Chip is hosting an Issues in Depth call next Wednesday, April 18 to make the case that CEO should really stand for Chief Emotions Officer. He'll present a surprisingly mathematical approach to common emotions like anxiety, curiosity, despair, and meaning - and explain how exploring your EQ can make you a more effective business leader.
We asked Chip via email about how folks react to his work - his answers suggest that there's a deep need for more thoughtfulness around how we bring our emotional selves to our work, and that those who make the effort to explore their EQ may end up leading with their whole selves, for the better.
What do you think prevents business professionals from getting comfortable with their EQ?
Somehow, emotions are almost thought of as a forbidden subject at work, but of course, they're one of the most universal aspects of our humanity and what we share with each other. But, when you aren't fluent or conscious of your emotions, you can be scared of them. It's easier to look at numbers on a spreadsheet than to deal with the feedback from an emotional intelligence 360 degree review by your peers. And, yet, those that do become more familiar with EQ have a tendency to see much faster career growth.
How do you deal with those who might brush off emotional intelligence as a touchy-feely, self-help approach with little place in the business world?
I ask them, Tell me about the best and worst bosses you've ever had in your life. Typically, their best boss wasn't necessarily the nicest but it was someone who truly got them, someone who could see their potential and help coach them. Their worst boss was someone who constantly made them feel smaller than they were. Once we have this conversation, they are able to see the importance and value of emotional intelligence in leadership.
Let's cut to the chase. Give us an emotional equation that people doing impact work can relate to.
Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness. Anxiety is the most contagious emotion in most organizations and it gets amplified in an economic downturn. There are two primary variables that create anxiety: what you don't know and what you can't control or influence. So often, especially for those who are trying to make good in the world, it seems like what they're trying to solve is just so big.
My recommendation is to create an Anxiety Balance Sheet. Imagine the thing that's making you anxious and then create four columns. Column one is what I do know. Column two is what I don't know. Column three is what I can influence and Column four is what I can't influence. When you take 15-20 minutes to list everything that's on your mind related to this subject, we've found that 75% of us have more items under columns one and three (the assets) than we do under columns two and four. And, yet, when we're seized by anxiety, we tend to get fixated on columns two and four.
The other thing to consider is can you move certain items in columns two or four to one and three by being proactive. If you don't know something (column two), is there someone you can ask who can help you learn it? If you feel like you can't influence something (column four), can you ask a wise elder who you work with or who's a mentor about how you might be able to make a difference with that particular issue? In sum, just becoming conscious about what's making you anxious can have a profound effect on loosening anxiety's grip on you.
Can you tell us about a time where EQ played a role in a business succeeding or failing?
On a personal level, I was struggling four years ago as the CEO of Joie de Vivre. I had spent the prior downturn (the dot-com bust) being the confident gladiator that rallied the troops and helped us triple in size based upon using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory as a cornerstone of our business model. In this more recent downturn, I felt more like a prisoner for all kinds of reasons.I was reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and decided to turn it into an equation to make it more practical for me on a day-to-day basis. The equation became Despair = Suffering - Meaning, with suffering being the constant and meaning being the variable. This taught me that when I was feeling the most desperate, the best thing I could do was to find the meaning or lesson in it and to articulate what I was learning on a weekly basis.I also saw certain emotional muscles develop during this time like resiliency, courage, authenticity, and humility. People started to notice a difference in me and, one day, in November 2008 when I was supposed to give a cheerleading speech to our top eighty execs about how 2009 was going to be a great year (which was false since the hotel business was in a death spiral at that time), I instead wrote this equation on an easel and we had a one-hour conversation about it.
Maslow said great companies have psycho-hygiene, which means they know how to metaphorically cleanse themselves communally during the times when they're most like a sweatbox. This is what we did that day and it was incredibly energizing for our team.
Join Chip this Wednesday, April 18 for How Emotional Fluency Will Make You a Better Leader.
