Emotional Intelligence Intro

[Music] 0:10 [Music] 0:24 welcome everyone and thank you for joining the michigan online visionary educators or move event 0:31 the move series is hosted by the center for academic innovation at the university of michigan 0:36 an important part of our mission is to create a more inclusive and global learning community 0:42 we believe an informed peaceful and equitable society is dependent on learners everywhere adopting a learning 0:49 lifestyle this monthly series features experts sharing insights tools and discussions 0:56 on issues relevant to the lives of people around the world many of the speakers may be familiar to 1:01 you as the faculty members behind some of our most successful and innovative learning experiences available through 1:07 michigan online for information on our upcoming move series events be sure to check out the schedule at 1:13 online.umich.edu move before we get started i have a few 1:19 housekeeping items to go over first we'd like to invite you to submit questions for our panelists by using the 1:25 q a function in zoom you can also upvote questions that you see in the q a section by using the 1:31 thumbs up button we will do our best to address and answer as many of these as we can 1:36 given our limited time we ask that you please keep your questions related to the topic as another note today's event will be 1:43 recorded and the recording will be made available at michigan online today's topic is emotional intelligence 1:50 cultivating immensely human interactions i am joined by sherry alexander and 1:55 jeffrey sanchez-burks sherry alexander is a faculty of management and organizations former 2:02 chief innovation officer at the university of michigan-ross school of business in the executive education 2:07 department and the vp of hr for international operations at general motors 2:13 jeffrey sanchez-burks is a william russell kelly professor of business administration at the stephen m ross 2:20 school of business and a faculty associate at the research center for group dynamics within the institute for 2:26 social research sherry and jeffrey thank you again for joining us today and let's go ahead and get started 2:34 wonderful thank you for that introduction sherry how are you doing i'm doing pretty good excellent all right let's get started so 2:41 there's our avatars so um shall we share some keys insights about this absolutely 2:46 let's go all right we'll start with uh number one the latest research uh is 2:51 showing that this topic is not only um critical for a variety of reasons that 2:57 we'll talk about but actually in the wake of the pandemic the shifts in labor markets and the new 3:03 world of work this topic of being highly attuned and more adept socially to create these interactions is going to be 3:09 critical for the workforce you're seeing the same pattern no i absolutely have seen the pattern here and around the 3:15 world it's true actually part of the topic we'll cover in this session here on 3:21 emotional intelligence is really trying to understand ways for example you can enhance your collaborations whether this 3:28 is virtually or not there's a greater interdependency in the work that we do this is true even when we're 3:34 remote i know some may have felt a lot like this maybe some still do working that and your only connection to others 3:40 is maybe a zoom call like this but also working across cultures this is quite key and people have been working 3:47 both remote and on planes quite some time sure you've seen this yeah i was very fortunate i worked in 3:53 four different countries on three different continents and truly the social emotional intelligence what was 3:59 what my key to success because when you can make high quality connections across 4:05 the world you do it by being totally a listener an open learner somebody who's 4:12 ready to really hear what someone else is saying and that requires a lot of 4:17 respect and conveying presence to other people you know also unfortunately 4:23 there's a need in order to be able to handle some of these more difficult conversations like conflict in teams 4:30 of course you and i would never have conflict well not totally true but 4:36 being able to resolve them quickly with resiliency is also key on that yeah 4:41 i can't remember us really ever having a conflict jeffrey but maybe because we have learned to be very self-aware and 4:49 to self-manage and there are many tools that you can utilize to manage conflict 4:54 and to manage your own emotions so that you can tamp down any conflict that occurs during a collaboration and so 5:02 another context we see this is in becoming a transformational leader you've not only worked in industry but 5:07 worked with a lot of organizations what are some of the things that they're telling you 5:13 well just recently you and i did some research and asked a lot of high level 5:18 leaders and what they said to us was the social emotional intelligence of being able to read the room was critical to 5:26 being a transformational leader so that people aren't left out of the conference conversation yeah what's great is we 5:33 actually have a lot of those videos and in the course we have these sort of testimonials from people in practice 5:39 really articulating exactly how this matters um because we're a university it makes sense to do a pop quiz no okay um so the 5:47 pop quiz here is if you're thinking about a team and you're wondering what type of dream team would be able to 5:53 succeed across context regardless of what you give them they tend to outperform other teams here are possible 6:00 predictors what do you think is the most important is like pop quiz pop quiz you know i look at all of them and i say 6:06 they're all important but i know some of the most recent research is 6:12 taking turns when speaking in a meeting that's right actually well here i'll show you the the final graph on this one 6:20 this work comes from anita wooley and tom malone carnegie mellon and mit and some of the amazing insights that 6:26 they've had is that not the intelligence of individual members contributes to what they call collective intelligence 6:32 it's the ability to be tuned to these subtle cues that maybe somebody has something to contribute but they're 6:38 not raising their hand maybe somebody has a quick look of surprise or confusion that can be investigated 6:45 or you're monitoring who hasn't contributed since there's all of these intelligent interesting people who have 6:51 thoughts and that's the reason they're in the meeting this attunement allows you to then to 6:57 deploy tactics like turn taking um so i find that work really fascinating and just more generally with emotions as our 7:04 colleague kevin says emotions are a defining feature of the human condition they structure our relationships and 7:11 imbue our lives with meaning and purpose and so i guess one thing we might be 7:16 able to share is what are sort of the core components to this uh thing we are calling emotional intelligence that 7:22 contributes to immensely human interactions do you want to share that with them i would love to 7:27 i love our model uh i call it the maze and blue model of social emotional intelligence and it 7:34 includes the being aware that i just talked about earlier and being able to manage those emotions absolutely and 7:42 then if you go to the blue even more important the awareness of others and in 7:47 the end what we jeffrey have called social acceleration and social 7:53 acceleration is being able to give to others through being able to coach mentor to uh really talk about people 8:01 when they're not even in the room and as well to storytell and to teach yeah 8:08 you know these things are so interesting and so powerful and yet one of the sort of most frustrating things we've 8:13 discovered in our early work is this question about well do they have a place at work and what we found is 8:21 that they're really strong norms to acting professional that really make it difficult for people 8:28 to use the emotional intelligence they already have so in essence what our work is found is 8:34 that when people enter the workplace their emotional intelligence scores actually go down 8:40 which means that they are not actually using and leveraging some of the skills they have the good news is it's much 8:46 easier to learn how to deploy a skill you already have being subtly attuned not just to the 8:52 work that's being done but the people that's been done it's much easier to use that than to acquire a brand new 8:59 skill and so whether we're talking about being able to read the room being able to manage your own motions 9:05 these strong norms of act professional have made it somewhat more difficult to do that in fact there's a wonderful 9:12 quote here from chris boss who's a former lead fbi negotiator who in a way is kind of making fun of business by 9:19 saying that over in the business school you could say but in business in general we pretend emotions 9:24 don't exist and his insight is is spot on with all of the other work out there showing that 9:30 emotions are critical to that so i think that's um an important point that this whole topic 9:37 begins with awareness of not only yourself but understanding how the situation can either 9:43 create blinders for you to attend to certain things or not um but i loved your point about 9:49 managing your emotions it reminds me of this interesting story with donald dell and a very famous 9:55 african-american tennis player arthur ashe donald doe was actually negotiating on arthur ash's behalf 10:02 and in this meeting with this particular company they didn't want to renew the contract and after a while the ceo stormed into 10:08 the room as donald dell uh tells the story and basically said you know what what 10:15 the hell is going on here why are we talking anymore and it was so tense many people can sort of say well we need to 10:21 tell people to calm down of course it's not going to work necessarily um but what donald did is he told a joke 10:28 and it was funny enough that everyone laughed a little bit but they relaxed what the insight here is that he 10:35 understood emotions actually do have a role he needs to understand what needs to be understood is what is the 10:41 ideal emotion for this moment what's the appropriate emotion or what would actually change the situation and in 10:47 that case you're able to have a productive conversation yeah humor can always 10:54 change the dynamic of what's going on in the meeting and to be socially attuned 10:59 to when you should use humor is important it doesn't always work but sometimes you can really tamp down well 11:06 as you remind me even failed attempts at humor can work you know here's a here i got whenever 11:12 you send me these pictures from your uh your gym it sort of captures what we mentioned earlier that you can have this 11:17 uh tool but not necessarily use it so i think you you use these things a lot but 11:23 you put some clothes on there and a lot of people especially as the pandemic wanes we'll start using all that 11:29 exercise equipment to hang clothes but here's just a little bit more on that research 11:34 which we dive into in the course talking about how we can actually reimagine organizations to be more immensely human 11:42 to be more emotionally intelligent what's really important for us to know 11:49 is that the brain is capable of changing once somebody decides that they want to 11:58 pull at that social emotional intelligence they already have they can do it let me share with them this small 12:04 vignette um you won't be able to hear the audio and so hopefully you can see us in the bottom of the screen 12:09 what we do in the course is really try to capture these moments of reality in organizational life 12:16 where in this case you and your colleague approach it and you always make me the bad guy in these yeah it is not true you 12:22 are not always the bad guy okay maybe in the ones that made the final cutting room but anyway so um but the idea here 12:29 is we try to capture these moments that a lot of people can resonate with and really sort of talk through what 12:35 happened why did it happen and how can it be done differently yeah i remember in this case uh 12:41 you were really rude to me in this vignette but the thing was is i interrupted you i interrupted you in a 12:48 time when you were working really hard and then i called you a name so really it was a 50 50 kind of thing jeffrey 12:54 yeah but again you wrote the script hypothetical so um hopefully we won't get blamed too much on that another 13:00 thing we really wanted to talk about and share with you is some amazing work that really counters this assumption that 13:06 emotions cause us to be unreasonable in fact work we've published shows that 13:12 when people are say feeling emotionally ambivalent which is a form of emotional complexity they're 13:19 feeling both hope but also concern it makes them more open to conflicting 13:24 pieces of information and when we're open to more conflicting or diverse information 13:29 it leads to better decision making and so really understanding not just emotions or not emote not the emotion be 13:36 emotional not being emotional but understanding how things like emotional complexity how to get that state how to 13:43 feel like that or how not to try to simplify your emotions can actually enhance a lot of your decision making 13:51 it definitely is a paradox how much can we hold inside of us at the same time 13:57 yeah and actually the paradox goes even further i think what was really amazing is some 14:02 interesting work that's coming out of the university of michigan um a lot of this has led with a brilliant doctoral 14:09 student christina bradley the paradox looks something like this we asked people in this study if you 14:16 have a very brand new idea really new idea and you're going to share it with somebody 14:21 do you pitch the idea saying hey this is a great idea what do you think or do you maintain that complexity you 14:28 have with new ideas i mean let's be honest when we have new ideas we we think they're good 14:33 but we're also a bit concerned that maybe they won't work out and what you see in this graph is that people will 14:39 say if i have this emotional complexity and i'm more open with that i will actually get people to feel 14:48 i'll get greater levels of participation if other people in the organization were 14:53 to allow themselves to maintain that authentic emotional complexity they will also get more participation 15:00 so far so good however here's the real challenge is that same graph if i switch 15:06 it to well will you do this people say hell no i i will be seen as less competent if i 15:13 come across as having these mixed emotions having this sort of hope and concern 15:20 and the real challenge here is that we know that that can be a reality but if 15:26 people are reluctant to be authentic with their new ideas they're going to over invest in bad 15:32 ideas their new ideas may die in the vine before 15:37 they can actually see the light of day through the help of others and so there's a real challenge of trying to not just think about emotional 15:44 intelligence through yourself but creating the right team dynamic that fosters the ability to have these more 15:51 authentic emotions what do you think i think that learning to allow ourselves to be more 15:57 vulnerable allows us to pitch more and in fact to really be able 16:05 to choose the best decision for others and for our teams now in the limited time sort of just 16:13 walking through this model we also really pull from a lot of interesting research on this idea of social 16:19 awareness as our famous um favorite uh sophie poet it's always hard to uh 16:26 sufi poet roommate roomie i love remember having to put that in a sentence i i fumble it up sometimes had 16:33 this wonderful um quote of let soul speak with a silent articulation of a face 16:39 and it really conveyed how much information is lost if you only rely on 16:44 the spoken word the japanese have another expression which basically captures people's um 16:51 when people are able to read the room to read the air to capture this and in organizational research we find 16:59 that this is actually something that more and more leaders need in fact now with the labor economy 17:06 and labor market as it is there's no longer this luxury of well if there's not a good fit there'll be 17:11 turnover we really need to reevaluate our ability to engage others and be attuned to them here is a quote pulled 17:18 from some of our colleagues of how those in an organization just wished their leaders would actually 17:24 pay attention they were trying to subtly communicate so much to them and we know by research that people join 17:31 companies they leave bad bosses you don't have the luxury any longer to 17:38 elicit those emotions that make people feel uncomfortable and not included yeah 17:43 and actually it's interesting if you are the employee and you have a boss that appears emotionally tone deaf i know in 17:50 some of the folks that were on this initial call they had some questions about how to do this and this is an important topic that we talk about but 17:56 it fortunately it doesn't hinge on just one person it always requires creating a dynamic where you 18:03 elicit this attunement to others absolutely um and there's a number of different strategies that we sort of dive into 18:09 this notion about paying attention to emotions can all seem very wishy-washy but some of my favorite anecdotal data 18:15 on this is when you look at ipo road shows so when a company is about to go public 18:20 the founder often will go and talk to institutional investors the folks with the big bucks 18:26 and they're not allowed to share any inside information in fact the security exchange commission has recordings of 18:32 these made public and yet these institutional investors want to see the founder 18:38 now these presumably are folks that care first and foremost about the financials 18:43 which makes a lot of sense so it begs the question why do they feel that they need to see 18:49 the face of the founder the only real conclusion is that in part they think they can have access to the mind of the 18:57 founder and see things in the organization the mind reading it really speaks to how even people 19:02 in a position whose identity is really about numbers still values having a connection to the 19:09 face yeah i just was talking my students yesterday and i said when you make your presentations you have to make me trust 19:16 you before i will go with your recommendation yeah that's wonderful that's wonderful 19:22 inside because it maps on to that other data that if you're more often authentic people more likely to trust to be more 19:27 likely to listen absolutely um pixar actually does a lot of work and a lot of effort trying to 19:33 be attuned to what are the ways in which people express emotions and for example in their consultation 19:39 with emotions researchers they discovered how important the eyebrow is so in this picture you see fish with 19:45 eyebrows and even though we know they don't have it turns out fish don't have eyebrows uh 19:51 not yet anyway and but when they do they emote more 19:56 expressively and of course makes these things resonate more broadly and whether you are thinking about parts 20:02 of the face or thinking about being in person there's also emerging research really demonstrating how this plays a 20:09 role even in remote collaborations yeah tell us a little bit more about the 20:16 aperture jeffrey oh the emotional aperture so much like you can change the aperture of your 20:22 camera to adjust its focus so too can you think about reading just one person 20:27 as you see here in the foreground or really changing your attention to bring into focus more in the group 20:34 what is sort of the emotional landscape if you will of the organization we found that this ability to shift your 20:41 attention think about it like listening at a coffee shop to a conversation next to 20:46 you in a table or to listening to the ambiance of the room we tend to either have a habit of 20:52 listening to the ambiance or specific conversations when it comes to emotions but your ability especially in teams 20:59 leading teams or being a member of a team is greatly enhanced if you can be more mindful and strategic about not 21:06 just focusing on one person but being able to understand what is the emotional landscape and by that for example 21:13 uh is everyone feeling the same thing maybe we're ready to mobilize towards action is there a lot of diversity in 21:19 emotions is there a growing level of discontent this is rich information that allows you 21:25 to better fit in and succeed in the group or to lead the group yeah to be a 21:30 transformational leader is to be able to really understand the individual as well 21:37 as the team the ambiance or narrow in yeah and we've captured some of these insights in a recent article in 21:44 mit sloan on how leaders can manage these emotional landscapes 21:49 so in this whole model i'm hoping in the final moments sherry you might be able to just hone in here on this this last 21:55 component of it what do we mean by social acceleration yeah i love that we have coined this social 22:02 acceleration because it really takes social emotional intelligence to the 22:08 next level we have learned in research that closing the emotional or the 22:13 physical distance between people is critically important to take the level of performance to a higher place and we 22:22 do this through a number of things and the things that we teach a lot about her 22:28 coaching and mentoring as well as being able to tell stories to paint pictures 22:34 in other people's minds that allow them to be in that place at that moment which 22:41 helps build trust between one another closing that social distance and also 22:48 teaching and i'm not talking about the teaching we do for hours in the classroom i'm talking about micro 22:54 teaching every one of our participants today can teach something a minute two minutes three minutes but 23:01 that can improve the social emotional intelligence and bring us closer together really scale it i like that 23:08 here's um us with our avatars but we'd like to be able to use the remainder of our time to 23:13 answer some questions and i think we're going to have some help from our facilitators on that 23:19 so we'll um we'll pause there and open it up for questions 23:24 thank you sherry and jeffrey um we do have a couple um pre-submitted questions as well as a few that were 23:29 submitted during the event um one of them was how many of the emotional intelligence tools do you use 23:35 do you need to use to work together so well with each other because you have such great chemistry 23:41 i think i think sherry has to deploy all of them for work with me 23:47 well maybe no jeffrey and i have had a lot of time together and we've taught together and 23:53 we've built trust together but i will say that personal before professional we 23:59 got to know each other on a personal level and i recommend that to everybody that when you want to take your 24:05 performance to another level in a team or with another person get to know them 24:11 personally before you turn on the professional so we've 24:16 our families have been together and uh we know each other's families and we uh 24:23 drink together maybe overestimating how much trust we have well no so actually so sherry uh has an 24:29 engineering background and talks about her her trajectory of becoming more attuned and as a behavioral scientist um 24:36 this has sort of been part of my life the whole time wasn't um didn't have the engineering 24:42 capabilities but what's interesting is i notice when sherry is holding back on 24:48 things and really sort of say you know tell me a little bit more i get a sense of that and then it comes out 24:54 maybe more than i wanted no i'm just kidding um so that's an interesting question but i to me it comes down to 25:00 being able to understand when people have something on their mind that they're almost about to share it 25:08 but they don't if you're able to bring that out you're able to establish more trust and 25:13 once you have trust it doesn't prevent conflict at all but it makes it easier to quickly 25:19 resolve it i think another thing that we've we've been able to work with together is feedback and feedback is 25:26 something important that we both teach and uh we have to ask the person are you okay 25:32 with some feedback today i am ready for feedback let's take the next question okay 25:40 well actually one of our questions was about feedback what can you do when someone tends to 25:45 get defensive around feedback or how can you respond or maybe give gentler feedback what would you suggest 25:51 well i'd like to give you a model for how to give feedback 25:57 and it really relies on step number one is asking the person are they ready for 26:03 feedback now somebody always says yeah i'm ready but you can sense the defensiveness 26:10 within their words then it might be that you want to do a little teach piece 26:16 about what feedback can do and what it can help in the future so you may want 26:22 to soft pedal a little bit before you try again but but step one is to ask 26:29 i think you're you're right picking the moment is key um we often under appreciate the needs of 26:35 others we cannot see there's some amazing work coming out of berkeley and chicago on this um 26:41 eppley intruder and in their collaboration and basically one of the things that we under appreciate 26:48 is people's need to save face and have dignity and so giving feedback for example in public or when people believe 26:54 they're in public maybe not the right time so i remember you or may not be public but you came to me 27:00 with you know here's something we need to do for this particular class or whatever and i just loaded in my brain 27:07 the core content from this and had to say like stop talking to me right now 27:12 and you instantly stopped talking and i got the feedback later don't worry um but it was like picking picking the 27:18 moments and having a quick conversation about when is the right moment so are they i love how you said are they open to it 27:24 and then when would be the right time and i remember exactly that incident and it taught me more about when is it 27:31 appropriate to give feedback to jeffrey and it isn't appropriate when he's just 27:37 about to start a new topic in teaching and i was giving him some feedback that really didn't need to be given at that 27:44 moment no so i had to choose the moment it was like the coffee is too cold in the room or something like this 27:50 but truly after you ask if the person's open number two 27:56 then you detail the behavior that you saw you heard or you felt 28:05 saw heard or felt and detail it as it existed 28:11 then the third stage is what was the impact of that feedback to you 28:18 it's not giving you messages it's imessages and then the fourth step in giving 28:23 feedback is to say do you think perhaps there's another way 28:28 that this could have been handled don't give the person a new way 28:34 let them find it within themselves to do it their way that's nice there's all many different 28:41 approaches to a situation allow them to effectively think of it as a creative 28:47 not brainstorming per se but effectively like what are the multiple ways it can be done yeah co-creating it 28:53 potentially it's good yeah i like that that's really nice i i would think it would be very effective 28:59 what about someone uh you're just meeting what are some skills you can learn to show empathy early in an 29:05 encounter with a new person before you really know much about them so um i'm most in i'm most intrigued by 29:13 this work that comes out of harvard from allison wood brooks on what types of uh 29:19 questions well first of all how do you build rapport with someone which i think is part of what sarah you're saying 29:24 and one finding is asking questions so being attuned to the other person 29:30 in a sense that you're curious about the other person so you're asking more questions and you're just talking but there's one type of question she 29:36 identified as the most powerful type of question and it's a follow-up question now 29:42 when i when i give the explanation it'll be so obvious but it's it's because you can't fake a follow-up question 29:49 in order to ask a follow-up question i had to have been listening to you process what you said not just echoed 29:54 what you said and then took the conversation even further so you're it's a behavior 30:00 that demonstrates actual listening and curiosity and attunement to the other 30:06 person and so i think this is um very powerful work that complements what we know about 30:12 emotional intelligence and is very practical um you can literally put this in your pocket of asking yourself when 30:18 you talk to someone are you actually asking questions and do you bother with follow-up questions so you don't just 30:24 wait for them to finish and then you share your own story yeah i love talking about curiosity because it is really one 30:31 of the most important things that transformational leaders have to rely on and i say to some of the leaders that i 30:37 coach think about when you were five years old and you saw something you never saw before and you were asking a million 30:44 questions and many of you who are parents out there remember oh no not another question 30:50 but asking and conveying your presence with the other 30:55 person is just an incredible showing of respect 31:00 and that respect builds trust so communicate communicate and ask that 31:05 next question not just the first yeah relentless relentless curiosity is a 31:11 good way of capturing as well good yeah that's great um so let's talk about the the impact of 31:17 the pandemic on the social emotional intelligence because now we're not in the room all the time we don't with each other we can't pick up on all the same 31:23 social cues what are some specific actions that we can take to um 31:29 to mitigate some of the negative impacts that we have seen or some ways that we 31:35 can um increase that when we're maybe in a virtual setting 31:41 or behind a mask i can give i'll give a couple tips and maybe okay so now build off of what sherry just mentioned so 31:47 cherry left off just a moment ago without presence so i think there's two concrete things that people can do to deploy emotional 31:54 intelligence and enhance the quality of their zoom skype teams whatever you're using um chats 32:02 number one when you need to see people have um 32:07 clarity that everyone will be present and whether it's hybrid or everyone on zoom step back far enough away from the 32:13 camera that people can see your hands when people can see your hands you know they're not multitasking you wouldn't 32:20 really bury yourself in technology live with sitting next to another person and 32:25 so why so let's help us remove that distraction so one is step back enough so that i i physically have to 32:31 demonstrate i'm present and then the second is turn off the camera more frequently 32:37 don't flicker it to give people a seizure but the idea here is be mindful when do we need a camera when do we not 32:43 need a camera so if i'm about to give a mini presentation or talk i will um really signal everyone please turn 32:49 off your camera right now because that can be stressful having that on and you don't need it so that when we do turn 32:55 the camera back on it's we're present and there's a purpose for it so we're more purposeful about 33:00 the type of technology we're using rather than letting the technology um which wasn't designed to be 33:07 emotionally intelligent it's designed to give us multiple capabilities but we need to understand how to use those 33:12 capabilities in an intelligent way and i go back to what i said uh earlier 33:18 uh personal before professional so when you start a zoom call or 33:24 meeting whatever technology you're using spend time getting to know what's going 33:30 on in people's lives how was the weekend what are you doing this coming weekend 33:36 tell us about wait a second your cat who is that everybody bring a uh 33:43 an artifact into the room of something that means a lot to them 33:49 these are important things of getting to know each other and really spending a little time on that personal 33:56 and be genuine with it the minute i tell you something about the artifact that i wear all the time 34:03 about the world you know a little bit more about me and how important the whole world is to me everyone knows 34:09 meetings are wildly inefficient and so one of the practices we use is to basically take what could be a 30-minute 34:15 meeting and say we only have 20 minutes of content 25 minutes of content and then after 20 34:22 minutes of content make sure we have that five minute buffer on the front end back in for that social emotional 34:27 connection and then five minutes for people to just turn off their camera and close our eyes or or just take a moment 34:33 of a break to type their notes before they go to the next meeting um the technology again 34:39 has caused people to go non-stop and this allows us and so being more mindful about even these things how to structure 34:46 the minutes of a meeting really make a difference so we need to sort of take back control of how we're managing our 34:51 relationships because the time of walking to the hallway to go to the next room is no 34:57 longer with us so we have to build that in yeah build in the walking through the hallway 35:02 into the meeting that you're having virtually and therefore you'll 35:07 get to know somebody even more and you'll respect that they have personal lives as well 35:16 i have certainly loved um i loved your example about the cats because i have certainly loved and 35:21 meeting my teammates pets and children and anyone else who might be around in the room recently it does 35:28 definitely fill in a different space than we've had in the past um and i think this is kind of related it might 35:34 be a similar tactic but what might what might there be a special consideration if you're trying to interact with someone who is maybe incredibly 35:40 introverted um and that's been i feel like increased increasingly difficult during the pandemic but might there be 35:46 um other advice you have for for um getting to know um 35:52 our intraverted teammates will resume or maybe in person as we're returning a 35:58 little bit too yeah there's um you know we often think about um 36:04 having everyone use the chat or or thumbs up or something some common thing will help everyone 36:10 um but with a little bit of mindfulness you can come up with a variety of creative ways to 36:15 [Music] find um creative ways to get everyone to 36:20 contribute but maybe in different ways so for example introversion can be just introversion it 36:26 also can be maybe your you have ten languages and english happens to be the tenth and that's not that's your strength 36:32 um but having people know in advance what's coming and prepare maybe submit some insights 36:38 or questions or something and then you as a leader collate this and feed this back to the group at the beginning of 36:44 the meeting so that people are contributing and then you can actually let the person know in advance you know 36:50 we're gonna do this you're gonna send like let's say your favorite vacation place or the first place you want to go to when you're out of lockdown 36:57 and then let them know in advance you know we're going to go around the room and share this and so that preparation 37:02 goes a long way so they don't feel they're put on the spot in education in american education we do 37:08 value putting people on the spot that's how we train people especially in business schools and that's a particular 37:14 culture but that is not necessarily an optimal culture and it doesn't need to be the dominant culture there's a 37:20 variety of ways we can structure conversations again be more attuned 37:26 if if you're attuned and collectively intelligent you'll notice there are some who have a hard time struggling that 37:32 should trigger off a brainstorming of different ways to get 37:37 them elicited in there so it's a wonderful point about connecting being a tune so what do you do what now you're 37:43 tuned here to the introversion and introversion again it can be introversion it could be language it 37:50 could be engineering background it could be many things but also you need to address not the 37:56 introverts but the extroverts and so how do we damp uh sort of um temp down the ones 38:03 who talk too much go ahead now you tap me now so that there's more space so it's not a problem 38:09 of the introverts it's really the dynamic of where you're creating space so that people 38:15 maybe like me say sherry what do you think well i will have to say that i thought 38:20 about a lot of things while you were talking and one thing that i want to bring up is that we use a tool 38:27 and jeffrey teaches this tool really effectively in design thinking is that 38:33 allowing people to brainstorm individually first you know say okay we're going to be 38:38 really quiet for two minutes write down as many ideas on topic x as you can 38:44 and then make sure that everybody gets to share one or more of those things that they're 38:50 brainstorming and it really helps to allow everybody who's introverted 38:56 to think a little bit more before they're put on the spot to share immediately or 39:02 if you just open up that brainstorming the extroverts are going to come whoa and then you're sitting there well they 39:09 covered most of what i was thinking about or should i even talk but the agenda 39:14 is really good to help people prepare another tip is the utilization of not only 39:23 the voice i've used having everybody draw a picture and share their pictures on the 39:28 screen and that's been something that really gets the creative emotions in 39:34 out yeah back to the language i know you you just said introversion i brought in the language part but often i'll have um 39:42 moments where people uh speak in their in their native tongue and then i do the translation so that 39:48 they don't have to do the translation i put the burden on us now of course translations don't always work out well but that's actually could be fun and 39:54 sort of talking about how google translate works well sometimes not so on other times 39:59 so anyway so that's maybe helpful for that i love the idea of multiple languages 40:07 and since we teach with so many different cultures uh respectfully talking about those 40:14 differences are really an important thing that you can do to break down barriers in collaboration while you're 40:20 on a screen yeah yeah it's good it's a good point 40:25 i love that thank you um let's turn our attention a little bit now to maybe someone who has a toxic 40:31 characteristic if they're you know how would you handle someone who's deliberately um being toxic in the workplace i mean i 40:38 mean i meant this way over the other way next door that way um someone who's being toxic how to deal 40:45 with uh well if you're the boss and you have an employee that's toxic 40:50 let me just deal with that first i say only six months of coaching and if you 40:56 cannot coach the toxicity out of the person you need to get the person out of the environment because that toxicity is 41:04 going to by osmosis destroy the team so toxicity is something that 41:12 transformational leaders really need to be attuned to and listen to others when they come 41:18 saying i have this little problem with so-and-so and really delving deep into it but if you're a peer to that person 41:26 it may might be even harder to address it's learning how to give feedback to 41:31 that person telling them what they what you saw and how it made you feel 41:36 if you are able to do that not everybody is able to do that but 41:43 the leaders in this room in this call need to be attuned to 41:48 seeing and operating in a way to make sure the toxicity can be coached 41:55 out or moved out you know on the on the 42:01 just everybody else who does not have the position of being the boss i think here one in a lot of um 42:08 countries the labor markets are are more conducive to just leaving 42:13 but there are a lot of people who are unable to to leave and this is where a lot of the components of emotional 42:20 intelligence that have to do with managing our own emotions are key so it's not putting up with it but 42:26 trying to limit the damage it's doing to our mental and physical well-being 42:31 is key if you literally do not have the ability to to change bosses and to do anything 42:37 about it number one to take care of yourself find to use these to use the attunement to how you're 42:44 feeling to put yourself more and more in the situations where recovery is possible so that's that's not step one but that's 42:50 one component in terms of addressing the problem it's very helpful to try to understand 42:57 is this a person problem or is this a cultural issue and so trying to assess 43:02 what are the norms here is this normative then maybe it's a really not ideal place to be or is it one 43:08 individual and trying to see if there's a way to build enough community so that there's support for 43:15 this situation again i'm not trying to say just put up with it but in situations where you don't have the 43:20 ability to fire your boss many people would love that there are things we can do to help 43:27 ourselves and that it also involves community and if the organization is 43:33 one that is worthy that to stay in and you want would like to hopefully both taking care of yourself 43:39 but then also building that community things could could work out that way um and again i'm coming from a position 43:45 of where you may not be able to hire a coach for your boss so 43:51 you know sherry gives it to one side so it is a difficult issue and talking 43:56 more about this might help you identify some of the early signals of emotionally intelligent bosses so that when you are 44:03 in the opportunity to choose an xboss you don't just look at the compensation 44:08 you look at the portfolio of the context and maybe you are able to make 44:14 wiser decisions going forward so it's a complex issue these are very quick answers 44:19 but it's a topic that we sort of dive into a little more deeply in the course yeah it is a very complex issue and 44:25 every situation is different but knowing if the culture and the 44:30 toxicity is pervasive in the culture i go back to exactly what jeffrey said what are the norms here and are we 44:37 living to the norms um thank you for that i think it kind of leads into our next question is talking 44:43 about addressing disinformation in an organization i mean wherever that's stemming from how can these tools be 44:50 used to address disinformation in an organization i i would say that emotional 44:56 intelligence cannot solve all problems so this is i i 45:01 being a human being living in the world in society i get many different ways you can you can understand the background of 45:07 this question um i think there's no anyone who says oh just do x 45:13 y or z this is a very complex issue there are there are algorithms working against us there's technologies that 45:19 don't make it easier to do this um we could talk again about sort of the 45:25 effect of disinformation on us and our well-being and a lot of people's stress on this 45:32 there's also ways in which you can be much more mindful about how and maybe this is the only 45:37 concrete thing i can pull up how you can be more mindful about what am i consuming and how does that 45:43 make me feel so i have a colleague ethan cross and osgoribaro who published data showing 45:50 that the more you're on social media and they i don't need to mention which particular company the worse your life 45:56 satisfaction was and so that work is out there and and yet of course like uh vaping 46:02 pens people may know it's not good for them but they say i just can't quit being more in tune to what you need as a 46:08 human being and what you're doing and how that affects how you're feeling 46:14 we have a lot more agency we often blame technology for doing certain things but we have a lot more 46:20 agency and probably a greater need to take control of how we are exposing 46:25 ourselves to certain things in collaboration with ourselves how we're 46:30 feeling trying to be attuned to i'm getting more stressed reading about all the supposed great things that 46:37 happen to my friends and nothing negative is happening to them because we overshare positive compared to negative 46:43 maybe i should limit this um i i now see limiters on my iphone saying you know 46:49 maybe you've watched too much x or y it's like okay you're right you're right thank you um and we can 46:54 hope that technology um can be a partner in this but really being more attuned to how 46:59 you're feeling in certain contexts may hopefully be an impetus to taking 47:06 more agency i don't know no i'm really glad that you brought up our colleague ethan cross because just recently i 47:13 recommend it to my students over the holiday period they need to read his new book it's called chatter and it's 47:18 damping down this chatter that is going on continuously in your brain and that 47:24 social media is in fact influencing our well-being and we need 47:29 to change that we need to take control of our emotions in a way that we 47:36 go more towards the positive and damp down some of the chatter yeah he does great work and now 47:43 of course we pull from his research in this as well he's an amazing scholar good call i i think this actually is a perfect 47:49 segue into the next uh section we wanted to talk about how the world has changed for students and 47:55 teachers during this pandemic and i want to be mindful of the time we are uh at a 48:00 two or three minute warning here so i guess the question is you know how has the world change for students and 48:06 teachers and or maybe how can we teach this in schools 48:12 well i'll just say that as teachers we need to be 48:18 far more socially emotionally intelligent to be able to read what's going on in the 48:25 classroom because everybody is not ready to be there yet we've been separated 48:31 from other people it's a little uncomfortable so we have to notice what's going on in the classroom whether 48:39 that's on zoom in the classroom or in real life i think that it is upon us 48:46 to help our students to come home again there's interesting work showing that when you are off technology you are 48:54 become better able to understand other people you become more tuned it's almost like a muscle that can experience some atrophy 49:00 and so when people are coming back in person we're seeing this but there's also a lot of complexity in people's 49:05 lives um whether it's it's a reality perception or a combination of the two 49:11 and it has been unbelievably exhausting for not just teachers and not just students nurses anyone who has to 49:18 who gets to work in very public social context where others may be able to have been 49:25 sort of working in place it's very exhausting and so the final thing i can say about this or the only 49:30 thing you can really point out is being attuned to these emotional landscapes is critical understanding when there is no 49:36 more learning happening here we need to pause and maybe reflect and maybe let what has been taught seep 49:43 in and collectively build the capacity to share where people 49:49 where we are uh am i at a moment where i need a time out am i a time where no i'm hungry for 49:54 more don't give me a time out i'm very energetic and i'm present and this is a rare moment in my day 50:00 i'm here let's go and that attunement can allow us to better calibrate the 50:06 tenor and tempo of the situation and don't exclude don't exclude the 50:11 utilization of music and art throughout our lives and in the 50:17 classroom as long as it's good music 50:23 i think that's all we have time for today and i'd really like to thank you both again for joining us it was it was 50:28 very fascinating to learn about how improving and using our own emotional intelligence can have such a positive 50:34 impact on ourselves and those around us both in the workplace at home and also at school and to all of you thank you so 50:41 much for joining us today and submitting your questions to learn more about the upcoming move series events please visit 50:47 michigan online um or follow us on any major social media platform 50:53 if emotional intelligence was especially interesting to you be sure to watch out for sherry and jeffrey's upcoming course 50:59 emotional intelligence cultivating immensely human interactions which is coming to michigan online in early 2022 51:06 as well as leading people in teams featuring sherry alexander you'll be able to find both on our landing page 51:12 and while you're there you might also want to check out some of our other great courses listed as well again thank you for coming and have a wonderful day 51:20 bye bye everyone 51:26 [Music] 51:43