Emotional Intelligence Leadership

Natasha Velikoselkly, Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, gives a thrilling presentation on using emotional intelligence to portray leadership.

Video Transcript

Natasha Velikoselskiy: So you want the term pipeline and you want to have leadership available to your organization continuously, not just currently but also in the future. And now let’s look at what leadership looks like. A lot of the time, leadership is viewed in terms of these 2 aspects, the tasks and the people. So you can probably recall from your career and interacting with leaders and maybe being a leader that gravitates to one or the other that people tend to either focus largely on the task or results, deliver, deliver, deliver, and then you have a leader who is more cognizant about get results through people and they focus on people. Have you heard this, if you take care of the people the people take care of the results? So there is that type. Now any thoughts on where you want to be on that–in that balance? Tasks or people? Well, let me ask you this question. Do you think task is more important or people are more important? And I’m not saying if you choose one then the other one doesn’t matter. I’m saying what is your natural tendency? Do you go more and think about the task or do you go and think about your team that you work with? So task, people? Task? Is anyone here getting results? Okay, task. Okay, people? Okay. So we all think people are really important. Okay. Interestingly enough. You’re all right and research confirms that right now in terms of leadership people are becoming increasingly important and the focus is right because we used to live in the command and control era. And what it meant is just a few decades ago in this country, if your boss said something you want and did it and you didn’t question much and you didn’t challenge much, the hierarchical system was there, so the command and control was there. What’s happening to the system now? Well, were not as dependent on our boss anymore. We don’t anticipate to report to them for 40 years straight.

They’re not the sole decider of our fate and career. They’re not the sole source of information anymore because we have information available to us from other sources. So effectively the command and control era is over. So modern leadership is no longer about dominance, it’s about persuasion. And as a leader, it’s really difficult to get everyone’s buy in versus compliance. You probably all have seen that play out in organizations many times. So what does it take to be a persuasive leader as oppose to dominating which sometimes our positions allow us to do as well? What is persuasion about? What skills do we need to be a persuasive leader? Listening. Yup. What else?

Male Speaker: Well, I just want to make a comment on that, because you have to win their hearts before you go in their minds.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Win their hearts.

Male Speaker: And a way to do that, I think, is listening skills–I think the way you do that to win their hearts before you win their minds is with listening, finding out what’s important to them and make sure they understand the direction you need to go. If you can get everybody pulling in the same direction, you’re going to be a lot more successful and but you have to listen to them to what they think. What I find is that there are very, very intelligent people at every levels of our organization and I think what really good leaders do is they listen to everybody. And they bring that intelligence from the ground level all the way up to the top.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: And that is so important because what happens there is as a leader I am making my people feel important and people tend to like that and appreciate that, right? Nobody likes to be discounted so by listening to them I give value to their opinion and I let them know that I am not smarter than them which in the command and control era, it was perfectly acceptable. The boss is the smartest person in the room, right? So right now, have you met people who tried to do that now? Well, I have. Have you not? I am the boss, I know everything. I’m supposed to know everything and they carry the weight of the world in their shoulders because it’s really tough right now to be the smartest person in the room. Because everybody is pretty smart, right? So thank you for that. Validating people is really crucial. Okay. So what other skills? Listening, understanding what people want, what else? Yes?

Male Speaker: Beyond the listening is once you listen when the opportunity presents itself and when it’s appropriate is if they are echoing concerns or something that’s important to them to be able to represent them, you know, upper and I think that shows you’re committed to them, too, and you’re willing to take some bullets for them.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Oh, take some bullets for them. Right. So you go to bat for them, you take bullets for them, you got their back. Have you heard that? And then they get your back, right? You don’t fight for your boss if they don’t fight for you. So it’s a mutual commitment to be together and to be committed to one another, developmentally, professionally, right? What else?

Male Speaker: Just trust each other as well.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Trust, yes. Yeah. So trust, yes. Trust is key. That’s one of the key things, right? Yup. What else?

Male Speaker: Vision and strategy.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Vision and strategy. Everybody heard that? Vision and strategy, right? I want to know that my boss has a plan, right? What else, Sandra?

Sandra: Kind of, I guess, follows that, showing them how to be successful.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Right. And that ties in with the vision–do you have a vision for my development here, right? Do you think about where I’m going in my career? Do you support me on that? Yup. Absolutely. A lot of what we we’re talking about goes back basically to soft skills. The so called soft skills and to honestly and they think you’re alluded to that before. The resources aren’t allocated to developing soft skills because we really focused on business acumen, business analytics, business strategy. Are the numbers adding up? Am I looking at the spreadsheets right? Am I operating my analytics in the right way? And then how much support do we really get developing our people skills? Not that much. And in terms of people skills, some of the buzz words right now are emotional intelligence. What is emotional intelligence? Anyone has ideas of how you view it? Or if you’ve seen it in action? What does it mean to be emotionally intelligent? Or have you seen a person be emotionally unintelligent in a work setting? Yes. I see some nods. So we do know what it is and we know what when it’s lacking, right? A really good way to look at it from the developmental perspective for one selves and for those that we mentor or manage is in the 2x2 quadrants. So the first column there is self and everything related to self. The second column is others or the outside world. The top line is awareness or knowing or understanding something and the second line is action or actually doing something about it. So if you look at the top left quadrant, self-awareness is really the corner stone of emotional intelligence and what does it mean? If I am a self-aware person I understand how I am. Have you seen a person get angry and not notice that they’re getting angry? Have you seen that? I am not angry. Right? I am just saying. I’m being perfectly rational, right? So that’s lack of self-awareness. I don’t know that I am getting angry. I don’t know that I am getting annoyed with something. I don’t know that I am starting to be emotionally reactive or responsive to something. Now how difficult is self-awareness to have? Is it easy or difficult? Easy. You don’t think it’s easy? No? Difficult? Difficult. Okay. Extremely difficult and I’ll tell you why. It’s extremely difficult because we grow up with stories of ourselves and we know how we are. We want to be wonderful. We don’t want to be self-aware. Because self-awareness may mean that I’m not perfect. I don’t want to be imperfect because I work hard to be perfect. I want to be awesome. I don’t want to be self-aware. So that’s part of it and the second part is we don’t know how other people may view us which is where social awareness comes in. So I may be thinking one thing, other people looking at me maybe thinking something else. And just to bring this to life think about American Idol. Anyone is watching that or has watched–have you seen American Idol? Yes? So what do you think? Those people who come in and sing their heart out and they think they are phenomenal and they think they are the super talented singers with God’s gift of the voice and they get made fun of. And you go, how in the world do they not know that they’re not great? Have you seen that? Why does it happen? Why do they come on the show? If they’re not great singers, how do they end up on the show? They think they’re great. They believe they’re great, right? And that’s heartbreaking. And what happens if people tell them that they’re not great? Do they believe it right away? No. They resent it. Oh, you’re so wrong. Oh, I had my off day. Oh, I’m actually awesome, it just wasn’t the right song for me. So we’re very resistant to feedback and even though people say I take feedback, we don’t want feedback that we don’t believe and that’s very–and that’s easy to observe on American Idol. It’s harder to observe it in ourselves because that resistance is very natural and that happens without us realizing it sometimes. So let’s talk a little bit about self-management. Let’s say I know how I am and they want to do something about it. Is that easy? So I know I get angry very easily. How easy is it for me to tone it down and to not–and to be calmer in the business environment? Yes.

It’s very hard because we are used to patterns. We fall into them naturally. And I’ll tell you research shows that we have a one and two chance of changing our behavior even with self-awareness. So I know how I am. It’s no secret. I know that I am a little difficult sometimes. I can only do something about it 50% of the time with the best try, right? Now if I don’t know how I am, what percent of the time am I bound to get it right? Zero, right? So 50% is good odds in this case and as far as social awareness, if I am a self-aware person I know how I am. I have a 38% chance of having social awareness or understanding how I have an impact on other people, how other people receive me. Can you imagine? 38%. I know who I am. I know precisely who I am. I can only guess right less than every other time what other people think of me. Is that a little scary as a leader? Right. My team loves me. Don’t you think? Don’t you see that happening a lot of the time? My team loves me. They have my back, they–we don’t know that. You can never know that. So it’s humbling and good to know that even when you know exactly who you are interacting with people can be very tricky and they don’t always–those interactions aren’t straight forward which is why soft skills are so crucial and so difficult. About the importance of self-awareness, so what happens when a person or a leader particularly has it? They seek feedback in multiple forms and I haven’t met a whole lot of leaders who are proactive about seeking feedback. Because where do you seek feedback? You don’t necessarily go to your team and say, hey, team, what do you think about me? But those who are successful they tend to seek feedback in multiple forms. So I understand people reacting to them. They understand what happens in their meetings and they tend to take it and accept it. Self-aware people tend to be more successful than those who are not self-aware and they tend to act on the feedback. So if I know something is not clicking with my team, I am bound to change it even if I am resistant to it. Even if I find it difficult or I don’t even see the point. I will still try. If I don’t have self-awareness I am missing feedback messages. So people try to tell me something and they don’t take it and sometimes people not telling me stuff also is feedback but I miss those messages completely because I don’t want to–I don’t want to have any impact on my own image of myself, right?

We’re very protective of our image of ourselves. And we ignore feedback that we receive we’re slow to change overtime but we don’t change at all and what happens to those leaders a lot of the time, they top out or derail and what does it mean they derail? Well they stop being effective with their teams, with people around them, with fellow, with their peers and so the higher they go up the ladder, the more they face the possibility of derailing and topping out. So let’s look now into how those leadership competencies such as self-awareness, emotional intelligence and people skills, how they play out in matrix organizations? This is a very long definition of a matrix organization, I will let you read through it just for a moment. And so the first point of the definition is we have teams that report vertically but we are also having those same people in the teams that go laterally. The second point is I report to my boss but that I’m also accountable for some project or assignments to some–to a peer of mine or potentially someone in the different functional area. So what examples of matrix teams do you have? What can that be? Managed care. Okay. Say more.

Female Speaker: Well, in a managed care organization where the managed care professional doesn’t certainly report to the sales organization nor to the marketing organization. They report into finance typically. However, they need to work successfully across the board. What’s good for marketing is also good for sales because it’s all still part of the commercial team.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Absolutely. So they do have to collaborate cross functionally quite a bit. What else? What other examples? Any of you are a part of a core team of some kind? A project team driving innovation within your company or coming up with a new way to do something? Or sales ops when you’re developing a new data processing system, you get input from core team members and different stakeholders? Right? So how many of you in the room have been a member or are a member of a matrix team? Okay. So what comes with that? I’ll let you talk about it just for a moment. What comes with being part of the matrix team on top of your regular job? What is the number one challenge that you come across in that? And we’ll about 2 minutes to talk about that. So let’s start wrapping up our discussions and I am going to ask for some input. Can someone share with us what those challenges were that came up and were consistent at your tables? What’s difficult about working in the matrix? Well I’ll start here.

Male Speaker: Well, the biggest challenge that we find frequently particularly some serious kind of two heads if you will, the vertical and the horizontal is making sure that the people at those–the tops of those food chains are in alignment in terms of what the goals and objectives of whatever work product you’re going after because if they’re kind of approaching it from a different angle the team has a difficult time figuring out which master they should serve and it creates a lot of turbulence in arriving at a conclusion. So making sure that the top folks are focused on the same objective with the same work plan basically is very important.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: So alignment of leadership because our leadership now is spread, right? It’s not one person that’s directing us. It’s two. Okay. What else? What else is difficult? Yes?

Male Speaker: Because you’re all coming from different areas and it’s a pretty diverse group when you’re a part of the team and you’re all speaker on language and I think just trying to get everybody to speak a common language as a big challenge but it’s a little–lot of reward in it, too. So you learn a new language.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Right. So your background is different, right? You’re not easily convincing other people about your stuff because they sometimes don’t know what you’re talking about. So with your boss, you have shorthand. You can just say one word and they know what you’re talking about. In a group setting, you have to do a lot of background explanation of what you’re trying to accomplish and if you’re not a good influencer, those soft skills aren’t there, then it’s that much more difficult to accomplish anything and–yeah.

Female Speaker: So we talked a little bit about communication which came up in the two other responses as well as at the end of the year when you’re doing your performance review, who gives you that review? Is it the people in the matrix team or is it your direct manager who might not have had as much interaction on a project that might have been 6 months ago?

Natasha Velikoselskiy: And that is such an important point. So as a leader on the matrix team, an important consideration as how do you keep everyone informed right? Because they may or may not have the same understanding of what you do. They or may not see all of your accomplishments. So in addition to doing the work, you now have to worry about making sure that everyone sees the work you’re doing and that’s not always intuitive. Some people actually prefer to have their work speak for itself but how do you have your work speak for itself if nobody sees you in action? Especially the people who are writing your year-end evaluation, right? So a lot of extra thoughts going into it. So what other challenges do we have?

Female Speaker: It seems to me there are some functions that are maybe more concerned with the task than the people and I don’t mean that in a bad way because the task has to get done. I merely said something a minute ago when nobody voted for task but people who are very much operational wizards, you know, may not be inclined to spend very much time on the sort of more visionary on macro side, whereas, you know, I work for an agency and of course there is always a bit of tug of war between the account side and the creative side and who’s really getting the work done and I’m in strategic planning which is sort of, you know, nobody actually accounts for. So, you know, just people–it’s not just a common language. I think it’s also just the prejudices that you bring to the table based on what your core drivers are and what you need to get done to feel successful.

Natasha Velikoselskiy: Absolutely. That’s an important dichotomy there because if I am all task driven and I’m working with people who are all task driven and they have their task and I have mine, we’re not going to spend a lot time figuring out how we collaborate. We’re just going to pull each in our own direction to get our task done and even though I was really amazed at how many hands were up here with a focus on people over a task. I would almost argue that when all of us are put in a stressful environment where its project and task driven and we are accountable for results, no matter how much we want to think where people person we think about people first. You know what, we’re going to be accountable for results first and we’re going to be the same people who know that we have to take care of the people first. We do get pushed into that mode of results, results, results, so it happens in matrix teams a lot when we don’t take the time to build collaborations. When we don’t take time to reach out and make relationships with people. We come to the meeting to get the work done but we have no idea how another person operates or what they want or how they’re trying to work with us. That’s a very, very common issue, so thank you for bringing that up. So any other additional comments before we move on to potentially dealing with this or starting to think about how to be more effective as a leader in matrix teams? Anything else? All right. Then VUCA is a very common, common, common, common descriptor of current reality. Have you heard it before? Yes? No? No. Okay. So it’s common. I think it’s created by the millennials so it’s a young word and it’s a young phenomenon but it’s pervasive. VUCA describes our world as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous and every day VUCA is growing bigger and bigger. When you have matrix teams as part of the organization, VUCA gets out of control because now the ambiguity is not just on one team but it’s a cross different team so it’s progressively complicating your environment. So controlling VUCA needs to be a conscious effort on matrix teams. Clarity. What do we need to do? How do we need to do that? It’s a huge challenge.

And operating in a matrix brings up needs around support mechanism, organizational culture and behavior patterns. How do I behave in this scenario? How do I position myself in the matrix team? Who is in charge? What support mechanisms are available to me? All of that needs to be a thought which a lot of the time, we don’t have time to entertain.

So I want to share with you one helpful framework that is very easy checklist if you will of things to pay attention to in any task related environment. It’s called BART Analysis. And BART stands for boundaries, authority, roles and responsibilities and tasks. Shockingly, a lot of the time teams come together and they are extremely ambiguous around all of these 4 things. Who is in charge in the project? Well marketing is driving this part and sales is driving this part and sales training is chiming in here but who is the actual authority? Who makes the decision? That needs to be very clear. So the project manager role needs to be identified and clear to all involved. What are the boundaries actually is probably the initial question to be asked and boundaries are disrespected everywhere all the time. Boundaries meaning time, how much time are we going to be on this project? How much time are we going to be in this project meeting? What are the boundaries of our work together? Because how many times have you seen people go off on tangents? Because they don’t have any boundaries. This is not what we are talking about right now, people focus. We don’t have boundaries therefore we don’t focus. So unless we said boundaries or someone who facilitates the meeting doesn’t hold us accountable for boundaries. We’re bound to derail as a matrix group. So boundaries, authority, roles and responsibilities–how many times have you come in to the meeting and said to yourself, very quietly in your head, why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? Am I the only one who’s been there? I hope not because I see it happen quite a bit. You don’t have to admit it publicly but it happens because roles and responsibilities sometimes are an afterthought. Let’s pull this person in and that person in and that person in. But then when we pull them in, do we really know what they’re responsible for? So when you are in that position in a matrix team, even if you take charge of your own BART, and you understand your own boundaries, your own authority and your own role in the project, that’s going to make your life easier. If everybody involved knows that and you’re all actually on the same page, it’s a piece of cake. It’s never piece of cake but it’s a lot easier. And then task. Surprisingly, a lot of the matrix teams are not clear about what exactly they’re trying to accomplish. So what is the outcome and is everybody in the room absolutely clear about what the objectives are and Sam alluded to that before. Are the leaders aligned around objectives? What is the deliverable we’re working towards? So if there is one thing you take out of this session, BART Analysis could be that thing. Boundaries, authority, roles/responsibilities and task and the more people on the matrix team are clear about that, the more effective the team is bound to be.

One last thing I’ll leave you with, as developing leaders and leaders developing other leaders is learning to be a leader is a lifelong process and because we’ve talked some about soft skills and how difficult they are and because we’ve talked about how matrix teams actually increase the complexity and the challenge that falls on the leader and their soft skills, experience, feedback, and reflection are the 3 components that they are important to pay attention to. We tend to be very good as organizations in terms of experience, we throw people into experiences all the time, we promote them, we put on them on matrix teams, we give them assignments, we give them projects, so we’re good there. Feedback tends to be difficult. We don’t like giving negative feedback. A feedback generally has a negative connotation. If we do give feedback a lot of the time it sounds like good job buddy or you could do better there. And that’s not helpful because I have no clue what that means. What exactly could I do better? What did I do well? Good job buddy doesn’t tell me–and it’s a compliment, it’s not feedback. Compliments are great. Feedback is, Natasha, you were such a convincing presenter, all of us took 3 takeaways from the session and we’re going to implement them tomorrow, that’s feedback. That’s specific, right? That tells me something. And reflection is something that almost no one does because we have no time and yet that’s the one must have as a leadership developing person.

You have to take that experience, take that feedback and marry the two together and figure out what you’re going to do about it. So from every experience that you’re a part of as a leader, try to come up with one takeaway for you professionally and personally. What am I going to do? What am I going to continue doing, stop doing, start doing? Stop, start, continue is one the simple mechanisms of how you can continue your leadership development. So with that, I am going to let all of us go to lunch and I thank you so much for being here and participating and I’m looking forward to continuously staying in touch and being developing leaders together. Thank you, everybody.

[Applause]