How to Empower... Emotional Intelligence: Helpful or Harmful?

Transcript

Katy Bennett: Hello and welcome to another episode of the How To Empower Podcast Series. On today's episode we're joined by guest Dr Ali Budjanovcanin, Reader of Work Psychology at King’s Business School. Hi Ali.

Ali Budjanovcanin: Hello.

Katy: And Leo Johnson, special adviser at PwC and lecturer on the Oxford Masters in Sustainability, Enterprise and Environment.

Thank you both for joining us today. Today we'll be exploring the topic of Emotional Intelligence and its importance in leadership. Emotional Intelligence is an important concept in the world of business, linked to high performance and transformative leadership. But it’s a concept that's often misunderstood. So, as I mentioned, I think a lot of people have heard the term emotional intelligence. It comes up a lot: be an emotionally intelligent leader, think about this. But what does it actually mean? Ali, let’s start with you.

Ali: Absolutely. So emotional intelligence is part of our psychological makeup. So it sits alongside things like personality and our IQ but it's distinct from those things. And it's a set of emotional and social skills and abilities that we have that help us navigate challenges in life, help us navigate interpersonal connections and generally be more adept at doing things in life. So yeah it's a set of skills and abilities.

Katy: Leo?

Leo Johnson: I think we are kind of mixed in our emotional intelligence.

Katy: Okay.

Leo: And I think we use our own emotional intelligence against ourselves sometimes. And let me throw out what I mean by this. There's a great article in the American Journal of Neuroscience where it looks at the brains of 40 psychopaths in the Wisconsin prison system who've got massively pumped up amygdalas and very little going on in the prefrontal cortex. In other words what they're not doing is using their emotional intelligence with the prefrontal cortex to cool themselves down and say these threats are not real. What we as leaders are often doing when confronted with the threats of climate change, of GenAI, of transformation, is we respond to that threat that we need to respond to by motivated cognition, by these devious feats of emotional intelligence, where we come up with generally opt-out clauses for ourselves, where we come up with ‘Oh, on climate change, I don't need to do anything because Elon Musk is going to sort it out’, which is the technologist's solution. Or ‘I don't need to do anything because it's too late anyway’, which is the catastrophist, emotionally intelligent voice cooling themselves off. Or ‘I don't need to do anything because I already wash my socks on low temperature’, which is the performative activist using their own emotional intelligence to justify inaction. So we need to be less emotionally intelligent about ourselves or at least super intelligent and see how we are deceiving ourselves. But we also, I think, need to be much more intelligent with each other emotionally. And we need to look at these leaders who are sabotaging the changes we want to make and we need to find a way to get them to understand their resistance and find a way through it. If we want to lead with change, if we really want to lead with emotional intelligence we’ve got to be ruthless with understanding our own inaction and extremely insightful I think with other people.

Ali: And yeah, I’d argue it goes the other way as well where, yes, we are potentially deceiving ourselves but I think on the other end of the scale there's a lot of people who are succumbing to their emotion in the face of all of these challenges and perhaps responding to them in a way that's not super constructive. So I agree with you that we do need to completely understand what's going on within ourselves. But also, I think, it's not just about understanding. It's also then about contextual intelligence: ‘what's going on here and what do I need to do to respond to this intelligently?’ To use your phrase. And I think for me that's the skill of emotional intelligence. ‘Where do I dial up on certain things? Where do I dial down?’ And if I'm a leader and I need to bring people along with me I have to be able to see that to be able to then say ‘okay, this is what I need to do in that situation.’ So I think it's the skill of understanding but then also the skill of leveraging one way or another.

Leo: I love what you're saying because for me what that speaks to is the phenomenon of polarisation. Which you're seeing across societies but I think in the workplace as well. And if you take the Net Zero agenda as an example, where suddenly you've got this anti-Net Zero anti-woke backlash. And you see within organisations ‘yeah forget that. We're going to cut these costs.’ You've got real potential I think for the same emotional intelligence defence mechanisms, which the psychologists call motivated cognition, to create polarisation. So if my form of motivated cognition as a defence mechanism is, to say, be sceptical: ‘yeah I'm not really sure this is a real thing. Oh yeah, get on. Come on. It's just weather.’ And if yours is to say ‘actually what we need is radical systems change of an impossible variety’, then the two of us are going to polarise. And we are going to inflame each other. And we're also actually going to destroy our ability to work together as a team, reduce collective efficacy and make it pretty damn nigh impossible to implement anything.

Ali: Yeah. But I think you're throwing a little bit here into the dark side of emotional intelligence where people are deliberately manipulating emotions in order to really push an agenda.

Leo: I think a lot of it's unconscious.

Ali: Okay, yeah. There's some of it that's conscious. There was a really nice study that was done on Anita Roddick from The Body Shop where she actually admitted to sort of using emotions as a way to galvanise people, so bringing tears to meetings to galvanise her team members to actually really head down, get on with the fundraising, support this project. And I guess it's that, where does it stray into the dark side? Where does it stray into manipulation? Which I think is really interesting because at that point I think then the polarisation becomes really problematic as we're pushing in the opposite directions at extremes.

Leo:. It varies in the manipulation. So we're doing this study at the moment with Oxford which we've been working on for the last 18 months, and we're launching a survey of 6,000 people where we're looking at mapping what are the specific kinds of manoeuvres people make to get out of the need to change. Across climate, across Generative AI as well. And we're trying to see if there are sort of patterns where the person who says they're a catastrophist or they produce catastrophist defences, does that correlate to underlying psychological mechanisms, for example, learned helplessness.

Ali: Yeah.

Leo: And do you see someone who acts as a catastrophist across multiple threat domains: climate change, Generative AI, you name it? At which point? Then you have a different type of conversation with the leader which is much more about deeper things to do with them than the issue.

Ali: I think that takes you into the area of whether or not actually it is malleable. Can we start to work with people in terms of the cognitive elements that they attach to emotions? Because if I'm a catastrophiser, I feel an emotion and I go to an extreme. Everything's wrong, pervasively thinking everything's going to fall apart. How do you start to work with those people to become themselves a little bit more emotionally intelligent and not always opt for the extreme end of panic? I think probably that's where leadership now has to do a bit more work in terms of focusing on how do you work with these people to try and start moving away from those extreme ends.

Katy: So I'm feeling a little bit better that I said I didn't know what emotional intelligence was because clearly it is a much more complicated question than I thought and not everyone perfectly agrees on what it is or where we should be thinking. And perhaps it's also not always a positive from the sound of it, Leo, that it can trigger slightly more complex or even nefarious behaviours.

Leo: I was kind of trying to be profound. [laughing] You know obviously we got to be emotionally intelligent. I'm just saying we can be cleverer than we realise with ourselves and we can trap ourselves. You know that great line from Jung about the unconscious has autonomy and it is autonomous insofar as it is unconscious. It's the stuff we're not aware of that traps us.

Katy: Now I was interested, Ali, you talked about it as a skill. Now I think of skills as something you can potentially learn.

Ali: Yeah.

Katy: I'm not good at all of them by any means. I don't think I can ever learn to knit. I have tried. [laughing] But emotional intelligence, is that something you can learn?

Ali: So there's been debate in the literature around whether or not you can learn it. Originally we looked at it as a sort of trait and then a different set of people looked at it as a set of abilities. We have something now, which I subscribe to, which is what's called the mixed model of emotional intelligence: that certain things are more innate but that we can actually build on those, we can engage in a set of learning that helps us start to develop things like emotional self awareness or our self regard, things like that. I would also argue that we can learn certain skills, like for example, reflective practice, which we would always encourage leaders to do, which is everybody says ‘do you reflect?’ everybody says ‘yes of course I reflect.’ But going beyond thinking about what happened during the day in the shower or while you're having a run, it's that really learning from, deliberately learning from experiences that helps us to build that emotional self awareness. So ‘what is this that I'm feeling? How does that present in my body? What are the cognitive attachments I put to that?’ As we start to learn those things about ourselves, what we can start to do is read those as signals, and in a situation where perhaps we're becoming, you know, hijacked by our amygdala, we can actually step in and start to learn how to plan ahead for certain interactions where we know particular emotions might be salient for us. So I think there are a set of skills there that you can learn around emotional intelligence and that's just one example.

Katy: Yeah. Do you agree?

Leo: Yeah. And I think the other thing we can do is this extraordinary thing which is actually listening to someone else. I mean really deep listening where you let someone else say what is genuinely going through them. And that for me, if there's one thing a leader could do, is find their people that they're with, whatever level, and just have a chance to properly get down in the pit and listen to what's really going on with them. And in that process you may just start also to understand how you can motivate that person and what really fills them with joy and hope and love. If you can manage to align what you want to do as a leader with that thing you've discovered they're really emotional about, then you've got a mission based team. Then you can actually start to relax and enjoy yourself too.

Katy: Apologies, I'm moving us on because I know that our listeners will be quite interested in this concept of learning emotional intelligence and why that might be helpful to them as a leader. And I'm mindful that the workplace today, or I guess the world today, is not just about being in work, it’s very different. And whether that's the catastrophes to come, as Leo has motivated us, [laughing] reminded us, or just the way we're expected to interact with others virtually with much more complex needs and expectations, has the importance of emotional intelligence as a leader changed do you think?

Ali: I wouldn't say it's necessarily changed. I’d say we're more cognisant of it. You know arguably we probably live in times that feel more turbulent now, and emotional intelligence then really comes into its own because that's where all of the responses we have in life are mediated by emotions. And so if we can understand that and we live in a world that does feel more challenging, then emotions can be ever present. But I would argue that it's always been important wherever you've got people, wherever you've got emotional responses, emotional intelligence becomes important. I just don't think we've actually understood it necessarily as well as we do now. And to make teams work, again it's something that's super important and we've had teams for as long as we've had an industrialised society.

Leo: I would agree with that. In a moment of disruption, that's when you see in organisations- you see institutional threat, rigidity come in. That's when the elbows get really sharp. That's when centralisation goes up, bureaucracy goes up, risk aversion goes up. Innovation budget goes down and all the things you need to transform and innovate become really scarce. And the risk is you get this sort of transformation doom loop right at the moment where you need to transform. And if you can find a leader who can just relax people and paint a vision and somehow close down the stress response system - which is denial - and get people to buy into that vision because they can listen, because they can understand where people are going from, because they've also got a strategic lens where they can see this is the vision that we can align around, then you can start to make progress. But I think it does take immense skill and understanding from a leader to do that.

Ali: Also, take space. And this is something when I speak to all of the leaders that I work with. This is the one thing. They have this intention to find the time to do that but that's the bit that gets crowded out often. And so it's a short term gain for sort of you know long term loss. If you can spend that time being empathetic to what your team members are, what drives them, that can galvanise people behind you.

Leo: And I think there’s sort of physical space in the day. There's emotional space to be present enough to listen to someone else. Then I think it's almost like ideological space as well, because right when these organisations are there confronting disruption, probably their numbers aren't looking very good. And when the numbers aren't looking good, you get a lot of pressure and the immediate thing you do is think ‘what can I do to get those numbers up a little bit?’ Which does mean those cost cuts, which does mean shaving off those budget areas which seem like they're discretionary but the risk is, you get this better before worse syndrome, where you go up for six months, for a year. But what you've done is you've underinvested in the capabilities that you need to push the next wave forward. Suddenly you find you're kind of left without an avenue to explore.

Katy: So I mean it sounds like you need some extraordinary skills to be a great emotionally intelligent leader but there are also some kind of intrinsic external factors there, that space, whether that's psychological or physical, to allow those skills to come to the fore. To me that sounds like very few people will really be able to crack and release the full power of emotional intelligence in leadership. If that's the case then presumably most of us, certainly myself included, may aim and strive to be there, but often fail. How can we learn from those failures?

Ali: Again I think it comes back to having the space to learn from those failures. Going back to my point earlier, something we don't do enough of is deliberate reflective practice. So taking the time to look backwards to say what happened and why and what was the role of my emotional response or others and to then really extract the learning from that to then think forward and say then how are we going to take this data and think about how we go into the next thing. I think failure is, what was it James Joyce said? It's a portal for learning. But it's only a portal for learning if we actually sit down and take the learning out, which often we just don't do. So to my mind again it's imperative for leaders to create that space within their own teams, for themselves, within organisations, to start saying okay what have we taken from this?

Leo: I love that James Joyce quote. Jung has a quote on failure which is that failure is a god. It's the god because it takes you off whatever track you were on, and helps unlock another opportunity for you to explore that might really align with what your soul is calling for. And you've got to look at that failure and see what part did you play in manufacturing that failure. And the learning that is possible from that, invites you to some dark places around what your real pathologies are as a leader. I think go there. Go there. How have you got it wrong and why? What are these things that are driving you? But your question about how can anyone pull this off. I think no one can. I think there is no transformative leader. There is only a transformative team. There is only this combination of people who can collectively come up with the agency that's required to make some of these changes happen. And I think part of the role of the leader is to listen enough and identify that difference and divergence enough to assemble the mishmash of capabilities that's required, from the catalyst who can come up with a beautiful but unformed idea, to the sustaining innovator who can take it and think this is the product market fit we need, this is how you really make it work for clients, to the workhorses who will go and scale it up and really drive it out into the market, to the silent rebels who will look at that and think ‘yeah but you're totally missing the point.’ This is what's really exciting and kicks you forward to the next wave of growth. So the amazing leader creates this coalition. I know it's election time. So it creates this coalition of very different groups who can collectively come up with I think the mechanisms for change.

Ali: And I think you're absolutely right. These differences create value. I think the emotional intelligence piece is the lubricant that really sort of starts to help us bring out that value. And that's where the Excellent Leader knows how to leverage that.

Katy: So the Excellent Leader is one who creates an excellent team. Okay. And Ali, I know you've done a lot of work around occupational regret and I'd really love to just understand a little bit more about that if that's okay?

Ali: Yeah absolutely. So a lot of my research has been looking at how we come to regret decisions that we've made in relation to the occupations that we've chosen and the responses to that. And when we think about emotional intelligence obviously this is a really kind of nice tool we can use to really respond to regret in a constructive way. Often people look at regret and see it as something negative but actually again, in terms of portals for learning and discovery, regret can tell us something. And to your point, Leo, about the idea around really trying to discover what it is that drives us, our mission, our purpose. Often that's where the mismatch is. We end up in occupations, careers, teams, organisations that aren't a good fit for our values, for who we really think we are. However the problem is is when we start to make those decisions about who we think we're going to be we're like 14, 15, 16-years-old making decisions about GCSEs and A levels and then we end up 20, 30 years down the line finding out that actually I'd much rather be working for an organisation that cares about the environment not a big profit making entity or whatever it is. So I think yeah emotional intelligence can be a really useful tool for addressing some of those types of challenges.

Leo: You're making me think of the great British psychologist Wilfred Bion who says - this is maybe a bit dark.

Ali: It feels like everything is a bit dark Leo! I’m not sure about this. [laughing]

Leo: [laughing] It’s nothing to do with work. Work is this place that you go to in order to rediscover these archetypes of, generally, family members you've battled with in the past, battled with and generally lost, in the form of aggressive siblings, of cousins, of absent mothers, of overbearing fathers and you go to work to find these archetypes. And if they're not totally there you kind of make them into that. And then you refight the same battle with them, generally with the same tactics, generally losing. And you re-traumatise yourself. And then you retire. And then you get sick. And then you die. And that's life. And by the way you die because you get sick, because when you retire what you've lost is the site where you had hope. Illusory hope. But the hope that you would actually manage to address these issues. So work is fundamentally this thing where we're engaged in a completely separate unconscious activity and failing at it.

Katy: So you heard it here first. You're working in the vain search of hope and then you die. [laughing]

Leo: Well pretty much. [laughing] Unless you have some emotional intelligence and you can figure out that's what you're doing. And you're having a completely rubbish relationship with your boss because you are projecting a whole load of other baggage onto them. And you could actually look at it, hold yourself up into the light, see what you're doing and completely transform that relationship.

Ali: But these are the table stakes I think for emotional intelligence is being willing to actually introspect and look at that dark side which, you know, the people I interview for regret, they're great because they sit there and talk about their regrets. They cry. [laughing] But they’re a small subset of the population who will look in the other direction and retire and die.

Leo: [laughing] That's why to create that culture of psychological safety where you can have these conversations where someone can say ‘I hate my job right now.’ That's incredibly valuable because then you can go down and understand what's going on. What is the dynamic that's causing you the pain? What would unlock it? What would actually make this place a place of joy for you?

Ali: That's a really great point. I guess the issue is, and I'm doing some research on this at the moment, on concealed regret in the workplace, is that we carry this baggage around. We probably have arguments with our boss who we're projecting on as our dad, whatever it is, but we conceal it. And so there's this culture of concealment which most organisations won't welcome.

Leo: Toxic positivity!

Ali: Yeah. Yeah. There is a place for positivity but you're right. It goes to an extreme.

Leo: I'm not saying we have toxic negativity; I’m saying we should have real positivity. [laughing]

Ali: You know we take positivity to the extreme. And again that's also a problem if we go too much the other way.

Katy: And I think you've touched on what I was about to ask - I'm sure some people listening were going to ask - to say it would be great that I could take this time to reflect and introspect and realise that I think of my boss as my dad. But I'm trying to imagine how he would react if I went and told him that. And there's sort of a piece of this that will work really well if you're in an organisation with leaders who are also doing that introspection and you can have those conversations. But if you aren't in that place, if you are in a culture how do you manage that? How do you kind of deal with that tension?

Ali: Well first I wouldn't go and tell my boss that I'm projecting that's my dad. That's my advice to anyone.

Katy: Good tip!

Leo: Please, I tried it and it didn't work. [laughing]

Ali: We can unpack that story later. [laughing] I mean the onus is on you as an individual. I don't think we can ask our leaders, our organisations to be our therapist. Sure. But I do think that if we're willing to take that step we can do the work ourselves outside of the office and start to understand where we're playing out some of those earlier life experiences in the work that we're doing.

Leo: [laughing] It's a tough one.

Ali: Don't bring it to the workplace. Don't bring it to the office. [laughing]

Leo: It's on you to do the hard work. Confronting your own… your own mad, which we've all got, and looking at it as the gold. That's the stuff. That's the stuff that makes you, you.

Ali: The mad holds the secrets.

Leo: Yeah. That's the wonder stuff. The rest is boring. The rest is commodity. The rest is front. So what's the real stuff? What's the stuff that triggers you? Where do you lose it? Why does it trigger you? What's going on? You go there and that's where you'll have the fun.

Katy: I'm not sure if it sounds fun to me; I'm gonna be honest with you. [laughing] But let's move on from that. So I mean I think we've actually touched on a lot of this but you know why do you think so many leaders really struggle to demonstrate this emotional intelligence when they're in the workplace even if they've managed to do that hard work at home.

Leo: There's just so much day-to-day stuff. Just stuff. We all work so much and have so many meetings. And so much sustaining innovation that's not about really addressing the fundamentals.

Ali: Yeah you talked about Wilfred Bion earlier on, but he talks about the different tasks that we have. We have the primary task which is, you know, the work that we're there to do. But really what's going on is the other stuff that sort of underlays that, the group dynamic, all of that. And that's a whole other day job. We're being asked to do more with less constantly. So if I need to become more emotionally intelligent in the workplace, I've got to find the time to do that. You know it takes an investment of my time. So I don't think necessarily it's a malicious thing. I think it's more just, we work in a very fast paced world now. So finding a time to do that work can be a struggle.

Katy: And do you think - and this is me just kind of positing a thought - do you think that's partly because that work to gain emotional intelligence isn't itself valued perhaps?

Ali: I think it's valued but I don't think people realise that's what's going on if you know I mean. You know the difference between a leader that you have who is brilliant and one that you have that isn't brilliant. But you might necessarily be able to quantify the fact that it's emotional intelligence. So I think until we can actually have a look at it and say ‘this is what's going on here, it's about that emotional intelligence’, we probably won't value it in the way that we should. And to my mind, it's as important as some of the other things that leaders have around technical expertise or experience.

Leo: Can I introduce another person who, along with Bion, who is wonderful, and Jung, who is extraordinary, both of these as people to read up on. Can I recommend an 89 page book by a theologian from the 60s called Martin Buber?

Katy: I don't know, is it going to be even more depressing than the last one? [laughing]

Leo: No! It’s incredibly upbeat! [laughing] There's only 89 pages. He wrote this book I and Thou which for me should be the Bible for leaders. And he basically said there's two ways of living in the world. There's ‘I and It’ where there's you and there's people and things that can help you with your goals, those kinds of instruments. Then there's ‘I and Thou’ where you recognise the awesomeness of people and places around you. And what Buber says is if you don't have the capacity to recognise the ‘Thou’ in the other, your own ‘I’ becomes an ‘It’. But beyond that, that recognition of the awesomeness of the other, that for him is ‘The Sublime’. ‘The Sublime’ is this inter-relational ability of that moment of connection between two people. It's not some vertical relationship. It's a horizontal thing between you. If you as a leader or as a member of a family or as a friend, can manage to clear away the wreckage of your day-to-day obligations, free yourself from it to be present enough from the prison of your own ego to be actually there, fully absorbed in the face, the eyes of someone else. And that is ‘The Sublime’. And that gives you a relationship with someone else that's a very different thing.

Katy: I don't even know where to go from there. Thank you. So circling back I suppose to well how can someone listening become more emotionally intelligent? It sounds like you talked a lot about the practices of emotional intelligence: reflection, space to be introspective and consider yourself and how that impacts your behaviour. Where does self awareness fit into that conversation?

Ali: I think it's the cornerstone of emotional intelligence. Having sort of self awareness, emotional self awareness, it's a bit like a thermostat that tells you what you need to do in terms of the heating. If you don't understand what's going on, you can't then act on it. So I think that has to be the first step which involves maybe facing some things that don't feel comfortable. But then beyond that I think you can start to learn very practical skills. You mentioned active listening for empathy, things like stress tolerance, things like understanding what your triggers are and really systematically unpacking, unpacking yourself and your responses.

Leo: You could try out volunteering at the Samaritans where you're just listening. Your only job is just to listen and to be there for someone else and be present. And the training for that is extraordinarily humbling.

Katy: Well I think you've answered the next question I was going to ask, which is if you wanted to start this journey, if you wanted to take an active step to become more emotionally intelligent to kind of hone those skills, what could you do? Ali, is there anything else you would suggest?

Ali: I mean obviously I would suggest that they come on my 'Leading with EQ’ programme!

Katy: Of course. [laughing]

Ali: Beyond that, I think just finding that space - things like journaling for example, where you actually start to really do that deliberate introspection. I think that would be a really positive first step. Also just getting feedback from people. I don't think we do that often enough. Again, for reasons of being busy and or not wishing to face that feedback. So those are very kind of practical steps you could take.

Leo: I would go to your partner, Grandma, kids, friends and ask them ‘what am I like as a listener?’

Katy: So go. Ask your family if you can listen, get some feedback, go on a great course and take a step. It sounds like to kind of take some time for yourself and to reflect on who you are. Now we are drawing to a close and we always like to finish this podcast with one question which is what makes you feel empowered? Would anyone like to go first?

Ali: I think for me it's that I know I have the ability to respond rather than react, that I do have some control over how I present myself in the world. And I think when you discover emotional intelligence, to Leo's point about being able to connect with people, that's super empowering being able to sort of really draw on those connections. So there are two answers to your one question.

Leo: Something for me about just like feeling that you're sort of facing in the right direction.

Katy: Are we? [laughing]

Leo: That there is this alignment between what the world's wanting and what your soul is calling out for and what you're doing. If you've got those three things lined up then yeah you absolutely feel the power surging through you. And you don't feel sort of in power because look at me how powerful I am. You just feel like you're lined up. You're lined up with the world.

Katy: Thank you. Well that brings us to the close of today's podcast. Thank you Ali and Leo for a brilliant conversation. Yeah I certainly found it both interesting but I think a moment for reflection, which is exactly what we're calling for in this conversation. So thank you both for joining us today.