0:00:09.3 Junior: Welcome back everyone, to The Leader Factor. I'm Junior, back with my co-host, Dr. Tim Clark, and today we're going to be talking about how mainstream EQ miss the mark.

0:00:19.0 Tim: Oh, they did.

0:00:19.8 Junior: They did. Big time.

0:00:22.5 Tim: And we can prove it.

0:00:23.1 Junior: We can prove it.

0:00:24.0 Tim: We're gonna do that.

0:00:24.0 Junior: We are. How are you?

0:00:25.8 Tim: Doing well, thank you.

0:00:27.8 Junior: Good. I'm excited for today's conversation. I think it's gonna be a good one. So we're gonna start off with a question. If emotional intelligence is the ability to interact effectively with other humans, do you think that belief and intent play a role?

0:00:46.3 Tim: How much time do I have to think about this?

0:00:49.0 Junior: Two seconds.

0:00:50.3 Tim: Yeah, this is baffling, or the fact that it's been neglected, it was...

0:01:00.5 Junior: For 50 years.

0:01:00.6 Tim: I still can't explain this. I still can't account for it.

0:01:03.8 Junior: The answer to that question should seem obvious, but it hasn't been accounted for, for really 50 years.

0:01:10.2 Tim: It's vocabulary time, Junior. I wanna introduce a word that I learned in academe years ago. Lacuna.

0:01:21.9 Junior: Matata.

0:01:22.0 Tim: No, close close.

0:01:23.5 Junior: I don't know. I don't know what that is.

0:01:25.6 Tim: Lacuna means a gap, or a hole. Something's missing. There's a lacuna in the research, which we can't explain, we can't account for, I know that's a funny word, but...

0:01:37.0 Junior: I literally never heard that word.

0:01:37.8 Tim: This is a big gap.

0:01:38.3 Junior: Yeah, there is.

0:01:38.7 Tim: And we've been going for all of these years, and we're finally saying, hello. We don't have this covered here.

0:01:50.6 Junior: Yeah. Well, the assumption is that in order to appropriately interact, we have to have appropriate intent and motivation, or at least those are variables in human interaction. I don't know how we could say that human interaction is void, intent and...

0:02:07.6 Tim: Motivation.

0:02:08.2 Junior: Motivation.

0:02:09.1 Tim: Yeah. How do you take those outta the equation?

0:02:09.2 Junior: I don't know how you do that. So in order to appropriately interact, we have to acknowledge those things. And in order to be an effective leader, we have to develop those things. And so at the end of the episode, we're gonna ask some questions. We're gonna give you a way to see if the title of today's episode, you actually care about people. And that's what intent and motivation is.

0:02:36.6 Tim: That's a pretty searching question, Junior.

0:02:38.1 Junior: It is.

0:02:38.2 Tim: Do you actually care about people?

0:02:41.8 Junior: And it's not a joke.

0:02:43.4 Tim: No.

0:02:43.9 Junior: Right? It's a question that each of us has to ask ourselves. And it's a question that we have to answer and then deal with. So whatever the answer to that question, we have to do something. So let's start off by going into the slides and asking about influence. So, the name of the show, The Leader Factor. We talk a lot about leadership. We think a lot about leaders. What is leadership? A lot of people say that leadership is influence, right? This word right here, you see it thrown around a lot as it relates to leadership. So what are the ingredients of influence? If you're a leader, how can you be influential? So I started looking into the research literature. There actually is a research literature regarding influence. And I stumbled upon two things that control or influence influence agent characteristics and content characteristics. So if you break down influence, you get these two things. An agent and content. So the...

0:03:56.3 Tim: So the agent meaning you?

0:03:56.9 Junior: You.

0:04:00.6 Tim: You. You the leader, you the person, you, you the individual.

0:04:03.4 Junior: Yep. You the individual.

0:04:04.5 Tim: And the characteristics of you.

0:04:06.3 Junior: And not necessarily you as leader either. You as a human.

0:04:11.3 Tim: As a human.

0:04:11.8 Junior: When we're talking about influence, we are talking broadly. Your ability to influence anyone in any capacity, in any role that you're in. Could be professional, could be personal, could be familial. It's all subject to the same things.

0:04:27.9 Tim: The assumption is that you bring your characteristics to any attempt to influence others. You gotta bring those to bear.

0:04:35.8 Junior: There's you and the content. So presumably, if we're interacting with each other, there's some objective, I might have something to say. I might have some piece of motivation, which we'll talk about later. But there are elements to that content, which are called content characteristics, and then agent characteristics. So if we break those down, what are agent characteristics, there are personal characteristics, your power, your credibility, your likeability, your emotional intelligence. What are content characteristics? The strength of your argument, if you're arguing. The importance of request, the enjoyability of the request.

0:05:17.4 Tim: The data.

0:05:17.5 Junior: The data.

0:05:19.4 Tim: That you bring in some way.

0:05:20.0 Junior: The data, the weather, whatever it is. The characteristics of that message. So those are really the only two things that are going to affect my ability to influence you. Me as agent and the content that I'm bringing to you. What do you think about this?

0:05:40.4 Tim: No, I agree. But furthermore, I would say you can't even divorce yourself from these characteristics.

0:05:50.6 Junior: No.

0:05:50.7 Tim: They come with you. It's part of the package. It's part of the influence package that you're bringing.

0:05:55.3 Junior: It is. So how do you influence other people if we take these content characteristics as stable? So let's say that I'm a leader, and we're talking about these content characteristics. And it might be, as you see here, a strength of the argument or the importance of the request that I'm going to make or the enjoyability of the request. Do these things change all that much? Or let's say that I have something to say, how much control do I have over the content characteristics? Little to none actually. What do I have control over? Only the agent characteristics.

0:06:34.0 Junior: And that is really the point we're trying to make here, is that if leadership is influence, and influence is agent and content characteristics, and I have little control over the content characteristics, what am I left with? Me. The agent and everything that I bring with me for better or worse. So the idea is, well, let's tune up the agent. Let's make ourselves better. Let's improve our emotional intelligence and we're gonna talk about the nuts and bolts of that, and what piece of emotional intelligence is most important. We recognized its absence at the beginning, and that's where we're gonna end up. Intent and motivation. So the shortcut to today's episode is that we need to improve our intent and our motivation if we wanna achieve healthy influence.

0:07:23.5 Tim: Junior, I wanna underscore that a little bit. If you think about leadership, and there's two sides. There's the skills side and there's the motivation side. Leadership is a function of those two things. It is almost inconceivable that we have not spent more time on the intent and the motivation side of the ledger. I can't explain it, and we've said that. So now we're gonna talk about the way that intent influences our approach to influence, which is so fundamental.

0:08:10.8 Junior: Yeah. So let's go over to this chart. Shout out Maria and Jillian for putting this together, because they spotted a few things and added, well, actually quite a few things that have made this much better.

0:08:24.7 Tim: It really is.

0:08:25.3 Junior: It's much better. Some of you may have seen the spectrum of influence slide in trainings in the past. This one is much better and we're gonna be rolling with it going forward. So you'll see two axes here. You've got intent and influence. So over here...

0:08:42.4 Tim: Man, I love this chart.

0:08:43.3 Junior: I know. Isn't it good?

0:08:44.8 Tim: Yeah.

0:08:46.0 Junior: It is. We're gonna say that a lot. Over here, we have covert, overt, a couple other things I wanna call out negative and positive. So if we are attempting covert influence, it's gonna be negative over here. We're gonna be over on this side. And what does that mean? How would we describe covert negative influence? Manipulation, deceptive means. I'm trying to deceive you.

0:09:17.7 Tim: Deceptive means.

0:09:18.6 Junior: On this side, overt and negative, what do we have? Coercion, force, again, unhealthy means. So these are the gutters of influence. And you can fall to either side. People tend toward either side, and these are dangerous and very damaging. There are spectrums, of course, there are levels of coercion and manipulation, but those are things that we see more often than we should in leadership that are very negative. So tell us about those two. Manipulation, coercion as they relate to influence.

0:10:00.4 Tim: Yeah. These are failure patterns, Junior. These two patterns in my mind represent an abdication of leadership. I don't think you're leading anymore. We have to ask ourselves if persuasion is in the middle and it represents healthy forms of influence, what are the tools of persuasion? What's in the middle? Encouragement is in the middle, inspiration is in the middle, coaching is in the middle, logic is in the middle, data is in the middle, empathy is in the middle, listening is in the middle. All of these things are in the middle. And yet we see so many instances in which leaders, they go to the east or the west, they go to manipulation, or they go to coercion to try to get people to do what they want them to do. And let's not forget, why do they do this? Why is there such a tendency? Well, how do people learn culture in an organization and then perpetuate that culture? They learn culture primarily through observation and imitation. So let's not forget that.

0:11:18.0 Tim: So that's the mechanism of transfer. We learn through observation and then imitation. So they are, and have learned it that way. They've learned that this is what influence looks like. This is what it looks like behaviorally, and so they observe that, and then they go do it. They imitate it. And so we see this over and over and over again, and yet what they're doing is an abdication. It's nothing short of an abdication of leadership. They're really not leading. So I would go so far as to say if you retreat to the left or the right, and you fall into one of those gutters, you're not leading anymore. You're doing something else. And yet these pathologies are so pervasive in organizations.

0:12:11.1 Junior: Let's look at the intent. This axis is really interesting to me because as we go up in intent, what happens? We get into this zone of persuasion, which is characterized by guidance. If we don't have high levels of intent over here, we only have those two other options.

0:12:35.0 Tim: That's it.

0:12:36.2 Junior: That's it.

0:12:36.3 Tim: Well, what else are you gonna do?

0:12:36.8 Junior: Those are the only possible combinations.

0:12:41.6 Tim: Yeah. You can't say, "Oh, you know what? I don't like this chart. I'm gonna go do something else." What are you gonna do?

0:12:48.2 Junior: Yeah. So if you said, "Oh, I wanna influence people, I have low intent, or even ill intent," what are you left with? You either deceive or force, like what else is there? If you say, "Well, I'm just gonna feign intent." Well, that's deception. That's manipulation. "Well, I'm just gonna make them do it." That's force. So we're only left with one option, which is, if you don't wanna use unhealthy means, we have to look at regard. We have to look at intent and motivation, and we have to improve that. That's it. Isn't that interesting to me? Like there's no other option. You have to come to terms with this chart.

0:13:40.6 Tim: I think you do. And even if you are deeply socialized to manipulate or coerce, somewhere along the line, I would think there would be some compunction, something would bother you, you would feel in your soul that, you know what, this isn't right. There's something wrong with the way that I am trying to influence other people.

0:14:12.4 Junior: Yeah. And I don't think that you could look back. Historically, let's say that you're doing that out of imitation. And look at the early experiences in which you were manipulated or coerced and say, that was fine. I don't see people doing that. I think if we are honest with ourselves and we look back at those instances, we don't feel good about them.

0:14:34.8 Tim: No. Junior, that's why I say I think that there's an inherent moral sense that we have, and there's got to be some twinge of conscience that says, Hmm, I don't think this is the right way to lead.

0:14:46.0 Junior: Yeah. I agree. So we're left with this, persuasion characterized by guidance. We're left over here. We've gotta develop the type of intent necessary to be effective, to have healthy influence. So we wanna go into the EQ index framework for a very important reason. What you believe, this is the row that's conspicuously absent from most charts, specifically social regard. If you look at mainstream EQ, which we said in the beginning, the social regard element is either deficient or non-existent. In many cases, it's non-existent.

0:15:27.7 Tim: Junior, there is no leading emotional intelligence assessment that includes both self regard and social regard, except EQ index.

0:15:38.5 Junior: Why is that important? We showed this before in skills, in the previous episode. We wanna show it again. If you look at social regard, what is this made up of? Social efficacy, interest, respect, empathy, and compassion. Now, again, the question. Can you interact effectively with other people without compassion, empathy, respect, interest, and social efficacy? I don't think so.

0:16:07.2 Tim: I don't think so.

0:16:07.6 Junior: If you don't have compassion, empathy, respect, and so on, can you have positive intent towards someone? No. So what are you left with? Again, coercion or manipulation. So if you have not yet developed these skills to an adequate level, you are left with unhealthy means of influence. So the only place we can go.

0:16:31.1 Tim: What else are you going to do?

0:16:32.1 Junior: You have no other options.

0:16:33.2 Tim: They're deficient.

0:16:34.1 Junior: The only place you can go is to develop regard. So many leaders, if we go back to the fundamental pieces of influence, agent characteristics, content characteristics, the assertion is that, many leaders have underdeveloped agent characteristics concerning intent. That's the failure pattern. What happens in organizations when leaders behave this way or are characterized this way? They have low intent.

0:17:05.2 Tim: So these inputs lead to fear as an output. And that's the primary equation that everybody needs to understand, right? Manipulation and coercion breed fear. And then what does fear do? What is the relationship between fear and feedback for example? Fear breaks the feedback loop and so people then retreat to two default patterns. Number one, they're quiet. Number two, they're nice. So that's what you get it, normally is you're gonna get a team that's quiet and nice. How helpful is that?

0:17:43.7 Junior: Not very.

0:17:44.7 Tim: Not when you've got work to do.

0:17:46.8 Junior: Not when your aspiration is to do something meaningful.

0:17:48.0 Tim: That's right.

0:17:50.1 Junior: Now, when your aspiration is to innovate, how do you innovate without a feedback loop?

0:17:54.4 Tim: So if you pull that causal chain all the way through, and you begin with manipulation and coercion, and you pull it through, you'll see the business impact at the end. And the personal impact at an individual level is adverse, and it is significant.

0:18:15.3 Junior: Yeah. So next I wanna go into the stage one, inclusion, safety. Take us on a little ride here into psychological safety. This is the element of belief as it applies to psychological safety, coming from emotional intelligence. So in the four stages of psychological safety, the first threshold we need to cross is the threshold of inclusion. What does this mean? This means that in an environment, someone feels safe to be themselves, they feel a sense of belonging. They feel included in the group. Many leaders do not provide this for their people. Many don't. If we look at the data, the PS index data, we can see very clearly that there are many people that do not feel this in their own teams. What does that mean? It's a reflection of the leader. So if we're seeing those scores in an institution, we know that there's some intent deficiency with the leader. Most of the time, that's gonna be the pattern.

0:19:21.0 Junior: If we look at the social exchange for this, what does the participant in the environment give, and what does the leader in the environment give, inclusion in exchange for human status in the absence of harm? So walk me through this, and walk me through it as an entitlement. Why is this an entitlement that people have? And why should we understand that as leaders?

0:19:44.4 Tim: It's an entitlement because we believe in the inherent worth and the dignity of humans. And so therefore, including them, giving them inclusion, giving them basic acceptance, allowing them to gain a sense of belonging is not something that they earn, it's something that they are owed. So we use the word entitlement quite intentionally here, without reservation, because of their human status. They are a member of the human family. They are therefore entitled to inclusion. That's the logic.

0:20:25.9 Junior: You mentioned the word dignity, and I think that's a really interesting word. It begs the question, Do you believe in the dignity of other human beings? That's another question that we need to ask ourselves. And it's a question that's worth asking, I think, often. It's worth checking in on, and asking, "Do I believe in the respect and dignity and value of other human beings?" And then write, write it down, write down your thoughts as they relate to that question, "Do I believe in the dignity of other people? Can I say that to myself convincingly?" One of two things is gonna happen. Cognitive dissonance is a thing we don't love, and so we're either gonna say, "Well, yeah, I think I do, but that's not in line with my behavior, so I've gotta change something," or, "I don't," in which case, you have no excuse to be a leader. Those are the two options. And so in order to be an effective leader, you must be able to convincingly answer that question, convincingly to yourself that, "Yes, I do believe in the respect, the dignity, the value of other human beings." If you can't cross that bridge, your leadership journey is going nowhere.

0:21:50.4 Tim: That's right. Another way to frame it, Junior, is the distinction between worth and worthiness. So when we talk about inclusion safety and being entitled to inclusion, we are applying a worth test to the individual, not a worthiness test. This is not about worthiness, this is about your inherent worth, therefore, you are entitled to it. So there's no other tests that you need to meet. There's no other litmus test based on your behavior or based on your performance, except, "Please don't present the team with the threat of harm." That's it. It's all you gotta do.

0:22:37.3 Junior: Well, why are we presenting this in the first place? Why is this a conversation that we're having? We have unique access to the PS index and the EQ index data, and we have seen these patterns in leadership. That's why we're bringing it to everybody today to say, "Hey, here's a pattern that we've observed," which is that many teams and leaders are deficient in these areas, because we see low stage one inclusion safety when we're measuring the group, and we're seeing low social regard when we're measuring the individual. So we're saying, "Hey, everyone, we're seeing an intent problem, the systemic. So we need to fix that." If influence is so based on intent, then we have to fix that in order to have healthy influence, otherwise, we're left with those unhealthy means. And many people have been socialized in environments where inclusion safety was low, where social regard toward them was low, and that's the way that they were socialized professionally. Sometimes personally. So what does that do? That creates some bad habits.

0:23:51.1 Tim: It does.

0:23:51.4 Junior: If we're imitating and we're observing...

0:23:53.2 Tim: Yes. We're observing, and we're imitating, we pass it on.

0:23:57.0 Junior: That's problematic, and those norms get passed on in organizations all the time. And so it's our responsibility to say, "Enough. We're gonna do it differently now. I'm gonna do it differently as a leader. That's gonna bleed into new norms, and we're gonna create new culture." That's what we do as an organization. We do cultural transformation. We do leadership development. We have seen, this is the pattern, and these are the things that we need to change in order to break those unhealthy chains.

0:24:24.5 Tim: Junior, let me just point out too. We've made the critical distinction between skills and intent. And you said it before, but I wanna say it again. You cannot skill-build over an intent problem. You can't fix it by strengthening your skills. Humans can smell intent. And so you can fake it, but you're not gonna pass the smell test. And that's not gonna be lost on anybody. And you may be charismatic, you may be very skilled, but you're not gonna get the job done. Further evidence of that is when we find a manager that is, I don't know, interpersonally clumsy, awkward, maybe doesn't, is not polished, is not smooth, and yet people love the leader, they trust the leader. They'll go to the wall for the leader. What's happening? Because they know that that leader has their best interests at heart. The intent is clean. The intent is pure. The interest is genuine. They're always acting in good faith. Everybody knows it.

0:25:47.7 Junior: Yeah. Well, here's another statement that I wanna throw out there and have people react to. See if you agree with the statement, your people are only as valuable as they are useful. Think about that.

0:26:06.0 Tim: Does that bother you?

0:26:07.1 Junior: Does that bother you? [laughter] Do you immediately agree with that? Say, yep, that's right on the money. It's utilitarian. Or is it deeper than that? These are the types of questions that we have to ask. And we talked previously about eligibility for management. These are the types of questions that we should be asking ourselves if we're eligible for promotion to management, and these are the questions that institutions should be asking. Can you imagine sitting down in an interview that is screening your eligibility for promotion to management, and they asked you about that, do you believe that humans have inherent worth. Do you think that's ever been asked? I mean, ever, probably. Normally, no.

0:26:57.3 Tim: No.

0:26:57.7 Junior: No. I'm not asking those types of questions.

0:27:00.6 Tim: We don't ask intent questions, typically.

0:27:01.4 Junior: No. We're looking at, "Hey, what do your KPIs look like over the last two quarters?"

0:27:05.7 Tim: I know.

0:27:06.2 Junior: "Pretty good. Up the chain with you." That's problematic.

0:27:12.6 Tim: It is.

0:27:13.5 Junior: So if you're ever in a situation where you're screening in an interview process for somebody that's looking to promote to management, ask some intent questions, because if you literally ask them that question, "Do you agree or disagree with this, that people are as valuable as they are useful?" That'll be an interesting question to get answered. And it would probably give you some insight into that person's readiness, that person's eligibility.

0:27:43.7 Tim: That's true. Very true.

0:27:44.3 Junior: And I do want to emphasize what you said about being interpersonally clumsy, because I've seen that too, and I just wanna say, yes, stamp of approval. I have seen people who have been very interpersonally clumsy. They are not socially gifted. They don't have the gravitas, and they're not charismatic people.

0:28:05.5 Tim: But people love them.

0:28:06.4 Junior: But people absolutely love them.

0:28:08.6 Tim: There you go.

0:28:10.3 Junior: Because they knew that they cared. And so we can skill-build, and we can get better, which is gonna be the back half of this episode. We're gonna get into it right now. But intent just showing up with that real heartfelt like, "No, I care," that will work wonders for people, and it will overcome so many other interpersonal deficiencies that you might have if you can just show up with that sort of intent. So, okay, let's get into the skills. We're gonna look at them one more time, and we're gonna talk about each one of these and go over just a few things that we can do to improve each of these skills. So five skills of social regard, compassion, respect, empathy, interest, and social efficacy. So these are just scores that you might see if you got... If you took EQ index, you get a score for each of these. That's what those numbers mean. Let's talk about compassion. We threw in just a couple bullet points about definition, so we're all talking about the same thing, and then we're going to talk about things that we can do to improve these. So compassion is the first one. What is compassion? Allowing yourself to be inconvenienced when someone needs help, overlooking small or insignificant mistakes or errors by others. These are the two behaviors.

0:29:32.5 Tim: Junior, the first thing that comes to mind, and hopefully, viewers and listeners are... You're seeing the same thing. These are behavioral. A lot of times, people will talk in general terms about compassion as an attribute, as a characteristic. "Are you compassionate?" "Yes, I'm compassionate." "Really?" Let's translate that into behavior. So these are great indicators that you can gauge yourself, measure yourself against.

0:30:01.0 Junior: Yeah. So if you're asking yourself, "Am I compassionate?" well, do you do these two things? Do you allow yourself to be inconvenienced when someone needs help? I know that in the past, that's been a pattern of struggle for me. If someone's yanking on my shirt, like, "Hey, I need some help with this thing," often, I've said like, "Figure it out. Ask me tomorrow." And those little things, I think taking a breath and just saying, "Hey, yeah, what's going on?" and just making space for that. And that's a real behavioral thing that I can do to get better at this. And how does this translate? It translates into someone coming, asking me for something and they see, "Oh, he's allowing himself to be inconvenienced to help me. Thus, maybe he cares. Maybe he cares about me." Which is true. You do this enough, you start practicing these things enough, that comes.

0:31:02.2 Tim: It's a measure of interruptibility in many ways. And so you ask yourself, how willing are you to be interrupted? And that's a measure of your compassion, which then is a key component of your social regard.

0:31:19.0 Junior: Yeah. Now that you need to be interruptible all day, every day for everyone, but it's important.

0:31:25.6 Tim: It's important.

0:31:26.7 Junior: Okay, number two, overlook small or insignificant mistakes or errors by others. What do you think about this one?

0:31:34.2 Tim: I think you have to do this. I think you're looking at the bigger picture, you're looking at their intent, you're looking at their effort, you're looking at what they're trying to accomplish, and you gotta have perspective, you gotta see things in proportion, and you've got... You can't... What matters the most? The people.

0:32:00.8 Junior: The people do. And do they feel that from you?

0:32:02.6 Tim: Right.

0:32:03.6 Junior: Let's go to the next one, respect. Get to know others better. Familiarity increases respect. Tell me about familiarity. You know more about this than I do, technically.

0:32:21.7 Tim: Not long ago, I was having a conversation with a gentleman, and he asked me a personal question. I don't even remember what it was, about my family or something. And I proceeded to give him an answer, and after I got done with the first sentence, I could see that he was not paying attention any longer to what I was saying. What did I think at that moment then? As soon as I could tell that he was no longer tracking, he was no longer giving me his attention, then I knew in that moment that he really didn't care. It was perfunctory. He was going through the motions. And I thought to myself, "Why did you ask me that? Why did you even ask? You don't care." So getting to know others better. Familiarity increases respect. If that's real, if that's genuine. I think that's true. I think it is a reflection of respect. And the absence of it means it's not there.

0:33:41.1 Junior: I know for me, my respect's gone up tremendously for people that I've gotten to know better. And I've made assumptions upfront about people that had an impact on the level of respect I had for them. Not necessarily, it shouldn't be that way, but it's been true. And then I'll learn something, and I'm like, "Oh, that's why. That's why you are the way that you are."

0:34:03.4 Tim: We've all done that.

0:34:05.2 Junior: I know we all have. And so that has been lesson for me, like, "Hey, chill out for a second. Wait, learn, become more familiar, and that level of respect will go up." It makes me think about the idea, there aren't people that you really hate, just people you don't know. And I've seen that play out. As I get to know people and become more familiar with who they are, my respect goes up. Because I've seen, "Oh, that's the mountain that you had traversed to get here," and that was evidently not easy.

0:34:40.4 Tim: And respect turns to affection pretty quickly as you get to know someone.

0:34:44.6 Junior: Yeah, it does. Let's go to the next one, empathy. What's the behavior? Try doing a different type of activity that's foreign to you, or shadow someone who does a different job from you.

0:34:56.4 Tim: That's good.

0:34:57.5 Junior: This is one that I've had some experience with this week, in people seeing different people's jobs and coming out with different perspective.

0:35:10.3 Tim: Oh, give us some examples, Junior.

0:35:12.2 Junior: Well, I've seen it in organizations that we've worked with, I've seen it in our own organization. Any time that there starts to be a little bit of diceyness, I've seen this in teams, where they're like, "Oh, you know this person," or it's a cross-functional relationship or something, there's often a lot of missing context. And I was coaching someone in another team another day in another organization that was having an issue cross-functionally with another team, and I asked them, "How well do you understand that person's role?" And they're like, "I know that this is what they do." I'm like, "No, really. What's their day-to-day like?" "I don't know. This is what they're in charge of. It's their job." Like, "No, I understand. But do you actually know what they do every day?" "No." "Okay. Just, I would like for you to go and ask them a little bit about their day-to-day, like, what goes on day-to-day. Ask them about this particular project, ask them what inputs were necessary in order for this thing to happen." Guess what happened when they came back? They said...

0:36:16.6 Tim: They were different. [laughter] That's right.

0:36:17.7 Junior: "Oh, it all makes sense now." And not only was it like, "Oh, I no longer begrudge this person," it was, "I am so grateful that this person is here."

0:36:30.5 Tim: Oh, really?

0:36:31.5 Junior: "What would be true if this person were not here?" "Oh, yeah. Interesting."

0:36:37.4 Tim: So in doing that, what did they learn? They learned about the pressures, the demands...

0:36:44.3 Junior: The contexts.

0:36:44.6 Tim: And the constrains of that person's role. And they came back with a much greater appreciation.

0:36:51.6 Junior: Yeah. I've been so guilty of this before in thinking, "Oh, yeah, it's just, this is your thing. This is what you do. This is what you're in charge of. I don't actually know." And then when I see, like I remember one time, some person I saw a calendar, I was like, "Oh, that was your day today? You had 14 calls? Oh, no, I wonder when I called you at 5:30, you didn't wanna talk very much anymore."

[laughter]

0:37:21.9 Tim: That right.

0:37:22.0 Junior: "Got it." And then it's like, you do build that affection, and you can joke about it. "That was 15 call day-to-day, huh? I can tell." And then you can have a laugh, and you can... It's good.

0:37:35.5 Tim: And it all enhances your ability to connect.

0:37:38.3 Junior: It does. But if you can't do that, if you don't get the context, you don't have the empathy, you've never tried a different thing, you've never met with the person, it's really difficult to do. And just getting outside of your comfort zone. I was at a class recently; this is another short story, and some person had very little tolerance for something that someone else was doing in the class, but this was a brand new activity for the person. And they didn't grasp that and understand that. So this one, try doing a different type of activity that's foreign to you, sometimes that's important to do, because whatever you're an expert at, a lot of other people aren't. And when they come into your domain, they can feel insecure, and you need to pay attention to that, and you need to know what that feels like. So you need to go do new stuff too.

0:38:31.4 Tim: And you need to be reminded of that again and again and again, lest we forget.

0:38:35.5 Junior: Forever. Yeah. Well, you see people who don't do that for 30 years, it shows.

0:38:42.3 Tim: It shows.

0:38:42.6 Junior: It shows. Okay, last one. Maybe it's the last one. No. Second last. Interest. Ask follow-up questions as you are getting to know someone. This one's pretty straightforward, but ask the next question. Whatever question you weren't gonna ask, go ask that, if it's just a time thing. If it was an inappropriate question, skip it. But if it's like, "Oh, where are you from?" there are much better questions than that, but if you do ask that question, "Oh, what's the most exciting thing about where you're from? What's the thing that you remember the most?" and they say, "Well, every year, we have this rodeo in our town, and it's really awesome." "What was your favorite memory of going to the rodeo?" "Well, there was this one year that one of the Mustangs got out of the corral and jumped over the fence, and we had to go lasso it and... " You get the story that people save for that second or third inquiry that they almost never get to.

0:39:43.6 Tim: But you get beyond superficial pretty quickly.

0:39:45.5 Junior: You do. And it only takes one or two more levels of questioning to get a really interesting story beyond like, "Wow, it's really hot today." No one cares. But the Mustang at the rodeo, that's a cool story.

0:40:00.1 Tim: That's cool.

0:40:00.5 Junior: Try to get there. What do you think about this one?

0:40:02.7 Tim: No, I do. I think here, Junior, I think it's a confluence of skills and intent, because to become a good questioner, to ask good questions, take some skill and practice and even some preparation.

0:40:24.5 Junior: Absolutely. If you go in prepared, you're gonna be much more successful. Okay, last one. Social efficacy. I like this one a lot. Identify and write down examples of others demonstrating resilience by overcoming setbacks. Identify and write down. What does this do? What is social efficacy? Maybe you could help us with that first.

0:40:47.3 Tim: Yeah, social efficacy means that you believe in the power and ability and capacity of people to do things, to help themselves, to change the world, to make things better. That's what it's about. Their self-efficacy, and that's a concept that we use in psychology all the time. So you believe in your own effort and ability and capability, but social efficacy means that you believe that about others. Very important part.

0:41:26.3 Junior: One of the important parts here is writing down. If you do that for whatever reason, as with many other things, it goes deeper, if you just write it down. So that's something that you can do to improve social efficacy. I've had, when I'm debriefing results, EQ index results, with people and there's low social efficacy, it's really interesting, it shows up in the way that they see other people and the way that they interact.

0:41:52.7 Tim: Do you know what I think, Junior? One of the most important ways that it shows up is that they're not patient.

0:42:00.0 Junior: Oh, yeah.

0:42:00.1 Tim: Right?

0:42:00.5 Junior: Yeah. Well, and then it's a hopeless. It turns hopeless very quickly, where people say like, "Oh, they're never gonna change. It just is the way that it is," and it's horrible. People almost never say, "Well, it is the way that it is, and it's a good thing." It's like, "Oh, it is the way that it is, and it's horrible, and it's just gonna stay that way forever, because this person's never gonna change. And even if they want to, they can't." How does that affect intent when you're showing up with somebody else? It absolutely affects it. So those are the five, compassion, respect, empathy, interest, and social efficacy. Where did we come from? What are the ingredients of influence? Agent characteristics and content characteristics. What is synonymous with influence? Leadership. So if you wanna lead, these are your two levers, agent characteristics, content characteristics. This one stays stable. This one is dynamic and movable. So what do you need to do? You need to change the agent characteristics, not least of which, or perhaps most importantly, is your emotional intelligence. So if we want to do well here, look at all these annotations. This is great. I'm gonna clean this up first.

0:43:13.9 Tim: We've had fun.

0:43:14.6 Junior: We've had fun. So this chart is probably the chart that we would like to leave with you.

0:43:21.8 Tim: More than any other, I would say.

0:43:22.2 Junior: More than anything else, is that intent governs your ability to influence more than almost any other variable. And if you don't develop the intent that's necessary to interact effectively with others, you are left with manipulation and coercion. Those are the only two other levers you have to pull, and that will leave a wake of destruction. You've probably seen that in your organization. You've probably seen it in yourself. Maybe you've been on the receiving end. Maybe you've been on the giving end. Maybe you are on the giving end and need to shape up. Regardless of the situation, we all have work to do to climb to the top of this mountain and use persuasion, guidance, healthy means that will enable us to have healthy influence.

0:44:12.6 Tim: That's where we wanna be. And Junior, that can develop even ahead of your skills, which is very interesting. Some people have developed skills, but they lack the intent. Others, they come right into an organization in the intent's there. They act in good faith, they have great affection and respect for their colleagues, and they just need to start building skills and experience, and they're gonna be in great shape. So this is a requirement of all of us.

0:44:50.1 Junior: So that's the episode today. Do you actually care about people? We mean that when we ask. And hopefully, you do. There's some introspection for all of us to do in order to become better leaders. So we appreciate your time very much. We know that you could spend it other places. There are a lot of other things to watch, a lot of other things to listen to, and so you taking the time to be here with us in order to become a better leader, that's something that we appreciate. So if you have feedback for us, any questions, any comments, anything you wanna tell us, please leave it in the comments. And be sure to download the resource from today's episode that will be available in the show notes. And with that, we will say goodbye. And see you next episode. Take care, everybody.

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