0:00:20.0 Junior: EQ might be the single most important skill that you can develop as a professional. Welcome back, everyone, to The LeaderFactor. I'm Junior here with my co-host Dr. Tim Clark.

0:00:31.1 Tim: Good to be with you.

0:00:32.5 Junior: And today we're gonna be talking more EQ. But the layout of today's episode is a little bit different. We've got the laptop rocking and rolling. We're gonna be in the app today.

0:00:42.8 Tim: We're gonna get into it.

0:00:44.2 Junior: We're gonna get into it.

0:00:44.3 Tim: Yeah.

0:00:44.4 Junior: The nitty-gritty, and a lot of data. We've assessed the EQ and trained the EQ of thousands of professionals across the world, across the industry. And so we're gonna dive into exactly how that works and how we coach people through it. We're gonna look at some mock, some sample data.

0:01:01.2 Tim: Yeah.

0:01:01.9 Junior: We're gonna go through action planning, and we're gonna talk about some aggregate results. So, inside EQ index, we measure 30 skills, and we're going to show what are the bottom skills of all professionals out there in aggregate.

0:01:15.5 Tim: I'm gonna leave you in suspense here because the data is...

0:01:15.8 Junior: I think the... It's really interesting.

0:01:18.9 Tim: It's very interesting. It's not only interesting, it's actionable data at an individual level, because these are empirical patterns across the world...

0:01:28.9 Junior: Yeah.

0:01:29.7 Tim: Regardless of where you live, regardless of your demographics.

0:01:31.2 Junior: So, if you take an EQ index in the past and you wanna see how you compare to other people...

0:01:36.0 Tim: Yeah.

0:01:36.8 Junior: Today is gonna be the episode for you. But before we get there, we wanna have a conversation about coaching. EQ is often a big piece of coaching. We often end at EQ through coaching. So, Tim, I'm wondering if you could tell us, give us a lay of the land. What is coaching? Why is it important? How have you approached coaching in the past, just what's your relationship to it? Give us some detail.

0:02:02.4 Tim: Right. Coaching, usually it's one-on-one, but sometimes there's group coaching where you have a coach that's helping an individual or it could be a team, and we're using dialogue to provide guidance, encouragement, inspiration, and not least accountability to help a person develop. And aside from modeling, coaching is the other indispensable tool that we have to promote and accelerate the development of another person.

0:02:38.3 Junior: Yeah.

0:02:39.3 Tim: That's how central it is to talent development.

0:02:41.7 Junior: It's something that almost everyone who's listening to this episode does or will do.

0:02:48.0 Tim: Yeah.

0:02:48.8 Junior: Coaching as is some piece of their role. So we thought, well, if we're gonna go through the EQ index results, we're gonna go through the platform, what better way than to tie it through coaching? So, we've done executive coaching for a very long time. We've coached many, many leaders, and we use a format. And this format, this coaching methodology has 5 A's: Assess, Aim, Apply, Accelerate and Account. In the last episode, we were talking about the relationship between EQ and psych safety, and one of the points that we made over and over again was this idea of measurement. We need to measure what we're doing, which is why coaching at the individual level starts with the same thing: Assess.

0:03:30.8 Tim: Yeah. Assess.

0:03:31.5 Junior: Measure.

0:03:32.3 Tim: Yeah.

0:03:32.4 Junior: We have to figure out where we are today so that we can see: What are the strengths, where are the gaps, what do we need to do in order to become more effective? So, help me understand, what does that process look like, practically speaking, when you're working with an executive that you're coaching? That assessment phase, what are you doing to gather data? What assessments are you using? Are you doing interviews? How does it go?

0:03:53.5 Tim: You do. It's a combination of qualitative and quantitative, Junior. So, from a qualitative standpoint, for example, if you're interviewing or... And say you're coaching a CEO. One of the things that you're going to do in the assessment phase is interview all of the CEO's direct reports. And that's gonna be qualitative depth interviewing, where you take in an interview protocol and you ask the same questions, you go through systematically, and you gather that qualitative data. That's very rich because you're trying to get contextual understanding of the person and where they are, and then reflect that back to the person.

0:04:35.8 Tim: So, that would be a part of assessment. But in addition to the qualitative side, there's the quantitative side. And so we want to be able to gather some additional data quantitatively that is valid based on a valid instrument. So, we're gonna add that too. So, assessment almost always includes a qualitative component and a quantitative component. And then we bring that together because the quantitative tells us what's going on, the qualitative tells us why that's going on and how that's going on. And so they are complementary. To get a full picture, we need both.

0:05:19.8 Junior: Yeah. It's so important, where possible, to get multi-rater feedback. And the interviewing essentially is that. It's multi-rater feedback.

0:05:27.6 Tim: It is.

0:05:29.0 Junior: We're talking to direct reports. Sometimes we'll get the peers in there, the supervisors often sponsoring the thing. And so we're getting, collecting all of that feedback. We're figuring out where we are at point A. We're making goals about where we wanna go, point B. And we're programming an intervention.

0:05:43.6 Tim: That's right.

0:05:44.0 Junior: How to do that? With accountability mechanisms. So, we wanna dive into EQ index and walk through as if we were coaching someone. We can coach ourselves. If you're in a self-assessment you have access to this data, you go through the exact same methodology...

0:06:01.0 Tim: Yeah.

0:06:01.3 Junior: In order to get better. It's the same thing. So, when we're talking about Assess, Aim, Apply, Accelerate, Account, you can do those five things yourself. Now, it requires a high degree of self-awareness, but you can do it.

0:06:13.1 Tim: Well, this goes... I have to add this comment, Junior. This goes back to the very premise of coaching. The premise of coaching is that the solutions reside inside the person being coached. But what they have to develop is the ability to self-diagnose and self-correct. And that's something that takes some doing. It takes some effort. You've gotta build some skills. You've gotta develop your way to being able to do that. But again, coaching is not... This is not a model where we come in, we engaged, and I am the repository of answers for you. That is not the model. The model is that the answers reside in you, I'm going to facilitate, I'm going to help facilitate your journey of self-discovery. That's what we're going to do.

0:07:07.8 Junior: Yeah. So with that, let's dive into the app. So, we're in LeaderFactor app. We're inside EQ index. We will assume that we've already completed the assessment, which we have. I'm impersonating Jody who is a sample user. So, this is just mock data to prove a point. So, let's get into the assessment results. So, it's 150 items, the survey itself.

0:07:32.6 Tim: Right.

0:07:33.1 Junior: Rapid response, right? You saw some of those items in here. So, if I go back to one, to give you an idea. "I often anticipate things before they happen." So, we've got 150 items like this. We are disagreeing or agreeing on a scale from zero to 10, 11-point scale. After we respond to all of those, it spits out our results. So, right here, we see our overall score of 61. That overall score is broken down into six domains. We have the regard competencies at the top, the self... The awareness competencies in the middle, and the management competencies at the bottom. Can you give us just a brief rundown of those six domains?

0:08:14.8 Tim: Sure. So, Junior, this conceptual model is based on a comprehensive review of all of the research literature in the field of emotional intelligence since 1990 when Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer wrote the first academic paper on emotional intelligence. And so what people will notice right away is that there's an internal domain and an external domain to emotional intelligence. What's going on inside of you? What's going on outside of you? Beyond that... There we go. So, beyond that, there are three areas that we have to measure. We have to measure the way that we feel about ourselves and what we believe, and then the way we feel about others and what we believe about others. Those are the regard competencies: Self-regard, social regard. So, for every competency that's internal, there is a companion competency that is external. So, we have self-regard, we have social regard. We have self-awareness, we have social awareness. We have self-management, and we have social management.

0:09:38.9 Tim: And so if you look at the entire conceptual model, we have these three domains. So, what I believe about myself and others, what I know about myself and others, and then self-management. So, how can I control myself and influence others? So taken together, this is the conceptual model that operationalizes the definition of emotional intelligence overall.

0:10:10.6 Junior: So at a glance, if we're looking at this report, we can see, okay, social regard, that's our lowest competency at 44. Then we move to self-management, next lowest, 55. Self-regard, 58. Social management, social awareness, and our best, self-awareness at 76. Which is interesting. We've debriefed a lot of these reports. I've seen a lot of results.

0:10:36.3 Tim: Yes.

0:10:36.8 Junior: And so one of the interesting things about this is, 61 is not a very high score, relatively speaking, to the average. Self-awareness at 76 means that I'm probably going to be extra critical of my deficiencies. So, seeing that self-awareness is our highest, and then seeing a low-ish overall score tells me a lot about this particular person.

0:11:02.7 Tim: It does.

0:11:03.1 Junior: And we'll kinda get into that. But I think it's interesting to see. So, down here, you see the 2×3 grid. This is a really helpful way to view the model as Tim described, because you can see the companion competencies next to each other, internal and external. Now, if I come down here, we'll go through the scoring as we would if we were coaching somebody. A success factor score 90 to 100, greater than two standard deviations, is going to show up as a success factor: 80 to 90, 70 to 80, so on and so forth. And the colors are one standard deviation away from each other. So you can see down here, my highest was self-awareness, which was green. That's a growth factor. These are EQ domains and skills that you've partially developed, indicating areas where you can invest more effort for additional effectiveness. Growth factors typically represent average or acceptable performance, meaning that we're right in there, we're kind of at the top, the peak of the standard distribution as it relates to that particular competency.

0:12:08.6 Tim: Exactly.

0:12:10.2 Junior: Now we go down to the skill level. So, help me understand. What's a skill? And how is it different from a competency or domain?

0:12:17.1 Tim: Right, Junior. So we have domains, we have the six domains, right? Internal and external domains. Each domain can be broken down into skills. And the skills really take us down to the behavioral level which is where we get better, where we can see what we're doing, and we can figure out what we need to start or what we need to stop or what we need to continue. So again, each of those domains breaks down into five specific skills.

0:12:53.5 Junior: So, let's go into one of these domains, self-regard. You can see over here, we've highlighted this in the 2×3 grid.

0:13:01.5 Tim: This is where we are, yeah.

0:13:03.7 Junior: And you can see the skills that comprise that particular domain. So, inside self-regard, we have motivation, optimism, independence, self-respect, and confidence. So, these are really interesting to me because I can pull these open and see, well, what does it actually mean when it says "motivation?" What happens if I have high motivation? Well, I'm gonna behave probably like this. If I have low motivation, this is probably gonna characterize my behavior. Here are some things that I can do to improve that particular skill. So, one of the points that I wanna make right here is that when we say "EQ," it's a composite variable.

0:13:46.9 Tim: Yes.

0:13:47.0 Junior: It's not just one thing that we're saying, "Well, you just have high EQ or low EQ." It's too blunt.

0:13:52.3 Tim: Right. Correct.

0:13:53.4 Junior: We've gotta go to the next level.

0:13:53.5 Tim: Yes.

0:13:53.5 Junior: So when we say that, we say, okay, we have six domains. Inside those six domains, we have skills. You can see as we go a layer deeper, we get more refined, more specific, which gives us way better leverage developmentally. Because how useful is it for you if I just come to you and from a coaching perspective, say, "Yeah, your EQ is low. Just go make it better?"

0:14:16.0 Tim: Right. And in a coaching situation where you're trying to facilitate the discovery of the person that you're coaching, right? Their self-discovery, they need to be able to break down their own emotional intelligence to go down to the level where the data becomes actionable.

0:14:33.9 Junior: Yeah.

0:14:34.2 Tim: It doesn't become actionable until you move from overall score to domain score down to a skill. And then at the skill level, now you have finally reached the actionable data where I can say, "Oh, this is a gap for me."

0:14:54.0 Junior: Yeah.

0:14:54.1 Tim: This is an area that requires some attention, some action planning, and some practice.

0:15:01.8 Junior: Yep.

0:15:02.3 Tim: You've got to be able to go down all the way to that level.

0:15:03.1 Junior: So, EQ, that's the top. Then beneath that we have domain, then we have skill...

0:15:10.3 Tim: That's right.

0:15:11.1 Junior: And we have the behaviors that support those skills. So, if we go back to the assessment results, let's go... Let's click into one of these. So, social regard is our lowest. Right? So, if we pull this open, it's a 44. Well, what skills comprise social regard? Compassion, respect, empathy, interest, and social efficacy. So, Tim, let's say that this is my report, and inside social regard, I have these skills. These are my scores. What might you say to me?

0:15:50.2 Tim: Well, first of all, we're going to acknowledge the fact that social regard is your lowest domain score, right? Out of the six. And then we're gonna break that down, which is what we're doing here. So, we go down to the skill level, and we further analyze the scores that you have. So, go down to the bottom, Junior. Scroll down. Social efficacy, you are registering a score of 27. Now, if you blow this up, which you just did, this is what we call a skill profile. So now we're doing a deep dive into your lowest skill within social regard.

0:16:37.0 Tim: And so it's here that you really are looking into a clean mirror as it relates to your own performance and behavior in this area. And this is where you should be able, through a process of, again, facilitated self-discovery, you should be able to say, reflect on these... For example, high competence, low competence. Look at your own score and be able to say, "Ah, yeah, I can see gaps. At the behavioral level, I can see things that I'm not doing that I should be."

0:17:13.7 Junior: Yeah.

0:17:15.2 Tim: Things that I am doing that are getting in the way. And by the way, this is social regard, which refers to the way that I... So, my beliefs and feelings about other people and their ability to help themselves. See, for example, if you go down to "What is social efficacy?", we're gonna break this down to some definitional elements. Belief that people can help themselves, confidence that others can learn and grow, conviction that people are resilient, trust that people possess the power to change. So, Junior, if I were coaching you, we go through these definitional elements and then I would ask you, "Tell me how you feel about each of those?"

0:18:01.5 Junior: Yeah.

0:18:01.9 Tim: Right? Let's have a conversation about those elements of social efficacy. This is your lowest score in this domain.

0:18:12.6 Junior: Yeah.

0:18:12.7 Tim: So, let's have a conversation.

0:18:14.9 Junior: Yeah.

0:18:15.8 Tim: And then after that, we would talk about behaviors. So, we're gonna do a deep dive. That's what this facilitates, is a deep dive for this one skill.

0:18:29.0 Junior: Yeah.

0:18:29.1 Tim: And then we can start to do some very productive action planning as a result.

0:18:33.1 Junior: Yeah.

0:18:33.2 Tim: How are you going to do the action planning if you don't get down to this level?

0:18:37.3 Junior: That's it's a good question.

0:18:37.5 Tim: You're gonna be at an abstract level or a higher conceptual level, and you're gonna have a hard time doing it.

0:18:44.9 Junior: Yep. So, it's 27, which is almost what? 40 points lower than our overall score.

0:18:54.0 Tim: That's right. Big gap.

0:18:55.2 Junior: Big gap. So, we know that they disagree with most of these statements.

0:19:01.9 Tim: They're struggling. Yeah.

0:19:02.0 Junior: Right? So, one of the things that I like to do in a debrief is say, "Okay, which one of those pieces of definition do you disagree with the most?" And in this case, most people are gonna say trust that people possess the power to change, right? So you're either gonna say, "I disagree with that more than the others."

0:19:19.4 Tim: Yeah.

0:19:20.3 Junior: Okay. Well, tell me about that.

0:19:23.7 Tim: Right.

0:19:24.7 Junior: Why might you say that?

0:19:25.0 Tim: Right.

0:19:27.0 Junior: And then they might open up and say, "Well, it's this and this, and I've seen this," and then we can go in there, and then we'll go into attitudes and behaviors, high competence. So people, conversely, who have high scores in social efficacy show this. They're more willing to collaborate with others, they'll ask to help to solve problems, empower others and delegate more responsibility, set high expectations, stretch other challenging assignments. So probably we're not doing these things as well as we could. Low competence, and then I'll say, "Do these describe you as we read them?" Is cynical about society and its ability to change. Believes they can do everything themselves is inclined to judge, label and stereotype others, and then probably nodding, right? Sounds like me, prefers to work in isolation. Yeah, put me in a dark room.

0:20:18.9 Junior: And then we go down to development tips and techniques. So these are really interesting. Take personal inventory of the ways in which you rely and depend on others. Let's just take that as an example. How is that helping me develop social efficacy?

0:20:35.6 Tim: Well, just think about the conversation that we can have just on that point, right? So this provides all of the gris, the raw material for a productive coaching discussion. Junior, can we do something else? So this is a regard competency, can we go to the management competencies?

0:20:57.2 Junior: Yeah, which one? Self or social?

0:21:00.0 Tim: Let's go to self. So if we go to self-management, let's take a look at the skills that are included, so we have resilience, we have stress tolerance, we have impulse control, we have emotional stability, and we have delayed gratification, so I just wanna point these out as another example of the skills that you get to when you break a domain down. You're really getting down to the ground where you can assess gaps, build an action plan, and then go out and engage in deliberate practice. So this is just one more example of how that breaks down.

0:21:44.5 Junior: So let's get into some of the action planning. Materially, if we're talking about training, there are a bunch of trainings inside EQ index that people go through, videos and whatnot, this is obviously in the app, this is the asynchronous version.

0:21:59.4 Tim: Sure.

0:21:59.6 Junior: We want people to understand what it is we're talking about. So in a coaching scenario, they would have gone through, have some elementary understanding of, this is what the framework is, this is what we're talking about, then we jump into what we call it the 5P. Now, the 5P is the action planning process that we use. It starts with step one, ponder. So when we're looking at their results, we're gonna ask them to do this very thing, think deeply about your results, why might you think they are the way they are? Well, I'm seeing that this one's low, I'm seeing this one's high, and after thinking about it, I think that this might be why, so on and so forth.

0:22:38.0 Tim: Do you see patterns?

0:22:39.7 Junior: Do you see patterns? Then we move into prioritization. The prioritization step is very important.

0:22:45.8 Tim: Very.

0:22:48.8 Junior: And this is something that we help people understand, that we're not necessarily talking about, well, just choose your bottom two, right? You'll notice that there are just slots, so we're not saying go work on seven things, we're saying work on two.

0:23:00.1 Tim: Now, why is that? There's an enormous amount of research behind that. Developmentally, people can really go after one or two goals at a time, upper limit is three, sweet spot is two goals. To really get traction, to really move the needle, you need a disproportionate amount of energy and attention behind a couple of goals. So what did we say? We have six domains, we have 30 skill areas, pick two, just pick two.

0:23:34.6 Junior: So you'll see in the app two slots, right? If I click on this, it's gonna open up every single skill, all 30.

0:23:40.3 Tim: All 30.

0:23:41.8 Junior: And maybe I want to do the social efficacy, and I'm gonna add that to my plan. In skill two, based on my role, I actually think that conflict management is going to be something really important for me. Okay. Great, I add that. And then that's going to become part of my action plan, why did you select this skill? We're gonna go through that, and then plan. Plan is what am I actually going to do as it relates to those two skills that I selected.

0:24:12.5 Tim: At a behavioral level.

0:24:14.8 Junior: Yeah. And here's a question that I like a lot as part of the third P. How will your beliefs, perceptions and behaviors be different when you reach your goal?

0:24:23.1 Tim: So you're trying to look ahead at your future state, and so what do you see?

0:24:28.6 Junior: Yeah.

0:24:31.2 Tim: Sketch that.

0:24:31.3 Junior: Yeah. It looks like this, right? In meetings, it looks like this. With my people, it looks like this. Then we have practice, and then we have perform, how do we integrate this into natural work? We won't go into the details of each of these, but that gives you an idea. When we're coaching someone else or ourselves, we start by looking at these assessment results, we're pondering or saying, Man, why are these the way that they are? That's interesting. Then we're moving into prioritization, what is the organization asking of me as it relates to my role, what do I need to be good at in order to be effective? Maybe I'll choose this skill and this skill, then I'm going to implement these behaviors, and from an action plan perspective, if you come down here, let's open, openness and we will come down to the development tips. Give people permission to disagree with you, think of something that you have learned from another person, look at mistakes as learning opportunities, look at mistakes as learning opportunities, share information as openly as you can. Those are the types of development tips that are going to be integrated behaviorally every single day.

0:25:38.7 Tim: That's right.

0:25:40.0 Junior: We are gonna say, okay, today's Wednesday. Tomorrow, in this meeting, I want you to go and do this thing.

0:25:42.6 Tim: You know exactly what you need to do.

0:25:44.1 Junior: Exactly what we need to do. We might have that in a note pad, a little sticker that's on our monitor, we're gonna get that tactical.

0:25:51.6 Tim: That's right.

0:25:52.5 Junior: One of the behaviors in here that I really love way and last in meetings. Those are the types of behaviors that we can implement today, tomorrow, next week, that are going to make meaningful change. And then hopefully over time, we're going to see these scores start to move.

0:26:08.4 Tim: That's right.

0:26:10.1 Junior: The last thing that I'll show inside here is the reflections. So inside reflections, action plan reflections, these are important for any piece of coaching ever, it's part of the accountability mechanism, is we're reflecting on our behavior and we're asking a few questions. In this case, we're asking weekly, how did the week go? How can you improve? What else should we know? So that we can see over time, this aggregate, this bucket of reflections, well, here's how it went, here's how my improvement has coincided with my effort. Well, I haven't done anything for four weeks, so I can't expect any movement in the scores or in the way that people are responding to me.

0:26:58.2 Tim: Right.

0:26:59.2 Junior: So the reflections piece is an important accountability mechanism, and then a retake. So how many assessments have we seen that have no retake or no ability to measure longitudinally?

0:27:10.2 Tim: Most.

0:27:11.3 Junior: All too often.

0:27:12.7 Tim: Yeah, most.

0:27:13.9 Junior: All too often. And so the ability to do that is incredibly important. Now, I wanna move into the 360 for just a second and show what this looks like from a multi-rater perspective. So it's the exact same model, we're measuring the same things, it's just that now I have feedback from not just me, other people. In a coaching situation, more often than not, we're going to encourage the target, the coachee, to do multi-rater.

0:27:45.2 Tim: If at all possible.

0:27:45.5 Junior: Why? Yeah. Why? We want as objective data as we can possibly get our hands on.

0:27:51.9 Tim: That's right. That's right.

0:27:52.3 Junior: And so here you'll see, it's not just a self-rating, there are other categories. So inside here, we have all raters rolled up, which is a combination of your supervisor or supervisors, your direct reports, your peers, and any other categories that we put together. So inside here, you'll see those rater groups broken out in the rater chart, this is one of my favorite charts of all time. So you'll see the same thing, regard competencies at the top, awareness in the middle, management competencies at the bottom, and you'll see the rater groups as each of these colors.

0:28:27.3 Junior: So for self, I'm dark blue, so you can see these points plotted down here. Now my direct reports are gonna be a different color, my supervisor is gonna be a different color, you can see he thinks that my social management is much better than I think it is, but my peers think it's even better than her or she thinks it is, so you can see the way that that breaks out. Here's maybe my favourite chart of all.

0:28:54.4 Tim: Yeah, the most useful.

0:28:57.3 Junior: The Gap analysis radar chart, it's a mouthful, but this shows every single skill, all 30, and the difference between my self-rating and the average of other people, and then it shows gaps and hidden strengths. So anything that's a certain delta difference will show a blind spot over here, if the other raters rated me lower than I rated myself.

0:29:21.2 Tim: That's a blind spot.

0:29:22.3 Junior: And we have hidden strengths, anything that I rate myself lower than other people do. So you can see over here, observation, if this were my report, I'm saying I'm pegged out, I'm as observant as they come. And everyone else is saying actually...

0:29:37.8 Tim: Not so fast.

0:29:39.1 Junior: We don't think so, right?

0:29:39.3 Tim: Yeah, right.

0:29:42.0 Junior: And what amazing coaching material to be able to say, Hey, help me understand why that might be. And what are they gonna say? Well, they're gonna have to figure out some way to explain what's going on.

0:29:52.2 Tim: You have a data set that's looking you straight in the face, and it differs from the way you rated yourself. Now what?

0:30:00.9 Junior: Yeah. So if we go down to the domain level, you'll see the same type of thing, but just inside that domain, so we have the skills over here; confidence, motivation, independence, optimism and self-respect. And then the rater groups, you'll have the bar chart as well, and then some definitional elements like we have in the platform.

0:30:21.0 Junior: I just wanted to show this, to show that it's not just self, it's multi-rater, and that feedback can be especially useful in a coaching scenario. So I would say, could be one of the most valuable things that you could do for yourself or for someone else that you're helping develop, is the multi-rater. Any thoughts here?

0:30:43.0 Tim: No doubt in mind. Yeah, well, Junior, I just wanna go back to the... You asked a question at the outset, why do we have coaching? Well, in the workplace, in a professional environment, nine times out of 10, the focus of coaching is interpersonal effectiveness, nine times out of 10. It's not about strategy, it's not about your technical competence, it's not about any of those other things. It's about your interpersonal effectiveness. And so if it is, then at the foundation of that interpersonal effectiveness is your emotional intelligence. That's how fundamental this is. That's how important it is in the context of coaching.

0:31:33.9 Junior: Let's jump into some of the aggregate data, and I think people are gonna be interested by this. So I asked Ryan to send me a list of all 30 skills and their average score rank order.

0:31:46.8 Tim: And this is based on the entire global database.

0:31:50.6 Junior: Which is big, and it includes a lot of countries, a lot of languages, a lot, a whole lot of stuff. Up at the very top, the highest performing skill is respect. Interesting. Next, compassion. Let's look at the bottom, because these are the most interesting. The lowest skill...

0:32:13.2 Tim: Now, we need a... We kinda need a drum roll for this one because this is...

0:32:18.7 Junior: I'll do it.

0:32:18.8 Tim: This is a universal pattern across the human family, across cultures, languages, nations, cultural attributes, Democrat, it doesn't matter, and this is massively important that we understand this, so these low ones, especially the top... I'd say the bottom five, Junior, are extremely important for us to understand.

0:32:43.4 Junior: Yeah, so that bottom one is impulse control.

0:32:46.2 Tim: Impulse control, dead last out of 30 worldwide.

0:32:51.4 Junior: Yeah, by a decent margin. Then we have accountability management, emotional stability, stress tolerance, and mindfulness.

0:33:00.5 Tim: So those are the bottom five...

0:33:02.4 Junior: Those are the bottom five.

0:33:04.9 Tim: Skills out of the 30 worldwide.

0:33:06.7 Junior: Arguably just across the human family.

0:33:10.4 Tim: That's right.

0:33:10.5 Junior: Based on how big the data set is, we can say with a high degree of confidence that those are the bottom five for humanity.

0:33:14.7 Tim: Those are bottom five. Yeah, how important is that?

0:33:17.0 Junior: I think it's really important. If you're thinking about developing yourself, first of all, I find some degree of comfort in knowing that other people struggle with some of these things that I might find difficult too, right?

0:33:31.4 Tim: Yeah, you have company.

0:33:31.5 Junior: Mindfulness. Mindfulness is an interesting one. You think about the role that technology plays in mindfulness, I would say that it's probably inversely correlated.

0:33:40.7 Tim: It is. Its gotta be.

0:33:42.3 Junior: If you look across time technology use and some self-reported data like this.

0:33:44.9 Tim: Well, we have all kinds of data coming out talking about the fragmentation of attention.

0:33:50.6 Junior: Yeah. Well, think about how many things are vying for it.

0:33:54.7 Tim: Yeah, exactly.

0:33:54.8 Junior: Even during this episode, this thing's over here buzzing. I thought I turned it off, it's buzzing, my phone's buzzing, my watch is buzzing, all of these things are vying for my attention all the time.

0:34:05.8 Tim: That's right. That's right.

0:34:05.9 Junior: Even when you think you turned them off.

0:34:07.1 Tim: I know.

0:34:07.3 Junior: So we've got stress tolerance. That one's interesting, right?

0:34:11.3 Tim: Yeah.

0:34:11.8 Junior: Seems that a lot of people are dealing with stress, so if you're listening to this episode and you're thinking, wow, I think I have a lot of stress, and I'm having a hard time managing it. Well, so is the human race. Not to diminish the acuteness of your stress, but to help you understand that there are a lot of people that are dealing with that. And what are some things that we can do to help each other? What can we do as teams to help each other? As organizations, what patterns and norms can we institute in practice to help combat some of the things we're seeing that are systemic? It's not just some acute isolated problem with one single organization or team, these are broad issues that we have to tackle in a communal way.

0:34:55.2 Tim: That's right. Good point.

0:34:55.3 Junior: So that's what some of this is bringing to mind for me. And then I also wanted to bring up as a last point on coaching, the five stages of grief. This is something that we go through a lot when we're dealing with a debrief, with a 360 or even self-respondent data, if you're looking at your own stuff.

0:35:15.1 Tim: Yes.

0:35:15.8 Junior: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. So these are the stages that you're probably gonna have to go through...

0:35:23.5 Tim: You're gonna go through a little bit. Yeah.

0:35:23.6 Junior: When you're dealing with...

0:35:24.7 Tim: There may be a little cold water shock initially when you get your data back and you're looking at it, there may be some surprises, but isn't that wonderful that now you have access to that?

0:35:36.4 Junior: So just know that if you find yourself in one of those stages, it's natural, people go through those. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and we wanna move through those and get to acceptance as fast as possible. And the way that you do that, the practical reason I bring this up, is you need evidence and you need wins and you get those by doing these behaviors. So if that behavior is, ask someone about their day, and you do that, and someone gives you some story and you bond, and it's a great experience, that generates evidence that what you're doing is working.

0:36:16.6 Tim: It's working.

0:36:17.6 Junior: And that will help. That will snowball and you'll be able to move to that acceptance stage where you say, Oh, this is actually helpful, this is helping my team, this is helping my direct reports, this is helping me in my personal life. And as we said at the beginning, this is not just professional, it's personal as well. EQ is something that touches all humans everywhere. Any time there is more than one person, EQ is at play. And if you want to be exceptional in any one of those environments, you have to have exceptional emotional intelligence. So as we wrap up today, Tim, what are your final thoughts?

0:36:52.8 Tim: Well, the one thought that comes to mind is that you're not gonna get better in your emotional intelligence if other people are convinced that you have some gaps, that's not gonna happen. You're only gonna get better when you are convinced that you have some gaps. So that's number one.

0:37:14.3 Tim: Number two, you've gotta go all the way down to the ground, from an overall score of emotional intelligence to the six domains, down to the 30 skill areas, we go all the way down to the ground where we get to behavior, and then we have, as I said before, it's at that point that we have actionable data, we can say, Okay, I'm definitely struggling here, there are some specific concrete things that I can do, I put those into my action plan, I get to work. This is how we make progress. Back to the premise, emotional intelligence is a learnable skill, it's not a fixed trait.

0:37:57.8 Junior: And as I said at the very beginning, it's probably the single most important skill that you can develop today. So chances are, if you're listening to this, it applies to you. It is probably the single most important thing that you can do. So with that, we'll go ahead and wrap up. We hope that this episode has been useful to you. If you would like to get your own data, so your own report, all of the results, see how you compare against other people, do the action planning, look up EQ index, go to the website, I'm sure we'll link it and you can take the assessment, takes no more than 20 minutes, you can get your own data set. If you wanna use this for yourself and coaching, you wanna do the 360, we're here and available to help. So with that, we will say, bye-bye, see you next time. Take care.

[background conversation]

‍