EQ-i Assessment: Rob Finds Out How His Emotional Intelligence Ranks
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is your ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own and others’ emotions. On today’s podcast, Traci and Rob discuss how EQ is essential to great leadership. Understanding and growing your emotional intelligence enables you to lean into your strengths and recognize your blind spots. Traci debriefs Rob on his own EQ-i 2.0 Assessment results. Listen in as he reveals his own EQ struggles and strengths over his career!
Book recommendations: The EQ Leader by Steven Stein, EQ 2.0 by Travis Bradberry, Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
Talk to Traci about an EQ-i 2.0 Assessment for yourself or your team: traci@navigatethejourney.com
Transcript
Rob:
Hey, Traci. How's it going?
Traci:
Good, Rob. How are you doing?
Rob:
I'm doing well today. Thanks for asking. I appreciate it.
Traci:
Good. Are you excited for round two of assessments today?
Rob:
I'm not real sure. I'll be honest, we're doing ... Which one are we doing today?
Traci:
Today we're doing emotional intelligence, EQ-i.
Rob:
Yeah, that's what I thought. And when I was taking the two assessments, the DiSC that we talked about last week and the EQ-i that we're going to talk about this week, I was pretty sure with the DiSC there was no wrong answers. I feel like today might be different. I feel like there might be wrong answers, and I may be an awful person.
Traci:
No, no. What I like to tell people is EQ-i is a flexible skill, and it's something we're all growing in. So just like the DiSC where we saw where your strengths lie as far as your behavioral style, but we also saw where maybe some of your limitations and fears might be, with EQ-i, with emotional intelligence what we see and what we'll go over in your report is we will see where your natural strengths lie and your emotional intelligence. But we'll also see the areas that you can work to improve.
Announcer:
Welcome to the Overly Human podcast, where we discuss all things human in the workplace because it's not just business—it's personal too.
Traci:
So the way emotional intelligence works, it's a model, and there's five composites and three subscales. So we're going to have 15 different scores on you. What we're going to see are the three that rise to the top, your top three and your bottom three.
So what I like to tell people is everybody has a top three and everybody has a bottom three. So we all have areas where we kind of shine that are obvious to other people, and we all have areas where we know we can stretch ourselves or we might be limited and we just need to have our finger on the pulse of that so we can heighten our awareness.
Rob:
Yeah. Okay. So would I just, layman's term what I heard is you may still suck but you can get better at it.
Traci:
Exactly. I don't like to use the word suck, that's your word.
Rob:
Okay. I'm sorry. Well I'm here representing the people who aren't professionals at this. Yeah.
Traci:
I love that you're representing the people. That's great.
Well let me first give the definition of emotional intelligence, because I'm sure some people are pretty familiar with it because it's kind of a hot topic nowadays, but others might not be familiar with it. Emotional intelligence, a lot of people call it EQ. It's not like IQ. IQ is your ability to process information and that's pretty much fixed in your late teens, early twenties, and we're always going for the highest score with IQ. With EQ it's different. EQ, emotional intelligence, is your ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions as well as recognize, understand, and manage the emotions of others.
So I like to think about it as how am I coming across to other people? Am I aware of how I'm coming across? Am I aware of my own emotions and am I able to sort of manage and address them in the moment? Also can I recognize the emotions of the other people in the room? Am I able to read a room? Am I able to know when Sally might be upset even if she's not saying anything. I can sense it.
So it's that ability to understand and have your ability to manage your own emotions and to make sure, especially in the workplace, that you're able to come across as authentic and connected as you can. But you also want to be able to see what's happening with other people and be able to recognize that. That's really, in a nutshell, what emotional intelligence is, and I feel like it is the gap between a good leader and a great leader.
Rob:
Okay.
Traci:
These are sort of those kind of soft skills, for lack of a better word, the almost more psychological skills that you need to have as a leader beyond your technical ability or your ability to run a company or to manage numbers. You need to have these skills to actually be able to bridge and become the great leader that people really want to follow.
Rob:
Awesome. I think you talked a lot about emotions in the room and things like that. One of the things that I know I've heard before and I think about a lot is the fact that emotions are contagious too.
Traci:
Yes.
Rob:
That whole idea of co-regulation, when you're in the same space with somebody, emotions can transfer from one person the other and you can feel them and be affected by them. It sounds like some of this stuff we're going to talk about today is even a little bit was understanding and recognizing those tendencies.
Traci:
Yes. Yes. That's very true. Some people, you can probably think of people in your mind, especially people you've worked for in the past where you can say, "Wow, that person really understood where I was coming from, or really got me or really was able of catch themselves in a moment when they were about to get super angry. Then I watched them kind of dial back and admired that."
There's a famous quote where it says people will forget what you said. They might even forget what you did. But they'll never forget how you made them feel. I think that's very true.
As I look across the last 25 years of my career, I can remember the leaders or the colleagues or the people in my life through how they made me feel. Not so much remembering their exact words or what they did as a leader, but really how they made me feel. Those things stick with us forever, and that's why emotional intelligence is such a powerful skill.
Rob:
Yeah, that's really interesting. One of those things that I think about a lot is somebody else's how I made them feel, is I have influence over it, but it's ultimately their feeling. It's not something that I can control. But understanding who they are and as much as I can about them can allow me to interact with them in a such a way where they felt heard and understood, even if we don't necessarily agree at the end.
Traci:
Exactly. Yeah. Then the other half is how they handle it. Right? So that's the other side of emotional intelligence is also how can we handle the emotions that come our way or the stress that comes our way or the problems that we have to solve, especially in a crisis at work. How do we handle that? So part of emotional intelligence is are we somebody who flies off the handle? Are we somebody who slams doors at work, or are we somebody who retreat, becomes silent, cocoon, really don't want to engage anybody? These are the ways that we're sort of processing our inward emotions. So there is that balance of the others and then there's the balance of our own inner workings.
Rob:
Yeah. Interesting. If you were to ask, and I've not looked at my results for any of this yet, if you were to ask me how I respond to things, the word that I like to think about is unreasonably reasonable. Try not to become upset. Try not to let my emotions run away with things. But try to stay logical even when most people would become upset and slam doors, just trying to approach it from a very reasonable, "Okay, so this is what you're saying. Is my understanding of this correct? This is how you feel and this is what you're saying. Okay, let's just unpack that. I'll be curious to see what the results are. So let's dive into them."
Traci:
Yeah, let's look. Okay. So I'm going to, the listener can't see this, but I'm going to show Rob what his results are. Looking at the model here, here are the five composites which are
Self-perception, how you perceive yourself.
Self-expression, how you express yourself.
Your interpersonal skills. So your ability to have, your empathy, your interpersonal relationships.
Then your decision making, that problem solving reality testing, which is just being your ability to be objective even when you're emotional, impulse control.
Stress management, your ability to be flexible, how you handle stress, your optimism.
So that's the model, and then here are your results. So I'm going to show you...Let me get to the whole list so you can see that first before we look at your top three and bottom three.
Rob:
Okay.
Traci:
But this report, which is a pretty lengthy report and has a lot of information in it, and we don't have a lot of time on the podcast so we're going to just top line it.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
But you can see that you're going to have a score on every one of the composites and subscales. So what's important to remember again is what I said at the beginning. With IQ, you're probably going for the highest score. With EQ we're looking for balance. So we're not always going for the highest score.
I'll use the first subscale on this list, which is self-regard as an example. So self-regard, we want to have a healthy self-regard, which is a healthy self-confidence. It's really hard for people to follow a boss or a manager who doesn't have confidence, right? But we also don't want you to have the highest score because then you'd be a narcissist and it's really, really hard to work for a narcissist, right?
So we want that balance, and you have a really good self-regard score. You fall into the leadership scale that we want to see you in, but you're not off the charts. So what this says to me as a coach is I can see that you respect yourself, you have confidence in what you can do, but you're not off the charts arrogant narcissist who doesn't care about anybody else's opinion but your own.
So that's when we talk about balance, and you can see in some of these scores that you're falling within what we call the gold bar, where we want to see you as a leader and some are a little bit lower. How you read this, you have a scale from about 65 to 135, 100 is the norm.
Rob:
Okay.
Traci:
So if you have a subscale where you scored over 100, that just means you're using that skill more than the norm. If you have lower than 100 it means you're using that skill of less than the norm. So as you can see, most all of your scores fall at 100 or above and you have a few below 100. Overall you've really, really good scores-
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Which is good.
Rob:
Yay.
Traci:
So just like I said before, everybody has a high three and everybody has a low three. What I like to say here too is kind of think of it as your top three are sort of those strengths, those skills that you...If each subscale is a muscle, these are the muscles that you've worked into really strong muscles.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
The low three subscales are just areas that usually what we see is just with heightened self-awareness, you're able to see the scores go up. It's just that ability to see like, "Oh yeah, that is true. That's the way I kind of view things," that help your scores go up.
So here in your high three subscales your high three are problem solving is your highest, stress tolerance, and self-regard. Do you find those surprising or would you say, yeah, that makes sense to me?
Rob:
No, that's pretty much what I would have expected. Problem solving, that's something that has always come pretty natural to me and I really do enjoy. Stress tolerance is something that I've learned. Doing the job that I do it's almost a requirement, otherwise you'll drive yourself batty, and self-regard, that won't surprise anyone who knows me. I made a comment the other day, something completely off subject to my business partner Ben, and his response was what the world could only accomplish if they had your confidence.
Traci:
Oh that's nice. That's nice. This is a great combo, because this shows me, as a coach, that you're a leader that's probably easy to trust and easy to follow, and especially in a time of crisis or a time when you're tackling a big project or a big problem, I would imagine people would think...Your name would pop to mind pretty easily when they're saying, "Who do we need to go to talk to about this?"
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Because what it shows us, what your scores show us, is that your ability to problem solve, what an emotional intelligence score says is not actually the skill of problem solving. It's your ability to problem solve even in emotional situations. So even when the stress is high, when things are flying around, when the project deadlines right in front of your face, you're able to stay calm and stable and be able to solve the problem. Some people freeze when there are crisis's or stress is high and they're not able to really go through analytically, go through that problem and be able to solve that problem.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Whereas a normal day where there's not much going on, they might be able to just very easily solve a problem.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
But what we are looking here is can you do it in an emotional, stressful situation? So these first two go hand-in-hand. The problem solving and the stress tolerance really shows that you're a leader, that when emotions are high or there's a crisis, you're kind of unflappable according to this report.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
And you'll have that confidence, which also comes through probably in your optimism is this ability to say we're going to go for it, we're going to do it. I have a plan. I have an idea. It's all going to be okay.
Rob:
Yeah, that's interesting. Just remembering back, we do peer reviews and a whole bunch of those things on a regular basis, Sparkbox. One of the pieces of peer review that I got, oh it's been a couple of years ago, but really stuck with me is one of my direct reports that said to me is like, I feel like you're better at giving bad news than good news. You feel like you're more comfortable doing that.
I thought about that and it stuck with me a little bit. It's one of those that I've really tried to practice getting better at giving good news. Because it's great that people trust me to give them bad news and all of that. But that was an interesting moment for me.
I think that when I think about these two in particular, especially the stress tolerance, there was a time when I worked a job where I traveled all the time, on the road 70 percent of the time and I would be dropped into a new client situation every single week. Didn't know any of the names, just dropped into a company that never met me and I was there to solve some problem.
I made the decision and I spent two years practicing being the most comfortable person in the room. I decided that if you could be the most comfortable person in the room, you could win. That was a skill you could develop because everybody's nervous, everybody's stressed, everybody responds differently. But all you had to do was be the most comfortable, most confident person and things would work out.
Traci:
Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a great ... It kind of reminds me of, is it said Amy Cuddy? I don't know if you've ever watched her Ted Talk, the sort of taking the stance and taking that position and really getting your psychology right. It sounds like that's what you did to be able to have that kind of executive presence in the moment.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
And you're right. You're right. To be able to recognize that everybody could be slightly uncomfortable or slightly nervous and to say, "Okay, how am I going to stabilize the situation and how can I be a person that's going to be confident and self assured in a high-pressure situation? So that steadfastness, and to be able to be decisive.”
Rob:
Yeah. And I think you could relate that pretty well to a lot of the people that do what we do on the technical space, work on projects for clients. I tell the team this all the time is we have a higher responsibility than our clients do because where they may do one or two projects ever in their career, we do dozens and dozens and dozens of them a year. They're coming to us because we are the experts. Let's act like it.
Traci:
Yeah. That's good. So let's look at your lowest three and see how they feel to you.
Rob:
I'm buckled up here.
Traci:
Don't be nervous. So low three social responsibility, which in this is kind of that social consciousness. Some of the questions that fall in the report that you answered were things around contributing to your community or social issues or your preference to help people or making a difference in society.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
So that's that score. Empathy, you're slightly less empathetic than most, and emotional expression. So emotional expression is how much we give of how we're really feeling in the moment.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Just on the surface, how does this feel to you?
Rob:
There's no surprises there.
Traci:
Okay.
Rob:
I've worked really hard on two of those, empathy and social responsibility. Empathy doesn't come natural. I would love to have a comparison where I was ten years ago compared to that score, because I know how much work has gone into even getting slightly below average.
Traci:
What's the hardest thing for you with that, or has been?
Rob:
Empathy? I think we can go back to some of the things with even the DiSC profile we talked about last week, is the way I'm wired is I want to win. My natural instinct is I want people as committed as I am to all the things, and that what I've learned is that natural instinct to win at, not no cost, but to win and have that be a priority of winning and wanting people to be as invested or committed as I am is a recipe for not really seeing where they're coming from and what they're struggling with by itself.
So this is something that I've had to take a step back on a lot of cases and say, "Hey, just because you don't perceive them chasing and pursuing the things like you think they should or you would does not mean they're doing it incorrectly."
Traci:
Right.
Rob:
So that's been a lot of work on figuring that out and not being like, "No, no, no. I just want us to run at things.” I had a team member years ago who flatly said to me, "I don't know how to do this. I don't know how you expect me to." My answer at that point was, "I don't need you to know how to slay the dragon. I just want you to run in there with your sword drawn."
Traci:
Yeah.
Rob:
That's what I want, is I want you to run in and enthusiastically chase the problem. Maybe you can't figure it out the first go. So it's adapting those things and learning that there's lots of good ways to do these things.
The social responsibility, that's something that I'm surrounded by some really smart people. My business partner probably on these three scores is off the charts. So I know that I've got a balance point on some of those. But the social responsibility thing is one that I've had to work on a lot and do a lot of education. And I'm sure that's wrapped up in my own privilege and place in this world, and the fact that I've got know who I am and the way I was raised in all of that and trying to just do the education pieces.
Traci:
Yeah. You can see how your high scores relate to these low scores, right? So when you were describing your struggle with empathy, you even use the words kind of problem solving and that whole going in with a sword drawn. You're able to do that, to run into the fire, because your stress tolerance is really high. You can handle a lot of stress.
So sometimes, or often, when I see somebody with a high stress tolerance score, I'll see a lower empathy. Because empathy is really our ability to relate, not to just recognize other people's emotions or try to put ourselves in their shoes, but to relate to that emotion. So if you have a high stress tolerance and you see somebody in the workplace kind of freaking out over something, it's really hard to relate to them.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Why are you freaking out, or why are you paralyzed by this? Go in and just slay the dragon, right? Because it's hard for you to relate to that because that's not your own personal experience, right?
Rob:
Yeah, that's absolutely right. It's also interesting to think about this. I definitely have seen and have put myself...I'm comfortable putting myself in stressful situations and having tough conversations and doing that. Not that I go looking for them, but I know when they show up that I trust myself in those situations. Allowing and developing that trust of others to have that same ability is something that I've had to work on.
Traci:
Yeah, and emotional expression, you talked a little bit about that before about sort of conditioning yourself in your reactions. Have you ever heard the feedback that it's hard for people to guess what you're thinking or feeling?
Rob:
Yeah, I have.
Traci:
Yeah, and that's typically what you hear for a lower emotional expression. Talk a little bit about that.
Rob:
Yeah. My wife often says, "I don't know if I hurt your feeling." She's using my feeling as a single.
Traci:
That's awesome.
Rob:
Our relationship works because we are extremely direct and extremely honest with each other. So I don't take that as a bad thing. It's true.
I think growing up a little bit with the emotional expression stuff is…men were tough. They did what they had to do. They didn't have a lot of feels. I don't have those, I try not to instill those same things in my children or even live them out. But that's baggage that I have that's pretty deeply ingrained. This is another one where I feel like 10, 20 years ago when I started my career, this might've been really low, single digits almost and has come up quite a bit.
But I think that the thing that I've learned about emotional expression is if you're trying to get someone to share with you and to be open with you, sometimes it takes being vulnerable to them.
Traci:
Yes.
Rob:
And while I'm not wired that way by default, and I tried to when I answered these questions, tried to put myself in a hey, this is my natural instinct. This is what I want to do. I've learned some of the, not tricks, but learned some of the tools to be able to talk to people and coach people effectively so that we can have that conversation and they can get what they need.
Traci:
Yeah. And you're not alone with this low emotional expression score. A lot of the leaders that I coach that are men...I'll never forget coaching one CEO where I showed him his EQ-i and hit his lowest was emotional expression. He was like, "Yes." He was so proud of it because he was like, you're not supposed to show emotion at work. And I was like, "Well, let's pull this apart a little bit."
One of the things that I like to remind people about emotional expression is yes, nobody wants to see you throwing a chair or being crazy when you're in the workplace with your emotions. Nobody wants you to emotionally vomit all over them, right? So if you have a super high emotional expression score, that's a problem. But if you have a low one, the problem with that is people are guessing what you're thinking or feeling, and nine times out of ten they're going to think negatively.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
They're not going to think, "Oh, I bet Rob thinks that I'm doing great," because that's not our human nature.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Our human nature is to apply the negative. So words are your best friends when it comes to emotional expression. I don't want to change somebody, especially if they're an introvert or an extrovert or they're a very emotional person or not. It's really, again, this is a skill about balance. So you don't have to be Tom Cruise and jump on the couch to show how much you love somebody. But what I just want you to do is use your words. That really puts so many people at ease.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
To say, "I'm happy about this," even if physically you're not showing that happiness.
Rob:
Yeah. I think that's one of the things that I've tried to get better at is making sure that I'm using the words, “thank you” when I'm feeling that. Or, “I appreciate you” and those kinds of things with our team so they're not guessing.
Traci:
Yeah.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Yeah. It's the same with empathy. The best tools to really get better at raising these scores is really just asking the right questions, talking to people, using your words with empathy. If you're having trouble relating to somebody as like, "Okay, talk to me more about how you feel right now. What's that like for you?"
So it's just very simple tweaks as you're even talking about, some of the things you've done over the years, really bridge the gap. So that's the thing I really like about this model and about emotional intelligence. It should be encouraging for everybody out there because I really love this tool and I think it's such a great tool for leaders.
I've learned so much off my own report and being able to stretch myself and grow, and I know many people I've coached have, is it doesn't take a lot to get better at this. A lot of it is just self-awareness, and we'll put on our website some books that people can read or ways to find out how to have their own report done because it's so powerful and I believe in it so much. It's going to make you a better leader. It's going to make you a better spouse and friend and son or daughter. So this is something that can stretch over all domains of your life. So we'll put some more information on the website as well.
Rob:
Yeah. Awesome. So just to wrap up real quick, this was really helpful and this is really neat. I'm going to dig into the rest of this. How, in the workplace, how would you use this particular assessment?
Traci:
So in the workplace, typically what I do is run this type of report on the leaders. I'm mainly coaching the leadership team, and really coaching them one-on-one to recognize where their strengths are so that they can lean into them but not lean too far. Then where are their weaknesses are or blind spots are, and talking through how that might show up and how you can have some strategies for action.
The other cool tool that comes with this report is you can run group reports so you can see as a whole how your entire leadership team or how your entire agency falls. So as a team, what are our high three and what are our low threes? That's so fun to facilitate. It's really cool for a team to see, "Oh my gosh, we all are low on this? So that explains why we keep doing this. Then we can learn as a team how we're coming across, especially as a leadership team, how we might be coming across to the rest of the agency. We also do 360s with this too, and that's really eye opening too. You can kind of see how other people see where your strengths and weaknesses are.
So there's so many different things you can do with this tool. But really I feel like just one debrief you get so much out of just that complete awareness. In this report, as you go through it, you'll see there's tons of strategies on each page, each subscale that give you strategies for action on how to grow your strength and exercise your strength in each subscale, which is super cool too.
Rob:
Yeah. Awesome. Well thanks Traci. I appreciate you walking us through this today and I'm going to dig into this, and I'm sure I'll have some more questions offline.
Traci:
Well, thank you. Again, I just feel like it's great that you put yourself out there and you're like, "Let's just see what the scores show and tell the world." I just think that that's amazing and fun, and thank you for being vulnerable and willing to go down this journey with us.
Rob:
Yeah. Trying to have some empathy and emotional expression.
Traci:
That's so true. You did well.
Rob:
Yeah, but it's probably mostly my self-regard that allows me to do this.
Traci:
I knew you would survive. Exactly.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
You'll come out the other side just fine.
Rob:
All right. Thanks, Traci.
Traci:
Thank you.
Announcer:
This podcast would not be possible without the amazing communications team at Sparkbox. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe and tell your friends to listen as well. The Overly Human podcast is brought to you by Navigate the Journey and Sparkbox. For more information on this podcast, or to get in touch with Traci or Rob, go to overlyhuman.com. Thanks for listening.
