The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in the 21st Century

Building a Coaching Culture - #98: The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in the 21st Century === J.R. Flatter [00:00:44]: Hey. Welcome back, everybody. J. R. Flatter here with my mustachioed friend and cohost, Lucas. Hi. How are you doing? How you doing, brother? Took the week off from the gym. Felt pretty good. J.R. Flatter [00:00:55]: I was coming down the stairs this morning, and they're like, my legs don't hurt. Lucas Flatter [00:00:59]: What's going on? It's like the the Lack of soreness. It's like an alarm bell or something. J.R. Flatter [00:01:05]: Yeah. I'm here to get back in the gym. I'm gonna run a couple times this weekend and then be back in my weights Tuesday with you. Looking forward to it. So We were thinking about, you know, a topic for this session in the idea of the growing importance of emotional intelligence. As we dig deeper and deeper into the 21st century. I think what prompted my thoughts on this, I was reading an article The Marine Corps Gazette, if you're not a marine, you probably never heard about the Marine Corps Gazette, but it comes out every month, and it's like The source document of thought leadership for the marine corps, I think each service has their own Naval proceedings has 1. Army has 1. J.R. Flatter [00:01:52]: Marine Corps Gazette, SARS. But it was an entire, Every 3,000 word article on emotional intelligence and how to use it in 21st century Battle space. I thought it was really intriguing that something you and I talk about all the time It's now working its way deeper and deeper into all organizations as a necessity, and we're also chatting briefly about this idea of soft skills versus hard skills, and I kinda chafed at the idea that there are separate and distinct necessary skills now. As I was coming up, we thought of soft skills as we get all the hard skills squared away, and then perhaps We'll talk about these warm and fuzzy soft skills, but now you're the voice of the of this generation. It's part and parcel of how you think and decide and work. Lucas Flatter [00:02:50]: Yeah. I mean, I guess That leads me into the thought that I think maybe there's, like, a higher baseline on, like, the minimum Amount of technical skills everybody has where it's like, those are pretty well taken care of throughout our lives, like interacting with computers and Office software and and, like, just practices that you can easily bring into the office. And then it's like, Oh, but do we get along with this person or do they fit with us? Do they align with our mission? Yeah. It's I guess it's just easier to find somebody that can to the technical skills? J.R. Flatter [00:03:29]: Yeah. But even while I listen to you say that, I'm thinking about sort of heading into a new year. Obviously, we stop and pause and say, what did we accomplish last year, and what do you hope to accomplish in the coming year? And just looking back 12 months, There's a corporation that it was online entirely. I don't think they had any brick and mortar. They had to be in the 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in revenue, if not 1,000,000,000 of dollars in revenue, and I just read today they're going out of business. One day you're here, and one next day you're gone, right? You're the service of choice, and then you evaporate. So As a boomer looking at at millennials and younger, I'm understanding more and more it's a matter of necessity that You have an allegiance to your continued growth and your continued relevance, and The job you're doing today is very likely not gonna be there even 5 years from now. I mean, look at the software you're using today versus and by the way, congratulations on your 9th anniversary here. J.R. Flatter [00:04:38]: It's hard to believe. Right? You're here 9 years already. Look at the software you were using 9 years ago. We say all the time, Moore's law is dead, but what do you think? Two x, three x, four x? How many generations have you gone through in 9 years. Lucas Flatter [00:04:53]: The affordances. Yeah. In terms of, like, what you could be using to automate, you know, yeah, you could do the work of 3 people that When I started yeah. So definitely. J.R. Flatter [00:05:05]: That's interesting because all this technology and What I've spent the last several days doing is what I would call nug work, going in and making sure the right logo's in the right place, Wondering, I bet there's a tool out there that would help me do this, that I wouldn't have to do this 20 different times. I was creating a template, like a 30 page template, a branding template that we're all gonna use, so it is some sort of automation involved in There's still a lot of nugget work. So even this far into the 21st century, you're still going doing a lot of very technical and cognitive things. Lucas Flatter [00:05:47]: Yeah. Like, it also prompted these ideas. It's like, what is desirable to automate? Like, You think, oh, we're doing all this paperwork. Maybe it has to do with people, like, directly, like, with HR or something. And, oh, if we automated this, we would Save money, but do you wanna automate things that you know, some things require human intervention and Oversight and care and, you know, this emotional intelligence that we're talking about. So it's not always desirable to say, like, Everything should be automated. You're spot on. J.R. Flatter [00:06:24]: One of my biggest lessons of this year, past, was I've been in business 22 years, but I had never learned how to sell. And I read a book called fanatical prospecting, and, we hired a sales lead. She's been on the team just at a year right now, so very beginning of this year. She came on the team, and now it's been on almost a year. Gosh, dumb flies. And I think your brother's been telling me for years, You gotta sell analog before you can sell digitally. You gotta learn how what does the process look like human to human and then digitize it. But as always, being the boomer that I am, I pushed back and said, no. J.R. Flatter [00:07:11]: This is the 21st century. I'm gonna digitize my sales process. You know, our sales lead, like, day 1 is, like, stop focusing on the website. Stop focusing on what should be in marketing. Let's go old school, and I push back on that, but after reading the book and working with her for close to a year, it is rather analog, but from a place of emotional intelligence. Even the human, eventually it comes down to One of the things I learned in sales, and this is gonna sound like a blinding flash of the obvious, we decide to purchase emotionally, and then we rationalize it, that we really needed that, or it was gonna serve us. But in inside, we're deciding emotionally. So whether or not you use our coaching services or whether or not you use our coaching education, I have to make an emotional connection with you, and you have to make an emotional connection with me, and then you'll decide. Lucas Flatter [00:08:12]: Just thinking about tools in general and how, You know, you can gain capabilities from tools, but it's not going to change, like, what message Okay. And so yeah. And like like we're kinda getting out before, you can amplify it with automation. Oh, I wanna reach more people, but you're not necessarily gonna Hone the message on, like, what exactly you wanna get across. And then maybe those like, oh, we provide these 5 things like bullet points. Those are the capabilities that you're advertising. But like you're saying, it's what are what emotional decision Do those bullet points bolster? You know? So it is marketing's totally in that emotionally intelligent, like, Communication world. Yeah. Lucas Flatter [00:09:03]: You've just struck on and this is probably going back more than a year, but J.R. Flatter [00:09:08]: When I met our our friend, Brian Elwood, and he came on podcast probably a year and a half ago, talking about nailing your niche, as our British friends say, we tend to say niche in America. It's all about becoming one of 1. What are you delivering? What's your quantifiable end result? Now you're the only one in the world doing it. That's how you break through. And if you're trying to sell to all 8,000,000,000 of us walking the planet, you're not gonna sell to anyone. And so that's what The message I took away from his book is how to become 1 on 1. So you and I are going through rebranding. You've got a new job, a new role. J.R. Flatter [00:09:52]: It's all part of our continued growth here, and it's all about identifying, you know, what is that voice, that human to human connection that we're trying to make. Otherwise, you can't break through. You're trying to talk to 8,000,000,000 people. Lucas Flatter [00:10:05]: And even, like, going back to the Marine Corps example, it's like I think I mean, you have communications protocols like, Oh, let's use what is it called in the NATO alphabet or military time and things that make communication run smoother? But it's like now we can start asking like, how is the person, how might they feel if you say this at this particular time? It's really interesting. J.R. Flatter [00:10:34]: Yeah. And I think back to my own days, my early days of serving as a drill instructor, and the outside world looking in would think, you know, it's 3 months of yelling and screaming and push ups, and what you you have me doing again, which are mountain climbers. Push ups, mountain climbers, sit ups, again, push ups, mountain climbers, sit ups, again, but it's not. Actually, the Marine Corps breaks recruit training into 3 phases, and I didn't understand this while I was a drone instructor. But Looking back, I see it was very purposeful three phases of maturation from what kind of power are you choosing to use. And in the early days and especially in the early hours, it's very coercive. You're gonna do what I tell you to do immediately, and then you do that for a month or so, and 2 things happen. 1, it starts to lose its impact if you continued on that path, quickly lose their attention and lose control. J.R. Flatter [00:11:37]: So it begins to mature to a more participative, I'm doing this because I want to do it, and I know it's gonna fulfill my role in that 2nd phase. And the 3rd phase, looking back, I realized there's a lot of emotional intelligence going on there. We began to talk about after boot camp and what it was gonna feel like to be a marine in the fleet, as we say, outdoing your job and your mission. And the diff the kind of power that you used through those 3 phases was completely different. By the end, and, you know, again, as an outsider looking in, you might think that the Marine Corps leads through this very course of style, but it's not. It's a very participative style to the point of decision. And then once the decision's made, you've had your chance to participate in the decision, and now you go execute with absolute enthusiasm. I apologize for getting on that Marine Corps soapbox. J.R. Flatter [00:12:33]: But Lucas Flatter [00:12:33]: No. I mean, you talk J.R. Flatter [00:12:34]: about be out of the club, but I didn't do it once Lucas Flatter [00:12:37]: Talk about like a culture that's pervasive and, you know, identifiable and prevalent over time. J.R. Flatter [00:12:45]: Well, you know, one of the topics that you and I talk about when we talk about culture and emotional intelligence is becoming an employer of choice. And not to poke my sister's services in the eye, but there's only 2 services that are making their recruiting goals. The Space Force, because they have such a small force that they can handpick everyone, and congratulations to them for that, and the Marine Corps, because people come to The Minkl for a calling and a purpose, not for the education or the compelling purposes you might come join a military service. If you wanna be an employer of choice, and, again, going back to your breakthrough with your voice, You gotta make sure that the voice you have is the voice that's going to be compelling and make you an employer of choice. Lucas Flatter [00:13:39]: And I think, also, there are certain things that we kind of take for granted that are, like, mechanics So that kinda build these emotional connections, like, you know, exercising together, saying things in synchronicity, like, singing together. Like, Things that you kind of think, oh, like, you know, that's a no brainer. But people do it in in worship settings and in, You know, military organizations, little kids at school. It's things that like, they lead towards this emotional intelligence and this Kind of like feeling of connection, but they're almost like disregarded now. Like, oh, that's how they used to do things. J.R. Flatter [00:14:24]: Mhmm. Yeah. But I think The further we go down this path and the more we understand how the brain works, those rehearsals and those participative exercises, They're creating memories that are bonding you. They're creating neural paths that don't go away. I'm coaching someone right now who's applying for a promotion. In our next 2 coaching sessions, unless something else pops up, As always, as the coach, I come into the room with an empty chalkboard and an empty table depending on what she wants to bring in the room, but we intend to focus on mock interviews and role play. You know, you mentioned worship service in the military. I remember my days learning patrolling, which is a fundamental skill of military service, and practicing and rehearsing, and wondering why we were doing that, not knowing that just a simple exercise of a mock departure from the line of effort, and all of us getting into our position, we're creating those neuropaths and muscle memories that were gonna be with us on the actual mission. J.R. Flatter [00:15:41]: So that's ingrained in me now that I'm a coach to create those opportunities to Get that muscle memory and get that neural memory, and it'll stay with her when she goes into the actual interview. It won't be the 1st time she strung those words together in a sentence and in a paragraph. We will have rehearsed them, emotional over the technical. As I'm coaching her through this, being careful not to get too much of a mentorship pat on, come up to the edge of that line a few times, asking her, who do you need to make connections with that are going to increase the likelihood you get the job? Because you wanna be known as a human being to them. If you're a name on a resume, and they don't know who you are, the likelihood you getting that position is pretty low. And so what can she do to become a human? We call it put a face to a name oftentimes, but really, when I see you, and I see your mood, and I see your Posture and your enthusiasm is entirely different than when I'm reading Lucas Flatter on a resume. Again, going back to EQ, emotional intelligence. Lucas Flatter [00:17:03]: Yeah. I guess and it's also You can be very emotionally intelligent, and maybe you come across well in person and in video. But then sometimes you have to translate those back to technical, like, how do I convey that in a resume? Like, how do I Take all this that I've learned about our customer and convey it in like a 2 sentence copy, you know? J.R. Flatter [00:17:30]: Yeah. I think about that a lot. So I come from a very technical background, very blue collar background, school trained diesel mechanic, school trained welder, Those kind of trades, I don't do those anymore. I still kinda remember how to do them, kinda like I know how to do multivariate regression analysis from a master's degree, but the primary thing, you know, you've still got that neuropaths and those muscle memories. But I think about it a lot, and I had a ratchet in my hand the other day and how nice that felt to Be turning a wrench again and brings back a lot of good memories. So you never entirely get away from the technical and the cognitive. And You know, one of the things one of the ways I measure whether I've had a successful day or a successful year is how much time did I spend in any of those 3, and depending on what my role is, depending on what my objectives are for the year, What my key results are for any given quarter would be how much I wanna spend in each of those. And These last few days doing this snug work, this very technical work, very necessary in the configuration of the team and our roles and responsibilities. J.R. Flatter [00:18:49]: I'm the right person to do that template, and so the 2 days or 3 days that I've dedicated to it, it's a very slow time of year anyway, so it's very rather rather relaxing to be able to go back and do that. But I know beginning of the year, I gotta get back into the EQ, get away from the technical, and I have a team. We have a team, and you're part of that contributions, technical, cognitive, and emotional. And Whether you realize it or not, you're making those same decisions minute by minute and day by day. The people that you work with and the people that you work for for helping you make those decisions. Nonetheless, you're making them. Lucas Flatter [00:19:32]: I guess, I I kinda wanted to talk about, I think we used to have an example, like, selling the sills sizzle instead of selling the steak. And Thinking about applying that to, you know, our experiences over the last year, it's like, okay. You Go to the gym to build up muscle. Like, the stake you know, the the practical benefit is that you get stronger, you know, you're healthier. But then The emotional differences, it's sometimes harder to even predict what those might be until you experience it. J.R. Flatter [00:20:11]: Do you have an example? I'm sure you do in the back of your mind what you were talking about. Lucas Flatter [00:20:16]: Yeah. I guess, just generally, For the working out thing, I think that the physical health is one thing, but then I think maybe the more subtle effect is How you feel more confident, and maybe you feel more capable because you are more strong physically. J.R. Flatter [00:20:36]: Oh yeah, it's one of the things that when you don't work out for a while, you forget what it felt like, And even now, there were times in my life where I felt like I was floating, doing a sub 6 mile, mile after mile. And I don't do that anymore, but it still feels amazing to get out there, and you forget how well that feels. If you don't engage your emotional intelligence for a while, and you just hunkered down in technical and cognitive, and then you have a moment of pure unadulterated leadership where it's a 100% emotional between you and another human being. You're like, dang. That felt good. Felt good to be able to provide that and be part of that. So again, going back to the need for soft versus hard, as human beings, I think we're instinctively comfortable in the tactical and the cognitive. They provide immediate reward, you could see right there in front of you, you might be physically higher, and you could see the results of your work. J.R. Flatter [00:21:42]: But in emotional intelligence, you might not know for your entire life that you changed the path of someone's life, or they made a monumental achievement because of your engagement with them. I was just thinking about one of the case studies in our deck. It's called EQ is BS. There was a quote from someone in our coaching world. It was a long story leading up to us all engaging in executive coaching on our leadership team here, myself included. And so, this person was engaged in coaching with one of our best coaches and was getting nowhere, and couldn't or wouldn't. We always talk about willingness versus ability. Couldn't or wouldn't get their head around the fact that Simply doing their job wasn't enough in the role they were in. J.R. Flatter [00:22:37]: They were in an executive position that required leadership, strategic thought, yet every day was mired in technical and cognitive and just couldn't get their head around the idea that we needed more. And that's where the quote came from, this EQ stuff is all a bunch of BS. I'm making money. I'm making my numbers. Why should any of that matter? And so we do a lot of psychrometric tests here, and they're valuable, but to some extent, they're an interesting sidebar. We're getting ready to do an off-site, a whole a full day off-site with a customer looking at the 3 60 assessment feedback, and they tell you a lot. They tell you and they're all they're entirely perception based. How do you perceive yourself? And that's how you respond to the questions. J.R. Flatter [00:23:31]: And how does the world perceive you? And that's how your responders answer the questions about you and your leadership. So this is a really nice snapshot of how you perceive yourself and how the world perceives you. And the way this particular tool is set up, the upper left corner, it's a circle in a quadrant, the upper left corner is a story about your emotional intelligence. It's the questions that are asked about your ability to connect, your willingness to connect, and people oriented or task oriented, and this particular person, I suspect I I never looked at their circle. I suspect they were largely devoid of emotional intelligence in that quadrant. Lucas Flatter [00:24:16]: Yeah. I think I mean, This is kind of unspoken in a lot of cases, but it's like, x person could be 30% less effective at An example role, but their presence and personality and, like, what they bring to the Team is so valuable that that efficiency doesn't matter. And you could think of somebody that's So excellent at their job that you excuse a lot of, you know, social faux pas or, you know, uncomfortableness. So it's like there is a quantifiable, like, how much emotional awareness or intelligence does this person have versus how effective they are. And if I forego all emotional intelligence, I better be really effective at my actual technical tasks. J.R. Flatter [00:25:09]: And I'm glad you brought that up because it's so relevant, and it's one of the questions I ask myself again and again and again as I'm evaluating someone. Is it an annoyance, or is it existential? And I distinctly remember having a termination conversation with someone Probably 15 years ago, and telling this person, I was ashamed of myself for having not terminated them months ago because they were crucial to the success of that particular project. And so I excused. I made principal accommodations that I never should have made. And by the way, as tragic as having to terminate someone is, It rarely, if ever, hurts as bad as you think it's gonna hurt, and it's something that is, but you have to be very purposeful and thoughtful about. And so I asked myself day for days on end, is this an existential principle violation, or is it an annoyance? Because one of the things I've discovered, perhaps you have as well, if you want excellence from someone, Almost every one of us has some eccentricities that are annoying, and you smile every time I say that, so I know I know I that annoy you, but you have to ask, can I am I willing to accept the annoyances, the eccentricities to receive the excellence? And in this case, I had convinced myself it was the right thing to do, and so the good of the team, yeah, it was annoying. But 5 a 1 afternoon just crossed a line that was absolutely unfathomable and irreversible, and It was terminated very soon thereafter. Not sure how I got off on that tangent. J.R. Flatter [00:26:57]: But Lucas Flatter [00:26:58]: Well, we're gonna try and Find a happy note to end this J.R. Flatter [00:27:04]: on. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Let's do that. You always have a way of doing that. So Lucas Flatter [00:27:09]: Yeah. I mean, I guess, just generally, a thought I always have about this is and going back to, like, the technical automating things That you can automate things, and it'll speed you up, and you can go faster, but you might be sprinting into a brick Or, you know, doing something very quickly, but making a mistake very quickly and over and over again. So Like we said, it is important to consider the, you know, the basics of your messaging and things like that before you try to Use tools to amplify it. J.R. Flatter [00:27:47]: Yeah. And I will finish on a a bright note, I hope. Of all of the kinds of intelligence you could use, If you wanna maximize your contribution exponentially, technical and cognitive or at best marginal or or multiplicative, like 1 x or 2 x. But you wanna get 10 to the 2nd, 10 to the 3rd, 10 to the 4th effects. You have to use emotional intelligence and build teams and connect people human to human. No matter how beautiful a bead I can weld or how well I can rebuild an engine. Those technical abilities are only gonna take me so far take our organization so far. And I came to the realization that being a leader of those people are doing a particular task. J.R. Flatter [00:28:33]: That was really the exponential contribution that I could make to the team and to and to the world. This global court that you and I have, that's an exponential impact through emotional intelligence. So anybody that is listening or watching, you wanna figure out how to maximize your impact to the world, to your family, to your church, to your soccer team. It's gonna be through emotional intelligence. Alright, my friend. I'll do a, unapologetic plug for a couple of boot camps we have coming up. One of them here in the what we would call the Americas, it's gonna be on eastern time zone in the US, and it's the 5th through 8th February. It'd be 8 AM to 5 PM. J.R. Flatter [00:29:19]: We get out a little early, the last day because we'll have a working lunch, get out at 2 o'clock on the on the 4th day, and and then we have a boot camp in APAC, Asia Pacific, on the 21st through 25th February, so 2 in the month February, depending on where you are in the world, and then that one will be on GMT plus ten. So it's a split between Tokyo and Sydney, that part of the world, Asia Pacific. And, we're really focused on, I think we talked about in a recent podcast, DOD COOL inviting people to use their COOL funding credential opportunities online, but also a reminder of our military spouse scholarships. Anybody who's a military spouse is tuition free to any of those boot camps, so I look forward to engaging with those 2 cohorts in the month of February. Yeah. If you wanna register for either of those boot camps or if you want any information about any of our programs, Number 2 rl2romeolima@flatterinc.com.flatterincorporated.com. Thanks. Alright. J.R. Flatter [00:30:32]: See y'all later. Well, that concludes this episode of building a coaching culture. I truly hope that this episode was helpful to you. If it was, be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Maybe stop and give us a rating or a review And share this podcast with someone who might find it helpful as well. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.