Vicki Anderson

I have been reading all the stories and comments running around about the upcoming changes for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno’s prime time cancellation. One common point brought out was that both men were put into different spots and their styles didn’t translate well enough to garner the audiences they had in their previous time slots.

I think this is often typical of personnel moves in all fields. You take an outstanding salesperson and make her a sales manager. She knows how to sell and has great people skills, but she doesn’t have leadership skills for coaching, delegating, and planning. She knows how to do, but not how to lead. The skills that made her successful in her previous slot won’t make her successful in her new slot.

Even though the new person wants the new role, there are new expectations that are not often communicated or coached, so when the failure occurs, senior management shakes its head and says, “It’s too bad. They had so much potential.”

Where is the coaching, the mentoring, and the support to make the person translate to the new role successfully? Has the new person been open to the coaching of others or has ego in their new role shut down that opportunity? I don’t know how much of this happened to Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien, but it is sad to see two successful comedians, each with a following and confidence from NBC, turn their new shows into ratings losses and hurt their reputations as well as NBC.

Since I’ve been reading Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman I have been reflecting on people I have worked with and their levels of emotional intelligence.

Goleman reports that his research shows that the more complex your job is, the more you need to have emotional intelligence competencies. He makes the point that having emotional intelligence does not just mean “being nice” to others. It is being empathic, motivated, and aware of how your behavior is affecting others. It is also being able to effectively confront others about their poor behavior when necessary without destroying their self-esteem.

I have seen very competent executives who have very little emotional intelligence and it usually comes back to bite them. Goleman says that emotional intelligence can be learned and I agree, but you have to want to learn it–just like any other competency or skill. I have worked with people who think emotional intelligence is just a bunch of mushy stuff for the weak and I have worked with people who have a healthy dose of emotional intelligence already. The big difference I see is in how the people who report to them relate to them.

The people with emotional intelligence usually earn the respect of others because they are willing to listen and learn. They are less about ego and more about serving and raising the power of others as well as themselves so the organization can succeed. They have a personal touch that encourages others to get onboard.

People without emotional intelligence find working with others more difficult. They blame others for not getting things done, but aren’t able to get people to open up and discuss the obstacles freely. Subordinates are not sure where they stand and loyalty is lacking.

I’m going to write more about this topic, but that’s enough to get started. Let me know your thoughts on emotional intelligence.

During my working years I have had the good fortune (or misfortune) to work for some very demanding and difficult bosses. I have had people ask me how I could stand to work for them. However, I had a pretty good relationship with all of them.  As I consult with leaders and their staffs, I have often heard people frustrated with their bosses but they don’t think they can do anything about it.

I think a key ingredient in your career success is managing the boss’s expectations of you. If you think you are working hard, but are not doing what the boss thinks is important, you are wasting your time. Your boss may be wrong but she/he is the boss. It is very important that you are clear about what your boss wants from you and when. Make sure you know outcomes desired and their priorities. Also, make sure you know what types of things they need to know and what types of things they want to approve.

As a leader, it would be good for us to give these things to our staffs automatically, but the truth is that in the fast pace of every business today, we don’t always take time to give as much direction as we should. Therefore, it becomes incumbent upon the employee to ask questions for clarification and communicate status on projects before the boss has to ask.

I think the reason I got along well with my difficult and demanding bosses was because I figured out what was important to them and made sure they got it when they wanted it. If I disagreed, I had an alternative solution. If I made a decision without them that might have been controversial, I alerted them as soon as possible so they didn’t hear it from someone else, and I owned up to my mistakes and their remedy quickly. I think it is not only possible to manage the boss, but imperative if you want to move ahead in your career.

Lately I’ve been talking with several of my clients about how to have difficult conversations with others. It seems that conflict is something we just can’t get away from. As soon as two people get together, there is the possibility of conflict. That’s not bad. What’s bad is not knowing how to discuss the difference of opinion without either person feeling defensive or hurt.

I have been using the two books, Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations, both authored by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler. I have found they provide some good models for talking productively. A key ingredient that is contained in both books is creating safety first. Whenever the stakes are high in the relationship or the topic is emotional, you have to create safety so the other person doesn’t have to raise his defenses. The goal is to get into open dialog. I think the models are pretty practical and I highly recommend them if you want to improve your skills in this area.

Have you ever thought about how we develop ways of communicating that are more and more efficient? Everywhere I work there are abbreviations for standard terms and acronyms for processes or parts. We create these so that we can be more concise and efficient when understanding technical information.  However, what happens when we encounter new things and there are no acronyms or shortcut words? We quickly make more!

And what happens when the people working on the “new stuff” try to communicate with people who haven’t learned about the “new stuff?” It sometimes creates two groups, the “old” group and the “new” group, who can’t communicate because they each have their own language. Sometimes you can’t explain new language in terms of old language. As leaders, we have to keep an eye on when to bring the “new” language into mainstream and require people to learn it.

Think about all the terms used in the evolution of computers, the internet, and mobile devices. While I understand some things about computers because I remember the old days of DOS and programming with punch cards, operating today’s computers require no need of that knowledge.  I put off writing a blog for a long time because I wasn’t sure what it was or where to start. I hadn’t acquired the language to understand it, but I finally dove in and got started. What are you holding back on in your business or in your leadership because you haven’t acquired the language?