The WHY Helps Us Take Action

Many of us intuitively recognize where we’re strong and where we have blind spots. Experience can serve as an amazing teacher IF we’re willing to analyze it and we’re willing to take action based on what we learn from analyzing it. The challenge someone who’s as impatient as I tend to be can run into when relying on experience alone for mastering a new skill is that it can take a really long time to have all the experiences we need to build a solid foundation for making great decisions. Even then, just knowing WHAT happened without having a clear understanding of WHY it happened can limit the effectiveness of those decisions.

I recently had a conversation with a client where they explained a situation with one of their employees who had made similar mistakes a few times in a row when completing the same task. While the mistakes weren’t exactly the same, the client felt like the second one should not have happened since they had pointed out the first mistake and told the employee what should have been done. The second time appeared to have been caused by a lack of attention to detail. It was caught before there was any impact on an outside customer but the owner was frustrated because they had already explained what was supposed to have been done to ensure accuracy. After hearing the story, I gently pushed back asking if they had taken the extra step of explaining WHY it mattered after they told their employee WHAT needed to be done. 

Without hashing out the rest of that conversation, I’ll just emphasize how easy it can be for any of us to miss, or even skip, critical steps in a process when we don’t have a clear understanding of WHY the step is necessary. When we think back to that first component of emotional intelligence, Self-Awareness, it’s really similar! Having some level of knowledge that we’ll likely respond a certain way when something happens is important but it can be incredibly difficult to do anything to control or alter it if we don’t understand WHY we’re responding that way in the first place.

As William Marston conducted the countless hours of observation he used to compile The Emotions of Normal People, he noticed that their responses to various scenarios became very predictable within a specific framework. As he did even more research on human behavior, he also discovered that our systolic blood pressure changes in different emotional states. When combining those findings, he was able to develop a solid foundation that could be used to understand WHY we do certain things in certain situations as well as a framework for making adjustments to those somewhat natural responses.

This is where the second component of emotional intelligence comes into play; self-management. Using some tools that were created based on Marston’s work, Cindy and I have been able to help hundreds of individuals and dozens of teams make significant progress in developing an increased level of emotional intelligence.

Now let’s take a look at the third component of emotional intelligence as well as some simple steps that can be taken to put all of this into action!

Understanding the World Around Us

In unpacking the first two components of emotional intelligence, self-awareness and self-management, I referenced the research William Marston did almost 100 years ago as he prepared to write The Emotions of Normal People. Before we dive into the third component, I want you to really think about the complexity involved with reading someone’s emotions. Heck, it’s not always all that easy to keep a firm grip on our own! With that in mind, what was Marston focusing on as he conducted that research?

Nearly twenty-five years ago, during the first training session I ever sat through on a new process called “behavior-based safety” that was being rolled out in the manufacturing facility where I worked, I learned the importance of focusing on behaviors rather than attitudes or emotions. We can OBSERVE behaviors; we can’t always see emotions and attitudes unless someone is exhibiting outwardly through their behaviors!

In Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Travis Bradberry defines the third component of emotional intelligence, social awareness, as “your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them.” When I first read that, I immediately pictured someone lying on a couch and sharing their innermost feelings… Bradberry went on to say that “this often means perceiving what other people are thinking and feeling even if you do not feel the same way.” Ugh! Based on that alone, I would have called it quits and resigned myself to a life lacking outstanding emotional intelligence skills…

But since I had a decade and a half of experience in behavior-based safety and what I believe to be a pretty firm grasp on Marston’s work, I looked for ways to develop this skill without being a psychiatrist or having a hundred pound brain. I love John Maxwell’s idea of keeping the cookies on the bottom shelf, which he explains as keeping things as simple as possible so people can actually take action on them and get results…

Let’s look at Marston’s work one more time here. When the vast majority of people I talk with hear the term DISC, if they’ve ever heard it before, respond by saying something like “I took a DISC assessment once. I know all about that.” Interestingly enough, Marston never actually created an assessment. Today though, dozens of companies sell assessments that are based on his work; some are incredibly useful and some aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on - but I’ll come back to that another time. The real power in applying the DISC Model of Human Behavior (not to be confused with any given assessment some clown tries to sell) is in understanding a framework we can use in nearly any situation to recognize another person’s primary behavioral style, based on how they’re communicating, and begin to accurately pick up on their emotions in that particular situation!

The most exciting thing to me has been how effective this can be when our team members develop even a basic understanding of how to use those tools. From there, it builds up to the fourth component of emotional intelligence. Let’s wrap up here for now with that, then we’ll begin working through some simple steps to apply all this next time...

Strong Relationships Build Strong Teams

Once we understand the framework for accurately picking up on the emotions of the person we’re interacting with, by recognizing and understanding their behaviors, we can begin honing the fourth component of emotional intelligence - relationship development.

Let’s be honest, building strong relationships requires quite a bit of intentional effort! That said, I can’t think of a single area of my life where the energy I invested into creating a solid relationship with someone - be that personally, professionally, or a combination of the two - hasn’t ended up yielding far more value than I ever expected.

Consider the best relationships in your life… Did they just happen on their own or was there a good bit of work involved? Most definitely! Were there ever any bumps in the road along the way? I’m sure there was. Who are the people in your life that you have the most loyalty to? I’m guessing it’s the folks you have the strongest relationships with!

I’ve had times where great relationships seem to fall into place almost immediately but I’ve also been in situations where it took what seemed like a ridiculous amount of energy to build anything resembling a cohesive relationship. Have you ever wondered why that is, why you just click with one person but seem to continuously butt heads with another? Some people appear to be on the same page with you from the beginning and some seem to be doing anything they can imagine to get under your skin…

If we rely on our experiences and our intuition alone, it could take a lifetime to really get a handle on building strong relationships with all the different people we need to interact with effectively on a day to day basis. But if we use William Marston’s work as a foundation for developing self-awareness, applying that in self-management, and then to building our social-awareness, relationship development becomes a fluid part of the process! As we recognize the behaviors we see in others, and we process that through the set of patterns Marston detailed with each of the four primary behavioral styles, we can develop a much better understanding of why they do what they do and understand what can trigger different emotions in them. When we use our self-management skills to apply what I’ve learned to know as The Platinum Rule, strong relationships are created much faster. And when we have strong relationships in all areas of our lives, we can build strong teams around us that yield great results!

We’ll build on these components by looking at some simple things we can each look for in nearly every situation that will help us become more emotionally intelligent as we wrap up this look at Why Emotional Intelligence is Important soon!