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Why ICT needs Emotionally Intelligent team leaders

John Batros, Information Age

12/10/2004 14:11:49

Synopsis This paper will argue that emotional intelligence [EI] is a necessary if not sufficient condition for ICT team leaders.

It will draw upon recent research into the EI of Australian managers and use Swinburne University of Technology's Genos EI model to introduce the concept. Using the five dimensions of the model as a platform, arguments will be mounted for the positive effects for leaders and followers in all groups, in particular ICT teams.

EI is a human competitive edge, which can be leveraged for leadership development, promotion and synergistic results. It affects bottom line outcomes and team members' satisfaction.

This paper will argue that ICT leaders will need to become more emotionally intelligent to ensure that optimal expression of emotion is brought to bear on rational ICT decisions in groups to maximise productivity.

Introduction

For too long, professional managers have eschewed the soft skills. Pejorative attacks on human relations, "tree hugger", "airy fairy" and "touchy feely", were regularly heard in the dry downsizing 80s and "tech boom" 90s. These attacks are driven by anxiety about the difficulties of managing people face-to-face.

In addition, influenced by a brilliant and ever expanding technology, many ICT professionals have retreated into isolation and individual pursuit. Learning to lead and follow in teams has been difficult, especially as messy human beings with irrational emotions must be faced if synergistic outcomes are to be gained from ICT project teams.

Optimal levels of emotion assist rational ICT decision making. Neither too much nor too little emotion is optimal. The emotional centres of the brain are an integral part of what it means to think, reason and to be intelligent. Emotion is absolutely necessary for us to make good decisions, take action to solve problems, cope with change and succeed [Caruso & Salovey 2004 flyleaf].

The new ICT team leader will be psychologically present, passionate about her work and will manage her people in such a way that they can bring themselves to their roles. She will enable each team member to be maximally powerful.

Genos EI and the Swinburne research

Professor Con Stough and Dr Ben Palmer have developed through extensive research of Australian executives and workers, a five-dimensional model of emotional intelligence, Genos EI. They are:

Emotional recognition and expression (in oneself) - The ability to recognise one's own feelings and emotional states, and the ability to express those inner feelings to others.

Understanding of emotions external - The ability to identify and understand the emotions of others and those manifest in external stimuli (ie, workplace environments, staff meetings, literature, artwork etc).

Emotions direct cognition - The extent to which emotions and emotional knowledge are incorporated in decision making and/or problem solving.

Emotional management - The ability to manage positive and negative emotions both within oneself and others.

Emotional control - How effectively emotional states experienced at work such as anger, stress, anxiety and frustration are controlled

Each person obtains a percentile ranking on each dimension from the application of the Genos EI instrument (which can be taken online). This is not an absolute measure but places the participant along a continuum related to scores of a large sample of Australian executives or workers.

Working with a consultant, an ICT manager can determine the meaning of his profile and determine whether it is appropriate for his context. Development plans can be created with the person.

Five dimensions of EI: Ground rules for ICT team leaders

1. Be aware of your emotions and express them

Be psychologically present! For too long we have been taught by our organisations to keep our feelings out of it. As if we could! Valuable psychic energy is wasted in the attempt and reduces creative possibilities. To be psychologically present means being aware of my feelings and thoughts in the moment. I am then able to bring both into the service of the task.

Bring my self to the role! Recent theory (Hirschhorn 1988, 2002) recommends that we bring ourselves to our roles. The old Descartian question, "Should I play my role at work, or be myself at work?" is replaced with "How can I bring myself to my role?" That is, "How can I both play my role and be myself in role?"

There are three zones of awareness - the Outer Zone (everything outside me including others and the tasks we have to do), the Middle Zone (thinking, judging, intellectualising, analysing, blaming) and the Inner Zone (feelings, emotions, sensations).

Unless an ICT leader expresses her feelings she will be mistrusted. To be present to my people, it is necessary first to be present to myself. I must be aware of my feelings as well as thoughts and the external environment. Expression of my feelings to others lets them know where I am coming from and by self disclosure invites reciprocal self disclosure. Increased mutual openness leads to trust.

The transport engineering case study I administered Genos EI to the general manager, transport engineering, of a large international company. His report showed him at the 8th percentile on dimension 1 [emotional awareness and expression] and the 99th percentile on recognition of emotion in others. He could read others like a book but did not reveal himself to them.

The GM had a strong engineering background with significant ICT components. When I explained the dimensions and asked him about them, he was puzzled. Yes, he was great at negotiating multimillion dollar contracts because he could read the other party's body language with great accuracy. However, his own team did not trust him and were demotivated. Further he had a European background and claimed to be a very passionate person.

The penny dropped; he said: "At home I express emotions a lot; but at work I have learned not to express my feelings. My people cannot see where I am coming from and distrust me don't they?" What a wonderful self-diagnosis.

He could now decide how much to express his feelings in order to make better contact with his team members and build trust.

Contactful communication, here and now When you and I are aware of our three zones of awareness and express them, we communicate contactfully, here and now. This contact releases psychic energy in the present moment. In turn, these energies combined produce synergy.

Case study: "I am feeling alarmed..."

Tom, a member of an ICT organisation whose culture prohibited "feeling talk" and "I language", was attending a strategy meeting attended by 10 people. He noticed that the meeting was dull and lifeless although the decisions to be made were critical to the future effectiveness of the organisation. Only one or two members of the team were speaking at the meeting.

Tom noticed that he was becoming increasingly alarmed at the direction the emerging plan was taking. Taking courage, he stood up and said: "I feel alarmed at the emerging direction of the strategic plan" (and waited for the crunch).

To his surprise, three others came to life: "We feel alarmed too." With that, the whole team came to life and the strategic direction was radically changed.

As they were leaving the meeting, several members approached Tom and said: "Thank you for speaking up. I was worried about the decision, but no way would I have expressed my feelings unless you had expressed yours. I thought I was the only one to feel this way."

Reason may be slave to the passions (Hume), but without passion, reason is bereft and sterile. Expressing feelings is a team skill, necessary for trust and openness; awareness and expression of emotion are necessary but not sufficient conditions for team excellence.

The ICT team leader must become an aware expresser and lead the way in modelling these behaviours, encouraging others to learn them.

2. Recognise your ICT team members' emotions and empathise with them

• Empathy: Recognising others' emotions helps ICT leaders enter the worlds of their followers. They feel accepted for "who they are, even that they are" (Hycner & Jacobs, 1995). • Understanding emotion in others produces trust: People feel understood. You do not have to agree with what they say, but show that you truly have listened and understood. "Seek first to understand, then to be understood" (Covey 1989). • Reduces defensiveness: ICT team members' defensiveness is reduced enabling them to be psychologically present and therefore release their energy for the task at hand. • Allows thoughts to find thinkers: The reduced anxiety in the team enables rational thinking. • Recognising emotion in others includes and acknowledges their worth in the team. Everyone has a deep need to be met, recognised, respected and appreciated. • Leader as empathiser: ICT team leaders should be able to recognise emotions in others. In so doing they bring EI to bear on the leadership role.

3. Use your feelings to influence decision making in your ICT team

• Feelings enhance rational judgment. One of the great insights of recent research is that optimal levels of emotion inform rational decision making [Nussbaum, 2001]. While it is true that too much emotion, like too much conflict in a team, is bad for group decision making, it is equally true that too little emotion is bad, too. • They are doorways to meaning. Our emotions store hard-won experiences; they are results of our history and development as a person • Emotions are irrational but not meaningless. In B-School, we have been indoctrinated that science and rational thought are the only ways to truth and that passions and emotions should be eschewed. They can only interfere. Feelings are not meaningless and are well-springs of creativity. Ignore them to your cost. • Gut feel produces intuition. When team members pay attention to the irrational, new ideas emerge by themselves. "Lose your mind and come to your senses" - (Herman & Korenich, 1977.) Let us take rationality as far as it can go, but then let us listen to our guts. When we allow ourselves to become aware of our emotional reactions without analysis, they will inform our judgments. • Emotions produce synergistic outcomes for the ICT team. When ICT team members are freed of their intellectual shackles and fear of being judged incompetent or stupid, creative intuition in individuals and the group is released. • The leader as team facilitator: The successful ICT team leader does not lose his or her critical faculties, but suspends them occasionally, inviting emotional expression to excite team members to their best efforts. Brainstorming is one process which invites right brain activity, intuitive felt responses as well as thoughtful ones. Lead creativity first; critique later.

4. Manage the emotions in interpersonal relations with your ICT team members

The leader as container: • The age of anxiety did not end in 2001 • The downturn in the ICT industry is still having its effects • No longer can team members feel as secure as they did in the 1990s • Downsizing, restructuring and the general view that loyalty has nothing to do with the workplace, create anxiety, competitiveness and uncertainty. • Often these factors are accompanied by increasing workloads under the Newspeak of 'doing more with less', 'churning' and 'work smarter not harder'. • Leaders can ignore these anxieties or manage them. They are often unaware that feelings of frustration, anger and resentment are undermining teamwork. • Team leaders will need to hold the tensions of their people while managing their own anxieties if their team are to be optimally effective. They will have to be able to give hope to the ICT team that its primary task can be achieved under stressful conditions.

Assertively managing conflict: • Conflict must be viewed as an asset! It must not be avoided, crushed or smoothed over • Neither aggressive nor passive, the new ICT team leader will invite conflict to be fully expressed so that the latent energy within it can be turned towards team purposes. • The EI team leader will need a range of assertive skills which respect the rights of all parties in order to manage interpersonal conflict and produce Win-Win outcomes.

Facilitate the storming stage of group development; teams grow through five stages of group development [Tyson, 1998]: • Forming (inclusion and acceptance) • Storming (conflict and control) • Norming (cohesion and conformity [groupthink]) • Performing (team work and achievement) • Adjourning (separating and celebration at the end of the ICT project).

ICT team leaders must adapt their management styles to each stage of group development. Each requires emotional management so that the social or maintenance needs of the team are met. Only when people's needs for inclusion, safety, influence, belonging, acceptance and respect are met can they get on with the task. It is critical that ICT team leaders have highly developed interpersonal skills as well as knowledge of their domains.

Treating feelings as data about the team • Projection: The team members unconsciously split off their feelings and project them into the leader. The EI leader becomes aware of his or her emotions and recognises that they are not all his or hers. They treat their own affective states [feelings] as data about how their followers might be feeling and check it out. • Metabolising emotion: By not "acting out" difficult feelings, but containing them, anxiety and anger can be turned into hope and team effectiveness

Case study: Team building with the partners of International Consultants

I was invited to conduct a two-day training program in interpersonal and team skills for IC. IC specialised in process re-engineering, organisation development and systems change involving ICT. The managing director wanted the program to be conducted with the 10 local partners. Unknown to me, they saw it as a team development workshop. At the end of the first day one partner said at dinner, "Why don't you open it up to what we want to do tomorrow?" Naively, I took the bait.

Next day, I opened the forum with the partner's suggestion. It was agreed to create an agenda there and then. I went to the flip charts and began to write their suggestions which flowed readily. As time went on, I noticed I was feeling increasingly full in the stomach and commented on this in passing. Half an hour passed and I now felt both full and worried. I was doing almost all of the work and we were getting nowhere. This could go on all day...

I hypothesised that I was "filling up" with their projections, including their split off ability to lead.

I decided to quietly walk off-stage, sat behind the group and said, "I think I am doing all the work. This is your problem; I am not speaking for the next 30 minutes." My anxiety went up. Could I do this? One or two questions were directed to me. "What do you want us to do?" I did not answer. One partner said: "He's not going to answer you know."

They solved the problem in the next 10 minutes.

By becoming aware of my own feelings, I treated them as data about the group. By controlling and containing them, I was able to choose an effective course of action which returned leadership authority to the partners. [In this case all five dimensions of Genos EI were at play!]

The Leader as Healer: The ICT team leader who pays attention to the heart as well as to task issues will be more effective.

5. Appropriately control your own emotions as ICT team leader:

Control your own emotions when you are severely anxious: • Uncontrolled emotion is ineffective o Aggressive emotional outbursts can frighten people or ignite hostility o Denying, avoiding or deflecting strategies do not work either • Over-controlled emotion can be ineffective

Air Traffic Control team leaders are high on EC: They can keep calm while aware of their own feelings and those of their followers. They consequently can manage their and others' emotion and act constructively in times of crisis.

Change irrational thinking in order to reduce your anxiety: Since our thoughts affect the way we feel, changing thoughts that cause anxiety can reduce it to manageable levels.

Reduce catastrophic thinking: If you can learn to become aware of thoughts and beliefs that are catastrophic, and alter them for more realistic beliefs, then emotions can be controlled and effective action can be taken.

Maintain appropriate levels of emotion to enhance performance: Again, it is optimal levels of emotion, not absence of emotion that is the desired state. No emotion can be a symptom of being out of control, too detached from the tasks and the people who have to do them; psychological absence.

Stay aware of your emotions: Another powerful means of controlling emotion is simply to stay aware of them. Go deeper in. Accentuate them. The paradoxical theory of change entails that by becoming aware of what is the case, change automatically occurs by itself. 'Planned change never ever functions . . . [Perls, 1969].

Anxiety is suppressed excitement. By staying aware of my feelings [Dimension 1] I will often find what is behind them. One feeling changes into another as I pay attention to it. Anxiety becomes excitement, excitement becomes an idea, the idea suggests a thought, the thought entails action, action leads to team effectiveness. Leaders of ICT teams will respect their own feelings, especially when they feel out of control. They will contain them but not ignore them so that they will act effectively rather than fight or flee.

Conclusion

I am arguing that increasing competence in the five dimensions of Genos EI will enable ICT teams to be much more effective. Both followers and leaders need to be EI to maximise value.

I am not arguing that EI is all there is to it. On the contrary I believe that rational task process skills and knowledge are as valuable and necessary now as they have ever been. I do not advocate the denial of business and strategic planning, decision making, goal setting, problem analysis, potential problem analysis, world's best practice, KPIs and the formulating of purpose, mission and vision statements.

I argue that the factor of production which is under-utilised is Emotional Intelligence. It complements rational judgment and other management processes. Goleman [1998b] claims that EI has twice the effect on leadership than IQ. Both are necessary. All of those who must get their work done with and through others (ICT project team leaders, consultants, salespeople, software architects, programmers, operations managers, systems designers, suppliers and customers) must pay attention to their level of EI in order to leverage the human potential of individual people, teams and the organisation as a whole.

Information and Communications Technology needs emotionally intelligent team leaders, for soft skills have hard consequences (Goleman).

References

Batros, John G. 2002 'Emotional Intelligence: The intelligence of emotion', Local Government Manager, October/November, p 8

Caruso, David R. & Salovey, Peter 2004 The Emotionally Intelligent Manager San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Covey, Stephen 1989 The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People NY: Simon & Schuster

Goleman, Daniel 1996 Emotional Intelligence- Why it can matter more than IQ Bloomsbury: London

Goleman, Daniel 1998a Working With Emotional Intelligence Bloomsbury: London

Goleman, Daniel 1998b 'What Makes a Leader?' Harvard Business Review Nov-Dec, p93

Goleman, Daniel 2000, 2004 'Leadership That Gets Results' Harvard Business Review Mar-Apr p80 and January 2004 [reprinted]

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. & McKee, A. 2002 The New Leaders - Transforming the Art of Leadership into the Science of Results Little, Brown: London

Herman, Stanley M. & Korenich, Michael 1977 Authentic Management: A Gestalt Orientation to Organisations and Their Development Reading Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley

Hirschhorn, Larry 1988 The Workplace Within Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press

Hirschhorn, Larry 2002 Managing in the New Team Environment USA: Author's Choice Press

Hycner, Rich and Jacobs, Lynne 1995 The Healing Relationship in Gestalt Therapy NY: Gestalt Journal Press

Nussbaum, Martha 2001 Upheavals of Thought - The Intelligence of Emotions Cambridge University Press: Cambridge & New York

Stough, Con &Palmer, Ben 2002 Genos Emotional Intelligence: Accreditation Manual Genos Pty Ltd

Tyson, Trevor 1998 Working With Groups 2nd edn South Yarra: Macmillan

John Batros is a "pracademic". He lectures on leading teams in the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship at Swinburne and is an organisation development consultant specialising in emotional intelligence, team development and process facilitation. Formerly with Shell and BHP, he has qualifications in education, science, philosophy and Gestalt therapy. His vision is to help people to bring themselves fully to their ICT roles.

He is MD of Eudaemonia HR Consultants. eudaemonia@bigpond.com

This paper was delivered at the ACS National Conference, Melbourne, September 2004.

[breakout] John Batros will facilitate a two-day workshop called "Successful and Productive Teamwork" for the Victorian branch of the ACS on October 27 and 28. Details at acsvic.com