In my last post, I discussed some of my views on Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and personality theory and how these can foster Emotional Self-awareness, the most fundamental EQ competency. I represented that a good way to strengthen Emotional Self-awareness is to learn more about what makes you and others tick, specifically in the areas of identifying values, motivators, observable behaviors and communication style. Understanding more about oneself and our underlying driving forces, as well as opportunities to adapt, contributes to self-confidence or self-regard, the cornerstone of so many intrapersonal and interpersonal skills.
Moving along the EQ competency spectrum, I’d like to relate a story of a scene that’s repeated itself “too many times to count” over the course of my career. Sitting at my desk, deep in thought or work, I receive the dreaded ping on my phone/alert on my computer/flood of emails in my inbox/alarms from other mechanisms I’ve set up — all to let me know that something is down. It could be anything from a network connectivity problem to a failure of a disk drive to an entire farm of database or web servers crashing. I walk over to the team of engineers to make sure that they’re “on it.” I then quietly retreat to my desk to start poking around a bit to see if I can help with the solution. If the problem isn’t resolved within about an hour, I’ll check in again and see what the status is…this after fending off inquiries from customer service, salespeople, and others — even the CEO. I approach the engineering leader and speak in a hushed tone. Do we know what is wrong? What is being done to address it? Is there an ETA? What can I do to help? I collect these data points and retreat once again. It’s either a major problem or a tiny one, but sooner or later it gets fixed, as it always does. People start breathing again.
I was once having a discussion with a colleague who was a fellow leader at a particular company I worked at. “I don’t get it,” they complained. “When there’s an outage and the company is losing money by the minute, we’ve got customers calling and complaining, our reputation is on the line and we just plain look bad, the engineers don’t really seem to care. I look at their reactions and I get no sense of urgency from them. Don’t they recognize the implications? Why is it that they just seem to continue what they’re doing as if nothing is wrong?? Don’t they care???”
Which leads me to the topic of today’s post: one of the 12 EQ competencies, Emotional Self-control.
Daniel Goleman, in his book series, “Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence” describes Emotional Self-control as “the ability to keep your disruptive emotions and impulses in check, to maintain your effectiveness under stress or even hostile conditions…it is not being swept away or overwhelmed by disturbing emotions.” With this in mind, I had an answer for my colleague. “Would you rather see the engineers running up and down the corridors as if their hair was on fire, shouting in panic that the sky is falling as we lose customers and money by the minute? OR, would you rather they maintain a calm and collected demeanor and actually work on fixing the problem?” My colleague answered after a quick second, “of course I want them to fix the problem,” they retorted. “Well,” I continued, “a problem can be caused by a hardware or network failure, a single misplaced semicolon in a configuration file, bugs or regressions in code or a million other reasons. Engineers need to maintain their composure, because they potentially may need to comb through thousands of lines of code and/or logfiles to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. That takes deep concentration and focus. If they lose their cool, we’re toast!”
Emotional Self-control is “the ability to keep your disruptive emotions and impulses in check, to maintain your effectiveness under stress or even hostile conditions…it is not being swept away or overwhelmed by disturbing emotions.”
There’s an urban legend about a high-ranking executive who received some bad news and threw a mobile phone across the office and against the wall so hard that it became as useful as a paperweight. We would probably be correct in assuming that the executive’s self-control score (at least at that moment) was fairly low. And the resultant behavior was quite noticeable. What distinguishes how the engineers I mentioned earlier responded to their problem is that their self-control scores must have been quite high. Perhaps many of them prefer introversion. Perhaps many of them are more task-focused than people-focused. (Perhaps this is why the term “geek” needs no concrete definition. And perhaps this is why geeks are so very often misunderstood.)
Many of us notice lack of Emotional Self-control when we see a colleague or boss fly off the handle. But we may not necessarily notice the presence of Emotional Self-control because it doesn’t manifest quite as “in-your-face” in the way that the lack of it does. Does this mean that all people who prefer introversion exhibit Emotional Self-control? Of course not. But we shouldn’t mistake introversion or cool and collected thinking for lack of caring or nonchalance, nor should we assume that there’s just one way to (react to) or solve a problem. More importantly, we must recognize that EQ competencies can be demonstrated in many different ways. In the engineers’ case, it was demonstrated without a single word being spoken. (Note to self: upcoming blog post on introversion.)
There are other areas that Emotional Self-control becomes important. Think about a new leader, just promoted or given new responsibilities because they’ve excelled in their role and advanced through the organization. New or broadened responsibilities take effort and time, but old habits also die hard. So when problems come up that the new leader is accustomed to jumping on and owning, they may need to resist the urge to once again, own it and fix it. It takes self-awareness and self-control to stand back in such circumstances. If there’s someone else who is now responsible for dealing with the problem, then the new leader, the responsible colleague and the company will allbenefit from the leader taking on a teaching and mentoring role instead of trying to fix it all themself.
It’s fairly clear that self-awareness and self-control play an important role in how people make decision and plans, react to problems and/or attempt to solve them. What I’ve learned, though, is that looking at Emotional Intelligence is simply not enough. Behavior in psychologically healthy adults has many levels of undercurrent and influence, and if we truly want to modify our behavior, we need to look deep and understand what those precursors are within ourselves.
As we’ve seen, anger, fear and anxiety are just some of the emotions that we should take note of when discussing Emotional Self-control. These emotions are most usually present when the brain undergoes what is called an “amygdala hijacking,” which is sort-of a takeover by a part of the brain that activates our fight or flight responses and may cause someone to feel like they “just can’t think straight.” Other factors, such as sadness, depression, boredom, frustration, old habits (as in our new leader example) or just being in a foul mood are worthy of our attention as well. When any of these conditions is present, we can have a multitude of reactions, from the “I-just-don’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed” apathy to snapping or responding snidely to those around us. A leader who expresses themself in this manner will most certainly have a negative impact on employees. An employee who expresses themself in this manner risks their job. Stressful circumstances require both self-awareness and self-control so that we can regulate our responses. While we don’t want to completely suppress these triggers and accompanying behaviors, we certainly don’t want to lead with them either.
Another term for Emotional Self-control is “impulse control.” It’s nearly impossible to control one’s impulses without some degree of emotional self-awareness (see my prior post on Emotional Self-awareness.) After all, recognizing undesired behavior and understanding that it is impulsive are the first steps toward changing it. Richard Boyatzis, PhD, takes this one step further and says that Emotional Self-control requires attentional focus, which is defined by The American Psychological Association as “the focus of an individual’s attention at a particular moment. This focus may be internal (i.e., attending to cognitive, emotional, or pain cues) or external (i.e., attending to environmental cues.)” There’s a more familiar “nowadays” term for this: mindfulness.
Next time you feel like you’re losing your cool, take a deep breath and give your emotions attentional focus – or be mindful – and think about alternatives. If it’s too late and you’ve already lost your cool, you can still turn it into an opportunity. First you might want to apologize to anyone you may have offended. Then take some time to think about the incident. Look back at the triggers, the warning signs, your emotions and your behavior. Think about other ways you could have reacted to the circumstance that would have maintained your Emotional Self-control. Even the act of imagining a different outcome can help prepare you for the future. Do this enough and you might begin to notice a change in yourself.
Controlling our external responses that are triggered by our natural impulses takes work and a deep level of cognition. For those willing to do the work, the EQ Emotional Self-control competency can most definitely be learned, practiced and incorporated into our daily lives and become second nature. More on this in upcoming posts.
