Its premise is that Emotional Intelligence (EQ) -- your ability to both understand and control your emotions and to be aware of the emotions of others, and to use that awareness to productively manage your relationships -- is the single greatest predictor of “professional success and personal excellence.”
Is it? No idea, but the book is chock full of strategies that you could theoretically use to amp up your ability to perform in one of the four key areas of EQ. In fact, for each area, the suggested strategies are provided in a handy index: 15 for self-awareness, 17 for self-management, 17 for social awareness, and 17 for relationship management.
And the best part? Unlike a lot of business books I’ve read, that will explicitly or implicitly state that you have to employ all 66 of these strategies in order to improve, the authors here are giving you the option to pick and choose. Their prescription is to first pick one area, then three strategies in that area, and master those before moving onto something else. Refreshing!
But, as always, I have a bone to pick.
The mass exodus of Baby Boomers from the workplace has already begun. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, between 2006 and 2010, Boomer retirement will have robbed American companies of nearly 290,000 full-time experienced employees.
Note the future tense there. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is copyrighted 2009, so I can only assume the authors were writing about data on generations in the workplace as it existed in that year -- nine years previous to the year I read it.
Silver hair, pension funds, and personal memories of the Kennedy assassinations are not the only things our struggling economic engine will lose when Boomers settle into the quiet life. Boomers hold the majority of top leadership roles in the workplace, and their retirement creates a leadership gap that must be filled by the next generations. The question is whether or not the Boomers’ successors are up to the challenge.
Oh boy, you know where this is going. Hourglass Blog, anyone? You can bet I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting to see if they come through.
We wanted to find out. We broke EQ scores down into the four generations in today’s workplace -- Generation Y (18-30 years old), Generation X (31-43 years old), Baby Boomers (43-61 years old), and Traditionalists (62-80 years old). When we looked at each of the four core EQ skills separately, a huge gap emerged between Boomers and Gen Y in self-management. In a nutshell, Baby Boomers are much less prone to fly off the handle when things don’t go their way than the younger generations.
Okay. Maybe that’s a slip of the editorial tongue. After all, they did mention Generation X as one of the four generations in today’s workplace. And Generation X is shown on the chart that accompanies the text. Let me try to faithfully recreate it below.
Wow. That is a huge gap. It looks like Generation Y scored a 65 and Baby Boomers scored a 71. But, wait a minute. What’s going on with that y-axis? Why are they only showing me the range from 64 to 74? I wonder what the data would look like if I scaled that axis to include all the possible scores, for 0 to 100?
Hmmm. Where’d that “huge gap” go? I probably shouldn’t have done that. It kind of destroys their point. But let’s go back to their text and see if they mention anything about that mystery generation that lives between Generation Y and the Baby Boomers.
It may not appear that this should create any real cause for concern. After all, retirement has been a fact of life ever since FDR signed the Social Security Act. The generation that designated Dennis Hopper as its unofficial spokesman proved capable of filling the superhuman-sized work boots of the Greatest Generation. So how hard can it be for the leaders-in-waiting to replace the Easy Rider Generation?
Without well-honed self-management skills, it might be a lot harder than we think. Of course, while Gen Y’s approach may be different from the Boomers’ approach, many would argue that it isn’t any worse. Actually, when you consider how knowledgeable and technically proficient Gen Yers are, they might even have a leg up on their predecessors in the Information Age. However, it should be clear by now that there is more to leadership than being a walking Wikipedia. So, if Gen Yers can’t manage themselves, how can we expect them to manage, much less lead, others?
There’s more, but I’m going to stop transcribing it. Over the next couple of pages, Gen X is mentioned (in passing) once, but the overwhelming focus is on Gen Yers and whether they have (they don’t!) or can develop (they can!) the “right stuff” to take over the leadership reins from all those Dennis Hoppers.
Maybe all I can do is cite my own organization, in which someone from Generation X took over the corner office when his Baby Boomer predecessor decided to retire. And that Gen X leader now has members of Generation Y working for him.
Radical, I know.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
I wonder if the EQs presented for each of the generations accounted for the additional time the later generations had to build up those skills. Wouldn't it be logical that younger professionals have had less time to build their skills than older professionals? And, if that is the case, wouldn't they have built up their EQ sufficiently to take over the corner office by the time they move into that role?
ReplyDeleteIt's a fair point, Unknown, and one often overlooked in generational conversations. The things that separate generations are often more about life stage than about being of a different generation.
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