The podcast by project managers for project managers. The need for optimal emotional intelligence is even more pronounced in project management and Dr. Vanessa Druskat, who is married to a project manager, shares insights on emotional and team intelligence on how to improve your own EQ. If we can get in touch with an emotion, we can manage it, and the more emotionally and self-aware we are the more we can build emotionally intelligent teams.

Table of Contents

02:37 … What is Emotional Intelligence?05:43 … Developing Your Emotional Intelligence07:07 … A Work in Progress08:25 … EQ and Cognitive Intelligence09:20 … The Need for Emotional Intelligence in Projects11:03 … EQ Research Study of Project Managers12:48 … Self-Confidence15:50 … Kevin and Kyle16:54 … Emotional Intelligence Starts with Self-Awareness19:09 … The Brain Science behind Emotional Intelligence21:03 … The Emotional Brain at the Unconscious Level23:53 … No Motivation without Emotion25:59 … Managing Oneself29:44 … Social Harmony34:45 … Find Out More36:42 … Closing

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  And so the kind of norms that create space for people so that everyone can have the synergy, the kind of habits you create build an emotionally intelligent environment, and are more likely to have harmony and synergy and really produce.  You can produce results without that, but they’re not going to be synergistic.  They’re not going to be as good,

WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We love to have you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories and leadership lessons and advice from industry experts from around the world.

And just one of those industry experts is Vanessa Druskat.  Vanessa is a multi-award-winning behavioral scientist, and she’s an internationally recognized expert on leadership and team development.  She has a research program examining the differences between the behavioral strategies of high- and average-performing work teams.  And this led her to pioneer the concept of team emotional intelligence.

Vanessa has a popular Harvard Business Review article with S. Wolff on emotionally intelligent teams.  She’s a member of the board of directors of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, and she talks a little bit about that at the end of the podcast.  And she’s also an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics.  So you may have gathered we’re talking about emotional intelligence.

BILL YATES:  Yes, we are.  This is such a critical skill for project leaders, for project managers because we all know it.  We can’t do this on our own.  We’ve got to work with a team.  Sometimes that team, each one of the team members brings their own issues to the table.  We’ve got our own issues.  You bring in the issues of our customer, the issues of our contractors, and there’s just a lot to manage.

WENDY GROUNDS:  There’s a lot of issues.

BILL YATES:  There’s a lot of issues.  So we need to be more emotionally intelligent and figure out how to get things done.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Vanessa.  Welcome to Manage This.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Thank you.  It’s wonderful to be here with you, Wendy.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, we’re very happy to have you as our guest, and this is definitely a topic we’ve wanted to talk about again.  And I think you bring such a fresh perspective.  And Bill and I were very excited when we found out your husband was a project manager.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

WENDY GROUNDS:  So you definitely speak with some authority on this topic.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yes, indeed.  I’ve heard plenty of stories from my husband.

BILL YATES:  I’ll bet.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Some difficult times.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  So to get started, let’s just talk a little bit about what constitutes emotional intelligence.  Could you just describe that for us?

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Sure.  So two things about emotional intelligence that I’ll start off by saying.  In the field of psychology, we never really knew what social skills were.  We didn’t know how to measure them.  We couldn’t define them.  And so early on in the 1950s and ‘60s, the most well-known psychologists said let’s just not deal with social skills.  Let’s focus on what we can measure easily and define, which is, you know, IQ, cognitive intelligence.  And once we started learning more about the brain, we started learning about the importance of emotion in social interaction.  We started to really understand what social skills are all about.

And so essentially emotional intelligence is a great way to define social skills.  We now know that every social interaction involves an exchange of emotion.  And so emotional intelligence really is using emotion as data.  It’s recognizing that emotion, recognizing that this is an exchange of emotion and managing that emotion.  Often it’s really managing yourself in order to help manage the other person.

But let me give you the formal definition that most people agree to.  I’m going to have to read it to you, but I’ll explain it once I read it.  It’s a personal and social intelligence – because it is really about yourself, but it’s also about the way you interact with others – that enables us to monitor our own emotions and the emotions of others, to discriminate among emotions.  So, for example, you can discriminate between anger and anxiety, which is something a lot of people confuse, and then to use that information to guide your thinking and your decision-making, your actions, your interactions.  And so really it is using emotion as data to improve your interactions.

BILL YATES:  That’s good.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  And your decisions, by the way, because every decision involves emotion, we now know.

BILL YATES:  To me, there are two significant pieces to that.  There’s the self piece, self-awareness, self-management; and then looking at a team or looking at another person and recognizing what’s going on with those other people, and then trying to influence that.  Like you said, you know, there’s cognitive.  There’s, “Okay, how do I do on an IQ test?”  That’s one thing.  But now I’ve got to work with people and get things done.  So let’s look at EQ and see really how effective can I be.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Exactly.  Once you’ve got to start interacting with others – because, you know, we can’t do these things alone, especially project manager.  You’re not supposed to be doing it alone.  As soon as you’ve got others involved, you need to really think about who they are, their emotional world, how you impact them emotionally, how you’re coming across, because it impacts the way they respond to you.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, that’s tremendous.

Developing Your Emotional Intelligence

WENDY GROUNDS:  Can a person develop emotional intelligence and these interpersonal skills, if that doesn’t come naturally?

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yes, absolutely.  That’s been one of the great things about the field of emotional intelligence.  I can tell you there’s been a lot of research in the last 30 years.  First, we spent a decade trying to define it.  Then we spent a decade trying to say, “Well, what’s its link to performance in all different kinds of areas?”  We also look at it in school systems, by the way.  Originally, a lot of the research was focused on kids and their emotional awareness.  But the business world, organizational world just clung onto it and said, “Finally, there’s something that can help define what differentiates really high performers from people who are good, but not really superior in their roles.”

So the last decade has been all about how do we develop it, and in fact we can.  So there’s been a lot of really good research done.  Some of my colleagues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio have done a lot of that.  They’ve tracked MBA students over time.  They’ve helped develop skills.  And they’ve seen which ones last, you know, how you develop them and which skills actually last for, you know, a five-year period.  So yes, it’s not easy to develop in the sense that it requires practice.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  So you can’t just read about it.  You have to do it.  And that requires some risk, especially if you’re an introvert.

A Work in Progress

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  This is so important to me, and this is an area where we’ve got some other building blocks that we’ll cover.  But then we’ll get into some practical advice that you can share with us for those who need to grow this ability.  But I just want to hit the pause button and say to the listeners, this is great news, right, for those who struggle with this.  And man, I just have the hardest time connecting with my team, or I have the hardest time getting along with my customer, or my contractors.  There’s hope, right?  There’s a whole body of study behind this, and there are practical steps that you can take.  So we’ll go into that deeper, but that’s just really good news that you shared.  Yes, this can be developed.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yes, absolutely.  It’s always a work in progress.

BILL YATES:  Sure.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  And I’m, you know, I’ve been working on it myself, so I can tell you some of my own stories.  And my husband, as well.

WENDY GROUNDS:  I think we all take a look back, you know, 20, 30 years ago, look back in our youth, and we think, “Oh, my gosh, the things I did.”  I was so emotionally unintelligent.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Not that I’ve got it all together now; but, man.

VANESSA DRUSKAT:  Yeah.  And also the good news is, typically, the older we get, the more emotionally intelligent we become because we’ve had more emotional experiences.