And you think you will be successful ?!

"People often miss perceive me" this was the response of one of my coachee Mr. Nitin Sharma (name changed) during our coaching session. I asked him "Ever wonder why?" and he was prompt enough to answer, "Ya they never understand me properly" ! I did check with HR colleague to substantiate the correctness of Nitin's statement and credentials, and I was shocked to see almost similar response the HR gave!! The point is, what made them to frame a very strong perception about this manager?!

After a couple of rounds of discussion and question-answer session, I found him pretty ok and satisfactory in his ability to do the given task. His IQ was great and he was considered as one of the intelligent managers in the organization !

What was the root cause of this 'Insensitive Perception'? To arrive logically on the root cause, we did a small exercise and assessed him on his Emotional Intelligence.

The findings were very much evident about why he has been miss perceived by his team and other colleagues. He was most often behaved as per the 'mood triggers' and therefore was considered as insensitive. Less empathetic to the person and more focused towards the person's involvement in issue. In other words, he was unable to differentiate people from problem and was operating with fixed mind-set. Very strong in process but poor in managing emotions !

Emotional Intelligence as a subject described and well explained by world renown authors and management experts. The possibilities are endless, what we need to do is to bring this concept to the workplace and establish a mechanism to testify the correctness of the EQ and IQ relevance for each job role. Before promoting a manager or hiring new manager, his EQ assessment should be done and post that he should be allowed to enter the assessment centre for promotion. While most often we do various psychometric assessments, the objective of that may be limited to the current or future role. This on a face sounds time consuming, however the fruits are sweeter after investing the proper time.

HR colleagues would agree that there is a scope in the organization to train employees and leaders on EQ. I would say "Sooner is better" ! Spending lots of funds on training and development will only yield result if the employee is better equipped with EQ.