Leadership Development with Jack Zenger and Advice From The Car Buyer’s Advocate with Paul Maloney
Leadership Development with Jack Zenger and Advice From The Car Buyer’s Advocate with Paul Maloney
Growing Your Connectional Intelligence with Erica Dhawan and The Purpose Of Life with August Turak
Turning Followers Into Leaders with David Marquet and Creating Strong Memories with Chloe Doesburg
From Trash Can To Business Mogul with Antonio T. Smith and Building Transformational Improvement with Mark Samuel
Culture And The Power Of Great Storytelling with Mike Ganino and The Wealthy Speaker with Jane Atkinson
Telling Stories In Business with Megan Macedo and How To Pivot, Disrupt, And Transform with Marcia Daszko
Teaming Versus Teams with Amy Edmondson and Body Language Secrets Revealed with Greg Williams
The Culture Of Creativity with Kevin Freiberg and Sales, Messaging, And Pageantry with Wendi Russo
The Difference Between Leadership And Management with Dr. John P. Kotter
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Developing Employee Culture with Dr. Terence Jackson and The Selling Formula with Brian Robinson
What Motivates Our Brain with Phil Dixon and Aligning The Conscious And Subconscious with Vince Poscente
The RARE Values For Leadership with Hellicy Ng’ambi
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How To Have The Best Customer Service with Shep Hyken and Leading With Courage, Compassion, And Wisdom with Jim Bouchard
Knowing Your Strength As An Executive Leader with Will Pemble and Tapping Into Your Entrepreneurial DNA with Rick Steele
Creating Great Leaders with Vince Molinaro and Personal Development with Roger Salam
Day One Leadership: Delivering Core Leadership Values with Drew Dudley
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Inspiring Employees to Innovate Requires Removing Barriers
Attend any leadership conference, and the buzzword will be innovation. The focus on artificial intelligence has made it inevitable. To be truly innovative requires employees who embrace the ability to question processes and policies. It is also essential for employees to feel confident their organization’s culture provides a haven for inquiry and discovery.
Some of the top research organizations have concluded that the need for innovation will require adaptability to focus on skills needed to compete. The McKinsey Global Institute conducted a study of more than 3000 c-level executives in seven countries in 2018, and they found executives believe there will be a need for more advanced technological and cognitive skills; there will be an increase in emphasis on team-based work; nearly 20% of companies believe their executives lack the knowledge to adopt artificial intelligence; and competition for skilled workers will increase, with firms who are early-adopters of automation likely to snag the best talent.
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Opportunity Cost and Its Relationship to Curiosity at Work
When recently researching content for my work on curiosity, I was reminded of the importance of opportunity cost. For those not familiar with the expression, it means, “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.” In other words, what do you give up when you make a choice of one thing over doing something else? I meet many people who become paralyzed in their decision-making process because they find weighing alternatives challenging. However, what they might forget is that indecision is a decision.
In business leaders, often think about the benefits, profits, and values of actions and choices, but they often overlook how opportunity costs can be associated with people. If people’s skills are under-utilized and they are not aligned to jobs that match their interests, it is essential to consider the opportunity cost involved.
That is why it is important to consider the value of curiosity. I found that four factors hold people back from their natural levels of curiosity. These include fear, assumptions, technology, and environment. Fear can keep people from asking questions, from researching opportunities, and from exploring their natural creativity. Assumptions that employees might not like an activity or might not be good at it can keep people disengaged from improperly matched jobs. Inability to understand technology or fear of it is often overlooked. A culture or environment that does not promote curiosity can be the one thing that keeps the competition one step ahead in the race.
The opportunity cost of not developing curiosity in our workforce can lead to catastrophic results to the economy. Employees will need to learn new skills as technology replaces less-skilled labor. Organizations might have other opportunities for people who show initiative and creativity. Individuals who fear their jobs could be in danger, need to develop foresight to be proactive to change and become indispensable to organizations.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Einstein, and others have all credited curiosity with their success. This experience drove me to determine how to ignite that desire in other people. What I discovered was that it was not enough to understand the value of curiosity; it was essential to determine the things that hold people back from being curious. That is why I created the Curiosity Code Index assessment to go along with the book, Cracking the Curiosity Code, to discover the things that impact curiosity and provide an action plan for how to improve.
Cracking the Curiosity Code and the CCI includes everything from:
- How curiosity impacts engagement, creativity, innovation, and productivity
- How fear, assumptions, technology, and environment (FATE) can impact curiosity
- How to set strategies for overcoming the factors that hold people back
The book and assessment are due to be released by the end of 2018. To learn more and get notified of their release, please go to http://curiositycode.com. Consider the opportunity cost of not improving your curiosity. Can you, your company, and your employees afford it?
What Excellence In Leadership Is All About with Tom Kolditz
When you’re in the real world, things go wrong. You can interpret that as failure or as something you can learn from. Tom Kolditz believes we should be more in touch with what we get from our failures. Tom is an American retired Brigadier General, an educator, author, and consultant. He became the director of the Leader Development Program at the Yale School of Management and is the founding director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University. He says excellence in leadership is when you can create an organization where people will take a failure and analyze it in a forward looking way so that it doesn’t happen again and where there’s a presumption of competence among people in the organization so that the organization can learn and move forward. His book, In Extremis Leadership: Leading As If Your Life Depended On It, is based on more than 175 interviews taken on the ground in Iraq during combat operations. He has been named as a Thought Leader by the Leader to Leader Institute and as a Top Leader Development Professional by Leadership Excellence. In 2017, he was honored with the prestigious Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership.
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Leadership From The Inside Out: Growing A Person Into A Leader With Kevin Cashman
The works of Maslow and Ericsson studied people and the stages of their development. Kevin Cashman, best-selling author of Leadership from the Inside Out, was more fascinated with how the transformation of a human can impact others and the world. He has worked with so many people that he has built a database of 7,000,000. With this data, he was able to validate patterns as well as identify new ones. Learn his answer to the question: Are Industries different in competencies, industry context and leadership?
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What Holds Us Back? 4 Things Holding Our Curiosity Hostage
We are often told to follow our passion. Even if we determine our passion, some things hold us back from pursuing our natural sense of curiosity. Curiosity has been called a sort of mental itch. There are surprisingly few studies about curiosity because it is difficult to study. Some people are more naturally curious than others. It can be important to have curiosity hardwired into us because it helps us grow and develop. There are factors like stress, aging, drugs, genetics, etc. that could impact our level of curiosity. Outside of medical issues or lack of financial capabilities, I have found four major things that hold people’s curiosity hostage including fear, the way things have always been done, parental/family/peer influence, and technology.
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It Wasn’t Curiosity That Killed the Cat
Lack of curiosity is holding people back from having a better job and fulling life. Having taught more than 1000 business courses, I have seen the same issue with thousands of students. The success of those who lack curiosity pales in comparison to those who embrace it. Over the last decade, I have researched the importance of curiosity to improve performance. I have also learned how successful individuals value and develop curiosity through interviewing hundreds of guests on my show. That has led to my interest in doing further research for my forthcoming book about curiosity.
Creating Powerful Leadership Connections In The Smallest Moments with Doug Conant
At the heart of every high-performance company is great employee engagement. Every company has an agenda to meet and this can be done in a fast and effective way when everyone sees what the goal is. Every leader needs to be supportive with the uniqueness of every employee. When Doug Conant became the CEO of Campbell Soup Company, he empowered his team to make decisions on demand, efficiently meeting the needs of the customers. Building powerful leadership connections makes being a leader fun because you get to enjoy the challenges in a balanced sense and make a greater impact in the end. Doug explains that it’s not about the leader, it’s the team and how they show up when their leader doesn’t. Continue reading “Creating Powerful Leadership Connections In The Smallest Moments with Doug Conant”
To Become a Highly Effective Leader: Reduce Fear by Developing Curiosity
It might be surprising, but many leaders fear being discovered for not being as smart as they appear. Realistic or not, people often look to leaders as if they should know everything. This external pressure often leads to internal pressure. Leaders fear criticism, failure, making hard decisions, taking responsibility, or being unable to reach an important goal. Because of this, leaders often surround themselves with experts in areas with which they have less experience or knowledge, which can be a very crucial to their success. However, this can also keep them from developing some of these skills on their own. There are other things leaders can do to be truly effective, including developing their sense of curiosity in areas with which they might not normally be comfortable. Continue reading “To Become a Highly Effective Leader: Reduce Fear by Developing Curiosity”
Improving Workplace Conflict Requires Understanding Preferences
How do we know how others would like to be treated if we only look at things from our perspective? Understanding personality and generational preferences is so important because we learn about opposing or differing perspectives. To improve some of the key challenges in the workplace requires this understanding. These challenges include poor soft skills, low emotional intelligence, lack of engagement, and a negative culture. Many articles address how these problem stem from Boomer and Millennial conflict. Continue reading “Improving Workplace Conflict Requires Understanding Preferences”
Closing the Gender Gap and Empowering Women in Business and Leadership with Manar Alomayri and Roya Mahboob
In the present world of technology, we find more and more women closing the gender gap and empowering women in business, a once male-dominated space. Roya Mahboob has gained attention for being one of the first IT female CEOs in Afghanistan where it’s relatively rare for women to work outside of the home. Her software development company provides job opportunities and learning programs for women and she uses her global fame to help bring awareness to overcoming the limitations of culture for women wanting to pursue a career in IT. In the world of publishing, Manar Alomayri is publishing audio books on self-development geared towards women more accessible in Saudi Arabia, opening up a wider world for women in that region.
Expert Speaker and Trainer, Dr. Diane Hamilton, Available for Corporate Events
I have updated my speaker and training bio. Please click on the picture below to watch the video. To contact me for an event, please go to http://www.speakermatch.com/profile/drdianehamilton/
MBTI and Business Executives Inflated View of Emotional Intelligence
Those interested in how personality affects performance often study the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or Emotional Intelligence (EI) and the relationship to leadership. Rarely do I run across studies that look for relationships between MBTI and EI. Leary, Reilly and Brown published a Study of Personality Preferences and Emotional Intelligence where they examined the “relationships between the dispositional factors measured by the MBTI and elements of emotional intelligence (EI) as measured by Bar-On’s emotional quotient inventory (EQ-i).”
For those unfamiliar with the MBTI and the EQ-I, the MBTI measures our preferences for how we like to receive information. The EQ-i measures our emotional quotient or EQ. Emotional intelligence has often been defined differently by various authors. One of the easiest ways to think of emotional intelligence is by defining it as the ability to understand your own emotions as well as those in others.
In the Leary et al study, their results showed a relationship between Myers Briggs extroversion and emotional intelligence components. Also noted in the study was a “positive and significant relationship between a preference for the use of feeling in decision making and an individual’s EI.”
When discussing “feeling” as defined by the MBTI, it refers to how one bases their decisions on their values. When discussing “extroversion” as defined by the MBTI, it refers to how people prefer to focus on the outer world of people and things. Leary et al concluded, “The positive and significant results for the extroversion and feeling hypotheses seem consistent with the view that EI is related to the ability to accurately perceive and manage relationships.”
I found the relationship for “feeling” to be the most interesting part of the study due to the high number of “thinking” as opposed to “feeling” executives in the workplace. The study suggests that using “feeling” when making decisions shows awareness of others’ feelings. This would be indicative of having emotional intelligence.
If there are more “thinking” people in business executive positions and this study showed people that were “feeling” had more of a relationship to emotional intelligence, what does that say about our business leaders? A study of nearly 5000 people by Sala revealed that executives may have an inflated idea of how high their emotional intelligence actually is. “The results of this study demonstrate that higher-level employees are more likely to have an inflated view of their emotional intelligence competencies and less congruence with the perceptions of others who work with them often and know them well than lower-level employees.”
What is interesting to note is that one’s MBTI type does not usually change over time. However, one can develop their emotional intelligence. The “thinking” personality type bases their decisions on data. They tend to be logical. If people with a strong “thinking” preference do not show as high of a correlation with emotional intelligence now, can they develop this based on their understanding of this data? It seems logical to conclude this is possible.
As with any self-reported data, there are possible limitations to these studies. I personally have studied emotional intelligence and its impact on sales performance. I had to take the EQ-i and the MBTI in my training to be a qualified instructor for both assessments. I came out as an ESTJ and had a high EQ-i score. I may be an anomaly, but from what I have seen from the work of Daniel Goleman and others, whether someone is a “thinking” or a “feeling” personality, it is important to always be working on one’s EQ in order to be successful.
Related Articles
- Myers Briggs MBTI: Testing Your Relationships (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
- EQ-nomics: Can Emotional Intelligence Beat the Recession? (psychologytoday.com)
- Can’t Afford to Take the Myers Briggs MBTI? A Free Way to Determine Your Personality Type and Job Preferences (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
- Sue Sylvester from Glee: Classic ESTJ MBTI Type (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)