Smartest guy in the boardroom, dumbest guy on the street

Subtitle: How CEOs can improve their emotional intelligence. See the numbered simple procedure at the end of the article. 

We measure our own strength by comparing ourselves to the people we are standing beside. This is an essential lesson for business. Understanding it can help us live with less frustration outside of work, too.

Coincidentally, Travis Bradbury just recently wrote a post about how the top guys end up having lower emotional intelligence. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-your-boss-lacks-emotional-intelligence-dr-travis-bradberry Well, this post explains a bit of why that might be, and how bosses (and everyone) can use this fact to become a better boss, or parent, or friend.

Bosses may lack emotional intelligence partly because they have never put themselves in a different position. We judge our own strength by comparing ourselves to those around us. Therefore, the only way to truly know our own strength is to change our situation, and see how we react.

Here's an example.
One fine day in the summer of 1995 I walked off the boat into southern China. It was not long after tourism sort of opened up there -- sort of opened up, but not really, but that's another tale. Anyway, there weren't many whites in Canton then. I didn't see one all day.

I had a phrase book and I had the Lonely Planet book, which had maps with labels in both Chinese and English (so you could read the signs). 

I strolled off the boat onto a long cobbled laneway and alongside an old white tile-topped wall and into a market. The first thing I marvelled at was someone buying frogs, and the merchant skinning them alive before he chopped their heads in half to kill them. I realized then that I was in a very different society. 

As I began to stroll the streets of Guangzhou (Canton), I also realized within a few hours that I was the dumbest person on that street. I was surrounded by millions and millions of people and I was by far the stupidest. Do you know why?

Because I didn't speak the language. High and mighty straight-A university girl wasn't much now, was she? (Except for some kind of freakish weird-looking pale-haired circus show, source of much amusement).

I tried using my translated map to ask directions to a temple or something that the guidebook had recommended. :) Mostly people didn't know where it was, but then I found a man who was very helpful. He wrote me instructions in Chinese -- a full page of them.*

Of course, that didn't help me. I had one tool -- that translated map, and not enough training to do anything else. I didn't manage to get to that temple -- mission failed, but no big deal. Happily, I had enough spatial sense to get myself to the train station of the next leg of my trip. But I'll never forget that moment that I realized that I was the dumbest person in the middle of that street.

I wish that so many North Americans would go try that. Go try to be the dumbest person on the street, and see how you react.
My boyfriend back home at the time was tall, white, and an engineer. Our society had pampered and fawned on him at every turn, as our society almost always does with tall good-looking men. His arrogance (and lack of empathy for others) matched just what you would expect.

Guys like that sure seem big and strong, don't they? Bosses get pretty secretaries, and every time they stand beside the shorter, smaller woman, they feel bigger and stronger. Some school teachers start it, fawning over the tallest, best-looking fellows in the class. I wish they wouldn't. I wish they would, instead, give them challenges to test their strength (something they constantly do to the girls, leaving them to fend for themselves or fail).

If you measure yourself against other fellows on the sports team, you feel good. You're all big and strong and proving it. Maybe you are the very biggest and strongest, or maybe you're just stronger than those who aren't on the team, but sports is not really the maximum strength-testing situation.
What really would have made that old big white boyfriend and others like him into a big tough guy would have been getting the balls up to walk down that street in China, alone. Knowing that even if he's totally the dumbest guy on the street, he could manage himself.

I don't mean going to China with an entourage, and a translator, and a guide. I mean, walk out there alone. You and a translated map, no Chinese skills, and a goal to get to the train station.

What if you can't go to China tomorrow? What could you do to measure your strength differently?

Find an unfamiliar, uncomfortable situation and immerse yourself in it. Go to new groups of people without your entourage. Do something completely without your box. And be aware of how you affect those around you. If you're Big White Guy, do you just accept all the goodies people naturally give you and only you? Or do you actually take the time to be perceptive about others' needs, and see that others in the group get a share? That is what makes a true leader.

We all need to do this. People who perceive themselves as weak and are frustrated by this can also find more strength by changing the situation. Here are some examples:

• Wives who might have married early and have always been submissive to their mate sometimes despair at their own perceived weakness, yet if they join activities outside the home, and change those up until they find the right group, they may find their strength.
• Often in a marriage, women are conscious of being weaker than their spouse, and stronger than their babies, which can be a beautiful balance, but is one that needs to adapt as the children age, so it's useful and important to realize that our perceptions of ourselves play into our treatment and expectations of others.
• Women who become single mothers because there was no father available to lean on are often perceived as very strong, but again, this is just a rut that we fall into through habit. The strength we perceive of ourselves may be just what we know we have to do (i.e., I had to get to the train station in Canton, but I didn't have to get to the temple -- I made what I had to do, work). So single women are strong because they have to be, but it's an excellent exercise for them to be able to trust someone else to turn the reins over for a little while and experience being the weaker partner. If you can help a single parent friend that way, then do!
• I know of more than one shorter white male who has gone to teach English in Asia and has come back feeling like a sexy god-like creature because of all the adoration he received.

I am the first to admit that there is nothing sexier or more wonderful than feeling like a little woman standing beside a tall, strong, sexy man. These instinctive reactions are rooted deep in our DNA, and they can be beautiful and wonderful. I am not at all saying that we should deny or despise them. However, that is not always the most appropriate interaction to nurture to make the most of everyone's abilities for business success.

What I am saying is that if you want a higher emotional intelligence, then do this:

Procedure
1. Take a look at where you are compared to the people around you and how you perceive your own strength, and how they perceive your strength.
2. How is that working for you? And how is it working for others? If you're always coming out on top and getting all the goodies, is that really the best for everyone concerned? Or could you change things up so that you redistribute the advantages and benefits, so that the team functions better overall?
3. If you perceive yourself as weaker than you want yourself to be, who are you standing beside all the time? How can you change that, at least for part of your week? Could you volunteer with a group, change the group of people that you socialize with, or perhaps change your job role at work?
4. If you are feeling weak, also learn to count up your strengths each day or week, and write them down. Focussing on your strengths will make them grow.
5. Whether you feel strong or weak, think in your past to situations that changed that up and what you learned about yourself.
6. Write a list of teams and situations that you worked really well for, and who you felt great contributing to. People who made you feel that you have a lot to give and that you were able to contribute really well.
7. Whether you feel strong or weak or somewhere in between, write a list of people that you love interacting with, and teams that you enjoy being part of, now.

I suggest writing these things with pen on paper, as you'll be closer to it and more creative than simply tapping away at your computer. But do it however you can. Start to make some notes, any notes. Once you start to turn the steamship of your mind, the change will come if you let it.
Write me and let me know how this works for you. I'd love to hear about your progress.

Footnote: *Some friends translated the page of instructions when I got home. It said something like "go right at this street, walk along a few hundred metres, take Bus #10, and get off at the stop in front of the temple."