Book Review: HBR'S 10 MUST READS On Emotional Intelligence

※英語力向上および備忘のため、自分用にメモ。

I've been interested in EQ (emotional quotient) and luckily, could find this book at the bookstore by chance.

The contents of this book are as follows:

• What Makes a Leader?

• Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance

• Why It's So Hard to Be Fair

• Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions

• Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups

• The Price of Incivility: Lack of Respect Hurts Morale - and the Bottom Line

• How Resilience Works

• Emotional Agility: How Effective Leaders Manage Their Negative Thoughts and Feelings

• Fear of Feedback

• The Young and the Clueless

Each chapter has "Idea in Brief" and "Idea in Practice" sections, making it easier to review the key messages of each content.
Although there were some difficulties, especially because of my poor vocabulary, I enjoyed learning the fact that emotion plays an important role in the workplace.

Based on my understanding, the answer/summary to each content title is:

• What Makes a Leader?
  -> Emotional Intelligence. Leaders should learn the five components of EI skills: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill.
  It takes time but we can learn each skill and it is worth the effort.

• Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance
  -> Surprisingly, leaders' own mood influences the company's performance mostly and is contagious. To strengthen emotional leadership abilities, we should recognize who we are now and where we want to go. In addition, we have to establish how we can do that and find who will help us.
  "Emotional leadership is the spark that ignites a company's performance, creating a bonefire of success or a landscape of ashes."

• Why It's So Hard to Be Fair
  -> Some managers wrongly believe than tangible resources are more meaningful than treating employees decently. Also, the benefit of process fairness is not obvious. By utilizing process fairness, we can not only minimize costs to strengthen performance but can pay enormous dividends in a wide variety of challenges.

• Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions
  -> Leaders make decisions based on pattern recognition and emotional tagging. Both can be distorted by internal factors such as self-interest. Managers must recognize their baiases.

• Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups
  -> Emotional intelligence for groups has stronger effects than that for individuals. To build a foundation of group emotional intelligence, we must realize and regulate emotions of: individual team members, the whole group, and other key groups with whom it interacts.

• The Price of Incivility: Lack of Respect Hurts Morale - and the Bottom Line
  -> Civility is one of the important competencies for managers. Failure to keep tabs on behavior can harm the organization. It may lead to: loss of employees, loss of customers, and loss of productivity.

• How Resilience Works
  -> Resilience has a strong power. There are three uncanny abilities that resilient people have: to accept and confront harsh realities, to find meaning in terrible times, and to improvise. The importance of these skills rises in deep recessions.

• Emotional Agility: How Effective Leaders Manage Their Negative Thoughts and Feelings
  -> To build emotional agility, we should recognize our own patterns, label out thoughts and emotions, accept them, and act on our values. Knowing our own values is a key to do that.

• Fear of Feedback
  -> Nobody likes receiving performance feedback, especially if it is a negative one. People tend to avoid the truth but try to guess what their bosses are thinking. Fears and assumptions can lead to psychologically maladaptive behaviors such as procrastination, denial, brooding, jealousy, and self-sabogtage. But by learning adaptive techniques, we can free us from those destructive responses. Once determine emotional and behavioral barriers, let's reframe thoughts and move toward more adaptive actions.

• The Young and the Clueless
  -> Promoting talented young managers too quickly can prevent them from developing key emotional competencies that only come with time and experience. The solution is to delay their promotions and give them time to mature emotionally. To enable this, what we can do is: deepen 360-degree feedback, interrupt the ascent, act on the commitment, institutionalize personal development, and cultivate informal networks. This must be a hard decision but critical to develop effective leaders.

The most impressive part of this book for me was the last chapter. Intentional delay of promotions seemed to be too simple a solution. And it was astonishing - I thought they didn't care about ages as long as they performed well in European culture.
However, it's understandable that emotional maturity takes time as well as physical maturity. To persuade young talents, explaining the reason and giving them a chance to speed up their growth are necessary, of course.