Читать книгу The EQ Leader - Stein Steven J. - Страница 7

Demetri never felt so anxious before. It was worse than his first day at work at the exclusive menswear store. He had been the top salesperson for four years in a row and had fought hard to be promoted to sales manager. He had all the best customers on his roster. Out of the entire sales force, he was the best at establishing profitable relationships. Now that he was rewarded with a promotion and pay raise he felt the pressure to perform at a much higher level than before.

Worry set in. First, he was unsure about how his coworkers would react to him in his new role. He knew at least one of them, Carlos, also applied for the manager position. Would Carlos be upset, perhaps even jealous? Then he worried about the effect his promotion would have on the team. They were a tight team, not just celebrating each other's successes, but socializing together. How would they now respond to him? How should he treat them? Could he keep the relationships the same? Treat them all as his buddies still? Never did Demetri think a promotion, something he worked so hard for, would create so many mixed emotions. Unfortunately, there was no preparation provided for him or the team he was now supposed to lead.

This scenario has been repeated so many times across many industries. People with good technical or sales skills are placed into management positions. The thinking seems to be – if they can sell, do great accounting, make the most widgets, design the best buildings, build the best software, well, then they can probably lead and help others do just as well as they did on the front line.

Unfortunately, leadership doesn't work quite that way. The skills and competencies that help you sell things, build things, analyze things, fix things, and so on, have little to do with being a good leader. Many people I've spoken with shake their heads when they hear about companies such as GE, Google, Microsoft, FedEx, and American Express that spend so much money on leadership training. They're even more surprised when I talk about it in terms of succession planning, but, the fact is, without a willingness to invest in selecting and training leaders, companies are likely to suffer the adverse effects of poor leadership.

When I speak with fellow CEOs they usually can recount a situation where they promoted someone on the basis of technical or industry skills and knowledge. While these skills are important for frontline job performance, leadership, whether supervisory or upper management, requires a different or additional skill set. What are these skills precisely? How do we develop them? These questions will be the theme of this book. I'll be presenting a combination of real stories, modified examples, research studies, personal anecdotes, new data that we've compiled at MHS and some very public examples to illustrate these points. Our emotional intelligence testing over the past 20 years includes over 2 million working people worldwide, and we'll use these sources to inform our leadership discussion.