7 ms·

For me it could be one of the most important things. As a manager and entrepreneur we had some people that were intellectually bright, masters of cognitive abi

For me it could be one of the most important things. As a manager and entrepreneur we had some people that were intellectually bright, masters of cognitive ability, but were miserable and made everybody miserable. As bright as they were, they had their partners or children abusing them, or cheating. It was clear that they were not bright in other areas of their life. The problem was when they projected their anger, frustration or cynicism on other members of the team. This is a red line for me, I learned to never tolerate this and it is one of the best thing you could do for your team. Emotions are addictive and contagious. It you let negative emotions of one member go against the team, soon the entire team will react and escalate(people work this way, hey he insulted me so I double the insult back and so on). In lots of jobs, emotional intelligence is not that important, specially when you can "outsource" it from the workers to managers but on sales it is an essential ability.

ninjaplease 12y ago
Your employees were being abused and you blame them? Think your own emotional intelligence might need a firmware upgrade.
- gadders 12y ago
  He blames them for bringing their issues in to work.
- philh 12y ago
  Ve described a situation and what ve did about that situation. Ve didn't say anything about assigning blame.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    Ve?
    - philh 12y ago
      Gender-neutral pronoun.
      - aninhumer 12y ago
        We have one of those already, it's "they".
        philh 12y ago
        I sometimes use that, but it feels awkward to me when referring to a specific person. And in this case, I think that at one point I was using "they" to refer to the employees, and didn't want the ambiguity. (I'll note that I've had this discussion multiple times before. I'm fine with people expressing disapproval of my choice, but please assume that I'm not making it out of ignorance.)
        lucian1900 12y ago
        "You" already has this problem and we can deal with it. Pronouns often need disambiguation anyway.
        to3m 12y ago
        I immediately assumed you were putting on a comedy german accent. But for obvious reasons, I had some difficulty figuring out why you were doing this.
        aninhumer 12y ago
        It takes some getting used to, but I think "they" is still a lot less awkward than using a completely new word. My post was probably more condescending than necessary.
        jkaunisv1 12y ago
        'They' can be confused with a plural pronoun and a lot of people feel it's grammatically incorrect to use it to refer to a singular person. The problem with gender-neutral singular pronouns is that there are many of them originating from different contexts. Each group or person tries to get their pronoun - ve, ze, co - adopted as standard but it's difficult because they're invented, so nobody knows about them, so you have to have this discussion every time you use one. I'm friends with an asexual person who doesn't identify as male or female, and ze asked me to use the "ze" pronoun when referring to zer. I do in zer presence but there's no way I'm going to drop a sentence like that when somebody asks what I did yesterday. I just want to continue the conversation rather than have an involved discussion about gender norms.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurus3 12y ago
In lots of jobs, emotional intelligence is not that important, specially when you can "outsource" it from the workers to managers but on sales it is an essential ability. The article's point is that they designed a test to check whether this is true, and found that in terms of dollars (which are the whole point of sales people) it wasn't. If you'd said "programmers," there wouldn't be too much room to disagree. Or if the author hadn't published other papers in the field, there probably wouldn't be grounds for disagreement, since nobody should take someone's word that they "ran a test" without at least some academic familiarity. But here's the author's related research: http://amj.aom.org/content/56/6/1703.abstract http://amj.aom.org/content/56/6/1703.abstract Unless the whole article is a submarine piece to plug http://www.optimizehire.com/ http://www.optimizehire.com/ (which is quite possible), it would seem that ignoring the facts while sticking to your gut feelings is a bad idea. That said, whether they are facts is debatable, since it's simply an anecdote from the author. But personally, I'd find it extremely interesting if an experiment called into question conventional wisdom, so hopefully the author will release rigorous details about his methodology and process.
Argorak 12y ago
I think the important part here is that the task "working with the team" is an entirely different task from "debugs a memory leak". So comparing based on the main skill might not be very helpful for actual workplaces.
lsc 12y ago
Eh, most managers are like you. And you know what? That's why I can pretty consistently hire very capable people at dramatically below market rates. The way I see it, if you are the more emotionally capable team member, well, sometimes it makes sense to put a little bit of that emotional capability into helping your more mentally capable team members deal with the team and be productive. I'm not saying I'm more emotionally capable than average; By those tests, I'm probably not. But I do seem to be pretty good at interacting with people that are generally thought to have low emotional intelligence, and that's probably what you want for a manager of Engineers. See, the fact that I'm pretty good when dealing with "low-eq" types but generally much less good when dealing with "high-eq" types (and further, that I tend to make friends with foreigners faster than other Americans in work situations) indicates to me that emotional intelligence is a relative sort of thing. A person who is good at dealing with one type of person or one culture may be less good at dealing with another.
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  I find that a lot of people persons understand about 75-90% of people great, and do terrible at trying to interact with the remainder, because their various norms are so far apart and the person just can't picture the other's perspective in that situation. Also, I'm completely with your other point: if your job at the company is to help manage emotions, why isn't it reasonable to expect that you impart some of that knowledge and experience on coworkers? If I'm hired to do math/software, the expectation is generally not only that I develop new math/software ideas/code, but that I also explain these ideas to coworkers, and give my less technical coworkers the benefit of my knowledge and experience, including training them in basic concepts they need for their job. I think a lot of companies would be well served by having managers/HR/etc run seminars for less people oriented people who want to develop their people skills (similar to the training that is given to people in people position roles, eg sales).
EC1 12y ago
On the contrary, some of the best people I've ever worked with were people I bonded with over cynicism and an equal hate for most things. It made it incredibly easy to sift through the bullshit.
pessimizer 12y ago
Cynicism and frustration, loudly projected, may be the only thing that saves a project from the groupthink toilet. edit: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-30/here-s-theory-why-segarra-drove-new-york-fed-crazy-opening-line.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-30/here-s-theory-why-s...
maaarghk 12y ago
You sound like a horrible manager. Those employees needed support.
dschiptsov 12y ago
One criteria of intellectual brightness, it seems to me, is the ability to recognize oneself as the primary source of one's own suffering and misery.)

ninjaplease 12y ago

Your employees were being abused and you blame them? Think your own emotional intelligence might need a firmware upgrade.

gadders 12y ago
He blames them for bringing their issues in to work.
philh 12y ago
Ve described a situation and what ve did about that situation. Ve didn't say anything about assigning blame.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  Ve?
  - philh 12y ago
    Gender-neutral pronoun.
    - aninhumer 12y ago
      We have one of those already, it's "they".
      - philh 12y ago
        I sometimes use that, but it feels awkward to me when referring to a specific person. And in this case, I think that at one point I was using "they" to refer to the employees, and didn't want the ambiguity. (I'll note that I've had this discussion multiple times before. I'm fine with people expressing disapproval of my choice, but please assume that I'm not making it out of ignorance.)
        lucian1900 12y ago
        "You" already has this problem and we can deal with it. Pronouns often need disambiguation anyway.
        to3m 12y ago
        I immediately assumed you were putting on a comedy german accent. But for obvious reasons, I had some difficulty figuring out why you were doing this.
        aninhumer 12y ago
        It takes some getting used to, but I think "they" is still a lot less awkward than using a completely new word. My post was probably more condescending than necessary.
      - jkaunisv1 12y ago
        'They' can be confused with a plural pronoun and a lot of people feel it's grammatically incorrect to use it to refer to a singular person. The problem with gender-neutral singular pronouns is that there are many of them originating from different contexts. Each group or person tries to get their pronoun - ve, ze, co - adopted as standard but it's difficult because they're invented, so nobody knows about them, so you have to have this discussion every time you use one. I'm friends with an asexual person who doesn't identify as male or female, and ze asked me to use the "ze" pronoun when referring to zer. I do in zer presence but there's no way I'm going to drop a sentence like that when somebody asks what I did yesterday. I just want to continue the conversation rather than have an involved discussion about gender norms.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sillysaurus3 12y ago

In lots of jobs, emotional intelligence is not that important, specially when you can "outsource" it from the workers to managers but on sales it is an essential ability. The article's point is that they designed a test to check whether this is true, and found that in terms of dollars (which are the whole point of sales people) it wasn't. If you'd said "programmers," there wouldn't be too much room to disagree. Or if the author hadn't published other papers in the field, there probably wouldn't be grounds for disagreement, since nobody should take someone's word that they "ran a test" without at least some academic familiarity. But here's the author's related research: http://amj.aom.org/content/56/6/1703.abstract http://amj.aom.org/content/56/6/1703.abstract Unless the whole article is a submarine piece to plug http://www.optimizehire.com/ http://www.optimizehire.com/ (which is quite possible), it would seem that ignoring the facts while sticking to your gut feelings is a bad idea. That said, whether they are facts is debatable, since it's simply an anecdote from the author. But personally, I'd find it extremely interesting if an experiment called into question conventional wisdom, so hopefully the author will release rigorous details about his methodology and process.

Argorak 12y ago

I think the important part here is that the task "working with the team" is an entirely different task from "debugs a memory leak". So comparing based on the main skill might not be very helpful for actual workplaces.

lsc 12y ago

Eh, most managers are like you. And you know what? That's why I can pretty consistently hire very capable people at dramatically below market rates. The way I see it, if you are the more emotionally capable team member, well, sometimes it makes sense to put a little bit of that emotional capability into helping your more mentally capable team members deal with the team and be productive. I'm not saying I'm more emotionally capable than average; By those tests, I'm probably not. But I do seem to be pretty good at interacting with people that are generally thought to have low emotional intelligence, and that's probably what you want for a manager of Engineers. See, the fact that I'm pretty good when dealing with "low-eq" types but generally much less good when dealing with "high-eq" types (and further, that I tend to make friends with foreigners faster than other Americans in work situations) indicates to me that emotional intelligence is a relative sort of thing. A person who is good at dealing with one type of person or one culture may be less good at dealing with another.

ObviousScience 12y ago
I find that a lot of people persons understand about 75-90% of people great, and do terrible at trying to interact with the remainder, because their various norms are so far apart and the person just can't picture the other's perspective in that situation. Also, I'm completely with your other point: if your job at the company is to help manage emotions, why isn't it reasonable to expect that you impart some of that knowledge and experience on coworkers? If I'm hired to do math/software, the expectation is generally not only that I develop new math/software ideas/code, but that I also explain these ideas to coworkers, and give my less technical coworkers the benefit of my knowledge and experience, including training them in basic concepts they need for their job. I think a lot of companies would be well served by having managers/HR/etc run seminars for less people oriented people who want to develop their people skills (similar to the training that is given to people in people position roles, eg sales).

EC1 12y ago

On the contrary, some of the best people I've ever worked with were people I bonded with over cynicism and an equal hate for most things. It made it incredibly easy to sift through the bullshit.

pessimizer 12y ago

Cynicism and frustration, loudly projected, may be the only thing that saves a project from the groupthink toilet. edit: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-30/here-s-theory-why-segarra-drove-new-york-fed-crazy-opening-line.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-30/here-s-theory-why-s...

maaarghk 12y ago

You sound like a horrible manager. Those employees needed support.

dschiptsov 12y ago

One criteria of intellectual brightness, it seems to me, is the ability to recognize oneself as the primary source of one's own suffering and misery.)