I coached a senior military officer who worried that her boss, The Admiral, was stuck in the past, potentially endangering American electronic security. Responsible for developing and protecting cyber networks for a large portion of the Atlantic Coast, and concerned that these assets were vulnerable to attack, she asked her boss for more resources. He wasn’t interested.
Her career, and more importantly, essential assets were vulnerable as never before. She had given her boss all the important facts, yet her proposals were rejected, and he stopped returning her phone calls. She could resign her commission and walk away but was sure she would hate herself if she took that action.
I didn’t see the problem as old thinking vs. new, and focused on helping her to connect her emotions to her story in a constructive way. I challenged her to tell me the story from her bosses’ POV rather than hers. At first all she could do was shake her head and say “that’s easy he is an idiot and that’s that.”
Slowly, she was able to see thru his eyes and feel the deck through his boots. By doing this exercise she gained valuable strategic and emotional insight. The next time she saw The Admiral she was able to frame his problems clearly and offer solutions that he could hear.
My client increased her EQ (emotional intelligence) by learning to shift her point of view. Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame says that EQ is twice as valuable as IQ as an indicator of success, and constructing a story from someone else’s prospective is a powerful way to build EQ.
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