Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

62 LEADING WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
person and then capitalize on it. Average managers play
checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference?
In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the
same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and
coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move
at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of
piece moves in a different way, and you can’t play if you
don’t know how each piece moves. More important, you won’t
win if you don’t think carefully about how you move the
pieces. Great managers know and value the unique abilities
and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they
learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan
of attack . . . Average managers treat all their employees
the same. Great managers discover each individual’s unique
talents and bring these to the surface so everyone wins. 86
Identifying your strengths and the strengths of the people you
are developing is the first step in improving Emotional Intelligence.
The second step is developing your plan. In your plan the first
action is to determine how can you stretch, redeploy, or build on
your strengths. The next step is to identify “fatal flaws” that could
derail you if not attended to.
The EI Star Profile can be used to clarify
these strengths and to develop a plan to
focus more on your strengths. Using 360-
degree feedback, which many organizations
do, can also help you identify your strengths
so that you can understand how others perceive
you. Aside from the ECI administered
by the Hay Group, www.haygroup.com, you
can use the Emotional Quotient Inventory
(EQi) and the EQi 360 from Mental Health Systems, www.mhs.com, or
the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal from TalentSmart at www.talent
smart.com to identify your Emotional Intelligence skills.
Average
managers play
checkers, while
great managers
play chess.