Welcome to the Leader: Unlocked Podcast brought to you by WhistleBlast where we chat with the leaders of today on how we can inspire and empower the leaders of the future. My name is Paige Buan, and I am your host.
Our guest for this episode has over 2 decades worth of experience in the corporate world, starting as a technical writer and working his way up the corporate ladder. Today, I am joined by Rocky Teodoro, Leadership Consultant and Resource Speaker and Former Senior Global Site Lead for the Research, Advisory, and Specialty Solutions division at S&P Global, as we talk about Emotional Intelligence in Leadership: Developing the Skills for Success.
Paige Buan
Welcome to Leader: Unlocked, Rocky. Thank you for joining us.
Rocky Teodoro
Yeah, thanks for having me here. It's my honor to be a guest on your show.
Paige Buan
We're so excited to get this started, for sure. I really think that there are so many leaders out there that just don't have that platform to engage and inspire the current workforce and the incoming so I think this discussion and what you have to share with us today is really important.
You're also a resource speaker for business writing, and financial news writing workshops. Can you tell me more about these initiatives? And more importantly, what's your motivation for doing this? Why do you have to create these initiatives?
Rocky Teodoro
Yeah, all of these workshops on critical thinking, business writing, financial news, and of course, emotional intelligence: all of these are targeted to help employees improve their skills and enable them to climb up the ladder as well as better perform in their roles. So these initiatives are geared towards the company's pillar of empowering people. So everything starts with the people in our organizations. Without an engaged and empowered team, you will not be able to accomplish much.
I'll talk about iLEAD, which you joined. So iLEAD is a leadership development program that I envisioned and executed for the Manila office way back in 2016. So this was a time when we were hiring a lot of people, which entailed having more managers to lead teams. Instead of hiring leaders externally, the most effective way to deal with the challenge was to develop leaders from the existing employees. And this program was a success. And I hope you can also attest to that.
Paige Buan
Yes, I can.
Rocky Teodoro
It became a yearly program for developing high potentials. It was even brought to our Pakistan office.
Paige Buan
Yeah.
Rocky Teodoro
So I even flew there to talk about the program and hold some sessions, also on emotional intelligence. I got the stats. So 56% of the participants have been promoted to leadership or to senior roles.
Paige Buan
That's amazing.
Rocky Teodoro
All successful organizations need a steady supply of new leaders.
Paige Buan
Right.
Rocky Teodoro
So the onus is on the leaders, executives to recognize potential and to take steps to develop these high potential team members. If you don't develop these people with leadership potential, if you don't nurture them, these people will leave. They can easily become leaders somewhere else. The onus is on the executives to train and nurture these high potential.
Paige Buan
It's like a leader's responsibility is not just to lead, but also create the future leaders of their organization.
Rocky Teodoro
Correct.
Paige Buan
That's what I really loved about it. Because there were so many programs that empowered employees to take hold of their careers, which is I think, if not all companies are doing that now, they should start. If they don't focus on hiring the right people and retaining them, it's actually a huge chunk.
You're now a Genos-certified emotional intelligence practitioner. So you have a very clear path forward. Where does that come from? What's behind that?
Rocky Teodoro
Okay. One of the first things I learned in leadership development is that leadership starts with leading yourself first. So you cannot lead others if you are unable to lead yourself. And emotional intelligence has always been one of my interests. Ever since I attended a discussion session on an article about EI, or emotional intelligence, and leadership, written by Daniel Goleman years ago back in the ‘90s. Daniel Goleman is a grandfather of emotional intelligence. He was one of the key people who popularized EI. Given my interest in EI and leadership development, it made sense to get certification on the subject, so that I could train others on EI better.
So let me talk a bit about Genos. It's a leading EI assessment and solution provider based in Australia. It has over 7,500 certified partners globally. It was recently named the 2022 Top Assessment and Evaluation Company by Training Industry, Inc. So in the Philippines, Geno's EI training is provided by a company called Emovation, led by my friend Ruby Mañalac.
Paige Buan
There you go. Now we know to call.
Rocky Teodoro
Yeah. In emotional intelligence, specifically, the Genos’ definition of it, there are 6 competencies of emotional intelligence. So 2 of the 6 competencies, self awareness and self management. This is the first competency that anyone who wants to be a leader should focus on first, since as I mentioned, you have to lead yourself first before you lead others. My purpose as a leader in a company or my why? It's to help others develop themselves, especially in the area of leadership. So in the corporate world, it gives me joy to see someone grow from a fledgling new team member, just learning the ropes, into a strong leader who can also motivate other team members.
Paige Buan
I actually really like that. As a leader, your primary motivator is to empower others to step up and lead themselves. Now I love the statistics that you gave. So that really highlights the fact that before what was rewarded was high IQ. But now, if you really want to survive today's work environment with AI, it's not about just IQ. In order to really make it further in your career, you got to know yourself. You want somebody who is invested in your own career growth and your path forward, so I love that.
And that ties perfectly into our main theme. For today's discussion, which is all about leading oneself through emotional intelligence. We keep talking about emotional intelligence, what is emotional intelligence?
Rocky Teodoro
There are a number of definitions of emotional intelligence, I'll give you the Genos one. So emotional intelligence is a set of skills that help us better perceive, understand and manage emotions, both in ourselves and others.
So the first point to remember here: It’s a set of skills that can be learned. It's learnable. So there are some people who are naturally better at it, but anyone can learn it. So that's a positive. And these sets of skills help us better perceive, understand and manage emotions in ourselves and others. So we start with ourselves, once again. If we are able to do that to ourselves, understand and manage our emotions in ourselves, we will be able to help others with their emotions as well.
Paige Buan
I really love that. It's a skill that you can learn.
So let's talk about emotional intelligence versus critical thinking now. Is there one greater than the other?
Rocky Teodoro
First, I'd like to dispel the myth that being emotionally intelligent means having no emotions, like a robot, or you're just pure logic, because everyone has emotions. If you're human, you have emotions. So emotions are valid. They are indicators. So to perform well at work does not mean you have no emotions, or you deny them or you ignore them. Emotions impact us and those around us every day, whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, even in the workplace. So it's a falsehood to say emotions have no place in the workplace. They are there. We go back to the definition, it's a matter of perceiving the emotions in you and in other people, understanding them and managing them.
Now, back to your question. Of course, both are important, critical thinking and emotional intelligence. Both are important to help you succeed in the corporate world, and even in everyday life. Critical thinking helps us understand and analyze things better. EI helps us in communicating and influencing those around us. Put it this way: even if you have a great solution to a problem, if you can persuade others to follow your lead and apply the solution, you will get nowhere. So you need both, definitely.
Paige Buan
Learning more about yourself also helps you so much in communicating your ideas. Because if you have great ideas but you don't know how to communicate them with your stakeholders, it's just gonna be an idea forever. So it's good to have the skills, keep thinking critically, but work on your emotional intelligence too. And it is a skill that can be learned. Is it a skill that can be unlearned?
Rocky Teodoro
I would think you have to unlearn some misconceptions. I mentioned one earlier, that you have to be emotionless in the workplace. So yes, definitely. There are some ideas that you have to unlearn about emotional intelligence, as well as other things. You have to unlearn a lot of things as you grow and develop yourself. So sometimes you have to unlearn something first before you learn because maybe there's something holding you back, a fallacy or a falsehood that's keeping you from developing yourself further.
Paige Buan
Going back to how emotional intelligence also ties to how well you can communicate with others, like bosses, right? Dislike bosses and stuff like that. It does make you feel a certain way about your work and even impacts the way you think. Does it have a huge impact if we have disliked bosses or colleagues?
Rocky Teodoro
I think that's a great way to think about how important emotional intelligence is. So think of the boss or colleague that you disliked the most when you were in the corporate world. How did they make you feel?
Paige Buan
Uninspired? Demotivated? That's definitely like a feeling you'll get.
Rocky Teodoro
Yeah, I agree. Uninspired, demotivated, uncertain, stressed, worried. I've heard these adjectives from- when I hold my training sessions. If you are feeling these emotions, these lead to unproductive mindsets. The popular term these days is “silent quitting.” Disengaged employees. And that's all from emotions. It's not logic that you dislike a boss. It's emotional.
Paige Buan
Absolutely. Yeah, it is.
Rocky Teodoro
Now on the flip side, think of your favorite boss and your favorite colleague. How did they make you feel?
Paige Buan
Excited to go to work? Definitely. That's something that's gonna help you not drag your feet every day. It makes everything lighter. Yeah, you're right.
Rocky Teodoro
Yeah. I like that emotional word: excited. You're excited to go to work because of this boss, because of this colleague. You feel valued. You feel informed you have a purpose. If you feel this way when you're at work, it leads to engagement. It leads to creative ideas. You feel you can express yourself, you feel comfortable brainstorming and voicing out your ideas, your opinions.
And this is the kicker: it made you want to go the extra mile. So if this favorite boss asks you to do something extra, you would gladly do it. So that's proof that emotional intelligence, especially in our leaders, in our bosses is very important because it correlates to productivity and engagement in employees.
Paige Buan
Yeah. It really impacts the people who are following that leader. Honestly, I think the future is here with AI, technology. It's crazy. I can't even digest majority of the things that I'm reading right now in the realm of AI. But in this age, why do we still need emotional intelligence? The majority of the things that are running the show would be centered around AI and automation. Why did you still study? Get a certification? Why do you think it's so important?
Rocky Teodoro
That's a good point regarding AI. So we're moving to an AI future. In fact, I've been reading some articles about AI-generated art, which causes controversy.
Paige Buan
Yes, I saw that.
Rocky Teodoro
So you know AI can even create art. So we're moving there. We're moving to a world where AI is becoming more prominent.
So your question is, why is emotional intelligence still important? An article from the Harvard Business Review said, “Skills like persuasion, social understanding and empathy are going to become differentiators as AI and machine learning take over other tasks.” And the second is a quote from a study by Capgemini Research Institute. Their study found that 83% of organizations said a highly emotionally intelligent workforce will be a prerequisite in the years to come.
Paige Buan
You mentioned that it is a skill that can be learned. What are the steps to increasing one's emotional intelligence?
Rocky Teodoro
I won't give a procedure or steps on improving emotional intelligence. I'll give some tips and some pointers and a general direction for people who want to improve their EI. So as we mentioned in the definition, it's perceiving, understanding and managing emotions in yourself first. So we start with that. EI is all about understanding and managing emotions first in yourself before others.
So the first step to improving your emotional intelligence is perceiving your emotions. So how do you practice perceiving your emotions? There are some people who go through their day and all of these emotions. They feel all of these different emotions. And at the end of the day, you ask them how did your day go? They give a one-word answer, right?
Paige Buan
Yeah.
Rocky Teodoro
It was good or it was bad. The first step is actually perceiving these emotions as you experience them throughout the day. So one step or method would be to keep a journal. So you just keep a diary. A journal can be a notebook, could be on your laptop. But just, at the end of each day, or even twice a day, maybe during your lunch break, make a list of the things- important things that happened and how you felt about them, and that’s it. And your reflections on it. That's a good first step towards…
Paige Buan
That act of just writing is very helpful.
Rocky Teodoro
So this will also help you expand your emotional vocabulary and understand the intensity of your emotion. So it's not enough to just say, “Okay, I was angry at this person. I was sad, because this happened.” Try to understand the intensity of your emotion. So were you angry? Were you upset? Were you frustrated? Or were you just annoyed? So these are different intensities, right?
Paige Buan
Yes, it’s different.
Rocky Teodoro
Because sometimes when we remember, “Oh, I was angry at this person,” when in fact, they were just annoyed. But when you think about it, yeah, I was angry. So you know, it causes you to become angrier because your vocabulary is “I'm angry, and this is what I do when I'm angry.” But when you analyze it when you take a step back, “Okay, I was just annoyed. So it's not really a big deal.”
Paige Buan
I was just tired. That's why I found him annoying. Yeah, just really go to the root feeling that you have and realize that you're not actually angry at somebody. You were not okay that day.
Rocky Teodoro
Yeah. Or let's take sadness. Were you disappointed with something? Were you just feeling pessimistic? Or were you dismayed? So these are different levels, very different. So if you're just disappointed in a person, you take a step back and you think about, “Okay, maybe I was just disappointed. So maybe tomorrow, this won’t happen. Or I'll take steps to improve the situation, right?” Instead of feeling, “I'm sad. I can’t do anything about it. I'll just lock myself in my room.”
Paige Buan
I thought of a scenario in the office, right. One of the tips that they mentioned, if you're angry or emotional, and you have to write an email, you received an email that made you angry and want to respond. You can write it down because that's part of it. Right? It's like the journal. You write it down, but you don't send it. You just let it simmer. And then you try to figure out why you felt that way. Maybe you just didn't get your coffee for the day just yet. And then suddenly, you get an email that wasn't actually so bad.
Rocky Teodoro
Speaking about that email technique, there is actually a technique for processing and managing your emotions. It's called the 6-second rule. So when you're feeling strong emotions, before you react, just count six seconds, and you take deep breaths per second, this gives your logical brain time to process what is happening. It allows you to take a step back. “Okay, I am feeling angry. Why am I feeling angry? Because I feel this person disrespected me. But is that really what happened? Maybe he’s just…” So you're processing it. At the end of the 6 seconds, you will be much better at perceiving your emotion and understanding what is happening and making a better decision on what to do rather than if you just react. If you didn't count down the 6 seconds, you will just react angrily, right? I don't know how you react but maybe shout at the person or some people leave the room. Right?
Paige Buan
Right.
Rocky Teodoro
So simple: 6 seconds, just take deep breaths. It will help you process the emotion that's happening. So in the brain, there's an emotional part. It's the part that takes over when you feel something is stressful or dangerous. There's a term for it called amygdala hijack. So we won't go into the technical details, but the 6-second rule helps with that. It helps prevent the hijack of the emotional brain, and allows our logical brain to process, and in turn, we will make better decisions.
Paige Buan
That's a good one. When I watch movies, series or anything like that, I would always find myself commenting, “If you guys only just talked about it, then the entire season wouldn't even happen.” And now that I think of it, whenever there's conflict in any of these shows, they don't take the 6-second pause. Yeah, they just react, and then we have the entire season.
Rocky Teodoro
We'd have very boring movies if everyone followed the 6-second rule.
Paige Buan
Yes. But what does that say though about our stories? We need to learn more about emotional intelligence.
Rocky Teodoro
Yeah.
Paige Buan
All right. Okay, that's a good one. Do you have any other tips for those who want to improve their emotional intelligence skill?
Rocky Teodoro
Since we're in a podcast specifically for leaders, I want them to know or to realize emotions are contagious.
Paige Buan
Yeah.
Rocky Teodoro
So emotions actually leak and affect the atmosphere of a room. So if you are a leader, you should be aware of this, and avoid mirroring negative emotions. I think all of us have been there, like we're in a meeting or with a group of people, then there's one person who's really emotional and really vocal about it, and then the rest of the people in the room follow her lead or his lead. One person is angry, and then the other people suddenly start feeling upset.
Paige Buan
Yeah. I’m also upset.
Rocky Teodoro
So if you're a leader, understand that. Don't mirror the negative emotions. So if someone is angry, don't also become angry. And in fact, as a leader, you should project positive emotions so that others can be influenced rather than the other way around. There's a person in the room who's angry, if you keep projecting calmess, relaxed positivity, the others will follow your lead, since you're the leader in the room, maybe you’re the manager or maybe or the senior person. Or even if you're none of these, even if you're just a team member, if you keep a positive aura, others will start also being influenced by you. So if you're a leader, you should definitely be aware of this.
Paige Buan
Right. As we're wrapping up today's episode, do you have any final thoughts about leading oneself on emotional intelligence?
Rocky Teodoro
I'd like to end with a quote from Maya Angelou. This is a very applicable and very memorable quote. Her quote is, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” So it's a great quote.
Paige Buan
It is.
Rocky Teodoro
And it speaks to the importance of emotional intelligence. Even years down the line, we still remember our favorite boss. This boss is great. Even if we don't remember specifically what they did, or what they said to us, we remember how they made us feel. This applies not only with our bosses, but even with our family, with our friends. For those parents out there, if you make your child feel loved and protected. They'll remember that even when they're 50 years old, and you're 80 or something, they'll remember that for their whole life. Even if they don't remember even the activities you did, the exact words that you said, but how you made them feel, they will always remember that.
Paige Buan
That is a great one. When you work on yourself, manage how you feel it improves how you make others feel too. That's a really deep one. Thank you for the advice too for the parents. That's so true. Last question for me. What do the leaders of the future look like?
Rocky Teodoro
I think that's a great question. So we're in an age of change. All of these things happening: remote work, AI, lots of upheavals, lots of changes. So I think the leaders of the future need to be able to adjust to these changes quickly. Change is here to stay, and it's accelerating. So leaders need to be agile and able to adapt to these changes. That's one.
Second is leaders need to be able to, as you mentioned, unlearn and learn quickly, because all of these changes and all of these new technologies happening.
And then the third one relates to EI, the leaders of the future need to be able to influence others. Because that's the one thing that AI and machine learning cannot do. It cannot understand others. It cannot understand the emotions of others. And that's where we, as humans, need to excel. We need to excel in the human side of work, because the AI or the machine part of work is taking over a lot of things. So we need to focus more on the human side, and emotional intelligence is a big part of the human side of work.
Paige Buan
That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Rocky, for joining us on the podcast today and for sharing your wisdom with us. Do you have anything else, other initiatives that you'd like our audiences to be aware of or would like to check out?
Rocky Teodoro
I'm certified with Genos. So I'm happy to talk about emotional intelligence. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn, Rocky Teodoro, and we can talk about EI. And all of this training and initiatives, I'm happy also to do these for organizations. I've even held business writing workshops for colleges, like UP, UST. So yeah, feel free to add me on LinkedIn. We can chat there if you're interested in talking about any of these initiatives that I've been doing.
Paige Buan
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Rocky, for joining us today. Thanks, everyone, for listening to the podcast.