Emotional Intelligence And The City

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I recently had a discussion with a big hitter in the City of London, a stones throw from the Bank of England. We were talking about senior executives who he felt could be raising their game or from whom he thought he could be getting better value. He was nonplussed by my question What do you do about them if theyre not performing at their best?. What do you mean? he replied. They perform or we get rid of them. My response that I found it intriguing that he was willing to summarily dispose of his investment in these people, for want of exploring possible solutions, failed to connect with him at all. The thought that they could grow and develop, much less be facilitated or supported to develop, was irrelevant to him.

This is a man who has established a run a number of successful companies in a wide range of industries in the UK and beyond. His business acumen is beyond doubt. However he failed to see any connection between the value of proactively releasing more of the potential of his people and their delivery to the exacting demands of the business.

For me its almost a non-question: why would you not want to do this? It makes business sense, let alone human sense. Without the human, the business has no foundation. This man demonstrated a level of emotional intelligence which does not seem to have inhibited his business success. But how much more successful might he have been and how many risks might he have been able to manage better, if he had had more emotional intelligence? There must be thousands like him in the City: people who dont recognise the role of emotion, the value of managing it, and its connection with performance in either the business deal or the business running.

I find myself speculating on how many millions of pounds, dollars, euros and yen are being lost on a daily basis because the people generating them are being regarded as disposable units of work. The creation of conditions in which they can perform sustainably at their peak is not featuring on the agenda at all, and the return on the investment in them is being jeopardised because no-one is giving any attention to the experience of the executive and how that could be changed to raise their and their businesss performance. In City life if an intervention doesnt have a clear, direct and demonstrable return on investment, it often doesnt get considered. The role of emotion in behaviour is deemed soft and fluffy a million miles from the everyday activity that characterises the City. Yet the irony is striking: people whose working lives rotate around the huge figures involved in a return on investment are failing to make one of the least-costly (albeit harder to define) investments of all: an investment in understanding who they themselves are and who their people are, which could help them significantly raise the quality of leadership and reap a return of a whole different order. Retention rates would be higher, burn-out rates could be reduced, profitability would go up, efficiency would be improved. As long as theres a constant stream of people willing to sacrifice health and family, relationships with colleagues and stability of the company, and to run the risk of getting to their death-beds and wondering where their lives have gone, not much will change.

Lindsay Wittenberg
Aug 2007

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Tags: , , Leadership, Inspiration, Management, Organizational Culture //

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