IQ to understand, EQ to manage

I read about this interesting summary "IQ to understand, EQ to manage" a few days ago under this post. 

It's been a serious debate between two gurus (Adam Grant vs Daniel Goleman) about the importance of having IQ (Intelligence Quotient) or EQ (Emotional Quotient). You could read about the debate in the link. 

After I have been working for several years as an educator, I have learned that I cannot rely solely on IQ. It is not about being talented only, but everyone needs this EQ to have a sustainable career. Some of my bosses with high EQ were successful in managing people and limited resources at the university to reach the university goals. However, some other talented line managers with numerous achievements were rarely remembered for their accomplishments but more likely from their particular behaviour to peer colleagues, staffs and students. They were efficient managers, but quite unpleasant to work within the long term.

The post has also pointed out a research on how EQ works as a strong predictor of success or performance at work. The managers with high IQ and experience but low EQ had a failure rate of as high as 25% on their projects, on the other hand, the managers with high EQ but high IQ or experience showed a less failure rate of 3-4%. It seems that a combination of high IQ and EQ is potent to get a high standard of success in any project. 

When I took a survey about my current project (internationalization), which is involving several line managers at different levels (university, Faculty, Department and Study Program), I've found that most of the managers were friendly and intelligent people. Most of them had pleasant countenances and friendly gestures to other people from different background. They like to help and collaborate, providing useful answers to my list of questions. 

I noticed that most of them were successful in other areas, such as research, management, or community empowerment, but don't like to talk about those achievements, unless they were related with my project. The managers were enthusiastic about this area (internationalization) and showed their point of views independently based on their excellent understanding of our workplace management style. They shared their best strategies and practices on how to handle a problematic situation or resentment from academic and administrative staffs regarding the introduction of new policies. I've found most of their advice was logical and adaptable to our current university situation.

All in all, now I could see why IQ is essential to understand the current situation (and provide a solution), but EQ is needed to manage a complex situation in the workplace. 

Pekanbaru,

A Paradox of Being Busy

This is a great thought. How many of us do like to tell other people that we're busy?

I am in the first row, of course, always bragging about how busy I am etc. A very much annoying attitude, to be honest.

Some people who don't say directly about how busy they are, also tend to look busy. It could be a sign when they don't focus on what you say or look frequently to their watches and always agree about everything we have said. This is quite ridiculous, but that's one tactic to stop people brag about something irrelevant to their attention at that moment.

We are giving an impression that being busy means we're in demand, more significant or important, and automatically (perhaps) more successful. So, if you are not busy, means either you are not efficient enough, doing something dull (uninspiring) or even don't know exactly what to do.

A paradox of being busy is obvious in my work environment. We could absolutely look very busy and pretend of being busy. This is because the fact that 'the more busy, the more productive the individual' mind set in some managers. The line managers tend to give tasks for certain people who already have so many things in their plate, with an assumption: the individual is more effective (doing the right things) and efficient (doing things right), so he/she could accomplish more tasks. They even have a mental list of some productive people just in case these people could contribute to their new projects in the future. Certainly, this is unhealthy because it could lead to an exhausted employee producing low quality output and causing delay. However, it is another problem when the employee agree with such arrangement.

There is another notion that to pretend of being busy could save us from being a victim of a new task or a new project. When we say we don't have time, then we know actually where our time is, and what shall we do with it, but we are not just interested to add more load, so we tell the manager that we're very busy with other issues. This could be a polite way to say that you're not interested, but then we must be careful with our frequent refusal, because in the future our chance to get some challenging offers is pretty slim. It could harm our long term career development and not to mention about our personal motivation at work.

I think this paradox of busy or pretend to be busy, is much more related to our attitude of complaining about how busy we are. If we don't have any problem about looking busy but still don't say a word about it (which is annoying to some people), then it is considered healthy. Meredith Finemann (2014) in her post has highlighted about using tactics to work smarter to avoid complaining about how busy we are all the time. These tactics are 'constraint the time': focus on the tasks at hand for certain time, 'use scheduler': to use time wisely and always in control of time, and 'cut the fat': cut all unproductive time at work.  

It really depends on how we place ourselves in this situation, but our attitude towards this issue is a big matter.

Pekanbaru,