Emotional Intelligence In The C-Suite Starts With Our Kids

Can leadership skills be taught? Yes, and it starts as early as age five. This holiday season, consider giving your favourite kids (and their parents) the gift of social and emotional intelligence. Harvard alumna Jenny Woo has created a series of simple card games that connect generations while teaching essential life skills.

The Challenge: Declining EQ

If you are cringing at the destructive, emotionally tin-eared leadership currently on display from a range of self-harming billionaires, prepare yourself. Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried may only be the tip of a rising iceberg. Research is suggesting future generations of leaders are less emotionally intelligent compared to those a decade ago. How much further can we fall?

Further. The data is saying that social skills are what matter most in the C-suite. It may be time to start investing in what Ade McCormack calls ‘intelligent leadership’ development, that better balances the emotional and physical with the purely rational and intellectual. The latter, we have learned these past few years, is a dramatically limited way to lead, yet it dominates most educational curricula and teaching approaches. Despite the ample and robust research proving it is social and emotional skills that predict success in school – and in life – more than IQ. EQ isn’t (yet) on the scholastic radar.

The workplace needs less convincing. Six of the top ten skills identified by the World Economic Forum for the future of work involve social and emotional competence. But both at work and at school, more focus on what are still called ‘soft skills’ is urgently required. “In assessments of more than 2 million workers,” TalentSmart researchers found, “just 36 percent of people are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen.”

Steve Tappin, co-author of a book called The Awareness Code, has coached over 500 CEOs around the globe on how to build self-awareness and emotional skills. For him, strong leadership is rooted in emotional empowerment and becomes “the catalyst for accelerating the shift towards a level of functioning that is profoundly sustaining of self and the globe we live on.”

The pandemic has hit this side of our kids’ development hard. The loss of social and emotional connections during the pandemic could “impact this generation of kids for their lifetime.” Building self-awareness, resilience, and purpose is a lifelong pursuit, but it’s almost never too early to start.

A Playful Solution

Enter Dr. Jenny Woo, a Harvard alumna who teaches Emotional Intelligence and Management Fundamentals at the University of California, Irvine. She is the Founder and CEO of Mind Brain Emotion, which uses simple card games to build powerful skills in a playful context.

So-called ‘soft skills,’ she says, “are simply not explicitly taught nor practiced enough in school. This creates the deficit of social and emotional competence in adults – with multiple consequences, both at home and at work.” The card idea was born reading a Harvard/ MIT study showing how much influence parents could have over their child’s language and brain development – simply by engaging them in back-and-forth conversation. But how to get kids talking? Not every parent has the language, skills, or confidence for empowering dialogue. Too often, well-intentioned words turn into lectures (or worse).

“Adults often struggle to get kids to share information,” says Woo, “yet rarely role model how to do so themselves.” A deck of playing cards seemed a perfect medium to equip both sides – parents and children – with a shared language with which to engage. Each card suit in a given deck represents a different social and emotional Intelligence competency (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship skills).

Woo has now developed seven different card decks, each aimed at cultivating specific skills.

• 52 Essential Conversations. The starter deck which launched authentic parent-child conversations for building emotional maturity and social competence.
• Relationship Skills. For all relationships, including in business. Woo has used this deck to facilitate EQ leadership sessions and team effectiveness at places like Google, Harvard, and UC Irvine.

• Coping Skills. Support for mental health and resilience. During the pandemic, Woo saw that people lacked actionable strategies to cope with stress, anxiety, and burnout. This deck is used for therapy and self-care and comes with an online coping assessment to track progress.
• Critical Thinking. Game to help people detect cognitive biases in speech, debate, and writing.
• Social Skills. Three decks on difficult social situations and dilemmas kids and teens commonly encounter in school.

The Research Behind the Games

There are a raft of card games for almost every sort of conversation on the market. But Mind Brain Emotion’s roster of awards, is built on the feedback of educators and parents who see the impact of her careful curating and data-driven research.

Woo started her career in adult development as a Human Capital Consultant at Deloitte where she first observed how social and emotional intelligence played a critical role in people’s personal and professional success. Later, working in HR at Cisco Systems, she began to understand why some ‘smart’ people couldn’t make the move from individual contributors to people managers—even though they were seemingly great on paper.

As an MBA Career Coach at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, she saw people were most successful (and happy) when they were in tune with their emotions – as well as those of others. These individuals exuded influence, resilience, and purpose. They persisted despite obstacles, succeeded in their goals, and inspired others. They were happier, calmer, and wiser. She also witnessed what happened when people lacked these skills and suffered lost opportunities, missed connections, and aimless directions.

But her real epiphany hit with parenthood. In her first minute as a mom, she felt “strapped to an emotional rollercoaster that never seemed to stop.” Personal needs drove her into child development and she became the School Director of a network of Montessori schools. Working with teachers, parents, and children revealed the need to build skills earlier in life – a glaring gap, as absent in K-12 education as it is in upskilling adults. A subsequent Masters in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, further anchored her convictions.

“It’s just as important for kids to learn social and emotional intelligence skills as it is for adults to unlearn the misconceptions that have shaped their social and emotional identities.” Her message appears to resonate: the 52 Essential card decks are used in over 50 countries by parents, teachers, and mental health professionals.

Every leadership guru on the planet will tell you that to have good relationships and authentic conversations with others, we first need to have them with ourselves. Now Jenny Woo has offered us a way to have them with our kids too.