Emotional Intelligence Over AI: Learning To Manage EI

There is a lot of justified excitement in the business world about artificial intelligence. But how well you can implement AI, or any other new digital technology, will depend on your company’s emotional intelligence.

Have you fostered a culture of empathy and mutual trust? Are your top executives sensitive to the feelings of others? Are they supportive when someone struggles or screws up? Over the course of a major digitization project — which can be a very trying group activity — these so-called intangible qualities become tremendous assets. Yet, they’re often ignored amid the pressure to focus on what is tangible and measurable.

1. Start with Recognizing the Elephant.

Going into a big digital effort, the typical company’s leaders prepare a list of documents including a project plan. If there are multiple projects, they have a program plan. They will have a risk management plan and a test plan. The purpose is to spell out tangible steps and measurable objectives, which is necessary but not sufficient. Rarely do the leaders think about, let alone plan for, matters like how to build trust among diverse teams. The closest they come to working with “human” factors is by offering financial incentives, such as bonuses for hitting targets. Quantitative rewards of this type may be popular but they still leave key qualitative issues unaddressed. When the going gets tough, will your people help each other or drift apart?

As digital consultants, we’ve seen many companies dismiss these concerns. “Everybody’s a grownup here,” they might say. “We can handle the touchy-feely stuff.” And then before long, personality clashes are flaring up. Several officers who need to work together are each asking the CEO for one-on-one time to say that they can’t work with one or more of the others. The CEO’s response is to pick out the officer who seems the most disruptive, and call the headhunter for a replacement.

Such a move only drives the project into the red. You’re creating a new problem: the discontinuity and waste of bringing a new executive up to speed. Your time and cost to market will at least double, if not triple. We see this happen in eight or nine out of every 10 projects.

2. Try to Read Between the Lines.

Another counterproductive practice can happen even when people try to be helpful. They interact on literal terms, fixating on the words they read or hear, instead of trying to go deeper. Suppose a certain officer states an emerging need in a group email or a PowerPoint. Once a thought is put into words, everybody aligns around dealing with the subject as it has been described. The trouble is that we don’t always hit the nail on the head when we communicate. Often, we call attention to a problem by pointing out the symptoms without yet knowing the root cause. Or we just don’t find the right words to say what we mean: maybe we leave out a key part, or frame it misleadingly.

Anyone who’s married knows the confusion and hard feelings that can come when spouses get their signals crossed this way. In a digital transformation project, with dozens of people involved, the consequences are vastly multiplied. To be good at connecting with others, you must know when to look past their literal words and sort out what’s really going on. And that, too, is an intangible quality — seldom cultivated, but critical on a project that’s taking the entire company into uncharted, uncertain territory.

3. Organize Yet Another Meeting.

Intangibles can help you conduct everyday business, too. Are you bogged down in meetings? A new business book, Come Up for Air, cites various studies to show the extent of the problem. Average executive time in meetings has more than doubled since the 1960s; most meetings are “unproductive and inefficient”; meetings have hidden costs that run high, etc. And while many sources suggest practical steps to fix the issue, the best approach that we’ve seen starts from intangibles. When people are on the same page to begin with, they’re much less likely to burn time in pointless meetings.

No single solution exists for building a cohesive and empathetic culture. We recommend starting now. Rather than invest in formal team-building programs, which tend to arouse skepticism and have limited impact, try seeding a grassroots movement anchored by people in the company who have the qualities needed. For the CEO, leading by example is essential. We bet you’ll find that working on intangibles is a powerful way to produce tangible results.