What’s first… Emotional Intelligence or Professional Development?

It's Zig Ziglar's famous quote, "If you want to earn more, you need to learn more" that was the driving sentiment for me personally…

It drove a lot of my behaviour, motivation and action. Every moment I could, I was working on my competence, my ability as a health professional, my understanding of how the body moves and why we might develop pain without injury...

Every day I was (and continue to be) enthusiastic to help people and have a meaningful impact on the lives of these around me - patients, colleagues, friends...

As I started to learn more, I started to see that translate into results with patients but also, I was receiving more referrals, compliments, gifts and recognition.

Going into my 10th year leading the team at Balance Health a Performance, along with having coached dozens of business owners, I asked myself the question...

Why is it that 2 different people in the same working environment make progress in their professional career at different rates?

Some people say professional make career progress with clinical excellence; others say mindset; others say patient communication and relationship building.

The research certainly makes a point that all aspects of business improves with improved emotional intelligence - operational performance, revenue, customer and employee satisfaction and it’s the thing that sets leaders apart from the rest and from each other.

So why don’t we just focus on emotional intelligence as a starting point?

You could always say that idealistically in some speculative blank canvas situation where an "all rounder'' joins the team without biases and in the absence of company needs, with no real time pressure, then sure, I would work on emotional intelligence hands down every tie... But since this is NEVER the reality, we should probably stop that.

So where should you start?

Maybe some background about me might help…

I entered the workforce just helping my father in the barber shop from about the age of eight. The jobs I was given were mainly basic things like sweeping the hair and taking payments. Once I was competent, the focus then became on ensuring I gave each customer the experience my father expected. He would forever pull me up on things like my posture (he hated hands in pockets), my mannerisms, facial expressions and even to the extent of how I answered the question of "how are you?" needed to be with a positive inflection and answered in a way that made the customers feel comfortable and at ease... More often than not I didn't really want to be there so, as I got older I was more inclined to answer. "how are you?" a little more honestly with the right vocabulary - which was surely addressed by my father.

From a young age, I was trained to do things I didn't want to do, and then pretend like I was enjoying it... Aside from the simple fact that the more I pretended to enjoy it, the more I actually did enjoy it - when I look back, I realise now that the developed my emotional intelligence from a young age.

I became sensitive to my father's needs, the customers needs and I learnt to prioritise duties and manage my sense of panic at busy times and boredom at quiet times.

Later during high school, I was elected as school captain:

• It wasn't my academic capability

• it wasn't my sporting prowess

• it wasn't my popularity 

I'm confident that the accelerated training in emotional intelligence helped me develop into a leader... (Without this as the justification for my selection, I'm otherwise left a little perplexed as to why I was chosen. Who knows, maybe everyone was, but at least this reasoning helps me solve my own mystery).

Considering I had these skills, I entered my career with a zest for learning, and combined my emotional intelligence with my growing confidence and I saw great success.

Although my story is a great example of when emotional intelligence is a good place to start, I want to make a point with a few different examples of why I don't think it's always a great starting point.

On the back of some professional success, I was (and still am) fortunate enough to be working with a team. Mentoring team members as a joy watching them apply their learning, to their patients is up there with what brings me most joy - growth + progress.

I was teaching the team similar things and giving more to those that asked for more (or at least didn't decline) and saw that they were performing at a level where I was confident to ask them to co-manage my patients.

But their patient retention was low. I was getting feedback from patients about their experience.

We spent 2- 4 weeks building emotional intelligence and all performance measures turned around!

So now the question remains...

What if we started with emotional intelligence?

I'm proud to say that I've been testing this over the past 3 years. (no formal tests - just focusing on it).

Without a competence level that an individual is comfortable with, they tend to not be confident in themselves and in their abilities. When this is a REAL concern and you have ways of justifying a competency gap, working on emotional intelligence does not seem to fit. However, if the lack of confidence is present IN THE ABSENCE of a competence gap, it may well be that the individual lacks the self awareness required to appropriately critique themselves and provide themselves with the appropriate credit where it’s due.

Overcoming the hurdles associated with a lack of confidence either come from learning to listen to your mind & heart or legitimately learning more.

It seems that once the confidence hurdle is overcome, it doesn't seem to come back again, and if it does - It's not as severe.

So should you start with emotional intelligence or with professional development?

Well, it really depends.

Emotional intelligence is a good bet, but be careful not to coach someone through an area of incompetence - That will only make things worse.

The best way forward is to invest the time to GENUINELY get to know your team. Their history, what they believe in and then to build enough trust that they show you how they talk to themselves. This is knowledge that arms your leadership to have the best guess as to what the starting point needs to be.