C EO TOOLB OX
HI-EQ
LEADERSHIP
Rallying employees in difficult times requires forging a true emotional connection with them. How do you do it? BY DALE BUSS
KARA GOLDIN HEADED INTO A LOCAL Target store one evening in March and executed a corporate duty she’d left behind a decade ago: merchandising. In the teeth of an unfolding pandemic, the CEO of San Francisco-based Hint Water decided to go where she wouldn’t send her sales team, slipping into the stockroom to assure the startled grocery manager that she would personally make sure his empty shelves would bow again with dozens of cases of Hint Water within days. “I wanted to show my executive team that this is what should be done,” says Goldin. “I should lead by example—not lecture people on what they should ultimately be doing. They appreciated that. And then, they were like, ‘If Kara is doing that, maybe we should be doing that, too.’” In June, Pam Maynard, CEO of Seattle-based Avanade, offered all of the IT-services company’s 38,000 employees and contractors worldwide the opportunity to take the day of George Floyd’s funeral off. “I knew that speaking up in this way and having the team come together was the key to drive real change,” she says.
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In August, Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain checked in with an engineer in Dallas, and the phone call led to an impromptu 20-minute Zoom presentation to the boss about a new AI initiative for the Mountain View, California-based software outfit—and much more. “He was talking about his wife, a nurse practitioner, and how stressed she is during Covid-19,” Jain says. “I really enjoy that kind of conversation, so the empathy was genuine.” Call these high-EQ moves—EQ as in “emotional quotient”—for a moment that demands them. Essentially, EQ, or emotional intelligence, describes an individual’s capability to recognize his or her own emotions and those of others, discern and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide behavior and decisions, and manage or adjust emotions to achieve goals. Popularized by Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence, EQ has since gradually worked its way into executive-education curricula and corporate human-relations programs. CEOs have also adjusted to the greater expectations for EQ by an ever-younger workforce. But Covid-19 and the disruptions it
