Dr. Steven Stein
Founder and Executive Chairman of MHS. Author of “The EQ Leader” and co-author of “The EQ Edge”
Emotional Intelligence and Your Success
Episode Summary
What is the difference between your IQ and your EQ? Why does it matter? I sat down with Dr. Steven Stein the Founder and Executive Chairman of Multi-Health Systems to discuss this. In this episode, we explore the importance of emotional intelligence and its role in success for leaders.
Bio
Dr. Steven Stein is a clinical psychologist and Founder and Executive Chair of MHS, an internationally known publisher of psychological tests and human analytics company. MHS is a 3-time Profit 100 winner for fastest-growing companies in Canada, one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies (since 2014), one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures, and has been awarded the American Psychological Association Healthy Workplace award. Dr. Stein has also been awarded Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Ontario, 2015) award.
Dr. Stein has consulted to a number of organizations including for-profit, non-profit, government and military. These have included American Express, Air Canada, Canadian Forces, US Air Force, US Army, Navy Seals, Canyon Ranch, and various reality TV shows including Big Brother Canada, Scare Tactics, The Amazing Race Canada, MasterChef Canada, Intervention Canada, and The Bachelor Canada. MHS clients include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NASA, Disney, FedEx, Ford, FBI, US Navy, US Air Force, and many others.
He is a leading expert on emotional intelligence and has authored several books, including The EQ Leader: Instilling Passion, Creating Shared Goals, and Building Meaningful Organizations through Emotional Intelligence; The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success; Emotional Intelligence for Dummies, and Make Your Workplace Great. He has also done over 100 TV, radio, and newspaper interviews mostly related to emotional intelligence in the workplace.
Websites
https://www.mhs.com
http://stevenstein.com
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drstevenstein
Twitter
https://twitter.com/drstevenstein
https://twitter.com/mhs_talent
https://twitter.com/eiconnection
Evoking Reality from Reality TV: What Emotional Intelligence Can Teach Us
Steven Stein at TEDxUTSC
https://youtu.be/-ezV14UT_X8
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/MHSAssessments/
Leadership Quote
“Leadership is taking actions that influence the thoughts, behaviors, or feelings of one or more people.”
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Transcript
This podcast is part of the C-Suite Radio Network. Turning the volume up on business. [music]
Welcome to the Keep Leading podcast. A podcast dedicated to promoting leadership development and sharing leadership insights. Here’s your host, the Leadership Excelerator, Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading podcast. The podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. Have you heard about emotional intelligence or EQ? It’s being discussed a lot in organizations around the world today. What is the difference, however, between your IQ and your EQ? And why does it matter? You’ll want to listen to this episode because my guest, Dr. Steven Stein, a best-selling author and the founder and executive chairman of Multi-Health Systems or MHS will explain this for us. We will learn the importance of emotional intelligence and how we can discover our own emotional intelligence numbers. And become a more effective leader as a result. We’ll learn that and more right after this.
This podcast is sponsored by Eddie Turner, LLC. Eddie Turner, LLC delivers executive and leadership coaching, professional speaking, facilitation services, and management consulting across the globe. Eddie Turner, LLC also creates voice-overs, serves as a master of ceremonies, as a [inaudible] event moderator, and provides national media commentary. Visit eddieturnerllc.com to learn more.
Eddie Turner
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading podcast. The podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. Have you heard about emotional intelligence or EQ? It’s being discussed a lot in organizations today. But what is the difference between your IQ and your EQ? And why should it matter to us? Well, you’ll want to listen to this episode because my guest is Dr. Steven Stein. And he’s going to explain to us the importance of emotional intelligence, how we can discover our own, and how we can become a more effective leader as a result. Dr. Steven Stein is a clinical psychologist and the founder and executive chair of Multi-Health Systems. More affectionately known to many people as simply MHS. An internationally known publisher of psychological tests and human analytics. MHS is a three-time profit 100 winner for the fastest growing companies in Canada. It’s one of Canada’s 50 best-managed companies since 2014. And one of Canada’s most admired corporate cultures. And has been awarded the American Psychology Association Healthy Workplace Award.Dr. Stein has also been awarded Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and that took place in 2015. He’s consulted a number of organizations including profit and non-profit along with government and military. He has an impressive list that will be posted to the show notes, and it’s essentially the who’s who of business. He’s a leading expert on emotional intelligence and has offered several books on the topic including: The EQ Leader: Instilling Passion, Creating Shared Values, and Building Meaningful Organizations Through Emotional Intelligence, The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success, Emotional Intelligence for Dummies, and Make Your Workplace Great. He’s done over 100 tv, radio, and newspaper interviews mostly related to emotional intelligence in the workplace. And for that reason, I’m excited to have him on the Keep Leading podcast. Dr. Stein, welcome to the show.
Dr. Steven Stein
Hey, it’s great to be with you here Eddie.
Eddie Turner
Dr. Stein, I just gave everyone a little bit about your impressive credentials, but can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Dr. Steven Stein
Sure. As you’ve mentioned, my background is in clinical psychology, but I kind of changed directions and went into the business side because of my interest in the assessments. And we started our company back in 1983 looking at clinical assessments of people but then moving into organizations and doing organizational assessments. And we came across the concept of emotional intelligence in the early 1990s before anyone ever heard of what it was. And once that became a popular idea, it really galivanted and helped turbocharge the work that we were doing.
Eddie Turner
Interesting. Now I first learned about emotional intelligence as a student at Northwestern University. I went back as an adult to get my degree. And around 2006 I thought it was a very fascinating concept, but I didn’t do much with it. Fast forward to 2017 and I began coaching at the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, and I was reintroduced to emotional intelligence because the Doerr Institute requires it as a part of every single coaching engagement for the students there. And so I went from using it to becoming a full-fledged practitioner because I became certified in the tool. And that’s how I learned about your company MHS, and that’s how I discovered your book which I will tell people I consider one of my Bibles. It’s one of the key tools in my coaching toolkit, The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success, so that book and your assessment. And I use them in my private practice as well, not just at the college. And I’m one of the certified people who can deliver the Emotional Intelligent Leader workshop.
Dr. Steven Stein
That’s great. Great to hear Eddie. It’s really amazing to see something that we started with as basically just an idea and see it grow to be so huge all over the world the way it is today.
Eddie Turner
Yes. It has really taken off, and you’ve reached a lot of people as a result. So that’s why I’m just so excited to have you on the show and be able to talk to you. Get it straight from the author himself. Well, not just a fantastic series of books, but also this powerful assessment. So please explain to those listening to this episode what emotional intelligence is. What is EQ?
Dr. Steven Stein
Sure. So with emotional intelligence you can kind of boil it down to three major things: your ability to understand, be aware of your emotions and the emotions of other people, your ability to manage your emotions and manage emotions of other people. And finally, your ability to focus those emotions to really help you achieve things, to help you make decisions, to help you manage stress. There’s a number of different definitions of emotional intelligence that get more specific but, generally, all of the different definitions of emotional intelligence include at least those three things.
Eddie Turner
I like the way you explained that because that’s not how I normally define it. So I will certainly be using that going forward. Thank you. Now, I often use the correlation of the difference between IQ and EQ. Can you explain that for our listeners?
Dr. Steven Stein
Sure. Well, most people are probably familiar with IQ. It’s the kind of testing that we have in schools. The focus on arithmetic or solving math problems, verbal fluency, reasoning, logic. All those what we call cognitive tasks lead to IQ. And everyone kind of knows that because our school systems are really focused on those cognitive skills over the years. We’ve been tested on them all the way through school. The newer discovery of these emotional skills are quite different because, for one thing, the good news about them is that they’re changeable, they’re malleable, we can actually increase our abilities. And they include things like, as I’ve mentioned, our ability to be aware of our emotions, to be aware of other people’s emotions, and manage those emotions. Very different from the cognitive skills we talk about in IQ. Our ability to manage ourselves and deal with others. We used to refer to things like street smarts as these emotional skills. It’s those things that we haven’t really focused as much on as school, although we’re seeing big changes with the emergence of emotional intelligence.
Eddie Turner
Thank you. And it makes people perhaps wonder, “Well, which one is more important? Shouldn’t I be more focused on my IQ since that’s what–” as you mentioned, “schools are concentrating on?” And certainly, that’s how many people may attribute their success in life to in terms of getting hired and promoted at their places of employment.
Dr. Steven Stein
So what we found is that they’re both actually important. But it’s interesting, we’ve studied millions of people around the world and, clearly, if you have a strong IQ and a strong EQ, you’re really going to go far in the world. And we’ve seen people on the stage – just think of people like Oprah Winfrey and other people who really succeeded – they had both of those abilities really strong. But, interestingly, we found people who maybe aren’t as strong in their numerical ability, or math ability, their verbal ability, but really strong in their interpersonal skills, their emotional intelligence skills, and they’ve been able to succeed in many ways as well. And then on the other hand, we’ve found people high in IQ often– and low in EQ, some of them end up as university professors, or engineers, or scientists, and they still manage to get through in life being fairly successful. But you can sort of notice those differences once you start thinking of these factors and how they play out in people’s lives.
Eddie Turner
Absolutely. In fact one of the things I have observed, and I believe you actually have written about this in one of your books or one of the white papers, is that at a certain level everyone is an accomplished professional, especially in your top-tier organizations, they all went to the top schools, they all have the best pedigree. But what we start to really see become the differentiator is the level of success attributed to their emotional intelligence as opposed to IQ, all things being equal.
Dr. Steven Stein
Sure. When we looked at people, like leaders– we looked at lawyers, for example. The average IQ of lawyers is somewhere around 115 or so in terms of getting into law school and succeeding. But we see a huge range of success among lawyers. We find some that are so bad they get disbarred, they go to jail, on one end of the spectrum, and then we see phenomenal performers on the other end of the spectrum. And we found the same– we’ve also looked [inaudible] physicians we see medical people who get sued for malpractice, who lose their license on the one hand, and others who go on and do great things, help hundreds of people make great discoveries, and in all of the different areas that we’ve looked at, including corporate leadership, we find that range. People squeak through with high EQs, but it’s really their emotional intelligence that differentiates those that really shine versus those that maybe don’t shine so well or in some cases get burned.
Eddie Turner
Yeah. So they squeak through with the high IQ, but then it’s the EQ that comes back if I’m correct.
Dr. Steven Stein
Absolutely.
Eddie Turner
Yes, absolutely. So I thank you for citing the areas of high performers like doctors and lawyers, but how does this show up in other workplace settings?
Dr. Steven Stein
Well, there are so many different examples. Are you speaking of non-leaders or do you want to go into leadership?
Eddie Turner
Let’s do both.
Dr. Steven Stein
Okay. So we look at other people. We’ve looked at, as I mentioned, millions of people around the world. So frontline workers, customer service, salespeople, these emotional skills are incredibly important in terms of being successful. As customer service, you have to be able to listen to what’s going on to the customers. These traits that we measure, these skills such as empathy, interpersonal relationships, assertiveness, they really differentiate the high performers in everything, customer service, sales. We even looked at Air Force recruiters in the US Air Force and it made a huge difference in their success whether or not they were strong in these emotional skills. So in the direct-facing occupational groups where you deal directly with people, it’s just an incredible difference. Leadership, we’ve done a lot of studies on leadership in both for-profits, corporations, nonprofit, military, all kinds of areas. And, again, the leaders with the higher emotional intelligence scores on the EQI, for example, really stand out and we’ve been able to identify some very specific areas that differentiate them and that’s what’s really exciting about this research. When we look at all the different occupational groups we find that there may be different factors that are important or that stand out for being really successful in those areas and a lot of our work has been working with organizations and companies and pinpointing what are the critical factors in your organization for success.
Eddie Turner
I want to share with my audience that you have done in addition to all this extensive research you’ve boiled some of these down to a very nice case study brochure that I will include as a part of the show notes for folks who want to look at not only the list of some of these organizations you’ve worked with but some of these different case studies where you’ve applied this and seeing the success rate change in people at these different organizations no matter what the context was, public or private, nonprofit, for-profit.
Dr. Steven Stein
Yeah. That’s great. Yeah.
Eddie Turner
Now, some people may wonder, “Hey, listen, I’m hearing this emotional intelligence. Is this just the latest leadership buzzword? Is this a fad or a trend that’s going to be replaced by the next best thing?”
Dr. Steven Stein
That’s the question that I started getting back in around 1992 when we first started talking about it [laughter]. I would get that a lot. “Is this just reengineering?” It’s just they list all these fads that have come out in the world. And what I used to say back then, and I guess I could still say right now, as long as there’s more than one person in the world, you’re going to need emotional intelligence [laughter]. The world becomes if there’s only one person left, some hermit somewhere, it may not be that important, but if there’s at least two people walking around and interacting with each other these emotional skills are going to be pretty important and I don’t see it going away. And, in fact, since the 90s when we started it’s become increasingly more important and we’re just exploding with requests in the work that we’re doing in this area. So we’ve seen nothing but growth as more and more think tanks and investigators are identified, this is one of the top 10 skills that people are going to need in the workplace now and in the future.
Eddie Turner
Wow. One of the top 10 skills needed now and in the future. That is something that obviously [inaudible] significance and it’s important, and that it’s not just a passing trend. So thank you for explaining that. Now, the other thing that people often inquire about is does it matter more for men? Or does it matter more for women? Or is it no difference at all?
Dr. Steven Stein
Oh. That’s a great point, Eddie. So we get a lot of questions about gender and gender differences. And in the research we’ve done, we really pioneered the first look at how genders differentiate each other on these emotional skills. And consistently over time, we found that there are some gender differences like males and females. And they’re universal. We find them whether we go to Africa, whether we go through Asia, whether we go South America, North America. Everywhere in the world that we’ve looked women seem to score higher than men in areas such as empathy, interpersonal relationships, social responsibility. On the other hand, men seem to score higher in stress tolerance, self-regard. Now, it’s amazing how universal this finding is in all the different cultures that we’ve examined worldwide. Now, it doesn’t mean that some men can’t be more empathic than some women but these are just overall averages that we find in populations. But the great news, as I mentioned before emotional intelligence skills can be improved. So even some male who has low empathy can learn how to improve their empathy and be a much better performer.
Eddie Turner
So we’re not lost causes? We can become more empathetic? That’s good news [laughter].
Dr. Steven Stein
I hope so. Yeah. That’s our message.
Eddie Turner
And I’m glad that you included the information around other countries because that’s a closely related question. I’m often asked about, “Well, does this matter as much in India or China as it does in Europe? As it does in the States?” Because I often cite if the sample size for the instrument I’m using was based on the United States and Canada.
Dr. Steven Stein
Right. And in my book, The EQ Leader, we’ve got some fascinating data on how these things play out internationally. Especially when it comes to leadership. So we know generally around the world leaders are expected to have certain behaviors. For example, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, as a leader you’re expected to get things done. The difference culturally is in how you go about doing that. Right? So in some cultures, we find that the skills are different in terms of how they’re displayed. Assertiveness is one of the things we measure as part of emotional intelligence. And assertiveness varies from culture to culture. People in Asia come out a bit lower in assertiveness than people in United States or in some countries in Europe. So what we find when you move leaders around within multi-national corporations is that it’s important to know how to get things done but it’s also to know how to temper those emotional skills to fit where you’re going. So if you’re overly assertive in an Asian culture, you may not come off well as a leader. On the other hand, if you come to a more assertive culture, think Mexico was one for example, and you’re under-assertive, nobody’s going to follow you as a leader. So it’s really important to understand the culture and how these emotional skills play out in that culture and your ability to adopt them and fit in.
Eddie Turner
Very intriguing. So if I have taken the assessment, we’ll talk about this a little bit later, and I realize that I’m one way and I’ve been effective, I hear you saying that if I now take a new role in a new country, new organization, new culture, that I will now need to flex my skills and learn a new way of operating as a leader?
Dr. Steven Stein
Exactly. You may be a bull in a china shop if you’re transplanted to some other country. And you’re going to have to temper that if you want people to really work with you and be on your side. So you really have to be sensitive to some of these cultural variations on these skills. And the good news is we’ve documented a lot of these differences in the EQ Leader. So you can actually see in a number of different countries which are the key skills that are stronger for leaders in those countries.
Eddie Turner
Okay. So clearly, I am discovering that I have a missing resource in my library, my toolkit. So I’m going to have to grab that myself [laughter].
Dr. Steven Stein
Fair to say.
Eddie Turner
Now, something else that comes up oftentimes. I hear this a lot. In my work with some leaders, they have said to me very clearly they avoid talking about emotions because it indicates that somehow they’re just not tough. And one leader said very clearly, “I don’t have time for people’s emotions. I have a business to run.” What would you say about that kind of thinking?
Dr. Steven Stein
Well, there’s a couple things around that. I mean, one is talking about emotions and the other is being aware of emotions. So let’s start with the awareness part. If you feel as people used to say to me way back when that there’s no room for emotions in the workplace, well then you’re going to be in a lot of trouble because emotions don’t stay at home when you show up at work in the morning, right? You don’t lop off half your brain and say, “Hey, I’m leaving you behind. You’re not coming with me today.” So things happen whether you like it or not, and if you want to be effective as a leader, then the least you can do is be aware of them. So when someone working with you is not performing or is very upset about something, you can ignore it and suffer the consequences of that which is continual bad work or miscommunications or whatever, or you can choose to be aware of those emotions and really help that person get through or get past it and perform much better at work. So the first part of it is being aware. Great leaders are acutely aware of the emotions of the people around them because you need to do that in order to motivate them. How can you motivate someone if you don’t know what gets them excited, right? You can talk about, “Oh, I’m going to give you more money and increase your pay,” but that person might be interested in more recognition and being identified more as a leader or as a high performer. So you have to understand where people are coming from.
Dr. Steven Stein
The second part of what you’ve said is the ability to talk about emotions. And it really isn’t expected that you spend all your time talking about emotions. I think what’s really useful is if you acknowledge emotion. So if you come to me and I see you’re angry about something, I want to acknowledge that. I’ll say, “Hey Eddie, you seem to be upset with me right now. What did I do that caused that? What’s getting you so upset?” So I’m acknowledging the emotion. I’m discussing it, and we’re going to deal with it because burying it under the rug isn’t going to help either one of us. You’re just going to get angrier and angrier, maybe leave, and I’m just going to ignore you and get mad that your work is bad and not understand why your demeanor is so bad.
Eddie Turner
Very interesting. So I like how you broke that into two separate areas. So thank you. This is a fascinating conversation I’m having with you Dr. Stein. And so we’re talking to Dr. Steven Stein the founder and the executive chair of MHS and the author of many books on emotional intelligence including The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success. We’re going to take a break at this moment and have a word from our sponsor.
This podcast is sponsored by Eddie Turner, LLC. Organizations who need to accelerate the development of their leaders call Eddie Turner, the leadership accelerator. Eddie works with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. Call Eddie Turner to help your leaders one-on-one as their coach or to inspire them as a group through the power of facilitation or a keynote address. Visit eddieturnerllc.com to learn more.
This is Dr. Diane Hamilton. I’m CEO and founder of Tonerra, and you’re listening to the Keep Leading Podcast with Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner
Okay everyone. We’re back. We’re talking to Dr. Steven Stein. Dr. Steven Stein is the founder and the executive chairman of MHS and the author of many books on emotional intelligence, and he’s been telling us about the importance of our emotional intelligence and the difference between our IQ and our EQ and why it matters for leaders. So Dr. Stein, can you tell us a little bit more? We’ve talked about MHS, but please tell us about MHS as an organization.
Dr. Steven Stein
Sure. So we started MHS back in 1983, my wife Rodeen and I, and in those days computers were brand new. The Apple computer IIe had just come out.
Eddie Turner
I remember those.
Dr. Steven Stein
So our original mission really was to take standard psychological tests and automate them, put them on computers, because I was dealing at that time as a clinical psychologist with a lot of kids who were having real emotional difficulties, serious difficulties. And we were doing research is that area and I found that a lot of those kids didn’t like the traditional testing we did.
Eddie Turner
Really?
Dr. Steven Stein
They were really excited and I was able to get all the results I needed. So my work sort of switched from clinical treatments in the mental health area to assessments and understanding what it is that makes good assessments, understanding people. One of the things that really triggered interest was the fact that I was finding in a one-hour computer interview with these kids I was learning about things like sexual abuse, drug abuse, physical abuse, things that psychiatrists and psychologists who’d been seeing these kids for months had no idea that they were willing to reveal stuff to a computer that they wouldn’t tell the human beings that were working with them.
Eddie Turner
Isn’t that something?
Dr. Steven Stein
So, yeah. So that was my first transition into we set up a company and started looking at that and that was in the clinical market, then we got involved with some colleagues in the public safety area predicting dangerousness, people [inaudible]. We had one of the first risk assessment scales and that became sort of the second wave of HMS, the second area that we really excelled in. So in the clinical area, we became number one in the world and still are in the area of attention deficit disorder. We had the first test ADHD, the Conners’ rating scales. Then when we moved to the public safety area we had the first risk assessment tool, which is the LSI, Level of Service Inventory-Revised. So we became pioneers in both of those areas. Then, as I mentioned, in the early 90s we came across [inaudible] and his work in emotional intelligence and we were the world’s first test of emotional intelligence that we came out with. And, again, we’re still the leading most widely used test of emotional intelligence in the world, the EQI 2.0. So MHS really took a leadership position in the three different areas that we really operate, in the clinical education area, public safety area, and in the talent area, and what makes us unique is that for 36 years now we’ve been focusing on measurement and accuracy of measurement, especially in high-risk decisionmaking. So our emotional intelligence tool is heads and shoulders above anything else out there because no one has that background and measurement and assessment and really being cautious about how you do this and accurate in how you do this. No one else in the world really has that background that we have.
Eddie Turner
What a fascinating background. Thank you for explaining that. And there’s something else interesting about your tool that I often use in promoting its value and that is it is the only scientifically validated emotional intelligence instrument. Can you explain what that means?
Dr. Steven Stein
Sure. And to sort of corroborate that, we’re the only tool in Buros Mental Measure Yearbook, which is sort of the good housekeeping seal of testing that the American Psychological Association refers to. So what it means is a number of things. The first is when you have a test or measure anything it’s got to be well norm, it’s got to represent the population. Anybody could throw a bunch of items on a napkin and give them to somebody and say, “Oh, you’re high in this,” but what does that mean, right?
Eddie Turner
Right.
Dr. Steven Stein
If you don’t have a norm, if you don’t have a comparison group, it’s meaningless. So we have to know what the distribution of each of the factors that we measure is in the population, and not just any, in North America, as you mentioned, Canada, the United States, in Europe, in Asia, South America, or everywhere we go, we have to have a sense of how does the population score. So that’s one aspect. Another aspect is it has to be reliable. I can ask you a couple of questions today and then ask again tomorrow and they could be completely off, completely different. Well, if they’re that far apart then that’s not a reliable test. We can’t really put much weight into it. And the third one is validity. We have to know that what we’re measuring actually matters, it actually relates to something real. We’ve actually tied it to work performance. We’ve actually tied it to leadership. We’ve tied it to we retired to some real-world measures that we use, real-world behaviors. So because we had a 20-year head start over everyone else– actually, this was originally part of [Baron’s?] doctoral thesis in 1985. That’s how far back the research goes on the EQI 2.0.
Dr. Steven Stein
So because we followed this path– there’s a lot of copycat tools out there. It’s easy to kind of look at something and say, “Oh, I can do this.” And come up with a bunch of questions. They don’t have that validity. They don’t have that reliability and they don’t have that normative sample. Developing a quality tool like this can cost you up to $1 million in terms of just research and development and reevaluation. And the American Psychological Association puts out a whole book on the standards for these tests. For example, if you don’t have a manual, a detailed scientific manual, that outlines how you got those norms, how you did that reliability and validity. Psychologists are told not to use the tool. Right?
Eddie Turner
Yes. And so, not only is your instrument scientifically validated and you’ve gone through that rigor and you have that authoritative stamp from the American Psychological Association but your instruments are used in medical facilities all over the world.
Dr. Steven Stein
Oh, absolutely. They’re used with physicians. And the other part of this is the scientific publications, peer-reviewed publications. There’s over 200 peer-reviewed publications on the EQI in many of these facilities. So everywhere from the Mayo Clinic to all kinds of healthcare facilities are using EQI as part of development, leadership development, working with physicians. I’ve worked with many healthcare groups. I work with anesthetists, nurses, and other groups. Because they’ve all found that emotional intelligence and especially as measured on the EQI 2.0 are important factors in their ability to avoid burnout in order to be a successful leadership position. So the healthcare industry has really come on board with this. Just think of the doctor-patient interaction, how important emotional skills are. You could be a genius mentally in terms of understanding diseases but if you can’t communicate with your patients you’re going to have serious problems.
Eddie Turner
Absolutely. And so, just to give my listeners a glimpse into the depth of how far you’ve reached. It’s one thing to say that someone is global which could mean that you’ve got two locations, three locations around the globe. And you probably have later numbers then what I’ve received. But this instrument has been translated into 45 languages. More than 1 million people have taken it in 66 different countries.
Dr. Steven Stein
Yeah. We’re probably over 2 million people at this point. I think some of that might be dated on our website.
Eddie Turner
Okay.
Dr. Steven Stein
It’s over 2 million. And we have at least 45 or so partners around the world working in a multitude of different languages. We’re working throughout Africa, we’re working throughout Asia and many parts of Asia. So yeah, we’ve done translations, we’ve done cultural adaptations to ensure that the populations that we represent, whether it’s in China, whether Hong Kong, or Malaysia, or some of these other countries, Singapore, are in sync with the local populations there. So it’s really been amazing to me personally to see this idea spread to so many countries around the world and be embraced in so many places around the world in so many different cultures. That’s been amazing. Because you look at IQ which has been around for over a hundred years. 1906 was the first IQ test. A hundred years and it still has problems with many cultures. And in many places around the world, it has tremendous controversy around it. Whereas, emotional intelligence- -these skills are universally accepted by so many different cultural groups. I work with Cree natives up in northern Canada. And they said, “Wow. This is like our medicine wheel, like our ancient culture. These same skills is amazing, right? And those kinds of things blow me away working in Africa, with our partners there and finding the acceptance in so many of the cultures, it just blows me away. Because we don’t see that very often in western sort of creations or inventions.
Eddie Turner
That is illuminating information. Thank you for sharing that. And just, wow, something you should really obviously be very proud of to see what you started and how it has blossomed and how many people it’s impacting.
Dr. Steven Stein
My wife [Rhodene?] says we have to pinch each other every day just to realize that happened [laughter].
Eddie Turner
I imagine you do. Yes, absolutely. And so then you have a bunch of folks like myself that are out there, issuing the instrument, and assessing the results of people and then working with them to coach them around those results. So if people want to find out, they contact us, but how often should they be reassessed? That’s always the number one question.
Dr. Steven Stein
Well, it really depends. In some situations with coaching, there’s actually published studies on using EQ, IQ in coaching. And in some cases, they found that in eight months, there’s significant changes in people; their ability to relate to others to be more aware of their emotions. With the right coaching,–they’ve actually used the EQ edge in some published research studies with control groups looking at change over time. So I would say anywhere from six months to a year, year and a half, two years, we’re doing follow up studies on very specific groups where we’re tracking him down. And what I love about this as we look at people on the sort of high end of society and people in the low-end society. So we’ve got a number of groups we’ve been following who are homeless people who have mental health challenges, who have been unemployed for significant periods of time. We have large samples of those kinds of people in most situations. On the other hand, we have people who are successful CEOs, successful physicians, successful lawyers. I’m working a lot in the arts. We have people who are musicians, and who are personalities on television and other places. And we’re following these people up to see how they progress in their emotional intelligence skills and how that affects their ability to to perform.
Eddie Turner
Yeah, and I imagine you have all kinds of success stories. And as I mentioned earlier, some of those are in those case studies that you’ve published. But is there one success story that really just kind of stands out top of mind that you make reference often that you can share with us?
Dr. Steven Stein
It’s hard to really point out one, although there is an individual I wrote about in the EQ leader, Lisa Grahame, who I found really interesting. She contacted me. She’s the head of this large– become a large nonprofit program for homeless women caught up with women. And what I found intriguing was when she contacted me was the fact that on her signature line, it had that she was in the Guinness Book of Records. She was the first woman to pull an airplane. She actually pulled an airplane. So that intrigued me.
Eddie Turner
That is intriguing [laughter].
Dr. Steven Stein
Yeah, but when I got her story, and basically it was a very sad story to begin with. She was homeless herself. She had gone through a number of traumas in life, lived on the streets and the city, had to fend for food and beginning. And a number of different traumas, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and she rose out of it. And the story you’ll have to read because we don’t have time to go through it all. But she rose out of this poverty, got herself a job in the high tech areas in sales. Found she had a knack for sales, and work your way up now where she manages this whole organization. And it’s been a tremendous story, a turnaround story. And she talks about how have these emotional intelligence skills were a key part of her ability to transform her life. So that’s one really fascinating story.
Eddie Turner
That is a fascinating story. Thank you for sharing that. Wow. Well, we mentioned earlier that you’ve written several books, and so if someone is listening to this interview, and they decide, “Wow. I want to start my journey on the road to becoming more emotionally intelligent as a leader,”which of your books would you recommend for a beginner?
Dr. Steven Stein
Well, a beginner, I think, would start with EQ Edge. We wrote the EQ Edge early on, my co-author Howard Book and I, because there was no book at the time that told you what to do about emotional challenge. Dan Goldman’s book was the first one out there, and it sort of said what it is, but in that book there’s really, A, no definition of it, and B, it doesn’t tell you what to do, how to increase it or what to do about it. So that’s why we wrote the EQ Edge, because it clearly defines emotional intelligence, and it clearly gives you suggestions, homework assignments, things you can do to improve in each of the areas, whether it’s empathy, assertiveness, emotional self-awareness. We have exercises that people can take and actually change their– I get emails from all over the world of people who have changed their lives as a result of using some of these exercises. And as I mentioned, there’s a peer-reviewed study published that documents in coaching situations, where people have used these exercises and made significant changes. So the EQ Edge would be my first recommendation to introduce you to the topic and to start you moving and that moving towards increasing your EQ.
Eddie Turner
Well, I can personally testify to the power of this book, and it’s extremely well-written to your point. Lots of good meat in here for those who just want to read and improve, but also for the coach practitioner. And, of course, you have a PhD and your co-author, Howard Book, has an MD, so he’s a medical doctor. It’s not light reading, but it’s good reading, and it’s a solid read that I highly recommend. So what about for the advanced practitioner? Which of your books would you recommmend?
Dr. Steven Stein
Well, for the advanced one I look at the EQ leader, because this gets into a little more of the scientific stuff, some original data that we’ve taken from our databases of over 2 million people worldwide, and it helps you define leadership, what are the key emotional intelligence skills that [inaudible] the focus. We didn’t just look at very great and successful leaders. We look at failed leaders too, because you really want that comparison. You really want to draw the contrast, and in EQ Edge you’ve got some great data on how do failed leaders differ from great leaders, and what are the emotional skills. And we break it down to four pillars, that if you want to be successful as a leader today, you’re going to have to excel in these four pillars to really make it in today’s world.
Eddie Turner
Wonderful. Well I tell you, I could talk to you for hours. This is just fascinating, and especially for me as a practitioner, who’s using your work almost daily, this is just really a gem and really a treat to be able to speak with you. And a summary of our conversation, I think, would be that emotional intelligence has become a key ingredient for successful leadership today and tomorrow. Would you say so?
Dr. Steven Stein
I would say absolutely.
Eddie Turner
On the Keep Leading podcast we like to give leaders a quote that they can use to keep leading. What quote or advice would you share?
Dr. Steven Stein
So the quote I’d give you is that leadership is taking actions that influence the thoughts, behaviors, or feelings of one or more people in your world.
Eddie Turner
Wonderful. I like that. Leadership is taking actions that influence the thoughts, behaviors, or feelings of one or more people. That’s powerful, so thank you for sharing that. That will absolutely help leaders keep leading. Where can people learn more about you, Dr. Stein?
Dr. Steven Stein
They can come to the website of MHS, www.mhs.com, or to my own, to drstevenstein.com, and they can learn about emotional intelligence and some of the other areas that we’re working in in the corporate environment.
Eddie Turner
Wonderful. Well, we will be sure to include that in the show notes, so that my listeners can find you, connect with you, and start to follow you and MHS. Thank you again for being on the Keep Leading podcast.
Dr. Steven Stein
Well, thank you, Eddie. It’s been great talking with you.
Eddie Turner
And thank you for listening. Well, that concludes this episode, everyone. [music] I’m Eddie Turner, the leadership accelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So whatever you’re doing, always keep leading. [music]
Thank you for listening to your host, Eddie Turner, on the Keep Leading podcast. Please remember to subscribe to the Keep Leading podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen. For more information about Eddie Turner’s work, please visit eddieturnerllc.com.
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The Keep Leading!™ podcast is for people passionate about leadership. It is dedicated to leadership development and insights. Join your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator® as he speaks with accomplished leaders and people of influence across the globe as they share their journey to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques and insights. For more information visit eddieturnerllc.com or follow Eddie Turner on Twitter and Instagram at @eddieturnerjr. Like Eddie Turner LLC on Facebook. Connect with Eddie Turner on LinkedIn.