San Diego Women Leaders Association Chapter Meeting: Honing Your Emotional Intelligence
Tatiana Epstein of Accenture discusses ideas and strategies for honing your emotional intelligence at the San Diego Women Leaders Association Chapter Meeting.
Transcript
today is Tatiana Epstein. Tatiana, are you on the line? I am. Yes. All right. Wonderful. Well, Tatiana, before we pull up your slides, can we ask you to give us a self introduction? Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks, Ginger. Um, my name is Tatiana Epstein and I am a senior manager with Accenture. I'm actually coming up on my four-year anniversary of moving to San Diego from Seattle. Um, Accenture is the largest global consulting firm. We have over 500,000 employees across 150 countries. And before COVID, um, my day-to-day life was a travel life. So, um, I grew up in Seattle, um, BS from University of Washington, Industrial Systems Engineering, and I work primarily for utility clients. So, Sumpra, uh, San Diego Gas and Electric actually brought me down here four years ago, um, to do some work in intelligent automation and with their customer contact center.
And I happened to meet u my now husband down here. He's a chiropractor and um, moved down and now I am a San Diego resident. So, um I will give a little bit more about my bio as we get into the slides, but um yeah, that's me. All right. Well, we have your slides. We have your slides pulled up. So, just tell me next slide and the floor is all yours. Thanks. Awesome. So, um, today to kick things off, um, with this awesome jam-packed agenda, first things first, I'll be sharing a few tips and tricks on how to hone your emotional intelligence. So, we can go to the next
slide. All right. As I mentioned, I am a senior manager with Accenture. Um this is analogous to a director level probably in your company. Um I work primarily for utilities um within the supply chain space field operations but have also done financials um intelligent automation and I'm working for a California utility right now working on their wildfire mitigation planning. Um, as I mentioned, Accenture is the largest global consulting firm. And so, we spend a lot of time and energy embracing different culturals, uh, different cultures, different working styles. And as a business that relies on sales, um, all of our senior leaders take training on how emotional intelligence plays into buying behaviors. Now, it's important to know that what I'm sharing with you today is simply from my lived experience and from my professional experience.
I am not an expert in emotional intelligence. Um, I'm just passing along some of the trainings that I've received at my company um and how I've put them into practice. Um, on kind of fun personal note, um, my husband and I bought a home in the Bejo Bejo neighborhood last year and we've been spending every weekend of, uh, the pandemic renovating it, um, one small project at a time. Um, I also have a French bulldog who is sleeping and may start snoring. So, if you hear that, um, I apologize. But, uh, without much further ado, we can get right into it. So, Ginger, next slide, please.
All right, first things first. Let's start off by talking about women's intuition. So, when you hear that, what do you think about? Is intuition something real and tangible or is it really just something that you know you hear about in romcoms or maybe your grandmother told you an old wives tale about it. Sayings like trust your gut and a mother always knows, right? like is this BS or is there some truth behind this? Let's see. We can go to the next
slide. If we were to put a scale to this question about women's intuition, myth being on the left, reality being on the right, if you would ask me about kind of where I I stand on this, I would honestly probably put more so on the left, right? trust my gut. I'm pretty much just always hungry. I don't know that I could have pointed to a point in my life or a pivotal decision where I relied on my gut and my instincts. Um, I have some friends who I think do rely on theirs and you know, if you're out there listening to this and you're like, 'Yes, I use my gut. It is one of my guiding principles.' Rock on.
Power to you. Um, but if you're like me, maybe on the fence or you don't really rely on your gut and your instincts, bear with me for a moment and uh see if we we can't convince you otherwise. We can go to the next slide. So, a great place to start out is asking Google, right? So if we ask Google to define these terms for us, we see that women's intuition can be described as having a knack for knowing what people are feeling and thinking based on the ab ability to read body language. On the other side, emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions to handle relationships. So when we look at these together, we can see that our intuition again being female and our innate intuition being able to understand what people are thinking and feeling based on body language heavily influences that emotional intelligence.
Again, the ability to use this to improve relationships. Now, so those of you who are still maybe on the fence, you're like, 'This is great. I don't see how it applies to me. These are all lofty ideas. Hang in there because I'm going to tell you that as females, we all have this intuition and therefore we all have the foundation for emotional intelligence. So part of the work is already done. All right, let's give an example. We can go to the next slide.
So, as I mentioned, I'm saying here that all women innately have intuition. And if you look at the pictures, you might realize that we don't always use this intuition for good. The cattiness, manipulative stereotypes that our gender sometimes elicits is really an expression of this intuition. It's our ability to read a situation, to understand body language, and to anticipate an outcome that allows us to quote unquote get what we want. Now, I'm not saying that we all use this skill for evil, and I'm definitely not recommending that we revert back to locker room drama. However, I'm using this to illustrate the fact and I want you to acknowledge the sophistication by which we as women interact with situations for a desired outcome.
Okay, we can go to the next slide. And with that, I'll be so bold as say as females emotional intelligence is our superpower. This is what sets us apart from our male counterparts. So my goal for you here today is to first and foremost acknowledge that you do have intuition. And because of this, secondly, you already have the foundation for emotional intelligence. Third, we'll go into um some step by steps you can take away today to start to put this intuition to good and start to develop and mature that emotional intelligence foundation for our personal and professional advancement. All right, let's get into it. We'll go to the next slide, please.
All right. So again, if we're going with the premise as females, we all have intuition. We all have foundational emotional intelligence. How do we start to nurture and shape this superpower? And we do it by three ways that I'm going to leave you with some key nuggets to take away today that you can start to put into practice and to improve upon your professional success. First things first, we have to understand behavioral styles. And most importantly, we have to understand ourselves, right? Part of emotional intelligence is being able to be aware of and control emotion. Only then can we start to understand those around us. We can go to the next slide.
Social style is a tool and it's one of those ways that we can begin to better understand ourselves and it gives us words to put into those behaviors and experiences that we can start to acknowledge those around us. Social styles is just one of those many behavioral or personality tests. It's trademarked by the Tracom Consulting Group, but I personally like this assessment and we use it at Accenture because it's relatively easy to diagnose others and it also comes with a blueprint of how to tailor our behavior. Now, in a few years when we we've had a few female presidents, um I will gladly update these pictures, but I do like to use presidents to convey these styles because it demonstrates that regardless the style, they are capable leaders.
So, if you were to read these descriptions, people often think that drivers, the George W. Bush, the people who get down to business quickly, they are very taskoriented. They think that these are additional typical leaders, but that's simply not true. Okay. If someone like Ronald Reagan who uses charisma and it highly emphasizes relationships with people, if someone with those traits tried to move too quickly and tries to focus only on facts, they would most likely feel uncomfortable and this would come across as being a not a very effective leader. Instead, if they had the self-awareness and use social styles here to understand that instead of trying to emulate George W. Bush as the driver and realize that they're more like Reagan as the amiable, they would actually have a stronger sense of self and they would be able to reflect themselves as a more effective leader.
Okay. Now, I know you're probably scrambling trying to jot down notes here. Um, and that you're probably trying to find out where you fall within one of these four quadrants. And you might actually see yourself across the four boxes. And that's a good thing. It actually speaks to your skill and versatility and the ability to adapt to different situations. But we'll get into that in a little bit more. Um, but coming back to the notes, you don't need to scramble to write this down. Um, I recommend taking a screenshot if you'd like it today. Otherwise, I think the material will be shared um in the next few days. So, definitely something that I would earmark to come back to.
All right. So, as we start to pinpoint our own files, we can go to the next slide for um kind of a handy way that I like to do it. As I mentioned, you might have seen yourself kind of across these four different styles, and that's a good thing. But if we're going to kind of pinpoint which style we most closely resonate with, again, this is coming back to what is our innate default behavior outside of our lived experiences, outside of our ability to be a chameleon and adapt to the social environment. What is our default behavior? The quick and dirty way to do this is to look at our best and our worst day. And honestly, start by looking at your worst day.
So, if I do some self-reflection and think about my worst day, so I'm most likely stressed, I'm hungry, I'm tired, I'm going to turn highly autocratic, I have a short temper, and I would much rather prefer to do things myself and try to coach others and bring each other along in a team setting. So, if I look at that and then I look at kind of these quadrants here, that is a hardcore driver up in the top right. and most of my team would agree. Now, I did this exercise with my husband named CJ, and he found that on his birthday, he'll most likely shut down, get quiet, and he'll let me run the show. So, we pegged him as an amuable, kind of that opposite corner.
Now, while I might argue that it's effective for when he shuts down and lets me take the reigns, um I like that. But again, in the long term, this probably isn't healthy for our relationship. This imbalance would lead to things down the road. Resentment and his uh likelihood to acquies is not going to be that partnership that we're looking for. So, social styles actually gives us words to start to put together kind of what it is about our behavior that makes us do certain things and it provides recommendations on how to better interact and better level the playing field when we're acting with different personality styles. We go to the next slide.
This here is uh a super nifty, handy tool. I definitely recommend screenshotting this, keeping this one close. This is a matrix that helps you tailor your behavior based on the individual that you're interacting with. Okay, so again, it relies on understanding kind of where you fall. So if you use the best worst case scenario to at least have a starting point of where you think you fall like myself, I'm the driver. So I would look across that top row and fall where I'm going to be interacting. So if we take the example of my worst day, maybe say I have low blood sugar shopping at Costco um and I'm with my husband who is an amiable. I'm going to need to I remember that I should probably slow my pace and see my husband as a person rather than someone who's pushing the shopping cart too slowly.
And if we flip that on its head, if CJ the amiable, so we go down to that row, interacts with me, the driver again in Costco, he should adapt his behavior to realize that the goal is to get out of Costco as quickly as possible. And instead of theorizing about meals that we could make in the future, just focus on the list at h list at hand and get out of there today. Right? Just an example, but this is a really good one to save once you've started to identify where you are within your social style and then when you start to pay more attention and interact with those around you. All right, let's go to the next page and we'll learn what step two is.
So now that we have kind of a basic understanding of what social style we are and putting words to those behavioral traits that we exhibit, we've hopefully started to pay more attention to those around us. Now, not saying that you're going to become an expert and be able to pinpoint where people fall, but at least you're more in tune with it and starting to pay attention that people behave differently in different situations based on the information at hand. Now, how do we use that to our benefit? And we start to use that to our benefit through influence. Um, and I can't talk about influencing people without um talking about the next slide. So we can jump
ahead. Most of you are probably thinking about this uh when I say how do we influence people, right? Tried and true. We refer back to Dale Carnegie. Um is one of my favorite books. It is a recommended read for everyone on my team. And if I could ever be so bold as to recommend it for all of my personal friends, um Christmas gifts, um I may not have too many friends afterwards, but regardless, um this is a fantastic book. Um most of you have probably read of it or at least heard of it. It is not a quick read and it is not a book that you read once. I highly recommend taking this book in pieces, taking time to practice the lessons so that they become habits and really coming back to it because you'll continue to learn new things as you have lived experiences and as you mature in your own person.
You can go to the next slide. Now, I won't spoil everything about what the book has to offer. Um, and we would be here for much longer than an hour if he wanted to go into the lessons. Um, but there are lots of good value and real world examples that Gail Carnegie presents. Um, albeit a little antiquated in today's society, but the rationale is still incredibly accurate. Um, he teaches us everything from kind of big lessons and habits that take a lot of conscious effort to change our behaviors, but he also gives us small little nuggets that we can take away today. So, I've left a few teasers here for you. One of my favorite ones is talking about a person's name, right?
To a single person, their name is the most important sound and the most beautiful word in any language. When you hear your own name, you kind of perk up a bit. So, why don't we use it more in conversation? When was the last time you used your partner's name when you ask them to do something rather than saying h, love, or babe? Try it out tonight. See how it feels. Another one is when we're conversing, right? When we all come back from the pandemic, some of us will probably have some social anxiety. Um, I know I'm definitely out of practice small talk and so I will be reverting back to the basics that Dale Carnegie taught me.
And what he taught me was people love talking about themselves. So when I'm in a conversation, especially with a new person, I will try to take a genuine interest in this person and I'll do so by continuing to ask them questions. This will keep the conversation flowing and people will think of me hopefully as a great conversationalist. Again, there's a lot of really good nuggets in this book. Um, I can't recommend it enough. So, um, that is your reading assignment um, for the month of April. All right, let's go to the next
page. Perfect. So coming back to the third step of how we start to build upon again our innate intuition that lays the foundation for emotional intelligence. We've started with understanding our own behaviors. From there we're paying more attention to those around us, picking up on different behavioral cues, and we're using some of the habits to start to influence people and to start to enact change in a way that benefits us. The last one that I'll leave you with today is being more reader centric. And what I mean by this is when I write an email from my point of view that is writer centric. Most of us do this all the time. But I really challenge you to think about it from the reader point of view, from the audience's point of view.
And I think we do this, right? We do this when we're sending an email to our boss or to a client and we read it from their point of view, right? We ask, 'How would they receive this?' And that's great. But do we ever stop to think how do they want to receive this information? And I'll give you some test tips on how to do so. We can go to the next
slide. All right. So a few steps to write some better emails from a reader centric point of view. Now this applies to newsletters, blog posts, what have you. But for today, let's just focus on an email. First things first, why are we writing the email? What do we want to get across as the writer? Then take a step back and say, does our audience even care about this? Right? Do do they care?
Next, revert back to those social style slides and see if you can pinpoint. If you're sending to an individual, see if you can pinpoint their style. Okay? Could just be a hypothesis, something that you're going to test out, but you can use it to guide how you convey the information. Are they analytical and wanting to see facts and figures? Are they a driver and they appreciate to the point communication or are they expressive and they welcome flourish? Third, recommend you go back, reread what you wrote, possibly rewrite it, look for language changes you can make, but also structure and format. How do they want to see this information? All right, let's go to the next slide, please.
and I'll share with you a real world situation of what I'm actually working on right now. So, my client, I've been working for them for 13 months. We wrap up our contract in three weeks here. And so, I want to send them a communication that says, 'Hey, I'm working on a summary of everything that we've done for you for the past year. I'm calling it the book of work. I have no action for you. I just want to give you a heads up that I'm aware our contract is ending and I'm giving you something that summarizes all of the work. That would be the writer centric email that I would write. But if I take a step back and I look at each audience and I look at the social styles, it becomes a very different message.
So you can see by some of the words that I've highlighted, but also just the structure and the format of the text is different based on the person I'm interacting with. So if we start with Jodie, she's very analytical. So I give her some details about this deliverable that I'm putting together. I also know that analyticals enjoy some level of control. So my last sentence there, I'm inviting her to provide direction if she'd like. Kenny, my amiable, I often see him as Switzerland of the group. He has very strong human relationships and he's often spending time out in the field with his folks rather than sitting in front of his computer. So this message would actually be more efficient as a text message.
But you'll notice there's almost no reference to work or to the content of the book of work. Rather, I'm asking him how I can engage with his people and I'm making sure that his opinion about how I engage them is heard. Anna, you can see this comment here. It's kind of written in um stream of consciousness. It's the longest and the most verbose. She's an expressive, so I'm actually mirroring her communication. And I use a lot of superlatives. There's less formal language. And towards the end of it, I appeal to her creative side by inviting her to brainstorm. Peter, the driver, is short and sweet and to the point. The line breaks make an email very easy to scan because I know he's probably only going to spend a few seconds looking at this email.
I'm also key to point out the be how this will benefit him and what he can expect next. So this is how I take something of being writer centric what I want to get across the top and how I translate it to my different audience members. We can go to the next
slide. So, as we bring these three steps together, first and foremost, understanding our behavior and starting to pay attention to those around us, by practicing Carnegie's lessons, ideally to build habits that influence people, and by reframing our communication, we can begin to hone and enhance this emotional intelligence with the goal of improving our personal and professional relationships. Now again, if you are like me back in the beginning thinking that you didn't have much intuition, emotional intelligence is new to you, or some of these concepts here are new to you, this can be very overwhelming and kind of you don't know where to start, especially um the whirlwind of the past 20 minutes or so. So, I've laid out kind of a road map of where I recommend starting with this slowly to start to build some of these new habits.
We can go to the next slide. My advice is to start by just picking one. To start, pick one person, co-workers, someone you work with, a friend, maybe your partner, and using the social style, start to form a guess or a hypothesis about what their style is and slowly begin to test it out. So, if you're in a meeting and you're listening to someone, pay attention to what kind of words they use. Are they backward looking or are they forwardlooking? Are they strategic? Do they rely on facts? Are they uh hesitant to make decisions? Right? All of these things cue you into how a person is going to behave. Once you have it identified, start to test it out and see if you changing your behavior elicits a different outcome.
and ideally an improved outcome. Next, pick one habit or rather maybe one chapter from Dale Carnegie's book. Read it slowly and take time to understand the how it works and really the why behind this lesson. I advise setting daily reminders if this is something that you truly would like to incorporate into your day-to-day life and practice in low risk situations. So before the pandemic, as I mentioned, I used to travel. So I would actually take some of these habits or some of these lessons and I would practice with Starbucks, flight attendants, and hotel staff. Oftentimes, I was asking for something. And so by using these tips of influencing people, it would actually elicit a more beneficial outcome than in the past of just asking for, hey, where's the bathroom?
or you know, could I have a seat that's in the aisle? Something like that. Last, I recommend picking one communication. Okay, so each day or or maybe even each week starting out, look in your scent folder and find one communication that you're going to rewrite. In the moment of our day-to-day work lives, um we typically don't have the time or honestly the brain space to go through this like threeprong revision, and I get it. But after the fact, if we go back and look at it, think about our audience's social style, and take time to rewrite it, we're slowly forming the habit so that we can do that next time in real time and improve upon that communication.
We can go to the next slide. And with that, um, I will wrap it up and I think we can probably open it up for questions. But thank you for uh staying tuned, tuning into this whirlwind of emotional intelligence. Um I invite you to connect with me um professional email LinkedIn. I love to hear whether you agree, disagree, um what are some of your own lived experiences with this. And um for those of you HGTV lovers out there, um there's kind of a fun Instagram handle where you can follow along my my weekend projects. So with that, Jinder, um you can open it up if there are any questions. All right. Well, thank you so much, Tatiana.
And just as a reminder to everybody, if you hit five star, I can unmute you and you can ask a live question. And then everyone, you can also put questions into our chat. So, we've had a couple of questions that have basically all come in. They're about the same question. So, I'm going to try to make one combined question. And the question is, if you have somebody on your team who is not emotionally intelligent, how do you start that conversation with that person or how do you try to train them in emotional intelligence?
Absolutely. It's a great question and I think the thing that I love to do whenever I have a new team um at Accenture, again, we use social styles. So, I go to a new team and someone will say, 'Hey, what's your style?' And I can tell them. Oftentime, that's not the case. Um, and you can find kind of self assessments and team assessments online and they're real easy question. It's probably like seven questions about, you know, is this person quick to make decisions? Do they lean forward? Do they use hand gestures? Do they use inflections in their voice? All of these things help to pinpoint someone's style. And so I actually use it as a team bonding experience.
So what I do is I have all of my team members do a self assessment. So they go through those questions themselves and then we do an assessment of everyone else and then you get to see kind of where you thought you lied and then how everyone else sees you. So years ago, I thought I was an analytical and I was blown away when about seven of my team members pegged me as a driver. So that was real eyeopening for me. Right? That's the beginning of emotional intelligence is to have the awareness of what you are and how other people see you. So that's one way that I would recommend instead of calling out that one individual, make it a team bonding event.
um you know do it as a kind of brown bag lunch event and you can kind of learn as a team together. That's great. Thank you for the answer. So we have one last question before we move on to our next speaker and this one comes from Anna and Anna says, 'Have you found that many employers are now using emotional intelligence interview questions with objective success in their screening processes?'
Oh, that's a really interesting question, Anna. Um, I don't know. A and part of it is, um, I'm not super close to recruitment. Um, but what I will tell you is I work with a lot of different clients and I've worked with um, nine different utilities throughout the US. And what we do do is within Accenture, we get together and we talk about our clients at the behavioral and emotional style level. So, we will actually say if we're going in kind of blind to a new client or especially if we are doing some sales and we're looking at um we're looking at the buyer, we are asking what type of personality we think they are and we are blending our team to either complement that or if we don't have that luxury, we are educating the team members on, hey, this buyer is an analytical.
If you're telling stories and using hand gestures, we're probably going to lose them. What we need to do is we need to tell them facts and we need figures, right? Versus a pie chart or a graph may not land with different personality types. So that's actually where we use it. I don't I don't know if people use it in um recruitment, but um it is something definitely that we use when we go to look at other companies. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. Well, everyone, Tatiana is going to come back and join us again for one of the panels. So, thank you Tatiana. and we'll give you a break and we will hear from you again in a few minutes.
And I happened to meet u my now husband down here. He's a chiropractor and um, moved down and now I am a San Diego resident. So, um I will give a little bit more about my bio as we get into the slides, but um yeah, that's me. All right. Well, we have your slides. We have your slides pulled up. So, just tell me next slide and the floor is all yours. Thanks. Awesome. So, um, today to kick things off, um, with this awesome jam-packed agenda, first things first, I'll be sharing a few tips and tricks on how to hone your emotional intelligence. So, we can go to the next
slide. All right. As I mentioned, I am a senior manager with Accenture. Um this is analogous to a director level probably in your company. Um I work primarily for utilities um within the supply chain space field operations but have also done financials um intelligent automation and I'm working for a California utility right now working on their wildfire mitigation planning. Um, as I mentioned, Accenture is the largest global consulting firm. And so, we spend a lot of time and energy embracing different culturals, uh, different cultures, different working styles. And as a business that relies on sales, um, all of our senior leaders take training on how emotional intelligence plays into buying behaviors. Now, it's important to know that what I'm sharing with you today is simply from my lived experience and from my professional experience.
I am not an expert in emotional intelligence. Um, I'm just passing along some of the trainings that I've received at my company um and how I've put them into practice. Um, on kind of fun personal note, um, my husband and I bought a home in the Bejo Bejo neighborhood last year and we've been spending every weekend of, uh, the pandemic renovating it, um, one small project at a time. Um, I also have a French bulldog who is sleeping and may start snoring. So, if you hear that, um, I apologize. But, uh, without much further ado, we can get right into it. So, Ginger, next slide, please.
All right, first things first. Let's start off by talking about women's intuition. So, when you hear that, what do you think about? Is intuition something real and tangible or is it really just something that you know you hear about in romcoms or maybe your grandmother told you an old wives tale about it. Sayings like trust your gut and a mother always knows, right? like is this BS or is there some truth behind this? Let's see. We can go to the next
slide. If we were to put a scale to this question about women's intuition, myth being on the left, reality being on the right, if you would ask me about kind of where I I stand on this, I would honestly probably put more so on the left, right? trust my gut. I'm pretty much just always hungry. I don't know that I could have pointed to a point in my life or a pivotal decision where I relied on my gut and my instincts. Um, I have some friends who I think do rely on theirs and you know, if you're out there listening to this and you're like, 'Yes, I use my gut. It is one of my guiding principles.' Rock on.
Power to you. Um, but if you're like me, maybe on the fence or you don't really rely on your gut and your instincts, bear with me for a moment and uh see if we we can't convince you otherwise. We can go to the next slide. So, a great place to start out is asking Google, right? So if we ask Google to define these terms for us, we see that women's intuition can be described as having a knack for knowing what people are feeling and thinking based on the ab ability to read body language. On the other side, emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions to handle relationships. So when we look at these together, we can see that our intuition again being female and our innate intuition being able to understand what people are thinking and feeling based on body language heavily influences that emotional intelligence.
Again, the ability to use this to improve relationships. Now, so those of you who are still maybe on the fence, you're like, 'This is great. I don't see how it applies to me. These are all lofty ideas. Hang in there because I'm going to tell you that as females, we all have this intuition and therefore we all have the foundation for emotional intelligence. So part of the work is already done. All right, let's give an example. We can go to the next slide.
So, as I mentioned, I'm saying here that all women innately have intuition. And if you look at the pictures, you might realize that we don't always use this intuition for good. The cattiness, manipulative stereotypes that our gender sometimes elicits is really an expression of this intuition. It's our ability to read a situation, to understand body language, and to anticipate an outcome that allows us to quote unquote get what we want. Now, I'm not saying that we all use this skill for evil, and I'm definitely not recommending that we revert back to locker room drama. However, I'm using this to illustrate the fact and I want you to acknowledge the sophistication by which we as women interact with situations for a desired outcome.
Okay, we can go to the next slide. And with that, I'll be so bold as say as females emotional intelligence is our superpower. This is what sets us apart from our male counterparts. So my goal for you here today is to first and foremost acknowledge that you do have intuition. And because of this, secondly, you already have the foundation for emotional intelligence. Third, we'll go into um some step by steps you can take away today to start to put this intuition to good and start to develop and mature that emotional intelligence foundation for our personal and professional advancement. All right, let's get into it. We'll go to the next slide, please.
All right. So again, if we're going with the premise as females, we all have intuition. We all have foundational emotional intelligence. How do we start to nurture and shape this superpower? And we do it by three ways that I'm going to leave you with some key nuggets to take away today that you can start to put into practice and to improve upon your professional success. First things first, we have to understand behavioral styles. And most importantly, we have to understand ourselves, right? Part of emotional intelligence is being able to be aware of and control emotion. Only then can we start to understand those around us. We can go to the next slide.
Social style is a tool and it's one of those ways that we can begin to better understand ourselves and it gives us words to put into those behaviors and experiences that we can start to acknowledge those around us. Social styles is just one of those many behavioral or personality tests. It's trademarked by the Tracom Consulting Group, but I personally like this assessment and we use it at Accenture because it's relatively easy to diagnose others and it also comes with a blueprint of how to tailor our behavior. Now, in a few years when we we've had a few female presidents, um I will gladly update these pictures, but I do like to use presidents to convey these styles because it demonstrates that regardless the style, they are capable leaders.
So, if you were to read these descriptions, people often think that drivers, the George W. Bush, the people who get down to business quickly, they are very taskoriented. They think that these are additional typical leaders, but that's simply not true. Okay. If someone like Ronald Reagan who uses charisma and it highly emphasizes relationships with people, if someone with those traits tried to move too quickly and tries to focus only on facts, they would most likely feel uncomfortable and this would come across as being a not a very effective leader. Instead, if they had the self-awareness and use social styles here to understand that instead of trying to emulate George W. Bush as the driver and realize that they're more like Reagan as the amiable, they would actually have a stronger sense of self and they would be able to reflect themselves as a more effective leader.
Okay. Now, I know you're probably scrambling trying to jot down notes here. Um, and that you're probably trying to find out where you fall within one of these four quadrants. And you might actually see yourself across the four boxes. And that's a good thing. It actually speaks to your skill and versatility and the ability to adapt to different situations. But we'll get into that in a little bit more. Um, but coming back to the notes, you don't need to scramble to write this down. Um, I recommend taking a screenshot if you'd like it today. Otherwise, I think the material will be shared um in the next few days. So, definitely something that I would earmark to come back to.
All right. So, as we start to pinpoint our own files, we can go to the next slide for um kind of a handy way that I like to do it. As I mentioned, you might have seen yourself kind of across these four different styles, and that's a good thing. But if we're going to kind of pinpoint which style we most closely resonate with, again, this is coming back to what is our innate default behavior outside of our lived experiences, outside of our ability to be a chameleon and adapt to the social environment. What is our default behavior? The quick and dirty way to do this is to look at our best and our worst day. And honestly, start by looking at your worst day.
So, if I do some self-reflection and think about my worst day, so I'm most likely stressed, I'm hungry, I'm tired, I'm going to turn highly autocratic, I have a short temper, and I would much rather prefer to do things myself and try to coach others and bring each other along in a team setting. So, if I look at that and then I look at kind of these quadrants here, that is a hardcore driver up in the top right. and most of my team would agree. Now, I did this exercise with my husband named CJ, and he found that on his birthday, he'll most likely shut down, get quiet, and he'll let me run the show. So, we pegged him as an amuable, kind of that opposite corner.
Now, while I might argue that it's effective for when he shuts down and lets me take the reigns, um I like that. But again, in the long term, this probably isn't healthy for our relationship. This imbalance would lead to things down the road. Resentment and his uh likelihood to acquies is not going to be that partnership that we're looking for. So, social styles actually gives us words to start to put together kind of what it is about our behavior that makes us do certain things and it provides recommendations on how to better interact and better level the playing field when we're acting with different personality styles. We go to the next slide.
This here is uh a super nifty, handy tool. I definitely recommend screenshotting this, keeping this one close. This is a matrix that helps you tailor your behavior based on the individual that you're interacting with. Okay, so again, it relies on understanding kind of where you fall. So if you use the best worst case scenario to at least have a starting point of where you think you fall like myself, I'm the driver. So I would look across that top row and fall where I'm going to be interacting. So if we take the example of my worst day, maybe say I have low blood sugar shopping at Costco um and I'm with my husband who is an amiable. I'm going to need to I remember that I should probably slow my pace and see my husband as a person rather than someone who's pushing the shopping cart too slowly.
And if we flip that on its head, if CJ the amiable, so we go down to that row, interacts with me, the driver again in Costco, he should adapt his behavior to realize that the goal is to get out of Costco as quickly as possible. And instead of theorizing about meals that we could make in the future, just focus on the list at h list at hand and get out of there today. Right? Just an example, but this is a really good one to save once you've started to identify where you are within your social style and then when you start to pay more attention and interact with those around you. All right, let's go to the next page and we'll learn what step two is.
So now that we have kind of a basic understanding of what social style we are and putting words to those behavioral traits that we exhibit, we've hopefully started to pay more attention to those around us. Now, not saying that you're going to become an expert and be able to pinpoint where people fall, but at least you're more in tune with it and starting to pay attention that people behave differently in different situations based on the information at hand. Now, how do we use that to our benefit? And we start to use that to our benefit through influence. Um, and I can't talk about influencing people without um talking about the next slide. So we can jump
ahead. Most of you are probably thinking about this uh when I say how do we influence people, right? Tried and true. We refer back to Dale Carnegie. Um is one of my favorite books. It is a recommended read for everyone on my team. And if I could ever be so bold as to recommend it for all of my personal friends, um Christmas gifts, um I may not have too many friends afterwards, but regardless, um this is a fantastic book. Um most of you have probably read of it or at least heard of it. It is not a quick read and it is not a book that you read once. I highly recommend taking this book in pieces, taking time to practice the lessons so that they become habits and really coming back to it because you'll continue to learn new things as you have lived experiences and as you mature in your own person.
You can go to the next slide. Now, I won't spoil everything about what the book has to offer. Um, and we would be here for much longer than an hour if he wanted to go into the lessons. Um, but there are lots of good value and real world examples that Gail Carnegie presents. Um, albeit a little antiquated in today's society, but the rationale is still incredibly accurate. Um, he teaches us everything from kind of big lessons and habits that take a lot of conscious effort to change our behaviors, but he also gives us small little nuggets that we can take away today. So, I've left a few teasers here for you. One of my favorite ones is talking about a person's name, right?
To a single person, their name is the most important sound and the most beautiful word in any language. When you hear your own name, you kind of perk up a bit. So, why don't we use it more in conversation? When was the last time you used your partner's name when you ask them to do something rather than saying h, love, or babe? Try it out tonight. See how it feels. Another one is when we're conversing, right? When we all come back from the pandemic, some of us will probably have some social anxiety. Um, I know I'm definitely out of practice small talk and so I will be reverting back to the basics that Dale Carnegie taught me.
And what he taught me was people love talking about themselves. So when I'm in a conversation, especially with a new person, I will try to take a genuine interest in this person and I'll do so by continuing to ask them questions. This will keep the conversation flowing and people will think of me hopefully as a great conversationalist. Again, there's a lot of really good nuggets in this book. Um, I can't recommend it enough. So, um, that is your reading assignment um, for the month of April. All right, let's go to the next
page. Perfect. So coming back to the third step of how we start to build upon again our innate intuition that lays the foundation for emotional intelligence. We've started with understanding our own behaviors. From there we're paying more attention to those around us, picking up on different behavioral cues, and we're using some of the habits to start to influence people and to start to enact change in a way that benefits us. The last one that I'll leave you with today is being more reader centric. And what I mean by this is when I write an email from my point of view that is writer centric. Most of us do this all the time. But I really challenge you to think about it from the reader point of view, from the audience's point of view.
And I think we do this, right? We do this when we're sending an email to our boss or to a client and we read it from their point of view, right? We ask, 'How would they receive this?' And that's great. But do we ever stop to think how do they want to receive this information? And I'll give you some test tips on how to do so. We can go to the next
slide. All right. So a few steps to write some better emails from a reader centric point of view. Now this applies to newsletters, blog posts, what have you. But for today, let's just focus on an email. First things first, why are we writing the email? What do we want to get across as the writer? Then take a step back and say, does our audience even care about this? Right? Do do they care?
Next, revert back to those social style slides and see if you can pinpoint. If you're sending to an individual, see if you can pinpoint their style. Okay? Could just be a hypothesis, something that you're going to test out, but you can use it to guide how you convey the information. Are they analytical and wanting to see facts and figures? Are they a driver and they appreciate to the point communication or are they expressive and they welcome flourish? Third, recommend you go back, reread what you wrote, possibly rewrite it, look for language changes you can make, but also structure and format. How do they want to see this information? All right, let's go to the next slide, please.
and I'll share with you a real world situation of what I'm actually working on right now. So, my client, I've been working for them for 13 months. We wrap up our contract in three weeks here. And so, I want to send them a communication that says, 'Hey, I'm working on a summary of everything that we've done for you for the past year. I'm calling it the book of work. I have no action for you. I just want to give you a heads up that I'm aware our contract is ending and I'm giving you something that summarizes all of the work. That would be the writer centric email that I would write. But if I take a step back and I look at each audience and I look at the social styles, it becomes a very different message.
So you can see by some of the words that I've highlighted, but also just the structure and the format of the text is different based on the person I'm interacting with. So if we start with Jodie, she's very analytical. So I give her some details about this deliverable that I'm putting together. I also know that analyticals enjoy some level of control. So my last sentence there, I'm inviting her to provide direction if she'd like. Kenny, my amiable, I often see him as Switzerland of the group. He has very strong human relationships and he's often spending time out in the field with his folks rather than sitting in front of his computer. So this message would actually be more efficient as a text message.
But you'll notice there's almost no reference to work or to the content of the book of work. Rather, I'm asking him how I can engage with his people and I'm making sure that his opinion about how I engage them is heard. Anna, you can see this comment here. It's kind of written in um stream of consciousness. It's the longest and the most verbose. She's an expressive, so I'm actually mirroring her communication. And I use a lot of superlatives. There's less formal language. And towards the end of it, I appeal to her creative side by inviting her to brainstorm. Peter, the driver, is short and sweet and to the point. The line breaks make an email very easy to scan because I know he's probably only going to spend a few seconds looking at this email.
I'm also key to point out the be how this will benefit him and what he can expect next. So this is how I take something of being writer centric what I want to get across the top and how I translate it to my different audience members. We can go to the next
slide. So, as we bring these three steps together, first and foremost, understanding our behavior and starting to pay attention to those around us, by practicing Carnegie's lessons, ideally to build habits that influence people, and by reframing our communication, we can begin to hone and enhance this emotional intelligence with the goal of improving our personal and professional relationships. Now again, if you are like me back in the beginning thinking that you didn't have much intuition, emotional intelligence is new to you, or some of these concepts here are new to you, this can be very overwhelming and kind of you don't know where to start, especially um the whirlwind of the past 20 minutes or so. So, I've laid out kind of a road map of where I recommend starting with this slowly to start to build some of these new habits.
We can go to the next slide. My advice is to start by just picking one. To start, pick one person, co-workers, someone you work with, a friend, maybe your partner, and using the social style, start to form a guess or a hypothesis about what their style is and slowly begin to test it out. So, if you're in a meeting and you're listening to someone, pay attention to what kind of words they use. Are they backward looking or are they forwardlooking? Are they strategic? Do they rely on facts? Are they uh hesitant to make decisions? Right? All of these things cue you into how a person is going to behave. Once you have it identified, start to test it out and see if you changing your behavior elicits a different outcome.
and ideally an improved outcome. Next, pick one habit or rather maybe one chapter from Dale Carnegie's book. Read it slowly and take time to understand the how it works and really the why behind this lesson. I advise setting daily reminders if this is something that you truly would like to incorporate into your day-to-day life and practice in low risk situations. So before the pandemic, as I mentioned, I used to travel. So I would actually take some of these habits or some of these lessons and I would practice with Starbucks, flight attendants, and hotel staff. Oftentimes, I was asking for something. And so by using these tips of influencing people, it would actually elicit a more beneficial outcome than in the past of just asking for, hey, where's the bathroom?
or you know, could I have a seat that's in the aisle? Something like that. Last, I recommend picking one communication. Okay, so each day or or maybe even each week starting out, look in your scent folder and find one communication that you're going to rewrite. In the moment of our day-to-day work lives, um we typically don't have the time or honestly the brain space to go through this like threeprong revision, and I get it. But after the fact, if we go back and look at it, think about our audience's social style, and take time to rewrite it, we're slowly forming the habit so that we can do that next time in real time and improve upon that communication.
We can go to the next slide. And with that, um, I will wrap it up and I think we can probably open it up for questions. But thank you for uh staying tuned, tuning into this whirlwind of emotional intelligence. Um I invite you to connect with me um professional email LinkedIn. I love to hear whether you agree, disagree, um what are some of your own lived experiences with this. And um for those of you HGTV lovers out there, um there's kind of a fun Instagram handle where you can follow along my my weekend projects. So with that, Jinder, um you can open it up if there are any questions. All right. Well, thank you so much, Tatiana.
And just as a reminder to everybody, if you hit five star, I can unmute you and you can ask a live question. And then everyone, you can also put questions into our chat. So, we've had a couple of questions that have basically all come in. They're about the same question. So, I'm going to try to make one combined question. And the question is, if you have somebody on your team who is not emotionally intelligent, how do you start that conversation with that person or how do you try to train them in emotional intelligence?
Absolutely. It's a great question and I think the thing that I love to do whenever I have a new team um at Accenture, again, we use social styles. So, I go to a new team and someone will say, 'Hey, what's your style?' And I can tell them. Oftentime, that's not the case. Um, and you can find kind of self assessments and team assessments online and they're real easy question. It's probably like seven questions about, you know, is this person quick to make decisions? Do they lean forward? Do they use hand gestures? Do they use inflections in their voice? All of these things help to pinpoint someone's style. And so I actually use it as a team bonding experience.
So what I do is I have all of my team members do a self assessment. So they go through those questions themselves and then we do an assessment of everyone else and then you get to see kind of where you thought you lied and then how everyone else sees you. So years ago, I thought I was an analytical and I was blown away when about seven of my team members pegged me as a driver. So that was real eyeopening for me. Right? That's the beginning of emotional intelligence is to have the awareness of what you are and how other people see you. So that's one way that I would recommend instead of calling out that one individual, make it a team bonding event.
um you know do it as a kind of brown bag lunch event and you can kind of learn as a team together. That's great. Thank you for the answer. So we have one last question before we move on to our next speaker and this one comes from Anna and Anna says, 'Have you found that many employers are now using emotional intelligence interview questions with objective success in their screening processes?'
Oh, that's a really interesting question, Anna. Um, I don't know. A and part of it is, um, I'm not super close to recruitment. Um, but what I will tell you is I work with a lot of different clients and I've worked with um, nine different utilities throughout the US. And what we do do is within Accenture, we get together and we talk about our clients at the behavioral and emotional style level. So, we will actually say if we're going in kind of blind to a new client or especially if we are doing some sales and we're looking at um we're looking at the buyer, we are asking what type of personality we think they are and we are blending our team to either complement that or if we don't have that luxury, we are educating the team members on, hey, this buyer is an analytical.
If you're telling stories and using hand gestures, we're probably going to lose them. What we need to do is we need to tell them facts and we need figures, right? Versus a pie chart or a graph may not land with different personality types. So that's actually where we use it. I don't I don't know if people use it in um recruitment, but um it is something definitely that we use when we go to look at other companies. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. Well, everyone, Tatiana is going to come back and join us again for one of the panels. So, thank you Tatiana. and we'll give you a break and we will hear from you again in a few minutes.