Can your company pass the EQ test?
CPG executives each discussed their companies’ efforts to recruit and develop high emotional intelligence during a panel discussion moderated by Dan Mack, executive director of the Mack Elevation Forum, at the Future Leaders Summit.
For a sales and marketing team operating in the retail space to be truly successful today, team members need to have a high EQ — the emotional equivalent to IQ.
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That was the key takeaway from a panel discussion among leading CPG executives — including, Todd Hutsko, VP sales at Fleet Labs; Nick Rini, VP global sales at i-Health; Kevin Garvey, director of sales for the Target team at Pfizer Consumer Healthcare; and Andrew Archambault, chief customer officer at U.S. Nutrition-NBTY — about what their companies are doing both to recruit and develop high emotional intelligence in their organizations.
“The data is wildly telling. People who demonstrate high emotional intelligence have a 58% higher success rate in every job there is — high tech, medicine, everything. It’s that powerful,” noted Mack Elevation Forum executive director Dan Mack and co-host and moderator of the May 24 Future Leaders Summit.
“One of the things I look for in people to join our team, is how much they talk about their performance in terms of what they did with others versus how much they talk about what they know,” said U.S. Nutrition’s Archambault.
For Pfizer Consumer Healthcare’s Garvey, “it all comes back to interest and passion,” he said. “That’s when you link it all together, when you connect those basic business competencies that we all have with energizing someone [around] purpose, passion and interest.”
“The most important thing is someone who has a passion for continuous improvement,” added Fleet’s Hutsko. “Someone willing to listen, willing to ask questions, willing to not have the answers; someone who wants to be better, wants to do what it takes. What’s going to stop [my] team from being the best it can be? That’s me. What can I do to support them and help make them better? [EQ] is the multiplier. Twenty-five percent of your success comes from IQ, 75%[comes from] EQ.”
Turning the lens inward, Mack asked the panel the types of EQ-related leadership skills that they are trying to develop within themselves.
“We have a saying within the team: ‘Feedback is a gift — both good and bad,’” said i-Health’s Rini. “Real-time feedback is critically important. So not only praise what we do well, but more importantly, what is it that we need to work on. ... That goes all the way up the organization; in our organization, rank doesn’t have a privilege.”
At Fleet, not only do titles and roles not carry any special privilege, the company has done away with conventional business titles altogether. “We don’t use roles in our organization, and that’s really important because now I’ve got five coaches on my leadership team instead of five direct reports,” Hutsko explained.
In fact for Fleet, EQ has become synonymous with company culture. “If you have high EQ and you’re not worried about a title, and you’re very focused with a purpose — everyone’s rowing in the same direction — EQ is just an abbreviation for good culture,” Hutsko said.
Archambault believes he was fortunate enough to have mentors who put him in a number of different roles early on in his career to help him “understand the things you don’t know,” have the freedom to fail and to learn from it.
“The other piece [is], you’ve got to be really comfortable putting people on your team who are very different from you,” he added. Borrowing a lesson from famed hockey coach Herb Brooks, who led the 1980 U.S. “Miracle” Olympic team to gold, “I’m not looking for the best ones, I’m looking for the right ones,” Archambault said.
According to Garvey, at Pfizer there are really three critical factors that help foster happiness and create work-life balance for people at the company.
“The first is my job — what I’m doing,” Garvey said. “Does it provide meaning for me or drive something creative in my soul? Meaning and creativity are main drivers for us. The second — and this plays even more so with millennials — it’s relationships, interconnectivity with people. We all have individual jobs, but we can’t do them alone. And the final thing is — and I’m passionate about this — that work is going to change; life is going to change, we’re all going to have different challenges that affect us. But it all comes back to an EQ skill — being able to choose your attitude.”