D. Trinidad Hunt

Leadership is about using your head, feeling with your heart and connecting with your team. If you want to build a sustainable organization resilient enough to meet the challenges of change in a timely manner, you have to develop your SQ competencies.

Fast is slow when:

1. A team member has an idea and you’re in too much of a hurry to listen.
2. You make all of the improvement decisions.
3. You pass someone in the hall (anyone) and don’t say hello or at least acknowledge them with a smile.
4. You give a short answer when a longer one is needed or vice versa – you give a long answer when a short answer would do. (Know your audience!)
5. You engage in the Kaizen process alone.

Why is fast slow in these cases? Because each situation requires damage control which takes time. People want to feel that they make a difference and in each of these cases they went away wondering.

Don’t ever leave a person wondering. Remember, the human brain is hardwired to connect with others. Relationship is everything. Students, teachers, principles and business leaders can develop their Social Intelligence or SQ competencies. SQ saves time and energy in all human relationship connections and in our professional lives.

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I have advocated for a long time that we can teach students Emotional and Social Literacy skills.  At Farrington High School on Hawaii I actually did an activity with some students teaching them about perseverance when working towards long term goals.

The Grid is my classroom activity to have students experience the challenges inherent in trying to achieve a goal and to break through the barriers that might keep them from succeeding.  The Grid is meant to replace theory with practice, students should feel directly the frustration and barriers during this activity.

This is an EQ activity because students will feel the frustration, boredom, angst, and wanting to give up that they feel in real life when the blocks and barriers arise.  It is also an SQ activity because students must work together to accomplish the task and no team member can be left out. One wins when all win.

The grid is best used in conjunction with a goal setting activity as part of a process:

1. Draw the comfort zone and show students how leaving their comfort zone can create a state of angst, frustration, fear etc
2. Draw a star way outside of their comfort zone to represent their goals anddreams
3. Explain that when they leave their comfort zone to achieve their goals, feelings of fear, boredom, frustration and wanting to quit may come up – Use examples – How many of you quit guitar lessons, piano lessons, etc.  What are some other goals you have given up on?
4. Have students set short-term goals (1-6 month goals)
5. Finally, students do the Grid

The Grid will bring feelings of frustration, wanting to give up, anger, boredom, blaming teammates for a mistake to the surface so that students can experience them.  This gives you an opportunity to coach students about how to deal with negative emotions that arise on the way to the goal.  It makes theory palpable and real so that students walk away with a real experience rather than a theoretical lesson.

One of the students at Farrington High, Mel, said to her Principal at the end of the day after doing the grid, “I will never be the same.  I now know what it will take to achieve my goals.  This was a life-changing experience for me.”

The lesson plan is here for you to download and use in your classroom

The Grid

You can share this classroom activity with your colleagues, but please ask them to come download it from my site.

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Given the latest research on the affect that human beings have on each other, SQ may be one of the most important components of student as well as leadership success. SQ is really the quality of our social intelligence. It is how we connect with and relate to others. It is how we invest in, build and nurture relationships over a lifetime.

Here’s 2 pieces of information that really hit the SQ mark and may help clarify the role of relationships in our lives.

1. Neuro-plasticity – Your brain is like plastic. It is moldable. It changes throughout your life based on your experience, who you hang with, and your intention to change yourself. Human beings can learn and change at any stage in life.
2. Our brain is wired to connect with others. Even our immune system is linked to respond to our relationships. Positive nourishing relationships nourish us while negative relationships are toxic to the system, especially over time.

The more scientists study the human brain, the more they realize how important our SQ really is. Our social relationships and interactions influence both our brain and our biology.

Every school, every teacher and every principal needs to understand the importance of SQ education. It lowers the bullying incidents, upsets in the classroom and referrals to the principal’s office in the school.

And how important is SQ in leadership? A policeman friend put it simply when he said that a new police chief had just been hired from the ranks. “I judge a leader by whether I would go in before him on a raid or let him go in before me,” he said. “I would go in first to protect this man. That’s how much I trust him,” he said quietly. ”And from what I’ve heard, I believe anyone on the force would do the same.” The trust that my friend spoke of here only happens out of SQ!

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During my work in corporations and in the classroom. I have come to equate IQ or Intellectual Quotient as a relic of some  past era.  IQ testing was traditionally used to separate people into groups for the benefit of the tester.  As an example the US Military in the early 1900’s used mass IQ testing to filter people into Officer and non-Officer ranks

Today’s students are tomorrow’s citizens.  We need to help them develop the thinking skills that will help them navigate the seas of tomorrows’ storms.

I have come to rename IQ as the Quality of Thinking – How we use our minds and how we think. This includes problem solving. decision-making and meta-cognition.

These are:

1. Problem Solving:
   1. Accessing the problem
   2. Analyzing the components of the problem
   3. Clarifying the goal
   4. Establishing strategies to achieve the goal
   5. Developing procedures to measure success
   6. Measuring success
2. Decision Making:
   1. Gathering information
   2. Making distinctions
   3. Sorting and synthesizing
   4. Integrating information
3. Meta-cognition:
   1. Self-reflection
   2. Thinking about thinking
   3. Developing an awareness of feelings and intuition
   4. Monitoring and managing my thoughts and feelings

The shift from Quotient to Quality is all about the movement from linear comparisons of people to one in which we acknowledge the multidimensional nature of human beings.  In fact the ability to use data and apply that to problems is the true nature of thinking.  Where thinking is the interaction between Problem Solving, Decision Making and the Meta Cognition skills we have.  Trying to define this interaction on a linear scale seems too simplistic.

This is the reason that I expound the need to focus on the quality of a person’s interactions and not simply the quotient.  Because as teachers we have the ability to improve the thinking of our students.  We can explicitly teach students problem solving, decision making and the meta cognitive skills, I don’t think this should be measured on a linear scale.

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I’ve been saying for 30 years human beings are more than their intellect. To be a human being includes our emotions. EQ is the Quality of our emotions or how we manage our reactions to the events and situations in our lives.

Until very recently emotional literacy was not thought to be a part of the classroom. Far from it, especially at the high school level. “It was not my job as a teacher to impact the way the student manages his or her emotions”, was a common comment in the staffroom at my school.

However, if you think about your own experience as a human being or as a professional, as a teacher, you know that you and I are still engaged in managing our emotions. In fact, when I am in a classroom with 30 students, I am very aware that my reactions make a difference to the overall outcomes I produce with my students.

As a teacher the emotions that I manage every day include:

• Ability to delay reaction time
• Patience
• Equanimity
• Psychological hardiness
• Stillness

I’ll never forget an incident that happened when I was teaching 5th grade. I reacted in anger at a student and the change in feeling in my classroom instantly changed. The classroom went from warm and playful with the students having fun to frigid ice, the class froze. Just remembering it hurts in the pit of my stomach.

In that moment, I vowed never to react with such anger again. Naturally, that vow became a learning process. I had to learn to manage my emotional reactions over time.

So it is with students. Students have to manage their reactions and they learn this as a process over time. Some of the emotional qualities that I begin with in the middle years include:

• Self-control
• Calmness
• Self-discipline
• Self-confidence

Emotional literacy is a teachable process.

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