Episode 275: Emotional Quotient-Intelligence in Philanthropy – the Office, Donors, and Teamwork
It's a fabulous day right here on this edition, and I hope for every edition, on the podcast of Around with Randall. I want to spend more time talking about over the next several months. How do we get into finding the best people? How do we bring out the best in us to really give us an opportunity to be successful?
The organizations we have successful? Because at the end of the day, we're a people driven business. And I want to talk today around with and discuss the idea of emotional quotient. Or maybe emotional intelligence is another way of saying it and why and how it fits into what we do, both as a leader, as a gift officer, infrastructure team, and with donors, board members, volunteers as an important component of success.
Now, if you think back on the podcast, I've talked about kind of the emotional context in different ways. Three podcasts I allude to. If you're looking for specific things in these areas in episode seven, way in the Wayback Machine, almost originally was this idea of how you use emotion in the stewardship process. In episode 97, I talked about it from the idea of, what really happens when we have moments where it's difficult, it's challenging, and how we can't let our emotions get the best of us.
In episode 218, I talk about kind of the idea of people who have negative emotions or negative situations and how that emotion will drag you or other people down, and you how to look for more positive people today is more of a framework around those things, plus others. Because I've talked about offices, I've talked about relationships, I've talked about leadership.
But what I realized is I've never put context around this idea of EQ or emotional intelligence. So we'll start at the top, work our way down. Five major suggestions on maybe how you can look at it internally, how you can develop it, how you can figure out how to work with it to make it better for you as an individual and for the office, maybe for donors and boards and others who are in the nonprofit philanthropic space.
We have to start, though, at the top about what we're actually talking about. So what's kind of a basic definition of all of this? It really refers to the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's emotions. And then also within the context of a team where everybody else's emotions are and recognize and influence theirs, hopefully in a positive way.
There could be an argument that nefarious or negative people would want to influence them negatively, to raise how they feel about themselves. I want to not maybe spend a lot of time on that. Really focus about who we are and what we're trying to do. There's some common components that you hear about in Daniel, Goleman and others have written a lot about this, but they kind of frame it with about five things, or emotional attributes that are important to trying to figure out EQ or emotional intelligence.
They're things like self-awareness, self-regulation. And that goes back to the episode I was talking about in terms of episode 97, of how you deal with your own emotions and really how you react to things in maybe not the worst or most negative manner, the idea of empathy, the idea of social awareness. So the social connections or relationships that are part of your community, office, society, family, and then lastly the relationship management, your choices around this, all of these are really, really important.
So self-awareness to me really ties to what I believe in. And I did in the podcast on this about Abraham Maslow in the hierarchy of needs. The idea of self-awareness is the idea of self-actualization. How do we look at ourselves and know that we we're not perfect, but we are okay with kind of what we see in the mirror.
And most importantly, we recognize how to get better self regulation. We've talked about how do you manage that deal a lot with this. With my kids, particularly with our son, who's kind of in an age 12, where the emotions are coming and puberty is kicking in, and he's kind of seeing the world a little bit differently. We talk a lot about what I call washing it.
We do this a lot on the basketball floor, but it also applies to taking tests and other things where you have to learn this idea of regulation. Are you going to let that affect you, or can you wash it away and sports or in basketball, some lot of my life around sports and now coaching my kids teams, I talk about, hey, that last play, you can't go back and fix that bad official's call.
You can't adjust. What are you going to do to wash it? Same applies to us. What can you do to let things go? How do you do that? Whether it's go down the hallway or the bathroom and kind of take a moment to kind of quiet everything, go take a walk or just realize, hey, there are things in life I can't control and I need to become more aware of that and more okay with it.
Empathy is all about, as we well know, is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and understanding the circumstances that we are. I think this is a part of EQ that is absolutely under discussed, because when you bring an office of people together or you're dealing with donors, they bring their own perspectives, their own world into this. And I really want to paraphrase my dad because he uses a used a four letter word that you can swear very often, but his context was that most people don't give a darn, and you can figure out a four letter word that might fit into that something.
There are bad people, but they're looking at their own life through their own kind of filters, what's going on for them. And so those filters get heavy, particularly when there's a challenge that they don't see the broader world, they don't see what's out there in terms of what's happening in other people. And so they don't put themselves in other people's shoes.
So empathy is a huge part of this. Social awareness is critically important. This is one that my nine-year-old daughter scares me to death because man, she's already got this licked and I am like a neophyte at 55. There's significant difference in our age 44 years. She's genius. She's a genius. She can read a room and who needs a hug and who to stay away from like that?
She reminds me of her mother. It's one of the qualities amongst many that I just find fascinating about my wife, because I can't do it. I'm kind of headlong into things and realize, wait, I probably should have taken a step back or not taken a step forward at all. Being able to sense and see what's going on around you is, is really interesting character trait.
And what we need to do is figure out how to maximize that, not for a negative outcome, but just to be aware of how we deal with our own emotions and the emotions of the group. And finally, relationship management. And I steal from my wife. And what she teaches our daughter on this is, is that you have to realize what's really a friend issue, what is an association issue and what's just a societal issue.
And what my wife talks about is, for the nine-year-old, keeping it simple, you need to have lots of friends because some days some girls are going to be mean. Some day some girls are going to be catty. Some day they're going to be needing a friend and a hug. And the more friends you have and the more connections you have.
But most importantly, what you realize amongst a very, very, very, very small group people are the people you trust that they're the ones you got to be most concerned about. This is all about trying to read the room in terms of donor conversations, in terms of office environment, dealing with the appointment, disappointment and rejection, which is something we deal with in philanthropy all the time.
If we're doing our job well and understanding the motivations of not only our donors, but also what's going on internally in the office. Which brings us to the kind of the second we're moving down more into the tactical is why is this important in the nonprofit sector? Why is this important to us? Well, that we're a relationship driven business model, that our industry is all about relationships, whether it's internally or externally, that 90 plus percent of what we do, if we do it well, yes, we have a CRM and yes, there's finance and other maybe what I would call business things, but we don't build anything, we don't sell anything.
What we do is build relationships internally and externally with volunteers and our board, with volunteers and our community, with donors and our community, and internally with the office team of people that are all trying to accomplish a really challenging mission because there's no profit in it. It's about betterment, love, hope, making people's lives better that we need to realize what we do.
So it's a relationship based business model. We've chosen that. The second is, is that there's a lot of, I think, a lot more high emotion moments, environments in the nonprofit space that when we think about what nonprofits do just kind of holistically, it's health care, it's education, it's poverty, it's housing, it's food, it's community wellbeing, it's mental health.
All of these things are highly emotionally charged, and we work really hard at times to stay kind of apolitical because we have hopefully donors that are Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, old and young, black and white, green and blue. We're interested in is moving what our river, our mission is forward in the most effective way, but we deal every day as services and highly charged, highly emotional content areas.
Number three is that when we talk about kind of why this matters, I think greatly in the nonprofit space, is it ten years in our profession are incredibly low. Now, I'm not saying it should be the, you know, utopian days of the 1950’s where you go to work and you stay in a company for 40 years. But the average tenure of a CEO is right at three years, gift officers in 18, 19 months.
We're turning people over so fast. I look at resumes maybe more often than not on LinkedIn, and I'm just amazed that there are 18 months, 20 months, the next job, the next job, the next job. That turnover amongst advancement leaders is just common, which means if we can't pay and we have kind of a turnover issue, are there ways in which we can make the environment in which people work better, which would maybe elongate ten years, which were the longest relationships were steeped in those relationships, which may lead to greater success for our nonprofits.
It's the inability to kind of work through or navigate these internal relationships with boards, presidents, program leaders, donors, and others that I think sometimes shortens the tenure of most people because they go look for something better over there. And what they realize it's not better over there because it's more about emotional quotient or emotional intelligence of themselves that they're missing.
Obviously, number four, number four, obviously is about donor trust and credibility. I mean, I'm not gonna spend much time on this. This is what we live by. But I have trust if we don't have the ability to build relationships, then nonprofit work does work really well because there's not a lot of funding. Number five is just internal culture that there's so many strife and challenges in the nonprofit space.
We're not in this for the money. I'm not. I'm positively no art. Yes, we like a paycheck. But at the end of the day, to be candid, we don't overpay. We're probably underpaid. And so this office intelligence or office environment based on emotional intelligence is about cohesion and safety and retention and the ideas of wanting to go to the office.
You wake up saying, yeah, there struggles, challenges, issues I got to deal with. I got a lot on my to do list, but I like where I work. And so that ties to this idea of tenure, that we need office environments that are really, really great to keep and attract the best people. So let's get into the truly tactical.
How do we kind of look at approaches or mechanisms that help build emotional quotient or emotional intelligence in an office, in a person, in an organization, in structure? Five things that I think are worthy of conversation. So the first is, and this comes from early on in my career, is the idea of building self-awareness through a kind of a structured reflection process.
When I began my career, I worked for the Jesuits, the Jesuit priest in the Catholic faith, and Saint Ignatius, who was a patron saint of the Jesuits, lived in, started his life in, Spain. And then, then during a recovery process began the idea of reflections. He called them the spiritual exercises. So religious connotation. But it doesn't have to be during his recovery and then eventually went to, the Vatican.
And he developed this idea that reflection allows people the opportunity to think about, in his case, or his instruction about God. Now, it doesn't have to be about religion or God. The idea of reflection is a tool that can be used to figure out what I was thinking and feeling when I was doing something. So like journaling is a mechanism of reflection or thinking about and having quiet time where you can contemplate what's going on and pull back from the immediacy of the moment is an idea of reflection.
Having small group conversations that are non accusatory and maybe bring the emotional, accusatory nature down a level as it is a part of reflection, that we can do certain things because the outcomes of using reflection and doing it well is this idea of recognizing patterns in behavior not only of yourself, but in others, and the interaction between people.
And actually what we know about reflection when done correctly. Journaling formally. Informally, yoga is a form of kind of reflection in a way, it reduces stress, rejection, conflict it it makes an environment much easier to deal with. It brings cohesion to groups and individuals. In terms of self-actualization, Maslow talks about this. Do you allow your team a chance to pull back, or is it foot on the gas pedal all the time?
Do you get a chance to retrench? There's one thing that I really like that's a very personal thing that aligns with this in the way my business model works. If you know me or don't, I'll tell you now I'm a firm of one. By design, I can have 4 or 5, six, eight people tomorrow, probably find them a lot of business, but I don't want that because of several factors, but one of which is I come to an office.
I do not work at home, although you might see the home office when I do some recording of the podcast from downstairs. But this is the office that I live in. Every day I leave home, drop my daughter off, grab my Diet Mountain Dew, head to the office, and I work here, and I'm given a chance because it's me to have a sense of opportunity to reflect, to just kind of think, what am I dealing with?
What do I need to deal with? How do I organize myself? What do I like about myself? What do I need to go do and get better at? And that brings more harmony. And then I go home every night to the place that I'm, I think, at my best. And that's with my wife and kids, as my mom lives six blocks away, as a son, as a husband, and as a dad.
But I get a chance to pull back. Do you have that chance? Do you make that chance? Do you give your team that chance where there's a chance to kind of think about this idea of donor visits and office environments and peer reflection, maybe even doing springing someone to help do some coaching with this, just to help build a more sense of awareness of self and a small group or team in a structured reflection type way.
So reflection number one, number two is to normalize feedback in the office or in life that emotional intelligence improves when people have honest feedback. One of the things that I've learned as a parent, and I hope I'm right, but I won't believe in it and work at it, is. I tell my kids that life is a lot. When you think about what we go through and the relationships we have and where trust lies, well, like being on an ocean in a small boat and there are waves and you're going up and down, up and down.
And my children look forward as we all should. That's where life is going. But what I keep telling them is you fail sometimes to realize that if you turned around, you'd see your mother and I in the boat with you. And this all goes back to this idea of feedback. We are going to be the most honest people with them in their life.
We are going to tell them when they screw up, when they take this off, when they've embarrassed us, when they've been. More importantly, who cares? We think there are some cells and what's caught some of that is, is that they come to us and say, what are your thoughts on this? Let's then pivot this now towards an office.
Maybe even you think about your friendships or your family when you have honest feedback. People trust each other and they're willing to listen because that leads to improvement if it's done in the right way. We are not harsh with our children. I don't belittle them. At least I hope I don't. It's instructive. It's constructive. Hey, have you thought about this?
Hey, have you done this? Well, if we have these kind of thought processes and trust with the right people, what that does is causes the emotional quotient or emotional intelligence of an individual, an office to rise. It also then helps them be more self-aware, which leads to things like if you're a gift officer, being aware of the signals that donors give or the emotion that's present in a conversation, being more empathetic because there's an opportunity to help them see beyond themselves.
And it needs to be regular. There's nothing worse in an evaluation process, formally or informally. It's done once a year and like you think you're doing great, and then you go in and you have to 12 months, you're like, oh my gosh, there's a dumpster fire here. This is why we do conferences with kids 3 or 4 times a year, because nobody wants to be surprised.
Why would we want anything less for adults? So is there a normalized feedback process, whether it's a group you've got suggestions we talked about in the last episode giving opportunities for people to put feedback in. Are you as a leader, meeting with your team? Are you sitting down with your board member? Are you sitting down? You should be sitting down with your donors.
But in terms of this idea of connection, and that leads to feedback loops where you hear things and can provide things that make people better. And it's trusted and it's constructive meaning it means or drives toward improvement. Feedback loops. Number three is an integrated emotional intelligence. When you hire. I talk about this all the time. Of the three things that I truly believe we should be looking for when we hire anyone, and it's not based on years of experience, and I'm one of them.
Fire in their belly. Will they show up, stay late, get the job done? They have. They have a sense of pride in what they do. Number two is can they communicate? Can they listen? Can they speak? Can they build relationships? Do they represent the organization in the right way? And number three, do they have a sense of resiliency?
You've heard me say these three things. If you listen to the podcast every once in a while, resiliency is all about, hey, if something doesn't go right, gift officer, they don't get the appointment. They don't like, crumble into a pile of goo for three days and you don't get anything out of them. Well, interestingly enough, I never thought about those three things in the context until kind of beginning to think about this episode as really important emotional quotient, emotional intelligence issues.
It's about can the person fit into the organization to have everyone rise, accomplish what they need to accomplish, but not take away from everybody because they pull energy out? Everybody because they are not deeply or driven towards maybe fitting in and having a sense of self-actualization. So curiosity and listening and the ability to just see and describe relationships and they can handle and can show examples of that, of disagreement and disappointment really become important because you can hire the greatest person in the world.
But if they are a real problem, as we've talked about in a recent episode, just kind of destroys everything. So maybe a question for you to ask when you're interview, when you're talking with people, tell me about a time when a relationship with a donor colleague became difficult. What did you notice about their perspective and what did you do about it?
I've never had that question asked to interview, but that would help kind of have a deep dive into EQ where are they? What do they see? How do they deal with it? Number four is assessing empathy through stories, particularly when you do the interview process. We're back to kind of that hiring. So how do you get people the right people into your office?
Can they describe situations from multiple perspectives? When I thought about this one, I caused me to think about, again, raising children as they should, 12 and nine. That's the way it should be. They see life through their eyes, and as they get older, I find myself always asking them, can you see this from the other person's perspective?
12-year-olds getting closer. The nine-year-olds got it. Although it doesn't always come to the forefront. But if you can put yourself in their shoes, this idea of empathy and then turn it into not only office dynamics, but also interviewing their, what it does is it might allow them to see their blind spots. It might help them to chance to grow.
And it's about thinking about predictive behavior. And if you do this in the right way in the current office structure, can you see what they're going through? How would you tell their story? Or in the interview process about describing situation where there were multiple perspectives and what the viewpoint was? What you end up with is growing empathy in the dynamics of an office.
And that's possible. So create opportunities through stories to develop empathy. The final one is to is really tactical. But to train gift officers to observe donor motivation I always talk about the tactics if done too many podcasts, the list of the movements, processing. But I've begun to talk about and kind of writing about, and there'll be more about this coming out that we've put the moves management processes forefront as to how we do our jobs and we fail.
It fails to recognize what actually is going on is the donors process to make a gift, which is all based on emotion. The decision to make major gifts is an emotional one. Yes, sir. Maybe tax implications, yes, or maybe financial implications. I'm not denying that. But their choice of you and how and when are emotional, they are drivers of that inner being, of the donor who are looking to figure out what they're trying to accomplish.
And so if you we trained gift officers, relationship managers to focus more on what they're going through rather than the steps we have to go through, we would build a more robust relationship process, which is focused on accomplishing their goals rather than ours. And this framework around donor motivation is really about the concept of really studying the what I call amateur philanthropic psychology.
Seven phases of philanthropy. Go back and look at that. The Princeton File Study from 1994, which is kind of the seminal donor understanding of seven phases philanthropy, Princeton file. You get the book, or you can find the podcast where I kind of break it down, the idea of what donors are going through and how we meet them, where they are.
If we train gift officers to focus more about the emotional motivation, we'd actually be training them in EQ emotional intelligence. What is what is, what's going on? How do you see it? How do you feel it that they're going through? And how do we bring that into what we're trying to accomplish? So five things to think about, whether it's the idea of art, of reflection, getting a chance for people to kind of recalibrate and listen and think and, and have an opportunity to kind of focus on what's happened and how they fit into it.
Number two is the normalized process of feedback. Number three is this idea of integrating emotional intelligence into the hiring process. Number four is a subset of that is really about story based empathy. How do you get someone to see different perspectives. And number five is to think about donors from their emotional perspective when it comes to their ability and willingness and desire to make a gift.
You do those five things. You're developing emotional quotient, emotional intelligence in your office, in yourself and your donors and your relationships and what will come of it if you if it's done correctly, these people are more willing to make mistakes. They're more open to constructive criticism. They will see themselves more holistically. They will become more aware of what others are doing.
They will listen more carefully, and they'll respond better under pressure. If everything's going great, I think about the basketball teams I go to even a young age when things are going great, everybody's happy. But when things get tough, I become not their basketball coach but their emotional coach. Everybody settle down. We're okay. That's why I use timeouts. We know what we're doing.
I'm trying to get them to settle down. The tactics of the game don't become as important as the emotion. The same on and off for an organization where there's a chance. Yeah. So all of this is to say that leadership and the models that we use about behavior and are important because teams adapt to them. That's why this you have more control over this and you do other things.
And so nonprofit work, think about it this way is deeply human. And strategy campaigns and data matter. But relationships are the core of who we are and what we do internally and externally. And so the best nonprofits and the nonprofit leaders use a combination of different tactics to create a competence in EQ, and that it may be one of the most overlooked and under realized and underappreciated parts of long term fundraising success.
If you can get a hold of it, if you can do some of these tactics, what you end up with is a stronger off, a stronger group people, stronger individuals, stronger relationships, and better outcomes for the things we believe in. That our mission drives the story that we've chosen to embrace. Don't forget to check out the blogs at HallettePhilantropy.com. Two per week, 90 Seconds reads.
I'm always reading, writing, thinking about things. Maybe there's something there. You get an RSS feed, how it plans to be.com, check out the blogs, other things there as well. I give away a lot free, including the things like the podcast, and if you'd like to, you can reach out to me a podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. If we spent more time thinking about others rather than ourselves, we would then really mirror or answer the thought process that I believe in from the old Gaelic saying some people make things happen, some people watch things happen.
Then there are those who wonder what happened. There are moments in life where we are stuck with being someone who's wondering what happened. I live that with our son, and his health challenges early on in his life doesn't make a difference. How much of a doer and a trendsetter I try to be, or trying to get things done, or be aggressive and get things done, never being satisfied.
There are moments when things happen. You're like, oh my gosh, I just got to hang. But for the most part, it's a choice. And if we could rally philanthropy and using what we learned today, maybe about emotional quotient, emotional intelligence, and really concentrate on what we are and what we do and why it's valuable. We can be more people.
We can be greater at making things happen. Having our organizations do more to make things happen for the people in the places in our community that are wondering what happened. Number one, pretty good for your community and for your nonprofit to do so, but also for you individually to make a contribution, to make a difference. And at the end of the day, that's what life should be all about.
How do we make the world a better place? The essence of the definition of philanthropy. Love of mankind, love of humankind. I look forward to seeing you the next time right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall. Don't forget, make it a great day.