— organizational productivity, Engineering personality, Somatic Coaching

Speaker: Gary Herman, Gradient Coaching
Meeting Date: Thursday, November 4, 2010
Time: 6:00 pm Networking; 6:30 pm Management Forum/Guided Networking; 7:00 pm sandwich dinner; 7:30 pm Presentation
Location: Ramada Sunnyvale

 
Summary:
Management Forum / Guided Networking: Bring Your Management Challenge; Arrive by 6:30 PM to join this exciting Management Forum. Following informal networking is a guided discussion typically related to the topic of the evening’s after dinner talk, or of general Technology Management interest.
Light Dinner: This month we’re continuing with our light dinner format — typically sandwiches, salad, drinks, and cookie or similar light dinner.

Presentation: The Emotionally Intelligent Engineer: Can People Really Change?
In an organizational setting, continued career progress for engineers or other professionals whose education and training have strongly emphasized intellect, analysis, and logic often requires development of emotional/relational, rather than purely intellectual, competencies.  Sometimes the consequences of lack of emotional competency in an individual are flagrant – e.g., the seemingly irreplaceable Chief Scientist whose abrasive, conflict-prone personality erodes morale, stimulates turnover, soaks management time and attention, and reduces organizational productivity.  Other times, the consequences are less noticeable – careers stalled, potential unfulfilled.  Despite the extensive body of findings of the importance of so-called “soft skills” to individual and team success, reactions of technologists and technically trained managers to emotional intelligence and similar training programs often range from indifference to discomfort to outright hostility.

This talk draws on results from management science, neurobiology, developmental psychology, psychotherapy, and leadership coaching to provide a tangible, grounded perspective on “emotional intelligence” – what it is, why it matters, how and why individuals differ, and how motivated individuals can build new competencies in the emotional/relational domain.  In particular, I’ll examine emotional intelligence from the perspective of the field of interpersonal neurobiology, which relates the distinct cognitive and emotional patterns of individuals to specific aspects of human physiology, brain structure, function, and development/evolution from birth.  In a sense, this perspective allows us to understand the stereotypic “engineering personality” as the external consequence of a particular set of architectural specializations in the internal system architecture of the adult human organism.  The good news in this is that, even for adults in mid-life, the our psychobiology remains plastic, and with the right practices, sustained over time, the internal architecture can be “re-balanced,” can become more operationally integrated, and can produce behaviors that are better aligned with the present circumstances and goals of the individual in question.  I’ll use examples from somatic coaching to illustrate how this process typically unfolds.