Why Smart Leaders Fail: Emotional Intelligence Lessons from Amazon - Rich Hua

What's Your Deal? | Business Buying, Business Acquisitions, Investing & Exit Strategies

Host Matt Euler interviews Rich Hua, a former Amazon EQ evangelist, about the necessity of combining Emotional Intelligence (EQ) with IQ for

Key takeaways

• High levels of stress can reduce a person's functional IQ by as much as 50% to 60%.
• Rich Hua defines 'Epic Leadership' as the successful harmony of both EQ and IQ.

Main topics

• Emotional Intelligence (EQ) vs IQ
• Leadership development at Amazon

Notable quotes

Emotions are data.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a guide for leaders to integrate emotional aware

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Welcome to the What's Your Deal podcast, where we discuss business acquisitions, investments, management, and exit strategies. I'm your host, Matt Euler. Let's dive in. Speaker 2 (0:16) Welcome back to another episode of What's Your Deal? I am joined today by Rich Haw, and I am so excited to have him because he's going to talk with us today about emotional intelligence. And we're so focused as a world right at the moment, and AI, and IQ, and all of these different things that when Rich and I got together in Las Vegas many weeks ago at an event, I was just taken by the conversation we had. So I'm happy to share that with you today. So Rich, thank you for joining us. Speaker 1 (0:46) It is a pleasure to be here with you, Matt. Thank you for having me. Speaker 2 (0:48) Absolutely. So can we start by you sharing with the audience a little bit about your background and what kind of brought you on this path? Speaker 1 (0:56) Yeah, so I served for the last quite a few years as the chief EQ evangelist at Amazon and actually scaled emotional intelligence skill to over one and a half million people, both at Amazon and at Amazon customers, Fortune 500 companies, all over the world. I've been a student of and practitioner of emotional intelligence for decades. And that's because when I was younger, I started with no EQ. And I focused pretty much on IQ. And I realized somewhere in my 20s that this was not going to be a recipe for success. Being really smart was great, but something was dramatically missing. And that was that whole social emotional side. And now I've combined them into what I call epic leadership. That's EQ plus IQ. And that today is the recipe for success for anybody who wants to thrive, lead, and be able to do great things in this AI era. Speaker 2 (1:48) I love it. So there's a lot there, but let's start with EQ for anybody who's not clear exactly what that is. Can you describe that? And then also, why was it so important at the level that you were sharing that with Amazon as an example? Speaker 1 (2:03) Yeah, so EQ can be defined as essentially knowing how to have emotions work for you rather than against you. And the reality is every waking human during their waking hours is experiencing emotions 90 to 100 percent of their day. And it dramatically affects how we make decisions, our relationships, our focus, our creativity, our performance, our emotional, mental health. It's kind of like everything. So knowing how to harness that energy rather than being derailed by it or confused by it is really powerful. Research has found that your IQ. decreases by 50 to 60 % if you're stressed out and you don't know how to manage your emotions well. And so it can literally become dumber by a dramatic mile if you don't have the EQ skills along the IQ skills. Have you ever seen somebody really smart do or say something like super dumb? Yes. Right? Why does that happen? Because they literally drop their IQ. And so having those work together is key. And that's what I was able to help lots and lots of people at Amazon and some of the leading companies in the world realize that, yeah, you got here because maybe you're really smart. You have experience, you have technical capabilities, you have high IQ. But to optimize and maximize all that brain power, you really need to harmonize it with emotional intelligence skills. Speaker 2 (3:23) It's so amazing to me what I don't know until I know it. And I guess that's true for everybody. But it just, I mean, who would have thought? And so this was a personal mission for you. It sounds like what brought you to this, but how, what was the implementation of that? Like at a company like Amazon is an example. I mean, where do you start? What, how do you measure that? Speaker 1 (3:45) Yeah. So it really begins with empathy, meaning you have a really, really super smart people, brilliant, very successful, prominent, influential, you know, they've gotten to a certain level. with maybe a lot of IQ and whatever varying amounts of EQ. And really, it begins with this idea of what got you here won't get you there, right? Where do you actually want to go? What are your pains and challenges, hopes and dreams? And what's blocking you? And I help people understand that in 99 % of the cases, it's not IQ. You're not like not smart enough. You already have proven that you're actually very smart. It's something else. It's something like influence or self-awareness or cognitive control or grit or resilience or adaptability. And these are all things on more on the EQ side. And, you know, I face a lot of really skeptical people. I mean, these people were brilliant and very much data oriented, IQ oriented. And so I brought two pieces of information that were quite compelling. Number one is we're a data driven company. Emotions are data. They're actually very important data points that you must take into account if you want to actually be successful as a leader. Right. Just one simple data point. If you meet somebody in a meeting and this is their facial expression versus this facial expression. I mean, you should probably take that into account on how you approach that situation. Absolutely. It's kind of an important data point. And the other thing is, how many of us here want to be more successful? I'd ask that all the time. Speaker 2 (5:18) Yeah. Right? Speaker 1 (5:19) How many of us here want to be happier? Speaker 1 (5:22) I know it's here. I want to be, you know, healthier. Speaker 2 (5:26) I Speaker 1 (5:26) have some things that can help you get there. Right. And so that's what I helped a lot of people realize. I can help you achieve your goals more effectively if you actually work on this other side of your capabilities. And in the meantime, and the process being kinder doesn't hurt. Speaker 2 (5:43) Well, isn't that right? If Speaker 1 (5:44) you want to be happier, healthier, more successful, one of the keys is actually learning to be more empathetic and kinder because then you'll have more influence. And you make the people around you better while also elevating yourself and promoting your own success. Speaker 2 (5:57) Yeah. So is that a behavior? I mean, learning how to be more empathetic with people, which for somebody who's, you know, has an extremely high IQ, that may become more difficult. So is it a learned behavior? Is it a new awareness? I mean, what are some of the ways that people explore that? Speaker 1 (6:13) It's kind of, it's a lot of things actually, but I say it really comes down to mindset that comes out as behaviors. Right. A mindset or a mental model, it's a way of approaching something and then it changes the specific behaviors that you have. Like, for example, a very, very simple one is when leaders maybe start a meeting instead of just going, hey, what's on the agenda? What do we need to get to? Because we're all in a hurry. Just pause. And just do two minutes of, hey, I just wanted to check in. Anybody got any good news that they'd like to share or any highlights from their life? We'll take a few minutes to just talk about it. I mean, literally, a simple thing like that can change the tenor of the whole meeting. Another one is when leaders are talking to people. One of the most powerful ones is we're kind of in an engineering world that I lived in, very tech-oriented, solution-oriented. And when somebody brings a challenge, Instead of the first statement going, well, here's what you should do. Here's the solution. Change the behavior to, tell me a little more about that. Speaker 1 (7:17) What's been your approach? How do you feel about that? What have you tried so far? Like just understanding or even a real simple one, like how can I help? Speaker 2 (7:25) What Speaker 1 (7:26) can I do for you in this situation? And by the way, great advice for a lot of guys in their marriages. You know, don't just like give a solution. Maybe go, how can I help? And doing that one very simple thing, both in my marriage and with my kids and with my employees and colleagues. It allowed them to be able to say, well, actually, I just want you to listen for a little bit because, you know, I kind of just need a friend. Speaker 2 (7:50) Or, Speaker 1 (7:50) hey, I just need sort of a brainstorming partner to sort of bounce some ideas off of. Or, hey, I really could use some solutions. I'm banging my head against a wall. So that allows me to actually give them what they're looking for and what they need versus assuming and just activating my IQ. So that's just one very simple but really powerful way of being more empathetic. Speaker 2 (8:11) Okay. So it's, it's truly a communication style, but, but I'm assuming, but I also assume there's the, there's a behavior or an intent behind it because otherwise it's just lip service. Right. I mean, if it, yeah. Speaker 1 (8:24) Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:24) So how do you. Speaker 1 (8:25) And here's, here's the thing. I mean, um, there's sort of different philosophies about it, right? Some people say, well, you basically need to think at first and then you do it. Others say, well, act your way into feeling. The bottom line is they both work. It depends on your situation. Speaker 2 (8:40) Okay. Speaker 1 (8:41) And so for me, when I was younger, my empathy was extremely low. I had no idea how to actually, because I avoided emotions. I grew up with very high IQ, very low EQ. And that was by intention. I decided to shut off all my emotions. You know, as a kid, as an immigrant to America from Taiwan, I experienced kind of a lot of, you know, unpleasant feelings. And so I said, let me get rid of all those. And let me focus on the IQ and be a genius robot. Right. And it kind of worked actually well for a while. I mean, I got straight A's in high school. I got a perfect score on the SAT. I got in every college I applied to. I studied engineering at UC Berkeley. So my genius robot plan was going really great for a while. And then I did this thing that completely screwed it up. I got married. Speaker 2 (9:26) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:27) So basically what happened was my wife didn't mind the IQ, the genius part, but she really didn't like the robot part. Right. She wanted this thing called emotional connection, vulnerability,