Pardon my ADD for a moment, but consider for a moment all of the moving parts of a business: marketing, sales, operations, finance, client retention, human resources. The list goes on to include technology, processes, products, pricing, strategy, etc. For all of the perks of being a leader, there is a down-side. The leader is responsible for everything, but unable to focus on any one thing for very long, lest other priorities go unattended, and pull the company down.

A good leader knows the value of leverage, of pushing work down to capable people below. But for most men and women in the leader’s chair, the most difficult area of the company to achieve sustainable leverage is the sales function. Why is that? Is it a lack of talent available to the company? Is it a training issue? Are the processes out of alignment? Why is the sales function – the fuel that drives the machine forward – the hardest part of any company to leverage?

I would love to hear your thoughts…

You have all heard it’s not what happens to you but how you react to what happens to you that makes you successful.

If you buy into this, then you will probably also agree that economic cycles are inevitable.  What’s not inevitable is whether you have the emotional intelligence to succeed regardless of circumstances.  We believe by developing and utilizing emotional intelligence quotient (EQ), more than intelligence quotient (IQ), you can position your team to make wins inevitable during the economic down-turn.

A relatively new area of psychological research, emotional intelligence is described by Salovey and Mayer (in their book by the same title) as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”

So what do you think about EQ?  How are you managing your (and your team’s) EQ in 2009?

Are you attacking the marketplace or waiting to see what happens?