RWL #184 - emotional intelligence of teams, empathy, and heroes.
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire - Forward Operating Base Last Homely House (FOB LHH)! You know, the seasons change about a month later than I always expect them to. I expect fall to start in September, but the leaves are still hanging on until late October. I expect winter to start in December, but we generally don’t get persistent snow until January. I expect spring to come in March, but the buds don’t show up on the trees until late April. And summer doesn’t really start until July. It was so hot this week, I decided to bake our pizza on the grill. This is our Italian Farmhouse pizza my middle daughter taught me to make when she was working at a restaurant by that name - olive oil, prosciutto, caramelized onions, a layer of arugula, then 4-cheese mix and gorgonzola. All topped with a balsamic reduction after it’s baked. This pizza rocks. We have a couple of window unit air conditioners, so we avoid heating up the house on hot days.
After I sent out The New Yorker article, This Old Man - Life in the nineties last week, one of the comments he made, that he doesn’t remember the details of a lot of life, really struck me. When I was in the Army moving every couple of years, I felt like life had a sense of punctuation. Now, having lived in one place for more than five years, I’m worried that one day I will wake up and twenty years will have gone by like one long run on sentence. So I decided to start a daily journal. For the last few days I’ve been trying to jot down a few facts about the day - mostly just bullets - but four or five things that differentiated that day from other days. I have enjoyed this discipline. The standard is pretty low - just a few incomplete sentences - which makes the project not very intimidating. I think this might make a nice record to keep me from wondering where the time went someday. Try it - you might like it, too.
Stay well and stay safe.
Read
What: HBR, Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups
https://hbr.org/2001/03/building-the-emotional-intelligence-of-groups
Why: This article was written by my colleague here at UNH, Dr. Vanessa Druskat and her coauthor Steven Wolff. Cited more than 1,000 times, this HBR article talks about the importance of developing the emotional intelligence of teams for productivity. I released an interview with Vanessa this week (see Listen below) and we talk at length about the material in this article.
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What: Across Two Worlds, Snap-Back and Gone-Forever Goods: Understanding the COVID Recession’s Economic Winners and Losers
Why: This blog post is an interesting look at how different economic goods are being affected by the COVID recession. The purchase and consumption of some goods are being delayed by COVID, but once it is over, people will engage in make up buying the author calls “snap-back” goods. These are new cars, appliances, etc. Other goods that were not purchased are not merely being delayed, they are gone forever, and he calls these “Gone-Forever” (clever, right?). Examples include things like haircuts. If you don’t get a haircut in June, you don’t go out and get two in July. So the haircut you would have had in June is gone forever - there is no catch-up buying of haircuts. So some industries just have to hang on and they will automatically be made whole when the catch-up phase begins, but some industries will likely just have to endure the losses. He gets into income elasticity and does a nice job with that, so this post would be useful for anyone teaching economics as well.
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What: The New Yorker, Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea
Why: Need a great story of courage, human vs. nature style? This is the story of Victor Vescovo and his goal of diving in a submarine to the five deepest points on Earth. It was a feat of technical genius and genuine courage. The article doesn’t make him out to be a cuddly guy, but it does highlight what it takes to accomplish a meaningful first. The article made me reflect on a different kind of heroism that seems to be mostly absent from the current social conversation. From the article:
But every age of exploration runs its course. “When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduction to “South,” Ernest Shackleton’s diary. “The concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War.” … A century later, adventurers tend to accumulate ever more meaningless firsts: a Snapchat from the top of Mt. Everest; in Antarctica, the fastest mile ever travelled on a pogo stick. But to open the oceans for exploration without limit—here was a meaningful record, Vescovo thought, perhaps the last on earth. In 1961, John F. Kennedy said that “knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.”
I feel like we should be celebrating heroes like Vescovo more. Accomplishments like Vescovo’s change our relationship with the natural world, and that is a benefit to all human beings.
Watch
What: TEDxOslo, Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world
Why: Roger Antonsen plays with a variety of visualizations to show that mathematics is about finding patterns and representing patterns in some sort of language. He offers lots of kinds of language and lots of ways to represent something. What does it mean to understand something? He argues you understand something if you can look at it from multiple perspectives. He closes with how this multiple perspective-taking is how we achieve empathy. This is a nice lesson for our time.
Listen
What: Health Leader Forge, Vanessa Druskat, PhD, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Management
https://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2020/07/vanessa-druskat-phd-associate-professor.html
Why: I’d been wanting to have my colleague Vanessa on for a long time. I met Vanessa through the NH Physician Leadership Program, which we both teach into. Vanessa studies and teaches about team emotional intelligence, helping organizations develop more effective norms and behaviors. She’s a fantastic teacher and has had a real impact on the field. In the full length version of the interview, we go through Vanessa’s intellectual journey from an early interest in social work to work on leadership, teams, and emotional intelligence. We talk in detail about a few of her papers, particularly a Harvard Business Review paper she coauthored called Building the Emotional Intelligence of Teams (see Read above).
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What: AUPHA Management Faculty Forum, Podcast with Mark Bonica (25 min)
Why: Yes, that’s me - what’s the use of having a newsletter if you can’t engage in a little shameless self-promotion every now and then? I actually think this is a great innovation by incoming AUPHA Management Faculty Forum chair Zach Pruitt. Zach is taking over chairmanship of the Management Faculty Forum from me next week. We’ve been working together for two years on trying to make the Forum useful to members. Zach came up with the idea of interviewing Forum members, all of whom are healthcare management professors. I think it will be a great project and I wish I had thought of it! Good luck Zach and thanks for letting me be the inaugural guest. Oh - I mostly talk about my use of self-directed learning in management instruction, after bragging about how nice it is to live in Seacoast New Hampshire and how beautiful UNH is, and of course kayaking.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)