My unplanned specialty: STEM leadership

One of the largest impact areas in my career came about rather unexpectedly. You see, I barely made it through my math and science courses in high school — clearly STEM work was not my unique talent; so when I was asked to work with a team of some of the most brilliantly sourced STEM Employees in the world, I was intimidated, to say the least. 

Though my brain was well developed in the areas of emotional intelligence, intuition, and creative problem solving, graphs and spreadsheets made me cringe. Talk about being thrown into the Lion’s den! I quickly found that marrying our diversity of thought and knowledge created a match made in heaven.

Interestingly, the High-Tech leaders I worked with were just as intimidated by my knowledge and expertise, as I was of theirs.  I was surprised to find that my STEM experts were fascinated by learning about human behavior and emotion.  They embraced the opportunity to understand this “other science.”

The learning journey helped them understand and strategize areas for improvement for getting the support and results they needed to be successful in their leadership aspirations.   

It was so gratifying to teach and coach these leaders on what I knew and to be well received, almost like they had discovered a long- lost part of themselves. And it was that foundation of emotional influencing skills they lacked, that were critical for connecting and evolving themselves and their teams. 

I chuckled when they said that learning about the soft side of communication and connecting with others was way harder than the ‘rocket science” they had studied!   

Most of them embraced becoming Emotionally Aware, Emotionally Competent, and Emotionally Sensitive. It helped them see things like why their “fascinating content” was often received with less than high enthusiasm by upward leadership, or why setting boundaries around helping, staying on track, being flexible and versatile, and choosing to be accountable impacted the rest of their team. 

They learned new ways of being and connecting with others including reading and adapting their behavior to facilitate influence. These new skills help with broader goals like strategy, large scale cost containment, product design/launch, team development and other critical organization impact projects.