Posted by on May 30, 2025.
As we think about leadership development activities, one of the current most requested skill development areas for most leaders is evolving ones emotional IQ.
We like to think about emotional IQ in 3 areas:
- Do I understand myself and do I have a language to explain why I do things the way that I do?
- When I interact with any audience do I observe how my preferred style impacts that audience?
- When I observe differences in my preferred style versus my audience, am I able to makes small changes in my style to align with that of my audience for a more efficient and effective interaction?
The data collected with the Profiles PXT Select provides the language for you to explain, in detail, why you do things the way that you do.
We all have heard the phrase “Listen to Learn.” Your best persuaders have very good listening skills. The question is: What do we listen for? If we are selling a product, we listen for opportunities for our product benefits to be a solution for our client. If we work in an organizational function other than sales and are persuading a member of our department, we listen for openings where our solution can add value. Usually, that is the extent of our listen to learn perspective.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article surveying 230 buyers 81% of those buyers indicated they would prefer to buy from someone who shared their mannerisms. The number 1 reason the sale did not close was the buyer did not TRUST the salesperson. This information would suggest that if we can mimic the mannerisms of our client, we can enhance TRUST and improve our potential to close our persuasion activity. The Profiles PXT Select provides specific insights about how to listen and determine key style insights once we know our own style using our own PXT Select results.
For example, The Thinking Style section of the PXT Select tells us how we learn and process information. Our tendency is to share information in similar fashion to how we learn it. Audiences learn information the way their cognitive abilities allow them to process information. So, we use our emotional IQ and learn how our audience best processes the information we are sharing. As an example, if we notice that our audience picks up information faster than we are presenting, we can speed up the pace with which we deliver the information so they do not get bored. What we are listening for is how quickly people speak relative to us. Generally speaking, the faster people speak the more quickly they process. The slower people speak the more slowly we should deliver the information.
As we begin to understand how to make these small adjustments in how we share information and the intensity of our behaviors, we immediately build trust with our audience. The more trust we develop, the more we can ask for during our persuasion activities. If you would like to learn more about how the PXT Select can support your Leaders Emotional IQ development, contact Profiles, Inc.
