Approaching 140 mph in his 2004 Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale at Watkins Glen Raceway, I sense that my student driver has a death grip on the steering wheel.

“Let go of the steering wheel!” I direct him via our inter-helmet communicator.

“What?” He shouts back, a brain surgeon probing the limits of the projectile he just purchased.

I tell him, “Release your death grip on that wheel.  You can’t sense the car when you’re so tense.” This is more information than Dr. Joel can handle on the fly.  I ask him to park the car so I can demonstrate.   We switch sides and strap in.  Engine on, I pull on the right paddle shifter of the fastest car that doctor’s money can buy.  Shifting up through the gears I carefully blend back into traffic on the racetrack.  I goose it going up the esses (entering a fast right hander at 90mph, then uphill left at 110, then right again exiting at the top of the curves at 130).  Dr. Joel observes and comments: “Your hands hardly move!” Thank you. Perfect compliment.  Object lesson delivered.

Driving up the esses should be sheer poetry.  Driving on rain, ice and snow is done with a light touch, with smooth transfers left to right, gas to brake.  Race car steering wheels are thick, providing more feedback to the driver. But the tighter you hold the wheel, the less you feel the car. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s fact.

And so it is in life.  If you’re too intense about what you’re doing, you’ll miss crucial data points.  If you have a death grip on your function, choking the life out of your team, or supplier, you’ll lose sight of your own ‘vehicle’ (your career).  Are you oblivious to ‘track conditions’ around you (your superiors, peers, subordinates – customers)?  A lighter touch is needed.  At 140 in nose-to-tail racing traffic, staying alert to surroundings is critical to safety.  Are you getting a sense of your current situation, being alert to inputs, to people around you? Their moods?  Their view of circumstances?  When you sense that you belong, that you’re in the zone, you’ll experience what we racers mean when we say, “the track is coming to me.”

But there is also time for intensity.  Seven years later another track student brings a 2011 Ferrari 430 Scuderia, a red rocket with license plate: SCUDMSSL.  It’s Sunday afternoon. He’s been on track since Friday morning.  His instructor left; the driver is reassigned to me.  We go out on track.  I observe how he drives one lap, then I tell him: “Okay, I see what you’ve got.  Let’s work!  GAS, GAS, GAS!  BRAAAAAKE! Turn in! Now GO, GO, GO!, BRAAAAKE! Turn in! GO! Go for it, now! GAS, GAS! NO BRAKE HERE, NO BRAKE – TURN IN! GAAAAS!”

We did two sessions like that.  He had never gone so fast in his life.  When we stopped at the paddock he literally jumped out of the car – delirious!  He was so happy.

I guess I take umbrage at the notion that personal attributes and EQ are generally referred to as ‘soft skills’.  The reality, however, is that we screen for IQ.  We rarely screen for EQ, or we do so only as an afterthought.  But I suggest that as a hiring manager you want your candidate to have both IQ and EQ.  As a candidate, you want to deliver both. It’s not an EITHER / OR proposition.  It’s BOTH / AND.

On one side of the interview table, when I coach an executive as a candidate for a position, or on the other side, when I coach a senior leadership team screening candidates to fill a key position, it strikes me that they primarily dwell on the IQ (by this I mean the cluster of education, skills and experience in a specific discipline and industry).  They relegate the EQ to a casual conversation, if at all.

I would dare anyone to say that determination, resourcefulness, tenacity, flexibility and high tolerance for ambiguity are soft skills.  Anyone who has had to learn to be more assertive, or become more collaborative, or more detailed, or more strategic would tell you that there is nothing soft or easy about learning those characteristics. They are as difficult – no, more difficult – to master than any “hard” skill, such as writing software or passing certified public accountant boards. Granted, EQ can be characterized as interpersonal skills, different from, say, clinical skills or engineering skills, but referring to EQ skills as soft creates a delusion that they are somehow less important, if not irrelevant, which is definitely counterproductive.

Some corporate recruiters will emphasize interpersonal skills, including leadership and teamwork. Alan Breznick, of Cornell University, asserts in the university’s Johnson School of Business Magazine that “such intrinsic qualities as leadership and teamwork are difficult if not impossible to teach on the job.” Recruiters must find a way to elicit EQ from the candidates through the interview.

Karin Ash, director of Cornell’s Johnson School Career Management Center, says, “Recruiters want candidates who can clearly articulate who they are, where they’re going, and who can persuade other people around them.”

Try this, Google-search this term: assertive.  Yahoo-search confident.  Bing-search collaborative.  Wikipedia-search diplomatic.  Okay, now you know what those things are.  But how difficult is it to acquire those traits – if you are lacking them?  Very.  Difficult.

Now Google-search: lean six sigma, or social media marketing, or petroleum refining.  You can become conversant on the most difficult technical topics if you spend enough time reading and researching.  But how do you go from aggressive to collaborative?  How do you go from arrogant to humble?  How do you go from compliant to competitive?  See my point?  There is nothing soft about acquiring EQ skills.

Your IQ?  You bring that along, almost from birth.   But your EQ?  Your EQ is something you work on to develop, to hone and finesse during your entire life.

And that, as they say, makes all the difference.

When was the last time that you worked on your business?  Not in your business.  On your business.  Oh, you don’t have a business?  Well, if you don’t have a business, just pretend that you are the business.    Have you been passed over for a promotion?  Did you fail to close that big deal?  Have you been three times a finalist after the interviews, but first runner up?  It’s time for strategy.

Many readers will be making New Year’s resolutions.   That’s okay. I’m sure you can sit down with a cup of coffee and come up with a half a dozen New Year’s resolutions – but wait, there’s more.  I’m thinking more like investing as much as one week or 10 days of really assessing where you’ve been this year, and where you’d like to be at the end of next year, 3 years, or even 5 years.  This is not about making a bucket list of activities – people to see, things to do.  As Michael Porter says: “Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.”

How will you be different next year?  How will your business be different?  Let’s get you started:

• Your first New Year’s resolution should be to take time for strategy.
• Sit down with your business partners, leadership team or family and tell them that you have to take some time, a few days at least, to go off and think about the paths you’ve traveled and make some plans about the future direction.
• You don’t have to go to an expensive place.  You can retire for a few days to your nearest public library.  Take this opportunity to visit a few libraries in your area.  Get to know the Information Desk professional; they have studied about how to help you most effectively; they have an arsenal of information – all free.
• Ask members of your Board of Advisors to meet with you; ask your coach for some perspectives.
• Even if you don’t have a business this can be an investment in your own professional development – learn more about yourself and your potential.  If you decide to take some college courses, then ask yourself to what end are you taking those courses?

A rudimentary strategy is better than none at all.  A strategy is part of your internal guidance system, part of your core, part of your brand – and it’s important that you be aligned with it.  I love this quote from Michael Porter in his Billion Dollar Ideas blog: “The best CEOs are teachers, and at the core they teach strategy, by going out to employees, to suppliers, and to customers, and repeating, “This is what we stand for, this is what we stand for!”

Someone said: “Visualizing is a dream, but if you put it on the calendar – it’s a plan.”  So, when are you taking time for strategy?

In sports car racing when we talk about “lifting” we mean lifting your foot off the gas pedal just before braking for a corner.  The opposite of lifting is going flat out, pedal-to-the-metal (where the accelerator pedal is pinned to the metal floor).  This topic is about the propensity many of us have of “lifting” during the month of December.

If you are unemployed or self-employed looking for your next potential customer you may be tempted to have these thoughts, “Well, I think that companies are winding down for the year; they are taking it easy, cruising towards the holidays, so I’ll just kick back and wait for the new year.”  Isn’t that what we say to ourselves?  Isn’t that what we tell our spouses and friends?

Big mistake.

December is not the time to lift.  Here’s why: Have you talked to sales professionals?  Guess which is their busiest month?  If their employer has a fiscal year ending on December 31, they are working day and night to finish the year with a rise in their top line sales volume.  Their companies have accounted for every sales day, and they expect over-the-top results in December.  They are racing flat- out,  pedal-to-the-metal-and-steer!

In December we must maintain the same sense of urgency as our prospects.  If, on the other hand, we become complacent in December believing that everyone else is slowing down, here’s the likely outcome:

• The senior leadership teams of our prospect companies are still racing towards the finish – for a good / better / best sales year.
• Their sales professionals are pulling all the stops, collecting all the IOU’s and favors so they can finish a strong year and improve their own bonus payout.
• In addition, those who are self employed or looking for work who don’t lift in December are busy making plans to meet and network with their prospect companies not only for December, but also for January.
• In short, their eyes are still on the finish line  – they’re not lifting in December.

On the other hand, if you lift in December you’ll find out – in January – that not only didn’t you make any meetings in December, but you have none scheduled for January.  Why?  Because you lifted in December.  So you lost not one, but two months of effectiveness.

For December you have to have a sense of urgency.  In fact, you have to meet or exceed the sense of urgency you see in your prospective company.

As John Kotter says in his book, A Sense of Urgency, “At the very beginning of any efforts to make changes of any magnitude, if a sense of urgency is not high enough…everything becomes so much more difficult.”

The holidays in December are not an opportunity to become complacent.  The race is not over.  We must stay on the gas: pedal-to-the-metal-and-steer!

In December, don’t lift…

Recently, during a conversation with a friend about her struggle to convincingly define her space and appropriate sphere of influence within a large not for profit organization, I reminisced about various milestones in my own ascent to management and leadership.

My friend, we’ll call her Katy, has been rising steadily in her organization over the last seven years. She is now in charge of the largest portion of budget and headcount in her area office. Katy has climbed steadily to that platform by dint of her extraordinary performance and reliable results. Yet, her senior leader seems bent on bestowing title and salary on one of Katy’s peers who functions largely by total delegation (“dumping”) and braggart persona while manifesting mediocre to poor results.

Katy and I met for coffee. After getting an update about her current condition, I remarked: “Katy, leadership is a lonely road.” I remember clearly when, just after grad school in my early 20’s, I was working as a guidance counselor in a downtown school district. One of the Union teachers approached me and advised me that I was earning an unsavory reputation – that of someone who worked past the official end of the school day, 3:15 PM. Her message? It was imprudent to be above average; I should not stray from the poor performance plantation. A few years later, while working in the federal government I was supervising 142 field employees over five states out of the Philadelphia regional office. At that time, it was my custom to bring the Wall Street Journal to work to read during lunch. One day, one of my coworkers, Jim, who had worked there all his life, saw my Journal tucked under my arm and remarked with a smirk, “Wow! Wall Street Journal! What the hell do you think you are, Luis, an executive?” I replied, “Yes, Jim.”

Those are minor skirmishes, to be sure, but such are the vicissitudes of aspiring to leadership. Leadership is often a lonely, rock strewn path. One way to overcome is to meet with and consult other leaders. That’s why I founded Getting There Executive Network. GTEN is a network of leaders and executives who gather weekly to exchange perspectives, strategies and tactics necessary for leadership. A great leadership coach, Lee Thayer, observes: “If you intend to pursue real achievement, you have to be crazy enough and committed enough to crash through all of that.” Dr. Thayer adds, “To your peers, you may be a fool for simply trying to do your job well, or to pretend to own your own destiny.”

Katy and I discussed how to make progress and maintain composure against a bulwark of protected mediocrity. She is thoughtfully considering how much longer she should stay in that environment. I admire Katy’s courage and perseverance under such perversity. It’s abundantly clear to me she has what it takes to go to the next level. Meantime, Katy is crashing through all of that, navigating the shoals of office politics by employing conflict resolution strategies like accommodation, compromise, collaboration, avoidance – and sometimes, just forcing.