North Texas Dentistry Special Issue 2020 NTD SP ISSUE 2020 DE | Page 6

leadership
In Crisis
A millisecond that can change everything
by Joel Small, DDS and Edwin McDonald, DDS
There is an old saying that our success is determined by the “three
A’s”; ability, availability, and affability. There is no question that
ability and availability are key components for success of any clinical
healthcare practice. Affability is a curious quality, however.
In recent years, the “softer skills” of affability have been well researched
and have now risen in stature among the critical three A’s.
Daniel Goldman refers to these softer skills as “emotional intelligence”
in his seminal book of the same name. Becoming emotionally
intelligent is a process through which we become acutely aware of
our responses and how we show up in any given situation. It is defined
as the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions,
and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.
Critical to this acquired skill is our degree of self-awareness
and the ability to self-regulate.
Emotional intelligence has become so highly regarded as a leadership
competency that there are now widely used assessments to gauge
one’s level of emotional intelligence. The EQ2 assessment is one of
these assessments which is widely used by executive coaching professionals.
It is often used in conjunction with other leadership profiles
like the Leadership Circle Profile 360 (LCP 360). In combination,
these two assessments are commonly used in developing personalized
leadership development plans for many of corporate America’s
best leaders.
Viktor Frankl in his groundbreaking book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”
offers this poignant thought:
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is
our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth
and our freedom.”
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