NBA team Phoenix Suns has reached the Playoffs for the first time in 11 years. This year, unlike any other before it, the team has a competitive advantage – emotional intelligence. This episode features Jeff Bower, Senior Vice President of Basketball Operations for NBA team Phoenix Suns. Jeff joins EI at Work co-hosts Marie El Daghl and Genos International CEO, Dr Ben Palmer, to discuss the role of emotional intelligence in the sport industry.
The following is a shortened, edited version of the transcript from EI At Work episode 3. Listen to the full episode here.
Emotional intelligence has long been referenced in corporate leadership but today’s guest talks about it in the context of sport. Jeff Bower is a Vice President of NBA team Phoenix Suns. He speaks about the role EI played in leading them to their first playoffs in 11 years. Welcome to Emotional Intelligence at Work brought to you by Genos International.
Marie: Firstly, tell us about how you even came to learn of emotional intelligence.
Jeff: The whole thing was a bit accidental. A long time acquaintance, Jeff Summers from Genos North America reached out to me. We had initially met years and years ago at a college basketball game and mutual friends of ours introduced us and that was it. And then last year, Jeff reached out to me, I believe, over a weekend, saw what I was doing and some of the other things that I had been involved with as well and started to explain to me what he’s been up to, what the uses and the whole EI programming that he and Debbie had embarked upon. And it struck a lot of curiosity in my mind. And so, we continued to talk about it and dug into it. And during the whole outset of the pandemic, we really immersed ourselves completely into it and all that emotional intelligence and how it factors into everything that we do, both at work as well as personally.
Marie: And what was it specifically that you did with Genos North America? Was it a certification course?
Jeff: Well, exactly, after finding out the amount of information and the amount of questions that it could pose, Jeff then explained to me how I could really dig into this if I were to go through the Genos programming and so that’s exactly what we embarked on. And I went through the Genos training and the teachings and the exercises and with each exercise I was finding, it was just running through my mind how this would be so beneficial here. This would be a real asset to have in this situation, how helpful it would be to be able to apply it in this type of setting because everything that we do in sports is all about the human touch and the relationships that get built and the relationships that get stressed over time that add up to peak performance or failed performance in many cases. This was something that I thought could be an extreme benefit to us and to all the people that we work with and around the game.
