Emotional Intelligence – University of Richmond Leaders

About 4 years ago, AlphaSights hired Ethan Wolf, their first employee from the Univeristy of Richmond (and a Jepson alumni). At that point the company was about 1/8 of the size that it currently is and the foreign CEOs who were still doing all of the hiring at the time had never heard of the University of Richmond, they pretty much stuck exlcusively to Ivy league graduates at the time. Luckily, Ethan made his way to AlphaSights and became a huge ambassador for UR. Today, there are 12 of us in the NY office, and Richmond has become one of the major recruiting schools for the company.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with someone who works on the Professional Development team and asked her why the recruit so heavily at Richmond. While I am the biggest believer that we are getting as good if not a better education than any other school in the country, I don’t know that outsiders always see this. She told me that on top of having strong IQs, they have noticed that Richmond students have a high level of emotional intelligence, and a lot of grit – always pushing to get the job done no matter what it takes. Looking around at the Spiders in the  office, I realized she was correct. Not only has every Richmond alum who has been at the company for at least two full been promoted to Manager, but their teams are thriving, constantly in the top tier of performers at the company.

This week, I got the chance to experience this. On my new team, Ethan Wolf is my manager. Additionally, Emily Newman (’16) and James Lewek (’15) manage their own teams which sit right by me. Watching Ethan in action has been a great experience, his level of emotional intelligence (and intellectual intelligence) is extremely impressive. He seems to be a parental figure to the rest of the team: everyone is comfortable around him, not afraid to make jokes and be themselves, however, he also has an immense amount of respect, and thus gets the best results out of his employees because they don’t want to let him down. Ethan has been able to find a great balance with his team, setting goals for the group as a whole and individuals to make sure they are performing at a high level, while also keeping things light hearted. Every Thursday, his team plays “shark tank” (like the show) for 15 minutes in the afternoon as a way to refresh everyone’s brain to finish the week strong. Additionally, this week he organizaed a team dinner and game night. His excitement about work and for each member of the team is evident. Finally, it’s important to note that this team is very diverse, it’s clear that in another setting this gorup of 10 or so people would likely not choose each other as a friend group, however, in this setting they are, and much of that has to do with Ethan’s great emotional intelligence to form great group dynamics.

On Friday, Ethan and I had a quick meeting to talk about my experience thus far. One thing I was particularly impressed about was how he has used his skills from Jepson to help him in the workplace. In particular, we talked about how we both learned in Theory and Models about the importance of idiosyncrasy credit. He mentioned that he noticed that at AlphaSights, due to the nature of the job, people hired into the manager or higher level have never been as successful as those who were promoted from being an associate. He noted that while this is partly because they do not have a keen understanding of the nature of the job, it is also because they have toruble garnering support from their followers. Always great to see people putting what they learned in class into practice!