Your Business Needs a C-I-E-I-O
A MBA professor once mentioned during a lecture that there are many C suite positions with made up acronyms starting with the letter C. The C level job titles were created to make executives feel powerful and better about themselves. They also mentioned that the next C suite position was going to be called the C-I-E-I-O. All the students were listening intently as to what this new type of executive would do. The professor then went on to sing Old McDonald. All the students laughed uncontrollably for a few minutes. All joking aside, this was a great lesson from a great professor. The lesson was humbleness. Contrary to popular belief corporate executives are humans that have souls, sometimes. Anyway, I’ve been on this Emotional Intelligence kick and I was thinking that the CIEIO could exist.
The Chief Integrative Emotional Intelligence Officer or C-I-E-I-O could be the next addition to your C suite. Business schools have touted logical rational decision making for years. What if the logical decision making model we’ve been taught is flawed? The win at all cost, profit over people, and shareholder return over working wages model is flawed. It is logical and rational decision making, however, with every decision there are downstream consequences. There is also an aspect of decision making that involves feeling and emotion contrasting the cold logical and rational mind. This is exactly why the CIEIO will be helpful. Some decisions are not logical from a business standpoint, and the way that we train business leaders with flawed logic will perpetuate until there is a balance in decision making.
What if people were more important than profit? What if a businesses truly cared about their customers and not just about how much their customers are likely to spend over a lifetime. What if workers were treated as the ephemeral beings that they are instead of replaceable gears in the machine? Perhaps then businesses could change the world in more way than one. It has been said that business has no emotion, but I question that statement. I believe business is the collective emotion of those who work for a company. Unfortunately, workers have no way to channel or express their emotion through corporations, and corporations are not ready and/or organized in a way to support emotional decision making.
It is clear to me that the time to change organizational decision making is now. Corporations have thrived at the expense of human lives for too long. Few shareholders benefit while customers are exploited. The CIEIO needs a spot at the top of the corporate ladder so that companies can be more ethical.
