UTAR Alumni

JULY 2018

CQ + EQ: A Potent Combination for Leaders

CQ + EQ: A Potent Combination for Leaders

YOON SECK HOE

BACHELOR OF ARTS (HONS) ENGLISH EDUCATION

August 2014 Batch

Shedding light on the importance of soft skills was a forum titled ?Employers? Dialogue with Undergraduate: CQ + EQ: A Potent Combination for Leaders? organized by Department of Alumni Relations and Placement, in collaboration with Department of Soft Skills Competency. The topics for discussion throughout the forum revolve around four key questions including:

1. What are Cultural Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence?

2. Why are Cultural Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence important for graduates?

3. Cultural Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence: Nature or Nurture?

4. How to develop Cultural Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence effectively?

Big problems can no longer ? if they ever could ? be solved by one person, one sector, one culture, one community, one country or even one continent operating alone. So leading across boundaries through collaboration is increasingly crucial. To be effective, leaders must have a solid understanding of how their emotions and actions affect the people around them. Without CQ and EQ, leaders will lead underperforming collaborations. Graduates should also be exposed to the practices in the industry about cross-cultural collaboration.

Hence, the forum was attended by 3 panel speakers, who are Madam Ceylyn Tay Wei Lung, Director of Team Some Sdn Bhd & U Team Food Machinery Sdn Bhd, Dr Chai Choon Yip, Partner, T Cheung Chartered Accountants, Birmingham, UK and Company Director of Pulai Memorial Park Berhad, and Mr Chee Yik Wai, CEO and Co-founder of Crowd Sukan and UNESCO Asia-Pacific Youth and Sport Task Force Member, who attended the forum at Mr Yoon Seck Hoe?s invitation.

As a UTAR alumnus, who currently works with UTAR as a lecturer in Department of Soft Skills Competency, I am honoured to be the moderator of the event as these speakers have brought multiple eye-opening insights to UTAR students by sharing their experiences and knowledge from their respective journey and industry. Also, some of them are ideas worth spreading.

For instance, as Mr Chee Yik Wai pointed out, ?Students should 'lower themselves to experience the world' in identifying, interpreting and managing their experiences with different cultures in different parts of the country or even the world.?

He also added, ?Throughout my experiences travelling the world, and to very dangerous places sometime that are off limits to tourists, remaining humble and open about differences could gain respect from the local population, identify what they might do better than us, and analyse these new knowledge to see if there's anything that we can do to incorporate into our lives for a much better living experience, to improve ourselves. I highly encourage students to travel, as far as they can if they can afford it, and as near as they can afford, but with an open heart and ask a lot of questions on individual people's stories, and they shall get interesting answers that can help colour their lives.?

In Mr Chee?s opinion, a big part of travelling is also to manage the people that you've met along the way, how to recognise and understand people's different emotions and act accordingly to it to avoid conflicts. By managing other people's emotions the right way, you may even end up getting lifetime friends throughout your journey. The possibilities are just endless in a very positive way. ?A fine understanding of both cultural and emotional intelligence is essential to my daily experience as a traveller as well as a UNESCO representative working with various people from different cultural backgrounds in the Asia-Pacific region. The world is such a big, wonderful place and if anything my journey as an adventure traveller has taught me, 'stay hungry and stay foolish for knowledge as Steve Jobs once said, and one can best do that when we lower ourselves to experience the world, ?he advised.

I personally find Mr Chee Yik Wai a very inspiring figure for undergraduates and I strongly encourage more collaboration to happen between him and UTAR students. He is an Ipoh native from Malaysia and a member of the UNESCO Asia- Pacific Youth and Sport Task Force. He pursued an LL. B law degree in Multimedia University, Malaysia, after his secondary school education. Yik Wai spent several months during his undergraduate studies as an exchange student studying a Business promenade course to gain insight in Nordic tourism and business cultures in Turku University of Applied Sciences in Turku, Finland. He also took a gap year in between his undergraduate studies to work in China for 6 months and explored many places. Some of his travel stories are published on the global media. Yik Wai is an avid traveler, and has actively contributed to increasing and promoting cross-cultural interactions using best practices. Growing up in Malaysia as an ethnic and religious minority, Yik Wai is very sensitive towards cultural differences and constantly uses apolitical ways to engage with people of different faiths and backgrounds. Being a sport lover himself and a firm believer that technology significantly improves people?s lives, he co-founded Crowdsukan in 2017 to provide a platform to fundraise primarily for sports facilities in Malaysia. This involves actively connecting private sector partnerships and the public to contribute towards achieving a more inclusive and sustainable society, through the creation of sports facilities and activities. You can contact Yik Wai at hi.crowdsukan@gmail.com.