Last week one of the people I work with, part time, resigned.
Its sad, she was a good team member a good worker, but the lack of good emotional skills in our workplace contributed to her resignation.
Looking back on my career, most of the great people that resigned from my teams did so because of a personal clash with co-workers or bosses. Sometimes it was the lure of a significant promotion or pay increase, but social disharmony is the principle cause of regrettable HR losses. And so improving eQ in the workplace with significantly reduce these regrettable losses.
While we tend to focus on skills and competencies, individual and collective EQ affects the workplace, both positively and negatively even more- lets use the iceberg analogy (again).
High EQ workplaces experience high employee engagement. Low EQ workplaces experience high turnover, burnout, low productivity, and declining sales. These symptoms affect the bottom line.
Low EQ behaviours from co-workers and managers – such as angry outbursts, rude comments, incivility, negative gossip, talking behind peoples backs, and moodiness – lead to stress and burnout as well as anxious work environments. In a series of studies by Pearson and Porath of thousands of managers and employees they concluded the following:
- Two-thirds of employees said their performance declined in an environment of poor eQ
- Four out of five employees lost work time worrying about unpleasant eQ related incidents
- 63% wasted time avoiding the low eQ offender
- More than 75% of respondents said that their commitment to their employer had waned because of poor eQ in the workplace
- 12% resigned due to the low eQ behaviour
As a newly certified eQ practitioner I can certainly appreciate the poor levels of eQ in many offices, and most people simply put up with it. But high producers tend not want to get involved in what they see as “politics” and so leave when this behaviour occupies their time.
I promised you two BIG benefits of better workplace eQ
BIG Benefit 1; your good people won’t leave
BIG Benefit 2; the quality and quantity of productive work will increase,
So back to basics for a while…
Emotional Intelligence (eQ) is the ability to evaluate, perceive and control your emotions and though this work better with others. The corollary is if you can understand your own emotions you will have a better ability to understand other people, their motivations and how to work cooperatively and harmoniously with them. In a business world where success is measured by achievement, and where this depends on your skills in working with others, emotional intelligence is just as important if not more important as intellectual ability.
There are certain pillars or skills related to emotional intelligence. These are self perception, self-expression, interpersonal effectiveness, decision making, stress management as defined by Steven Stein and Howard Brook in their eQ-i 2.0 review.
Top on the list is self-awareness. This is the ability to accurately identify your emotions as it happens to enable you understand your behaviours across a given time or situation. Developing self-awareness, however, mostly requires one to tune in to their true feelings. By evaluating your emotions, you can control them successfully.
Self awareness contains three elements. Self regard is respecting oneself and understanding your strengths and weaknesses. Its most associated with feelings of inner strength and self confidence. Self-actualisation is the willingness to persistently try to improve yourself and engage in the pursuit of personally relevant and meaningful objectives leading to a rich and fulfilled life. Emotional self-awareness includes recognising and understanding your own emotions. This includes the ability to differentiate between emotions and the cause of those emotions and the impact these have on your thoughts and actions and those of others around you.
Once you understand your emotions you can then assess how you express these emotions; Self-expression, the second part of eQ. This consists of Emotional Expression which assess how openly you express your feelings verbally and non-verbally. Assertiveness involved communicating feelings, beliefs and thoughts openly and defending personal rights and values in a socially acceptable non-offensive and constructive manner. Independence is the final component which is the ability to be self directed and free from emotional dependency on others. Decision making planning and daily tasks are completed autonomously.
Having understood your own emotions and how you communicate these to others, the eQ assessment then moves into how you interact with others interpersonally. The first element in Interpersonal is Interpersonal Relationships referring to the skill of developing and maintaining mutually satisfying relationships characterised by trust and compassion. Empathy is recognising, understanding and appreciating how others feel, how you articulate this understanding from the others perspective and behaving in a way that resects the others feelings. Social Responsibility encompasses a willing contribution to society, through involvement at work, social groups, considering the welfare of others. This involves acting responsibly, having a social consciousness, and showing concern for the greater community.
Having built strong relationships, eQ moves to how we use these to make appropriate decisions- Decision Making. This involves three areas that are particularly applicable to work situations. Problems Solving is the ability to find solutions in situations where emotions are involved and includes the ability to understand how emotions impact decisions. Reality Testing is the capacity to remain objective by seeing things as they really are not clouded by your emotions and recognises when biases can make one less objective. Finally, Impulse Control is the ability ti resist or delay an impulse, drive or temptation to act and involves avoiding rash behaviours and poor decisions.
The final element of eQ is Stress Management. Flexibility if the first element, enabling one to adapt emotions, thoughts and behaviours to unfamiliar, unpredictable, and dynamic situations or ideas. Stress Tolerance assess how well you cope with difficult or stress inducing situations and believing that you can manage or influence these situations in a positive manner. Optimism, finally, is an indicator of your positive outlook on life and involves remaining hopeful and resilient, despite setbacks.
The fifteen elements of eQ can be easily measured using self-assessment tools like the eQ-i 2.0 report, that i am certified in. This report is remarkably successful in the business world and has wide validation.
But having completed a self assessment, so what? Well unlike iQ, eQ can be learned and enhanced. As I have found to my personal benefit. The eQ-i report includes various tips and suggestions for how one could either remedy deficiencies or enhance strengths. The following links contain studies that have shown that a high emotional intelligence boosts career success, entrepreneurial potential, leadership talent, health, relationship satisfaction, humour, and happiness. It is also the best antidote to work stress and it matters in every job — because all jobs involve dealing with people, and people with higher eQ are more rewarding to deal with. This is the fundamental benefit of enhancing eQ in the workplace…. more effective open, positive working relationships.
Reviewing the coaching of eQ a well-designed coaching intervention can easily achieve improvements of 25%in a persons ability to assess their own and others emotions and work towards abetter relationships, and decision making. Various studies suggest that the most coachable element of EQ is interpersonal skills — with average short-term improvements of 50%. For stress management programs, the average improvement reported is around 35%. Even empathy can be trained in adults and with adequate training, people can become more pro-social, altruistic, and compassionate.
And there’s a bonus: research also shows that the benefits of eQ-coaching are not just confined to the workplace — they produce higher levels of happiness, mental and physical health, improved social and marital relationships, and decrease levels of stress hormone (cortisol) . Admittedly, the programs noted here may be more sophisticated than what the typical coach or I could do but the point is that EQ can be enhanced with the right program.
Emotional intelligence skills can help you navigate the social complexities of the marketplace A high eQ office will have less turnover of good people and will be more productive. Besides that, these skills can help you to lead and motivate others around you. Most companies nowadays consider emotional intelligence as being as important as technical ability, and often base their judgment on the same when hiring or promoting employees. Besides that, an employee with emotional intelligence is able to communicate and relate with his coworker more effectively. They are also able to solve problems, manage change and build trust with his employers, clients and fellow employees.
So that’s the real tangible benefits of higher eQ, so what are your experiences?