Emotional Intelligence in the workplace separates high performers from the average employees. This is something gaining popularity as leaders become aware of the role emotional intelligence plays in the workplace.
Self-awareness; is an understanding of how you are feeling at any moment in time. It is also understanding how your behaviour impacts others.
Motivation – An effective self-motivation requires you to have a positive attitude towards goals across the organisation.
Self-regulation – Processing our own emotions effectively means we have the ability to read the situation effectively. Our response is only possible when we can self-regulate. We need to work to commit ourselves to the goals of the organization with integrity.
Social skills – are critical in a workplace the ability to build teams, forge change, and manage the conflict are important.
Empathy – Empathy is the ability to place oneself in the shoes of another. Managers need insight into how their decisions and behavior will impact their subordinates, peers, and superiors.
Emotional intelligence is a set of skills and behaviors that can be learned and developed.
According to Harvard there are some telltale signs of people with low Emotional Intelligence and those with high Emotional Intelligence.
People with low Emotional Intelligence:
Often feels misunderstood
Get upset easily
Become overwhelmed by emotions
Have problems being assertive
People with high Emotional Intelligence:
Understand the links between their emotions and how they behave
Remain calm and composed during stressful situations
Are able to influence others toward a common goal
Handle difficult people with tact and diplomacy
When staff lacks emotional intelligence they can be extraordinarily damaging to the culture.
The good news is that we can improve our emotional intelligence it is a skill that we can learn. We can improve on skills that improve knowledge of how others and we feel. We can also learn to harness our emotions in a way that meets the needs of our organisation.
At the individual level, exercises such as meditation, psychotherapy, coaching, and eliciting feedback from peers can provide meaningful insight into our own emotional landscape.
Within organisations, team-building exercises, corporate retreats, staff support groups, and training can pay handsome dividends for both collective and individual employee emotional health. In addition, you need to recognise and call out the behaviour.
Leading Together runs emotional intelligence workshops. Engage your leadership potential to improve your self-awareness, self-management, empathy, social awareness, and motivation. Horses are very aware of how you are feeling in the moment and can help you find a powerful way to experience emotional intelligence. The workshops are conducted in a relaxed environment with a horse trainer and leadership coach. They run for a couple of hours depending on the people attending and you will come away with a deeper understanding of yourself.
When creating connections with horses and people beautiful things happen.
Building emotional intelligence in yourself is one thing, but building a culture of emotional intelligence in the workplace can be a challenge. Our leaders must learn it first and model that behaviour. Changing behaviours doesn’t have to be complex. Leading Together uses horses to shortcut the learnings in team workshops. By scheduling team workshop sessions over 5 weeks you can radically change your workplace culture.
As a leader you are in a position of power over others and…“with great power comes great responsibility”. You can choose to use it to build people up or use it to destroy them. As a leader bullying, toxicity in the workplace becomes your responsibilty. Leaders need to know what it is and how to manage it.
Anyone who has been a victim of workplace bullying or worked in a toxic workplace will know the damage that can be done. It can ruin your confidence, cause anxiety, or even worse lead to severe mental health problems. When you are at work for most of your waking moments this constant stress can lead to physical manifestations and a breakdown in other significant relationships in your life.
repeated hurtful remarks or attacks, or making fun of your work or you as a person (including your family, sex, sexuality, gender identity, race or culture, education or economic background)
sexual harassment, particularly stuff like unwelcome touching and sexually explicit comments and requests that make you uncomfortable
excluding you or stopping you from working with people or taking part in activities that relates to your work
playing mind games, ganging up on you, or other types of psychological harassment
intimidation (making you feel less important and undervalued)
giving you pointless tasks that have nothing to do with your job
giving you impossible jobs that can’t be done in the given time or with the resources provided
deliberately changing your work hours or schedule to make it difficult for you
deliberately holding back information you need for getting your work done properly
pushing, shoving, tripping, grabbing you in the workplace
attacking or threatening with equipment, knives, guns, clubs or any other type of object that can be turned into a weapon
initiation or hazing – where you are made to do humiliating or inappropriate things in order to be accepted as part of the team.
Given more than 2/3rds of us experience workplace bullying there is a high probability that you are a victim, witness, or perpetrator of workplace bullying. The effects of this can last a lifetime. It is an important and urgent issue. I was staggered by the numbers and the research.
There is a growing body of evidence showing that there is a significant correlation between bullying and low emotional intelligence. I believe that most leaders who lead through fear do this because they don’t know another way. Bullying and low emotional intelligence also correlate also with workplace performance.
Having been the victim of bullying, I personally understand the emotional and physical impact. It is this experience that continues to drive me to find another way to lead. I am a passionate believer that those in a position of leadership have a responsibility to manage and care for their team in a way that supports them. As a leader you have an obligation to show up, be present and do what you can so that they can grow into great leaders themselves.
Physical Symptoms
What ongoing stress can do to the body
If you are seeing any of these systems in your organisation or in yourself you may want to evalutate if you are in a toxic workplace. It is important that we understand it. What does it look and feel like and then make choices to either leave or change the culture.
I have witnessed a workplace so toxic that woman were vomiting in the bathroom everyday through fear. There were suicide ideation discussed and strategies from leaders on how to support suicidal staff but none of the conversation revolved around improving culture. The anxiety in amoungst the team was incredibly unhealthy and had been normalised.
The physical and emotional cost is not just “burn out”. It can be permanent. It is trauma.
Solutions to bullying and toxicity are clear
By increasing emotional intelligence you can transform a workplace. It works in all areas of the organisation. , improving wellbeing, performance, and motivation. Research is clear that emotional intelligence creates the difference between good leadership and great leadership. Everyone wins in a workplace that has a higher level of emotional intelligence. If you want to learn more about emotional intelligence and how to use it you can download my free emotional intelligence book.
A Time Marker is how we remember and mark the passing of time. This has shifted for so many of us in 2020. Was 2020 fast or slow? I really can’t say. I was reflecting with a group of leaders on 2020 and talking about Time Markers. When I got a lot of puzzled looks I thought I should explain myself.
What is a Time Marker?
A Time Marker is an event or something that happens to us, that makes it easy for us to remember that moment in time. Our rites and rituals are important Time Markers. If you remember moments in your childhood they are often around significant events. Do you remember the graduation ceremony from school? Do you remember a birthday party? Your first kiss? Your first concert? A wedding? These rites and rituals of how we celebrate and mark time create moments for us to reflect on the passing of time.
Why are Time Markers Important?
They are opportunities for us to come together, create connections and engage with each other. They offer opportunities for things to look forward to, provide hope and celebrations.
One of the important functions of our Time Markers is to be our reference point and understanding of time. It also creates opportunities for change, rites, and social phases like “schoolies”, “weddings”, “significant birthdays”, “funerals”, “honeymoons”, “retirement parties”, “first days at school/jobs”, “sporting events”, and “graduations” these rituals mark a point in time where we expect change and our structures determine that this is a different phase in our life. Those more significant Time Markersare our rights of passage. Those first moments, and final moments like schoolies which marks the passage from a schoolchild to adulthood. Those significant Time Markers don’t just mark time but create our sense of time.
How many times have you said, “I am looking forward to… (holiday, birthday, celebration)”? The things we count down days until. We build anticipation and excitement around time markers. We use them for our delayed gratification. Delayed gratification is essential for motivation both personally and professionally.
Delay of gratification, the act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately available reward in the hope of obtaining a more-valued reward in the future. The ability to delay gratification is essential to self-regulation, or self-control.
For me, 2020 has been plans, plans, and disappointments. I have attempted to plan so many things only for them to be continuously changed or canceled. I have paid for tickets to events, to be postponed and changed. Parties have been canceled. Family events canceled. Events of all sorts canceled. Even holidays canceled.
Without Time Markers
So what is the impact if we don’t have transitions or Time Markers to signify important moments in our life which allow for transitions? We feel a sense of flux and grief. There is a collective sensation of emotional disorientation.
Sense of Flux
They feel disconnected, unmoored, isolated, lost. Some can’t sleep; others sleep too much. Some obsess while others tune out. For some, anxiety spikes or depression deepens; others report feeling numb.
It is important to remember that all of these are reasonable and responses to a highly unusual situation.
When we can’t plan or plans are canceled we need to acknowledge even as leaders we are also experiencing these emotional responses.
Leadership and Time Markers
In the workplace, it means we have people who are experiencing anxiety and depression or feeling disconnected and searching because they don’t understand the loss they are feeling. There is a shared experience when we lose our Time Markers and a sense of feeling disorientated. We haven’t experienced this before and we don’t have the language to even talk about it.
What are our Leadership Lessons?
Talk about what it is and what you are feeling. As leaders, we need to acknowledge that 2020 has created new challenges and we need new tools and language to deal with the constant change and loss. A shared language to describe things allows a space to describe and talk about these issues. Compassion and empathy are key whilst everyone is going to handle their grief very differently.
However, if you can find space to share what and how you are feeling it creates a sense of team and ‘we are in this together’. It allows an understanding of what we are feeling and acknowledgment of those emotions.
I have managed my plans, plans, and disappointments by trying to use mindfulness and gratitude. When I have another Time Marker lost I simply ask myself a number of questions to think about the situation differently. It has been a game-changer.
“What is it that I can learn?”
“What space does it create, or what is the opportunity here?”
“What can I be grateful for at this moment?”
The simple act of reframing the situation has made me less frustrated and reactive to what is going on around me. It has also given me a sense of control.
If you can continue this practice, it also starts to harness innovation. Imagine if you can, what happens when you have a culture of looking for an opportunity in change, you begin to build a team culture of innovation and growth.
When it comes to finding success, most people believe that the higher your IQ, the more success you’ll enjoy in life. However, this isn’t always the case. In the last decade, the topic of emotional intelligence has gained popularity and been shown to be a better predictor of success. Fortunately, unlike IQ, emotional intelligence, or EQ can be learned and developed.
Emotional intelligence is your ability to be aware of, control, and express your emotions and to effectively handle interpersonal relationships with empathy. There are two kinds of emotional intelligence: interpersonal and intrapersonal. Interpersonal emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, acknowledge, and regulate the emotions of others. Intrapersonal emotional intelligence is about your ability to understand, accept, and control your own feelings, motivations, and fear.
Having high emotional intelligence is not only necessary for success but plays an incredibly important role in your overall happiness in life. There are a variety of benefits that are associated with having a high level of emotional intelligence and improving your emotional intelligence can help you to navigate better the social complexities you face throughout both your personal and professional life. Here are some of the indispensable benefits that you can gain by having a high level of emotional intelligence.
Success in Your Career
Being successful in your career has a lot to do with effectively dealing with other people. In fact, recent studies showed that 75 percent of jobs are derailed for reasons that are related to emotional competencies. This includes your inability to handle interpersonal issues, an unsatisfactory team leadership during times of conflict and difficulty, and the failure to change or adapt to changing circumstances, among others. When you have a high level of emotional intelligence, you will find that you thrive in the following areas:
Success in your career
· Managing a team
· Leading a team
· Working in a team
· Selling or marketing
· Providing customer support
· Negotiating a deal
· Connecting with professionals
When companies are filled with high emotionally intelligent workers, not only does it contribute to the overall success of the company, but it also creates a better work environment, which helps the employees remain happy with their job. Whist your employees are happy, your customers are more likely to stay happy as well.
Able to Build Better Relationships
Building better relationships with emotional intelligence
One of the most common reasons why most relationships end up failing is because of low emotional intelligence. As Dale Carnegie once said, “When dealing with people, remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” People that have a low level of emotional intelligence, often find it challenging to manage their emotions and understand others.
Building a relationship is a two-way street, which means that you need to work on raising your emotional intelligence, while also finding someone who also has high emotional intelligence. When two people with high emotional intelligence are compatible, the relationship tends to work out much better.
Improved Personal Development
Among all of the relationships that you have in your life, the one that you have with yourself is the best relationship. If you have a toxic relationship with yourself, you can’t hope to have a healthy relationship with others. Emotional intelligence helps you to understand and manage your emotions. The more that you can understand yourself, the more you can recognize the differences in others. This will help you to understand others better and meet them where they are.
So, before you can go on to help others, you have to start helping yourself. However, you need to remember that you can’t be selfish or self-absorbed, which will cause you to become indifferent to others. There is a delicate balance between putting yourself and your health first, and not making everything about you. Fortunately, improving your emotional intelligence can help to draw a line between the two.
More Confidence and Happiness
When you can effectively monitor unpleasant feelings, you can take more action to feel happy, confident, and calm. Too often, we depend on outside influences to bring us joy, confidence, and peace. While you always want to celebrate the positive events, if you continue to rely on them for your happiness, you’ll find yourself sad, depressed, angry, upset, and more in your default state.
Having high emotional intelligence means that you can switch from this default state because you are able to regulate your emotions effectively. Through mindfulness, and taking the right actions, you can ultimately become more focused, happy, confident, relaxed, and enthusiastic in your life.
The Components of Emotional Intelligence
Psychologist and best-selling author of the book: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman, has suggested that five components are critical to emotional intelligence. The more that you can manage each of these five components in your life, the higher level of emotional intelligence you can expect to have.
Component #1 – Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is your ability to recognize, as well as understand your emotions, skills, and motivations. Another important aspect of self-awareness is understanding how your emotions affect those around you. To achieve self-awareness, you need to learn how to monitor your emotional state and identify your feelings. Traits that prove a person is emotionally intelligent to include the ability to laugh at your mistakes, confidence, and the awareness of how others perceive you.
Component #2 – Self-Regulation
Being able to self-regulate, when it comes to emotional intelligence, is your ability to control your impulses, the ability to think before you speak or react, and the ability to express yourself appropriately. In other words, it’s the emotional maturity that allows you to take responsibility for your actions, as well as being able to adapt to change and respond to other’s emotions appropriately.
Component #3 – Motivation
Motivation is having an interest in learning and improving yourself. This component of emotional intelligence is about having the strength to keep going when encounter obstacles in your life and setting goals and sticking to them. An emotionally mature individual in this category has traits like having initiative and being able to commit to the completion of a task, as well as having the perseverance to continue on in the face of adversity.
Having empathy means that you understand other people’s emotions and reactions. You can only achieve empathy for others if you’ve achieved self-awareness. Before you can understand others, you have to be able to understand yourself and your emotions. Those who have emotional maturity in the category of empathy possess traits like being interested in other’s worries and concerns, being able to anticipate someone’s emotional response to an issue, and the understanding of societal norms and why people act the way they do.
Component #5 – Social Skills
Social skills are your ability to pick up on sarcasm, jokes, customer service, finding common ground with others, and the ability to maintain relationships. It is defined as someone who has excellent communication skills, good time management skills, the ability to resolve difficult situations or conflicts using persuasion, and the ability to be a leader.
How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
Like any other skill that you want to develop, improving your emotional intelligence will take both time and practice. To start with, you have to develop a growth mindset and believe that you can improve your emotional intelligence no matter where you’re starting. You also have to think that there is no limit to how much you can improve your EQ. Here are some of the best ways that you can improve your emotional intelligence.
There are a lot of theories out there on personality traits, but the “Big 5” personality traits have been wildly researched and talked about. The five traits include openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. When you can come to understand your personality traits, it can become much more comfortable to accept or change who you are, while becoming more understanding and accommodating to the behavior of others.
Define Your Values and Beliefs
Limiting beliefs
While we all have similar basic needs, we all want different things in life and hold different beliefs and values. The worst thing you can do is chase others desires or copy their beliefs and not staying true to your values. To overcome this and improve your emotional intelligence, you need to take the time to set your beliefs, values, and goals. Once you’ve chosen your values, you need to define each one in your own words with as much detail as possible. The clearer your definition, the higher the chances that you’ll stick with your values and direct your energy toward them.
Listen to Yourself
Whether you realize it or not, your body and mind are continually giving you signs, but it’s not easy to notice them when you’re living on autopilot. Many times, we experience what is known as Amygdala Hijack. The amygdala is an area in the brain that is responsible for processing emotions. When it is hijacked, your pre-frontal cortex gets shut off, and the amygdala region of the brain activates your fear, putting you into the fight-or-flight response. While this phenomenon helped us to survive in the past, it often gets us into trouble today. The best way to combat this is to practice mindfulness.
Visit the Past to Create the Future
Since your childhood, you’ve been exposed to millions of different concepts that set the foundation of your subconscious mind. Your past holds a lot of insight into why you do what you do. Looking back at your past can help you to understand the underlying reason for your values, desires, thought patterns, preferences, and emotional reactions. Start by asking questions and resetting your mind and exploring the possibilities of what you can let go and who you can ultimately become. When you can develop a better understanding of your past, you become free to create a better future and navigate the world with confidence.
Learn to Handle Emotions Appropriately
If you want to improve your emotional intelligence, you need to begin to understand a wide range of emotions and how to handle them. The benefits of building your emotional granularity are immense including being 30 percent more flexible when regulating your emotions, being less likely to explode in anger when someone hurts you and handling fear and anxiety in a better way, among others.
Learn to Listen to Others
Learning to listen to others
You have to approach everything with a beginner’s mind and treat every opportunity to look at things from a different perspective. The more perspectives that you can collect, the more you will start to realize how small your viewpoint really is. If you want to expand your perception and knowledge, you have to learn how to observe and listen. You can also work on getting honest feedback from others on how they perceive you. The insights that you receive about yourself will change your life.
Learn to Communicate Better
There are two types of communication, verbal and non-verbal. When it comes to verbal communication, learn how to listen to others rather than thinking about what you’re going to say next. You can also try to make people feel safe by showing kindness. To improve your verbal communication skills, you can’t be afraid to share yourself with others, and you have to explain things simply so that others will want to listen to you.
To improve your non-verbal communication skills, you will need to learn how to use eye-contact appropriately, uses gestures and expressions in your communication, and read people by paying attention to the body language and expressions of others.
Conclusion
You can’t expect for people, including yourself, to be intelligent all the time. We all make mistakes, and one of the humblest things that you can do as a person with high levels of emotional intelligence is to accept mistakes. When it comes to improving your emotional intelligence, you want to make sure that when you meet people who lack EQ, you can lead by example and hope for the best for them. None of us are born with high emotional intelligence, but rather, it is something that we have to learn how to develop throughout our life. With this simple 5-minute guide on emotional intelligence, you can get a start on the path to improving your EQ and finding happiness and success in your life.
TOP RECOMMENDED GUIDE:
How To Develop Emotional Intelligence: A Step-By-Step Guide To Developing Self-Awareness, Improving Your People Skills, and Creating Happier Relationships
The success and failure of the societies and organisations are in the hands of their leaders. How they lead and manage is what makes the fundamental difference. The more charismatic, the more visionary, and the more enthusiastic they are, the greater their influence. A charismatic visionary leader has the ability to create a movement, transform an organisation, and even rewrite history. When I think of a charismatic and visionary leader several springs to mind: Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, and Mother Theresa. You can see from this list charisma and vision are not related to the purpose. Leaders and leadership styles are pivotal to the success of any business. Even an entire countries fate can be determined by its leaders’ charisma, vision, and ethics.
Style
A leader’s style is the greatest way to influence those around them. With an inspiring vision and motivation, anything is possible. Look at the impact of a teenage girl in Sweden, Greta Thunberg. Her vision and purpose are clear calling on others to take action on climate change she is leading towards a shared purpose. Leadership is not defined by where you are in an organisation but your charisma, vision, and purpose will define leadership. Among the many great leaders in the world, those who are successful are because of their vision, passion for the work, and creativeness in their ideas. Charisma and vision also need motivation and enthusiasm. We all know some leaders who because they thought differently were criticised. Innovation and motivation to change require a commitment to the vision. A change manager, leader, requires resilience to be able to weather the criticism for innovative thinking. It is only their motivation and drive that can change directions. A charismatic leader that has a strategic plan for the organization’s success, and is passionate about his vision is a powerful force. The strategy will keep everyone else focused on the vision in the organisation. This strategy is what makes the charismatic leaders’ vision a reality for others to understand and engage. It allows others to have an additional source of motivation and performance measurement. Great charismatic leaders are excited and motivated by their vision, so much so that they have the ability to inspire others. Even in the tough and challenging times where others will have given up.
Purpose, Passion, and Vision
Great leaders can be made. there are lots of opportunities available for people and organisations who want to focus on their leadership capabilities. Values and emotional intelligence must be where you start to ensure your purpose and values are aligned. If you want your staff to remain you need to ensure your leadership team is ready for the work not just on the organisation but also on themselves. The key to great leadership is simple, find your purpose, passion, and vision and you will and can change the world.
