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When you hear the term “Emotional Intelligence” what does this mean to you? We typically link this to empathy, understanding, patience, etc. There are actually 7 key principles of emotional intelligence that can help your leadership team achieve peak performance and results. Employee interaction is ongoing and crosses all levels within an organization and outside of the organization. By definition a company, large or small, is a collection of people with specialized expertise who are brought together for a common cause in order to help a business produce the products and services they offer their clients. In most cases the employees are from different age groups, different backgrounds, different family commitments and concerns, different cultures, different education levels with a wide variation in interests, goals, health, personalities as well as character values and beliefs. Some times, it is no wonder that goals and activities are mis-communicated or understood differently. These variations can affect people in the same department, people that need to interact with different departments, customers, suppliers, management and C suite executives. Any time a team has to work together to generate results one of the key factors in success is the ability of the team to work together in a way that supports and encourages one another, communicates well and believes in the company’s mission and vision for the future.
If your team and leadership group scores high in their emotional intelligence, understanding and abilities, this will have a significant positive impact on the success and results of the group. Conversely if they score poorly in this area then the result can be a variety of issues, challenges and related problems that negatively impact group success and the results they trying to achieve.
Marcia Hughes and James Terrell define “Emotional Intelligence” as based on skills in each of the following areas
a- Team Identity
b- Motivation
c- Emotional Intelligence
d- Communication
e- Stress Tolerance
f- Conflict Resolution and
g- Positive Mood
When all of these factors are understood by the group and everyone is in sync then a flow results that can be like poetry in motion. Training to help your leaders in these areas can pay huge dividends. All these employee interactions will never be perfect yet emotional intelligence can be learned and the emotional literacy that results will improve with practice.
For much of our lives intelligence and cognitive skills have been taught in all levels of schools, stressed in our job interviews and then supplemented throughout our careers with additional training and development. I would never suggest that this is not important as I am sure we can all agree it is critical to success, but it is puzzling that very little focus, resources or money is committed to build emotional skills and intelligence in our employees, teams, managers and executive. In fact surveys and studies show that less than 20% of companies complete any formal training in this area at all. Similarly there is very little training or mentoring done in areas such as inspiring, motivating, encouraging and engaging employees to high performance levels.
Some people will say that EI skills and intelligence are not that important but what is shocking is that when you look at the research, case studies and expertise in this area we actually realize that teams and people with high emotional intelligence are equally, if not more important than cognitive skills when evaluating the success and results that the team generates.
There are some excellent programs available now that can help build your leadership team develop these skills. In several cases, employees in companies are promoted to leadership positions with natural people and communication skills while in other cases they are promoted due to their knowledge and ability to generate results but may not be as comfortable leading a team and motivating and encouraging them to high performance.
Could your team use some support in this area? In many cases small improvements in these areas can have significant impact and provide strong results and profits.
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Source by Doug K Brown
