EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND MANAGEMENT

Emotional intelligence theory (EQ - Emotional Quotient)

Emotional Intelligence is increasingly relevant to organizational development and developing people, because the EQ principles provide a new way to understand and assess people's behaviours, management styles, attitudes, interpersonal skills, and potential. Emotional Intelligence is an important consideration in human resources planning, job profiling, recruitment interviewing and selection, management development, customer relations and customer service, and more.

Emotional Intelligence links strongly with concepts of love and spirituality: bringing compassion and humanity to work, and also to 'Multiple Intelligence' theory which illustrates and measures the range of capabilities people possess, and the fact that everybody has a value.

Emotional intelligence - two aspects

This is the essential premise of EQ: to be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one's own emotions, and those of other people. EQ embraces two aspects of intelligence:

·                       Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses, behaviour and all.

·                       Understanding others, and their feelings.

Emotional intelligence - the five domains

Goleman identified the five 'domains' of EQ as:

1.    Knowing your emotions.

2.    Managing your own emotions.

3.    Motivating yourself.

4.    Recognising and understanding other people's emotions.

5.    Managing relationships, ie., managing the emotions of others.

Measuring emotional intelligence

Different approaches to the measurement of emotional intelligence are available. But every measure of emotional intelligence is tied to a particular definition. To measure emotional skills or to test emotional intelligence as the ability to reason with and about emotions, one needs to use an ability test.

Identifying emotions:

• Need to be aware of one’s feelings so that one is not blinded by emotions
• Being aware of other’s emotions is a key to working with people

Using Emotions:

• Creative ideas can come from the ability to generate a mood or an emotion.
• Empathy for people.

Understanding emotions:

• Know what motivates people.
• Understand other people’s point of view.
• Understand and handle team interactions.

Managing emotions:

• Be aware of your emotions and use them to solve problems.
• When disappointed try to find out the cause and take remedial measures.

Management development

Emotional intelligence enhances management skills. It is a set of abilities which can assist managers in several, critical ways.

• Change plans to meet the need of the momen.t
• Adapt to different situations.
• Consider a variety of possible actions.
• Come up with alternate plans.
• Do not consistently do the same thing.
• Do not stick to the plan when it doesn’t work out.

Motivation: Emotionally intelligent managers are able to understand their emotions and those of others, in order to help them motivate their staff and themselves. Emotionally intelligent managers:

• Get people to keep going, even when they want to give up.
• Get people to try again after failing at something.
• Motivate others/ self.
• Get things done.

Decision-making: Managers are called upon to make decisions based upon strong emotions. When the emotions are not dealt with in a constructive way it can lead to bad decisions. Emotionally intelligent managers make better decisions by:

• Using emotions to improve thinking.
• See things clearly even when feelings are overpowering.
• Make good, solid decisions even when angry.
• Do not react out of anger.

Balance their thoughts and their feelings.

• Make decisions based on their head and their heart.
• Do not let strong emotions blind them.

Team effectiveness

When working in a team environment, the skill of emotional intelligence becomes even more important to the job. The key is to work efficiently with others. Emotional intelligence also helps in generating new and creative ideas and solutions to problems.

Creative thinking: All teams need to come up with solutions to problems. Emotional intelligence helps you to think creatively in many ways:

• View problems from multiple perspectives.
• Be inventive and see new solutions.
• Generate original ideas and solutions.

Social effectiveness: When working in a team, social effectiveness allows you to accomplish the desired goal. Why emotional intelligence helps in working with others:

• Enjoyable to be with.
• Good at influencing people.
• Believable and trusting.
• Empathetic.

The Emotional Competence Framework - a generic EQ competence framework produced by Daniel Goleman and CREI covering in summary:

·                       personal competence - self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation

·                       social competence - social awareness, social skills

Paving the way

·                       assess the organization's needs

·                       assessing the individual

·                       delivering assessments with care

·                       maximising learning choice

·                       encouraging participation

·                       linking goals and personal values

·                       adjusting individual expectations

·                       assessing readiness and motivation for EQ development

Doing the work of change

·                       foster relationships between EQ trainers and learners

·                       self-directed chnage and learning

·                       setting goals

·                       breaking goals down into achievable steps

·                       providing opportunities for practice

·                       give feedback

·                       using experiential methods

·                       build in support

·                       use models and examples

·                       encourage insight and self-awareness

Encourage transfer and maintenance of change (sustainable change)

·                       encourage application of new learning in jobs

·                       develop organizational culture that supports learning

Evaluating the change - did it work?

·                       evaluate individual and organizational effect

Emotional Intelligence Management Competencies

Here’s why these eight emotional intelligence management competencies qualities are so important now:

Self-awareness and accurate self-assessment:  Without self-awareness and accurate self-assessment, executives and managers will be too quick to get irritated with others, will create problems in their work relationships and in their personal relationships, will come across as abrasive, won’t be able to admit mistakes or accept useful, realistic criticism, and won’t have a realistic awareness of their strengths or limitations.

Initiative:  Executives and managers who are rather low in initiative ill be responding to events, rather than being proactive, thereby finding themselves in continual crisis mode.  Plus when leaders aren’t utilizing initiative, they may fail to seize strategic opportunities, either because they haven’t started their analysis and planning process early enough or because they may resist taking even well calculated risks.

Sound decision-making:  If a manager or executive is low in their ability to make sound decisions this will only be accentuated in a period of great uncertainty and turbulence.  Executives low in this area may spend more time than they can afford to in analysis, may not demonstrate the courage to make choices, may avoid taking responsibility, and may lack the commitment to execute a decision fully. 

Empathy:  When managers and executives don’t demonstrate enough empathy in times of uncertainty or crisis, they will likely be seen as indifferent, uncaring and in-authentic – all of which will make employees be less cooperative and less communicative.  The manager may be left feeling misunderstood, and will have difficulty “reading” their employees.

Communication:  Managers and executives will be hampered to an extraordinary degree if they don’t use adequate communication skills during turbulent times.  By not communicating well enough managers will tend to avoid getting into dialogue about important issues, will often only communicate good news and will tend to try to hide bad news – hurting trust, and will have great difficulty in managing complicated issues.  In addition, they will appear unavailable and uncaring to others, which will hurt teamwork and cooperation.

Influence:  When executives and managers are low in the management competency of influence they will fail to leave the right impression, will tend to alienate others rather than getting support, may end up working too independently and even against the group, and will have difficulty motivating the group quickly enough to address the eminent challenge.

Adaptability:  Without ramping up the ability to be more adaptable in a time of turbulence and uncertainty many executives and managers will tend to respond negatively to new, changing situations.  In addition, they may show emotional strain to others when they have to shift priorities; tend to express, or simmer with, frustration with change – even if it is for a positive purpose; will have difficulty adapting their responses and tactics to fit the emerging circumstances; and ultimately will often be hesitant in taking on new challenges.

Self-management:  When managers or executives have low self-management they tend to react impulsively in stressful situations, possibly get overly stressed, angry or upset when facing rapidly changing situations or conflict at work; and sometimes respond to problems in a non constructive manner – which often causes unwanted consequences.