Emotional intelligence spurs employees’ productivity
Emotional Intelligence (EI) has been recently validated with about 25 major skill areas that can influence your career and create abilities that improve your worth at work. These EI skills are not readily measured on standard intelligence or expertise tests. In fact, EI is quite different from IQ. People with emotional intelligence have tremendous advantages that far outweigh highly intelligent people who may be moody, premadonnas or have temper tantrums.
These “emotional intelligence” skills can count for far more when it comes to being a “star performer” or excelling at just about any job. To be outstanding, these EI skills are nearly everything for reaching success and the top of any career ladder. In the USA Today article, “Working Smart,” author Daniel Goleman stresses that emotional intelligence is not just being “nice” or giving free rein to feelings so that it “all hangs out.” Instead, successful people use their EI to manage feelings both appropriately and effectively so that the common good and goals of the work group can be readily achieved.
Each person has a profile of emotional strong and weak point areas. For example, a generality and on the average statement can be made that women are more aware of their emotions, are empathetic and are adept interpersonally.
On the average, men appear more self-confident, optimistic, adapt easily, and handle stress better. Goleman reports that there are far more similarities than differences between women and men and there are five major categories with five components each that complete the EI profile.
To know your emotional intelligence you need to understand these 25 abilities that matter the most. The five major categories include: Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy, and Social Skills. There are only about two dozen emotional intelligence skills that affect all aspects of work. Some of them are: accurate self-assessment, self-confidence, self-control, conscientiousness, adaptability, innovation, commitment, initiative, political awareness, optimism, understanding others, conflict management skills, team capabilities, communication, and the ability to initiate or manage change.
The good news for everyone is that unlike IQ which does not change much after our teen years, the level of our emotional intelligence can continue to grow, develop and change as it is largely a learned area of expertise. Goleman calls this growth by its old-fashioned word: “maturity.”
Talking It Over And Thinking It Through!
1. Goleman offers twelve questions to ask yourself to see if you work with emotional intelligence. If you answer “yes” to half or more, (and if other people who know you agree with your self-rating) then you are doing okay with your EI. See where you score on these items taken from his emotional intelligence chart.
Do you – can you – are you: understand both your strengths and weaknesses? be depended on to take care of every detail? Do you hate to let things slide? comfortable with change and open to novel ideas? motivated by the satisfaction of meeting your own standards of excellence? Stay optimistic when things go wrong? see things from another person’s point of view and sense what matters most to that person? Let customers’ needs determine how you serve them? Enjoy helping co-workers develop their skills? Read office politics accurately? Able to find “win-win” solutions in negotiations and conflicts? the kind of person other people want on a team? Do you enjoy collaborating with others? usually persuasive?
Add up the number of questions to which you could answer yes. How did you score? Answering yes to six or more of the EI skill items indicates that you are working well and with maturity in the workplace. Do you have more than five questions to which you answered no? Do people who know you well agree with your high number of negative scores? If so, what can you do to change and improve your emotional score?
2. In businesses and workplaces of every kind, a great deal of time has to be spent in meetings. To be effective and productive, these meetings must be carefully planned, skillfully led, and the emotional intelligence of the participants can affect the outcome. What are some things that you need to do as the moderator of the meeting to get all participants to share information and contribute to good decision-making? Remember that the key can be understanding others, political awareness of the emotional currents and power relationships, leveraging diversity, developing others and bolstering their abilities as suggested by Goleman.
3. Another area in which empathy has a play is being a good listener. If you know your emotional intelligence “quotient” needs improvement in your listening ability and that you need to improve your listening habits, what are some of the things you can do to become a “mature” EI listener? What distinguishes good listeners from the bad ones that you may know or have to deal with each day at work?
Thinking about the future!
In the future, employers are going to require emotional intelligence from their workers, especially as these skills become more critical in a global, diverse workplace. Employees will have to participate in team building and use collaborative, emotional intelligence skills that enhance working on shared goals.
To get you started in a new emotional intelligence direction, the key is to change what may be just a bad habit. There are proven techniques that really work to modify behavior, which ultimately can change the outcome of your future at both work and home.
In “Change Your Bad Habits to Good,” the author studied more than 2000 years of self-change concepts and came up with three especially good methods to successfully effect change. “People who have successfully changed their eating habits or career paths often relied on these methods,” states Dr. Robert Epstein, United States International University at San Diego professor.
Digging deeper!
If you are intrigued by the idea that we can change and enhance our emotional intelligence and increase our capacity for job output, earnings, security, and sales, you might want to read Daniel Goleman’s book entitled, working with Emotional Intelligence. Workplace expertise is more than the ability to technically operate equipment, especially as we move toward a service industry economy.