Purposeful action or impulsive reaction?

Cultivating Emotional Intelligence

As a species we’ve survived by spotting and assessing threat. And while the threats to our survival have evolved, how we respond to them hasn’t.

When our emotional filter detects and screens a change in our surroundings it sends our body signals based on the level of perceived threat - we physically feel a reaction within us. Historically, that reaction triggered a response that determined our very survival. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our emotional radar has become finely tuned.

But our primal, default, emotional responses aren’t particularly helpful in today’s world of work. As Nigel Nicholson wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 1998, “we are hardwired to avoid loss when comfortable but scramble madly when threatened” - hardly the mindset we need to maximise our personal performance or cultivate a curious, creative and innovative culture.

Yet we need not shy away from or be at the mercy of our emotions. Indeed, successful leaders purposefully harness and intelligently use their emotions to their advantage. Such emotional intelligence is a learnable, valuable and in demand skill set.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

There’s more than one type of intelligence. IQ, once thought to be the most robust predictor of success, is, as it turns out, only a contributory factor. It’s an important contributor, but other abilities, other intelligences, matter too. In fact, there’s growing evidence that as much as 60% of performance is driven by factors related to emotional intelligence.

At a basic level emotional intelligence is recognising that there is intelligence in our emotions and that we can bring intelligence to our emotions. In other words, we can gain insight from what we feel, and we can use those insights intelligently to better act upon that information. Purposeful action rather than impulsive reaction.

Suppressing emotions or surrendering to their impulses cuts us off from a rich source of data as well as a critical way to connect with our colleagues, hindering our personal and organisational performance.

Why thriving in a VUCA world requires emotional intelligence

We live in a world of accelerating change. And change equals potential threat, with neither a company’s size nor stature affording protection. The average lifespan of a company has dramatically shrunk; it’s now less than a quarter of what it was in the 1950s. Our skills, our jobs, and ultimately our livelihoods are under constant threat.

The recent dismissal of 800 crew by UK Ferry operator P&O does little to allay the anxieties of people from such perceived threats. News quickly spread of distraught crews, fired via a pre-recorded video message shown without notice or consultation, being forcibly removed from their ships - some had 35 years’ service. Such examples of tone-deaf leadership cause tidal waves of anxiety for workers far beyond P&O. In a letter to the shipping company’s chairman, UK’s Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, wrote, “the lack of engagement, of prior notice, or of any empathy whatsoever for your workers… was completely unacceptable." As empathy researcher, Martin Hoffman, has previously noted, ‘the roots of morality are to be found in empathy’. In this uncertain environment, never have business leaders with a strong moral compass been more needed.

And the ever-changing and complex nature of our work has also changed how we work, making emotional intelligence a much-desired leadership skill.

In today’s VUCA world, no one person has all the answers. Productivity, success and survival depends on the team, rather than the lone contributor. Those who can’t effectively work with others, harmonise the diverse whole, navigate their own emotions and empathise with others will ultimately fail.

And as if that wasn’t enough, on top of all of this, there’s also a noticeable destabilisation to our wider environment – polarising geo-political tensions, war, the pandemic, and climate chaos - each escalating, and yet another threat to our very survival. While these threats don’t originate in the workplace, our emotional responses to them certainly impact our performance while there.

In these pluralistic working environments, emotionally intelligent leaders have never been more needed to pave the way for people to work together with mutual respect and towards a shared goal.

The four focus areas of emotionally intelligent leaders

There are many models that describe emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman. the father of emotional intelligence, talks about four focus areas that those with strong emotional intelligence master: Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

Self-awareness
… is our ability to notice, acknowledge and name our own emotions. Easy, or so we might think, but accurately labelling what we are feeling beyond good, bad, happy, sad, or angry is hard. Yet it’s crucial to making better sense of our emotions. This wheel of emotions by meditation app producer Calm is a great resource to help distinguish and name nuanced emotions.

Self-management
… is our ability to manage our emotions, and to keep unhelpful ones under control. Contrary to popular belief this isn’t about bottling them up and never letting them show, yet neither is it an excuse to let them all hang out and overshare. Instead it’s about acknowledging how you feel and then act wisely. (Imagine being on a plane awaiting take-off and the pilot announces their excitement and nervousness because it’s their very first time as a captain.)

Social awareness
… is about noticing and interpreting other people’s emotions. This takes practice. A starting point is to take a moment during each meeting to imagine ourselves in the shoes of another person attending. What does the situation look like from their perspective? Listen closely and watch for non-verbal cues for what might be going on for them.

Relationship management
… is about using all of this to effectively build and maintain healthy relationships that allow for true collaboration.

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Successful leaders master emotional intelligence by skilfully learning to notice, name and manage their own emotions, then acting intentionally on them. They also register the feelings of others, making connections and relating to them at an emotional level – they empathise. They do so because it feels authentic, because in today’s working world it’s never been more needed and because they recognise the intrinsic relationship between emotion, action, performance and, ultimately, success.

April 2022

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