We have been developing Emotional Intelligence in leaders, teams and individuals with customised programs, in Ireland, for 15 Years.
Emotional Intelligence can give you a real competitive advantage through better leadership and a more engaged workforce; improving trust, teamwork, collaboration, interpersonal understanding and conflict resolution.
Emotional Intelligence is not about being emotional, but of being able to understand your own and others emotions and act accordingly.
Emotional Intelligence includes the ability to read and understand your own emotions as well as others’ emotions in the context of a particular situation to maximize the result. It’s not enough to build a product or service and execute sales, manage your marketing and operations. You must also manage the constant human interactions you will have with employees, consultants, vendors, investors, customers and others. The success of these interactions determines how easy and effective—painful or painless—meeting your company’s business goals and your personal goals will be. We have learned over our years teaching Emotional Intelligence to teams and individuals in Ireland that its NOT JUST ABOUT KNOWING WHAT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IS its about gaining insights and awareness about yourself and others. Its about those “AHA” moments.
To engage employees and colleagues and get them passionate one must use passion and communicate passion and act passionately. One must communicate on an emotional level with people – because to get them passionate you must connect emotionally. To gain trust you must connect emotionally. To engender world class performance you must work with people on an intellectual level and an emotional level. Emotional Intelligence at its best also needs an instinctual or gut level connection.
The Harvard Business Review has hailed emotional intelligence as “a ground-breaking, paradigm-shattering idea”
The results of using the three levels and particularly the underdeveloped emotional intelligence level are been seen as having huge impact in organisations. Through understanding how you are, how others are, how empathy works and understanding how to communicate with this understanding. Empathy is about applying the right approach for a particular individual, in a particular moment. This means reading the person, the scene, and anticipating how it will play out.
As a leader it’s a considerable advantage to have strong emotionally intelligence. Your key employees can resonate with positive emotions if you lead them in this way. This resonance passes through the organisation like ripples on a pond engaging other employees and customers too after all – they are never more enamoured with your company than your people are.
HBR: Are you a great leader or merely a good one? That depends on your emotional intelligence (EI) – and it’s more important than your vision, your toughness, or your industry smarts.
It starts with Leadership. They are the core. They can be the stones dropped into the still pond to send out ripples of energy, motivation and positivity – impacting all your people and your results. In terms of the bottom line that means leveraging and engaging your people through leadership and emotional intelligence to deliver bottom line results and shareholder or stakeholder value.
Emotional Intelligence Components
Daniel Golemans work in emotional Intelligence in the nineties popularised the concept and brought the term very much into the public eye with his bestselling books and the business case for has been well established.
Salovey and Mayer who did the Original Work on Emotional Intelligence later proposed one model that identified four different factors: the perception of emotion, the ability reason using emotions, the ability to understand emotion and the ability to manage emotions. According to Salovey and Mayer, the four branches of their model are, “arranged from more basic psychological processes to higher, more psychologically integrated processes. For example, the lowest level branch concerns the (relatively) simple abilities of perceiving and expressing emotion. In contrast, the highest level branch concerns the conscious, reflective regulation of emotion”.
Perceiving Emotions: The first step in understanding emotions is to accurately perceive them. In many cases, this might involve understanding nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expressions.
Reasoning With Emotions: The next step involves using emotions to promote thinking and cognitive activity. Emotions help prioritize what we pay attention and react to; we respond emotionally to things that garner our attention.
Understanding Emotions: The emotions that we perceive can carry a wide variety of meanings. If someone is expressing angry emotions, the observer must interpret the cause of their anger and what it might mean. For example, if your boss is acting angry, it might mean that he is dissatisfied with your work; or it could be because he got a speeding ticket on his way to work that morning or that he’s been fighting with his wife.
Managing Emotions: The ability to manage emotions effectively is a key part of emotional intelligence. Regulating emotions, responding appropriately and responding to the emotions of others are all important aspect of emotional management.
Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
When corporate leaders struggle with team relationships, it’s often a question of people taking the time to understand one another. In order to overcome this common leadership challenge, it’s often helpful to take a look at a leader’s “emotional intelligence.” While companies look for intelligent, capable individuals to promote into leadership positions, sometimes awareness of emotional factors can play a huge role in how effectively that person leads a team of people.
Emotional Intelligence ( EI ) is the capacity a leader has to effectively perceive, express, understand and manage emotions in an effective and appropriate manner. Research has proven that EI is a strong predictor of success in the workplace, more so than IQ, skill sets, personality and experience. In essence, EI equals interpersonal effectiveness, and the more effective a leader is with others, the more successful that leader will be.
Team Performance
The important difference between effective teams and ineffective ones lies in the overall competencies of the Team. Think of the Team as an organism in itself. Teams have an emotional intelligence of their own. It is comprised of the emotional intelligence of individual members, plus a collective competency of the group. Everyone contributes to the overall level of emotional intelligence, and the leader has more influence. The good news is that teams can develop greater emotional intelligence and boost their performance.Teamwork performance improved by 25% in terms of goal achievement over standard functioning teams.
Team emotional intelligence is also about behaving in ways that build relationships both inside and outside the team. Building relationships strengthens the team’s ability to face challenges. In order to strengthen relationships, the group must feel safe to be able to explore, embrace and ultimately to rely on emotions in work. Emotions must be considered for the good of the group. Feelings count, but then there are the tasks at hand and the work that needs to be done. Team leaders must constantly balance harmony with productivity.
The Harvard Business Review included Team Emotional Intelligence on its list of the Top Ten Breakthrough Ideas for helping organisations perform well. The Team Emotional Intelligence Survey has been used to build an effective team culture in organisations like yours for over 15 years. Research shows that it improves team performance by 25%.
ADEO Consulting offer this key Advantage
Adeo Consulting Ltd offer Emotional Intelligence Development workshops and coaching here in Ireland and also as part or our Leadership and Team Development Programs. We can help you develop individuals with our Emotional Intelligence (EI) coaching programs and we can improve Leadership or Project teams overall performance by up to 25% with our Team Emotional Intelligence (TEI) Program. We have more details on our programs here LDP and here LBP . We are also offering online versions of these programs customised to your requirements since September 2020 here in Ireland and Internationally.