I lost my father and first mindfulness teacher in November 2010. His death was not a surprise, and I traveled to India to be with him as he passed away.
After spending a few weeks with my family grieving, I returned to the United States. On my first day back at work, I went to the mailroom and ran into a colleague who was not a close friend. Probably clueless about my situation, this colleague innocently asked me how I was doing.
When I responded to this innocuous greeting with a flood of tears, my colleague took time to sit with me, give me a hug, bear willing witness my suffering and be there when I needed someone the most. In those moments, we were fellow human beings experiencing a poignant soul-to-soul connection.
“It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Antoine De Saint Exupéry,
The Little Prince
I still share this story more than a decade later because the interaction left me deeply moved. I also cite this simple act of reaching out as a demonstration of the key components of emotional intelligence, which are empathy, compassion, comfort, connection and acknowledgement.
To pull back from the micro to the macro, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has merged personal traumas into a global experience of suffering and loss. The individual burden is crushing, and the path ahead is hazy. This collective trauma, which encompasses economic upheavals and significant social change, calls for a response far larger than we can imagine.
Even before the pandemic, a tectonic shift had altered the paradigm within which organizations operate. In 2019’s Leading in a Changing World, futurist Graeme Codrington described the shift as the information economy giving way to the connection economy, the experience economy or the relationship economy. Technologies—more specifically, the use of social technologies—drove the shift. In contrast to the secrecy of business processes that defined the information economy, success now comes down to willingly sharing information with others and establishing personal connections. Another way to put this is that the ability to form meaningful connections and relationships confers a competitive advantage in the connection economy.
From a management and leadership perspective, nothing is more needed in organizations today than emotional intelligence. Activating emotional intelligence makes it possible to relate to job seekers and employees who, for the most part, look, think and act differently from those who have come before. Workers in 2022 come to organizations with unique needs, wants and challenges. For this reason, displaying emotional intelligence is the key to attracting, engaging and retaining talent.
Defining Emotional Intelligence
While there are many definitions of emotional intelligence around, one that personally works for me describes being emotional intelligent as having the ability to accurately read and manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of other people. Accepting this definition means embracing the possibility that, in a very real sense, we have two minds—one that thinks and one that feels.
Daniel Goleman succinctly summed up the how-to of emotional intelligence by writing in Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, “People’s emotions are rarely put into words; far more often they are expressed through other cues. The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels, tone of voice, gesture, facial expression, and the like.”
In the context of work, people who possess high levels of emotional intelligence lead by showing empathy, exerting influence and collaborating. Being able to do those things will take on greater importance as working arrangements and the workplace radically transform and as managing for resilience and renewal takes precedence. Already, remote work and hybrid schedules are prevalent. The management by walking around style of the 1980s is history. In the new world of work, working and living spaces are shared. This calls for a shift in leaders’ core values toward compassion, empathy and trust.
Note that while compassion requires empathy, the latter alone does not encompass compassion. Showing compassion requires acting to help others. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand others’ feelings, desires and goals. In this way, compassion goes beyond empathy. It is acting on knowledge. And all that being said, people respond best to those they trust.
Take Steps Toward Activating Emotional Intelligence
Here are five illustrations of how leaders can move from knowing colleagues need support—from perceiving a set of facts—to acting and providing the necessary guidance or assistance.
Recognize That It’s Business Unusual
Facts
Millions of Americans are quitting their jobs, and large numbers of people are anxious about going into work while the pandemic persists.
Actions
In the current world of work, no leadership skills are more important than displaying emotional intelligence and compassion. In fact, the pandemic is proving to be the greatest test of emotional intelligence in a generation. During turbulent times, emotionally intelligent and confident leaders can help employees navigate through uncertainty and mental anguish.
Focus on People and Their Emotions
Facts
Many in the workforce are emotionally frazzled and physically fatigued. Though they try to hide it, the strain manifests in more errors, showing up late and just not being mentally present.
Actions
Managers and supervisors have a tendency to view underperforming employees as inefficient or simply lazy. Taking this perspective turns employees into problems to be fixed instead of people to be helped.
An emotionally intelligent leader views the situation with a different mindset. They will inquire why an employee appears to be overwhelmed. The first step is acknowledging that a workplace is a human institution. The following step is engaging with one’s own discomfort and with the struggles others are experiencing.
While engaging with employees, leaders must understand regulating their emotional response is not about suppressing or denying their own feelings. The opposite response of expressing all their emotions is also inappropriate. What employees need are leaders who express emotions that are appropriate to the context and the hour. Striking the perfect balance in managing one’s own emotional reactions means satisfying others’ need for immediate or instant gratification without losing sight of how one’s actions have long-term impacts.
Listen to What People Are Really Communicating
Facts
Experiencing suffering and trauma puts people in an ironic situation. While few of us have friends who are close enough to fully confide in, we are always communicating our emotions despite not uttering a word. A widely accepted theory of human communication posits that we convey 7 percent of what we mean in words, 38 percent with the tone of our voice and 55 percent with physical cues and body language.
Actions
To recognize another’s suffering, we must first notice it, That being done, an emotionally intelligent leader will reach out to help and go beyond helping by sensitively bringing the situation to the attention of others. In the workplace, the others to inform will be direct managers and close coworkers.
Requisite to taking these actions are listening eyes and a hearing heart. Really listening to people at work calls for being intentionally sensitive to verbal, tonal and physiological communications.
Interpreting communications correctly is essential to showing compassion, which itself is a process that depends on experiencing appropriate levels of emotional arousal and providing proper cognitive framing. Forming accurate mental models and calling up the best options from one’s repertoire of behaviors also depend on managing one’s emotional response and framing facts correctly.
Model Empathy and Compassionate Behavior>/h4>
Facts
Reciprocity and mutuality are essential aspects of a culture of compassion within a team and across a workforce. The unfortunate reality at every organization is there will always be colleagues who claim to feel marginalized or silenced.
Actions
Paying attention to and acknowledging the feelings of marginalized individuals are essential. Reading emotional cues in meetings will help a leader determine whether a person genuinely has nothing to say or if they are keeping silent because they honestly feel excluded or expect their contributions to go unheeded. It is fine when a team member just doesn’t feel like saying anything in a group of people. It is not fine when a team member is intentionally shut out or shouted down.
Being empathetic and compassionate enables a leader to model those behaviors for all employees. It also allows the leader to create a psychologically safe environment for individuals who may require support in order to speak up and make their strongest contributions. Additionally, an emotionally intelligent leader will regularly check whether the workload and work culture is punitive toward or supportive of employees. When necessary, an emotionally intelligent leader will allocate additional resources or revise processes to ensure people have every opportunity to flourish.
Celebrate Joy and Gratitude
Facts
Pandemic trauma is real. Surveys of employees conducted since mid-2020 document consistent increases in self-reports of burnout. The pandemic effect has also been gendered, with working mothers, women in senior management positions and Black women suffering greater job and wage losses than some other groups of workers. For these reasons and more, the lack of joy and dearth of occasions to express gratitude at work are not difficult to discern.
Actions
Intentionally creating joy at the workplace instantly connects people and changes their attitudes toward the looming issues they are dealing with. This works for two simple reasons. First, people seek joy. Everyone has an intrinsic need to take visceral pleasure in something. Second, when it is experienced in the presence of others, joy connects people more powerfully than almost any other human emotion.
In a team environment, joy arises from a combination of harmony, impact and acknowledgement. Joy at work can result from connecting with friends or just sharing a laugh. And, come to think of it, there are plenty of insider jokes coworkers can share.
Related to sparking joy, practicing gratitude and showing appreciation at work has delivered some eye-opening results. Studies on gratitude at work, though somewhat limited, link it to more positive emotions among employees, less stress, fewer health complaints, a greater sense of achieving goals, fewer sick days and higher job satisfaction.
Maya Angelou, who is one of my favorite American poets, serendipitously summed up emotional intelligence when she observed, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This nicely explains how leading with emotional intelligence at work births hope in people’s souls and leaves a lasting impact on their minds and hearts.
01 February 2022
Category
HR News Article