OEC Consultant's Corner
Emotional Intelligence
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Why must
leaders develop their emotional intelligence to be effective
in today's workplace and how can coaching help?
By: Benjamin Dattner, Ph.D.
Only results-oriented leaders with task and relationship skills
are able to effectively manage the complexities of today’s
organizations. Role, organizational, and industrial boundaries
are shifting and becoming more ambiguous; technology often
requires an instantaneous response to electronic communications;
tasks are more complex, teams more prevalent, and employees
more diverse. The multiple and simultaneous demands that these
challenges pose — working with ambiguity, responding
instantly, collaborating on teams, and managing diverse people
— are successfully met only by managers with emotional
intelligence (EI).
Coaching can help managers develop their emotional intelligence
because EI is constituted by skills and abilities that can
be learned throughout one’s life. As Daniel Goleman
pointed out in his 1998 book, WORKING WITH EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE, EI involves being "self-aware,"
"self-regulating," "motivated," "empathetic,"
and "socially skilled." When we lack awareness
of these variables, "we are vulnerable to being sidetracked
by emotions run amok. Such awareness is our guide in fine-tuning
on-the-job performance of every kind...".
Many adept and highly skilled managers are unaware of themselves
and their influence on others and therefore risk derailing
their careers despite technical or intellectual brilliance.
For instance: a manager who does not accept that he is part
of a team and who does not realize that his individual actions
impact the collective task; a CEO who does not realize that
his employees’ failure to perform is linked to his inability
to articulate either the organization’s mission or his
own expectations; a caring manager who feels powerless in
the face of larger organizational issues and who inadvertently
treats her employees as she feels she is being treated by
withholding information and raising counterproductive expectations.
Coaching can be a positive tool for enhancing all
five of the dimensions of emotional intelligence that Goleman
discussed. Here are real-world examples from my coaching practice
for three of the five dimensions:
- Self-awareness: A coach can
assist an executive to gain deeper self-awareness about how
emotions may implicitly or explicitly influence his or her
decisions and actions. A first step might be to administer a
personality test such as the Myers-Briggs, which can serve
as the basis for a dialogue between coach and manager about
how different personal preferences influence working styles.
A coach might then shadow an executive as he or she
participates in meetings or goes about daily tasks in order
to later compare and contrast the manager’s perceptions with
those of the coach. For example, as a result of my working
with the CEO of an Internet company, he realized that his
hands-on management style, which had been so successful when
the company was small, was negatively impacting the growing
company’s ability to function efficiently. Once he realized
that he could no longer be involved in every decision the
company faced, he began to delegate more authority to the
team.
- Self-regulation: By discussing
situations in which the manager feels that his or her
emotions get the upper hand, coach and client can discuss
strategies for not letting that happen again. A manager
might learn to recognize warning signs that he or she is
becoming too emotional to think rationally and therefore
take a brief break to regain composure. A manager might also
work with the coach to create strategies for minimizing
stress in the first place. For example, an executive at an
entertainment company was having a conflict with a
co-worker. She decided to take a detailed agenda to meetings
involving this co-worker in order to provide a structured
framework for interaction and thereby minimize the
interpersonal conflict that might have emerged in a more
free-ranging discussion.
- Empathy: After discussing the interpersonal
conflict during the coaching process over a period of several
weeks, the same entertainment company executive began to
see things from the perspective of her rival and realized
that they shared responsibility for the tension that existed
between them. She was then able to consider ways in which
she could reduce the tension. She decided to share more
information earlier on in their collaborative projects,
thereby setting a positive precedent.
Leaders who possess emotional intelligence:
- Are able to assess their emotional
states, personal strengths and weaknesses, and the impact of
their biases on employees and colleagues;
- Are able to control their emotions
and impulses, refrain from externalizing stress, and are
less likely to impose their negative moods on others;
- Harness emotional energy to help
themselves and others to achieve goals;
- Are able to see the world through
the eyes of others and to value their concerns;
- Are able to negotiate relationships
with superiors, peers, and employees to produce desired
results;
- Clearly articulate mission and
goals for themselves and others despite increasing workplace
ambiguity.
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For more information,
please contact Joan Caruso, Managing Director of Organizational
Effectiveness Consulting at The Ayers Group — (212)
889-7788.
Dr. Benjamin Dattner, who has worked on staffing, teambuilding,
performance management, and executive assessment and development
projects as an independent consultant, recently joined The
Ayers Group as an Associate Consultant. He received his B.A.
in Psychology from Harvard College and his M.A. and Ph.D.
degrees in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from New
York University.
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