Every day, employees show up at your company in some kind of emotional state. They may slide into their seats still humming a tune from the car radio, or they may walk in gnashing their teeth after a near disaster in traffic; but they show up feeling something, and so do you. Like them, you’ll need to be productive regardless of how you feel. And sometimes, that can be hard.
Imagine meeting a deadline so serious that it absolutely, positively has to happen today, or your company will suffer huge loses and you’ll lose your job—when you’ve just discovered that you’ve won your state’s million dollar lottery. Could you do it? How about making that crucial deadline if you just got a phone call that your latest health test results came back with very bad news? Think of the flood of emotion you would feel with either of these phone calls. How difficult would it be to focus on the business at hand?
Even at work, your coworkers, your direct reports and you experience a range of emotions from sadness to joy, from mild, momentary feelings to the ones with heart-pounding intensity. How they (and you) control your emotions to accomplish what needs to be done each day makes all the difference to your company’s performance.
In the past, concentrating on helping your team develop technical skills and doing some occasional team building was considered good, because that’s all that was available. But knowing what we now know about how emotional intelligence affects performance, that’s not enough.
The emerging science of emotional and social intelligence is defining the conditions that bring out people’s power to create and collaborate at work. When you’re a leader or manager at any level in your organization, it’s extremely important that you are able to control your own emotions and lead your employees to do so as well, so everyone on the team is able to come to work motivated and energized. If your company isn’t using knowledge of Emotional Quotient to build an emotionally intelligent, high performance culture, you can bet that the leading organizations in your industry are. Their ability to keep innovating depends on it, and so does yours.
How does your organization look at the emotional side of your team?
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
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