Emotional Intelligence At Work For You
Emotional Intelligence had its early start with Reuven Bar-On in the early ’80s under the name: Emotional Quotient (EQ) – when it was compared to the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Dr. Bar-On wanted to answer the question, “Why does a high IQ not directly correlate to success in business and life?”
Salovey and Mayer coined the term Emotional Intelligence and Daniel Goleman in his New York Times bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, brought it into the awareness of the general public.
Emotional intelligence is defined as “a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.”
There have been many studies on Emotional Intelligence over the years. One study by Martin Seligman looked at “learned optimism” – referring to the reasons people find when they fail or experience setbacks. Optimists tend to see events as specific, short term and external: “The glass is half full now.” Pessimists see events as global, permanent and internal: “I’m a loser and I’ll never have water.” In his study at Met Life, Seligman found that optimistic salespeople sold 37% more insurance in their first two years than their pessimistic counterparts. The company hired a special group of optimists who had failed the initial screening and outsold the pessimists by 21% in the first year and 57% in the second.
What does this mean for your business? That people with more emotional intelligence will be more successful and thus make your business more successful. The solution is two-fold: hire people with high emotional intelligence and develop the emotional intelligence of the people you already have.
The EQ-i 2.0 is a self-assessment that is easy to administer. With the support of a coach, you and your employees can develop personal development plans to increase your skills and competencies. Competencies, such as: empathy, controlling emotion, and showing appropriate emotions can be increased.
With increased self-awareness and feedback that either supports the assessment or opens doors for discovery and discussion, there is a huge opportunity for growth and development. As people grow and develop their emotional intelligence, they will communicate with each other more effectively and be more resilient in the face of setbacks and challenges. As the average EQ/Emotional Intelligence goes up, so does the chance of achieving business gold! What would that do for your people? What would that mean for your business?
The Science of Coaching
The use of coaches to help executives, professionals and leaders to help achieve their business goals has grown exponentially over the past 20 years. Is this a crazy new fad? Or, is there something more to coaching? Coaching, clearly, is not a fad. It is being used by many Fortune 500 companies and by professional firms and entrepreneurs. Now, the study of neuroscience supports the efficacy of coaching.
In the article “The Neuroscience of Leadership” in Strategy+Business, David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz describe what happens at the neurological level when a person gets their own insight.
Rock and Schwartz tell us that, for an insight to be useful, it must be self-generated. So, in practical terms, if I figure it out for myself, I will own that insight and be much more likely to act on it. An insight often brings with it the realization that something must change in the current situation. One study found sudden bursts of gamma waves in the brain appearing just before insight was achieved. It seems that the light bulb actually does go on in our brains when we get insight! This brain activity is accompanied with a rush of adrenaline, which causes euphoria – and possibly helps to fight against the discomfort of change so that we are able to act on our insights.
Coaching, with its style of asking questions and reflecting back, encourages and facilitates coachees to have insights. The coach is the thought partner and the coachee does all of the “figuring out”. The coaching process supports the light bulb to go on. When you work with a coach, you will develop your insights quickly in a focused environment. Because the insights are your own, you will be fully bought-in and with the accountability framework that your coach will develop with you, more likely to change your behaviours and achieve success.
Confucius may have been able to elucidate it:
“Tell me, and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.”
Now we have the science to prove it!
