GETTING “DOWN AND DIRTY” WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Posted by shonagarner on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 · Leave a Comment

(How emotional intelligence can help you manage change)

Anyone who knows me, or who’s been to one of my workshops knows I’m a simple girl!

I love learning! But if I’m learning something that could help me get better results, then I want to actually give it a go and see if it works! What’s the point of theories or models if we don’t actually get our hands dirty and try them out? See if they work in the real world?

Take the subject of “emotional intelligence”, or EQ for short.

I wrote a couple of articles on the subject last year which attracted higher interest than average for my newsletters, so the subject seems to interest managers and L&D professionals alike. Which is great because it’s a fascinating subject, and there’s some darned good reasons why any manager should brush up on their emotional intelligence skills! As a practising manager myself, I’m still working on mine!

But the problem I find is it’s all too easy to get hung up on the theory; to spend ages looking at the “why’s” and the “what’s” of EQ, but not actually giving you, the busy, pressurised manager, some simple ways you can apply the theory in your everyday practice. Not every manager is looking for qualifications or detailed analysis – maybe you just want to know: “What could I be doing differently?” in a certain situation, and, “how could emotional intelligence help me here?”

For example, maybe you’re struggling to:

Motivate a particular member of staff who seems to be losing interest recently.
Keep your staff “on-side” even though you’re having to cut bonuses this quarter.
Handle someone’s repeated underperformance
Better manage some tricky changes you’ve got coming or you’re in the middle of.

How exactly can the emotional intelligence theories and models help you with this?

Well, let’s look at one possible way you can apply all the so called “skills of emotional intelligence” to a very typical, and common problem my clients are always bringing up as a real tricky challenge for them: managing change in their team.

By seeing how you can transfer the theory of emotional intelligence to deal with one challenge you’re facing, maybe you might be able to see how you could transfer those same techniques to any of the challenges outlined above – and more!

Using emotional intelligence techniques to help you manage change.

So you have some major changes going on or about to happen in your team. How will an understanding of emotional intelligence help you tweak how you do things?

In the table below, you’ll see each of the 4 key emotional intelligence skills in the left hand column; self awareness; self management; awareness of others and management of others. In the middle column I’ve suggested some of the actions you might take without using these skills – and in the right hand column, some “tweaks” or new techniques you might apply if you are using the emotional intelligence skills. Let’s see how “theory” turns into practice.

Challenge: How I might handle major changes with my team.

EQ skill of Self awareness (understanding & recognising my own emotions and reactions to the changes)

& Self management
(managing my own emotions – sometimes I may need to resist the natural urge I have to behave a certain way)

Actions without using EQProbably don’t think too much at all about how I’m feeling about the change!

Feelings are irrelevant. Emotions will just make this more difficult to manage. My aim to avoid any situation which will allow people to talk about how they feel. Because I feel uncomfortable I may be tempted to:

Keep my distance – don’t want to get “bogged down” with people moaning or asking too many difficult questions.
Just send information via e-mail or short meetings.
Get HR to send out or give the difficult messages. After all – that’s what these people get paid for.

Using EQ I might:I realise that how I’m feeling can and will often affect how I communicate with my team or with any given individual so I reflect on this before I act.

Instead – I think through the possible downside of this avoidance strategy and make a conscious decision to manage my urge to avoid staff meetings.

Bottom line is – if I don’t give staff time to express their feelings about the changes to me, they’ll do it anyhow – probably behind my back – diverting more time, energy and focus on gossip than on their job.

Decide to rethink strategy!

Awareness of others &
(understanding & recognising my staff’s emotions and reactions to the changes)

Management of others
(managing my staff’s emotions – tweaking what I do or plan, to ensure the most positive outcome – for the business and my staff)

In the same way I don’t spend too much time thinking about my feelings, I sure don’t want to waste time thinking about my staff’s feelings!
Can’t change what needs to happen – so what’s the point?I decide to keep people in the dark until it’s absolutely necessary. They’ll only gossip more if I tell them too much.

I either release the information through e-mail, which keeps me out of any situation where staff can confront or challenge me, or if I do hold a meeting, I deliberately make it just long enough for me to tell them what’s been decided, then send them back to work. They can think it through in their own time.

(And I hold these meetings and release this information on a Friday afternoon, so they can’t go back to work and moan about it all) Hopefully they’ll have calmed down by Monday.

I’m assuming most staff will react negatively and have no strategy to think about how I might utilise different members of my team to help us through the changes.

I take time to think about the different types of reactions people might have, and how I could manage or handle these.I think about what I can do to be as open as possible about what changes are going to happen; and about what is not yet decided.

I hold a meeting deliberately allowing time for people to discuss the changes and air their views. Whilst I don’t want this to descend into a “moan zone” I structure the meeting to ensure there is time for people to talk, to ask questions and to share ideas about how the team can take on these challenges and support each other through them.

I avoid Friday afternoons! I am also aware that, however often I would meet with staff before the changes, whilst the change is happening, I probably need to double the contact I have with my team – as a group and individually.

I have learned there are 5 common reactions people have to change:
Champion
Co-operator
Fence sitter
Cynic
Saboteur

Each of my staff will be somewhere on this line – and I want to understand where they are, so I can plan a strategy to help me manage them more effectively.

What I’d like to emphasise most here is the fact that this is not necessarily about adding a whole lot of stuff to your already long “to do” list (although in my experience, some people issues are worth a bit more time up front to save a whole lot more time on the back end).

You’ve got to deal with the change somehow. All that’s happening here, is you are tweaking what you do in the time you have, in order to produce a better outcome.

Quit worrying about remembering the 4 key skills of emotional intelligence. Instead just think about how you can recognise, value and respect people’s feelings at work, and how you can encourage more open and honest communication and you really have emotional intelligence all sorted – whatever the situation or challenge.

photo credit: Lori Greig

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For more information to help you with the people side of management,
including how to improve employee motivation and get the best out of your team, take a look at these great resources: