Tag: emotional intelligence

Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace

Published on by Abigail MillerLeave a comment

When you think of upskilling — learning new skills — at work, what comes to mind? Perhaps learning new software or working toward a certification or degree. There’s no question that many in-demand skills are technical in nature, but there’s also a critical need for what are sometimes described as “soft” skills, particularly strong emotional intelligence (EI).

EI allows us to build and maintain relationships and influence others — important skills no matter your position and area of work — and research has found people with greater EI tend to be more innovative and have higher job satisfaction than those with lower EI. Using emotional intelligence in the workplace can improve decision-making and social interactions, and enhance your ability to cope with change and stress.

The good news is that, like technical skills, soft skills such as EI can also be learned and improved.

Emotional Intelligence: What It Is

To strengthen your emotional intelligence, it’s important to know what it entails. Most definitions of EI include the following components:

  1. Perception and expression of emotion â€” Noticing your own emotions and picking up on the emotions of others as well as the ability to distinguish between discrete emotions.
  2. Using emotion to facilitate thought â€” How you incorporate emotions into your thinking processes and understand when and how emotions can be helpful for reasoning processes.
  3. Understanding and analyzing emotions â€”The capacity to decode emotions, make sense of their meaning, and understand how they relate to each other and change over time.
  4. Reflective regulation of emotion â€”An openness to all emotions and the ability to regulate your own emotions and the emotions of others to facilitate growth and insight.

Measuring Your Emotional Intelligence Skills

Do you find you relate to either of these statements?

“I want to improve my EI skills but don’t know where to start.”

“I already have strong emotional intelligence skills. This isn’t an area I need to work on.”

As with any skill, we all have varying levels of aptitude for EI and may feel overwhelmed about where to begin.

One interesting study found that 95% of participants gave themselves high marks in self-awareness. However, using more empirical measures of self-awareness, the study found that only 10-15% of the cohort was truly self-aware. Consider the following characteristics typical of people with higher and lower EI skillsets as one way to better gauge your skillset:

Potential indicators of higher EI:

  • Understanding the links between your emotions and how you behave
  • Remaining calm and composed during stressful situations
  • Ability to influence others toward a common goal
  • Handling difficult people with tact and diplomacy

Potential indicators of lower EI:

  • Often feeling misunderstood
  • Getting upset easily
  • Becoming overwhelmed by emotions
  • Having problems being assertive

It’s important to note that these potential indicators can also stem from other causes and vary significantly depending on the day and situation.

Learning and Developing Emotional Intelligence

Research indicates that as little as ten hours of EI training (i.e., lectures, role-play, group discussions, readings) significantly improved people’s ability to identify and manage their emotions, and these benefits were sustained six months later.

No matter your current EI skillset, it may be helpful to try the following exercises:

  1. Notice how you respond to people â€” Are you judgmental or biased in your assessments of others?
  2. Practice humility â€” Being humble about your achievements means you can acknowledge your successes without needing to shout about them.
  3. Be honest with yourself about your strengths and vulnerabilities and consider development opportunities. Even though it might make you cringe, it’s helpful to get others’ viewpoints on your emotional intelligence. Ask people how they think you handle tricky situations and respond to the emotions of others.
  4. Think about how you deal with stressful events â€” Do you seek to blame others? Can you keep your emotions in check?
  5. Take responsibility for your actions and apologize when you need to.
  6. Consider how your choices can affect others â€” Try to imagine how they might feel before you do something that could affect them.

Interested in further increasing your EI skills? Check out the resources below to get you started.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

elevateU Featured Topic: Emotional Intelligence | Short videos, self-paced online courses and more

Identify and Maximize Your Strengths | Instructor-led offering from HR Organization and Professional Development | September 12

Sources

https://www.ottawa.edu/online-and-evening/blog/october-2020/the-importance-of-emotional-intelligence-in-the-wo

https://positivepsychology.com/emotional-intelligence-eq/

https://professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/how-to-improve-your-emotional-intelligence/

an open empty notebook next to an iphone and a macbook on a white desk

Adapting Your Goal-Driven Approach During Times of Change

Published on by MSU Human ResourcesLeave a comment

Whether the goals are short-term or lifelong, SMART or HARD, goal setting is a key component of our professional lives. At MSU, we go through various aspects of the Performance Excellence process throughout each year—from annual reviews to performance planning and everything in between—with goals as a primary benchmark against which we measure accomplishment.

If you’re accustomed to setting and meeting goals as a barometer of success, the COVID-19 pandemic has likely thrown you for a loop. Perhaps you had goals this past year that were impossible to achieve due to COVID-19 restrictions. Maybe you’ve had to relearn how to manage your daily tasks, let alone your goals, due to major changes in your workspace, be it on campus or virtual. It may benefit you to take the time to reexamine your approach to setting and meeting goals—whether for yourself or, if you’re a supervisor, for your employees—and how that may have shifted due to the pandemic.

Goals Are Tools, Not Anchors

To move beyond the countless disruptions and redefine who we are in our everchanging world, goals remain a crucial element to help us maintain purpose, focus and motivation. However, the rapid changes over the past 18 months have served as an important reminder that our goals should serve as tools, not anchors.

Goals can be powerful things, and the pursuit of them may drive you to do your best work and accomplish what might have previously seemed unattainable. While focusing on your goals may lead to success, focusing too single-mindedly on a goal and becoming overly attached to the outcome of your work can put you at risk when forces outside your control are unstable and unpredictable.

Instead of viewing a goal as a fixed North Star that keeps you stubbornly set on a specific endpoint, no matter what the circumstances, try instead to view your goals as flexible targets that allow for adaptability while still providing a framework and path toward achievement.

Own Your Goals

To benefit the most from your goals, never let your goals own you. You have the choice and ability to adapt your plans and goals and detach from the outcomes when necessary. This doesn’t mean being disinterested or disengaged but rather reprioritizing and not allowing any one goal or outcome to give you your sense of worth.

When we can release our own expectations about how things are “supposed” to be, we can engage with what’s actually happening and work to achieve our goals in ways that better align with the circumstances we can’t control. When you become too attached to an outcome that’s out of your hands, you risk missing the benefits of all the hard work you’ve put into reaching your goals if the end result isn’t quite what you planned.

Re-align Your Priorities

If you’ve found your professional identity has become upended during the pandemic, it may be helpful to examine your priorities and revisit your goals. You may be working from what organizational psychologist, Dr. Tasha Eurich, describes as a flawed goal-outcome formula in which you’re too attached to outcomes that are fully or partially out of your control.

Eurich notes that the pandemic has led to many of us losing parts of our identity that once defined us, which can be profoundly destabilizing. Unplanned changes to the routines that helped us navigate our days, our work location, or our ability to accomplish our goals may have us questioning who we are and how the world works.

Give yourself and your colleagues grace as we navigate this uncertainty and work to realign our priorities with our goals in ways that offer adaptability and healthy challenges. It may be helpful for supervisors and employees to review previously established goals through the lens of “goals as tools, not anchors” and see if any adjustments can be made to lead to greater engagement and effectiveness.

Additional information about Performance Excellence at MSU, including goal setting tips, a professional development impact map, and an expectation development worksheet, is available for both employees and supervisors. Looking for additional guidance? Contact Organization and Professional Development at prodev@hr.msu.edu to learn about other upcoming opportunities.

Recommended elevateU Resources

How to Build a Learning Mindset (2-minute elevateU video)

Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think  (elevateU book summary)

Live Event: The Power of Insight: How Self-Awareness Helps Us Succeed at Home and in Life  (Recording of 60-minute elevateU live event presented by Dr. Tasha Eurich)

Saving Time by Setting Goals (24-minute elevateU virtual course)

Leading Change with Emotional Intelligence

Published on by MSU Human ResourcesLeave a comment

Written by Jennie Yelvington, MSW, ACSW, Program Manager, MSU HR Organization & Professional Development

Emotions tend to run high during times of change, and to navigate effectively for themselves and others, leaders need emotional intelligence (EQ). At its essence, EQ is the ability to regulate oneself and effectively interact with others. To help leaders assess all essential EQ traits, Harvard researcher Daniel Goleman shares that EQ is comprised of these four key components (Goleman, 2020):

  • Self-Awareness: To understand your moods, emotions and drives, as well as personal strengths and limitations
  • Self-Management: To demonstrate emotional self-control, adaptability, striving for excellence, an appreciation of feedback and a positive outlook.
  • Social Awareness: To have the capacity and demonstrate an ability for empathy and to read the dynamics of a group or organization.
  • Relationship Management: To deal effectively with conflict, facilitate teamwork, and demonstrate the capacity to influence, mentor and inspire others.

While these skills can be more natural for some leaders than others, all can be learned and are critical as we lead the way through changing times. The article Using Emotional Intelligence to Lead in Higher Education notes, “when leaders apply the principles of Emotional Intelligence in their daily leadership practices, a myriad of congruent studies on working environments and job satisfaction revealed that self-efficacy is heightened. Essentially, not only do people feel more valued, they feel a heightened sense of empowerment and confidence in their ability to accomplish tasks and achieve goals” (Vinciguerra, 2017). All of this is particularly critical when leading through change, when people tend to be stressed and fearful. Conversely, leaders who are lacking in these skills tend to struggle with behavioral problems within the team and a lack of progress in the change effort.

It should also be noted that while essential, EQ skills are not all that is required for leaders to advance a changing organization. Dwindling budgets have to be managed, data must be analyzed and critical decisions must be made. This is not an either/or proposition. Leaders must balance the analytic responsibilities of their position within a socio-emotional context. This requires a conscious effort as each is processed through different neural networks in the brain, and we tend to get stuck in one or the other. The article The Best Managers Balance Analytical and Emotional Intelligence by Melvin Smith describes these two neural networks as the analytic network and the empathetic network (Smith, 2020). Smith also provides the following strategies for increasing your capacity to attend to both:

  1. Be aware of your “go-to” neural network. This requires mindfulness. Questions for reflection include:
    • How am I processing the situation at this moment? Am I thinking about concrete facts? Creative possibilities?
    • What types of situations tend to pull me to the analytic network and when am I most likely to be pulled to the empathetic network?
    • On the whole, which do I tend to go to more naturally?
  2. Exercise the neural network that isn’t your “go-to.”
    • To exercise your empathetic network: practice having conversations where your goal is to fully understand the other person, as opposed to solving their problem or changing their mind. Really tune into that person, noting their body language, tone of voice, etc. Practice challenging your own assumptions and considering other possibilities.
    • To exercise your analytic network: Set a timeline for a task you need to complete and hold yourself to it. Identify a situation at work that needs a creative outcome. Do research, list pros and cons of options, look at risks and benefits and compile information to develop a framework.
  3. Practice balancing both.
    • Be clear on your intention to consider both.
    • Think about the implications of your decisions from both a relational and technical perspective.

The need for this balance and the importance of EQ in leadership has only magnified through the current pandemic. Continually changing data points, additional task force work, change fatigue and more have made the job of leaders more difficult, in addition to dealing with the fears, stressors and work changes for their teams. In exploring how EQ can be most helpful in this environment, the article Emotional intelligence during the pandemic: 5 tips for leaders encourages leaders to focus on creating psychological safety, welcoming respectful dissent while not tolerating personal attacks, modeling empathy, and inviting challenges to the status quo (Clark, 2020). Frequent communication continues to be essential as well, both to communicate potential changes and to check in with others to see how they are doing. By strengthening connections with peers and employees and actively working to create a positive environment, we will weather the storm and be positioned for a successful future.

The following resources in elevateU provide additional learning opportunities:

Sources:

Clark, T. (2020,April 29) Emotional intelligence during the pandemic: 5 tips for leaders. Retrieved November 10, 2020 from https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2020/4/emotional-intelligence-crisis

Goleman, D. (2020, June 9) Harvard researcher says the most emotionally intelligent people have these 12 traits. Which do you have? Retrieved November 10, 2020 from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/09/harvard-psychology-researcher-biggest-traits-of-emotional-intelligence-do-you-have-them.html

Smith, M., Van Oosten, E., Boyatzis, R. (2020, June 12) The Best Managers Balance Analytical and Emotional Intelligence. Retrieved November 10, 2020 from https://hbr.org/2020/06/the-best-managers-balance-analytical-and-emotional-intelligence

Vinciguerra, S. (2020, October 20) Using Emotional Intelligence to Lead in Higher Education. Retrieved November 10, 2020 from https://sunysail.org/2017/10/20/using-emotional-intelligence-to-lead-in-higher-education/