Emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in an organization’s dynamics. Its impact affects the organizational culture, team collaboration, and even individual performance. In the last decade, organizational leaders have struggled to find effective ways to manage emotional intelligence and direct it in the same direction as corporate objectives. With the turn to digital interaction and the decline of face-to-face communication, the challenge of building and developing emotional intelligence within people’s lives has become more critical than ever. In most situations, we stick in as participants; emotional disbalance, conflicts, and negativity are mainly produced by an imbalance in emotional intelligence. People tend to underestimate it, and this causes groups and individuals to enter disadvantageous situations and scenarios. With the lack of understanding of identifying deficits in the EQ area, people also produce deficits and shrink the possible solutions for dealing with those energetically unstable situations. Here are five easy-to-spot signs of a deficit in the employees of EQ.
Lack of self-awareness
Often given as an area for development, this threat is difficult to understand. People tend to move their characters around their Ego. Some of the employees struggle to recognize and, as a result of that, understand their emotional pallet. As a result of that, several visible elements struggle. Lack of self-awareness is recognizable through difficult communication, with a lot of ups and downs in it, poor decision making, mainly caused by the insecurity in the decisions taken, and poor self-regulation, often seen as incapability to put yourself working toward the broader norms and standards distributed across the team and the company.
Poor regulation of emotions
Employees with low EQ cannot often interact in a balanced way with their colleagues. Their productivity and effectiveness at work also suffer. They may experience emotional numbness and mood swings because of their inability to manage their emotions at work.
Lack of Empathy
“Whoever understands the feelings of others will be the leader of tomorrow.” Said in 2022, a participant in one of the People conferences across Europe. Empathy has grown from the corner metaphor to one of the most critical elements defining behavior and positioning today. It is essential for understanding others’ feelings, emotions, and perspectives. When lacking it, teams and leaders miss the balance; conflicts escalate, morale declines and teamwork suffers.
Ineffective communication
Not surprisingly, communication impacts the most balance in the workplace. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations at work lead to direct tension. At the same time, feedback suffers, collaboration is hindered, and conflict resolution levels fall dramatically, creating space for tension and an inability to get along with others.
Resistance to change
Maybe you have seen that employee standing in the corner and not accepting the significant change offered to the team. The lower the EQ, the higher the resistance to change. People with low EQ may struggle with accepting and fighting against them, hindering innovations and growth that these changes offer.
However, understanding EQ and how people may lack it is one thing. To react to it is another. No matter how the quick fixes are structured, organizations must respond as a whole to the lack of EQ.
Here is some advice on what the leader can do to help their team and individuals deal with the lack of EQ:
Encouraging self-reflection
We often hear about this, but as few as fifteen percent of people (according to a Gartner survey from 2023) clearly understand what that means. To help, the leader must first provide tools to help on a personal level with self-assessment and provide a possible list of mental exercises to help the person get to themselves.
Help personal growth.
An excellent perspective for the leader here is to turn to stress and how to manage it. Offering training to build emotional regulation skills and coping strategies is essential. At the same time, the leader must work with the employees to make a response technique, allowing them to stop and pause before responding to a stimulus impulsively.
Foster empathy
The agenda includes stimulating active listening, creating team-building activities, and different perspective-building exercises. The more the leader focuses on these, the better the empathy responses. One joint exercise in this area is putting yourself into the other person’s shoes. Getting this exercise to all employees helps them build that other perspective they are currently missing.
Boost communication
Now, this one sounds easier than done. With a concise learning path toward better communication, the interaction goes on a different level. On a leadership level, that may mean providing comprehensive training and information on what good communication looks like within the company, investing time in teaching people how to recognize non-verbal cues, teaching them how to be more assertive, and providing ongoing coaching to close them to the successful image they must face.
Brake the chains of resistance to change.
The most straightforward and direct advice for leaders here is to…cultivate a growth mindset. Sounds easy, right? However, it also requires a lot of work from the leader to achieve it with the team. Included here are such actions as supporting and encouraging learning agility to help people escape the predefined chains of “what it is now.” Boost activities that allow people to open their minds to change. Last but not least, the leader should not forget to celebrate the changes and consistently embrace change as a cultural norm in the team.
If these recommendations above can help the leader with the team toward change, one other participant must play their role to ensure that EQ will move in the right direction and that people will change. The other side is the organization as a whole mechanism.
But what can an organization do to support that change in the evolving mindset and the emotional growth perspective for employees? Some may say it is not much, and all depends on the individual readiness for change. Organizations play a crucial role in building the environment that boosts leaders’ and individuals’ efforts toward achieving a higher level of EQ to help the business move forward and grow. Below are several possible steps every organization may make:
Building a support network
The initiative on that one must be from the company. No matter how leaders think they have to act, the company’s or the organization’s primary purpose is not to deal with every person’s disturbances but to create equal opportunities for them. Building the network means providing access to coaching and mentorship and allowing employees to connect freely. Making this happen, the company creates an environment where the individual successfully fights stress, fosters individual growth, and provides emotional validation and help.
Recognizing and responding to tension
Everyone has moments of tension in their lives. No matter if these moments are personal or professional, they are there. The organization can interfere here by training employees to identify different signs of tension and learn to address them constructively instead of emotionally. By providing, for example, conflict management training to employees, organizations encourage open dialogue and foster a positive work environment.
Building and cultivating a collaboration culture
, which means promoting work that involves everyone in a harmonized and balanced way of collaboration. Promoting that collaboration agenda enhances individual skills and builds a mindset of teamwork and togetherness. In return, that reflects the building of collective emotional intelligence within the team and the organization. Some straightforward ways to achieve that are organizing conflict-solving team sessions, cross-functional project execution and completion, and even well-known team-building activities.
Providing training agenda on emotional intelligence
Leaders and organizations often fall into the trap of talking about emotional intelligence and doing nothing to support learning about it. The less time is invested in training people in emotional intelligence, the lower the results of their behavior are. However, training does not have to be provided in the classroom. Organizations may choose to mix in-class and on-the-field training involving different training sessions, workshops, online learning activities, etc. Building an emotional intelligence scenarios agenda may be one of the solutions to help people learn in practice how to deal with issues from that area. Combined with role plays and awareness of emotional intelligence in the form of feedback and coaching, they are also helpful here.
Reflecting regularly
Self-reflection is a powerful tool to improve. At the same time, less than 15 percent of people do it. Teaching people how to reflect on their emotions after a challenging situation and analyze them is a helpful tool for improving as a person, professional, and colleague. Organizations can help by creating environments and sessions to help self-reflect and discuss lessons learned from particular situations. As a result of such sessions, the next step should be strategies for improvement coming from the individuals, supported by their leader and enabled by the organization.
IN CONCLUSION:
Enhancing emotional intelligence benefits both individuals and the organization. By addressing these threats and implementing proactive strategies, workplaces can create a more emotionally intelligent and resilient environment that supports individual change and growth.
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