Emotional Intelligence for Managing Results in a Diverse World

The Hard Truth About Soft Skills in the Workplace

Anita Rose, Jorge Cherbosque, Lee Gardenswartz

• Publisher: Davies-Black
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780891063940
• eBook ISBN: 9781473643697
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Whether you work group stretches from here to Dubai or can easily meet in a conference room down the hall, anger and frustration are easy to come by when others don't do things your way, follow directions, or respond the way you think they should. But when emotions manage workplace relationships, the result is conflict, disengagement, and low morale. Emotional Intelligence for Managing Results in a Diverse World delivers a novel prescription for managing effectively in today's workplace: Use the dynamic principles of EQ plus insights from the author's pioneering diversity work to increase your competence in managing emotions and enhance your effectiveness in work, relationships, and life. The book also gives you the know-how to use this approach in coaching and developing others to help them be more successful on the job.

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You Can’t Leave Your Feelings at Home

Emotions aren’t just touchy-feely things that belong in a therapy session. Nor are they aspects of yourself—or of others—that need to be hidden, ashamed of, or ignored. They are a legitimate and powerful part of you and your relationships. They are also the energy behind behavior, whether it is yours or that of others. What’s more important, how you deal with those emotions results in consequences, leading to both your successes and your failures. Human beings function on both rational and emotional levels, and emotions are at the heart of energy, commitment, and motivation. Despite the old adage that you should “leave your feelings at home,” emotions come to work along with your thoughts. You know the exhilaration and energy you feel when you are doing work that matters to you. You remember the excitement and anticipation you felt at the beginning of a promising new job or assignment. On the other hand, you probably also recall the knot in your stomach when you made a major error at work, or the anxiety and dread you felt when you had a conflict looming with a boss, colleague, or subordinate.

Although emotions are the source of engagement, joy, and energy, they are also at the heart of anger, frustration, and disengagement. Feelings are there, whether you like it or not. If you don’t acknowledge and manage them, they’ll be managing you, your relationships, and your workplace environment. Without the ability to understand and deal with emotions effectively, you will continue to undermine your chances for effectiveness.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and deal with feelings, both your own and those of others, in a healthy and constructive way. Your ability to be effective in today’s diverse world, on and off the job, depends on it. When you have the tools to harness the power of emotions, you can build energized, engaged, and productive teams. If not, emotions will manage your interactions, your work group, and its output.

Emotional Intelligence Affects Profitability and Performance

In the past few years, thanks to the work of Daniel Goleman and others, acknowledgment and understanding of the essential role emotions play in shaping a person’s success have been growing. Most people would agree that IQ has never been enough to be successful and fulfilled in life. Who can’t point to colleagues and friends who are off the charts in intellectual gifts yet are their own worst enemies because their emotional intelligence doesn’t match their IQ. According to the Center for Creative Leadership, the three most significant causes of career derailment for executives involve deficits in emotional competence:

Difficulty handling change

Inability to work in a team

Poor interpersonal relations

Feelings and the impact they have can even be quantified. According to Tony Simons, writing in the Harvard Business Review, the more employees feel trust—an emotional response—in their bosses, the higher the profits for the organization. In one study, a one-eighth-point improvement on a survey of employees’ perceptions of how much managers earned their confidence increased profitability by 2.5 percent; that increase in profitability meant a quarter of a million dollar profit increase per business unit per year.¹

Additional research correlates emotional intelligence and performance:

In a multinational consulting firm, partners who scored above the median in emotional intelligence competencies delivered $1.2 million more in profit from their accounts than did other partners, a 139 percent incremental gain.²

At L’Oréal, salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competencies sold $91,370 more than other salespeople, for a net revenue increase of $2,558,360. They also had 63 percent less turnover in the first year.³

After supervisors in a manufacturing plant received training in emotional competencies, accidents resulting in lost time decreased by 50 percent, formal grievances dropped from fifteen to three a year, and the plant exceeded production goals by $250,000.⁴

As you can see from these examples, feelings and the ability to deal with them have an impact on the bottom line. That is just the tip of the iceberg of the truth about soft skills.

The Power of Emotions in Dealing with Diversity

Although emotions have always been a significant factor in performance at work, the role they play is even greater in today’s diverse work environments, where there is an increasingly wide array of cultures, lifestyles, and needs. You have undoubtedly experienced situations at work where you have seen the impact of feelings that result from dealing with diversity. You have also seen how the situations were dealt with, both effectively and ineffectively. Here are a few real-world examples.

A CEO was confused and upset when one of her best manufacturing employees, a recent immigrant, quit unexpectedly. After investigating, she found out that the employee resigned because of a cultural difference. The shame and loss of face the employee experienced in a feedback session with her was what led to his departure.

An executive understood the fear that was at the heart of his staff’s resistance to the changes he had instituted regarding diversity. He therefore gave them a chance to vent their frustrations at an all-hands meeting where he could listen, show empathy, and then respond to their concerns. His response calmed their anxiety and enabled them to accept the changes and move on.

A team leader was exasperated because his team members said yes to everything he asked and indicated that they understood, but they continued to make mistakes that made it clear that they did not understand. His frustration led to blowups on the plant floor that could have been avoided with some knowledge about cross-cultural communication.

Feelings are a fundamental part of your reactions to the differences you see in others, whether you approach or avoid them, like or dislike them, accept or reject them. In your workplace, it’s probably not uncommon for workers from five generations, with multiple languages and a wide variety of backgrounds, styles, and values, to come together on the job. You may be intrigued and stimulated by these differences. However, you may also find that bruised feelings, volatile reactions, and unint...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Activities, Checklists, Figures, and Table
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 You Can’t Leave Your Feelings at Home
• 2 We “Can’t All Just Get Along”
• 3 Affirmative Introspection—Taking a Look Inside
• 4 Self-Governance—Getting a Handle on Your Feelings
• 5 Intercultural Literacy—Reading Others Accurately
• 6 Social Architecting—Enrolling and Engaging Others
• 7 Coaching Individuals for Emotional Intelligence in Your Diverse Workplace
• 8 Coaching Teams for Emotional Intelligence in Your Diverse Workplace
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index