Today’s guest blogger is Lawrence Polsky. Mr. Polsky is an entrepreneur who, after a career in the financial services, healthcare, and consumer-electronics industries, launched and managed two successful businesses. Lawrence built a gourmet organic food-service business and then an organizational development & training business. Since 1993, Lawrence has assisted dozens of organizations as a consultant, coach, and trainer in the areas of leadership, teams and change. He is a certified administrator of the BarOn EQ-i.
Working in IT sometimes seems like an endless string of crises and setbacks.
For example, just when you’re excited about completing the new data entry screens on time, your client says, “No, that’s not what I meant. Oh, and by the way, our deadline just got pushed up two weeks.” Or, it’s Monday morning and there’s a seemingly endless supply of angry people on the phone, yet they expect you to be all sunshine and roses 24/7. And don’t forget, now that you’ve finally gotten your technical skills up to speed, the threat of off-shoring your job to India looms on the horizon.
Of course, none of these challenges have anything to do with your technical ability and skills. Yet, if you can’t cope, they are just as likely to interfere with your productivity as limited technical skills. These challenges require other skills – social/emotional skills – to successfully cope and produce results under pressure. These and related skills make up what is called your Emotional Intelligence (EI). Research shows that if EI skills are not up to snuff, you won’t be able to handle these kinds of challenges and stressors effectively. As a result, you are less likely to succeed at work or at home.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Imagine you have two employees of equal technical competence. One employee (Employee A) is usually upbeat, tackles problems in a systematic way, and is able to build and maintain productive working relationships with internal clients. The other employee (Employee Z), while able to do the same technical work, gets easily stressed out by job demands, doesn’t listen well to clients, and always seems to ask you to solve problems.
Obviously, we all want to have a department stocked full of employee A types. These employees have high EI. They are generally optimistic and happy; they don’t stress out or cave under pressure; they solve problems systematically on their own, and they are able to create and nurture good client relationships.
Often, though, we have people more like Employee Z. They may not have all the bad attributes mentioned, but enough of them so that we don’t know how to help them get out of their own way. The reason that they are not reaching their potential is they have a lower EI. They lack certain skills and competencies to help them cope with the demands of work and life.
Instead of looking to find ways to fire Employee Z, or to minimize the damage they do, we can help them develop the skill sets they need to be more productive through Emotional Intelligence training.
Definition of Emotional Intelligence
Think of the IT people you know who consistently succeed and thrive despite these challenging times. By succeed, I mean a holistic view of success – achieving work goals, earning the respect of colleagues and clients, taking time to play and enjoy life, liking who they are and what they do. Are these people excessively stressed out? Not usually. Are they optimistic that they will complete projects despite these challenges? Most of the time. Are they able to see the client’s point of view and listen to their problems, without taking things personally? Yes. How about being able to stand their ground when disagreements arise, while taking another’s feelings into account. Absolutely. They are emotionally intelligent.
Formally speaking, Emotional Intelligence is a set of non-cognitive capabilities, competencies and skills that influence our ability to cope with environmental demands and pressures (BarOn).
Let’s look at this more closely.
Non-cognitive capabilities, competencies and skills – These skills are very different from the logical, reasoning and technical thinking skills that we use to analyze, design and diagnose a system. These are social-emotional smarts. They are, in fact, rooted in a different part of our brain than our IT skills. EI is rooted in the limbic system, the oldest part of the brain. It is the part of the brain that quickly assesses a situation and decides whether we are in danger. It then directs our bodies to respond immediately. I think of it as the foundation for how we respond and react to all situations and people.
For example, if we are faced with a challenging module of coding, the emotional part of our brain is assessing whether we can do it well and on time. Based on our assessment, our body responds similarly to how it did back when our jungle-dwelling forefathers faced wild animals. If our mind believes that the coding is challenging and more than we can handle in the time allotted, our pulse may actually increase and our anxiety heightens; we will be stressed. A more emotionally intelligent response is to take a few minutes to use our logical brain to rationally assess the problem, see what help and resources we will need, and ask the appropriate people for what we need to get the job done.#p#分页标题#e#
Influence – Influence does not mean cause and effect. It means that EI will contribute to success and happiness. It is not the only factor, but a significant one. Do these skills really influence people’s success? There is much research showing that EI influences success.
Successful Coping – Ultimately, EI helps us cope with day-to-day challenges. Coping means being able to handle challenges and staying emotionally composed. It does not mean being completely poised all the time; we’ve all had bad days. It means to be able, in general, to handle difficult situations without falling apart or stressing out. Our ability to cope will influence our ability to succeed… whatever challenge we face.
The “bottom line” of coaching and training is that it does have an impact on the bottom line. It can help drive financial results through intermediate factors, such as emotional intelligence or leadership practices. That impact, combined with other smart business activities, leads to increased revenue and profits.
Why Emotional Intelligence Training?
You may think, “Yeah, but these skills just come with experience.” That is partly true. Research shows that EI naturally increases over age. Problem is, some of us start with lower EI’s, and while it increases over age, it is not as high as it can be if we had the time to learn some new skills.
We acquired many of our emotional coping strategies through osmosis, i.e., while growing up we learned to use skills that people around us were using. But now that we are in the workplace, our family’s method of conflict resolution (not discussing it) or stress management (yelling at each other) doesn’t work. We all do the best we can, learning by watching people we admire and/or from the school of hard knocks.
Assessment
The first step to change any skill is to assess your current skill level. We assess EI through an online tool called the EQ-i.
Current skills assessment often brings skill gaps into focus, giving employees the initiative to change. For example, there was an effective, respected supervisor who started to feel insecure about her management skills after a major organizational change. After taking an EI assessment, she realized she was being very hard on herself and was not expressing her feelings. This resulted in high stress and productivity loss from harboring negative feelings. Just this assessment, with minimal coaching, helped her begin communicating more with her manager and staff, setting and achieving more realistic goals, experiencing less stress, and as a result, feeling more confident. Her colleagues started telling her, “Gee, it’s nice to have the old you back.” Based on her changed behavior, her manager told her, “You’re no longer a supervisor in my eyes, you’re now a leader.” Today, five years later, she is no longer a front-line supervisor, but a Department Director, responsible for 50 people. She attributes her success to her Emotional Intelligence skill development.
Definition of EQ-i
The EQ-i was developed by psychologist Dr. Reuven BarOn. He examined all the existing research on emotional competencies and success. He chose to include only those skills that had been scientifically proven to be correlated with success. He condensed this into 15 skill areas. Over several years, he created, tested and retested his tool. Using a group of over 9,000 people across the world, he created a composite of the “average person”, based on age and gender, and made the average score 100. The company MHS published the tool and created various reports, including a detailed development report, a group report (showing the composite of any team, group, division, or company), as well as a 360 feedback tool.
Training
Sometimes the skill deficits are more significant and cannot be changed by feedback alone. Professionals need training on new skills they can use to improve their effectiveness.
For example, a manager grew concerned that employees were talking behind her back. She contacted me to train her staff to communicate more directly. First, we helped her see that she was the source of the problem. Her staff saw her as cold, insensitive and unapproachable. She was not comfortable building and maintaining relationships, and she was a poor listener and not assertive. Because of this, no one brought issues to her directly. After training, she transformed her behavior. People started to talk to her more; she listened and responded. We next worked with her employees and helped them develop the communication skills needed to be assertive and clear with her and each other. Her employees now report it is “fun to come to work in the morning.” In addition, productivity is up because people are dealing directly with each other. As an added bonus, her department gave more recognition to each other (through the company recognition program) than any other department in the company.#p#分页标题#e#
Training programs are focused on three areas: What is EI? What is your EI? What can you do about? By using activities and video clips, people learn in a comfortable environment exactly what this thing called EI is all about.
The next step is to give people a report of their EI strengths and weaknesses. This sets the stage and creates desire for people to want to learn new skills. Lastly, and most importantly, the “what you can do about it” section is made practical and usable. All 15 areas that make up EI are specific skills. Each skill has a step-by- step model or set of very learnable sub-skills. There is no magic or mystery to these skills. Each one is learned and applied right in the classroom, through non-threatening activities and discussions. The result? Participants leave with practical tools and techniques to use the very next day.
Practice & Feedback
Unlike learning how to connect a network server or install software, in order to change and learn, EI skills reside in a part of the brain that requires practice, repetition and feedback over at least three months. This means that EI training initiatives must include opportunities to learn new skills, plus give participants ideas, structures and support to practice these skills over a period of a few months.
Classroom practice, applying the skills to real- life situations (with the support and encouragement of colleagues and the facilitator), gives the participants a taste of success and the encouragement to try these new skills on the job.
Professionals also need to focus their learning. Often, training programs have participants choose three areas to work on or implement on the job. After an EI class, there may be many areas that participants want to develop after a class. However, the most effective approach is to pick one area and focus on that area for a few months, until their new skill is integrated into their skill set. Then, they can start the second skill.
EI & IT
The research on Emotional Intelligence and IT is interesting. MHS, a psychological assessment firm that publishes the EQ- i, an online tool to assess one’s Emotional Intelligence, found that, in general, IT professionals have a slightly lower than average EI. One hundred fifty (150) IT professionals took the 133 short question assessment, and MHS found that their EQ was 97.5. The average EQ of the general population is 100.
More interesting was that EQ varied based on job function. For example, programmers had an average EQ of 92, while help desk people had an average of 113. This makes good sense: Programmers may be less hampered by lower EI skills since much of their time is spent alone and coding. Programmers may choose such a job because they know they won’t need to have an emotional relationship with the computer (although those of us who have coded know that we experience both joy and anger at that box, based on whether our coding is working!). Help Desk scores also make sense, as these people need the higher EI skills to deal with angry callers and the pressure of getting answers under fire.
EI & Leadership
Star Executives – Hay/McBer researched hundreds of top executives at 15 global companies, including IBM, PepsiCo & Volvo, and found that close to 90% of the star performersa
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