Anyone ready to order? Yes, can I have some EI? Sorry, what? I'm sorry.
Emotional intelligence? Did you drink in our takeaway? Both? No, I don't think that's possible.
Oh, to drink in, please. Hey, take a seat. I'm sorry about that. She's usually not that abrupt.
How fitting that in today's episode we're talking about emotional intelligence and emotions in the workplace. I suppose I should have used business, E jargon and ordered EI. Oh well, we're here to learn. Never mind, I am delighted that you can join me for the third episode of Management Cafe where we can consume some evergreen theories and models from our main menu and also consider today's specials, those movements and trends that surround organizations today.
If we haven't met before, my name is Pilar Ortiz and in this Management Cafe I'd like to share my thoughts on the evolving role of the manager in organizations today, mainly looking at what sometimes is referred to as soft skills, those skills that have to do with interacting with others and which from being soft they are very, very hard. Today I've ordered emotional intelligence. Let's see what we get. And if you want to see what else is on the menu, head over to virtual.distant.com slash podcasts where you will find the other episodes of Management Cafe as well as those for the 21st century work-life podcast.
Virtual Not Distant is the sponsor of this podcast, website again virtual. Not distant.com and do have a look at your website to see whether we can help you and your team transition from working regularly in the office together to operating more like a like a virtual team, whether some people working from home or whether you're working with people in different locations. And of course today's Management Cafe episode is also relevant to virtual teams because they are made up of humans too. Right, I am about to embark on quite some theory today but I do have some reflection questions to leave you with whether your team members see each other every day in the flesh or not.
So I hope whatever you set up you will find a little bit of value in today's episode. Finally, the final bit before settling in for our coffee. If you want to subscribe to this podcast, you can do so via your podcast app or if you want to receive an email with a new episodes then go to managementcafepodcast.com and you can subscribe there just enter your email address. Here you are.
Oh thank you. You're welcome. Oh a smile. Right.
Let's see what emotional intelligence tastes like. First, a little bit of history. Some of you might remember Daniel Goldman's book, Emotional Intelligence, hitting the bookshelves in 1996. What a revelation.
Discovering that how we navigate the emotional aspect of life is just as important as how we use our intellect. Because a while to figure that one out, the book was followed by working with emotional intelligence and then also primal leadership unleashing the power of emotional intelligence which Daniel Goldman calls with Richard Boyassie. So if you are interested in the subject, you might want to check out one of those I've dipped in and out of them I have to admit. So one of the reasons I thought I'd share my thoughts about this topic here is that just the term in itself emotional intelligence, just the fact that it has made our way into our vocabulary of desirable professional competencies, just that fact means that we are acknowledging that we all have emotions and that it's how we operate with them that allows us to work better or worse with others.
Long gone are the days when we were expected to just leave our emotions completely out of the office door or the computer if you're working away from your colleagues. We are acknowledging that we are humans and why not let's celebrate that. So I've been it's a huge topic so I've been struggling with how to tackle it. Defining emotional intelligence is very well but how does it help us and how does it help us as managers and how does it help us to create the best conditions in which a team can operate which for me is at the heart of 21st century management.
So I've decided to structure my thoughts in three parts. We'll have a look at emotional intelligence itself then I'll introduce you to a couple of terms that I've come across over the years that have to do with emotion and emotion at the workplace and then finally I'll share some research on self-managed outstanding teams which shows some of what we might want to look out for and encourage, facilitate and even role model. So let's start with a very short definition of emotional intelligence as defined by Daniel Goldman. Actually just worth saying that that term was first used in 1989 by two American academic psychologists John D.
Meyer and Peter Salovey but I've just found their work a little bit less easy to apply to the workplace. So I'm going to stick with Goldman as he's a animal palatable and this is a coffee break podcast after all. So I would just say that emotional intelligence is the cluster of skills that allow us to understand and regulate our own emotions and those of others. And EI, I like that term EI, in which intelligence is made up of four components according to Goldman.
So we look at self-awareness number one. This is the basis of all leadership practice self-awareness and indeed it's the basis of all success of human interaction. I imagine you can see how in all human interactions it's desirable to be aware of how we're feeling and how we're coming across. But let's go a bit further with the self-awareness in the context of managing and leading teams.
It's not just about seeing or feeling that an emotion is brewing up and it could be happiness. I have a sense that when we talk about emotions at work we're always looking at those that are getting the way but remember the joy, excitement, happiness that they're also emotions. So acknowledging the emotional aspect of communication is something key in our interactions with others. Understanding where they might be coming from is the next step and this is all part of self-awareness.
If you really want to know yourself, understanding where emotions come from can sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable. So I'm not even thinking of going into some deep analysis although you can do that of course but even just thinking hey, doing this is making me really happy or having coffee with that person has left me inspired or you know what that conversation really angry probably because feeling the blanks. This can sometimes take us to a place that we didn't really want to acknowledge but I think it's having it's worth having that conversation with ourselves definitely and if possible with others. Even if they are just there to listen and help us to articulate our thoughts by being a sounding board.
So self-awareness it's important because emotions can get in the way and it's important to acknowledge them and make sure that we know what to do with them, made of that in a second but also when we're leading a team or a project it's tempting to design a process or to shape the groups process to suit our own tendencies and our own needs. So for example you might decide to continue running weekly meetings because it makes you feel connected to the team or because it makes you feel in control. You might not even be aware of this but if you are self aware you might understand this but yeah you might decide that you want to run these weekly meetings because it makes you feel good in different ways but maybe what the team needs at the moment is daily progress reports on tasks, short bursts of information that are best shared online maybe or maybe the project requires people working from different locations and actually a weekly meeting is just too unproductive. So it's often a good idea to just revise your current processes especially if you've played the major part in designing them.
To see who you're really serving are you serving the task the project the team or yourself. Are you actually designing a team process that suits your individual emotional needs and you can take this a little bit further and review it as a team also. What needs is the team serving by having these processes again it might be that it's a sense an emotional need for connectedness but that might be getting in the way of productivity and maybe we can design something else that will take care of that need. So emotions are there they will come into our work processes into our preferences and it's just it's part of understanding ourselves to help us design the work in a better way.
So that was self awareness and once we've done then we can then move on to self management this is a natural progression and you can't really move on to self management without addressing self awareness. You can't manage what you're not aware of but self management is not just about managing your emotions it's also about keeping yourself in check acting with integrity and staying adaptable making sure that you don't get in the way of your own opportunities or that you don't get in the way of others. As on a side anytime I start talking about management I just want to ditch everything I've ever thought set or written and replace it just with just get out of the way but that would be a very short podcast and a very short career as a consultant. So if we strive to have healthy levels of EI then we need self awareness and we need self management.
Those are the two things that are inward looking let's now look outwards. Another component of EI is social awareness and that of course includes empathy. This is not easy and it's where management means anthropology means psychology and it's why if you don't like people or are not curious about their behavior then you really should delegate people management responsibilities to someone else. So let's assume that you do want to nurture that side of your leadership practice.
So let's look at empathy which is really about standing in someone else's shoes. It's about understanding where they are coming from and of course this empathy builds up with time and this ability to empathize also grows with time and the danger here is that sometimes we think we understand someone because we have been in a similar situation to them but are we just reflecting on how we felt or are we really understanding how they're dealing with it. So just a thought next time you are oh yeah I know how you feel really. This social awareness is also key to understanding what's going on in your team, in your organization and even with your customers so you can see how it takes time to develop but curiosity and asking questions before assuming that you know the answers will help and of course if you want to hear more about asking questions before assuming you know the answers and wanting to solve problems then check out episode two from this podcast on creating a coaching culture.
So let's move from social awareness onto relationship management which is of course essential if you're running a team and again if you're not great at it, if you're not great at bringing people together, instigating change or collaborating then make sure somebody in your team is, I never said we can all do everything. However in a moment even if these are not your strengths I'll share with you what successful teams do to see whether there's anything that you can tap into and just something a little bit more practical that you can get your head and heart around even if your own natural tendency is not to facilitate teamwork. So let me just wrap up the bit on emotional intelligence which is composed of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. Now I promised well I said at the beginning I'd introduce some terms here which are just worth noting and it will be interesting to see whether once you've come across them whether you can then identify some of these phenomena in the workplace.
So we're moving a bit, well I don't think we're moving past emotional intelligence but we're staying in the emotion, rotor emotions in the workplace arena. So the first term I wanted to share is emotional contagion and this is exactly what it says on the tin. It's the ability of emotions to go from one person to the other for emotions to be contagious which is why it's so important to be self-aware and self-managed these emotions. Don't underestimate how these emotions can spread not just in person but also through video, through writing, I'm sure you've seen examples of this at work or in life and I've got a little recommendation for another show if you want a little bit more psychology about the reasons behind emotional contagion then check out episode from the 23rd of June 2016 of the podcast Two Guys in Your Head.
But if you want a short summary I'll give it to you here, in a nutshell we have been designed to try to understand what people are feeling because that's part of our surroundings it's part of being safe and knowing how to adapt. So when we meet someone else we absorb slightly another person's emotions to see if we can understand what they're feeling through feeling ourselves. It's really like putting on someone else's shoes and then walking in them to give us a sense of what they are feeling and of course as we absorb the emotion to try to understand it we start to embody it and this is the theory behind emotional contagion and again if you want a little bit more explanation on this Two Guys in Your Head is the podcast. So you can see how we might not realize that we are in a terrible mood but then we come into contact with others and suddenly the mood spreads and soon nobody in our team wants to talk to each other or the other way around we might be lucky and our happiness can spread everywhere but this again doesn't mean that we suppress our emotions or that we constantly have to check what emotions we're displaying because that can lead to get ready for another term emotional labor and this is basically the effort the psychological effort of holding back one's emotions at work or having to display emotions we don't really feel.
So this can be like when something makes us very upset but we want to appear cheerful or when we try and help someone out of a terrible mood by saying things that you might not really be feeling but we think that by saying that we can help that person out of the boots so that's another interesting one and finally one other term emotional dissonance and this occurs when we are constantly having to display an emotion when we actually feel another so the first example that comes to mind is when that waitress smiles at you even though she's feeling terrible when you have to contain your frustration when a client sends you yet another last minute request and you reply to them oh yeah what a great idea could you think of that two months before then or even when we are really happy because we just got promoted for example while the rest of the team has just found out they have to go back to square one on the design process that also involves holding back on our emotion and displaying another one so emotional contagion they're spreading of emotions emotional dissonance expressing emotions opposite to those we feel and emotional labor which happens when we are constantly suppressing emotions or having to display different ones to those we feel I suppose this last one is the build up of emotional dissonance so what to do if we come across any of these in ourselves well full disclaimer first this is just my opinion I'm not a trained psychologist but I like to save you're experiencing any of this first acknowledge it then that dissected why is it happening is it necessary for this to be happening for us to function better at work and then come up with some strategies that might help you either by talking to someone in or out of work writing down your experiences or reminding yourself that you're human I find this kind of dissection of negative emotional experiences often helps just to you're removing yourself a little bit from it you're saying yeah I'm feeling this why am I feeling it it's okay to feel it oh I need to do something about this right now we're gonna go a little bit away from emotions I'm gonna take a magnifying glass away from ourselves because finally I'd like to share with you some emotional competencies of high performance teams high performing teams as identified by Vanessa Druckert in a study where she analyzed 150 teams at a huge american polyester plant and then compared the 10 outstanding teams out of 150 with others doing the same job and just so what their characteristics were what was happening in those teams that wasn't happening in the ones that weren't doing as well now these were self-managed teams which means that we're not taking into account the effectiveness of a manager or an official leader and while I'm not saying that management is a profession should disappear if I were I would have to tell this podcast differently whereas I'm not saying that I do think that the main responsibility of a manager is to create or help create or remove the barriers to an environment that will help people do their best work so when looking at the characteristics of self-managed teams we can begin to understand what contributes to healthy team operations and even emotions so what Druckert found was the following these teams showed the following emotional competencies and I'm going to quote directly from Goldman's working with emotional intelligence book this is what they showed they showed empathy or interpersonal understanding cooperation and a unified effort open communication which comes from setting explicit norms and expectations and confronting underperforming team members they showed a drive to improve so that the team paid attention to performance feedback and sought to learn to do better they found self-awareness in the form of evaluating their strengths and weaknesses as a team initiative and taking a proactive stance towards solving problems they found they had self-confidence as a team flexibility in how they went about their collective tasks, organizational awareness and building bonds with other teams so before we continue just to say that the teams didn't show all of these but a combination of some that they weren't super women and men but with just with relation to the last two points organizational awareness and building bonds with other teams remember the more recent research by Sani Pentland from MIT I think it was 2012 that research into high-performance teams that I talked about in the first episode of this podcast one of the characteristics they found was that they came into contact with members from other teams so we start we see that relation between both studies that organizational awareness building bonds with other teams makes for a high-performance team so some of these competencies are very difficult to nurture and all of them need plenty of time and patience of course but for example just take initiative and taking a proactive stance towards solving problems what can you as a manager do to encourage this what can you do to encourage people taking the initiative and a proactive stance towards solving problems have a look at the episode of coaching for example or let's take flexibility in how they went about their collective tasks okay how I think what are the barriers to this why maybe why can't we have more flexibility in how team members go about their tasks with each other how about self-awareness in the form of evaluating their strengths and weaknesses as a team okay what processes can you suggest that will help you to do this so if your team is not located in the office then you must absolutely review your communication processes to see whether there is anything that you need to start thinking about have a look at that list you can find the show notes in your podcast app or in management cafe podcast.com and then see whether there's anything that you can encourage by just changing your communication processes and this of course has to do with both co-located and virtual or a mixture of both for example look specifically for examples when you can find empathy or lack of among team members and yourself and have a look at how open communication is affecting team norms so I'm assuming that communication is quite open especially if you're a virtual team because ironically they tend to have more open communication is the best way of staying aligned so how are your communication processes affecting the ability to empathize so my management challenge over today's cup of coffee is for you to have a look at this list and think about how your team measures against these competencies or better stay why not share this with your team in your next team strategy meeting what you don't hold them have a look at the list see how you compare and then pick a couple of items and see whether there is anything you can do to nurture those competencies in the team or maybe even just observe observe over the next few weeks what's going on and then have a look at the list I won't repeat the list now my coffee is getting cold but you can check out the show notes on managementcafepodcast.com or in your podcast app episode three or you can rewind now we wind about two minutes the cafe is getting full do you mind yes i'll leave in a second now which of the components of emotional intelligence do we think she needs to work on okay the environment of course plays a big part on our emotions so i better go before i catch a stress but before i go very quickly i just want to leave you with a book recommendation maybe you read it at another point somewhere else instead of at this table because you don't know what you might catch following on from today's theme why not have a look at Daniel Gorman's focus the hidden driver of excellence don't you just love the subtitle in that book he goes deeper into why self-awareness matters and he of course taps into plenty of science and he covers other such essential skills like developing empathy and social sensitivity aren't those two wonderful terms to leave you with today until next week