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Emotional Intelligence: Our Bread & Butter!
The concept of EI (Emotional Intelligence) has become a hot topic. We at LMA are happy to say that we have been working with people on Emotional Intelligence for twenty-five years through our work with leadership, negotiation and influence! First let's take a look at a definition of EI: In 1990 Dr. John D. Mayer and Dr. Peter Salovey formulated the first scientific definition of Emotional Intelligence. In 1997, they published a revised, more cohesive definition:
"The ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth."
Historically, it has been taboo to show or talk about emotions when dealing with business decisions or issues. Everything had to be rational. So does accessing our emotions make us irrational? No! We become more authentic because:
- we say what we are feeling and thinking thus giving more breadth and depth to issues,
- major decisions normally contain both rational and emotional aspects,
- we create an atmosphere of trust and openness, and
- acknowledging your emotions and the emotions of those around you creates astonishing results!
Promoting emotional, intellectual, and behavioral growth has been one of the key goals of LMA. Training and coaching thousands of people in these topics has resulted in their making demonstrable improvements in working with others and job performance.
In our Creating Results Program the focus is on three primary areas - Organizational "Street Smarts", Influencing Others and Leading Yourself Through Personal Power. Putting all three together gives a person a much deeper emotional, intellectual, and behavioral grasp of a situation. In short they are better able to take more mature action!
Each of these areas touch on or are entirely focused on EI. For example, Leading Yourself focuses entirely on managing your own internal reactions and thinking about how to react to others in a mature fashion. The Influencing Others skills have you thinking about the best way to approach the person you want to influence based on their needs and feelings. Organizational Street Smarts sharpens skills in understanding situations and how best to navigate your way through them!
When you are better able to handle situations, you are less likely to react in unproductive ways. At the heart of the way we influence people is understanding both our own needs and feelings, e.g., how we are going to act and react in a situation, and the needs and feelings of the person we wish to influence. Without taking into consideration these aspects of ourselves and others, successful influencing becomes more challenging!
In Resolving Conflict: The Key To Lasting Agreements you look at how you react in situations where there is conflict... with a cooperative, competitive or adversarial strategy. When people are being emotionally intelligent they choose the cooperative path as the appropriate process for managing conflict. They also learn how to work more effectively with others who may be taking a competitive or adversarial strategy!
In our Executive Coaching process we use a questionnaire which gives feedback on behaviors which display aspects of EI. We then work one-on-one with the individual to build on their strengths and focus on the areas where growth is needed to improve their emotional intelligence.
Through the current work on EI and our work for the past 25 years we know that people who make the best leaders are able to:
- manage and access their own emotions,
- support themselves and others to be more productive,
- tap into the positive motivational emotions of their direct reports, and
- inspire others in the organization towards realistic and exciting visions.
In summary, LMA has supported and will continue to support the growth of emotional intelligence in individuals, teams, and organizations!
