Why Executives Lack of Emotional Intelligence?

The higher you are in the org chart, the less emotional intelligence you demonstrate.

Have you ever been in a situation, either in your work or personal life, where you couldn’t understand why you were so upset, frustrated, angry or any other emotion? The ability to identify, assess, and control your own feelings is known as emotional intelligence. It also applies to how you perceive, evaluate, and respond to the emotions of others. Being able to express and influence your own emotions can be a challenge sometimes, but being able to understand, interpret, and respond to the emotions of others can be an entirely different animal.

We spend 90% of our time communicating

The workplace is full of human interactions, which can lead to some complex situations where people may interpret or react emotionally in different ways. It is very important that leaders be able to be sensitive to and manage others feelings and emotional reactions. As a leader you need to be able to be perceptive of your team’s emotions so that you can use this information to guide your thinking and actions but as well to lead better.

According to Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, leading researchers in this area, there are four different factors to emotional intelligence:

Perceiving Emotions: When it comes to understanding emotions, accuracy in perception is essential. This may include having to read nonverbal signs, such as facial expressions and body language.
Reasoning with Emotions: Emotions generally influence what we pay attention to and prioritize. You need to use emotions to promote thinking and cognitive activity.
Understanding Emotions: The emotions that we perceive can have an abundance of different meanings. If someone is angry, one must interpret the cause of the anger and what it could mean. For example, we all have seen that angry customer in line yelling at the cashier. Their anger could be caused by something that directly happened with the cashier, or it could be that they had a bad day at work, are fighting with their spouse, etc.
Managing Emotions: The ability to manage emotions effectively is a key to emotional intelligence. Regulating emotions, responding appropriately to your own emotions and the emotions of others are central components to emotional management.

Leaders who achieve effortlessly and inspire demonstrate Emotional Intelligence

Your level of emotional intelligence has a direct impact on your life, productivity, and achievement. You can work on this by always remembering that your thoughts determine your emotions. Sometimes challenging one of this thought will open the door to a more positive emotion.

By doing this, it will facilitate your ability to communicate clearly and with care. This is essential to implement in your workforce; it will promote effective and clear communication while still being sensitive and aware of how others – and customers – respond. This will directly affect how well your business runs, create a positive culture, and will be a competitive edge.

As a leader in the workplace, it is important to recognize that your employees are looking to work somewhere where they are understood by leadership as well as their colleagues. They are also very mindful of the culture; they want to be able to work in a place that allows them to be themselves and allows them to express their passion, fulfills their desires, and allows them to truly tap into their talent and reach their full potential. Sometimes, a leader can become so preoccupied and focused on their own goals that being sensitive to their employees’ needs and how to serve them may fall by the wayside. These employees are what allow the leader to continue in their role and essentially produce the statistics the leader needs to be measured as effective. Leaders are deemed successful in their roles when they can promote effective teamwork that gets the best performance from each of the members and increase productivity. This means that leaders need to be strong and supportive at the simultaneously.

Emotional intelligence allows leaders to be influence and lead other more effectively.

As an individual when you are able to identify what matters to you, what drives others, you become a more powerful person and you lead yourself and other where you want. Far too often leaders do not realize that others may not have the same drivers to succeed or an equal willingness to “sacrifice” in order to advance as they themselves have. Everyone is unique and different, and it is important for not only leaders but for all of us to embrace those differences and utilize them to leverage strengths, which in the end can create opportunities for the business itself. Essentially, it is important to practice emotional intelligence in order to create desired results for the business.

Here are five helpful tips that you can work on to improve productivity in the workplace:

Genuinely care about people and express it. All employees, and anyone for that matter, want to know that their effort and hard work is appreciated. Always say thank you and take time to be a mentor. These are simple, yet powerful, gestures.
Embrace differences. Be inclusive of differences and use this knowledge to leverage strengths and abilities that are useful for the project or situation. Everyone has a unique perspective and when they are brought together, you are left with innovations and opportunities. People also appreciate those who accept and embrace what sets them apart from others.
Allow people to experience success and significance.

Everyone wants to feel like they make an impact where they work, so as a leader it is important that you lead your team or employees in ways that allows them to experience feeling successful and significant.

Be accountable.

To earn the respect, it is crucial that you treat yourself as an equal in regards to accountability. Be approachable, admit when you have committed an error, and be transparent. Doing so will build trust and support.

Be mindful of others’ needs.

Everyone has the capacity to improve their performance and productivity. This requires you to be mindful of what others need, including feedback and recommendations.

Just by changing a few things that you do as a leader and by becoming more aware of how you feel and react, as well as how others around you feel and react, you can change your team and workplace for the better; employees want to work hard for someone that they trust. Being mindful and exercising emotional intelligence will allow you to become a better leader. And never forget that the larger the gap, the easier it is to forget what it was like to work in the trenches.

Global Leadership Coaching assists individuals and organizations to perform better, innovate and serve the community while increasing profit.

How Fear Based Leadership Limits Individuals and Organizations’ Growth

In brief, short bursts, fear can be useful and powerful. Fear is distinguished from anxiety in that it indicates an immediate threat that can be responded to. In the shared past of the human species, the threat often took the form of a natural threat. The release of energy at the end of a brief encounter was a critical part of returning to healthy functioning. Now, unfortunately, the concept of leadership at many organizations has been clouded by perpetual fear. Fear arises throughout an organization when humane concerns are sacrificed to achieve short-term profit goals at the expense of team members and the future. Fear spreads unconsciously in response to an entirely profit-oriented environment and fear’s effects are usually not questioned by those who suffer from them.

A fearful, ego-centric view of business supplants true leadership in favor of focus on “managing” people as if they were unruly and untrustworthy. Fear-based management abides in the belief that those in an organization “would never get anything done” unless they are continuously threatened. Rather than resolving a problem, this attitude creates one: Lack of trust leads to lack of productivity and lack of engagement caused by acute but unspoken consciousness of oppression. Relentless focus on individual gain in the form of money and promotion worsens this issue not just in America, but worldwide. This results in limitation of growth for our communities or organizations and invests all leadership within one personality. When the leader departs, the “machine” left behind disintegrates: As a limited “physical and mental” machine, it cannot generate integrity from its ego-based approach to external data. So long as it is believed that the enterprise can aspire to no benefit other than profit, there is no basis for evolution. Under such conditions, everyone associated with an organization is shackled by a self-interest viewpoint. The effects of this on the psychology of the group are obvious.

The benefits of a Value Based Leadership

One antidote to the fear basis has been values-based leadership. This is one important step away from the mechanical conception of enterprise and toward a concept that encompasses physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions. Instead of seeing work as a job, an evolution takes place wherein it can be understood as a career. The transformation from a fear basis to a values basis is a profound one. Leaders in such an enterprise focus on the long term and their goals naturally serve the community in which the enterprise is embedded. “Win-win” opportunities emerge more naturally than before because all of the different constituencies and communities impacted by a given enterprise have something to gain rather than being locked in a web of mutual exploitation for the gain of the few.

A sense of social obligation creates a resilient basis for fulfillment among employees and customers while imbuing the entire community with shared understanding of its role in the ecological environment. Under the conditions of this awareness stage, the organization is empowered with its own identity separate from the leadership. It generates anabolic energy that motivates every member to undertake evolution in their values, beliefs and assumptions. The business is no longer chained to the tyranny of external data and is free to evolve on the basis of internal data and values. In an individual, we might call this self-knowledge. As the enterprise develops its own soul, leaders no longer focus on fear but on positive feedback, collaboration, and shared values. It focuses on transformation among individuals using an outsider perspective. Overall, there is a balance between “hard” and “soft” skills in the workplace environment just as there is in life. When all these elements are achieved, it then becomes possible for any enterprise to reach the final and highest stage.

How Bringing More Love in Leadership Enables Individuals and Organizations to Reach their Full Potential

Another way to approach any enterprise-level evolution is love-based leadership. In this final evolution, the enterprise supports society and continues to deepen its understanding of the matrix of needs and wants represented by customer and employee. Environmental and community stewardship is made a priority and there is an understanding of the continuum between the enterprise and what might appear to be “outside” of it, including the community at large. Work is now perceived as a mission: Because of this, it is possible to champion a higher level of energy and consciousness within the organization.

There is no more basis for narrowing of perspectives, so it is understood that what is done within the enterprise can freely benefit the local area, the nation and the world at large. Profit becomes more easy to obtain in this final stage of transformation because there is a wider recognition of the organization and its ability to provide love experiences. Members of the community and of the enterprise come to recognize that there is no duality or conflict between profit, internal benefit and the greater good: In fact, the apparent conflict between these things is an illusion fostered by a fearful environment. At this elevated level of energy and consciousness, profit derives from the activities of individuals acting in a harmonious concert with one another. The enterprise becomes the heart of a values-centered mission for each person involved — and it provides a structure that anchors each person to the core values of love and trust. This allows each employee to reach fullest potential in the context of a specific approach to generating value for all of society. One can think of the arrangement of energy and consciousness displayed here as a “spiritual spiral” where the enterprise is at the core and the individuals within it are constantly growing, nourished and reaching out further and further toward the most distant elements of the environment that are impacted by their work. In this state, the energy of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual poles of human identity will all be fully activated. Everyone can benefit from this transformation by continuing to displace individual egos and seeking ways to express and achieve love more highly in a service orientation. Likewise, the world as a whole can benefit as the principles of this consciousness transformation ripple through similar and interconnected enterprises, further reducing the burden of fear. 

What is compassion? Human beings have been contemplating the true meaning of it for many thousands of years. Throughout the ages, philosophers and poets have applied many views and interpretations toward the concept, yet it is a consistent theme in all of humanity’s striving. As a leader who wishes to exhibit and encourage compassion, I have often wondered about the right way to demonstrate it to others and help them heal. It is not always easy to practice compassionate feelings when one feels challenged by the circumstances of life. Like so many of the good things within us, it requires mindfulness to model a compassionate worldview through our actions. For that reason, the dictionary definition of this concept is only a start when it comes to really knowing it well. The generic definition is as follows: “A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.”

When we think about compassion, it is easy and obvious to think about it in relationship to others. As soon as one turns on the news, it is easy to become inundated with images of strife from all around the world. Of course, directing compassionate thought towards others is a critical part of celebrating our common humanity. However, it is not the only facet with which we must be familiar in order to realize our potential for self leadership. Is it possible to be truly compassionate toward others if we are constantly inflicting shame, doubt and blame upon ourselves for our honest mistakes? Many people who consider themselves successful are able to recognize the need to be compassionate toward everyone around them but themselves. This leads to strife and internal conflict when we do not do what is necessary to alleviate our own suffering.

It is not selfish to practice self-directed compassionate behavior. On the contrary, it gives us the sense of self leadership that empowers us to heal others. An important part of this is releasing feelings of guilt that accumulate over the course of life. It is not helpful to constantly gaze longingly toward the past. Whatever resources, knowledge or abilities you have now, you cannot project them into the past. You must demonstrate self leadership to accept yourself both as you were and as you are. When you take this step, you will begin to heal and other aspects of your potential will unfold. You will find it easier to place yourself in situations where you are surrounded by the people and things you love. This provides you with the energy to truly resonate with others and serve as a guiding light in their times of need. It allows us to find within ourselves the reserve of strength we need to reach out to others and offer unselfish help on their journey.

The workplace might seem like one of the most difficult places in which to practice true positive sentiments. It is true that there are some workplaces that are draining and toxic. We must come to understand that this is due to a lack of compassion and is not a reason to shun it ourselves. By making a principled choice to represent compassionate behavior in the workplace, we can begin the process of positive change. For this, we must be aware that change is tied to action. Listening to others, refraining from judging them and offering our help when we can are all compassionate acts we can undertake at work. Recognizing the leadership potential of others and helping them cultivate their unique talents are compassionate acts that follow from the above. As we work toward greater and more consistent positivism at work, we naturally inspire humane and compassionate ethics. In doing so, we motivate others to believe in their own potential and to use love to counteract the fear, distress and malaise that can darken workplaces. 

Mark de Rond in his article  about being busy at work and still feel bored gives perspectives to many people who find themselves in the exact same situation. These individuals feel lucky to have a job or a career that anyone would want, but they still feel unfulfilled or unsatisfied wondering what is wrong with them.

Luck is mentioned in the article; it doesn’t appear to me to be the reason which led Mark to make his life purposeful.  At some point he felt bored, acknowledged this feeling then chose to respond according to what was in his best interest as a human being. He found himself at a place where he had confidence in his abilities and his potential. In addition, he took responsibility as well to tell his boss, the only luck he (maybe) had was to have him to listen and to support him in his journey.

Mark made actually a very good point by talking about the ego piece. Many people experiencing success at work and in life for a period of time. Suddenly “the key to a meaningful life — at work and elsewhere — lies in turning our focus from ourselves to “the other” “. Indeed, when basics needs are met and that we have confidence in our abilities, our ego lessens in our mind it lets larger space for reflection. We then look for greater purpose for ourselves, our families and our organizations and we turn naturally ourselves to others.

It is an article that I will definitely share with clients to illustrate some of situations they experience. It will certainly bring light to many of them.

Reflection and exploration of what you really want will lead to enthusiasm and excitment.