Working with Emotional Intelligence – An Organisational Development Strategy

An often under-rated corporate HR function involves the area of working with emotional intelligence.  While soft skills are frequently not seen as a pre-requisite when it comes to performing a job properly, it is playing an increasingly important role in the business environment, and organisations are warming up to the idea that it can, and should, be nurtured.

Working with emotional intelligence can be tricky.

Building emotional intelligence is not a static area of learning.  It is, unfortunately, not a course of study that can be read up on and absorbed, whereby after a duration of time will automatically lead to greater emotional intelligence for you.  Instead, it is a programme of change that will need you to actively think about, act on, and reflect on during your interactions with others.  This encompasses different environments – at home, at the office, dealing with suppliers, out shopping, and even while socialising in the pub.  Greater emotional intelligence will naturally lead to greater empathy and better relationships on all fronts for you.

Is your company working with emotional intelligence?

Getting your workforce to improve as a whole over time requires adopting a comprehensive organisation development strategy.  Two key areas to address within this are strategic thinking and relationships.

Strategic thinking is the top-level, big-picture view of how an organisation can develop to achieve greater business-related targets.  The general aim is to expand the orgaisation in some way.  It can be financial (e.g. greater revenue generated/increased project coverage), people-related (increased headcount, greater responsibility of department within the business) or skills-related (more staff accredited with a technical certificate, more patents achieved).

Relationships, on the other hand, are the enabler of your strategic plans.  Better empathy allows your project managers to understand their team members’ competing priorities and relate better to them, leading to greater co-operation.  Stronger supplier relationship handling enables your supply chain to remain robust and adaptable to changes in the marketplace.  Being able to empathise with your superiors allows you to appreciate the bigger business issues and therefore become more aligned with your boss on meeting business targets.

Working with emotional intelligence underpins relationship-building.  That is not to say that it neglects other aspects of the individual.  With greater emotional intelligence comes greater self-awareness, stronger self-confidence and the development of a can-do attitude.

Emotional Intelligence for Organisation Development

In order to systematically improve how your organisation is working with emotional intelligence, your organisational strategy should be aligned with one of what I call the “schools of thought” in emotional intelligence.  There are many different psycho-social models out there, and you will have to pick one which is right for your organisation.  For instance, this could be the Goleman approach, sub-divided into the 5 main competencies, or the Enneagram, which sub-divides into 9 styles of human behaviour.

Then you need to choose a relevant test – one that is aligned to the model of working with emotional intelligence.  This identifies individual traits and preferences along the pre-determined model and enables personal improvement work to be targeted.

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