READING COURSE: INTRODUCTION TO EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Understanding your levels of emotional intelligence and improving on them can be a valuable way to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. Emotional intelligence is the ability not only to assess and control your emotions but also to understand the emotions of those around you. As noted by psychologist and author Daniel Goleman,1 self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, and empathy are all aspects of emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness refers to your ability to know your strengths, weaknesses, drives, and motivations.
Self-regulation involves being able to control your emotions in response to outside stimuli.
Social skills gauge your ability to manage relationships.
Empathy refers to your ability to consider others’ feelings and thoughts and to put yourself in their position.
During his research, Goleman found that effective leaders tend to score high on emotional intelligence. He affirms that skills and technical abilities are important for reaching a management position, but once people move up the ranks into executive positions, emotional intelligence skills become critical.
MY EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TEST RESULT:
Self-Awareness:
15 out of 15
Self-Regulation:
12 out of 15
Motivation:
15 out of 15
Empathy:
14 out of 15
Social Skills:
11 out of 15
Total Emotional Intelligence Score:
67 out of 75
Your score is 67 out of 75.
Nice! You’re an emotionally intelligent person. You have great relationships, and you probably find that people often approach you for advice.
Researchers have found that emotionally intelligent people often have great leadership potential. Realize this potential by seeking opportunities to improve even further.
With such great people skills, though, it’s easy to lose sight of your own needs. Read the tips on this page to find out how you can continue to build your EI.
Develop Self-Awareness
People with high self-awareness can accurately perceive their feelings and moods in the moment. They also understand their strengths, weaknesses, and values. Develop self-awareness by:
Asking for feedback. Friends, family, and trusted coworkers can help you spot times when you overreact or avoid an emotional situation. They can also help you identify your strengths and values. Be open to their feedback and use it to identify skills and behaviors you can work on.
Keeping a daily journal. Use a journal to reflect on the emotions you experienced throughout the day. Note how those emotions were reactions to the situation at hand but also how they may have been influenced by previous experiences. Question what beliefs or assumptions may have affected your feelings.
Practicing mindfulness. Whether you are eating, working, or just relaxing, pay close attention to what you are doing and what emotions you feel. Allow yourself to experience uncomfortable emotions as they arise without reacting to them, avoiding them, or trying to change them.
Improve Motivation
It is important to use your emotions effectively to stay motivated to achieve your goals rather than be distracted or derailed by them. Improve motivation by:
Identifying what motivates you. What do you value? What tasks make you excited or give you a sense of achievement or purpose? The answers to these questions can help you align your goals, thoughts, and behaviors. Adjust any behaviors that are out of balance with your values and goals. Confront negative and unhelpful thoughts that prevent you from leading a well balanced life.
Identifying which emotions are most likely to distract you from your goals. Fear, anxiety, and boredom can easily push you off track. You might respond by procrastinating or abandoning your goals. Keep these emotions from overwhelming you by anticipating them. You might break up your goal into smaller tasks and reward yourself for accomplishing each one or schedule breaks to follow especially challenging tasks.
Breathing. Use breathing exercises to calm yourself down in emotionally challenging situations. Simply counting to four as you inhale and exhale can help move your attention away from emotions that feel overwhelming.
Enhance Empathy
Practicing perspective-taking. Consider how you would feel if you were “in the other person’s shoes.” It can help to think of similar experiences you may have had and how you felt.
Paying attention to emotions and body language during conversations. Try to identify what the other person is feeling and incorporate that into your response, “I can tell you are frustrated. How can we work together to make you more comfortable?”
Withhold judgment. When listening to other people’s stories or ideas, withhold judgement as you seek to understand their point of view. Ask respectful questions so you can learn more about their emotions or their perspectives. Listen to the whole story before you decide how you feel about it.
Practice Social Skills
Implementing active listening. Identify the feelings the person is trying to convey. Don’t interrupt, but do ask for clarification when confused. Rephrase or repeat back important information to reassure your conversation partner that it was heard. Offer positive feedback and frequent affirmations.
Showing interest in others. Ask questions about others’ backgrounds and experiences. Show an interest in their culture or experiences by asking respectful questions.
During negotiations or conflict, state your needs confidently but respectfully. Be willing to compromise in a way that upholds your core values. Understand that negotiation is not about getting everything you want but coming to an agreement that helps everyone get closer to what they want than when they started.
Emotions and Emotional Intelligence at Work
Emotions are typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. Emotions shape an individual’s belief about the value of a job, a company, or a team. Emotions also affect behaviors at work. Research shows that individuals within your own inner circle are better able to recognize and understand your emotions
Emotions at Work
So, what is the connection between emotions, attitudes, and behaviors in the workplace? This connection may be explained using a theory named Affective Events Theory (AET). Researchers Howard Weiss and Russell Cropanzano studied the effects of six major emotions in the workplace: anger, fear, joy, love, sadness, and surprise.4 Their theory argues that specific events on the job cause different kinds of people to feel different emotions. These emotions, and related emotions such as envy, in turn, may inspire actions that may serve to benefit or impede others at work.
Over time, experiencing these emotions at work can influence a person’s job satisfaction and performance. Although company perks and promotions can contribute to a person’s happiness at work, satisfaction is not simply a result of this kind of “outside-in” reward system. Job satisfaction in the AET model comes from the “inside-in”—the combination of an individual’s personality, small emotional experiences at work overtime, beliefs, and affect-driven behaviors.
Emotional Labor
Negative emotions are common among workers in service industries. Part of a service employee’s job is projecting a certain image in the eyes of the public. Individuals in service industries are professional helpers. As such, they are expected to be upbeat, friendly, and polite at all times, which can be exhausting to accomplish in the long run. Even when they are having a bad day, they are expected to provide “service with a smile.” The result is a persona—a professional role that requires acting out feelings that may not be real as part of their job.
Emotional labor refers to the regulation of feelings and expressions for organizational purposes.7 Three major levels of emotional labor have been identified and are unique but interrelated:
Surface acting requires an individual to exhibit physical signs, such as smiling, that reflect emotions customers want to experience. A children’s hairdresser cutting the hair of a crying toddler may smile and act sympathetic without actually feeling so. In this case, the person is engaged in surface acting.
Deep acting takes surface acting one step further. This time, instead of faking an emotion that a customer may want to see, an employee will actively try to experience the emotion they are displaying. This genuine attempt at empathy helps align the emotions one is experiencing with the emotions one is displaying. The children’s hairdresser may empathize with the toddler by imagining how stressful it must be for a child to be constrained in an unfamiliar environment—as a result, the hairdresser may genuinely begin to feel sad for the child.
Genuine acting occurs when individuals are asked to display emotions that are aligned with their own. If a job requires genuine acting, less emotional labor is required because the actions are consistent with true feelings.
Emotional laborers are required to display specific emotions as part of their jobs. Sometimes, these are emotions that the worker already feels. In that case, the strain of the emotional labor is minimal. For example, a funeral home director is generally expected to display sympathy for a family’s loss, and it is likely that this emotion will be genuine. But for people whose jobs require them to be professionally polite and cheerful, such as flight attendants, or to be serious and authoritative, such as police officers, the work of wearing one’s “game face” can have effects that outlast the working day. To combat this, taking breaks can help surface actors to cope more effectively.11 In one study, researchers also found that greater autonomy was related to less strain for service workers in France as well as the United Sates. Research even shows that for some, meetings are a source of emotional labor, especially when higher status individuals are in attendance.12 For people who have a strong desire to be authentic (being true to themselves) in their interactions, faking one’s emotions was related to worse well-being.
Cognitive dissonance is a term that refers to a mismatch among emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. For example, you might believe that you should always be polite to customers regardless of personal feelings even though you were just rude to one. You’ll experience discomfort or stress unless you find a way to alleviate the dissonance. You can reduce the personal conflict by changing your behavior (trying harder to act polite), changing your belief (maybe it’s okay to be a little less polite sometimes), or by adding a new fact that changes the importance of the previous facts (if you’re impolite again, you’ll lose your job). Although acting positive can make a person feel positive, emotional labor that involves a large degree of emotional or cognitive dissonance can be grueling and sometimes lead to negative health effects.
Emotional Intelligence at Work
One way to manage the effects of emotional labor is by increasing your awareness of the gaps between real emotions and emotions that are required by your professional persona. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling? And what do others feel?” These questions form the heart of emotional intelligence. The term was coined by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer and was popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman in a book of the same name. Emotional intelligence looks at how people can understand each other more completely by developing an increased awareness of their own and others’ emotions.
There are four building blocks involved in developing a high level of emotional intelligence. Self-awareness exists when you are able to accurately perceive, evaluate, and display appropriate emotions. Self-management, or self-regulation, exists when you are able to direct your emotions in a positive way when needed. Social awareness—empathy—exists when you are able to understand how others feel. Relationship management, or social skills, exists when you are able to help other people manage their own emotions and truly establish supportive relationships with others.16 Note that while the terms are slightly different, the building blocks mentioned here are the same four aspects of emotional intelligence described earlier in this chapter.
Levels of Ethics: An Organizational Framework
While there may appear to be a difference in the ethics of leaders and those of an organization, often leaders’ ethics are expressed through their organization, since leaders are the ones who set the ethics to begin with.19 In other words, while we can discuss organizational ethics, remember that leaders are the ones who determine organizational ethics, which ties the conversation of organizational ethics into personal ethics as well. If leaders can create an ethically oriented culture,20 then they are more likely to hire people who behave ethically and do so throughout their tenure at the organization.
Societal. At this level, ethical concerns focus on top-level issues affecting the world as a whole, such as the morality of child labor. Deeper-level societal issues might include the role (if any) of capitalism in poverty. Most companies do not operate at this level of ethics, although some do. The Body Shop, for example, focuses on societal issues by standing against animal cruelty.
Internal policy. At this level, the focus is on internal relationships between a company and its employees. Fairness in management, pay, and employee participation would all be considered issues at the internal policy level. It is in leaders’ best interest to create internal policies that benefit both the company and the individuals working for it. A lawsuit filed by a former Disney Parks employee claiming wrongful termination,22 for example, would be at the internal policy level of ethics.
Stakeholder. A stakeholder is anyone affected by a company’s actions. At this level, businesses must deal with policies that affect their customers, employees, suppliers, and community members, such as fair wages or notification of a product’s potential dangers. One example of a company facing stakeholder issues is Scottrade, which continues to face class action lawsuits claiming it didn’t do enough to keep customer information private following a major data breach.23
Personal. Concerns at this level deal with how we treat others—our employees and colleagues alike—within our organization. For example, gossiping at work or taking credit for another’s efforts would be considered personal issues. Showing favoritism toward one employee over another would be another example. Acting ethically at the personal level affects our credibility as organizational leaders in that our employees and colleagues alike are more likely to respect us if we show ourselves to be trustworthy when making decisions.
Sources of Company Ethics
Since we know that everyone’s upbringing is different, and people have different role models, religious beliefs, attitudes, and experiences, as company leaders we must create policies and standards to ensure employees and managers understand our organization’s ethics. The sources of these ethics can be based on the levels of ethics we discussed earlier.
Because people often look up to them, leaders are held to a higher standard for ethical behavior than anyone else in an organization. Consider David Petraeus, the former CIA director and general who resigned from his post after an affair he’d had was made public. Many people felt the resignation was the right course of action because, as a leader, he should be held to a higher standard of ethics. He had used a private Gmail account to send explicit messages to his girlfriend, an action that many believed recklessly imperiled the safety of the country.27 However, had one of his followers done something similar, they might not have been held to the same standard as Petraeus nor been expected to resign.
Social Responsibility
Both people and companies may engage in social responsibility. As we saw in our discussion of ethical company standards, it can be hard to distinguish corporate from individual ethics and social responsibility because corporate policies are, at their core, made by people. In this section, we will discuss social responsibility first at the corporate level, then at the individual level.
Ever since the term “social responsibility” entered public discourse in the 1960s, companies have felt pressure from society to behave in a more socially responsible manner. “Social responsibility” is the notion that companies should be concerned about the welfare of society and mindful of how their actions could affect society as a whole.
We know that companies have been known to shirk social responsibility despite claiming to uphold it. To take one notable example, BP (formerly British Petroleum) was charged with gross negligence for violating safety protocols and knowingly failing to maintain the Deepwater Horizon oil rig after the rig exploded in 2010, causing the deaths of 11 workers and precipitating a massive leak of oil into the Gulf of Mexico that lasted 87 days.39 The financial toll of this case totaled nearly $62 billion in stakeholders’ settlement costs,40 not to mention untold damages to the company’s reputation, the marine environment, and the lives and livelihoods of the people living along the Gulf Coast. Cases like this lead people to question large corporations’ commitment to fulfilling their responsibilities to society.
Four Areas of Social Responsibility
Economic: Companies and leaders need to maintain strong economic interests so they can stay in business. Being profitable and providing value to shareholders are actually part of a company’s commitment to social responsibility.
Legal: A company and its leaders have an obligation to follow the law. Car companies, for example, are required to meet certain emissions standards in car production.
Ethical: Acting ethically means going beyond mere legal requirements and meeting the expectations of society. For instance, Apple’s policies were called into question when investigations revealed a high suicide rate among workers producing iPhones in a Chinese Foxconn factory. As a result of this newfound awareness, Foxconn raised the salary for workers from ¥900 ($132) to ¥1,800 ($265).42 This example shows how the ethical expectations (and outrage) of society can pressure companies to behave in a more ethical manner.
Philanthropic: This is the expectation that companies should give back to society in the form of charitable donations of time, money, and/or goods. For example, REI, a Seattle-based company, donates 3 percent of its profit and thousands of volunteer hours to nonprofit community groups each year.
Individual Social Responsibility
Performing charitable acts. This can include philanthropy, such as donating money to nonprofit organizations.
Working for the community. This can include volunteering at a food bank or animal shelter, or donating blood.
Supporting issues that affect society. This can include advocating political or social initiatives that help others as well as company policies in support of such issues (e.g., lobbying for stronger child labor laws, purchasing fair trade products, recycling).
Observing individual ethics. These can include integrity, honesty, and the “golden rule”—treat others how you wish to be treated. This often entails treating colleagues and subordinates alike with empathy and a sense of fairness.