Developing Emotional Intelligence: Key Strategy For Team Leaders And Teams
For over a decade organizations from a broad spectrum of industries and businesses have offered Emotional Intelligence (EI) training for their work force. People from the executive level to the administrative staff have participated. While their roles and their job demands differ significantly, the emotions they experience are the same. As they face today’s almost overwhelming dilemmas, they all experience, frustration, anxiety and, sometimes, even anger. However, when they become internally self-managed through enhancing their EI skills, they become empowered and make their greatest contributions. And when the organization’s team leaders and teams work in that zone of peak performance so does the organization.
Team Leaders and Project Managers
Team Leaders and Project Managers frequently work with a group of diverse team members. It’s not unusual to work with a virtual team comprised of members across the country or world. The leader is accountable for establishing and maintaining a positive work environment. Often they are tasked with successfully completing projects of ever increasing magnitude and importance in shorter and shorter time periods. They may experience delays and missed deadlines if they are unable to eliminate or minimize obstacles (internal, external and organizational) that may block the team’s success. Members may leave the team, causing further delays and teams and projects to fall behind schedule. As leaders work in the organization’s political environment, they may experience a great deal of stress brought on by anxiety, frustration, suspicion and other negative emotions.
When Leaders enhance their EI, they become more capable of motivating their team to achieve higher, sustained levels of performance and achievement. With an increased ability to maintain a positive attitude and improve their own internal persistence, motivation and confidence, leaders become more influential, enabling them to eliminate obstacles to team success. These increased skills enable leaders to develop and retain talented staff. They become empowered to successfully accomplish major projects of significant importance on time and on budget.
Teams
As teams carry more and more of the responsibility of major organizational initiatives, they are under continual pressure to work effectively and smoothly with a variety of people both inside and outside the organization. Some team members never even meet face to face. Daily they must cope with tight deadlines, constantly changing team members, rapidly advancing technology, and scarce resources. team members can feel confused, overwhelmed and dejected. It’s normal to feel frustrated when, despite being crippled with roadblocks, you are still expected to meet tight deadlines, worried when resources are taken away, and angry when a team member doesn’t deliver. As team effectiveness and cohesion break down, progress can slow to a crawl, product introductions can be missed and competitors can gain lost market share.
Increasing Emotional Intellignce skills enables the team members to significantly shorten the storming phase of team formation. Team members can more efficiently and effectively deal with their own and other member’s emotional turmoil. When individual team members become more internally self-managed, the team becomes more cohesive and trusting. Esprit de corps is developed with a can-do attitude. The team finds itself more easily and effectively accomplishing goals, completing major projects on time and on budget, and the company earns a reputation as a geat place to work.
A True Story
This true story provides insight into the power of developing Emotional Intelligence. With their long history of antagonism, Doug and John (not their real names) were unwilling to work together. For approximately two decades, these team leaders did not support each other, focusing on their own respective departments. Neither leader was concerned whether or not the other’s department met its goals. Applying the tools learned during the EI workshop, Doug and John were able to transform the negative emotions they held toward one another. The resulting positive emotions promoted productive behaviors.
They began to talk to each other in the hallway during the training. Then, on a regular basis, they progressed to listening to and talking to each other. Just two weeks after the training, Doug and John, independently shared with me that they started to invite the other’s staff to their staff meetings. Their objective was to work jointly in addressing problems occurring in both of their departments. With this team-to team coordination, they broke down the “silo” mentality. The entire organization of about 5000 employees benefited as the positive effects of this work trickled-down to other groups. This improvement did not take weeks, months or years. It occurred over a few days after each team leader had learned simple EI techniques.
This example is not unusual as evidenced by Emotional Intelligence training program results. Program participants have reported improvements ranging from 15% to 40% in increased teamwork, increased personal productivity, reduced worry and stress, increased personal motivation, reduced emotional reactiveness, increased work/life balance, increased creativity and more. Improvements of this magnitude represent a positive return on investment for the organization.
About the Author
Tailoring the art and science of Emotional Intelligence to your needs, Byron Stock focuses on results, helping individuals and organizations enhance Emotional Intelligence skills, leadership competencies and core values. To learn about his user-friendly, practical techniques to enhance EI skills visit www.Byronstock.com.
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