Food for thought: Most often, the best-performing employees have a strong degree of emotional intelligence.
Therefore, it follows there’s a direct correlation between high performing organizations and whether they have an emotionally intelligent culture.
The benefits of an emotionally-intelligent culture are huge. Such organizations have long term performance success because their employees have emotional intelligence.
Such employees have great soft skills for higher sales, customer service and teamwork. This stems from self-awareness, self-control and empathy.
So, if you want to drive to maximum performance as a result of innovation and success, transform your culture into an emotionally intelligent company.
The trick is to evaluate your culture.
Not to be gauche or to alarm you, the process is simple but easy to achieve; however, an organization lacking emotional intelligence is a leadership issue.
It can be difficult to admit the reasons for the organization lacking emotional intelligence.
Senior managers must look inward to ask themselves questions:
Are they truly respected for their expertise, empathy, trustworthiness and generosity? Are these qualities prevalent among employees throughout the organization?
If your organization’s sales, customer service and teamwork goals are unmet, the truthful answer to each won’t be yes.
Recommendations to create an emotionally intelligent culture:
1. The importance of an outside participant to aid in the transformation
Cultural transformations are very challenging. Typically, an outside expert or consultant is needed.
No one likes to admit shortcomings in their performance gaps; especially those at the top of the organization.
Self-denial is often in evidence.
All too often senior managers claim they’ve already implemented solutions or they say the objectives aren’t attainable or that they don’t have the time.
What’s needed is a courageous and wise experienced consultant, who is objective in diplomatically confronting reality – particularly, in the evaluations of cultures and in the progress of the management team and employees.
Incidentally, the CEO must use best practices as a client to get money’s worth from a consultant.
2. Purpose-driven leadership
It’s not enough to declare and mandate emotional intelligence. Senior management must develop and share values for a company mission that goes well beyond profits.
The concerns and needs of all stakeholders – from employees to customers – must be addressed by management.
If all managers aren’t on the same page, the drive for emotional intelligence will fail. Cynics need to leave the organization.
Essentially, managers must be trusted and seen by employees as authentic. Leaders have habits for positive workplace cultures.
3. An emotional-intelligence structure for sustainability
It’s not enough just to hire an HR consultant. True, employees will reluctantly attend workshops, but then start having fun and learning some good ideas.
But a training program is just the start. Unfortunately, in many cases, emotional intelligence isn’t embedded permanently.
All employees – starting with managers – must be trained on the purpose and values for an effective transformation.
It begins with inviting individuals to self-assess, self-reflect and set goals for their performance. Employees should be encouraged to self-check their motives and measure their behavior for the benefit of the team on a regular basis.
In my experience, if the educational process is implemented well, everyone will respond well with the exception of a few.
You’ll find the dissenters – usually about 10 percent of employees – have addiction issues either in alcohol or drugs. Refer them to your employee assistance program.
Supervisors become coaches, who listen and inspire their employees to become independent performers.
Employees first become students and ultimately teachers – empowered to implement ideas for enhanced communication and performance on a daily basis.
Ready to transform? Good luck! You’ll know your emotional-intelligence transformation is successful when you discover your employees will even help you in strategic planning.
From the Coach’s Corner, here relevant topics:
How to Grow Your EI for Leadership Success – Emotional intelligence (EI) is important for communication and leadership. A person who has EI is able to evaluate, understand, and control emotions.
Optimize Talent Management with 5 Coaching Culture Tips – When managers become coaches, you get a higher-performing workforce. You will have replaced mediocrity with strong performance. Here’s how to develop a coaching culture.
Inexpensive Ways to Create a Fun, High-Performance Culture – Here are ways that will accomplish more than you dare even to hope to improve your culture – maximizing employee morale to inspire them to outstanding performance and loyalty to your organization.
Strategies for Maximum Customer Loyalty, Profits – Customer retention is important for profits in good times and bad. Here’s what to do.
Processes to Improve Your Company’s Customer Experience – If your company is having obstacles to improving your business with customers, by renovating your customer experience quotient there are steps you can take to lay a foundation for strong results.
