Unfortunately for all of us, no one comes out of formal education – irrespective of how extensive or on what topic it may have been- with any wealth of knowledge regarding the topic of emotions and behaviours. This hasn’t been too big of a hindrance in the “before times” when our work lives didn’t call for having a sharp and engaged amount of emotional intelligence as many of our tasks were individual work and they came together in a waterfall, sequential way but it no longer works in today’s environment where every walk of life requires some type of human interaction and collaboration so that we work in agile environments with fast results.
In this newsletter as well as the Future is Agile one, we have often bemoaned the fact that in addition to the mental health crisis we are in the midst of, we are also facing a crisis of EQ and that prevents most people from engaging with the human work that would be capable of reducing HumanDebt and creating happy, psychologically safe and therefore high performing teams.
Many point to a lack of empathy or a lack of communication skills and most of the accusations usually land firmly with leadership as indeed, at that level, the inability to regulate one’s own emotions and the unwillingness to comprehend and acknowledge those of others is most glaringly evident but really, the lack of EQ is a generalised problem that affects all of us at every level.
We often speak about the many strong lessons we have learned at PeopleNotTech through working with the many wonderful teams we have been fortunate enough to encounter and one of the hardest ones to admit is around EQ – it is all but inexistent. Often seduced by the sheer amount of goodwill towards doing the human work that some of these teams exhibited, we have been admittedly lax on education and we have presumed a level of understanding of emotions and reactions that is simply non-existent. So while teams started getting in the habit of using the Dashboard and offering honest feedback to inform a choice of next steps and actions, that often proved to be insufficient when the gaps in basic levels of comprehension were greater than expected.
In other words, even when people made the time, held the space and opened up to the conversation about the way they felt, it was often impaired by their lack of knowledge, practice and even vocabulary regarding emotions. And that was the case for those willing to engage but they are indeed a courageous minority as most people find the lack of EQ a much bigger barrier to engaging with the human work.
When we find it impossible to label how we feel and we think we never read others right why would we want to be in an honest conversation that exposes that vulnerability? So most of the human resistance at the team level can be traced to a sense of generalised impostor syndrome when it comes to having enough emotional intelligence to name and analyse how we feel, react and relate.
The educational gap on this topic is shocking and, while the general feeling is that it is glaringly missing in techies, in particular, the truth is that no industry, job title or level of seniority is better at reading, naming and analysing emotions in order to change behaviours.
To help with this, and drawing on our previous work with our EQ Trainer feature, we’re announcing the first of several plays in the “EQ Quick Wins” Series designed to give the least confident of us the means to quickly engage in the human work.
They’ll aim to cover the following aspects:
- Naming emotions;
- Recognising internal triggers and increasing self-awareness
- Recognising emotions in others;
- Increasing our capacity for compassion;
- Expressing Empathy;
- Mirroring;
- Moving from self-awareness to team awareness;
- Conversational turn-taking;
- Encouraging relating;
- Creating a gratitude pathway;
- Collectively reaffirming purpose;
- Understanding and sensing the emotional bond;
- Recognising team dynamics;
- Breathing and mindfulness;
- Learning how to assess intentionality and apply that;
- A view of impression management against looking “too emotional”;
- “Put yourself in my shoes” exercises;
- Vulnerability practice
This is not to absolve us all from the bigger goal of recognising and rewarding the human work that we have been so adamant about over the past few weeks but to bifurcate our focus into supporting the human work even more vigorously at the individual level in the interim.
As ever, if you’re a client of our software these new plays in the “EQ Quick Wins” series will simply “automagically” appear in your Playbook as early as later this week and we hope you start planning on having them as your next Team Actions and then reap the staggeringly clear and instant benefits and if you’re not then come speak to us. You can -and should- use the above list to create or benchmark against your own EQ-increasing efforts and if there are none and you haven’t even considered them then stop everything else you are doing and fix that because we no longer live in a world where being oblivious towards feelings is a sustainable work practice.
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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves the well-being and Psychological Safety of teams, come see a DEMO.
“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt™.”
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link