Yesterday we put it to you that we are in a crisis of EQ. We are collectively ill-prepared to interact in a mindful and empathic way and we have insufficient knowledge and practice to analyse our own emotions and the emotions of others. Unfortunately, there is a need to do this analysis which is more pressing by the minute as every day that passes in this unEQed space only increases our HumanDebt™.
This is not about a handful of awareness-raising courses or even hiring some coaches, this is about putting in place an educational effort of mammoth scale to help employees everywhere learn about feelings.
Ultimately this is about the organisation realising how sorely needed this is and about leaders and team members alike mustering the goodwill to stop shunning the important work.
In this video we speak about that need and what can both individuals and organisations do to tackle the crisis.
As an organisation:
- Reemphasise the importance of EQ – discuss the benefits to the individual and to the organisation to get organisation-wide buy-in for a serious effort;
- Put education in place;
- Find the right toolset and kit your people with it;
- Ensure that your people know they are expected and supported to do this human work regularly – find a way to show that in performance reviews and in remuneration.
As an individual:
- Stop thinking being busy or being untrained are valid excuses to eschew having to do the human work;
- Ask for the support you need;
- Start doing some of the educational work individually but also look for opportunities to do it with your team as a shared act;
- Work on developing a habit – check yourself a few times a day. Deep breaths and a full body and mind scan – how do you feel at that precise moment? What feelings that your teammates may be experiencing were evident today?
There is much noise about empathy and compassion out there nowadays. None of it is actionable at this stage though, because it is absurd to speak about compassionate leadership when we have not helped people build empathy on the back of a strong EQ. And this doesn’t just apply to leaders but for everyone else in the teams as well.
We are all in a place where we need to become a lot better when it comes to identifying and comprehending emotions. Today, when there are more emotions than ever, ignoring them, is bankrupt. Furthermore, in the absence of starting with EQ we will not see the behavioural changes we need and neither will we have sufficient agreement regarding the importance and the urgency of creating a practice of people work at every team’s level.
To be clear, this epic, this piece of work we are advocating for is not about interpreting emotions or suppressing them, it isn’t about analysing their source or about laying on the proverbial couch or about having cathartic revelations – it is simply about naming emotions with regularity, learning the words and creating the checking-in habit.
That’s all, no more than that would be needed to make a serious dent in the amounts of HumanDebt we all have on this topic.
The second and more important part of this will then centre around talking about these newly identified emotions and for that, we would have had to have built an extraordinarily sturdy environment of strong Psychological Safety, but this is now the first and most important step: not to have squandered the wins of the pandemic when it comes to the human work this is the first step we need to take: learn and observe all you can about emotions.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at contact@peoplenottech.com
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link