Emotional Intelligence: A Promising Pathway to Inclusion
As the bottom-line benefits of an inclusive workplace are becoming so much more apparent, organizations seek effective ways to develop inclusive leadership practices and workplace environments. Emotional intelligence (EI) has emerged as perhaps one of the most promising pathways for leaders wanting to increase inclusion. Simply put, EI is the ability to discern emotions in ourselves and others and respond in a way that increases engagement. The purpose of this feature is to introduce you to EI and provide you with tips & tools for using emotional intelligence to increase inclusion in your leadership performance and workplace environment.
Although terminology can differ, it is generally agreed that EI involves four core competencies many of which align with the best practices of inclusion. The competencies are self-awareness, self-management, awareness of others, and relationship management.
Self-awareness is the capacity to recognize your own emotions, passions, and biases. This includes being aware of your emotions in any given moment and also understanding your emotional patterns or your tendency to respond in certain ways under certain conditions. Increase your awareness by keeping an emotion journal to record events, experiences, conditions or people within the workplace that seem to trigger strong emotions in you. Name the emotion and identify the physical sensations that accompany it. Understanding your patterns increases your ability to manage your emotions.
Self-management is the ability to make conscious choices about your response to emotions. When confronted with a difference in behavior or approach by a direct report that confounds you, before trying to correct the behavior, consider the two other options EI identifies. Change your attitude. Unless the behavior is a difference that makes a difference (i.e. in safety, legality, or productivity) work to understand it. Change your behavior. Instead of dictating a set change in the employee's conduct, engage them in thinking inclusively, connect with them to explore their intentions, identify the potential impacts of their behavior and develop better alternatives.
Awareness of Others is the ability to connect with the perspectives of others especially when these differ from your own. This core competency is grounded in our capacity for empathy or the ability to truly care on an emotional level about the needs, wants, and feelings of others. On the deepest level, empathy requires a willingness to suspend our own perspective and plans long enough to really take in where the other person is coming from. Keen observation and active listening are two of the most powerful tools a leader can employ in developing empathy. Experiment with “Management by Walking Around”. See what how much your observation can tell you about the feelings, needs, and interests of others.
Relationship Management is the core competency of developing caring relationships with others. A powerful tool in developing relationship-management is consequential thinking. Consequential thinking is the practice of considering the effects of emotional expression before engaging in it. What are all the ways you can respond to the emotion that you are feeling? What effect will the response you prefer have on your team?
Emotional intelligence can help you increase inclusion in your own leadership practice and in your workplace environment.
Calendar of Events
Upcoming events:
July 11-27 The Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication's (SIIC) new schedule is up for registration. View this summer's schedule at: www.intercultural.org/schedule.
- Session I: July 11-13
- Session II: July 16-20
- Session III: July 23-27
Passover: Of all the Jewish holidays, Pesach is the one most commonly observed, even by otherwise non-observant Jews. According to the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), more than 80% of Jews have attended a Pesach seder. The name Passover (Pesakh, meaning "skipping" or passing over) derives from the night of the Tenth Plague, when the Angel of Death saw the blood of the Passover lamb on the door posts of the houses of Israel and "skipped over" them and did not kill their firstborn.
Individuals of the Jewish faith worldwide celebrate with family gatherings and traditional Seder meals. At the ceremonial dinners, which are held on the first two nights of Passover, the Seder foods are eaten in a prescribed order with appropriate explanation of their meaning, recitation of blessings and discussion. One of the most important traditions of Passover is the retelling of the story of the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt. A book known as the “Haggadah,” a Hebrew word that means “telling” or “narrative,” contains this story, as well as songs, blessings and prayers to commemorate the occasion and to celebrate Jewish history.
Easter is the Christian holiday in celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after his crucifixion. Current celebrations of Easter are traced back to several traditions and cultures. Pre-dating Christian practices, historians believe many of the modern practices are evolutions of the pagan celebrations of spring and fertility. It is believed the rabbit or hare, symbolized fertility and new life while eggs were colored brightly to represent spring & birth.
Family and community traditions include attending church, Easter egg hunts, visits by the Easter Bunny, Easter parades, Easter brunch, and family gatherings. Different cultures have developed their own ways of decorating Easter eggs. Crimson eggs, to honor the blood of Christ, are exchanged in Greece. In parts of Germany and Austria green eggs are used on Maundy Thursday (Holy Thursday). Slavic peoples decorate their eggs in special patterns of gold and silver.
Cinco de Mayo: Cinco de Mayo ("The Fifth of May" in Spanish) is a national holiday in Mexico which is also widely celebrated in the United States. It commemorates the victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French occupational forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. It is a common misconception that Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, which is celebrated on September 16th ("Dieciseis de septiembre" in Spanish), but actually it is a celebration of the battle.
New at EDS
In order to enrich our assessment services to clients, we have now completed our Inclusive Engagement Indicator™ (IEI), a quantitative gap analysis survey. The IEI creates an opportunity for wider range of employees to provide input on inclusion and can be used with our other assessment activities to help organizations identify how successful they are being in engaging employees across cultures. Made up of engagement best practices, the survey results are reported out by demographic and work unit groups and allow organizations to identify for each group the inclusive best practices that are most important to employees and the level at which those practices are currently occurring. This allows organizational and leadership development plans to be more reliably focused on the changes that will have the greatest impact.
Donna is off on international travel this month, a well-deserved interlude between work this Spring in Asia and Europe and engagements this Summer in Warsaw, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Mexico.
May 19 -- Malcolm X was a civil rights leader, born Malcolm Little before rejecting what he considered a slave name and choosing "X" to signify his lost tribal name. Born in 1925, Malcolm X was a controversial leader that went through evolutions of thought and work before his 1965 assassination. Taken, like many young leaders of the time, before some of their most influential work had time to fully blossom. In his own words, “The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans." -- “Racism: the Cancer that is Destroying America," (Aug. 25 1964)
"I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment." -- Speech, Dec. 12 1964, New York City
Data Dump (Did You Know?)
On Employee Engagement:
“A Gallup Organization study of two million employees at seven hundred companies found that how long an employee stays at a company and how productive she or he is there is determined by their relationship with their immediate boss.” (Zipken, 2000) in Cherniss and Goleman, (2001) The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace.
According to a Gallup survey of more than 80,000 employees, recognition is a key factor in employee satisfaction and retention. The purpose of the survey was “to identify the consistent dimensions of ‘quality workplaces,' defined as those in which four critical outcomes--employee retention, customer satisfaction, productivity, and profitability--are all at high levels.
According to “Measuring Engagement,” published Thursday, August 28, 2003, by Paul Bernthal, Ph.D., Manager, Center for Applied Behavioral Research, Development Dimensions International, Inc.: “The [U.S. Department] of Labor conducted a comprehensive review of more than 100 studies and found that people practices have significant relationships to improvements in productivity, satisfaction, and financial performance. DDI's own research has shown that when engagement scores are high, employees are more satisfied, less likely to leave the organization, and more productive.”
Kudos for Best Practices for Diversity
This edition'sKudos goes to our readers! The first step to openness begins with self-awareness. An innovative and collaborative research project takes an interesting look into hidden bias and preferences.
Project Implicit represents a collaborative research effort between researchers at Harvard University , the University of Virginia , and University of Washington . While the particular purposes of each study vary considerably, most studies available at Project Implicit examine thoughts and feelings that exist either outside of conscious awareness or outside of conscious control. The primary goals of Project Implicit are to provide a safe, secure, and well-designed virtual environment to investigate psychological issues and, at the same time, provide visitors and participants with an experience that is both educational and engaging.
Explore the informational pages at this website and at their demonstration website before deciding whether to register at Project Implicit. If you are interested in participating in research at Project Implicit, registration is easy and you will instantly qualify to participate in numerous studies available in our databases. Most sessions require 10-15 minutes to complete. You are welcome to participate in as many studies as you wish. Each time you login, you will be provided information about the next study so that you can make an informed decision about participation. There are no fees, no advertisements, and no obligations to you for participating at Project Implicit. This site is for educational and research purposes only. To visit and learn more goto: implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
Whether participating in these surveys or pursuing other paths of continued growth, self-awareness and knowledge, here's to you!
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In 2005 Jorge Cherbosque, Ph.D., Lee Gardenswartz Ph.D., & Anita Rowe, Ph.D., developed a four part workbook series on that fosters the development of emotional intelligence and one's ability to deal with difference. The Emotional Intelligence and Diversity (EID) model offers a systematic approach to assess and build emotional intelligence and reinforces new EID skills. The four part workbook series includes: Affirmative Introspection, Self-Governance, Intercultural Literacy, & Social Architecting. Learn more or order the books from the Emotional Intelligence & Diversity Institute.
Six seconds is a leader in emotional intelligence reseach, articles and resouces. You can vist them at www.6seconds.org.
back to top »Quotes to live by...
“Emotional leadership is the spark that ignites a company's performance, creating a bonfire of success or a landscape of ashes.” Daniel Goleman
“Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself. When you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself. The practice is always to go back to oneself.” Thich Nhat Hanh
“Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.” Mayer & Salovey
“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.” Maya Angelou
Reel Reviews
PAPER CLIPS: The town of Whitwell is a tiny community of about two thousand people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee . Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian. In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to the diversity of the world beyond their insulated valley.
This touching movie tells the story of how these students responded to what had been to them a completely unfamiliar chapter in human history – the Holocaust – with a promise to honor every single soul lost in that horrible event by collecting paperclips to represent each individual exterminated by the Nazis. Their dedication was absolute. Their plan was simple but profound. The amazing result, which stands permanently in their schoolyard, is an unforgettable lesson of how a committed group of children can change the world, one classroom at a time.
Miramax Films presents Paper Clips, a production of The Johnson Group in association with Ergo Entertainment. -- Miramax
Coaching for Emotional Intelligence by Bob Wall: Based on 26 years of experience, Bob Wall released the 2007. According to Wall coaching for performance and for emotional intelligence are two different things. But that doesn't mean they exist in different worlds. Performance is just one part of an employee's overall development as a professional and as a leader -- development which depends on the employee's emotional intelligence and the ability of the manager to encourage and increase it.
The book provides a structured format for developing and delivering praise, and corrective feedback, as well as a step-by-step method and sample scripts for conducting a coaching session. Some of the information addressed includes overcoming fear of coaching on sensitive issues, how to give praise and why it is important, creating successful, detailed, and clear personal, team, and work evaluations and mission statements. Coaching for Emotional Intelligence was released this year (2007) by the American Management Association.
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