Emotional Awareness – Are you in Survival Mode?

Research by Rich Cooke in Assessment and Development Matters, into the emotional awareness differences of Public and Private Sector managers highlighted a range of significant differences.

The findings illustrate that in the Public Sector, 85% of managers operate in ‘survival mode’ compared to 72% of Private Sector managers. This would indicate that managers in both sectors:

“appear to be tired, overworked and struggling to adopt habits that support emotional intelligence”.

The study compared 11 areas and in only two of these, did Public Sector Managers, when compared with Private Sector Managers, have significantly higher levels of Emotional Intelligence in the following:

Public Sector Managers had higher levels of Emotional Intelligence in the following areas:

Flexibility

Carefully Trusting

Private Sector Managers had higher levels of Emotional Intelligence in the following areas:

Self Regard	Personal Power	Reflective Learning
Goal Directedness	Awareness of others	Inter-dependent
Emotional Resilience	Free and in Charge	Assertive

So, with so many managers in ‘Survival Mode’ how can developing emotional intelligence ensure that Managers operate to a higher optimum becoming both personally and interpersonally effective.

Having a blocked mindset particularly as a manager can quickly spiral so that poor standards are tolerated and managerial responsibilities neglected. We can look at the incidences of ‘fraud’ in the corporate world. The Volkswagen Diesel Emissions ‘fraud’ is just one example, with around £11bn now in fines and compensation to US States and owners, and this doesn’t consider Europe.

Perhaps the avoidance culture often found in businesses of ‘Hear nothing’ ‘See nothing’ and ‘Speak nothing’ contributes to under-performance of managers and clearly impacts on both the profits and services provided.

Benefits of Understanding your Emotional Intelligence

In the workplace, there is now considerable evidence to suggest that Emotionally Intelligent people outperform their peers in areas such as Sales; Productivity; Assessing Risk; Communication; Customer Service; Retention of Staff; and Job Satisfaction. Understanding your Emotional Intelligence provides the individual an additional insight into how they can effectively meet work place challenges and opportunities.

Our behaviour is more than personality or abilities. Knowing that we can improve our Emotional Intelligence, provides businesses the opportunity to know that by enhancing their staffs’ Emotional Intelligence they can outperform their competitors, on a range of key performance indicators.

What Next?

At the business level, perhaps is now the time to discuss that:
• We need to change how we operate?
• We need to begin to develop strategies to assess the Emotional Awareness and Intelligence of our managers and staff?
• We need to begin to improve our productivity and service to our customers?

At the individual level:
• Do you want to know how self-motivated and adaptable you are?
• Are you assertive or how do you control your emotions in work?
• How do you express yourself to others?
• How do you react to stress?
• How happy and optimistic are you?

Mindchange solutions

We recognise that emotionally intelligent people are more likely to have the edge when it comes to leading, managing, and performing in today’s competitive and complex world by being more adept at dealing with stress, low morale, conflict and change.  Working with organisations we adopt a solutions based approach in meeting your challenges. We undertake a diagnostic questionnaire and combine this with 1-1 and team coaching, as well as with development workshops.

We use Thomas International’s TEIQue Emotional Intelligence questionnaire. This is a registered test with the British Psychological Society and provides an in-depth report on the positive and negative implications for the individual. As there are no good or bad scores, the report provides much information for the person on the positive and negative implications for all the scores.

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