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The Emotional Intelligence (EI) skill level of an organization’s leaders and employees is critical for business success. The emotions of leaders and employees play a significant role in what people say or do (their behavior). In turn, these actions affect how customers perceive the organization and, ultimately impact the bottom line.

In their Harvard Business Review article, “The Service-Profit Chain,” Hesket et. al. identified a chain of factors driving profitability in a company. Their factors revealed that effective leadership is critical to profitability. The emotions that leaders experience impact the climate and culture of an organization as a whole. More specifically, leaders’ emotions impact:

- What employees feel.

- How satisfied employees are with their work and the company.

- How loyal they are and their willingness to give extra effort.

- How productive and efficient they are.

How employees feel and perform their work impact how customers feel, how satisfied they are with both products and services, and ultimately how loyal a customer is to the company or organization. And how loyal customers are has a direct impact on the bottom line and profitability of an organization.

In this set of relationships, it is important to notice that the foundational element is leadership. It doesn’t say Executive Vice President, Director, or CEO. It says leaders. The leader is the person in charge of every work team, every manager or supervisor, and every individual in the organization. Self-leadership is one of the most important factors to focus on in skill development. Self-leadership is the internal ability to lead oneself to make the best choices and decisions moment-to-moment throughout the day, whether at work or at home.

Both positive and negative emotions impact everyone in organizations and the customers they serve. For example, the effect of negative emotions on employees may be high stress, poor performance, more errors, poor quality, low morale, increased conflict, lack of trust and teamwork, increased turnover and more. In turn, these problems may decrease customer satisfaction and increase customer complaints and defection. Ultimately, this could negatively impact organizational profitability.

Impact:

If we ask ourselves a few questions surrounding these problems, we discover the significant impact negative emotions have on the organization:

- Has your organization experienced any of these problems?

- What is the impact on performance, business objectives, and key initiatives?

- If these problems were minimized, what could your organization achieve?

Value of Developing Emotional Competence:

Additional research supports the critical value of developing the Emotional Competence of leaders. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, examined competency studies of 200 large global companies and reported the following results in the Nov./Dec., 1998 Harvard Business Review:

“When I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.”

His conclusions about senior leaders were even more telling…

“When I compared star performers with average ones in senior leadership positions, nearly 90% of the difference in their profiles was attributable to emotional intelligence factors rather than cognitive abilities.”

Impact on the Bottom Line:

Several studies reveal a direct impact of the organization’s leadership on its bottom line. In the same HBR article (see above), Goleman shares the following findings:

“David McClelland found that when senior managers had a critical mass of emotional intelligence capabilities, their divisions outperformed yearly earnings goals by 20%. Division leaders without that critical mass under performed by almost the same amount.”

In his book Primal Leadership, Goleman, et. al. provides further evidence of the impact of emotional intelligence on the organization’s profitability:

“A study found that the more positive the overall moods of people in the top management team, the more cooperatively they worked together – and the better the company’s business results.”

“In a study of nineteen insurance companies, the climate created by the CEOs among their direct reports predicted the business performance of the entire organization: In 75% of the cases, climate alone accurately sorted companies into high versus low profits and growth.” (Cited in Primal Leadership – research by David McClelland, “Identifying Competencies with Behavior-Event Interviews,” Psychological Science 9, 1998 and David Williams, “Leadership for the 21st Century,” Life Insurance Leadership Study, 1995.)

The Results:

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The benefits of increasing your Emotional Intelligence skills fall into three basic areas: decision-making, relationships, and health.

These areas are comprehensive in that they impact every action and reaction, every behavior and every circumstance. They are integral to your professional relationships as well as your family interactions, from the broad sweep of day-to-day small incidents that influence your life to major, multi-million dollar corporations.

Decision Making

By becoming aware of what you are feeling in the moment you have information you can use to make a decision about what to say or do now. You can think and act more rationally in the moment by developing emotional self-regulation skills that enable you to quickly transform negative, draining emotions into more positive, productive ones. Your moment-to-moment decision-making is enhanced significantly. These skills will help prevent you from reacting and allow you to respond more thoughtfully and thoroughly. Your effectiveness, your confidence and your motivation are all positively impacted when you are in control of your emotions.

Relationships

Emotional Intelligence skills will not only empower you personally, they will have a positive impact on your relationships with others as well. For example, instead of blowing up when your project manager announces a deadline without consulting you, managing your emotional reactiveness enables you to remain calm, ask good questions, perhaps even influence the deadline – all the while preserving your good working relationship with your manager. In contrast, a breakdown in communication and barriers to working effectively would have been the result of a negative, reactive response on your part. You would have essentially lost ground in your relationship and would need to exert a great deal of effort and time to repair the damage. When relationships are maintained and enhanced, all parties benefit.

And at home, instead of putting a child who comes home with a lower grade than expected or a poor test score on the hot seat, you can show him you care and are concerned about him, and still maintain a firm but understanding approach to the situation. Think of the positive effect this is likely to have on your relationships with your children.

When using simple EI techniques, participants in my programs have been astounded by their children’s responses. For example an SVP of HR for a large organization discovered his son had charged a tank of gas on his credit card. His immediate reaction was to grab a baseball bat to get his son’s attention. However, he was able to manage his emotions by using a simple, quick emotional management technique and asking himself, “How can I best handle this situation?”?As a result, he and his son discussed the situation calmly (no bat was involved). For punishment, his son was not allowed to drive his own truck for a week. When the son asked, “How am I going to get to work?” Dad’s reply was, “That’s your problem.” The next morning the son called his dad at work and thanked him for having a conversation instead of a yelling match.

This story demonstrates how managing emotions can have a significant impact. The conversation and interaction was very different than the usual, and the relationship was improved. And the dad was being a much better role model for his son.

Health

The third area affected by developing your Emotional Intelligence skills, but certainly not the least, is your health. Negative emotions fuel higher cortisol levels, often called “the stress hormone.Excessive cortisol levels, over time, can cause acid reflux, sleeplessness, asthma, ulcers, loss of bone mass and osteoporosis, low sperm count, redistribution of fat to the waist and hips, and fat buildup in the arteries, which can lead to heart disease and numerous other diseases (McCraty, Borrios-Choplin et al. “The Impact of a New Emotional Self-Management Program on Stress, Emotions, Heart Rate Variability, DHEA and Cortisol” Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 33(2):151-70, 1998). Mismanaged emotions, correlated with dysrhythmias in our Autonomic Nervous System, are associated with many diseases including asthma, chronic fatigue, depression, hypoglycemia, hypertension and many more. Learning to transform from negative emotions into positive productive ones throughout the day or night over a sustained period of time has been shown to have a positive impact on many health-related problems. In my programs, participants most frequently mention a significant elimination or reduction of sleeplessness, often in a couple of weeks.

Developing Emotional Intelligence skills is not difficult. People have realized the benefits in a very short period of time by applying simple, proven techniques consistently. They have reported improvements in all of the categories – decision-making, relationships and health.
IQ test means Intelligence Quotient,with the help of IQ tests intelligence test you can measure your ability of your work in any field, if you get high IQ level in IQ intelligence test that means there is chances of highly complex jobs.

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Humans did not always eat meat.

Do you ever think about how far we?ve diverted from the path of our pre-historic ancestors and they?re eating patterns? Consider how the earliest humans evolved, and what they ate. They were hunter-gatherers and did not evolve with the characteristics of carnivores. Humans aren?t made to tear animals apart and eat their flesh. When you look at carnivorous animals, such as wild cats, you can see their teeth are designed to rip and tear, not chew.

Humans evolved from vegetarian creatures. Even our digestive systems are not particularly suited to eating meat. Eating meat is a relatively recent development in human history, most likely born of opportunity and necessity. Perhaps earliest man observed carnivores eating meat, and if they couldn?t find any of the natural foods they were used to eating, such as vegetables, berries, nuts and grains, then they might have assumed that eating meat would at least sustain life.

But initially we emulated the creatures we evolved from, herbivores like apes. Even to a prehistoric mind, apes would have looked similar to man, walking primarily upright, with arms and hands. We naturally would have foraged for our food, eating roots and berries, fruits and nuts. We would have watched the apes peeling bananas, or crushing nuts on stones to get at the meat of the nut.

We would have been living more moment-to-moment, constantly foraging for food. Hunting, after all, requires thought and planning. Eating meat requires preparation and most importantly, fire. Until man discovered fire, he was primarily vegetarian, living in what was the natural order of things. Vegetarian eating is a more natural way of eating, in addition to being healthier. It?s a way that?s in balance with the planet, and doesn?t seek to dominate it and conquer it.

Technorati Tags: Ancestors, Apes, Bananas, Berries, Carnivores, Carnivorous Animals, Creatures, Digestive Systems, Eating Meat, Flesh, Foraging For Food, Grains, Human History, Hunter Gatherers, Moment To Moment, Nuts, Peeling, Roots, Vegetables, Wild Cats