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Tag: EQ360

Categories
Business Skills Training Professional Development

Can You Have Trust Without Being Vulnerable?

Brené Brown is a research professor at University of Houston. Over the last decade, she has spent her time studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. In her TEDx Houston talk on the power of vulnerability, she engages her audience with insight and humor. She delves into the understanding of what people who allow themselves to be vulnerable have in common.

One of the elements of vulnerability that Brené explores is that people who allow themselves to be vulnerable have an underlying quality of worthiness. They believe in who they are and all their imperfections. With that worthiness comes courage, compassion and connection.

Trust and vulnerability are intertwined. In order to learn to trust each other, individuals must allow themselves to be vulnerable with those same people. Even the simple act of believing that someone will do what they say they will, is making oneself vulnerable and open to the possibility that they may be let down. The more that trust is developed, the more individuals will gradually allow their vulnerabilities to show through, thus creating opportunities for growth. Developing trust and exposing vulnerabilities in the work place are critical for a team to develop and meet the mission that they were all brought together to fulfill.

It may seem counterintuitive to expose vulnerabilities during professional team building exercises, but with a strong facilitator, team members can grow and learn, and together strengthen their weaknesses. Trust is the foundation and underpinning of any successful team. Without trust and vulnerability, teams will falter and fail.

With openness and honesty, an environment for creativity and innovation can be fostered. When individuals are taught to be open to honest solutions, they will find growth in their roles within an organization and improve both in their skill sets and in their comfortability within the framework of their position.

Leadership coaching programs conducted by trained facilitators, help foster trust and creativity while understanding vulnerability and courage in the workplace. These programs also allow participants to begin understanding emotional intelligence and the need for this within any social setting particularly in the workplace. A strong program may start with EQi-2.0 or EQ 360 assessments to provide each individual with a baseline from which to begin building upon their individual strengths.

The bottom line is that trust must exist in order for team members to successfully offer solutions, take constructive criticism, be open to disagreement, and work through potential conflict. Respect is an important aspect of allowing one’s self to be vulnerable. When mutual respect is fostered and exhibited, ideas and opinions can more freely flow. Without that respect, trust will not occur between individuals in the workplace. Instead, elements of systematic, organizational dysfunction will begin to impact team performance and mission success leading to an environment rife with high staff turnover and major financial implications.

How do you develop trust in your organization?

Categories
EQ-i 2.0 Leadership Development Leadership Skills Training

How Do We Build Trust in a Team?

“Learning to trust is one of life’s most difficult tasks.” – Isaac Watts

One of the key components of effective team building is developing trust amongst the group members. An absence of trust in the workplace can make productivity an uphill slog and hamper progress on projects and performance.

Trust means that you rely on someone else to do the right thing and you are willing to put yourself on the line in the belief of someone else. Without this sort of dependence within a team or organization, members can find themselves working at cross-purposes with each other.

As a manager, how can you build trust amongst your team and foster a strong bond that will enable productivity and cohesion?

The first step the leadership of an organization can take is to develop Emotional Intelligence. Taking the time to bring in a knowledgeable consultant such as Wise Ways Consulting, trained to administer EI testing such as the EQ-I 2.0 and EQ360 can help accelerate trust-building in the workplace.

Through self-awareness, empathy, motivation, self-regulation, and building social skills – the five categories of Emotional Intelligence – team leaders can properly develop and motivate their teams.

Once leaders know themselves, it is easier to find the strengths and areas for growth in others and work to develop those. The simple act of getting out from behind one’s desk, greeting people, and talking to team members while showing genuine interest in learning who each person is, will go a long way toward building trust.

When team leaders take steps to recognize successes, share failures, applaud people’s positive behaviors and individual growth, and respectfully address negative behaviors with constructive ways to improve, they set their team up for success by demonstrating the simple act of trust.

Can vulnerability build trust?

Absolutely! We have already discussed the intertwined nature of trust and vulnerability. The simple act of trusting that someone will deliver what is expected without micromanaging the process is an act of trust and vulnerability. Learn to sit with discomfort and allow team members to take the reins and prove they are worthy of that trust. Remember that they were hired because they are good at their jobs – allow them the autonomy to show you!

Being vulnerable is synonymous with learning to “sit in the discomfort.” This may simply be the discomfort of letting go, stopping controlling all aspects of the team’s mission, and giving ownership to the team in order to empower them in their roles within the organization. As control is released, teams become stronger as a whole and leadership are able to remove focus from day-to-day activities instead working toward shaping the organization’s long-term vision and strategic plans.

By employing techniques learned through completing the EI assessment, learning the concepts, and training the organization can work toward building trust and empowering a team.

Categories
Effective Communication

The Important Role of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) in the Workplace

The phrase Emotional Intelligence was coined by leading researchers Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer back in 1990 in their article, “Emotional Intelligence”  “We define emotional intelligence as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”

What is EQ?

Emotional Intelligence is often referred to as EQ and is arguably a more critical element of success than IQ in determining a cohesive productive team in the workplace. Five categories of Emotional Intelligence make up the EQ.

  • Self-Awareness – The perception of emotion in oneself and others
  • Empathy – The ability to express and understand emotions and recognize them in others
  • Motivation – The ability to utilize emotions for productivity
  • Self-Regulation – The ability to manage emotions
  • Social Skills – The ability to interact successfully with others

“Your EQ is the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates them, and how to work cooperatively with them,” Says Howard Gardner, Harvard theorist, influential in the field of EI research.

Why is Emotional Intelligence Important in the Workplace?
You hear the term ‘company culture’ thrown around frequently in modern organizations. Any research on values and goals tells you that when values and goals align in the workplace, organizations are more successful.

From a management standpoint, if you are working at cross-purposes with your employees, your productivity will be stunted. Much of drawing out the best possible productivity and growth in your team is dependent upon your ability to find the strengths and weaknesses in your people and nurture and grow their competencies. It may be easier to quantify and calibrate technical skills but the behavioral skills found within EQ fuel the growth of your business.

It can be highly beneficial for organizations to bring in a knowledgeable consultant to administer EI testing such as the EQ-i 2.0 and EQ360 assessments to evaluate emotional intelligence both in management and in employees and teams. Once an assessment has been performed, an interactive program to work with individuals and teams will cultivate valuable resources to improve effective communication and understanding to increase team and organizational productivity.

Categories
Goal Setting Personal Development Professional Development

As the Year Comes to a Close, Are YOU Meeting Your Goals?

With 2015 nearly upon us, New Years’ Resolutions swim in our heads as we prepare to have a “better” year than the last. Often times though, many individuals do not take the time to do a critical analysis of the past, present, and future goals in order to properly set themselves on a path of change and growth. This can be felt both in their personal development and professional development.

Studies show that people who put pen to paper and write down their specific goals tend to be more successful at accomplishing whatever they set out to achieve versus those who do not write them down and are not detailed in their goal setting.

Our personal goals tend to be things like gaining a promotion, losing weight, getting into shape, getting finances under control, meeting someone, and so on. While these are great goals, they need to be quantified and put into manageable perspective. This often cannot happen unless you take stock of where you are and where you want to be. This is doubly true for professional goals. Critical analysis is an important aspect of getting your professional goals in line for growth and improvement.

Goal setting is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of activity. Look at goal setting as an ongoing process of improvement and change. Ask yourself hard questions like “Where do I want to be in a year, or in five years. How does my life look to me now and what steps do I need to make in order to achieve these goals?” These same questions can be applied to professional goals – it is important to ask yourself the difficult questions in order to identify and quantify your goals.

From a business standpoint, here are a few questions that will help you take stock of your current job performance and formulating goals.

As a leader, how do you assess your own performance and make changes?
As a leader it is important to provide tools and programs to assess not only your own skills and performance, but also those of the rest of your team. When you use assessments like EQ360 and EQ-i 2.0 to assess emotional intelligence and consult with an expert to put together an interactive program to improve professional performance and growth, you are setting up not only yourself, but your entire team for success in the coming year.

Do you take the time to review your personal and professional performance goals?
Improving goal setting skills and putting together a consistent review process whereby you are constantly reevaluating goals and readjusting them to fit your reality is paramount to successful progressive growth, both with personal development and professional development. Implementing a goal setting skills training program in the workplace will set each and every team member up for success. Goals cannot be static. Goals are a constant compass that need referencing throughout the year in order to stay on the correct path.

How do you garner honest feedback on your performance as a leader or manager?
Opening the lines of communication between all members of an organization is key to individual professional growth and the growth of a team. How can you set goals if you do not have a reference point on how you are doing? There are many different ways to ask for feedback from your peers, managers, and employees. Take a walk and talk, send an office survey, “feed forward”, or schedule regular one-on-one meetings – these are just a few ways to receive honest feedback. Here are some great ideas from SmartBlogs.

What do you do with that feedback?
Once you receive feedback, decide how you are going to incorporate this into a program to improve your performance and grow in your role within the organization. Use feedback to help map out your own goals.

Goal setting is an important part of personal and professional growth. It is essential to be able to assess where you are to see where you are going. Let us know if we can help you improve your performance and fulfill your goals in 2015.

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