It's becoming more and more difficult for you to be a "lone ranger" or fly solo. Our world is becoming increasingly complex and we need to leverage our talents and partner with others to complete projects as quickly as possible.
Teaming with others is often essential to getting work done. I have found that using a virtual assistant or outsourcing certain work to experts invaluable in helping my work productivity. However, whether you are developing a website or writing a book you can't just give it away to someone else to get the best results. You need to interact and develop a productive relationship with whoever is providing you assistance.
In order to work well with others you need to develop the emotional intelligence skill of empathy which allows you to connect with other people. Empathy is the underlying competency that is integral to the emersion and phenomenal success of social networking sites ie. Facebook, My Space, You Tube, Linked In and Second Life. Empathy is the glue that holds all the connections together.
Businesses have embraced the concept of emotional intelligence and its importance ever since Daniel Goleman’s best-selling book, Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998). The challenge is to demonstrate that such competencies significantly impact employee performance.
Studies in corporations that have adopted emotional intelligence training have shown that “EI” can be trained and it is effective. There are overall improvements in productivity and profits. Furthermore, up to 90% of the difference between outstanding and average leaders is linked to emotional intelligence. “EI” is two times as important as IQ and technical expertise combined, and is four times as important in terms of overall success.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize your own feelings and those of others, and the ability to motivate yourself and others, as well as to manage your own emotions and those of others. Essentially, there are four competencies:
1. Understanding yourself, or self-awareness
2. Managing yourself, or self-management
3. Understanding others, or social awareness
4. Managing others, or social skills
Emotional intelligence increases when people commit themselves to building practical competencies in the context of every day situations. Nothing can be more powerful than developing empathy skills during everyday conversations on the job.
One of the foundation skills that contribute to a manager’s or leader’s success is the skill of empathy. It starts with self-awareness, in that understanding your own emotions is essential to understanding the feelings of others. It is crucial to effective communication and to leading others.
Lack of empathy is a primary cause of interpersonal difficulties that lead to poor performance, executive derailment, and problems with customer relationships.
Empathy as a competency skill is poorly understood by those who need it most, and it is even more difficult to train and acquire. Most people believe you either have it or you don’t. Many hard-driving managers lack a propensity for developing empathy because they assume it’s for the more “touchy-feely” types. Some very intelligent leaders are walking around blindly using only their powers of reasoning and wondering why everyone doesn’t see things their way.
Research by the Center for Creative Leadership has found that the primary causes of derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competency, and in particular, these three primary ones:
1. Difficulty in handling change.
2. Not being able to work well as a team.
3. Poor interpersonal relations.
Without an adequate capacity to understand the other’s point of view, some managers lack sufficient flexibility for change, cannot work well with team collaboration, and cannot relate well with the very people that affect the results they are trying to achieve.
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