To be a successful business owner in 2021, you must be a people person.
Ultimately, your business’s success depends on how well you get along with the people around it: Your team, customers, suppliers and the wider community.
And the secret to getting the most out of people lies in emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is one’s ability to understand other people’s emotions, what motivates them and how to work collaboratively with them. While less celebrated, EQ is regarded as more important than IQ in determining a person’s success in life. You may have heard of using DISC as a tool to help evaluate where you and your team sits with EQ and to understand how everyone can work together well. This is something we will explore in further in this article (you can also access our free downloadable on using DISC to understand your team better below).
Why is Emotional Intelligence Important for your business?
What really matters for success, character, happiness and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills (your EQ) not just purely cognitive abilities that are measured by conventional IQ tests.Daniel Goleman
The Group Emotional Competence (GEC) inventory is based on the work of Vanessa Druskat and Steven Wolff, who pioneered the application of emotional intelligence to group dynamics.
Druskat and Wolff asserted that emotional intelligence underlies the effective processes of successful teams and that it is impossible to imitate the results.
So, if you want your team to be as successful as they can be, you must foster an environment that allows their EQ to thrive. You want your team to understand you and your vision for your business so they can help you work towards it.
And, on the flip side, being able to understand your team and what drives them is essential to getting the most out of your employees and creating a high-performance team environment.
Learn how to get most out of anyone on your team by understanding their profiles, Download our free ebook “Emotional Intelligence is good for your business” here.
The Nine Pillars of a High EQ Team
The GEC inventory identified nine GEC norms that make for a team with high emotional intelligence.
Let’s unpack the norms and see how you can use them to increase emotional intelligence in your business.
Interpersonal understanding
What it means: Ensure your team understands, respects and values each other’s different perspectives and character traits.
Putting it into practice: Encourage your team to speak up and bring forward their perspectives on your business, rather than defaulting to the views of the most senior people in the room.
Confronting members who break norms
What it means: Team members should gently remind each other when they break a social norm that can hurt others, even when they do so accidentally.
Putting it into practice: If a team member is continuously showing up late, and due to this forcing their early work onto others, let them know. Of course, the best way to do this is to find out why they come late and offer them any support they might need.
Caring behaviour
What it means: Only accept kind, courteous behaviour and actions from your team. Team members must treat one another as they wish to be treated.
Putting it into practice: Take a zero-tolerance approach to bullying and team members taking advantage of others. Egos and power moves, whether intentional or otherwise, are common in work environments and do no one any favours.
Team self-evaluation
What it means: Ensure that you regularly analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your team in terms of successes, failures, good processes, successful interactions and dealing with emotions.
Putting it into practice: Take performance reviews beyond just how good your team members are at their job. Place an equal weight on how they interact with you and their fellow staff.
Creating resources for working with emotion
What it means: Create various resources and outlets for employees to understand and work with their emotions.
Putting it into practice: Hold meetings designed to help employees vent their frustrations and reward honest feedback, even if it might not be what you want to hear.
Creating an affirmative environment
What it means: Create an encouraging work environment and assume all team members act in good faith and with good intentions.
Putting it into practice: Encourage your team to work with sincerity and not to get hung up on failures, instead treating them as learning experiences.
Proactive problem solving
What it means: Make sure you and your team feel personally responsible for each other’s work, and do whatever you can to ensure everyone has the support they need.
Putting it into practice: Encourage your team always to be ready to help each other in any capacity they can. Too often the business owner doesn’t feel personally responsible for a team member who is struggling to meet a deadline, and nor do team members in other departments. Increased collaboration and support amongst your team not only creates a better work environment – it also helps your business grow.
Organisational understanding
What it means: Teams should continually learn about the organisation as a whole. Teams should also be encouraged to know the function of departments that are outside their own.
Putting it into practice: Share your business’s goals and vision with your team, and have them displayed around your workplace for all to see. Encourage cross-functional teams at every opportunity and allow your team to get to know how each department contributes to the success of your business.
Building external relationships
What it means: Ensure that teams across all levels and departments get to know each other.
Putting it into practice: Organise meetings and team-building events where the goal is to help build stronger bonds across your business.
Case Study: How a Plumber Built their Dream Team
A plumber I worked with came to me when they were struggling to recruit the right team members.
We worked together to create a vision for their business that people could connect with.
Next, we optimised their business processes, building the foundations for an emotionally intelligent team.
The result?
Thanks to the proven systems we implemented, recruiting and building the team became an easy step to process for the business.
Making a conscious effort to create a team environment where EQ thrives will be the catalyst to massive business growth and the resulting success.
And it begins with understanding your team and taking those extra steps to help them thrive.