The emotional side of work
Summary: Our human emotions play a big role in our day to day work. Learning to recognize them when they occur, talk about their impact and, most importantly, deal with them gracefully is what makes any workplace great.
Have you ever been in a room with smart individuals who can’t find reasonable ways to agree and work with each other because of their egos? That’s a sign for an unhealthy conversation.
After years of collaboration, I’ve had a simple realization: a large proportion of the situations in which we end arguing unhealthy about things are caused by our emotions. Nothing new here. But what’s surprising is that discussions about emotional and social intelligence at work are not yet so common in many workplaces. Together with the lack of feedback, this makes for a bad combination. And it allows for the same bad situations to repeat, to the dismay of those involved.
One way to improve this is by making conversations around emotional and social intelligence a part of everyday work. Managers and their directs, colleagues, all could benefit from learning more about themselves and how they react in different situations. And could benefit from learning to adapt their reactions. We can all learn to either think a bit more before we talk, or speak our mind more often and earlier in a conversation.
Exercises in empathy or how to socialize with others could also be helpful in fostering a greater respect. And we’d get what we want faster.
All of this may sound funny or unusual, but once we start seeing the impact this can have, we won’t want to go back. It does take a bit of courage to start if this is new, but long term it pays off big time.
Companies that incorporate these kind of activities in the workplace have understood the role culture plays over everything else.
The more advanced companies know culture is the best strategy, view culture as a product they can work on and even have people deliberately working on this.
