14
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 1st NOVEMBER, 2015
Dr. Graham King of the Faculty of Engineering doing a
presentation on “How to make your organisation more
innovative,” during the workshop, “Crafting an Agile
Organisation through Critical Thinking,” in March.
WORKSHOP REPORT
The Executive Development Unit
of the Institute of
Critical Thinking at The UWI St. Augustine seeks to foster
professional development through workshops it hosts
periodically. In September, one of its popular workshops on
emotional intelligence, “Building Organisational Efficiency
using Emotional Intelligence: Aligning skills, purpose
and strategy,” took place. The interactive workshop takes
leaders through the gamut of people issues that they face
when attempting to improve the efficiency and overall
productivity of their operations. It is built for leaders who
have reached the top of their organisation by virtue of their
technical competence and soon realise that despite their best
efforts to improve the organisation’s performance, issues of
personality, communication and motivation hinder their
progress.
The concept of Emotional Intelligence has been studied
by many social scientists and was made popular by the
work of Daniel Goleman. In his 1998 article, “What makes
a leader?” published in the Harvard Business Review,
Goleman pointed to four elements that differentiated
good leaders from great leaders. The first element was
self-awareness. As the name suggests, it is the ability to
understand who you are, what matters most to you, your
own strengths and weaknesses. Being self-aware allows
you to assess a situation that you are confronted with
and question yourself to determine the most appropriate
response. After all, if you understand your own emotions,
then you can appreciate how your employees feel and how
your emotional response can impact on them.
What’s your
Emotional Intelligence?
B Y C H R I S T A S A N K A R S I N G H
The second element is that of self-management. Self-
management is the ability to take a step back from a situation,
remove the initial emotional reaction fromyour mind and develop
a more productive response to a situation. Control over your own
emotions ensures that you are able to maintain your stance on
matters that are most important to you and not compromise your
values. Further, the ability to self-manage gives you the power to
lead change, to think fast and to design creative and innovative
solutions to issues.
Social awareness is the third element of Goleman’s model.
Social awareness speaks to the leader’s ability to interpret the
emotions of themembers of his/her team. Imagine how influential
you can be if you understood the emotions of your team and could
use this to see things through their eyes. This would allow you to
provide themwith the right motivation to have themachieve goals,
to be able to build and retain teammembers that you want and to
provide the right views for appreciating organisational goals. A
team that is motivated to achieving the goals of their organisation
will be self-directed and high-performing.
The final element of Goleman’s model is social skills. Social
skills are directly related to communication. Leaders with good
social skills are good communicators. They are able to express
themselves in a way that causes hearers to pay attention to what
they are saying. This also lends itself to being able to deal with
conflict appropriately. As a leader with good social skills, you will
be able to communicate the organisation’s vision to your team
by linking their goals with the vision and providing them with a
mechanism for self-motivation and a focal point for developing
team cohesiveness.
For information on future workshops, please contact us at 785-4587 or email
Control over your
own emotions
ensures that you are
able to maintain
your stance on
matters that are
most important
to you and not
compromise your
values.
