“In hard times, the soft stuff often goes away. But emotional intelligence, it turns out, isn’t so soft. If emotional obliviousness jeopardizes your ability to perform, fend off aggressors, or be compassionate in a crisis, no amount of attention to the bottom line will protect your career. Emotional intelligence isn’t a luxury you can dispense with in tough times. It’s a basic tool that, deployed with finesse, is the key to professional success” - Harvard Business Review.
Leading and Navigating at the Edge
In these times of unprecedented challenge and disruption we often see leaders struggling with difficult thoughts and feelings and most of them stumble not because they have undesirable thoughts and feelings — that’s inevitable. They stumble because they attempt to manage these thoughts and feelings by ignoring them, or suppressing them, and when that doesn’t work they end up venting - often inappropriately.
We know from research that minimising or ignoring thoughts and emotions serves only to amplify them. Over time attempting to manage your thoughts and feelings in this way can be debilitating, using up important cognitive resources, and depleting your energy levels. In turn this cycle of depletion makes it more and more difficult to achieve the results you want.
Effective leaders don’t buy into or try to suppress their inner experiences. Instead they approach them in a mindful, values-driven, and productive way - they develop what we call emotional agility. In our complex, fast-changing and disrupted world the ability to manage one’s thoughts and feelings is essential to success.
Most managers are promoted for their technical and business skills — but often find the “soft side” hard.
One of the biggest challenges facing organisations is how to get more employee engagement in challenging times with diminishing resources. These challenges include engaging people in change, proactively resolving issues, setting a context for performance, and building collaboration. All of these challenges require emotional agility. To change the outcomes and meet these challenges productively leaders need to change the inputs — and to do so they need new awareness, attitude, and skills.
My approach
Emotional Agility coaching includes the use of pre and post Six Seconds SEI LTC Self-Assessment.This scientifically validated tool woven into the coaching supports leaders to further develop and apply their emotional intelligence to increase their effectiveness and impact.
It alsoprovides the opportunity for compelling, quick, and meaningful insights.
It measures Change Readiness and provides leaders with valuable data that can be used to target the planning and successful implementation of change initiatives.
It integrates the AGILE Leadership Framework to raise awareness of the key attributes and behaviours that leaders need to model to inspire positive change.
A transformational roadmap for leaders providing numerous development opportunities to grow, use and apply EQ competencies in any change situation.
It is statistically rigorous in its capacity to measure the eight (8) EQ Competencies.
In fact SEI scores have been shown to predict over 54% of these important success factors.
Coined by the Harvard Business Review, the term closely aligns with a more widely used term, emotional intelligence—but the two concepts are not necessarily interchangeable.
Emotional agility is particularly focused on approaching your inner experiences mindfully, productively, intentionally, a feat that has become increasingly challenging during this COVID season.
"Becoming more emotionally agile will make you a better leader—while remaining emotionally rigid can compromise your ability to lead effectively and make the best decisions for your team" - Paul Goyette
Eight Reasons to Develop Emotional Agility
Build your agility and resilience in times of unprecedented challenges. Increase your effectiveness, relationships, health or quality of life. Create change in your organisation or team. Improve results. For practical tools to use in the way you work with people. Develop your self-awareness, interpersonal skills (empathy, listening), influence, motivation and engagement skills. Tap into powerful insight and the motivational force of emotion to fuel transformation. Increased job performance and the likelihood of successful change.
