Emotional Intelligence Series: Deep Dive into Harnessing Emotions
This month we’re deep diving into the important area of Emotional Intelligence – a super important part of TALY’s holistic personality profiling that measures your skills in perceiving, understanding and using emotions. This may be:
Your own emotions or the emotions of those around you
Overtly shared in conversation or perceived through behaviour, sensing, body language and more
In understanding others to build connections, or using emotions to create new ideas and outcomes
If you need to catch up, check out our first overview on Emotional Intelligence and the model we use at TALY, and our summary of Perceiving and Expressing Emotions and Understanding Emotions.
This model suggests that there are four key dimensions to evaluating and understanding someone’s emotional intelligence. The Mayer and Salovey model of Emotional Intelligence is illustrated below.
Today, we’re going to deep dive into the second key area of this model – HARNESSING EMOTIONS.
What is Harnessing Emotions all about?
As we’ve talked about over the past few weeks, Emotional Intelligence is a super important skill for everyone at work to develop. It leads to more effective leadership, happier workplaces, and better outcomes across the board.
A big part of EI is about being open to the emotional information around you, being a little vulnerable, and having open conversations to really understand your feelings and the feelings of others.
This is super important, but then comes the ‘so what’. What are you actually going to do with this information? What is the point of having super accurate and insightful emotional information if you just keep it to yourself?
This is HARNESSING EMOTIONS – the ability to generate, use, and feel emotion as necessary to communicate feelings or employ them in other cognitive processes.
When it comes to EI, this is where the rubber hits the road. Until this point, we’ve been talking about building skills at looking within, and at having open conversations to collect the right emotional data.
Harnessing Emotions is moving from the more passive area of collecting emotional information to the active area of taking action based on this information.
Some examples of this in practice include:
Getting better at collecting even more insight into others – by harnessing emotions, you can develop and fine tune your overall emotional research.
Creating better ideas – building innovations and solutions that bring a mix of practical and emotional information will not only solve a problem, but will connect emotionally with your audience.
Helping to lead others – by using your skills to train and develop others to be more effective in their use of EI.
Interestingly, this is usually the last aspect of EI to develop in people.
For many, that’s not easy to do.
Why does it matter?
This area of Emotional Intelligence has a significant impact in two areas:
In how we connect with and lead people
In how we build out ideas and innovation
As a leader, being highly emotionally intelligent, and using these skills, can drive much stronger outcomes for your team. Leaders who use their EI effectively in teams tend to…
Be better at giving and receiving feedback.
Build strong team engagement – both individually and in the group.
Be more open to the ideas of others, and to building on these ideas.
Encourages others to develop their own EI.
On the innovation side, the impact that using emotional information can have is profound. By building solutions – from simple changes in process to large scale innovations – that find an emotional connection, you’ll naturally have more success.
Innovation and creativity are not just the result of technical skills, knowledge, or resources. They also depend on the emotional climate, culture, and interactions within the team and the organization
How can you develop in this area?
Remember, Emotional Intelligence is not a fixed trait. Rather, it is an area that we all want to continue working on, and to become more and more skilled at. The better we are in EI, the stronger relationships we’ll have with others around us, and stronger outcomes will follow.
When it comes to Harnessing Emotions, as with many areas of EI, it comes down to practice, to challenging yourself in more and more situations to actively use the emotional information you have
Here are a few quick tips.
Push it further. When thinking through your approach to problems, make sure you challenge yourself to not only ask whether your idea will solve the problem, but also how people will feel as a result. Adding this emotional overlay can really take things further.
Practice asking ‘so what’. If you know someone feels a certain way, take action to adapt what you are doing to suit these needs.
Review and seek feedback. After team sessions, or after implementing ideas, take a moment to consider the emotional consequences. Did things fall out the way you planned?
Reflect on Past Interactions. Take the time to reflect on your past interactions and how your emotions influenced the outcomes. Consider situations where you may have reacted emotionally or where you missed opportunities to understand others’ emotions better.
Foster Psychological Safety. Create an environment where individuals feel psychologically safe to share their ideas, take risks, and express their emotions without fear of judgment or negative consequences.
Cultivate a Growth Mindset. Encourage a growth mindset within yourself and your team, emphasising the belief that abilities can be developed through effort and learning.
We shared this last week, but there are plenty of other ideas here and here to get you thinking.
Great people decisions start with TALY.
The TALY approach to personality profiling brings together a unique mix of Five Factor and Emotional Intelligence profiling to help organisations, hiring managers and teams to make better decisions about recruitment and teams.
Get in touch to find out more… we love talking about this stuff! Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.