Emotional intelligence

A robot workforce with personality? Where does the MBTI framework fit in?

New Disney/Pixar film has fun with primary emotions and teaches some interesting psychology.

The employment market seems to be improving, which is good news for jobseekers but not necessarily for employers; having more jobs available means that there are more opportunities for workers to leave. All the more important, then, that managers don’t give their people that extra incentive to start looking elsewhere. Here are five of the most common ways in which managers can (and unfortunately do) alienate their staff.

People make decisions largely on the basis of intuition and emotion. We might like to think otherwise, but it’s true. Even the most logical and rational amongst us find our cognitive functioning heavily influenced by a broad range of both positive and negative emotions.

Many leaders leave much of their ‘true’ personality at home and try to present themselves at work in the way they think a leader should operate. Leaders absorb these ‘should’ models of leadership from how they see leaders behaving around them (for good or ill), as well as from hoping to emulate leaders generally held up as great: eg Churchill, Branson, etc. On top of this, over the years leadership courses have advocated different styles of leadership, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Leaders can feel they should be all things to all men; but isn’t it better for leaders to just be themselves, natural and authentic, whether at home or in the workplace?

A recent survey by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) revealed that 37% of employees plan handing in their notice in 2015. The chief motivation for this was "better opportunity for progression" (cited by 59% of respondents). Faced with the prospect of stagnation, many people see better chances for career progression elsewhere.

Do you notice when a colleague is out of sorts or behaving out of character? If so, how do you use this information? That was a question posed to me by a colleague during an MBTI foundation workshop I ran recently. My initial thoughts were that (as an ISTJ) I tend to listen to the facts and try to solve the problem. But the question got me thinking about the value of linking personality and emotional awareness together and how people with different MBTI type preferences understand and react to emotional information.

People don’t leave their jobs, they leave their manager. It’s an old saying, but there’s more than a grain of truth here. The most recent survey by the Institute of Leadership and Management shows that 37% of workers are planning to leave their jobs in 2015. A quarter of those interviewed cited being unappreciated and undervalued by their manager as the reason. Across all workers, 30% were hoping for ‘better management’ in 2015.

In my work with individuals across all sectors and at all organisational levels, I am hearing more and more from managers and their HR colleagues about the importance of ‘Emotional Intelligence’. It’s a concept that has been around for a while and it looks like it is no longer the latest fad, but a permanent part of our people development “business as usual” tool kit. However, Emotional Intelligence has become a ‘catch all’ panacea for desirable interpersonal skills, a rather mixed bag of the positive qualities one might hope for in a colleague or leader.

Coaching has always been an important part of the L&D service that OPP’s consultancy offers. It’s also the mainstay of the practice for many of our independent practitioner customers. Why is there such a demand? In short, organisations need their leaders to develop a great range of responses to the challenges they face, and to develop greater psychological resilience. Additionally, many organisations are seeking to develop coaching skills among line managers, knowing that this too can have a significant and positive impact on organisational performance.