The workplace environment has undergone a revolution with
the recent emphasis on emotional intelligence. It has been shown that cultivating
feeling-oriented sensibilities can have a highly positive influence on effectiveness
and performance.
The first signs of emotional intelligence began years ago
when it was realized that we seek much more than just monetary rewards from
work. Primary needs for recognition, significance, and community, to name
only a few, are important to us as well. Management that understands this
greater scheme is more likely to succeed in its corporate objectives and
be seen as a contemporary organization to emulate.
The next level of emotion intelligence in the workplace
is concerned with developing skills. These programs are available from various
consultants and may be undertaken by individuals on their own initiative,
outside the company, or provided in-house. Trainings in emotional self-awareness,
sensitivity, empathy, stress reduction, and self-confidence aim at a more
personal level of development. While these programs can be excellent as
far as they go, and may be illuminating to those who have been neglecting
their feeling sides, they usually fall short of bringing about significant
change for several reasons:
First, there is often simply lack of expertise on how to
effectively handle emotional awareness. It is relatively easy to direct
attention towards feelings, but knowing how to release toxic negative emotions
and prevent them from contaminating work efforts and relationships is not
so simple. Second, there is a natural, yet unfortunate, propensity to crassly
apply emotional awareness to self-oriented positions, such as the salesperson
who uses empathic skills to manipulate customers. This moral misapplication
of emotional aptitude ultimately results in self-defeatism. Third, trainings
in emotional skills are usually “blanket” programs, and do not
address the deep, individual levels where dysfunction resides.
What’s next? That’s what EC training is all
about. In line with the increasingly personal direction of feeling-oriented
training, EC suggests that the next frontier is the inner emotional landscape
of the individual, and that what ultimately keeps people from achieving,
succeeding, and cooperating is their inner emotional blocking. The emotional
level is where we get stuck, and where the blocks occur that keep us at
low levels of joy, creativity, and performance. The emotional level is the
foundation; if we are misaligned here, the higher mental and intellectual
levels - the home of our aspirations and values - will be constantly undermined.
Thus, in spite of our best intentions, we continue to self-defeat.
What needs to be emphasized is that it’s not just
the stereotyped, poorly adjusted individual who is in need of such an approach
- it’s everybody. It’s really the human condition; it’s
a large part of what we are challenged with in our journey through life.
We all need emotional enlightenment, and not only in times of crisis, but
as a normal part of personal growth.
We are at unique and highly exciting time in history. There
is apparently much turmoil around us, but also opportunities that have never
before existed. One of these opportunities is a union, at least on a certain
level, of humanistic and corporate values. As we recognize that optimum
effectiveness, performance, and leadership are best attained when inner
blocks have been removed, true harmony in the workplace begins. The understanding
that corporate goals can be in line with individual, even spiritual goals,
is a revolutionary concept that can change life as we know it in the new
millennium.
