Emotional Intelligence for Change Leaders

Introduction

Welcome to the Senior Practitioner Emotional Intelligence (EI) module. Once completed, you will gain:

Enhanced awareness of your own level of emotional intelligence and its impact on others, together with a personal plan that will help you take your EI to the next level and enhance your effectiveness as a Senior Practitioner and change leader.

An understanding of how emotional intelligence influences organisational culture, practice and performance, and its potential for enhancing the effectiveness of your change initiative.

In the Workplace Innovation Practitioner Programme, The Emotionally Intelligent Leader section (4.1.1) showed that self-awareness, the ability to manage one’s own emotions, and a sensitivity to the feelings of others is not just a pre-requisite for effective leadership, but also supports and sustains workplace innovation.

As a Senior Practitioner, you will play a key role in change leadership within your organisation. In order to engage, inspire and support others, you will need to develop and deploy:

Self-awareness – the ability to recognise and understand your moods and emotions, and how they affect others.
Self-regulation – the ability to control impulses and moods, and to think before acting.
Internal (or intrinsic) motivation – being driven to pursue goals for personal reasons, rather than for some kind of reward (the opposite is extrinsic motivation).
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Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation means that the individual’s motivational stimuli are coming from within. The individual has the desire to perform a specific task, because its results are in accordance with his belief system or fulfils a desire and therefore importance is attached to it.

Our deep-rooted desires have the highest motivational power. Below are some examples:

  • Acceptance: We all need to feel that we, as well as our decisions, are accepted by our co-workers.
  • Curiosity: We all have the desire to be in the know.
  • Honour: We all need to respect the rules and to be ethical.
  • Independence: We all need to feel we are unique.
  • Order: We all need to be organised.
  • Power: We all have the desire to be able to have influence.
  • Social contact: We all need to have some social interactions.
  • Social Status: We all have the desire to feel important.

Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation means that the individual’s motivational stimuli are coming from outside. In other words, our desires to perform a task are controlled by an outside source. Note that even though the stimuli are coming from outside, the result of performing the task will still be rewarding for the individual performing the task.

Extrinsic motivation is external in nature. The most well-known and the most debated motivation is money. Below are some other examples:

  • Employee of the month award
  • Benefit package
  • Bonuses
  • Organised activities.

[Adapted from https://www.leadership-central.com/types-of-motivation.html]
Empathy – the ability to recognise and understand others’ motivations, essential for building and leading teams successfully.
Social skills – the ability to manage relationships and build networks.

(Source: Goleman, D., 1996)

In addition, you will need to understand how the level of emotional intelligence displayed in the behaviours of others can exert a major influence on the effectiveness of individuals, teams and the organisation as a whole. The ability to recognise negative mindsets and behaviours, and to be familiar with approaches that can lead to positive improvements, are often critical to the success of any change initiative.

This module begins by enabling you to explore your own emotional intelligence. It includes your own EI Executive Profile, followed by a confidential one-to-one coaching session to explore the results.

Emotional Intelligence Executive Profile

Please contact Natalie for more information.

The module also explores the wider impact of EI, whether on individuals, teams or the organisation as a whole. If your organisation has used the Workplace Innovation Diagnostic® or other employee feedback tools, we will help you to analyse the ways in which (high or low) levels of emotional intelligence might be influencing the results.

The module also provides practical evidence and resources to share with your organisation, helping you to minimise resistance and to support workplace innovation and people-centred change. This will include the template for emotional intelligence awareness workshops that will help you share key principles and practices with frontline colleagues, managers and senior teams.

Complete all objectives in this section:
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