Emotional intelligence and employee’s self-esteem

Before reading the book (1), I thought the emotional intelligence is nothing more than fake emotions of some gifted people who could win even the Oscar award for their acting skills. Moreover, what has job to do with emotions? The sphere of emotions is private life, after all. From work experience, each of us knows how bosses can humiliate and offend workers in many ways. It ruins motivation and self-esteem of employees and it leads to many harmful consequences.

Employee’s self-esteem

There is no place for a man at workplace; there is place only for a worker. Everybody here is a part of manpower sources, a part of staff with certain duties and performance. So valued and treasured by psychologists human personality is of no interest to managers. But, if an employee knows that he is not only regarded as a “working machine”, but also as a personality, individuality, he will deal with criticism in a more positive and productive way. He understands that only some outcomes of his work are being criticized, not he himself.

Employees feel more confident when they get positive work evaluation. What’s the use of saying it, isn’t it too obvious for everybody? Nonetheless, according to the outcomes of all employee researches, lack of performance evaluation was named among the three main negative aspects about work. Thus, management harms employees’ motivation and makes staff feel useless and less self-confident. It is to remember that negative work feedback also negatively affects self-esteem of the employee. That’s why it has to always be combined with positive feedback of the person’s personality.

Never forget: attacking a person’s self-esteem you harm relationships and communication. On the contrary, of you give positive feedback to other employees – you are powerful. It’s always your choice.

Emotional intelligence

Before, intelligence was only understood as mathematical-logical intelligence that could be measured with the popular Binet intelligence test. Later, the American psychologist D. Goleman told us how important emotional intelligence is for job success.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive and regulate one’s emotions, empathize, and anticipate certain situations and peoples reactions. Interestingly, but people with good score on Binet intelligence test lack often above-mentioned skills.

Only with the help of emotional intelligence it is possible to control one’s emotions that are the inheritance from the Stone Age. If the ancient «attacking/fleeing» program has been activated and you use it, it means that your emotional intelligence is at a low level. A typical example here would be a choleric person.

Nowadays interpersonal skills, ability to establish and maintain good working relations are essential at work as never before. Emotional intelligence is of high importance when it comes to management. Moreover, one will always have troubles at work and will never achieve success as a team player. The book author claims that in trainings top managers have problems when describing other people’s feelings. Isn’t this the sure sign of the lack of emotional intelligence?

How many words and notions describing feeling do you know? Many people distance themselves from their feelings even in their own speech. Next time when you watch a talk-show, pay attention to the way a person reacts to some hurting questions. Quite often he would use impersonal phrases, such as “This should be solved” or “One should take into account” or “Let’s see what happens next”.

Try to analyse your speech: what you say and what grammatical constructions are used to put the words into sentences. You will get to know a lot of new things about yourself.

The better you can control your emotions, the more chances for success you get. And manage people can only those who knows how to effectively communicate and what others feel at a given moment.

Unfortunately, managers have very poor emotional intelligence. It leads to numerous problems with employees and affect the performance of the whole company. This fact has been proved by researches and by the life itself in so many ways. But somehow it is still unclear to me what now? How tell the chef that he acts as a primitive man that is incapable of controlling his own emotions and cannot understand other people.