WANTED — Emotional Intelligence and Empathy
I met Kathy, a friend of mine, for lunch the other day. She’s the manager of human resources and training for a healthcare organization that serves our county and surrounding counties. Things have been difficult in her organization because of changes that Medicaid made last fall in defining what they will reimburse to healthcare organizations for the services they provide to patients. Because of these changes and a declining census they have been in the red for a number of months.
Kathy’s CEO, Lorraine, has taken a number of steps to bring a balance back to their financials. Those steps have been helpful but more needs to be done. I met Lorraine a year ago and was impressed with both her big picture view of where the organization was going and with her demeanor. One of the things that came up in our discussion was the importance of emotional intelligence (EI). Kathy had told me that Lorraine excelled at this and based on my observations and our discussion she seemed to have a high degree of emotional intelligence skills. She wasn’t one of those people who looked calm on the outside while hiding negative emotions on the inside.
During our lunch Kathy said there were a number of people in middle and upper level management who were exhibiting overt signs of increased stress. She was seeing some leaders being more defensive, expressing pessimism and indecisiveness, and a few that were confrontational and actually being critical of the Lorraine.
What is interesting is that they weren’t necessarily being critical of the actions Lorraine had taken but rather the fact that Lorraine seemed so calm about all of this. They were upset that she was not more anxious, worried and frustrated — like they were! I thought, “What an interesting phenomenon. Here we have a CEO who is managing her emotions well, which enables her to think clearly and stay calm and focused, while some of her staff are not managing their emotions very well, and they are upset at her for doing so.”
As I thought about it later it seemed that a good short-term solution for Lorraine was to make sure she was expressing empathy when she communicates with her people, especially for those who are showing signs of extreme negative emotions. Demonstrating that you know and understand what people are feeling shows them that you know what it is like to be in their shoes and that you will make decisions that are in their best interest.
The best solution would be to teach people how to develop their emotional intelligence skills so they don’t get emotionally hijacked by changes that take place, whether at work our at home. Emotional intelligence skill-building training has been shown to deliver improvements in performance, relationships, and health. When looking for a training program that really works the key is to check to make sure that it gets measured results — consistently. Leaders at all levels can help themselves and their people more easily weather these challenging times by demonstrating empathy for their people and developing their emotional intelligence skills.
