Written by: Brett Richards, PhD
President, Connective Intelligence Inc.

Emotions Influence Behaviour

Research shows that emotions influence behaviour. Our emotional intelligence – how we use our emotional and social skills – affects our actions, our decisions and consequently the results we get. Our IQ determines how smart we may be, our emotional intelligence determines how successful we likely will be. Since emotions underlie behaviour, it is possible to identify specific emotional capabilities that will impact the successful fulfillment of corporate and leader competencies.

For example, let’s look at the competency of Interpersonal Relationships, which one organization defined as “the ability to use one’s communication skills to build rapport and good relationships with individuals at all levels”. If you were to identify key emotionally-based capabilities that would drive success with this particular competency, what would you choose? We identified the following certainly as strong possibilities:

Corporate Competency
Interpersonal Relationships
The ability to use one’s communication skills to build rapport and good relationships with individuals at all levels.

Required Emotional Competencies
(using Bar-On’s EQ-i™ Model see below)
Interpersonal Relationships
Empathy
Self Regard
Impulse Control

Discussion

To successfully fulfill this specific competency, individuals will need to maintain composure and potentially modify their behaviour depending on who they are talking to within the organization (Impulse Control). They must be willing to emotionally engage in a mutual exchange of giving and receiving affection (Interpersonal Relationship). They must have a good degree of self-acceptance, realistically assessing both their positive and negative aspects (Self Regard). And they will require the ability to emotionally read other people, being sensitive to how and why others feel the way they do (Empathy). The degree to which they will be able to enact these emotional skills and abilities will largely depend on their own emotional fluency. Individuals who have strong fluency with these emotional skills will likely be more able to fulfill this particular competency.

Leading Self and Leading Others

In my experience coaching many managers and leaders I have come to appreciate the pervasive impact emotional skills have on leadership performance, as well as personal satisfaction. As leaders become aware of their unique emotional strengths and watch-outs they begin to realize a) why they feel the way they do about certain types of organizational tasks and activities, b) why they are frustrated and/or satisfied, and, c) perhaps most importantly, why they are hitting a performance barrier either personally, socially or corporately. Exploration of emotional skills provides managers and leaders with new ways of understanding and changing their behaviour so as to increase their leadership impact and potential.

Could anyone dispute the fact that organizations today are emotionally charged environments? Concrete walls and computer chips do not have emotions, so it must be the people within the organizations who are both creating and experiencing this emotional charge. Emotions drive the behaviour and performance of people within organizations and this is why it’s critical to appreciate the power of emotions with respect to leading others, leading change and nurturing innovative and inclusive corporate cultures.

The practical goal or business-based orientation to the exploration of emotional intelligence is to become more aware and skillful at utilizing our emotional abilities. At Connective Intelligence, we classify this process as harnessing Emotional Power®.

In most organizations today, people need to increase their emotional power and resilience to better cope with continuous change and increasing levels of complexity in their world.

A key challenge for most people in organizations is to be increasingly more skillful with the application of their emotional energy so they can respond to life’s pressures in such a way that is effective, rather than destructive or performance-limiting. The primary goal, then, should be to improve personal resilience and performance by learning to be more conscious of our emotional states and more skillful with the application of our emotional power.