Order Matters: Emotional Intelligence Before We Can Have Inclusion
“We are not thinking beings, we are emotional beings that sometimes think.”
— Brene Brown
I quickly scribbled this down while watching Brene on stage recently. It makes sense when you ‘think’ about it right! Emotions are what drive us, they are responsible for how we feel, who we love, what we buy into, our health, a lot of what makes us who we are.
Never has this been more present for me than when facilitating a Breaking Bias lab a while back for a group that told me they ‘don’t discuss emotions at work’. Unconscious bias is such a tricky but crucial concept for each of us to deal with. Even more so if you are a white, male, heterosexual executive and have lived a fairly privileged life. It’s going to require building a good level of emotional intelligence (EQ) to understand this concept. An ability to consider what it might be like to be in someone else’s shoes. To really listen and most importantly, to question some pretty big assumptions we often have about ourselves and others we work with. It’s likely the Senior Leaders in this group had spent much of their working lives focused on other aspects of their intelligence; intellectual, technical, negotiation, financials and political that their EQ had received very little attention.
But here’s the thing; unless we create emotional awareness, we cannot progress with the Diversity and Inclusion conversation.The order matters.
In fact, EQ is really the basis of all learning and the most important skill any of us can develop. Because as we know - we are emotional beings.
And yet It’s really given very little airplay right now. We focus a lot on the individual and their abilities to achieve mastery of their field. Our generation has grown up with a worldview steeped in striving, individual performance, succeeding at all costs, and that looks like more money, more power, more status. It is a mindset based on fear and scarcity. We put a lot of attention on success at work and much less on success in life.
So it’s understandable that this skill is often overlooked and yet we also can’t afford not to invest in improving it. It determines the culture of a company and will in the end, determine business success more than any other metric we know of.
The good news is this is something each of us can develop, we can all learn to be more compassionate to ourselves and others. We’ve seen incredible individual growth at Tosha through the work we do so we know its possible. We can all develop better listening skills for our friends and colleagues. We can master our difficult emotional reactions, our need to blame, get angry or shut off and instead chose a response thats much more reflective of the person we truly are.
So you have to ask yourself at some point;
How am I investing in the most important skill a person can build? And how are we doing this as a business?
If your answer to that leaves you wanting more, here are some great places to begin:
Watch this brilliant RSA Short about blame with Brene Brown
Chat to us about the unique experiences we create at Tosha through our Labs. Each designed to shift mindsets by tapping into emotions.
Check out the 20 Emotional Skills workshops offered at The School of Life
Invest in Executive Coaching or Sensitivity Coaching as the most effective way to build self awareness and emotional skills, see this article from Inc
Read about how Atlassian are Weeding out ‘Brilliant Jerks’