An Organization is a conglomerate of diverse individuals who adhere to various cultural and societal mindset. Efforts towards creating a unified cultural framework have often gone in vain in several organizations. It is extremely important to understand the Organization and attach ourselves to the vision or the soul of the Organization.
It is here comes into play emotional intelligence that can be used effectively for career success. This is not only true for the hospitality industry, but every industry per se.
Emotional Quotient encompasses a lot of things that Intelligence Quotient can’t. The world has moved towards Ethics, Corporate Social responsibility and humanitarian activities for reputation and business gains.
The ‘Go Green’ drive and save Environment drive are all forms of attaching ourselves emotionally to the generic global goal.
Hospitality organisations are thus understanding the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EI) involuntarily. It is now important for professionals to be emotionally correct and intelligent to be able to connect with the innovators and creators of the firm.
Not using emotional intelligence in the workplace effectively can be one of the biggest career mistakes for you. So, what are the steps towards being emotionally intelligent at work? Let’s take a quick look at a few of them.
Being Emotionally intelligent at work- Where to begin?
The below points can help you understand the basics of emotional intelligence at work. These are simple to implement but are extremely effective for defining your career in the long run. Have a look!
- Empathizing with the coworkers
- Social bonding with others
- Continuous interpersonal skill development
- Equality and mental connectedness to the culture and vision of the firm
- Awaydays and helping others
- compassion and respect for all
These are a few of the steps towards achieving career success through Emotional Intelligence in the hospitality industry. One of our earlier posts mentions how Emotional Intelligence is one of the top interview skills for your next job.
Incorporating these can be extremely beneficial to your career. Employers now recognise emotional intelligence as one of the most important virtues.
There is an interesting infographic by Ucreative emphasizing on why now employers value EQ over IQ and how is it affecting Organizational growth.
It is for sure one of the best traits to foster career growth that will help companies sustain themselves in this knowledge economy.
It is not surprising to see the results in early adopters of this concept like Google, Amazon and Facebook.
A lot of the top hospitality employers like Hilton, Marriott etc. have also started stressing upon the importance of emotional intelligence for career success.
Emotional Intelligence is going to be the differentiator in the future for hospitality professionals in defining their careers.
Understanding Emotional intelligence and EQ
It is extremely important to understand the details of the concept of Emotional Quotient. Only then hotel management professionals can use it effectively for career growth.
Emotional intelligence is a concept which has unified the diversity to bring everyone on the same platform.
The emotional quotient of an organization is an important subjective measurement of the productive health of the workforce.
So, however subjective or complex this might look, your emotional quotient does matter.
Emotional relationships combined with regular dialogues at various levels of an organisation drive the workforce towards achieving amazing feats in life by increasing their satisfaction level.
A satisfied workforce is a boon to any organization.
The concept of employee satisfaction and continuous improvement is now acclaimed and accepted globally.
Psychology Today provides a basic definition of what we popularly establish as Basics of Emotional intelligence.
“Just as the word `satisfaction’ conjures up visions of positive feelings, `stress’ evokes images of the dark side of our emotions.”
(J. Organiz. Behav. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.).
Knowing the Categories of EI to use it in your Career Growth
To know how to cook a delicious meal, we must be aware of a perfect recipe and the ingredients.
Similarly Lazarus and Lazarus (1994), in a literary outfit offer five categories of emotions as ingredients to master a recipe for personal excellence.
You need to understand your emotions and multiple categories of emotion so that it can be applied successfully at work.
Just like a doctor, it is important to understand the problem before finding a remedy.
So, here are the five categories of emotion.
- The first is what they call the `nasty’ emotions, which include anger, envy, and jealousy.
- The second is what is referred to as the existential emotions, which are anxiety, guilt, shame etc.
- The third category is emotions provoked by unfavourable life conditions, including relief, hope, sadness, and depression.
- The fourth category is emotions provoked by favourable life conditions, like happiness, pride, and love.
- The last ones are empathetic emotions, including gratitude and compassion.
Mastering these emotional traits is crucial for personal and organizational excellence.
Mastering even a few of these can help you come out with flying colours in your current and upcoming career assignments.
All these behavioural patterns remain clearly evident in a workforce and even in the career graph of an individual.
Everyone has to pass through these stages during their active work life- it may be jealousy when someone else is promoted or relief when a sales target is met.
There may be numerous situations when the workforce of an organization suffer from these emotional pangs while working towards achieving the goal even as a parallel current may be running in the opposite direction hindering the process.
It is, therefore, important to understand emotions to deal with your team or work under a manager.
Furthermore, Daniel Goleman had proposed a construct to explain the capacity to cope with emotions, which he refers to as emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence has five components or categories or stages. Understanding and using this concept can help you achieve great success in career.
The Construct includes five stages which are:
- Knowing one’s emotions— self-awareness of one’s emotions as they are happening
- Managing emotions so they are appropriate
- Motivating oneself– marshalling emotions in the service of a goal
- Recognizing emotions in others or empathy–the most fundamental `people skill’
- Handling relationships–which are the skill required for managing emotions in others.
Have you tried coping up with emotions in subtle manners? It is very much a part of all self-help camps and sessions.
A lot of hotels have now included this in their leadership training.
Also, Solomon observed, `Part of that knowledge is surely an understanding of our emotions, which are, after all, much of what makes life worth living’.
Emotional intelligence- For Hotel Managers and Hospitality Organisations
Managers and Directors of all operations are assigned the job of creating an environment which reflects the Organisation’s theme established by the founders.
As per Maslow’s theory on the hierarchy of needs, human behaviour is guided by various factors and falls in different zones.
At the epicentre of all the conflict within most organizations are the satisfaction of the esteem needs, that is, commanding or receiving due respect from all colleagues to satisfy their cognitive and aesthetic needs.
Emotional intelligence at times drives human farther than they expect themselves to reach and plays a major role in cognitive process and behaviour.
Most of the employees within an organisation have emotions attached to the prophesied success stories which can be debated to be mood rather than emotions.
Nowadays, a lot of organisations have started to behave like organisms and emotions have started to play a key role in defining behaviour within the organisation.
Several recent studies have proved that when employees are involved in the process of innovation and development, the growth is manifolds.
Toyota proved this several years ago with Kaizen, or, continuous development. Researchers argue that emotional intelligence has always played an important subtle role in organizational development.
The change managers only stir capabilities and they let the emotion within oneself drive him/her to new capacities and creative capabilities to unleash innovations.
We all must carry emotions without getting emotional. IQ is a quantitative measure of capabilities while EQ takes a holistic approach to quantify capabilities through enhanced awareness of emotions.
Try it yourself at work for better results and for amazing career success in the hospitality sector.
