Contents
“Listen to yourself”, “figure out what you want”, “learn to understand the signals of your body”… Coach Leonid Krol on why these right words often become useless declarations, what is emotional intelligence and what is needed in order to live in peace with oneself, with one’s feelings, emotions, not to lose one’s working spirit and be able to work in a group.
Psychologies: What guides our actions: reason or emotional intelligence?
Leonid Krol: We are far from being as logical creatures as it seems to us, and in many of our actions and communication there are emotional components that are not entirely clear to us. While it seems to us that we are planning our life, many other things are planning from within us. Like the hero of Molière, who learned that he has been speaking prose for more than forty years, we are sometimes surprised to learn that we are guided by our petty habits, memorized phrases about what we love, consider right / wrong. Often we try to convince not only others, but also ourselves. Because all our declarations, seemingly clearly stated messages, do not correspond to what we believe in and what we really want. We carry a lot of stuck shells on ourselves, realizing it, and even more often not. We are controlled by some of our past experiences and past relationships, we often speak in other people’s borrowed words, constructions and thoughts, although we are rather driven by feelings. Not only those that we exchange, but also the suppressed ones that we put aside somewhere, as well as our associations about what is happening and about other people whom we do not allow to develop. Of this rather violent internal growth, we select and pass only a small part into the field of reflection.
Pass the tests
- Emotional Intelligence: Determine Your Level
- Emotional quotient
How does emotional intelligence manifest itself at work?
OK.: We come to work, spend a lot of time together, and it is believed that all this time we exchange goals, objectives, attitudes and indicators. In fact, if you look deeper, the majority at work simply formally perform the function of presence, but think about their lives, about what is left at home, sit in social networks, get angry at the boss … If we could look into the heads, we would find there such a correspondence: 20% of the content itself, 80% – of the very “violent growth” that is born by emotional intelligence. Remember how you used to joke? “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Often people work with a sense of compulsion to show rather than do.
Does everything happen exactly as you say?
OK.: This is what happens in companies where a team becomes a set of emotionally random people who are matched to business tasks. In companies where the team is built on the principle of a hierarchical structure, neither the individuality of each person nor the mechanism of the emotional intelligence of the group is often underestimated.
Read more:
- Emotional Intelligence: Manage your emotions to get things done
Standards in Russian
“The usual Russian team is a set of people whom the boss is trying to get to work. At the same time, they consider him an idiot, and he considers them. Then, in order to unite the team, a corporate party is organized, where everyone gets drunk together. At one time, rope training was fashionable. We went somewhere, helped each other: we climbed over one log, lifted another, ate borscht in the cold, sang a song, became terribly close and drove back. This is team building in Russian: short, fast, cheap. In fact, this is also good, but not enough for the team to turn into a group. This needs to be done professionally.” OK.
So there are other companies?
OK.: Of course. For example, Google, Apple, Facebook declare in every possible way that it is not so important how many hours employees work, the main thing is how tangible their creative contribution is. In order for a new employee to be hired by Google, four people must recommend him: someone who knows him personally, whom he has worked with before, who has interviewed him, and who will work with him in the department. Thus, he passes four examinations, and people are selected according to the principle “our person or not ours.” In fact, this is selection based on the principle of emotional intelligence. At the same time, a person should not sit in the office: he can be at home, in another country …
Read more:
- What is emotional intelligence?
You’re talking about huge corporations, how do they do that?
OK.: What Google does is create small groups within a large company that work with each other and make sure that they feel comfortable in them. A person from these groups can go out and join a much larger group or form temporary groups with other people. In other words, he leaves home and returns home, or he goes to another environment, to other systems of comfort.
There is a curious book – “Corporation of Geniuses”, it was written by the president of Pixar, it describes well how a creative atmosphere is built and a team turns into creative groups1. By the way, the co-owner of the company at one time was Steve Jobs. The book describes various group forms that promote the development of creativity. For example, in order to fuse several kinds of people (techies and designers-artists), they once proposed such a move: sculpt or dance during working hours.
Steve Jobs was actively involved in the development of emotional intelligence at Apple. For example, he made toilets in only one part of the building. Pregnant women who walked for ten minutes to this toilet, cursed him for what the light is worth! And his task was to create a public space where people meet, literally at the urinal they begin to communicate, and then they move to another place where they can collapse on sofas and communicate further. These examples are just about how you can take into account the factors of emotional intelligence: give people the opportunity to be in groups where they feel comfortable, and take them out of these familiar places so that they find reasons for creative communication. The general team is always built as a set of different groups, where each has its own guiding ways for development.
Read more:
- “It’s easier for those of us who have a high level of intelligence”
You are talking about Western companies, but Russian corporations are not interested in the development of emotional intelligence?
OK.: Now in Russia, Sberbank is closest to this. There are highly resilient people working there. But recently, suddenly there was an idea to change the corporate culture of the organization. And how to change it? Through emotional intelligence. We have finished one job, now we are preparing the next one.
Daniel Goleman
“Emotional intelligence”
The term “emotional intelligence”, without which it is difficult to imagine modern practical psychology, has become so popular thanks to the psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman.
How is group work going?
OK.: She always moves along a certain route. First, there is a stage that can be called “pseudo-cohesion”: people proceed from what they declare, they are busy with business, they are friendly, they have common tasks. If we enter another stage – diversification – an argument may suddenly arise in the group. This happens if the function of authority, power vertical, subordination, and habitual roles is removed. Then the group begins to divide into parts: “the marketers are good, but the sellers are not”; “the old employees know their business, but the new ones were recruited on a whim”; “those who go to the boss, and we, the unfortunate hard workers.” Any groups, whether they are old women in a polyclinic or top managers of a large company, are divided according to emotional concepts – friend or foe. If at this moment the leader of the group in a special way pays attention to such an important component as acceptance, the group will have a chance to move to the third stage – “brainstorming”. In this state, people joke a lot, use metaphors in conversation, their postures are relaxed, they breathe deeply, they are interested in each other, they find common ground with everyone … They go out of the plane into the volume. And this, in fact, is the professional task of the person who leads the group: using the resource of the people who are in the group, to transfer them from a logical, linear space to a space where there is much more personal congruence, more states such as “I feel comfortable”, “I need”, “I’m interested”, “I like”.
Read more:
- EQ that helps you live
What wonderful transformations!
OK.: Yes, if in the first stage of the group, people for each other are functions “I don’t see you, you don’t see me”, “I am energetic, you are energetic”, “We share smiles, but hide tears”, then in the third they allow themselves more momentary states, the layer of so-called “social cosmetics” is reduced. Increased naturalness sharply increases efficiency, attunement to each other, something new really begins to appear. Emotional intelligence helps you make mistakes along the way and allows you to say five inaccuracies, two stupid things, and only then say something really interesting. Emotional intelligence is a potential resource that can suddenly appear and just as easily disappear. Once entering a state of brainstorming, a group can just as quickly exit it and fall back into a state of boring interactions and heightened sociality.
Read more:
- What is more important: emotional warmth or high income?
About communication
“The collective and the group are fundamentally different things. A group is at least a three-layer formation in which there are tasks and performance, there is how people think, feel and interact, there is a specific well-being and a sense of growth or loss of energy of each individual. A good group has three floors: basement, attic, residential part, and they are interconnected – the basement communications and the possibilities of the attic are always taken into account in the work. In order for the group to become independent, by analogy with a house, it must have a water supply, sewerage, heating system, electricity, the Internet … That is, there must be appropriate communications.” OK.
What to do to turn from a collective into a group?
OK.: Recognize that there is emotional intelligence in the group and this is still an adequate reason for the organization to talk about feelings, that people have their own habits, complexes, and so on. How can we make the person inside this job feel comfortable? Not only “come on, come on, you work well, we cut you, you work badly, we cut you.” And so that there are some intermediate opportunities for “milk gain”. Obviously, today there is a need not only for the group to fulfill the formal requirements in their work, make a plan, give external indicators, but also for people to want to do what they do and have the opportunity to culturally free themselves from negativity. Angry – do not keep it in yourself, throw it to the side without hurting anyone. It is important that people at work smile more and return home not too tired.
Read more:
- Lies are a sign of intelligence
Recently, everyone was discussing an interview with Zemfira Pozner. She is tense, especially at the beginning of the conversation, he tries to stir her up … The question is this: she came with a specific purpose – to remind herself, to advertise her tour, but nothing happens. Why?
OK.: Yes, she came and really knows why, but she is uncomfortable and wants to leave as soon as possible. It is clear that she does not have such an opportunity: she must answer questions, fulfill her obligations. That is, follow the logic, reason, the task. And inside it is a protest. This is how the animal nature inside of us protests (evolution has been shaping it for millions of years): when it is unpleasant, sad, dangerous, we immediately want to run away, snap, pretend to be dead, speak properly, feel less and not trust our impulses. In forced circumstances, natural reactions – run closer, run further, bite, attack, run away – are inhibited: we are forced to be where we do not want to be. We solve the problem – we want to leave, but we have to stay. We portray interest, love, a smile … We overwork our sociality, we become hypersocial.
Read more:
- Effective Communication: 5 Unexpected Strategies
What happens if a person spends the whole day in such forced situations?
OK.: He leaves work feeling like a squeezed lemon. And not because he did a lot, but because he forbade himself a lot. The task is to ensure that emotional intelligence comes out while maintaining social correctness, so that there is both an external shell and provision of internal feelings. This is the task of working with emotional intelligence in an organization. This is how it is put to the leader of the group: for people to work, remain functionaries, but at the same time not strongly suppress their humanity.
How it happens: real examples of group work
“The woman tells her case: the boss took away some functions from her, she first agreed, but now she thinks that this is wrong. I’ll paraphrase: “So he took your engine, won’t let you play with it, and all you have left is his little bucket?” And this very simple intervention causes laughter in people who understand what is at stake. And then it is not the rational part (which functions to give and which to take away) that is disassembled, but the story about the train and the bucket.
Another case: a girl tells her story about her boss, and it immediately becomes clear that she is slightly in love with him. The official version is: “I need to develop, make a career, and the assessment that only he can give is very important to me.” But as soon as it becomes clear that the point is not only in the assessment, and that she can afford to confess her sympathy for him, communicate with him, joke, talk, the fixation is removed. But she simply allowed herself to look into the corner with the invented monster. And I saw an old dusty sock there. OK.
Schedule of trainings on the websites of Leonid Krol’s projects: upcoming в Enchanting, in the Coaching and Training Workshop.
1 E. Catmull, E. Wallace “Corporation of Geniuses. How to manage a team of creative people” (Alpina Publisher, 2015).