I am often asked the question – how can I change my behaviour when certain relationships push my buttons?
I am sure anyone reading this can identify. We all have blind spots in relationships and games that we have perfected over years to protect us from experiencing strong emotions.
Dr. Eric Berne is the author of Games People Play, the groundbreaking book in which he introduces Games and Transactional Analysis to the world. According to Dr. Berne, games are ritualistic transactions or behaviour patterns between individuals that can indicate hidden feelings or emotions. A runaway success, Games People Play spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list in the mid 1960s – longer than any non-fiction book over the preceding decade. Games People Play and Transactional Analysis have gone on to influence and inspire millions of people, including Thomas A. Harris, author of I’m OK – You’re OK and Muriel James, author of Born to Win.
Amanda Wildman, Director, Emotionally-i-Fit conducts monthly interviews on the theme of Emotionally Intelligent Leaders. First up is Mel Forbes, CEO Guidant Group
Emotional Intelligence is a combination of attitudes and behaviours that distinguish outstanding performance from average performance. It provides a framework for understanding how you manage yourself to be personally and interpersonally effective. Your emotions are influenced by your attitudes. In particular, your attitude towards yourself and your attitude towards other people. There are 16 dimensions relating to Emotional Intelligence that great leaders will display. In these interviews, we are going to explore how successful leaders demonstrate these EI behaviours in their work.
Our emotions are powerful – they provide us with valuable information if we listen to them.
So why don’t leaders do more to understand their own emotions and other people’s?
In my experience the topic is now getting greater exposure in the boardroom. How to develop the right leadership behaviours in order to improve performance and the emotional engagement of employees is now a very hot topic and rightly so. I do, however, observe that there is still a discomfort in the workplace with talking about emotions, and different cultures will, of course, bring another layer of complexity to this issue.
Empathy is the degree to which a person is in touch with the feelings of others. It is a dimension of emotional intelligence and can have a massive impact on emotional engagement of employees at both an individual level but also at an organisational level. The degree to which a leader is in touch with the feelings of others will be based on how aware they are of themselves - their emotions from a physiology perspective, their feelings, intuitions and to some degree, their thoughts. From an organisational perspective, engagement surveys regularly check and measure how people feel and provide a significant amount of information that assesses this. The challenge with this is that once an organisation has this information, it needs to do something different to make changes, if appropriate, based on what it has learned.
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK and the theme is on relationships. Building healthy relationships and connections both personally and professionally can have a significant impact on performance and our health.
And good mental health has a positive impact on business
- 70 million work days are lost each year due to mental health problems in the UK, costing employers approximately £2.4 billion per year
So the theme this week is the importance of relationships for leadership
'A leader without a great team, or without an excellent relationship with his team, will struggle to achieve greatness, as a leader cannot do everything themselves.' - Gordon Tredgold
The day I chose authenticity.
Being an authentic leader is about knowing who you are, your principles and values. By inviting the trust of others by being known and through honest relationships, authentic leaders can improve long-term individual and business performance.
This is how I made my own decision to choose authenticity in my leadership and working practices.
Gender diversity in the boardroom is proven to have a positive impact on corporate performance. I believe the way to achieve greater gender diversity in the workplace is to develop dimensions of Emotional Intelligence in both men and women leaders. Organisations need to look at this issue on a much deeper level in order to effect transformational change.
