Emotional Intelligence

When did you last give or receive constructive feedback, or perhaps interview for a new job where you weren’t too confident about your prospects? How conscious were you of your feelings at the time, or more so, how these feelings actually influenced your performance? Anxiety, frustration and anger are all part of being human, yet sometimes these emotions can get the better of us and seriously damage our relationships at work.

Emotional intelligence is our ability to understand and manage such emotions. These abilities are essential to success in many occupations, the list is exhaustive but in general any job that involves working with people requires some degree of EI ability. Technical skills will only get you so far, people get promoted on their people skills. These critical people skills include:

Interpersonal sensitivity: the ability to ‘put yourself in someone else’s shoes’ and display behaviours that suggest agreement and shared understanding.

Emotional self-awareness: the ability to recognise your feelings and the confidence to manage and control their impact.

Emotional resilience: the ability to perform consistently when under pressure.

Intuitiveness: the ability to make clear decisions when faced with incomplete, ambiguous and emotional information.

Influence: the ability to persuade others to change their point of view, adopt a certain interpretation or agree to a particular course of action.

Motivation: the drive and energy to achieve clear results and make an impact.

Conscientiousness: the ability to display a clear commitment to a course of action.

A well researched EI tool based on these seven abilities has been recently developed by Professor Victor Dulewicz and Doctor Malcolm Higgs. The Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (EIQ) is a workplace instrument that comes in a self-measure or 360-degree version. Many people have found this to be one of the most practical tools for understanding how their emotions impact workplace performance. If you would like to trial this tool for free then please contact us at team@talentsolutions.com.au.

Measuring our EI is only the first step in developing superior people skills. Behavioural strategies for understanding the relationship between our thoughts, emotions and behaviours are the most powerful tools for gaining control over unhelpful emotions and improving our interpersonal effectiveness. There are clear advantages in developing EI in terms of improving workplace relationships, sales performance and leadership skills. Click here if you would like to learn more about our approach to developing emotional intelligence.

Intelligent Selling

Selling can be tough. Repeated exposure to challenging sales situations can produce damaging emotions, for example, customer rejection can reduce self-confidence and increase anxiety sometimes leading to call reluctance, customer criticism can fuel feelings of frustration or anger, and losing a profitable account to a competitor can be demoralising.

Exceptional salespeople realise this and can perform under pressure while preserving vital customer relationships. We have developed a new workshop that provides the critical emotional intelligence abilities underpinning sales success. This unique approach provides participants with accurate feedback on their EI abilities and practical strategies for negotiating challenging sales situations. The program helps people increase call rates, improve objection handling and win-over difficult customers.

The evidence for emotional intelligence and sales success is overwhelming, for example, sales agents at L’Oreal selected on the basis of EI abilities outsold salespeople recruited under the previous selection process by $91,370 for a net revenue increase of $2,558,360. In addition, these people had 63% less turnover than those selected under the previous process.

Click here if you would like to learn more about the role of emotional intelligence in delivering increased sales force effectiveness.

To experience this popular two-day program first-hand we are running a public program in Sydney on the 19th and 20th of April 2005. To find out more about the program or to register please email us at team@talentsolutions.com.au or call toll free on 1300 369 455. Registrations received prior to the 11th of March will receive a 25% discount off the standard workshop fee (normally $1,650 including GST).