Announcing the "EQ Quick Wins"​ Series of Plays and Team Actions

Unfortunately for all of us, no one comes out of formal education - irrespective of how extensive or on what topic it may have been- with any wealth of knowledge regarding the topic of emotions and behaviours. This hasn’t been too big of a hindrance in the “before times” when our work lives didn’t call for having a sharp and engaged amount of emotional intelligence as many of our tasks were individual work and they came together in a waterfall, sequential way but it no longer works in today’s environment where every walk of life requires some type of human interaction and collaboration so that we work in agile environments with fast results.

In this newsletter as well as the Future is Agile one, we have often bemoaned the fact that in addition to the mental health crisis we are in the midst of, we are also facing a crisis of EQ and that prevents most people from engaging with the human work that would be capable of reducing HumanDebt and creating happy, psychologically safe and therefore high performing teams.

Many point to a lack of empathy or a lack of communication skills and most of the accusations usually land firmly with leadership as indeed, at that level, the inability to regulate one’s own emotions and the unwillingness to comprehend and acknowledge those of others is most glaringly evident but really, the lack of EQ is a generalised problem that affects all of us at every level.

We often speak about the many strong lessons we have learned at PeopleNotTech through working with the many wonderful teams we have been fortunate enough to encounter and one of the hardest ones to admit is around EQ - it is all but inexistent. Often seduced by the sheer amount of goodwill towards doing the human work that some of these teams exhibited, we have been admittedly lax on education and we have presumed a level of understanding of emotions and reactions that is simply non-existent. So while teams started getting in the habit of using the Dashboard and offering honest feedback to inform a choice of next steps and actions, that often proved to be insufficient when the gaps in basic levels of comprehension were greater than expected.

In other words, even when people made the time, held the space and opened up to the conversation about the way they felt, it was often impaired by their lack of knowledge, practice and even vocabulary regarding emotions. And that was the case for those willing to engage but they are indeed a courageous minority as most people find the lack of EQ a much bigger barrier to engaging with the human work.