DEVELOP AND USE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Personal Strengths and Weaknesses

Emotional Strengths

I have observed that my personal strengths include my ability to identify my own emotions as I experience them. Identification of emotions helps me to predict my possible emotional reactions and I can control my emotional expressions effectively. I am able to perform well under pressure and I can keep myself focused on achievement of goals. My ability to stay focused helps me to achieve my goals in work and I can work my way through increased workload with high quality performance. I am even-tempered and I can control my frustration and anger with capability. As cited by Arora (2017), working in a managerial position may create difficult situations with other workers, and my even temper would help me to manage those situations.

Emotional Weaknesses

Despite these several emotional strengths, I have some emotional weaknesses as well. I tend to be highly persistent regarding specific tasks and I can become obsessed with achieving perfection in a certain task (Van den Brande et al. 2018). My excessive persistency regarding perfection can create frustration in my co-workers and may prevent me from giving attention to other tasks.

Reflection on Stress in Work Life

Causes

In my work life of 2 years in Australian Hardware as the coordinator of Homeware Department, I have experienced workplace stress in different situations. In my present work life, I have experienced stress due to excessive workload during particular seasons of year.

Managing Stress

My work life experiences have taught me that specific strategies are required to address workplace stress. Learning from my experience of emotional stress due to ineffective communication with co-workers in my previous workplace, I have developed friendly relationships with my colleagues at Australian Hardware and I can have their emotional support in the workplace.

Potential Emotional Triggers in Workplace

Identifying Triggers

• Disapproval of superior regarding work performance
• Judgement expressed by co-workers about personal choices and appearances
• Aggressive or disrespectful attitudes of superiors
• Being assigned with excess workload without prior notice
• Threats of being terminated from work
• Being assigned tasks outside their field of knowledge
• Unreasonable deadlines provided for certain tasks
• Inconsideration of personal problems and limitations of an employee

Determining Appropriate Responses

• Accepting responsibility for emotional response and understanding that despite being triggered, emotional responses are one’s own responsibility.
• Identifying appearance of emotions by monitoring factors such as increased heart rate, tensions in muscles, perspiration among others.
• Choosing emotions that are healthy responses and coaching self to feel these emotions in response to triggers

Evaluation of Own Workplace Behaviours and Their Impacts

Describing Own Workplace Behaviours

My workplace behaviours can be characterised by factors such as my job performance, relationship with my co-workers, attitudes regarding absences. I strive to provide excellent work performance in workplace and perform my duties with sincerity and care. I have developed a positive attitude towards work. I accept excess workloads and tight deadlines as challenges. Such attitude has helped me manage stress generated from short timing of deadlines and excessive work pressure. I have developed communicative and friendly relationships with my co-workers, which helps me to communicate problems to my colleagues when required. I ask for help from my colleagues in particular situations and consider their advice valuable.

Openness to Feedback

Openness to feedback refers to one’s ability to take feedback regarding personal work from different sources and the willingness to act according to them (Eketu & Ayondu, 2017). I am generally open to feedback from different persons in my personal life. I tend to value opinions of different individuals regarding various decisions and my personal principles. I recognise the importance of criticism and I am generally able to handle criticism well. Feedback and criticism from various sources provide us with different perspectives that are different from our own. I have trained myself to recognise feedback as positive factors and I try to implement improvements from these feedbacks.

I understand that to promote a healthy workplace environment, it is essential to practise positive attitudes such as opening oneself to feedback. My work as a coordinator in Homeware department of Australian Hardware requires me to communicate with almost every employee of this department. In order to manage different proceeding and activities in the department as a manager, it would be essential to collect feedback from employees. Feedback would provide me with different perspectives that I might have missed in my assessments. I might collect some new ideas from employees that may be effectively implemented in improving management.

Self-Reflection in Development of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an effective component of efficient management of emotions generated in workplace situations. I recognise that self-awareness and self-management are basic building blocks of personal emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence refers to improved management of emotions and this requires improved self-awareness. In order to improve my emotional intelligence, I should reflect regularly on my behaviour at workplace. Self-reflection would allow me to identify my emotional reactions in different situations and find triggers and factors that created these responses. Using self-reflection, I would be able to observe my emotional reactions in situations and assess the propriety of my reactions.

Personal Reactions to Emotions of Workers

I should develop specific strategies for responding to workers that express certain emotions in workplace. Particular strategies should be applied to manage workers that are experiencing emotions such as anger, stress or sadness.

Extremely Angry

• In order to avoid unpleasant conflicts, I would prefer to avoid direct communication with angry employees at the time they are expressing anger.

Extremely Stressed

• I would approach extremely stressed employees with sympathy and encourage them to share their causes of stress with me.
• I would attempt to understand their problems and provide them with possible solutions by discussing his problems critically.
• I would try to inspire him to develop a positive attitude towards work and suggest him strategies that may reduce his stress.

Extremely Upset

• An extremely upset employee would require sympathy and understanding. I would ask such employees to share their emotions with family members or friends.
• I would suggest short leaves or vacations from work or other possible entertainments that may cheer them up.

Cultural Expression of Emotions

            Cultural expression of emotion helps in building an emotional culture for a workplace that influences attitudes and behaviours of employees in that workplace (He et al. 2019). I know that attractive emotional culture of workplace can inspire workers to perform better by improving communication among employees and creating a positive environment for work. Emotional culture or attitudes of co-workers in a workplace and its effects on individual worker emotion can be explained by affective events theory (AET). The theory presents that primary emotions such as joy, sadness, fear, anger, love and surprise that can be derived from specific events can affect emotional behaviour of a specific employee. Researchers have found that positive feelings generated from various events in workplace can inspire employees to perform with improved efficiency and sincerity (Jain, 2018). On the contrary, negative emotions toward workplace or colleagues can hamper performance of workers.

Adapting Leadership Style to Worker Emotion

Effective leadership plays an extremely important role in emotional management of workers by helping them to cope with their emotional expressions. I would attempt to incorporate specific changes in my leadership style in Australian Hardware to manage workers that are experiencing different emotions such as anger, frustration, sadness, stress, insecurity and fear. Effective leadership should pay attention to individual employees and identify specific emotions experienced by them. Emotions such as anger expressed by workers may require firm and directive attitude from my part in order to manage them.

On the contrary, I may require developing a sympathetic attitude towards employees that are experiencing sadness or insecurities (Robinson et al. 2019). I would attempt to interact with my followers and subordinates that are experiencing stress and frustration regarding their emotional experiences in a tactful manner. I would attempt to provide my employees with an idea of ideal emotional responses in workplace situations, which would inspire them to develop emotion management strategies of their own. Emotions such as insecurities and fear regarding employment may require me to address these employees with sympathetic and reassuring attitude rather than directive leadership approach.

Factoring Worker Emotions into Decisions

            Integrated emotion management of workers in a workplace requires significant efforts of leaders to improve emotional disposition of employees (Jameson et al. 2016). Effective leadership involves successful management of worker emotions in a way that prevents degradation of employee performance in workplace. Decision-making is an important aspect of leadership in any organization and successful employee management involves making decisions that are suitable for employees.

In my role as manager of Homeware department of Australian Hardware, I would consider emotions of employees in making important decisions. I would make decisions regarding working hours, wages and inner environment of workplace by considering emotional reactions that may be generated in employees due to these decisions. Before finalising important decisions, I would collect possible suggestions from employees regarding consequent topic and make my decisions according to popular emotional reactions. I would evaluate emotional responses of employees in reaction to important decisions implemented by me and use their emotional cues to introduce required modifications to my decisions (Rausch, Seifried & Harteis, 2017). I would encourage employees to share their views regarding organizational changes and their roles in improvement of Australian Hardware and orient my decisions according to their suggestions. My decisions would be aimed towards creating positive emotions among employees and avoid generation of negative emotional reactions.

Providing Opportunities to Use Emotional Intelligence

Team performance requires improved emotional intelligence such as collaboration and cooperation. I would encourage employees to improve their participation in team projects and provide effective results by sharing workloads and dividing tasks of a project according to capabilities. In case of lack of collaboration and coordination among members of a team, regarding division of work and decision-making may generate. Solving such problems would require them to display excellent emotional intelligence. They would need to understand strengths and weaknesses of each other along with their preferences and come to solutions that satisfy requirements tasks and the capabilities of team members.

Improving Awareness and Management of Emotions among Workers

            Effective emotion management of workers would require them to understand their emotions by improving their self-awareness regarding emotions experienced by them (Khan & Noor, 2020). Self-awareness followed by self-management is basic steps and requirements of developing emotional intelligence among workers. Employees would be required to improve their self-assessments in order to identify emotional reactions as soon as they are generated. As stated by Koon & Pun (2018), self-awareness would enable them to identify specific triggers or events that elicit such responses from them. I would inform my followers in Australian Hardware about effectiveness and applicability of self-awareness and demonstrate effects of their emotional responses in other workers.

I would explain affective events theory (AET) to them and explain ways in which positive emotional reactions of one worker can inspire their co-worker performance. I would inform my followers regarding necessity of managing emotional responses at workplace by discussing possible ill effects of emotional outbursts in employee performance with tact and sensibility. I would present my emotion management and behaviours as an example of emotion management and explain its positive effects on my work performance. Such examples would encourage them to develop improved emotional management and self-awareness.

Encouraging Others to Develop Emotional Intelligence

            Emotional intelligence helps individuals to develop empathetic attitudes towards their colleagues and individuals involved in different aspects of their life (Makkar & Basu, 2019). I would inform them about applicability of empathy in understanding others and ways in which these qualities of emotional intelligence would improve their quality of life. I would emphasise on importance of emotional intelligence in managing organisational changes and rapid development of Australian Hardware. This information about advantages of emotional intelligence in professional and personal life would encourage them to develop integrated emotional intelligence.

Creating Positive Emotional Climate

            Positive emotional climate of a workplace can play an important role in motivating employees to improve their performance (Methot, Melwani & Rothman, 2017). Creating a positive environment in workplace would make employees and subordinates to respect me as their leader and manager. In order to create positive work environment I would adopt specific strategies.

Promoting Communication

I would encourage employees to improve communications among them and I would promote them to share their emotional experiences with others. I would promote communication by sharing my emotional and professional burdens with them.

Listening to Employees

I would listen to problems and limitations of employees along with their suggestions regarding different decisions. I would encourage them to share their professional and personal emotional conflicts with colleagues.

Recognising Hard Work

I would recognise hard work and efforts of employees in meeting deadlines and improving work performance. My appreciation of their attempts would encourage them to perform better (Rathore, Chadha & Rana, 20174).

Displaying Trust

I would trust my employees regarding their assignment and encourage them to work independently by utilising their own ideas. These would improve their confidence and create a positive environment.

Incorporating Fun in Work

I would encourage employees to perform their work in an innovative manner that may incorporate fun in their work by providing them with innovative opportunities.

Using Strengths of Workgroup Members

Upon becoming manager of Homeware department of Australian Hardware, I would utilise workgroup members and their particular strengths to achieve outcomes and goals of this company (Rathore & Pandey, 2018). In order to effectively utilise strengths of work members I would use following strategies.

References

Arora, B. (2017). Importance Of Emotional Intelligence In The Workplace. International Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 4(4). Retrieved on 24^th November 2020, from: https://www.neliti.com/publications/257492/importance-of-emotional-intelligence-in-the-workplace

Ashkanasy, N. M., & Daus, C. S. (2020). Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace. The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences: Clinical, Applied, and Cross‐Cultural Research, 485-490. Retrieved on 24^th November 2020, from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118970843.ch345 Bucich, M., & MacCann, C. (2019). Emotional intelligence research in Australia: Past contributions and future directions. Australian Journal of Psychology, 71(1), 59-67. Retrieved on 24^th November 2020, from: