Our blogs - management and measuring

12 October 2009

Emotional Intelligence – Recognising and managing emotions in teams

Last week I was reminded of the meaning of the term ‘serendipity’ – a fortuitous happening, and reminded too of how important it is to relate learning to real life – something I know, but this brought it home to me and I thought it was worth sharing.

Whilst running a Management Development Programme, the team were all participating in an activity which resulted in frustrations not being voiced in an adult manner, but the resulting emotions ‘leaked out’ in the behaviours of the team. There was condescension to other team members; ignoring points if they did not agree with your own; talking over and shouting down of opinions; brave but misguided attempts to lighten the atmosphere with poorly received humour; withdrawal from team discussions and personal comments about the contribution of individual team members.

You might be asking yourself why a trainer would want to raise such poor team behaviour in a blog – well, this example of not dealing with conflict, but responding to it gave us a fantastic real life example to work on in our conflict management segment. Rather than using the case studies I had prepared, we were able to take the previous activity and discuss it – maybe ‘dissect it’ would be a better term!

Every member of the team understood that our purpose in discussing the activity was two-fold: to examine common responses to – or lack of responses to conflict, and more important, to provide them with the tools within the team to prevent this situation recurring.

Every team member contributed fully to a discussion on what had happened and why, including an open discussion of how they felt at different points and why. We explored the spiral of response and counter-response that contributes to the escalation of conflict, and linked the range of behaviours seen to Thomas/Kilmann’s model of Conflict management. The terminology had so much more relevance for them when they were able to link it directly to their own behaviours.

We were able to identify a range of ways in which the differences of opinions could have been handled more effectively and to get an immediate response from others in the team as to how they would have felt and therefore responded, given alternative approaches to a situation. The team moved from a place of despondency and frustration, to one of positive appreciation of different viewpoints, and with a new toolkit of ways to help the team work together more productively.

This situation made me reflect on how many times we know that we should identify and deal with conflict in team meetings and discussions, but continue on and accumulate resentment and points-scoring with the knock-on effect on team morale. A team that has an awareness and understanding of Emotional Intelligence and is able to apply the rationale to their own feelings and behaviour, as well as that of others, has the capacity to be a far more effective and productive team, with far less conflict and far more constructive decision making.

I do not recommend that you provoke conflict in your team or on your training courses – I do wholeheartedly recommend that you help your teams to discuss conflict in a structured way to encourage productive, effective team working.

Serendipity – the opportunity in the right place at the right time - I love my job!

Deborah Willis