Increasingly, individuals, as well as companies as a collective entity, are becoming more and more aware of the importance of being emotionally intelligent.

Little by little, the discourse of the emotional has permeated society, awakening curious minds and gaining followers. So much so, that companies have begun to reorganise themselves around the importance of dealing with emotions in order to achieve greater benefits.

At Consulting C3 we have a course in Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. I invite you to get to know it or to discover the benefits that this course can bring you.

What only five years ago sounded almost like a joke among managers is now starting to be taken into account and gradually implemented in organisations. The so-called Happiness Departments have appeared, with their Happiness Managers at the head, busy and concerned with providing the best emotional conditions for workers, so that their personal and working well-being is translated into productivity.

No one disputes any longer that being emotionally intelligent provides benefits in all areas of our lives, in our level of satisfaction, success and effectiveness, and that it boosts our cognitive capacity, increasing our learning and our memory.

The equation is transparent: if EI (Emotional Intelligence) deals with human relationships, it is clear that it will influence any aspect of the company. Every decision, plan, product, service, team or customer will be affected by EI or the lack of it.

The imact

To make this impact more tangible, we will refer to Travis Bradberry and Jean Graves, co-founders of TalentSmart, who state that “a 1% improvement in a service’s work climate is equivalent to 2% growth in that service’s revenue”. Do the math.

On the contrary, a low mood, frightened workers or arrogant bosses are the cause of devastating effects that are often almost invisible to those not directly involved, but which take a heavy toll. These effects take their toll on the company through decreased productivity, poor communication, increased delivery delays, increased errors, and the drain of talent to more pleasant working environments.

To better lay the foundations, we can say that mastering basic emotional competencies helps us to be in good tune with the emotions of our colleagues, clients and suppliers, to be able to manage differences of opinion by avoiding conflicts, and to have the ability to enter into flow states in our work activity; three clear advantages that provide benefits in personal and professional well-being.

Commanding with the heart

Undoubtedly, much of the work of maintaining and enhancing that positive emotional state in organisations is part of the leader’s responsibilities. Leadership is not synonymous with domination, power or command, but with the ability to influence someone to help achieve common goals.

Leadership ability is not linked to intellectual ability or academic and/or technical preparation. Not even with experience.

A study by Daniel Goleman analysed the competence models of 188 companies, mostly multinationals and public bodies. The aim of the study was to determine which personal capabilities drove exceptional performance in these organizations and to what extent. The conclusions of the study were as follows:

• Intellect was undoubtedly one of the drivers of exceptional performance.
• Cognitive abilities were particularly important
• The proportion of related emotional competencies was twice as high as the intellectual and cognitive ones combined
• The higher the job category (where preparation and intellectual abilities tend to be equated), the greater the relevance for success of emotional competencies.
• 90% of the competencies that distinguished the “star” workers were related to EI competencies.

Emotional intelligence

On the other hand, David McClelland, an American psychologist focused on the study of motivation and professor of Daniel Goleman himself, demonstrated with a study carried out in 1996 in a multinational food and beverage company, that when their top managers had excellent skills in EI, their divisions exceeded the annual performance objectives by around 20%.

From the McClelland studies it can be determined that there are 6 main factors that influence the working climate:

• Flexibility, understood as the freedom that employees feel to innovate without the imposition of bureaucratic procedures.
• Sense of responsibility towards the company, i.e. engagement
• Quality level set by individuals
• Feedback: accurate feedback on performance and suitability for reward.
• Corporate culture: the clarity by which individuals see the company’s Mission and Values.
• Commitment: the level of commitment to the common goal.

The lack of flexibility discourages employees’ motivation by depriving them of creative mental space, thus preventing their expansion. When an employee does not feel that he or she participates in the company’s results, his or her performance tends to be the minimum necessary to comply and remains far from optimal. As a result, the quality level of the tasks does not allow the company to guarantee its competitiveness and the leader, overwhelmed by the lack of results, tends to transform his or her feedback into criticism, without generating the commitment of the employees, either to the company or to the objectives.

Whatever leadership style we exercise as leaders, leading from the heart should be our first commitment to ourselves.

At Consulting C3 we have a course in Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. I invite you to get to know it or to discover the benefits that this course can bring you.

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The Elevator PITCH: How to Convince on the Spot course is aimed at managers of startups, corporations, SMEs and agencies. PhD students and teachers. And in general, anyone who needs to convince others in a short period of time.

The training will be carried out in-company, using practical dynamics and seeking the participation of all those attending. The dynamic is based on a previous study in which those areas that require greater reinforcement are analysed. With a previous analysis allows us to use real cases from the client-company in the training action.

Course objectives

The Elevator Pitch course: How to Convince on the Spot will help you to achieve the following objectives:

• Conceive content strategically and prioritise.
• Build the ideal flow and rhythm of the presentation
• Reinforce strengths and minimize weaknesses.
• Adapt the speech.
• Distinguish the priority of the speaker.
• Preview the processes.
• Asking the right questions and anticipating situations.
• Eliminating stage fright.
• Managing the voice, body and emotions appropriately
• To adapt oneself to the space and to the unexpected.

In addition, training can help your company to achieve more sales, and to make your employees more qualified to achieve great closures.

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Interesting facts.

 

Being aware of what impact your product, service or brand has on your customers is fundamental to knowing why they like or dislike you, in other words, why they buy from you or do not buy from you.

Without elements that allow you to measure their experience, it will be impossible for you to understand your customers’ behaviour, whether it is in your favour or, above all, whether it is against you. As William Thomson said, “Anything that cannot be measured cannot be improved”. Therefore, if you do not have the elements to measure the quality of your product or service, or the quality of your customers’ experience, or the quality and functionality of your internal processes, it will not be possible to detect what you are failing at, let alone determine the optimal strategy for improvement.

In any case, to measure you need objective data that explains what, where, how, how much and when. These data are the key performance indicators (or KPIs) of what you want to measure and are like the fever thermometer. Another important piece of information is why, which will come out of your analysis, giving you a very accurate diagnosis, which will provide better results.

How do I know which indicators to use?

Implementing the right indicators seems easy if you know more or less what you want to measure. In general, we tend to measure everything so that nothing is missed. Thus, we start from the idea that the more we measure, the more we will know our clients. However, as often happens, excesses are not good and there may come a time when the trees do not let us see the forest.

Frequent mistakes in creating and managing KPIs: So that you don’t get stuck in the middle of a measurement and stop being effective, I share with you 10 common mistakes when choosing and managing your KPIs.

 

1. Measurement does not lead to corrective or improvement actions

The implementation of KPIs involves a commitment to precise and rigorous monitoring, without which they lose their functionality. If a KPI is not evaluated or is not followed up correctly; if it does not serve to make improvement actions, or the actions are not carried out, the indicator is simply useless.
Often, the vortex of daily work or the lack of clear responsibilities for KPI measurement makes its usefulness null and void.

 

2. Diogenes Syndrome

The habit of measuring everything makes us accumulate a lot of KPIs that do not add any value. It seems to us that the more we measure, the more we know, and it turns out that we get indigested by the indicators!

When we shuffle too many indicators, it’s impossible to manage them because their evaluation and monitoring takes too much time. Let go of that burden and balance the value of the KPI with your information management skills!

 

3. The dream collector

Man is a creature of habit. And it is the same with indicators. We often keep the same KPIs because they are the ones that have always been used. The question you should ask yourself then is: haven’t my clients or my company changed over the years? Remember to renew your wardrobe and keep only those KPIs that are useful to you today. Stick to a few: only those who provide you with valuable information to help you make decisions.

 

4. Falling into the silo

The indicators must be created on the basis of an overall view of the process. When we create KPIs thinking about the interests of our department and not in a transversal way and focusing on the client, we are falling into what is called the “silo effect”; that is, we become Golums who only look to conserve their treasure. Communication between departments stops flowing, there is no longer coordination and rivalries appear, putting the achievement of global objectives in check.

 

5. The perfume of vanity

We all like to look good in the picture, cover up our embarrassments and save ourselves a scolding from the boss. That’s why we are tempted to “make up the results” based on data obtained with vain KPIs, whose data suggest that everything is going well, but do not give us any real value. They are very dangerous, as they do not reflect reality and can push us to make decisions based on incorrect analyses.

 

6. Chronic myopia

When indicators focus on one part without taking into account the whole, it is easy to draw biased conclusions that make us take wrong decisions. For example, if a repair department detects, through a poorly defined KPI, a high level of stock and decides to reduce it in order to save on the cost of fixed assets, it may mean that the technical assistance service must repeat the number of interventions (more costs) and a loss of customers (!)

 

7. Navel-gazing

To think that we already know what to measure without having listened to the customer is a huge mistake. A restaurant measured the quality of its service with several indicators that valued the uniformity, image and education of its staff. They were not measuring, however, the average waiting time of customers between the first and second course.

 

8. Cheating on Solitaire

This can happen when the indicator eventually becomes the goal; that is, when the indicator stimulates a target or counterproductive behaviour in people. These are usually indicators that are associated with bonuses or financial compensation. For example: a commercial productivity indicator that measures the ratio between offers presented and offers accepted may cause the commercial to stop presenting some offers so as not to harm the ratio.

 

9. Stones on the roof

The indicators must be aligned with the objectives. When KPIs conflict with objectives, operational inconsistencies occur. For example: an indicator that measures the speed of delivery (no. of deliveries in 24 hours) may conflict with an indicator of logistical optimisation, such as “maximum utilisation of transport capacity”. Thus, in order to achieve a good result in the indicator of on-time deliveries, we under-utilise logistic resources, with truck departures without full loading, which means an increase in costs and less profitability for the company.

 

10. Buying a pig in a poke

The last of the most frequent errors occurs when measuring unreliable or unrepresentative values, as they do not add value to decision-making. Whenever we extract data, we must ensure that both the sources and the method of extraction of that data are reliable. If we extract data from a sample, this sample must be representative and extrapolated to the total data.

 

 

From Consulting C3, we advise you, to begin from being aware of these frequent errors in order to create and manage functional indicators, which are useful for decision making within your company.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to go deeper into the creation and management of KPIs, you can consult us to find a tailor-made training adapted to your needs, which will help you to establish effective indicators based on strategic and operational criteria, as well as to know the definition, creation and implementation phases. In order to do so, do not miss our course on creation and management of KPIs.

 

 

Interesting facts

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