Emotional Intelligence/Empathy, A Continuous Improvement - Part 1

"In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive, and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding". I love this quote by Daniel Goleman. While on one hand we work are striving to create intelligent solutions, we also do need give and take of empathy. It is also a crucial ingredient of what we know as EI (Emotional Intelligence). Be it our workplace or day-to-day personal life, the EI skills are important. Further, the current pandemic times have challenged (or transformed?) each of us in unique ways.

A workplace world may appear dry, but it does have a human being sitting behind the working mask. A little attention to 'that person' can lead to increased success in projects. Conversely if there is lack of empathy, less of listening skills, there is always some discomfort. When it comes to business analysis, even BABOK? has recognized emphatic listening as a crucial underlying competency. So have many management books.

Consider following situations

Self Regulation

This is about how normal we can be in abnormal situations and try and regulate our own emotions. It might be hard when it comes to the urge to react then and there. Yet deferring reaction is many a times helpful. You want to express unwillingness or disagreement to something that is being discussed. You may have a strong point of an exactly opposite view from others. A matter of conflict at a given point may get normalized in a few hours time or in a few days time. In this situation, defusing the feelings of discomfort and letting the situation settle might help.

Imagine a situation wherein as part of feature review and sign-off you are receiving various comments and feedback. You need time to sum up your thoughts. You would like to go back and check the baseline or scope before you can articulate your own feedback. Further a generally calm stakeholder is upset over a high risk matter related to the project. Dev teams have also been working extra hours for the past whole week. So is everyone on the team. Now in that situation how would you try and reach consensus? Either then and there (which is looking difficult) or after a little 'time-gap'? The key point here is self-regulation.

Empathy/ Different Perspectives

This one is classic and is always a fine balance. We all love our own creations, thoughts, ideas, imaginations. And the other person is exactly feeling the same, almost always. :-) Without losing the context of what our own standpoint is, it is imperative that we see others' perspective. It is almost like jumping out of our own shoes and sit in the other person's shoes and see their world. Without relinquishing our own views, it might be fun to embrace others' views as well. Key is not to feel negative about it. When it comes to business analyst's role, we often need to understand the challenges faced by end users and domain SMEs. Emphatic listening always helps here. We also collaborate with IT teams and see perspectives from their side.

Can you recall a situation wherein your manager expressed empathy towards you, when you needed the most? And in turn that act led you to put in extra efforts, go extra miles, be little more motivated? Or imagine a situation wherein a business analyst is facing some family health issues and needs to travel for work nevertheless. When he or she expresses this to his/her manager, she empathizes with your pain and shows all care and support to help you deal with the situation better. While at the manager does assert the expectations from the job. Since the manager has shown genuine concern to help, itself provides lot of encouragement to take on the challenges in the job. Small things matter.

The key is intelligence is 'necessary but not always a sufficient condition' for great work. Great work also requires skills that are falling under the umbrella of emotional intelligence where we need to see beyond it all.

I myself love to seek and build for intelligent solutions, conduct researches, take questions through their journey to answers. At the same time I feel that working continually on developing various EI skills is quite rewarding.

Thoughts?

Author Info

Swati Pitre, CBAP?, is Sr. Business Analyst with 20+ years of industry experience across various domains and geographies. Her specialties include Product Development, BPM, Process Improvement Consulting, Business Analysis/CBAP?/ CCBA?/ ECBA? Training. She is also a public speaker and has completed Level 3 of Effective Coaching Pathway at Toastmasters International. Her hobbies include reading, writing, travelling and music.

In Continuation...

This is the first of a few articles on the topic of EI we are writing. While I am authoring this Part 1, the next one, Part 2 is to be followed soon, by Taru Sharma. She is the Head of IT PMO at Zoetis Inc. (LinkedIn Profile: Taru Jain | LinkedIn).

Stay tuned for Part 2.

References

Emotional intelligence - Wikipedia

Daniel Goleman - Wikipedia