Profiting from Emotional Capital

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is about our competence in being able to motivate ourselves, manage our emotional energy and to recognise and adequately respond to the emotions of others.

This is often referred to as the ‘soft skills’ for both the management of ourselves and others. For this reason it has become acknowledged as one of the distinguishing factors for superior personal performance, management and leadership. It has been estimated to explain between 30% and 45% of job success.

This is particularly true in today’s modern environment where intangible assets like information and knowledge ('hard skills') are considered more important than physical assets.

Organisations are now learning that making the most of intangible assets is reliant on the ability of their staff to apply and make use of their emotional skills. That is, to make the best of our experience and knowledge, we need to be both emotionally intelligent and emotionally resilient. 

Coaching helps to build emotional intelligence and where there is a particular desire or wish to focus on job performance, maybe management, career development or leadership it is not unusual to choose Executive Coaching (that is to focus on the individual in their organisational and career context).

When commencing a coaching program, especially one focused on building emotional intelligence, it is essential to start with an assessment of the current position. One particularly useful tool for assessing this has been developed by Roche Martin and is known as the Emotional Capital Report™, an easily administered process that feeds back on the key components of EI being:

• self-management
• self-control
• self-confidence
• self-reliance
• social skills
• relationships
• adaptability
• flexibility
• optimism
• self-actualisation
• social awareness
• empathy
• self-awareness
• straightforwardness
• self-knowing.

The Emotional Capital Report™ benefits from and is unique in that it is both scientifically robust and has been developed from a focus on the key attributes, in the ten areas above demonstrated by high performing professionals and managers.

Although not solely for the purposes of leadership, it does therefore provide an assessment of the strengths and areas of development that can be used and built on to move towards even further superior performance.

Superior performance in emotional intelligence applied to good reserves of intellectual capital, like knowledge and information, will improve personal performance and can increase profits too.