How emotional intelligence transforms digital transformation

There's no single grand gesture that will make your projects successful; it's the small daily interactions as a team that will bring you together to deliver time and time again.

Digital transformation encompasses many different elements, and perhaps the one given the least consideration is the team responsible for delivering the change. What is being delivered — yes; when it needs to be delivered by — yes; who it is being delivered to — yes. But who it is being delivered by? Not so much. As a project or programme manager, how you interact with the people in your team right from the very beginning will have a significant impact on how the journey progresses and how exhausted they will be by the time delivery has been completed.

Why focus on the people delivering the change?

Your team will experience emotional reactions from the people they're taking on the change journey. Consider the Kubler-Ross Change Curve from the outside view: being the recipient of the venting of feelings of denial, spending the energy to work through the bargaining and encouraging people through the depression phase. It can be draining, especially when people are at different stages and require tailored support. On top of that, we know that change is not linear, so the team also has to keep an eye out for individuals slipping back a stage or two. However, as draining as it may be, centring the emotions of others as a key consideration is vital to a successful change journey and can even be very rewarding — particularly when people reach the up turn of the curve with experimentation. You know, that moment of joy when some says ‘I get it now!’ or ‘Could we look at how X might work?’.

There's also the fact that the team delivering the change journey will be moving through their own curve that will drain their emotional and psychological energy — the change could be something your team members are not yet fully bought into, yet you're asking them to ‘sell’ it to others. 

In general, companies provide a way of meeting the basic needs on Maslow's Hierarchy. However, the next two   levels, relating to psychological needs, are where the most effort is required to enable your team to thrive and achieve. Your objective is to build healthy, collaborative relationships with each member of the team and to encourage them to build the same type of relationships with each other. The type where you all actually want to work together! So how can you best support your people on this journey?

What is emotional intelligence?

You've probably heard the term ‘emotional intelligence’, and that it is beneficial to success — however, what you may not yet have gained is an understanding of what it really is or how to develop it  .

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook by Gill Hasson contains the description that has resonated with me the most: ‘Emotional Intelligence is about using your emotions to inform your thinking and using your thinking to understand and manage your emotions’. Gill also writes about extending this to manage your responses to the emotions of other people and how it’s all a dynamic process.   Note: There's a misconception that you can directly manage the emotions of other people; however, we are all responsible for our own emotions. What you can do is manage your responses in any given situation, which can have a direct impact on how a conversation progresses.  

Your emotional intelligence (EI) is not related to your gender, nor is it a fixed value like IQ. You can develop your EI just like any other skill set. The EQ-i 2.0® by Multi Health Systems (MHS) is a scientifically validated assessment tool EI (https://mhs.com/eq-i-2-0/) which is used to develop EI in a way that brings balance between five key composite areas and 15 subscales. Its wheel shape resonates with me as the more balanced the scores across subscales, the more rounded the wheel, and therefore the smoother the journey. Imagine a flat tyre — that's the same as a low score in one composite area such as decision making or self-perception, and a flat tyre makes a journey very bumpy indeed  !

The value of emotional intelligence  

Developing your emotional intelligence can add value to your team in many different ways, including:

Building a safe space: part of your role as a leader is to build a relationship with each team member, and encourage them to do so with each other, in order to create psychologically safe space. Including time for this at the beginning will pay dividends at difficult moments.

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Noticing problems early: building open relationships, for example through 1-2-1s, allows you to notice when something changes in how that person interacts. Be curious but not intrusive by using open ended questions to ask how someone is.

Creating a caring environment: activities like a ‘getting to know each other’ quiz or regular check-ins (for example at the start of meetings) are a great opportunity to have some fun, learn what’s important to people, and make each individual feel valued as a person, not just a number.

Challenging moments

When you reach a challenging point in your transformation programme — because there's always going to be a challenge, probably more than one — prepare for tough moments by thinking of a previous challenging conversation. When one of the participants raised their voice, perhaps due to frustration, did you also turn up your volume? Did the situation escalate to a point where it took a few days to recover? To keep the conversation on track as an open discussion, not avoiding the conflict, use active listening to understand what is being communicated and when it's an appropriate time for you to speak again, take a breath and play back what you've heard to seek confirmation. The key here is that when you speak, aim to keep your tone and volume neutral to reduce the potential of the situation escalating.

In this example, you're using your emotional intelligence in a few different ways. Specifically, your empathy to recognise the other person is feeling some intense emotion, your emotional self-awareness to recognise how you're feeling in the situation and decide how you want to respond, and your impulse control to enable you to delay an immediate response and actively listen to what is being communicated.

The way in which we work has changed significantly over the past decade, with technology providing the opportunity for us to work from anywhere and leaving people distributed on a global scale. The main thing to remember is that at our core, we're all wonderfully unique human beings who thrive in environments when we feel seen and heard — and as a leader, you have the opportunity to nurture that safe space for resilience and repeatable successful delivery!