Everyone has experienced working with others before. Whether it was creating a project with a group for class, or putting together a development team for a new product in an organization. Teams are everywhere in organizations, as they are often more effective and efficient than individuals, as they involve people with different skill sets, helping one another work towards a common goal. Teams also allow for greater task identity, which can increase motivation among members. A team can take on larger obstacles and advance projects much further than someone working as an individual could. This was clear for my brother and his best friend as they developed an idea in their last year of university.

The two friends wanted to do something significant in their last summer before permanently finishing their education and entering the workforce. One night, while biking home from a party (as they often rode instead of driving), they talked about how hard it would be to bike across Canada. This idea quickly developed into a cancer awareness campaign, rather than just an activity to kick off summer. With a goal to raise $25,000 for prostate cancer research, the pair of friends began bringing more people in to help them achieve it. Word spread rapidly with the help of a social media platform, and many friends and family met the two young men during their ride across the country – my dad included. My brother and his friend ended up having around a hundred people and a police escort join them for the last stretch of the ride from Abbotsford to West Vancouver, and raised ten times the amount of money they originally set as their goal. This is a clear example of what a team of people can accomplish. My brother and his friend would never have been able to raise $250,000 and the kind of awareness they did without the help of all those who joined them along the ride, shared their page on Facebook and other social media outlets, and supported them throughout the campaign.

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Emotions play a large part in the workplace. Increasing research has actually shown that emotions are a critical part of rational thinking, as they help us understand the world and other people around us. Negative emotions can cause conflict in the workplace and, as stated in an Organizational Behaviour textbook, those who are able to control their emotions in order to think more rationally and are good at reading others can be more efficient in their job (Damasio, 1994). People with this skill are said to have a high emotional intelligent (EI, sometimes shown as EQ), defined as being able to detect and manage emotional cues and information. Not surprisingly, it is highly correlated with job performance. In an article for Entrepreneur, Travis Bradberry even states that this correlation is so significant that “90 percent of top performers have high emotional intelligence”.

This topic of EI being the factor that truly separates the most valuable employees from the rest of the workforce has been trending. This can be explained by the fact that emotional intelligence is proven to be a more vital quality in employees and leaders than intelligence quotient (IQ). People can be trained to do a job better, but EI is more intuitive and relates to how people operate and handle others in the workplace. Bradberry’s article gives 11 signs that can be used to measure your EI, and finishes off by stating that EI, like most cognitive skills, is an ability you can improve by practicing emotionally intelligent behaviours and therefore training your brain the right way to process emotions. I’ve actually experienced this first hand, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, at my previous job I had two bosses. The one with the higher EI was able to deal with all the employees without coming off as angry, and always handled conflict in a calm manner. As a result, my coworkers and I were more comfortable and therefore able to be more productive around her. While in contrast, the other owner always let her emotions control her angry, and reacted rather than processing the situation logically first and handling it in a calm manner. This made it hard to be around her, and therefore made us less productive.

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References:

Bradberry, T. (2017, January 24). 11 Signs That You Lack Emotional Intelligence. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/288181

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.