Reflection on Emotional Intelligence for Managerial Communication
This write-up was constructed as part of an assignment for my Management Communication class. We were suppossed to develop a reflection note around a situation in which we struggled to effectively communicate because of emotional hijacking, along with what we could have done differently to remove the emotional barriers.
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all”. This quote by Aristotle perfectly highlights the importance of Pathos amongst his 3 elements of influencing people. Sure, one might use their position or logic to get people to accept their opinion, but at the end of the day, people buy people. You need to win them over, and it is important to build relationships in order to do so.
I once worked on a project in which we wanted to experiment with one widget in order to make it more extensible, but the ownership of the same was with a different team – one that was based out of Seattle. After discussion with the team, we came to a consensus of collaborating in an Away Team model. What this meant was that I, working in Indian Standard Time, was going to be working with 2 employees from the external team – both of whom were working in a completely opposite time zone.
In an industrial development process, the design is first agreed upon by all parties involved, and only then, any of the coding work is started. However, once we got down to the coding aspect, I noticed that we were making frequent course-corrections in the form of going back to the design and making changes on the go. Point to be noted – this person from the external team who was giving comments with regard to changes in design was a senior member of their team and a level higher than me in terms of designation as well. Since I was doing most of the coding for this part, what this meant from my perspective was – I received comments on my code the next day about changes I need to make. These were changes in design and hence fundamentally redundant changes from a coding perspective - and I felt like I was doing the same thing again and again, albeit in a different manner due to someone else’s decision-making incapability.
I decided to highlight this aspect in one of our weekly calls, albeit in a poor and diplomatically incorrect fashion. What came next was a scenario I never thought would happen – in the remaining minutes of the meeting, anything and everything that had and could go wrong with the project was highlighted and the blame of the same was thrown on me.
Analysing this situation according to Daniel Goleman’s EI competencies, I was self-aware about my emotions in the sense that I knew I wasn’t feeling part of any team. Since I was neither working with my local teammates nor cohesively with the away team members, I felt unimportant. This aspect came out in the form of me trying to give inputs – albeit in the wrong setting. I missed out the crucial element of building relationships – I was aware of my emotions but completely unaware of my impact on others, which resulted in me communicating the issue in an ineffective manner.
I wasn’t very self-regulated either. The call in which I had highlighted this issue wasn’t a planned discussion for blockers or a retrospective – there was no need to highlight the issue in that particular call. I wasn’t ready for the situation and hadn’t thought it through. The frustration had been building up inside of me – and not having a good relationship meant I hadn’t discussed this with them earlier. Because of not expressing my concerns earlier, my emotions had bubbled up to such an extent that it came out as more of an outburst with the intention of proving my disappointment in redundant and lack of challenging work, than honest feedback. Hence, retaliation was natural. My colleague went defensive and turned around the topic into bashing me. This was benefitting no one, and the project was only getting further delayed because of these frictions.
As far as motivation goes, I didn’t feel like I was working in a team, so I wasn’t motivated to work as they wanted me to. It felt like I was being directed, not involved.
One important lesson I learnt that day was “Praise in public, criticize in private”. I didn’t show empathy to look at the situation from her point of view. If I had done that prior to blurting out my criticism, I would’ve realized that with her vying for a promotion within her team, me highlighting this aspect of design changes in front of multiple stakeholders from both ends would affect her feedback. This resulted in her taking a defensive stance and shifting the blame onto me – an easy thing to do because of her superior position – or her ethos. I was emotionally unintelligent to have not considered the weight of this factor in a corporate setting. To satisfy my own ego, I wanted to prove myself better than someone who had more ethos than me.
Now let’s get to the core of the problem here. In the above paragraphs, I have mentioned “and not having a good relationship meant I hadn’t discussed this with them earlier”. The key thing to notice here is that I didn’t have a good relationship with them. Taking a look at my behaviour, I didn’t build a genuine relationship. Had I built a genuine relationship with the other team, I could’ve mentioned how this was affecting me and made me feel instead of highlighting how this increased my work. It would’ve also made me comfortable to open up to them about not feeling part of the team.
This incident only makes me realise the importance of emotional intelligence in organisational communication. Being emotionally intelligent could’ve helped me deliver difficult feedback effectively, along with running the meetings thereafter with confidence.