Being Human: Leverage the Power of Emotional Intelligence in Transformations and Change

Whether you’re running a billion-dollar enterprise, a multi-million-dollar business or a relatively large division or department, you’ll have at some point over the years seen a need for a substantial shift in strategy, a major change of plans or a radical shift in how you operate… And if you haven’t, you likely will in the future, whether due to changing customer demand, market trends or a plethora of other reasons.

In these situations, you’ll find that the larger the change, the greater the need to manage it well – especially if you’d like to truly achieve what you are aiming for with the change.

Change management is an essential, structured approach that goes hand-in-hand with both strategy and execution, but leaders tend to sometimes forget a critical area while driving transformations and change: the human factor.

In life outside of work, you usually see that emotions play a significant role in how people deal with major change. Extrapolate that to dealing with change in the workplace, and the same emotions will have as substantial an impact as they would elsewhere – and this is not something that you can afford to ignore.

Emotional intelligence, focused inwards, helps you recognize, understand and manage your own emotions. Focused outwards, it lets you identify and influence the emotions of those around you.

Emotional intelligence strengthens your self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and your ability to effectively manage relationships and communication – each a necessity when it comes to navigating or leading complex change.

Connecting these aspects together, as a transformational leader, emotional intelligence becomes a key contributor to achieving successful outcomes from a transformation or change.

Let’s explore areas where you, as a transformational leader, can bolster change management with the power of emotional intelligence:

• Planning the Change: Self-awareness can highlight your own emotions, desires, drivers and biases, helping you manage them effectively, enhancing your decision-making as you plan a transformation. You can serve as a role model to others driving the change, bringing in empathy and sensitivity as you consider kicking off a difficult transformation.

• Creating Awareness and Desire for Change: A complex change, while difficult, can be inspiring. You can create a shared vision, bring in a sense of purpose and commitment, and influence and motivate your people, drawing them along, even as you demonstrate empathy and recognize that it will not be easy to accomplish the change.

• Maximizing Psychological Safety: As you progress through your transformation, you can build up trust and create a safe environment where your people can express their fears. Recognize the emotional impact of change on your people, and provide them with support to successfully navigate the change.

• Managing Resistance to Change: Recognise what factors trigger fears or concerns. These in turn drive resistance to change. You can adapt your change management strategy as needed to alleviate fears and ease concerns, addressing the resistance to change. Be transparent, proactively communicate and do so early. Share your rationale and use active listening to draw in feedback where feasible.

• Bringing the Change to Life: Leveraging your social awareness can foster improved teamwork and collaboration as you land the change. Creating the right environment can birth ideas and energy, bringing together cohesive teams that can deliver successful outcomes from the change.

It’s important to recognize that as you begin to leverage the power of emotional intelligence, these points are easy to understand, but difficult to implement.

To understand why this is the case, let’s dig deeper into the social awareness aspect of emotional intelligence and explore a few of the fears and concerns that people would have during a change.

Take for example a software company that’s launched a transformation focused on cost optimisation and an increase in operational efficiency. Here, one of the known outcomes might be that 500 people across several departments and teams will lose their jobs. This in turn might have some implications on the work done by about 3,000 other people.

A change of this scale might perhaps take two months to plan out, and another two months to execute in this company. For the majority of this time, unless every aspect of the change is planned out to the smallest detail, there will be a considerable degree of ambiguity, some unavoidable leaks of information, rumours, and greatly active imaginations.

With this in mind, let’s step into the shoes of the people facing the change and explore some of the drivers behind fears and concerns that you need to be mindful of:

• Financial: People have ongoing financial commitments. They may have purchased a new home or a car, and EMIs become a concern. Perhaps some are paying for their children’s education.

• Health: There might be a degree of dependence on your organisation’s health insurance coverage, with ongoing treatments, hospitalization, or upcoming plans.

• Age: Despite the current focus on inclusion across organisations, ageism remains a problem. People past the age of 50 have a limited range of options when it comes to finding new roles.

• Comfort Zone: People might have spent several years in the same role, or even a couple of decades in the same organisation, never having considered what it means to move on.

• Visa: People working in a different country from their home country might be concerned over limited stay periods or an immediate expulsion from that country depending on what laws are applicable to them.

• Capabilities: People might be concerned about not having the skills required for after the change, and might fear that they will be unable to upskill themselves in the time available.

• Missing Pieces: There could also be legitimate gaps in your planned or ongoing transformation that leave people concerned about how certain types of essential work will continue to be performed.

If you were in the shoes of a person that has one or more of these issues on their mind, how would you react? What would your mental state be like?

These drivers or issues, in most cases, have nothing to do with the organisation, but in the worst case can drive people into a panic, whether or not they are impacted. In milder cases, you will have an environment brewing with apathy, fear or concern, with stress-levels going through the roof.

Those with skills that are in demand, or your best talent, or your best performers – the ones that you want to keep – might outright leave, not wanting to “take a chance” that the change might impact them.

And if your people’s energy is focused on dealing with these fears and concerns, it can have a massive impact on productivity, especially during, but also after your transformation. If you’re aiming for a transformation with minimal disruption, you’ll have already taken a setback in this situation.

Leveraging emotional intelligence can let you get ahead of these issues. Empathize with your people, understand these drivers, and recognize their fears and concerns. Put good support systems in place for impacted employees, make them transparent and communicate effectively. Be there for them when they need you, and cascade this approach downwards through your senior and mid-senior leadership. Create retention plans for those you want to keep, and more importantly, let them know what you have in mind for them.

For a leader, these are merely a few additional check boxes in a larger change plan. But when you do have these added in, do you think this change will be a tad more successful? 

Note that it’s not just taking action, but how you do it that matters.

This example covers a single dimension that a transformational leader could utilise emotional intelligence for, but there are many more. It’s worth pausing for a moment to give some thought to what these might be, and how they might fit your context…

Emotional intelligence is hence critical if you are a leader driving transformations and managing change, the human factor often missed out in change management. Identify and understand people’s emotions, inspire them, build trust, be transparent, openly communicate, support them, and manage resistance as you go about your change.

Where do you start though? You can enhance your emotional intelligence through workshops, coaching or self-study. It’s a journey of continuous improvement – be mindful, reflect on your thought process and actions, and be thoughtful rather than reactive. By developing your emotional intelligence over time, you can be a highly effective transformational leader, a step closer to leading successful transformations and managing complex change.

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