It was 1995 when Daniel Goleman wrote his book Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more.

Since then, EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) is globally acknowledged as one of the key characteristics of great leaders in all fields. Nevertheless, it is surprising how businesses worldwide first treated EQ suspiciously and later intentionally delayed its integration into their leadership programs. IQ was still preeminent, and emotions were widely alienated from the work environment.

It was not until recently that the importance of EQ and emotional skills became broadly recognized. Teams, managers and C-level staff now have sophisticated training tools at their disposal. At the same time, correlated to the development of EQ career paths, we have witnessed the growing influence of inclusion programs that accentuate the importance of Gender Equality & Diversity in the workplace. 

Then Covid-19 came into our lives silently, without warning. It was only a few weeks ago, although now it seems it has already been an eternity. Today we all agree we are living through an unprecedented moment in history.

During this crisis, traditional IQ indicators have lost much of their value. It is clear that we cannot rely anymore on our dear IQ to face the complexity of the emerging environments. From a strictly rational perspective, in fact, we cannot obtain any satisfactory explanation for all the emotional and physical turmoil we are currently experiencing.

How Covid-19 is making EQ more important than ever. 

Unexpectedly, Covid-19 is redeeming EQ. Whether we like or not, whether we are conscious or not, EQ is becoming essential to survive and succeed in this new environment. We are experiencing in our own skins the best global training ever on EQ skills.

As Peter Salovey and John Mayer stated, EQ is the “Capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking, decision making and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal”.

Forced lockdown and global confusion is inviting us to feel ourselves. We need to label our emotions, embrace our own monsters and face our fears. Self-awareness and personal management are not optional during this new chaos. We are wrapped up in our feelings, they surround us and penetrate us, while the virus is expanding quickly, relentlessly and unpredictably.

So, when it comes to managing our remote teams, we desperately need to find ways and tools to listen to our people in real time. We must learn to survive while coping with distance and build trust and alignment while taking difficult decisions. We must reinforce the so-called “feminine skills” such as empathy. But how can we do it? 

Digitally? Naturally, yes.

Tools like TeamEQ’s intelligent team analytics platform can help us to monitor the well-being of our teams by listening to their thoughts, worries and feelings in real time. A truly breakthrough way of bringing EQ to the forefront of our decision-making process as we work towards the construction of a new post-Covid-19 way of working; one that is based not only on the skills of our teams, but on their emotional and human capacities as well.  

Somehow, we all sense that things will not be the same after Covid-19. We now have a couple of weeks more at least to design our companies and teams’ transformations. Let’s take advantage of the situation and start adapting our businesses to the new emerging future.

Let’s generate a positive impact in our society and use our confinement time wisely.

Francesca Gabetti

CEO & Co-Founder

Ph: Unsplash