CNN report on Employee Satisfaction

“CNN reports that 67% of people hate their jobs on account of their managers.” (Ian Mann writing in this week’s Sunday Times “Mann’s World”)

When employee satisfaction has so many ‘bottom line’ benefits, isn’t it amazing that so little is being done in this area?

Case in point; Wits Business School advertisies “short-courses for far-sighted people” but offers nothing on employee satisfaction strategies. More like short-sighted courses for the totally blind!

That’s a bit like medical school; until recently medical graduates got a total of one day’s training on nutrition in theentire five year curriculum yet the importance of nutrition has been blatantly obvious for years.

Someone’s missing the plot! Are you?

Frames of Mind and Emotional Intelligence

• Our ability to understand and relate to ourselves
• Our ability to understand and relate to others

We know this already but … a great deal of research has demonstrated that emotional states influence levels of neuropeptides in the body; little  protein-like molecules used by neurons to communicate with each other … which in turn influences brain functions, like reward, learning and memory. (read more on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropeptide)

In a nutshell, a person’s emotional state at a given time, dictates how that person will think and act in the moment … actions affect feelings and feelings affect actions and actions affect feelings and so on. 

It’s a cycle, either positive or negative and those little neuropeptides play a significant role determining which way the game plan plays itself out; every day these invisible molecules influence the fate of individuals, families, companies and even nations.  

I am sure you know that already but how often do you put that knowledge into practice?

• How often do you take a colleague’s emotional state into account when approaching them?
• How often do you consider a person’s state when things go wrong?
• How often do you take the time to learn from a negative encounter?
• How often do you design a strategy for “next time”?

It’s all good and well to expect people to take responsibility for their emotional states but it is an effective leader who understands that human nature is what it is, and it isn’t always pretty!

The fact is that many people don’t take responsibility for their emotional states; what a person should do, in a rational state, and what they actually do are not always the same. A failure, especially by leaders, to understand this dynamic wastes huge amounts of unnecessary time, money and energy.

Effective leaders understand the importance of;

• Careful Timing: Communicating into a receptive environment or state.
• Intelligent Review: Understanding the “what, where, why and how” of past mistakes and then learning from them.

Matching Agendas, the simple art of caring, creates the receptive environment so essential for effective and productive communication between people … who do not always behave rationally.