Emotional Intelligence and NLP in Business
Emotional Intelligence (EI) concerns how a person understands and manages their own emotions and those of other people. Crucially in a business context, EI may be measured scientifically and areas for development highlighted. It has been proven to be a useful technique in both employee recruitment and development. With average costs of labour turnover being quoted recently as €7,500 per employee* (rising to €11,800 for senior managers*), recruitment errors and poor staff retention strategies become very costly.
Before you dismiss "emotional intelligence" as another fad, yet more "psycho-babble" that promises to revolutionise our lives, you should know that emotional intelligence testing is currently in use by the likes of American Express, Avon, Shell, Unilever, Nestle, Pfizer, Lockheed, Hilton, Boeing, Motorola, and Johnson & Johnson to improve their organisation's performance. Some like Amex, have used emotional intelligence techniques for over ten years to improve sales performance resulting in a return on investment amounting to millions of dollars.
What these companies have realised is that EI is at least as important as IQ for success in business and in life in general. Research has concluded that a leader's ability to connect emotionally with others is a better predictor of effective executive leadership than is general intelligence. Increasingly, leadership is being seen as a key component of jobs at all levels.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a very positive area of psychology with its origins in finding out how people who are exceptionally good at what they do, achieve their results. NLP Practitioners use the knowledge of how success is achieved to help others adjust their behaviour to also achieve.
The combination of EI and NLP can be a powerful tool in defining the right individual for an organisation and in developing that individual to his or her full potential.
* 2005 CIPD Survey: 'Recruitment, retention, turnover'.