Organisational awareness – combining intellectual and emotional intelligence

5 Comments / Developing managers, Enhancing Team Effectiveness, Ensuring successful business change / By

By Elisabeth Goodman, 5th September 2018

Booklet number 7 in Daniel Goleman et al’s “Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence” is entitled ‘Organizational Awareness”.

As with the previous booklets that I have documented:

I have found it helpful to summarise the key points from the various contributors in the book.

Here is my summary in the form of the ‘why’, the ‘what’, the ‘how’

Why is organisational awareness so important?

Key points from 7: Organizational Awareness in Daniel Goleman et al’s Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

What is organisational awareness?

A system that involves the awareness, development and use of both intellectual and emotional intelligence in the context of:

Informal and social networks (within and outside the organisation).  Knowing who are the opinion leaders, decision makers, influencers.  Who are the people that people defer to?  Who are the people who make things happen (or block them from happening)?  What is the nature of the interactions with external partners, suppliers, customers?

The engagement of every employee: the demonstrated connectedness between the organisation’s mission, values, goals and day-to-day behavioural norms.  How people are focusing their attention and their energy.

External forces affecting the organisation e.g. through PESTLE analyses (Politics, Economics, Social, Technical, Legal, Environmental) to understand the external landscape and how this might affect the organisation; how it should be adapted.

Extension of personal emotional intelligence to the wider organisation: applying all the skills we have for understanding and controlling our own emotions to the wider context in which we operate.  Using these skills to understand the emotional undercurrents in the organisation and, in a leadership situation, to influence and channel them towards a positive outcome.

How to practise organisational awareness

  1. Listen to and observe conversations within and outside meetings (applying your emotional intelligence skills)
  2. Ask yourself and others about what is going on when decisions are being made and change is taking place.
  3. Find out who are the ‘go to’ people: the ‘movers and shakers”.
  4. Carry out analytical research, or commission external consultants to help you with this.
  5. Make use of established tools such as stakeholder analysis when planning to implement change; and team temperature / health checks or diagnostics

Now… how will you approach organisational awareness?

Click here for information on RiverRhee’s training, workshops and coaching for managers and teams

For my part, these are again extremely useful insights to weave into RiverRhee’s courses for managers and teams.

NOTEs

About the author. Elisabeth Goodman is the Owner and Principal Consultant at RiverRhee Consulting., a consultancy that specialises in “creating exceptional managers and teams”, with a focus on the Life Sciences. (We support our clients through courses, workshops and personal one-to-one coaching.)  Elisabeth founded RiverRhee Consulting in 2009, and prior to that had 25+ years’ experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry in line management and internal training and consultancy roles supporting Information Management and other business teams on a global basis.  RiverRhee is a support supplier for One Nucleus and a CPD provider for CILIP (Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals). Elisabeth is accredited in Change Management, in Lean Sigma, in Belbin Team Roles, MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) and is an NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) Practitioner. She is a member of CILIP and of APM (Association for Project Management) in which she was a founding member of the Enabling Change SIG.