Emotional Agility is to develop an understanding of the relationship between moods, thoughts, behaviors and then to take charge of them by practicing skills to cope with intense negative feelings, extreme sadness, anxiety, anger, and so on and so forth. One broadens oneself via awareness, coping skills, regulating difficult feelings, killing skepticism, and tolerating challenging situations in setting goals. When one has the capability to take control of these behavioral changes in oneself, the teams get solidified, the department becomes steady, and ultimately the organization’s success will peak. That is the reason we decided to add Emotional agility into our model.
Emotional intelligence and partnership in government visibility and innovation can be smooth sailing if this particular flavor is honed in. An example to illustrate is the invasion of Cuba by President Kennedy and his advisors. As we know it failed. One of the reasons is because when there is a groupthink in process, there are disagreements that are bound to happen. Sometimes in these scenarios, the majority opinions are taken as the actions to go ahead with and issues raised by minority individuals are not dealt with. This happens in small, medium, and large organizations too. So individuals as well as companies have to make sure the emotional behavior of the individuals and the group is geared toward the organizational goal.
Emotional Agility warrants agile appearances and sometimes suppression of inner feelings. Psychological adaptability and cognitive improvisations under stress create anticipating changing situations. This includes obstacles, tidal waves that an organization may encounter due to multiple organizational acquisitions. An individual may arise to a nonprogrammed decision. In this scenario, emotional agility would, without a doubt, be a great trait to have, to utilize in unusual, unpredictable opportunities and threats such as these.
Dealing with disgruntled customers, different temperaments, lies, anxiety, the customers’ needs, manipulation, lack of patience, and much more in an organizational setting can be handled very delicately with our definition of emotional agility. To cite a few immediate remedies for an organization’s performance brilliance, we suggest instilling enthusiasm for the work with motivational organizational rides such as friendliness in and around the work space that boosts their morale. Inculcating compassion toward the team and beyond added with indoctrinating balancing work and life hours will certainly have emotions at a calm level.
Jiten Vara in Scrum and Kanban2 says: “There are absolute advantages to having tools and processes, but if we really want to create awesome software and come to work where both us and our clients are happy then we should probably focus on the people and spend a bit more time understanding how people interact and communicate.” Taking the Agile Manifesto value “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools” concept this is where emotional agility intertwines in tandem.
Having the patience to bear the pains of an organization involves ardent listening, fellow feeling to cope with fear. Self-awareness in many arenas is a staple for emotional agility. For example, summing up productive indications for short- and long-term planning, making sure that the customers’ curiosity requirements, not just the BRD (Business Requirement Documents), are addressed in a timely and satisfactory manner. This helps to overcome the rough and extreme state of affairs with multiple organizational acquisition dealings. On the flip side, customer curiosity within reason if not curbed can make the project performance sway unnecessarily.
Just to give a simple example, some of the mainstays of tenacity of the sales and imports team according to us are as stated here. Implanting the push for incite and drive throughout the entire team to be the best they can by talking through a tiresome conflict resolution setting, and not getting personal. Team excellence and success for career with a passion for complete transparency of the weekly Profit & Loss results and how this impacts the organizational goals and the annual profit pledge is at its high tide here.
To take another case, Urban Outfitters3 does not just end their training after the day is done. Instead, there is an application (app) for Urban Outfitters employees to see how they are progressing in the company. The app also helps decide whether employees and teams are promoted or are going to stay at the level they are at. The app shows transparency and transparency helps build trust among workers within a company or external to the organization. The app shows the logistics and rational mindset of the company. With transparency, there is very little room to withhold information and to lie to their personnel. This is one of the main reasons individuals choose to work at Urban Outfitters.
The designing and processes of the app include making sure that the app runs efficiently and effectively.
This also includes:
- making sure that every bit of information is updated,
- is easy to use,
- making sure that employees are using the app to ensure that all the designing and development is worth the time in building and updating the app.
The app helps in the reflection of the individual as well as the team because it shows how many sales they have made and their progress during a certain time period. If Urban Outfitters employees maintain a certain number of sales then it is a good reflection of the company. By including this app, Urban Outfitters, as a company, has kept a transparent relationship between their corporation and their employees, due to past mistakes that were made.
To have the emotional agility honed, some of the remedies that can be employed are:
- Being friendly in and around the work space even though there might be drifts.
- Making sure the requirements that the stakeholders have are not out of curiosity but out of genuine need for the product or the contract negotiated.
- Responsiveness and understanding go beyond one’s own team, extending to other verticals and departments of the organization.
- For collaborations emotions cannot come in the way of navigating to the intended results.
Industry Applications by International Practitioners and Academia for Emotional Agility
Some of the most agile organisations use emotional agility; they improvise, they know how they feel about the decisions they need to make as to the portfolio’s governance and they consistently apply appropriate and professional behaviours when doing so.
Paul Hodgkins, Executive Director, Paul Hodgkins Project Consultancy,
UNITED KINGDOM
Having the openness to learn and change increase our emotional agility. Awareness of our emotional intelligence in relationship to others provides an adaptability to change, reasoning, coping, and increases our ability to problem solve while understanding the complexity of a nonlinear problem. Today’s complexity of real world business problems affects our political, personal, and social environment taking in gray areas of consideration. Emotional agility is required in order to recommend a solution at the table.
Professor Linh Luong, Program Director of Master of Science in Project Management, University of SEATTLE
At the senior management level, when things go wrong, usually and most often exploiting, hurting feelings of people who are giving their best and are not really guilty of the situation and not responsible of the negative deviations of the plan becomes a norm. This can be avoided with the application of Emotional agility.
Rafael De La Rosa, Project-Portfolio Management Consultant,
PT. SMART tbk
INDONESIA / SPAIN
While there is a strong mental connection to data, the emotional connection to data cannot be underestimated. Data tells stories, and sometimes, ugly stories about the (sad) reality of their current or future state. Data is also highly personal. Within organizations, fiefdoms and data kingdoms can arise – HR doesn’t want to share certain data elements; marketing may need and want to understand or leverage key operational / sales data, and the IT group may feel an overall ownership / stewardship over all enterprise data. These challenges and organizational silos require leaders to have high emotional IQs, specifically the ability to adapt, improves and manage numerous stakeholder groups.
Patrick N Connally, Director, Teradata, Philadelphia,
USA
During the period of organizational transformation, it is pertinent that people adapt to change organically and thrive which happens only when the purpose and goal are clearly explained by the leaders. Leaders also need to coach people if required and gain the buy-in from the target audience. One of the important values of Scrum process framework is “Respect” which allows Scrum team to build a professional culture and makes the team emotionally intelligent.
Emotional agility is to be sharpened in order to achieve futuristic success. Here, we have to consider both current value and unrealised/ future value. The goal of looking at the current value is to maximize the value that an organization delivers to customers and stakeholders at any given time; it considers not only what exists right now, but the value that might exist in the future as well as continuous improvement and continuity is the name of the game in the agile world.
Gaurav Dhooper (PAL-I®, PMI-ACP®, SAFe4®, CSM®, LSS-GB)
Program Manager, RPA & Agile Practitioner at Genpact
INDIA
Juggling your associates and their different emotional states can be difficult. Being able to convince a skeptic, comfort and uplift a sad person, motivate, encourage others to stop being shy simultaneously can be quite a rollercoaster. But, the good news is that you can be trained.
The first step is to evaluate yourself. How stable and calm you are in a stressful situation. What is your ability to read a situation and diffuse it if needed and how self-controlled are you when faced with adversity? The best I gather from the PALHTM model for this agility is to say, “Take your drama somewhere else! I don’t want to put my team through the unwanted stress of having to go through unnecessary emotional tensions.” The team needs to know that their leader has everything under control. Helping the team to manage their emotions is possible when you are able to manage your own. Although, at times I did allow them to witness my inner hesitation because that made them understand that regardless of how tough it got, I almost always put the team first and that would allow them to see that I am human too.
Joanna Staniszewska CEO, You’ll Ltd.,
POLAND
We cannot wish away the fact that the whole person, emotions and all, comes to work. Emotional agility helps us to be flexible in dealing with our own emotions and with the emotions of others. Situations like challenging the person who introduces a recycling equipment that separates paper from glass when that is not the desired outcome will lead to friction and that is where emotional agility stands you in good stead.
Makheni Zonneveld, Future Readiness Coach,
NETHERLANDS