The term “Emotional Intelligence” came into the limelight in 1990 when two researchers, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer published their research on the topic.  Salovey and Mayer identified four factors that comprise emotional intelligence:

1. Identifying Emotions – The first factor towards understanding emotions is to be able to recognize them as they occur in others.  This includes verbal cues (e.g. intonation) and non-verbal cues (e.g. body language, proxemics, etc.).

“Have you eaten?”

“How are the kids?”

Depending on your cultural background one of the statements above is considered friendly conversation during the business day and the other is considered awkward.

Any tech-savvy communicator with a penchant for instant messaging will have at one point in time misread the emotional responses of someone at the other end of a text message.  Only 160 characters to say what you want, a puny mobile keyboard and no ability to express non-verbal cues is a recipe for interpersonal communication disaster.

Demonstrating leadership competency across cultural boundaries is no easy task.  Hundreds and often times thousands of years of cultural nuances have impacted the way each civilization operates.  Nuggets of wisdom, passed from generation-to-generation come together to form the slowly evolving backbone of a society. 

The question, “why is change so hard” is a difficult but important one to answer.  The change management industry wrestles with developing a concise model because the question of “why” grows in complexity as we try and apply it to ways people react to change.

Renowned academic, author and speaker Dr. John Kotter summarizes successful change in 8 basic steps.  His model is a great starting point for developing organizational change strategy for organizations.  Here is a quick summary to keep in mind as you develop your organizational change strategy:

One of the first action steps in implementing change is to create a sense of urgency.  Employees need to be energized by a feeling that change is needed—now!  This is what creates the energy that empowers people to make a change and embrace the change as it is implemented.

Organizational change management (OCM) principles have their roots in research done as far back as the early 1950s when psychologist Kurt Lewin developed his three-stage model for planned change.

Understanding the culture around us

The way people interact within your company – expectations, norms and taboos are a result of years of interactions between people, management styles and organizational structure.  Changing the status quo of an established corporate culture is not an easy task.

The physical distance you keep between yourself and others during social situations is your personal space.  In normal conversations we don’t give our personal space much thought; it’s a natural distance that we grant between ourselves and others based on our culture, gender and personality.  However, when you enter into a cross cultural conversation, you may want to keep your personal distance in mind.