Tag Archive for: Emotional Intelligence

emotional intelligence in healthcare

Emotional intelligence (EQ) has been an important topic in business and organizational leadership for decades. It’s equally important in the health care business. Health care administrators can develop their own EQ skills, and they can also promote EQ in their organizations via employee training. These industry leaders will discover that EQ allows better relationships between colleagues and patients while also improving overall organizational performance.

emotional intelligence benefit to healthcare infographics

Why Emotional Intelligence is Crucial in Health Care

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Psychology professors John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey coined the term “emotional intelligence.” They defined the term as “the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotion; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships; and to manage your own and others’ emotions.”

In 1998, psychologist Daniel Goleman noted the connection between EQ and business leadership, specifically citing self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy for others, and social skills as the link’s key components. In 2013, Goleman used neuroscience research to demonstrate how leaders can build each element of EQ by learning better ways to focus their attention.

How Health Care Administrators Hire People with EQ

Health care administrators that seek high-EQ employees see it as a valuable piece along with education, certification, and technical skills. They’ll evaluate EQ by using behavioral event interviewing tactics to see how prospective employees handled challenging experiences in previous jobs. They’ll also contact the candidate’s references to obtain firsthand insight into their people interaction skills.

How EQ Benefits Health Care Professionals

EQ lowers stress and burnout of health care professionals in several ways. It improves communication, yielding better doctor-patient relationships. It provides understanding to a patient’s emotional reactions to a treatment, which leads to higher levels of patient satisfaction. Additionally, it leads to increased job satisfaction, and it also leads to improved leadership quality, which can result in better team effectiveness and motivation.

The Key Skills Administrators Need to Develop

How Administrators can Develop EQ to Become Better Leaders

EQ skills fall into two areas. The first area is personal competence, or the ability to understand and express oneself. This skill requires emotional self-awareness, respecting and accepting oneself, and a commitment to self-improvement. It also involves having an assertive self-expression of emotions, proper stress management, a capacity to stay optimistic, and being able to adapt behavior and emotions in unforeseen circumstances. Additionally, the skill is defined by an ability to control impulses.

The second area is social competence, which is the ability to manages relationships. This skill requires empathy, effective and compassionate communication, and social and organizational awareness. It also requires the capacity to manage conflicts, the ability to inspire and motivate through leadership, and being able to be a coach and mentor. Additionally, the skill is defined by having a sense of social responsibility.

Conclusion: How Technology Can Help

Artificial Intelligence in Health Care Statistics

The healthcare AI market is projected to rise from around $663.8 million in 2014 to around $6.66 billion in 2021. The U.S. health care economy will potentially save an annual amount of $150 billion because of the AI applications projected to be in healthcare by 2026.

These applications can serve a diverse number of purposes. From a security standpoint, AI can help with fraud detection and cybersecurity. AI can also be applied to help nurses and staff by reducing dosage error reduction, providing administrative workflow, and becoming virtual nursing assistants. They can also help out in advanced capacities such as robot-assisted surgery, providing automated image diagnosis, issuing preliminary diagnoses, and identifying clinical trial participants. AI units can all be connected with each other, which could provide cohesion.

 EQ and AI: What’s the Difference?

EQ and AI are two wholly different concepts. AI is defined as a branch of computer science that focuses on allowing machines to solve problems and perform tasks associated with human intelligence. EQ, on the other hand, is a concept defined by the understanding of the emotions of the self and of others to foster personal and professional relationships.

The Potential of AI Technologies and Emotional Intelligence in Health Care

When combined, AI and EQ could advance healthcare in remarkable ways. It could make the assessment of a patient’s moods and feelings through speech cues, inflections, and gestures possible. It could also make it possible to detect depression and emotional wellness through vocal tone. Additionally, it could ease the stress of patient clinical trials by enabling real-time feedback. Overall, it could create a better customer experience by automating intake and discharge processes.

IBM’s Watson has provided a glimpse into this combination. The AI system can potentially match cancer patients with available clinical trials, medical therapies, surgeries, radiation, and supportive care. This could free up physicians, so they could spend more time providing care to patients.

The Importance of EQ

The relationship between EQ and leadership will continue to be a valuable asset for the success of health care organizations. Leaders and employees at all levels stand to benefit from adding EQ to their repertoire of professional skills.

In the world of hiring, soft skills have recently become the holy grail of recruiting. Soft skills – emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills like communication and empathy – are among the most in-demand qualifications a candidate can bring to the table.

According to one LinkedIn survey, more than half of nearly 300 hiring managers reported that the lack of soft skills among job candidates is limiting their company’s productivity. Recruiters are getting creative in trying to find new hires with talent in communication, time management, negotiating, writing, listening, problem solving, and decision making. Soft skills – the more intuitive EQ – are seen as a better predictor of success than hard skills, which can be taught or trained. 

Why are soft skills the best predictor of success? How can hiring managers design a recruitment process that takes these skills into account?

The Case for Soft Skills

Soft skills are in-demand in nearly every company and every industry. A Wall Street Journal survey of 900 executives found that 92% said soft skills were equally important or more important than technical skills. But 89% of those surveyed said they have a “very or somewhat difficult time finding people with the requisite attributes.” Likewise, LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Report discovered that the four most in-demand soft skills are leadership, communication, collaboration, and time management.

Are emotional intelligence a better predictor of success? According to one author, yes. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence at Work, found in his research of 500 executives that emotional intelligence was a better predictor of top performance than previous experience or IQ. CEOs at some of the world’s top companies (Amazon, Xerox, and Tesla, to name a few) lead with emotional intelligence have designed their entire corporate structure around soft skills.

And such skills aren’t just great for creating a fulfilling and pleasant work environment. The link between profit and leaders with high emotional intelligence is clear. In one study, CEOs whose employees rated them high in character had an average return of 9.35% over a two-year period, nearly five times as much as companies with CEOs who had low character ratings. The case for recruiting for soft skills is strong: but, there’s something to be said for balancing good leadership and communication with individuals who have honed their talent.

Don’t Ignore Hard Skills

Have some recruiters overcorrected in their search for candidates with high EQ? Maybe, says one expert. 

Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, believes that to have a successful career, you must develop skills that make you an expert in something. There will always be a market for those with a depth of knowledge in one thing; certain fields will always demand new hires with niche skills and technical training. Newport argues that he more mastery you have in a skill or field, the more control and satisfaction it’ll give you in your career. 

While it’s true that technical masters do become top CEOs – Steve Jobs and Bill Gates come to mind – other experts note that eventually, soft skills and emotional intelligence must be learned. Many programmers, for example, have some of the basic hard skills that it takes to run a company. However, they fall short on key EQ traits like listening. The best leaders can learn soft skills over time, but start as an expert in something. 

How to Hire for Hard Skills and Emotional Intelligence

Unfortunately, soft skills can’t be found on a resume, which is what makes hiring for them so difficult. 

Companies who hire successfully with low turnover have learned how to construct their interview process to cover hard and soft skills. These recruiters ask candidates to perform tests mimicking real-world scenarios to get the best prediction of their success in the company. These skills tests then get triangulated with psychometrics and attitude testing. 

Plus, the advent of AI has made it possible to weigh soft skills vs. hard skills equally. Where in the past a candidate might wow a recruiter in the interview, but have no mastery over their field, an algorithm can’t be easily biased by a resume or stellar presentation. Smart companies have even begun to customize their interview process for certain soft skills that are applicable to each open position: so your extroverts become your top sales people, while your listeners join your HR team. There’s a place for both hard skills and soft skills in the workplace: it’s up to your hiring team to find the right combination for success. 

ABOUT THE COMPANY: Rensol Recruitment and Consulting, Inc. is the fastest growing recruitment agency in The Philippines. A career consultant that aims to go above and beyond the level of expectations of both the aspirations of the candidates and the dream team standards of employers through providing exceptional opportunities and unparalleled quality-driven recruitment services.

If a candidate wants to get hired, he primarily needs high Intelligence Quotient (IQ), but if he covets to get promoted, he must have a high Emotional Intelligence (EQ). In the same correlation, if an executive desire to be successful, he should have a team with high IQ, but if he aims for an excellent one, he must have a team who values EQ.

It was a proven fact that an executive can only achieve the ascendance from the monotony of success to the full culmination of excellence if he has a team who works together in harmony and in maximum effectiveness. The competition in talent acquisition has really been tough these days. It is on how human resource strategies get along with the rapid changes to explicitly respond to the demands of the competition without compromising the quality of hired employees as their company’s invaluable assets. The job has been tedious but there is a key for every executive and their recruiters to conclude a talent decision the company will never regret. Apart from satisfying clients’ expectations, the company can also attain a work ambiance healthy for everyone. Apparently, a recruiter could never go wrong with a candidate who possesses high levels of EQ. Regardless of job type, EQ has been a reliable predictor of a guaranteed positive performance in the workplace.

Long before, IQ has been the only gauge recruiters have to foresee a candidate’s viable success in the industry. But with decades of research, a missing link yet a critical factor that was long disregarded in the crucial process of talent acquisition has been found. This critical factor doesn’t just make the job of recruiters easier but just ascertained that they may have been losing potential top performers in the process. It was just in 1995 when this new kind of smart has been determined and coined. And in 2020, the World Economic Forum predicts this to emerge as one of the top 20 skills among human resources, even surpassing technical abilities.

 

Emotion Matters

Emotional intelligence or EQ surprisingly comprises that critical portion to 90% of star performers in every company. But by being intangible, it may be difficult to figure how much we have or how much we actually lack. Emotions are intrinsic to our humanness and are vital in controlling how will we behave within our premise. Inherently, candidates with high levels of EQ can manage their own feelings, can perceive and express themselves, can form and maintain social relationships, can cope with stressful challenges and can come up with personal decisions which guarantee favorable result. Such qualities may have been commendatory for many executives who envisions to have a healthy work environment and an excellent workspace. It so happens that people with high EQ are usually successful in most things they do. Every team wants to have them. Their attitude essentially brings good karma back to them.

Meanwhile, if you have an employee who get stressed easily, who could not stand tension and endure anxiety, who couldn’t manage their moods responsibly, who couldn’t handle conflict, who are quick to make assumptions and argues vehemently, who easily succumbed to pessimistic emotions, who always blames other people, who are easily offended by negative remarks, or those who are just being toxic in your workplace are indications you have overlooked the candidate’s level of EQ before absorbing them in your company. Along with an increasingly demanding professional climate various industry requires, higher stress levels, increased workloads and hours, and the pressure of the fast-paced environment make it more crucial. Executives should try to hire the most emotionally- intelligent individuals who could handle this or at the very least, dedicate premium for their manpower’s emotional needs.

While cognitive intelligence is as significant to determine whether a candidate could perform the job as prescribed, knowing whether he will succeed in doing such is where emotional intelligence plays a great role.  This will foretell a candidate’s motivation, creativity, drive, commitment, passion, and energy to carry out his function more than we expect.

IQ alone could not fill in your vacancies with ideal employees you ever wished to have.  A man with high EQ but low IQ may have intellectual discrepancies while having someone with high IQ, but low EQ may lead to poor performance. An ideal candidate is a seamless fusion of both.

Executives must acknowledge this strategy as their own competitive edge in their respective market and for such assets are keys which will never be duplicated by competitors.

 

The Filipino Psychology

There has been a lot of misconceptions about how western countries view the psychology of the Filipino people. Dr. Virgilio Enriquez, the Father of Philippine Psychology himself, pinpointed the emotional values of Filipinos that many western ideologies had subjected into bad light.

Enriquez highlighted in his contributions to the study regarding the emotional intelligence of the Filipino people the three core values that have been uniquely shared in its culture.

First is the concept of “Kapwa” or shared identity which emphasizes how Filipino communities have been established.  Everyone in the community is generally inclined with a people-centered orientation, that they are morally-obliged to connect and to build relationship with others.

Second is the shared inner nobility or the spirit of “Bayanihan” where people are willing to offer a helping hand for a common cause.

Lastly, intuition or in the western psychology, specifically known as emotional intelligence. This has been an innate quality among Filipinos where they can naturally read body languages, tone of voice, and hidden emotions by mere gut- feeling.

For Westerners, the ‘as- God- wills’ attitude among Filipinos is a sign of fatalism but in actuality, it is an expression of determination and preparedness to face whatever challenge is ahead. Some foreign countries also regard the concept of “debt of gratitude” as a return of favor with interest but on the contrary, it is not a debt obliged to be paid but only a regard to kindness being offered. The natural expression of shame among locals was also misunderstood by westerners as on how awkward we are to become socially acceptable but in fact, it is just our innate sense of propriety to whatever circumstances we get involved with. Even the way Filipinos aim for companionship was a misconception to debunk as it was regarded to avoid arguments or conflicts but in reality, it is just natural for many Filipinos to long for camaraderie, build relationships, and form harmonious community, and as a norm, Filipinos give the best treatment they think every human deserves. Lastly, Filipinos were seen as being too emotional. Studies have shown that the Philippines topped as the home of the World’s most emotional people, while Singapore, being the least. But to be more precise, being emotional is an understatement.

Psychologist regarded this behavior distinctively as emotional expressiveness, a relevant indicator of emotional intelligence. Expressiveness comes along with awareness in recognizing the entirety of emotionality.

After all, EQ is not being emotional alone, it is an umbrella term for skills such as: self- awareness, interpersonal communication, flexibility, stress management, and optimism.

Singapore has actually pioneered emotional intelligence education because of their alarming status on EQ while the United States, which doesn’t appear at the forefront in the statistic, has still to work on their level of self- awareness, a skill innate for 60% of Filipino people.

This nature has been considered by psychologists from Spaniards which had an occupancy of three centuries in the archipelago.  

While emotional intelligence is a set of core skills and competencies that we could learn and develop as we grow, Filipinos, in general, are innate to be intelligent emotionally.

Seasoned recruiters will always have an eye for star performers. Learn more of our best practices in talent acquisition and let us collaborate to achieve your business goals.

ABOUT THE COMPANY: Rensol Recruitment and Consulting, Inc. is the fastest growing recruitment agency in The Philippines. A career consultant that aims to go above and beyond the level of expectations of both the aspirations of the candidates and the dream team standards of employers through providing exceptional opportunities and unparalleled quality-driven recruitment services.