Any business and almost any career require an ability to communicate successfully with other people. When you expand the work environment to a global level, it requires extra special communication skills in order to succeed in business as a leader.  As Moran, Abramson, and Moran (2014) indicate, to increase the effectiveness across the cultures, training must be the focus for the leaders. Good education, high IQ score is no longer good enough to be a leader I was told by my manager recently, on the 2017 performance evaluation he actually asked me to work on my emotional intelligence.

Consistently providing beyond the expected performance is great but he pulled out some of my emails for an example to explain why I needed to work on my emotional intelligence. He said “when you encode your emails they are very direct and precise to me but your peers are taking that like an order from you. So, when you want to make an offer for help put yourself in their shoes. Imagine not being part of the email chain with the Global team all the time like you. So, when you compose your emails if they are related to them make sure encode it with empathy so that they can decode it feeling like they are being empowered by you. This is going to be your growth plan this year, the only requirement I want from you especially now that you are working on a global scale”.

Although English is not my native language, it is the international language of commerce, in order to conduct a successful business across the continents, just like the global leaders, I need to develop emotional intelligence in order to conduct a successful business.  Whether they like to or not, leaders are in charge of managing the mood of their organizations. When the organization in the global level, maintaining the mood and communication can be even more challenging. Therefore, the leaders have to improve their emotional intelligence.

Where does Emotional Intelligence come from? And why it has become a key element in effective Global Communication. John D. Mayer (2004) defined Emotional Intelligence in HBR article that “From a scientific (rather than a popular) standpoint, emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships, and to manage your own and others’ emotions. It doesn’t necessarily include the qualities (like optimism, initiative, and self-confidence) that some popular definitions ascribe to it”.

According to Coleman, there are five key elements that constitute into emotional intelligence that leaders must have.  Those are; self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills (Moran, Abramson, and Moran, 2014).  When a leader combines those skills into their existing intelligence level, they can become a more globally well rounded skillful leader. Certainly, in a world that where most of the communications are composed electronically, emotional intelligence becomes a key factor in understanding self and others. Unlike IQ, emotional intelligence requires a lifelong learning.

Personally, every leader whether they have been in a leadership role long enough or not should invest their personal effort to improve their emotional intelligence. Once they learn to adapt, they will be able to see others from a different perspective, negotiate better and certainly empathize others.

References:

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing Cultural Differences (Ninth ed.). New York: Routledge.

Ovans, Andrea (2015) Harvard Business Review.  How Emotional Intelligence Became a Key Leadership Skill. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/04/how-emotional-intelligence-became-a-key-leadership-skill on February 1, 2018.

The usual patterns in work environment blind us to the things that exist in plain sight. In order to notice new things, we need to expose ourselves to think outside of the box and create cross-connections that are not bound by our pre-existing physical networks. In other words, with the developing technology companies expand their zones across borders and we find ourselves in the need of learning the virtual diversity. And to understand and appreciate this new unique concept, where our co-workers could be living in another country, and where we connect with them only via Skype or electronic mails, or phone. That being the case how are we going to understand their culture.

Before in order to understand someone’s culture different than ours, we could either visit where they reside and live or learn directly from that person. But nowadays, when we are connected to people we work only via virtual world, it brings many challenges.

Culture itself takes many forms, commonly related to diversity; age, gender and ethnicity of the people we work on a daily basis. If you have a job like mine, where traveling every week to another city. You will struggle to maintain a healthy relationship with your peers and maintain the strong bond once you had. In most times, I see my co-workers once or twice a year. I belong to the same team, yet very disconnected with them due to working on the road where everything is communicated in a virtual world.

Think about how much your organization relies on a virtual environment.  Is your team or organization full of people like you? Do they come from the same race, gender or age group or share the same socioeconomic or educational background? Do they think like you do? If you are connected with your co-workers only with your electronic devices like me, sense of knowing them, having a connection will be slim.

We are designed to feel safer and collaborate more easily with people with whom we share a great deal in common. When we feel safe, the frontal lobes are freer to think creatively. When we feel, safe and connected, there comes the culture. Culture gives people sense of belonging, feel of who they are, of how they should behave, or what they should be doing (Moran, et al., 2014). And finding the time for a happy hour with your co-workers in a virtual world is impossible.

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing Cultural Differences (Ninth edition.). New York: Routledge.

Hello all,

My name is Pinar. Sorry for the official photo, this is the only picture of me I have on my work laptop 🙂 I am originally from Istanbul, Turkey, however, I have been living in Michigan for the past 27 years. I am married and I have identical twin daughters who are sophomores at Michigan State University    I am currently working at GE Healthcare as a Lead Clinical Specialist for the Strategic Academic accounts. My background is Neuro-interventional Radiology, I have worked in Neuro Angio labs for about 12 years and 7 years ago I left the hospitals and moved on to the corporate world. I do not have an official managerial role but I am the lead for the team of 13 people. I have recently applied for a management role for the team I work with, unfortunately, I did not get the job. First I was upset but now looking back it was a good thing. I will graduate in Summer 18 with BS in Organizational Leadership degree and hopefully, I will find an opportunity to grow in my current division within GE.

My favorite Leadership quote is from legendary Jack Welsh “Great leaders love to see people grow. The day you are afraid of them being better than you is the day you fail as a leader.”

Lasty, one interesting fact about me I used to play volleyball and won a world championship when I was in highschool in 1988. Wishing all of you the best in this class.

Pinar

https://sites.psu.edu/global/2018/01/08/3251/