15 March 2010

It is October 1995 that Daniel Goleman's book 'Emotional Intelligence' is introduced and published by Bantam Books USA. Six Seconds, based on his views, is a non profit American organization founded in 1997 and dedicated to bring emotional intelligence into practice in schools, families, organizations, and communities.   Their mission is to support people to make a positive difference - everywhere - all the time. Joshua Freedman, chief operating officer and master trainer of this Six Seconds organisation, just publishes its 2010 workplaces issues report called 'what are the top issues in organizations to day'. This publication 'captures input from 279 leaders and employees from a variety of sectors around the globe'.
Six Seconds invited those leaders to identify the key challenges in the workplace today – and particularly 'the people side' of it. The survey explores top issues and nowadays are 65% of the pressing issues on 'the people side' and 35% on the financial/technical side. In 2007 this was 76 versus 24%. The most pressing challenge today is maintaining a healthy culture under intense economic pressure. And respondents identify several aspects of leadership as the key to this, especially vision, feedback, and communication. Getting and keeping good people - especially 'people people' - will make the difference' they say. And 89% of the respondents said feelings are highly important or essential in solving the problems they face. Only 8% of the respondents report that they're fully trained to deal with the issues they're seeing.
Training, coaching and mentoring are all seen as valuable to cope with the situations of to day. Coaching is 6% more needed than training and mentoring 12% more needed than training is the result. Respondents see, that emotions are a major component of the problems they describe, and that emotional intelligence is extremely important for solving the organizational challenges. But the emotional intelligence development is not yet an organizational priority.
The regions where the responses came from are: Canada and USA 62%, Europe 12%, Oceania 12%, Middle East 11%, Central and South America 2% and Africa 1%. The participants came for 31% from the executive level, 26% upper manager, 15% team manager, 19% middle manager and 9% line manager. Summarizing they say: 'People are uncertain and distressed; they perceive very serious 'people needs' but don't see organizations making those a priority. While people understand that their organizations are in 'survival mode', they don't like how it feels. There is widespread recognition that this difficult combination will lead to a dangerous loss of talent'.
Thanks for this survey that makes so clear how important emotions, also on the shop floor, are!

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