The Emotionally Intelligent Office 20 Key Emotional Skills for the Workplace

Pdf Book Name: The Emotionally Intelligent Office 20 Key Emotional Skills for the Workplace
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ISBN-10, 13:
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Language: English
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The Emotionally Intelligent Office 20 Key Emotional Skills for the Workplace Pdf Book Description:

A good business education teaches us a host of vital skills: how to navigate a balance sheet, analyze competitors, negotiate contracts, market and sell. But when we reach the office, we may be confronted by other, less familiar, kinds of challenges: the person at the desk opposite us with the charming manner who enthusiastically agrees with whomever they’re speaking to yet harbours a range of toxic reservations and privately pursues their own unstated agenda; the person who responds to polite criticism or well meaning feedback with immediate hurt and fury; the person who follows orders dutifully but cannot generate an original vision or initiative; the person who manifests a rivalrous and factional nature… In days gone by, when work only required people to turn a boat swiftly starboard, push coal trolleys up a hill, or increase the rate of production at a blast furnace, psychological dynamics were of negligible economic importance or interest. A worker could feel underappreciated, bullied and belittled and still perform their role perfectly.

Even when they hated the supervisor and there were communication issues in the team, they could operate the brick making machine at optimal speed. If the head gardener had a macho streak, the men watering in the greenhouses or pruning in the orchard could not imagine they would work for anyone much better. Emotional distress could be ignored. Yet many of us now labour with our minds (and souls) far more than with our bodies. Our work requires from us continuous interaction, creativity, personal service and intellectual concentration, and is therefore susceptible to the prevailing emotional atmosphere. The quality of our efforts has grown reliant on tricky, elusive fare: a sense of meaning, respect, inner fulfilment, encouragement and a spirit close to friendship. A wounding comment or curt interaction may ruin the productive potential of an afternoon. Profitability has grown reliant on feelings.So peculiar and awkward is this phenomenon, it is tempting to deny that it might even exist. It would be much easier if workers could remain at all times ‘professional’ – that is, logical, efficient, straightforward, insensitive to mild insult, responsive to brute command and uninclined to mental breakdown. We are under pressure to forget the difficult truth that we know from personal life: that humans are exhaustingly complex, unpredictable and fragile. Our desire to assume that the workplace is emotionally simpler than it really is has been partly sustained by its long-standing neglect at the hands of culture. Films, novels and art dealing with the emotional aspects of office life have been in a minority, and this gap has hampered our ability to understand the significance of our real experiences at work.