Make Emotional Capital Work for You & Your Team

Cambridge Dictionaries Online defines Emotional Capital as: “The feelings and beliefs that help an organization’s employees to form successful relationships with each other, which is good for the organization.”

Emotional Capital is the glue that holds together the relationship between an identified goal, and commitment to fulfilment of that goal. It is an often overlooked, intangible asset with deep reservoirs. The return on its proper investment can yield tremendous results in employee productivity and engagement.

To put it another way, investing emotional capital can be likened to the everyday concept of “having skin in the game.” When we have skin in the game, we play differently. We do not give up easily. We devise new and ingenious ways to find success. When we invest emotional capital in a thing or another person, we are more likely than not to support that thing or person with a greater measure of enthusiasm than if we had not invested at all. In the same way, whether at work or in our personal lives, the more emotional capital we invest in a goal or vision, the more committed we become to its success.

So how does the savvy leader, manager, supervisor, or coach get an employee to make this type of emotional investment in the workplace? How do we inspire employees to take personal ownership of the tasks and responsibilities associated with their roles/positions?

Below are a few tips to get you started on the way to getting your employees to invest in emotional capital:

• Communicate well, and often.
• In real estate, you always hear, “location, location, location.” It is all about the location. Well, when it comes to employee engagement and investing in emotional capital, it is all about the communication. When people know why they are being asked to do something, and how their performance affects the bigger picture, you are more likely to elicit a higher level of performance from them than if they cannot relate their importance to the success of the whole.

•  Be strategic, purposeful, intentional, and focused.
• I call it “Managing your SPIF.” Be strategic, purposeful, intentional, and focused about knowing your employees. When you know your employees, it is easier to delegate those tasks that you know they “prefer” doing, and subsequently will produce better results, versus delegating tasks they hate and may produce subpar results. Learn your employees and their personalities.
• Go beyond the standard personality profiles and assessments and build relational collateral with your employees. Ask them open-ended questions. Show interest in them. There is a popular saying that I believe to be quite true: “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
• A quick way to discover if you are effectively investing in building healthy, working relationships with your direct reports is to ask yourself if you know how long their commute to work is. If you cannot answer that question, then you are probably not being strategic, purposeful, intentional, and focused enough.
• Research suggests that on average, people spend 60% of conversations talking about themselves, and that this figure jumps to 80% when communicating via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Engage in short bursts of conversations with your employees and you will be pleasantly surprised with how much they share with you. The more you know about them, the easier it is to motivate them and get them to invest emotional capital in the organization’s vision and goals.

• Curb the urge to immediately give the answers.
• Most people are promoted to leadership positions because of their technical ability and knowledge, not because of their leadership skills or ability. As a result, the tendency is to rush to supply answers when their direct reports come to them. Unfortunately, even though it makes the leader feel “good, and needed,” this approach is the perfect recipe for creating a not-engaged, non-initiative taking, dependent employee. It creates non-thinkers and offers no incentive for personal responsibility.
• A more productive and helpful approach is to ask open-ended questions like, “how do you propose we do that?” or, “walk me through your approach?” or, “tell me what you’ve already tried so far.” This approach can be beneficial in several ways. First, it gets the employee more engaged and in a problem-solving mode. Second, it is an excellent opportunity to build relational collateral. Third, it allows the employee to “discover” the answer themselves. When they do, they become responsible for the results. Ultimately, personal responsibility is a great motivator.

Need some help in this area, just reach out and let’s connect!