Geoff Marsh: Tackling Difficult Situations At Work

And linking onto that, what role do you think emotional intelligence play in managing conflict and difficult conversations? Do you need to be emotionally intelligent, do you think, to do that right?

Yes, hugely, hugely.

If you look at the sort of three dimensions, and I think this was John Adair and his action-centered leadership, who said that the working environment for a manager is made up of three dimensions, the task, the team, and the individual.

Of course, we want to get our jobs done.

Of course, we've got our targets to meet our KPIs, our objectives, our results.

But we've also got to keep in mind it's human beings that are doing these jobs.

So we have the team dimension.

That's where we require the team to cooperate.

A group of people working together are normally capable of producing more than they can do working individually.

But even so, you've still got the individual element.

Each of us have.

our personal issues, our family issues, our health issues, our concerns about our careers, our ambitions, our fears.

And if the manager ignores all of those because they're only focusing on the task dimension, they won't get the task done.

It's very easy to say you should leave your personal life outside of work, but we're not robots, we're human beings.

And if you have health issues or family issues, inevitably as a human being, they do come into the scenario and we're sensitive.

If your manager is criticizing you or telling you you didn't do something, then your response is not always going to be a logical response.

That fight or flight kicks in very quickly and you get embarrassed and you might get tearful or you might get to the stage of feeling anxious and therefore the result doesn't come across.

But emotional intelligence is about choice.

We often think that when Something happens to us, a stimuli, for example, somebody shouts at us, something goes wrong, a technology doesn't work.

That's the stimuli.

But we are able to choose our responses to that.

We choose our responses much more than we think we do.

And when somebody shouts at us, before I instantly go into my natural reaction, which might be to fight back or to hide, it might help if I'm able to process where that person is at this particular time.

I know that they've just had a bereavement in the family.

I know that they've been under a lot of pressure recently.