How to make yourself more effective

One of the first questions we get asked is often, “how can I become more successful?”.

My first response is always to emphasise the importance of defining your own vision of success and assessing your belief in it. Once you have this clearly in view, you have set yourself a definite goal. You can then begin to consider how you’re going to achieve that goal and focus on the objectives that need to be met and not the tasks that you need to carry out.

Your ability to achieve these goals depends to a large degree on your own drive, motivation and the strength of your aspiration to succeed. Your level of intelligence is also significant, although in a different way from the traditional academic measurement that comes to mind. You will find that a significant component of business success rests on your ability to apply your emotional intelligence.

What is emotional intelligence?
To put it simply, emotional intelligence is your empathy. This is the capacity of your mind to understand both your own and other people’s emotions. This capacity to balance your own emotional state against that of others enables you to reason, understand situations and begin to move towards problem-solving.

How can it be used in the work environment?
The Hay’s Group has conducted a study that identifies four key attributes:

• Self-awareness
• Social awareness
• Self-management
• Relationship management

Self-awareness
This is the most important starting point to improved emotional intelligence. Ask yourself how what you’re saying to them is impacting other people:

“What effect am I having on my workforce?”

“Is it positive?”

“Is it helping to develop my team?”

“Is it helping to resolve an issue?”

We often refer to this as the importance of what is heard as opposed to what is being said. A good starting point here is to ask people what they have heard when you speak to them. This will help you to develop a broader understanding of how you communicate and how you can improve.

Social awareness
Increasing your social awareness will help you to develop empathy with other people.

Ask yourself how they are responding to you? Tone and language are vital in this area, if you consider and adapt to how your behaviour is received, people will find you more approachable. This will then give them more confidence, be more creative, and contribute new ideas, all of which will help the business.

Self-management
Once you are aware of how you impact others, you will begin to understand more about your business practices.

Examine what you actually do, and ask yourself whether you’re being effective and/or efficient. Are you properly prioritising what you do? Are you building towards your key objectives?

This is an important consideration, which will help you focus on identifying the key priorities and putting them first. It will also help to improve your self-awareness.

Relationship management
Recognising how to manage your own practices will help you to manage others more effectively and to evolve your own leadership style. The more you consider how your interactions with others are received, the more you will be aware of how you can adapt them to make them more effective.

During our mentoring sessions with clients, we often spend quite a lot of time discussing this area and reflecting on how people can improve. If this is something that interests you, please do get in touch on the link below.

Our team at BHP Consulting all run successful businesses, we understand that businesses are unique and our approach involves sharing this experience to improve your business. For an initial telephone conversation or face-to-face meeting, click here