How are your employees coping after the last two years of the pandemic?  Have you checked in with your teams lately, to understand their stress levels?  Have you thought about ways you can coach them through this new way of working?  Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Keynote Speaker Bill Benjamin is on our blog today, walking through how best to use Emotional Intelligence to coach your employees.  And there is more beyond just reading this blog – join his Livecast on April 28th to dive deeper into how you can help your employees!

Leverage Emotional Intelligence-based Coaching to Help Your Employees

After a challenging two years of the pandemic, coupled with supply-chain issues and the labor shortage, organizations are facing another epidemic:  stress and burnout of their employees.  According to the American Psychological Association’s Work and Well-being Survey of 1,501 U.S. adult workers, 79% of employees had experienced work-related stress in the month before the survey. Nearly 3 in 5 employees reported negative impacts of work-related stress, including lack of interest, motivation, or energy (26%) and lack of effort at work (19%). Meanwhile, 36% reported cognitive weariness, 32% reported emotional exhaustion, and an astounding 44% reported physical fatigue.

There are many approaches that organizations take to address stress and burnout, but one of the most overlooked strategies is coaching of employees by their manager.   Often managers/leaders are feeling overwhelmed and burnt out themselves, and don’t feel they have the time or the skill to coach their employees to deal with stress and burnout.  

According to Personnel Today:  “Coaching skills include active listening, purposeful questioning, and providing helpful and objective feedback. The client, or ‘coachee’, is responsible for making progress towards achieving defined goals. Essentially, coaching is a process of equipping people with the tools, confidence, knowledge and opportunities necessary for more effective self-development.”

Typical coaching focuses on skill development and behavior change.  Stress and burnout are based on emotions, so coaching that is going to help an employee deal with these issues must address the underlying emotions that are driving their stress.  Examples of emotions that create the stress and anxiety people feel are:

• Not feeling the ability to be competent or successful
• Not feeling recognized and valued
• Feeling out of control
• Feelings of uncertainty
• Not feeling understood
• Not feeling heard and listened to
• Feeling of not being treated fairly

When a coach can connect to these and other emotions that lead to stress and burnout, it will help those employees gain awareness that these emotions are leading to their stress, and provide them with the ability to manage those emotions.  This type of coaching also leads to an employee feeling heard, understood and valued by their manager, which in and of itself, helps reduce stress.

The challenge is that many managers and leaders don’t recognize the importance of this type of coaching, and even if they do, many don’t have the skills to do Emotional Intelligence based coaching.

On April 28th at 2:00-3:00 EST, Bill Benjamin, an Emotional Intelligence expert will be joined by Jennifer York, Learning and Leadership Development Manager at Maxar Technologies for a Livecast focusing on how managers can learn Emotional Intelligence based coaching skills to address burnout and stress, as well as drive performance, engagement and retention.