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I invite you to think differently about your work contributions using my Smarter Kinder EQ Professional Development Strategy. Feel Smarter Think Kinder.
What is the Smarter Kinder EQ Strategy?
The Feel Smarter Think Kinder EQ Strategy is a Professional Development Strategy for you to use in your daily work as well as in you broader career development.
Our Smarter Kinder Professional Development strategy provides a means to equip you to focus on those professional development opportunities that can underpin both a successful career and an enhanced sense of wellbeing.
Strategic Professional Development Standpoint
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is reframed by adopting a strategic professional development standpoint as follows:
Defining Core Emotional Intelligence (EQ) skills that you need to develop personally to optimise your own professional and business career.
Core EQ applies an educative not therapeutic lens to guide you in unpacking your work tasks. There is no role for psychology or counselling in our work together. This applies equally to the equine experiential education exercises we facilitate.
Our robust educative model and reflective tools help you clarify your emotional intelligence strengths and challenges.
The Leaderwork Job Crafting Method and Exercises equip you to conduct your own analysis partly in our Smarter Kinder Workshop, and then in your own time, based on your unique work and learning experiences.
We help make your invisible work more visible to you and, if you choose, also your workplace and profession.
Job Crafting
Undertaking a Job Crafting approach to your role can empower you to capture, define and document your learnings about the work you actually do. As you progress in your career you can build on this initial foundation to create a personal knowledge base of practical wisdom about your work and learning as a professional and as an organisational worker.
In further articles, about Job Crafting and Role Sculpting, the benefits to working professionals of using this technique will be explored.
Approaches to Job Crafting have evolved. A useful perspective is the Bakker and Demerouti (2007) JD-R Model which considers the characteristics of our jobs—psychological, physical, organizational, and social aspects—as either demands or resources and how these interact to impact a person's motivation:
Job demands require that we put in physical or psychological effort or skills; they ‘cost’ us something. Emotional strain and similar are popular examples of job demands, which can lead to costs like stress, burnout, and related stressors when they become extreme (Bakker et al., 2003; Bakker & Demerouti, 2008).
Job resources help us accomplish our work goals and we can draw on these facilitators to counter the potentially negative impacts of job demands. They can be made available by organisations or they can be personal, respectively these are workplace resources or personal resources. (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008).
According to the JD-R model, we can impact our work challenges in several ways. Firstly, by increasing our job resources – We can use relationship crafting, for instance, to increase social resources. Another example is to add to our personal structural resources (training, autonomy, etc) through task crafting. And secondly we can endeavour to increase or reduce our job demands – to a pleasantly challenging extent.
The JD-R model is very reliant on support from the workplace and profession and therefore is impacted significantly by workplace and organisational cultures. For example, authoritarian workplace cultures are most unlikely to provide resources or to be open to reducing job demands.
Professional Development Strategy
The Smarter Kinder EQ Strategy applies to both professional and organisational work Its application can help to understand the nature and extent of a practitioner's professional development at work, including Professional and Organisational leadership.
To understand the application of the strategy requires us to consider some key concepts of mainstream professional learning theory.
Key Features
The key features of the Smarter Kinder Strategy are:
It captures when valuable learning by a person at work, occurs, whether, as a professional, or organisational worker i.e. allegiance either to professional standards or organisational norms
It examines and interrogates the different values and beliefs evident in professional and organisational work and how they impact a person's motivation, self-esteem and work performance.
Applies a critical reflection lens to that part of the work I define as Leaderwork thus guiding a person to identify and understand that work they do to achieve better practice.
Adopts the framework of [Legal] Working Culture to understand how well the organisational culture supports this work and learning.
The Benefits for the Working Professional
Applying the Smarter Kinder Strategy can guide you to recognise and articulate the key milestones in your professional work at which time you achieved better work (practice), i.e.:
the work you do to make things better (Leaderwork).
Often you will have done this work in isolation from the formal performance and development systems produced in your workplace. Here there is a direct link to Job Crafting because it involves the development and work changes you have self-initiated.
You will gain valuable insights and skills into how and when to better advocate for the recognition, and where appropriate codification, of this better practice work.
The Professional Organisation
As discussed elsewhere it is possible to codify leaderwork (best practice work outputs) and to map it into an enterprise or professional capability framework. However to realise the full potential of this approach it is necessary to have the active support of your organisation and, when appropriate, also the profession.
Including the leaderwork or better practice work and learning into an organisation's capability framework will provide a more comprehensive, supportive and respectful learning and development system.
Opportunity Cost Analysis
It follows that generally speaking leaderwork (better practice work output) is not always validated, much less celebrated, in your workplace or profession.
This is not necessarily because of any deliberate intention by those in charge because people are busy preoccupied professionals. And this kind of work just seems like more documentation to do. Operational objections can include:
Too touchy feely
Self-initiated - not in line with strategic organisational goals
Not practical enough
Too theoretical.
Yet if an effective and efficient means is found to capture this valuable "knowing," about what we do around here, then there are clear benefits to the individual, their work team and the organisation.
At the very least an appreciative enquiry approach which acknowledges such work will be motivational and respectful to the individual person.
Benefits for People and Culture
For enlightened organisations the Feel Smarter Think Kinder EQ (Professional Development) Strategy concepts and tools developed by Core EQ provide a rigorous methodology to build a Kinder Smarter Capability Framework.
Additionally they:
underpin Job Crafting initiatives.
provide an invigorated means to engage in constructive conversations with your professional workers about their individual contributions and performance.
equip you to engage more effectively with your people
provide you with crucial data about the health of your working culture and the performance and wellbeing of your people.
It may also identify undesirable behaviours which target individuals whose motivation is to simply improve their work. These targeting behaviours can at times amount to bullying.
General Application
The concepts, method and tools referred to above have been refined in consulting work, over the past decade, to the point that they are now generally applicable to many workplaces and professions.
The Equine (EQ) Link
Equine Experiential Education programs can significantly assist you to tap into your EQ and leaderwork capabilities by guiding you in how to draw on your unique strengths and attributes
Dr Deb 8 December 2023
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