Leading with Emotional Intelligence for Stress Management

Globalisation, technological changes, and the resultant chaotic business environment have led to large-scale changes in organisations. The new business dynamics has generated pressures on all – the top leadership, middle management, and supervisory personnel – to build a facilitative culture that is oriented to customer demands, employee needs, and sustainable business growth.

Great organisations are able to develop the capability to align themselves quickly with the internal and external changes that are brought in by the new compulsions. They keep evolving and redesigning themselves for an appropriate response to the changing business scenario. Towards this goal, they focus themselves on building a dynamic structure, engaging culture, organisational leadership brand and the requisite people capabilities. Research reveals that managing change becomes more efficacious if employees’ concerns are addressed along with business issues. The redesigned agendas of some leading organisations even envisage “people first and customer second” focus. These perspectives necessitate organisation-building through interventions such as leadership competencies development, responsive organization design, learning organization, employee involvement, attitudinal change programme, and people-centric culture. In terms of developing and internalising specific skills to move to the next level of organisational growth, this involves, among others, focusing on personal leadership development, ability to nurture psychological contract, developing a caring and fun culture as a way of organisational life, entrepreneurially innovative mindset, ability to bounce back under crisis, emotionally intelligent citizenship, and aligning people issues with business needs.