THE BEST OF CARE

By Susan Muldowney

Didier Moutia AFMIL began volunteering with St John Ambulance when he was 16 and says the decades of experience have provided valuable management lessons.

“In a typical job, you do things because you’re getting a pay packet,” he says. “At places like St John, people are volunteering their time, so you have to think about how to make them engaged with what they’re doing and how you can achieve a consensus. It gives you a whole set of different skills that you can use in your corporate life.”

St John Ambulance is a self-funding charitable organisation that provides first aid services, training and equipment in more than 40 countries. Active in Australia for more than 130 years, it has about 16,000 volunteers and the training they provide has resulted in 500,000 first aid certificates. Moutia started as a St John cadet and says the experience led to his career in nursing.

“I really liked St John’s approach and how they managed patient care. It was very holistic and they were all extremely knowledgeable yet humble at the same time. They were able to communicate with patients and their family members in a way that gave them reassurance and broke down information so they could digest it. It got me thinking that nursing could be for me because I liked the people side of it.”

“If someone is struggling, we try and identify that early on and refer them to an appropriate resource.”

After working as a theatre nurse, Moutia joined medical software company InterSystems in 1998. “I’m still doing something that I did in nursing, which is influencing outcomes for patients, but I’m doing it by delivering the technology that assists and supports it,” he explains. “I bring a bit of realism to what we do. I make sure that what we deliver to a clinician is something that’s very usable and saves them time but ultimately improves patient care.”

Moutia has held various positions at St John, including commissioner in NSW, and is now peer support coordinator for the state. “If anyone needs peer support or if there’s been a critical incident, such as a patient having a cardiac arrest, my job is to make sure that whoever was involved gets the peer support they need. As a minimum, we would call them to see if they’re OK after the incident. If someone is struggling, we try to identify that early and refer them to an appropriate resource to help them.”

Volunteer work occupies about 20 hours of Moutia’s week and he says balancing it with his day job comes down to careful planning. “I just have to be really organised with my diary,” he says. “I’ve been volunteering with them for so long it’s just part of my life now. I have a philosophy – when you’re doing one thing, do it really well. In other words, I try not to multitask. When I’m at work, I’m at work. When I’m at St John, I’m at St John.”

Good leadership relies on high EQ. But how do you know if you are an emotionally intelligent leader? By Nicola Heath

It’s not just a buzzword. In the modern workplace, emotional intelligence often outranks technical ability.

“Businesses don’t want to hire people just based on their IQ,” says Ushma Dhanak, a HR specialist who runs Collaborate HR, a consultancy offering HR support to SMEs. “It’s all about how to manage people, how to lead people, how to read your own emotions and how to use that skill to read the emotions of others and respond accordingly.”

EQ is the “X-factor” that creates effective leaders, says Dhanak. Studies have established a strong link between emotional intelligence and business performance. It’s also linked to employee engagement. “If a business has a highly-engaged workforce, it means there are more people or leaders managing them with higher EQ,” she says.

Emotional intelligence has been on the radar since 1990, when psychology professors John D. Mayer of University of New Hampshire and Peter Salovey of Yale coined the term in a research paper.

In 1998, Rutgers psychologist Daniel Goleman linked emotional intelligence to leadership in an influential article published in Harvard Business Review titled ‘What Makes a Leader’. Without emotional intelligence, he wrote, “a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.”

Today Dhanak runs EQ workshops for a range of clients including the Australia Federal Police, marketing and advertising companies and dental practices. “We use emotional intelligence techniques to help the business manage HR issues, and focus on the leadership teams to really make them aware of how they’re feeling and what that impact is having on their team.”

 

What’s your EQ?

Workplaces lacking in emotional intelligence are often plagued by problems such as micromanagement, a lack of trust and bullying.

To help leaders gauge their own emotional intelligence, Dhanak has created a list of 10 signs that an individual lacks EQ:

1. You are easily stressed and irritated
2. You treat people rashly and unfairly
3. You are wrapped up in your own world
4. You are over-confident
5. You fear change
6. You take failure badly
7. You get into conflicts easily
8. You interrupt and don’t listen
9. You find fault with others easily
10. Your relationships break down

 

The first step of Dhanak’s training is a self-assessment, a 10-minute online test that scores respondents across 26 competencies of emotional intelligence, including innovation, creativity and service orientation.

Based on those results Dhanak develops a coaching plan that can be delivered one-on-one or in a series of workshops run over a six to 12-month period.

Many traits contribute to emotional intelligence – empathy, flexibility, honesty, resilience, positivity, the ability to listen – but one of the most crucial is self-awareness. It’s important to understand your strengths and weaknesses and be better prepared for situations when these will be exposed, says Dhanak.

“Can you name the emotions you’re feeling? If you are not aware of what emotion you’re feeling you are not going to be able to read it and explain it to other people.”

---

Want to know more about Emotional Intelligence (EQ)?

Join our webinar on the 30th of August where we discuss the neuroscience behind WHY Emotional Intelligence is so important, as well as practical tips to boost your EQ & take your leadership to a new level.

Book today

 

---

 

The workplace is changing, and with it the skills that workers need to thrive in a digital and diverse environment. Here are four skills that will be in highly sought after by employers in the future:

1. Emotional judgement

EJ, the new EQ, is now a top priority for many employers. “Emotional judgement is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathise with their position,” says Dr Marcus Bowles FIML, founder of the Institute for Working Futures. “It’s also about understanding the impact of the decisions you have to make.”

“EJ correlates strongly with the customer experience in service organisations. For technical experts, engineers and doctors, it’s about empathising with the outcome the client might want and being able to understand that the optimal solution may not be the best solution.”

2. Global citizenship

This encompasses cross-cultural work and diversity, says Bowles. “If you can’t empathise with different views of the world then it’s very hard for you to work in that context.”

Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?

3. Courage

“A lot of organisations don’t just want people who can innovate, they want people who can advocate for the customer,” says Bowles. Courage is a desirable quality that shows up among natural learning strings in organisations. “Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?”

4. Foresighting

Visionary leadership is about to take on a whole new meaning. “Can you see through the macro-trend to spot the business opportunity?” You’ll need to.