Student’s Corner
Student’s corner is an exclusive section of Lsquare that brings to you the literary creation, pen-craft, creative content contributed by students.
A Solitary Night
The stars had just been switched on
The moony bulb glowing bright
The earth beneath turned cold
With the onset of a lonely night.
The bed sheet was crumpled
Her restless mind driving her from side to side
She got up and lurched towards the window
Watching an owl glide.
“Hedwig?” she called out
Dampening the glass by cold air
“How stupid” she thought
Harry is to be found nowhere.
A cup of coffee? Or ice cream?
Her mind had a feud
Finding a way to pull her
Out of solitude.
From Instagram to Netflix
The Chrome tabs switching
She witnessed things that night
That had never made a meaning.
A wide spectrum of emotions
Built in her eyes
Fear,rebel, beauty and
Love accompanied with cries.
5:30 on the clock
Her eyelids rolled down
When “Cinderella” was just dressed up
In her magical gown.
Not much after she scattered
The sun woke up yawning
Trying to diverge the winter clouds
And emerge out shining..
To slay away all her darkness
With lustrous rays of hope
To bless her with strength and courage
To march forward on the fallen slope.
And then she arose
Stronger than afore..
More beautiful than her..
Reflection in the mirror,
With heroism surged up in her veins
To meet head on with her inner strife
To win over it; for a better life
– Dodia Vinit Anil Kumar
PGP 2021-23
EQ- Emotional intelligence in the workplace
“There are certain emotions that will kill your drive; frustration and confusion. You can change these to a positive force. Frustration means you are on the verge of a breakthrough. Confusion can mean you are about to learn something. Expect the breakthrough and expect to learn.” — Kathleen Spike
We have grown up in a schooling system in which marks were considered the main comparison factor. More the marks, more the intelligence. While we can sit and discuss all the things wrong with our education system, it is inherently built into our society and will take a huge amount of time to change. It was at school where we first learned about IQ and started on online tests to compare it. Well, a while back companies were also focused mainly on IQ levels and had their reasons(good enough) for that. But now, the wave is changing. In the recent past, companies have started to consider emotional intelligence or EQ as a parameter in finalizing prospective employees.
“According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, emotional intelligence will be one of the top 10 job skills in 2020.”
Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage your emotions. While this might seem as a very easy task, it comes at a great cost of being emotionally developed. How do you react to useless ramblings? How does gossip around the workplace affect you? How do you convince a client by identifying his needs and forming your sentences accordingly? These are all the questions that matter in the workplace right now.
Emotional intelligence can be broken down into 5 major areas:
- Self-awareness, requires a person to understand his strengths, weaknesses, values and the impact of those values. The end goal of self-awareness is to use these strengths and weaknesses accordingly.
- Self-management is basically the monitoring and controlling of one’s emotions. For eg how do you react if your team messes up a task? How do you motivate them to do better by channeling your anger towards something positive?
- Motivation, as we all know, is what drives a person to be doing what he is doing and how to use it for maximum productivity
- Empathy is the quality of relating to someone’s state and understanding their situation.
- Finally, social skills, which help in developing relations and influencing people
Now that we know the key elements of emotional intelligence, let’s focus on why we need it at our workplace. Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical company, focused on the emotional intelligence skills of its sales force, which boosted annual performance by 12 percent (see the research by S. Jennings and B.R. Palmer in “Sales Performance Through Emotional Intelligence Development,” Organizations and People, 2007). So, it must be of a great value.
People with high EQ make $29,000 more annually than people with low EQ. Emotionally intelligent people make great team mates and leaders to work with. Why? Because they know how to control their own emotions along with catering to others needs. Emotional intelligence helps in easier adjustments in new workplace through social skills and in creating a peaceful work environment. If an employee holds his feelings inside without being able to communicate them, they develop into stress. So, high EQ also helps as a stress buster. Finally, the company employing people with higher EQ and working on improving that always stays ahead of the curve. Because once an employee loves working, his productivity increases manifold. From anger management to stress management, emotional intelligence proves to be beneficial in all situations.
The hiring scenario is also changing due to the aforementioned benefits of a high EQ. Approximately 82% of global companies now utilise EQ tests for executive positions; 72% of these companies give the tests to middle management and 59% of companies give the tests to entry-level positions. Along with that, many companies are introducing EQ seminars and workshops to help employees understand it’s benefits and reduce overall stress.
So, how to increase our EQ? Does it have a similar process as IQ? Or do we need some special trainings for having a high EQ? Well, these surely help but assessing and working on our own EQ is quite easy. Observation is the key. How we react to emotional stimulus and what effects does it have on our colleagues and our productivity is one of the key steps to a high EQ. Once, we get self aware, we can understand how to control negative impulses and turn them into positives. And finally, we can become a good leader by assessing the emotional states of our team and by taking prompt decisions.
On a daily basis, we take emotionally charged decisions and base some of them on our gut feelings. Once we understand why our gut feeling says what it says we get in touch with our emotions and become better attuned to assessing situations. That’s what differentiates leaders from others. Their higher EQ makes them well adjusted to uncomfortable situations and allows them to take better thought out decisions. So, EQ is as important as IQ in today’s world and being on a higher EQ level is quite easy. So, let’s work towards it and make our workplace environment better.
“Emotional competence is the single most important personal quality that each of us must develop and access to experience a breakthrough. Only through managing our emotions can we access our intellect and our technical competence. An emotionally competent person performs better under pressure.” –Dave Lennick, Executive VP, American Express Financial Advisers
– Vani Dayal Sharma
PGP 2021-23
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