Page 283 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Emotional Skills | 271

• Service orientation: Anticipating, recognizing, and fulfilling institutional
needs.
• Developing others: Seeking students’ development needs and
bolstering their attitudes.
• Leveraging diversity: Cultivating opportunities through diverse
people.
• Awareness: Being aware of the social, political, and emotional currents
in the institutions/organizations.
Two most important competencies required in teaching are emotional or
supportive communication, and the art of listening. We have discussed in
detail what supportive communication is.
We do much better in our profession when we listen well and empathize.
A finely tuned ear is at the heart of empathy. Listening well is essential to
success at work and those who cannot, or do not listen, come across as
indifferent or uncaring, which in turn makes others less communicative.
Listening is also an art, and the first step is to make the others aware that
one is open to listening. Teachers with an ‘open door’ policy, who appear
approachable or go out of their way to hear what people have to say, ‘Embody
this competence’. Naturally then, who seem easy to talk to are those who get
to hear more.
Emotional competence is a learned capability based on emotional intel-
ligence that results in outstanding performance at work. Our emotional
intelligence determines our potential for learning the practical skills that
are based on its five elements: self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation,
empathy, and adeptness in relationships. Our emotional competence shows
how much of that potential we have translated into on-the-job capabilities.
For instance, being a caring and understanding teacher is an emotional
competence based on empathy. Likewise, trustworthiness is a competence
based on self-regulation or handling impulses and emotions well.
Emotional competencies are categorized into groups, each based on a
common underlying emotional intelligence capacity. The underlying emo-
tional intelligence capacities are vital, if people are to successful in learning
the competencies necessary to succeed in the work place. If they are deficient
in social skills, for instance, they will be inept at persuading or improving others,
at leading the team, or catalyzing change. If they have little self-awareness
they will be oblivious to their own weakness and lack self-confidence that
comes from the certainty about their strength.
There are four dimensions of emotional intelligence and the twenty-five
emotional competences. None of us is perfect; we inevitably have a profile
of strengths and limits. But as we shall see, the ingredients for outstanding
performance require only the fact that we have strengths in a given number

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