Enhancing Working Relationships

Many of the challenges faced in today's workplace can be directly attributed to the lack of basic social or 'emotional' skills, where people fail to communicate, motivate, or deal with stress and conflict appropriately. Emotions are at the core of all successful human interactions and endeavours. organizations work more effectively if they have people who can perceive, identify, and manage their collective emotions, which is referred to as 'emotional intelligence'. Dialogue, which relies on emotional intelligence, is a process that changes the way we think and make new meaning together. This study investigates an innovative approach that combines traditional emotional intelligence training with dialoguing learning circle sessions. This approach is used to assist the members of a university based human resources team to better deal with their current challenges and ongoing learning. Results suggest that combining these two different processes can actually augment each other, allowing greater benefits by increasing the collective emotional intelligence of a team. This approach can be used by any workplace to enhance working relationships and team cohesion.