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Introduction
Dr Grant Crow, managing director of StepStone ExecuTRACK, discusses why emotional intelligence is important for all organizations. He outlines the program he developed for his own team and explains how it realized the tangible benefits of organic growth, improved customer satisfaction and consistent customer retention rates that mean the program is soon to be rolled out to the wider organization.
StepStone Box 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] is probably more in tune with talent management as a major business issue than most organizations. As a provider of talent management solutions, it is our entire raison d'être . We have the same needs as any of our customers in terms of attracting, recruiting, developing and retaining good employees by giving them the right mixture of development opportunities linked to ongoing performance and career management. As StepStone expands and the talent management industry matures and competition intensifies, it is particularly important for our people to improve their relationship management capabilities by developing greater levels of emotional intelligence.
The growing importance of EQ in IT
People who work in IT very often struggle against the "geek" stereotype and we can come across as being very focused and intense. This occurs because we work in a world that has a very specific vocabulary and structure, which is totally different from that of the real world. The focus of our work has traditionally been on achieving technical excellence and ensuring that the systems we deploy physically do what the customer wants. This is obviously still totally relevant, but the emphasis is shifting.
Over the past few years the marketplace for software applications, which essentially focuses on human capital management, has become highly competitive. To sustain growth levels, suppliers need to forge stronger relationships with customers and help them go beyond "do what they asked for" solutions. This calls for a more consultative relationship whereby we help to interpret and indeed predict their business needs from a technological perspective. For our customers to really benefit strategically from our applications we need people who can get inside their businesses and help them identify what they need to do to realize the full business benefits of the solution. As technical specialists get more involved in clients' operational strategies, emotional intelligence becomes...