By Sean Harper, CEO and co-founder at Kin Insurance.
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The right employees are essential to the success of your business, no matter your industry or growth stage. But for an early stage startup, the importance of your team can’t be understated. When you’re just starting out, every employee is a key employee. The wrong hire can cost you a lot of time and money to find and train their replacement. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor found the average cost of a bad hire is up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.
To hire right the first time and retain talent, we invest in emotional intelligence at my company. It informs how we hire, create teams, provide feedback, set standards and manage stress. Emotional intelligence isn’t just a trait some people inherently have, either — it can be cultivated and developed so your team can better work together, deal with conflicts and meet big goals.
Here are five ways you can build and practice emotional intelligence at your workplace.
1. Hire the right people.
Your hiring process lays the groundwork for realizing your company’s vision for its team. If a workplace that prizes emotional intelligence is the goal, it has to start here.
But how do you hire for emotional intelligence? During interviews, use open-ended scenario questions to help identify candidates who already demonstrate the four core competencies of emotional intelligence:
• Self-awareness: Understanding how we react in situations.
• Self-management: The ability to manage how we react.
• Social awareness: Awareness and understanding of others’ feelings and needs.
• Social management: The ability to communicate, influence and lead others.
The assessments should ask what candidates would do in certain scenarios to get a sense of how they would react (or have reacted). For example: “It’s a Friday afternoon, and an end-of-day deadline is approaching. One of your team members is behind on their portion of the task. What would you do?” Depending on their answer, you can tell if the candidate has a team mentality and is dedicated to meeting team goals and willing to step up and help another team member — or not.
The takeaway: Screening candidates for emotional intelligence gives you a leg up on building a team that meets your needs.
2. Put the right people together.
Most organizations have multiple teams. If you’re a startup, teams must be able to move quickly and change course frequently to meet demand. Each team should have a leader who is not just self-aware but also is an effective communicator who can facilitate conflict resolution when needed. Good leaders understand how to elicit the best from those around them.
That starts with understanding each person’s strengths and weaknesses. Team assignments should be based on strengths. A good team has individuals with complementary strengths to support one another.
For example, say you have two employees on your consumer research team. One has excellent organization skills, and the other has amazing social skills. It might make sense to task the more organized person with orchestrating consumer interviews and task the individual with social management skills with interviewing subjects to get the most helpful responses.
The takeaway: Start with team leadership that is attuned to their own strengths and weaknesses as well as others’. Assign tasks based on strengths so your team can confidently contribute.
3. Provide insightful feedback.
Meaningful feedback is the only way to turn strengths into superpowers and weaknesses into improvements. Feedback should always be constructive; avoid criticizing statements that can create defensiveness. Start with what’s going well, and then provide suggestions your team can put into action.
A great way to kick off performance conversations is to ask team members to provide a self-assessment of what they do well and what they want to improve. If you’ve hired self-aware individuals, you’ll see honest assessments of how the team views itself. This can uncover themes you weren’t even aware of. It also gives your team a voice in how things are going both from an individual and team perspective.
The takeaway: Feedback is a tool for growth. Use self-assessments to open up a dialogue about where and how improvements can be made.
4. Establish a team rulebook.
There’s a misconception that rules run counter to the spirit of startups. But clearly communicating expectations helps employees do their best work and work well together. Everyone knows they’re being held to the same standards.
But rules can also lay the groundwork for emotional intelligence. Some rules can help mitigate or manage conflict. Others can help facilitate communication. For example, team leaders might create some guidelines around how deadlines are handled and how to communicate delays. This can help guide members whose work is dependent on the work of others.
The takeaway: People handle situations better when they know what to expect. Set team rules so everyone is playing with the same deck and create a system of remedies to handle problems.
5. Effectively manage stress.
Stress management is well within a leader’s control. Effective leaders can spot the signs of burnout and intervene before it takes a toll on performance or retention. For example, a good leader might encourage team members to take breaks and unplug, discourage multitasking and create manageable workstreams. These can reduce stress and create an environment more conducive to focused, quality work.
The takeaway: Team leaders need to make sure team members take time to recharge and keep workloads manageable.
Developing Your Superteam
By hiring the right people and cultivating a culture of emotional intelligence, your team will not only be happy — they’ll also be more productive. And it’s a flywheel effect: That happiness and productivity only build over time, setting your business up for long-term success. But building this team starts with assessing your own strengths and weaknesses. You have to develop your own emotional intelligence so you can nurture it in others.
