A call for advancement of WOMEN in the WORKPLACE

Last Thursday, The Scotiabank Women’s Network (SWN) held their ‘Women in Leadership’ breakfast seminar and workshop at The Hyatt Regency Hotel. Facilitator, Shane Ram, an international HR Consultant and author spoke to some 150 women covering topics of Self Leadership, Success and Life Purpose and Emotional Intelligence. The three and half hour-long seminar was in accordance with the SWN’s vision to be a recognised leader in the advancement of women in all countries in which they operate. This initiative is crucial because, worldwide, more than 70 per cent of Scotiabank employees are women.

Thus, Shane’s presentation was in sync with the SWN’s goal to remove barriers and provide women with the best possible chance to grow and advance to enable success for the bank and all its employees. The basis of Shane’s presentation was for everyone to understand their true self, realise their true potential and to live their highest potential. During the interactive session, Shane’s used his experiences to help participants achieve fulfilling lives through finding their life purpose and removing fear. From the start, the women actively discussed qualities of a good leader.

From different ideals of the difficult challenges of a leader, Shane came to the notion that “the things that we need to be successful as a leader are what we would define as soft skills. Shane urged the importance of upper management investing in soft skills. With comparison to Phineas Gage, a supervisor who lost his ability to rationalise, to illustrate the link between the frontal lobes, emotion and practical decision- making, gave rise to the topic, Emotional Intelligence. “Emotional Intelligence is the capacity for recognising your own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.

He explains that Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the better predictor of success (career, wealth, life, happiness) because it accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs. “EQ causes us to make better use of Intelligence (IQ). “It is the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence. “Phineas’ case was in essence, what EQ is and how it works physiologically in our brains. The key is to be able in certain situations decipher between how we feel and what we think. This is where self awareness comes into play.

According to Shane, self awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your own emotions in the moment and to understand your tendencies across situations. “Keen understanding of tendencies is important; it helps you quickly make sense of your emotions. A high degree of self- awareness requires a willingness to tolerate the discomfort of focusing on feelings that may be negative,” As such, Shane advised that the only way to genuinely understand your emotions is to spend enough time thinking through them to figure out where they come from and why they are there.