Funeral service employees must be ready and able to deal with extremely emotional situations. Customers can be experiencing feelings such as anger, despair, guilt and frustration and the non-verbal response to these emotions is critical. Funeral Arrangers / Directors need to communicate that they are offering a friendly, caring, helpful and yet professional service. At the same time, they must stay in control, in some respects, be professionally distant and yet be caring and understanding. These skills, the ability to recognise and understand the emotions of others along with the ability to manage one’s own emotions is known as Emotional Intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence or EI is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and those of the people around you. People with a high degree of Emotional Intelligence know what they’re feeling, what their emotions mean, and how these emotions can affect other people.
For leaders, having Emotional Intelligence is essential for success. After all, who is more likely to succeed – a leader who shouts at his team when he’s under stress, or a leader who stays in control, and calmly assesses the situation?
In 1996, Daniel Goleman created a stir by claiming that existing views on cognitive intelligence or IQ were too narrow and that our emotions played a far greater part in individual success or ability. He stated that self-awareness, empathy and social-deftness were the attributes that made people excel. He referred to these abilities as “Emotional Intelligence”.
Emotional Intelligence was not a new concept in 1996. The model of Emotional Intelligence had been proposed in 1990 by Yale Psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer. Salovey and Mayer mapped out in detail how we can bring intelligence to our emotions and went on with fellow academic David Caruso to form the MSCEIT®, – a form of Emotional Intelligence testing. This focuses on how emotions can be used intelligently and looks at four core abilities that will be explained next.
- Recognising Emotions
- Using Emotions
- Understanding Emotions
- Managing Emotions
Recognising Emotions
This is the ability to recognise how you and those around you are feeling. The first branch of the emotional intelligence model involves the capacity to perceive feelings accurately. Emotional perception involves paying attention to, and accurately decoding, emotional signals in facial expressions, tone of voice and body language. If the Funeral Arranger / Director is uncomfortable with a person’s expression of emotion, for instance, and they turn away when they sense another’s discomfort, they may not accurately perceive that other person’s emotional state. Accurate emotional recognition is the basis for effective interactions. It helps you position yourself, your decisions and your communications more effectively.
Using Emotions
This is the ability to know which emotions can assist a situation or task and being able to generate these helpful moods. Key leadership tasks are building rapport and trust, creating a vision, thinking flexibly and strategically and making effective decisions. These tasks require an integration of emotions and thinking. As a Funeral Arranger / Director and for some perhaps a leader of a team your skills at using emotions may be called upon daily. For example if you sense that the mood of your team, or your colleagues is negative, you will understand that this is directing the focus on to what won’t work rather than what will work. If you are able to shift your emotions to what the team or your colleagues are feeling and empathise, you can help individuals feel connected and become more focussed on achieving the common goal.
Understanding Emotions
The third part of the model is, “understanding emotions”. Emotions are a central part of our relationships with our self and others as they are present in almost every interaction. Understanding emotions involves knowing what a person is feeling, the causes of these feelings, and the ability to predict how feelings will progress and change. It also involves putting this knowledge into words. Your ability to understand emotions will help you figure out what drives and inspires your team and what frustrates and alienates them and how one event compared with another will make them feel.
Managing Emotions
To be effective we need to be able to manage our own and others emotions. This involves being open to what we and others are feeling. This skill is hugely beneficial to the Funeral Arranger / Director who will spend a lot of his or her time with families who have suffered traumatic loss and who are looking to their Funeral Arranger / Director for support and guidance. Motivating yourself, dealing with stress and making decisions or taking actions that are helpful to you, require the ability to manage your own emotions. Having the relationship you desire with your customers and colleagues also requires you to have the ability to manage others emotions. Situations where you need to inspire, give feedback, deal with conflict and criticism, handle and achieve change and gain support, all hinge on skilled emotion management.
Caring for others starts by caring for oneself
It will be evident that the responsibility for a high standard of customer care rests with all those involved in funeral service; however, the bereaved cannot be served effectively unless steps are taken to prepare Funeral Directors for this task. As individuals, Funeral Arrangers /Directors need to recognise that caring for others involves directing attention to their own skills and knowledge. Although daily contact with customers increases experience in the handling of situations, on a more professional level it is essential that the need for on-going personal development is recognised.