Home Health & Hospice Week

Here’s how to identify high EQs.

If you are looking to improve patient engagement and care quality, you can’t afford to overlook an important attribute of your potential new hires — emotional intelligence (EQ).

Look for These High EQ Traits

People with high EQs:

• Are self-aware, curious, and not afraid to challenge themselves to learn and grow.
• Recognize and acknowledge their own emotions, and take responsibility for their own emotional wake.
• Are empathetic, listen well, and can work well with a range of personalities.
• Understand that when we deal with people, we’re not only dealing with the rational, frontal lobe of the brain, but also the older, impulse-driven reptile parts of the brain that force logic to take second place to emotion. They know how to work with intense emotions just as well as they work with logic.

Individuals with high EQs set the best cultural standards in any business organization, including health care organizations, says the American Academy of Professional Coders’ Brian Ingles, who led a session about emotional intelligence at the AAPC Coders Conference in Las Vegas this month.

People can develop their emotional intelligence over time, but only if they work at it and only if they want to. It’s a lifelong pursuit — a pursuit some people forgo completely. “EQ can be developed, improved, fixed, and worked on both in individuals” and in larger organizations, Ingles says, “and doing so can create very healthy and happy work environments for both employees and patients.”

Do this: You can’t judge a person’s EQ from their resume, but you can use interview questions to get a sense of a person’s EQ and their commitment to developing it every day. (For sample questions, see box, this page.)

Developing Your Agency’s EQ

Hiring a new staff member with high EQ won’t accomplish anything if the work environment they’re entering lacks EQ of its own. In the hierarchy of a medical provider, warns Ingles, “those with higher authority or status tend to show less EQ than those below them; i.e. physicians or high-ranking administrators who have been through many years of training and education treating a nurse or another staff member like they are beneath them.”

The result of this attitude of superiority is a staff that either becomes too dependent on its leader or checks out entirely. “In a healthy emotional culture,” says Ingles, “relationships are not treated unequally due to title, experience, or level.” An authoritarian management style only leads to staff resentment, which in turn leads to underperformance and bad results for the organization.

In a high EQ environment, staff members refuse to be bullied. Instead of arguing or being combative with their boss, they “work to mutually come up with solutions and to enhance awareness of how not solving the problem will impact them and the practice negatively,” says Ingles. An emotionally intelligent culture simply won’t let such a negative atmosphere continue.