EQ is a measure of a person’s emotional intelligence. How many contracts make any reference to the need for a good standard of EQ? None?
Interestingly some of the key skills for emotional intelligence in business, as mentioned in Dr Lynda Shaw’s book ‘Your Brain is Boss‘ are directly relevant to the behaviours needed for successful construction projects:
- ability to use and rely on technologies – we need a digitally -built Britain to compete globally and to improve our productivity; contracts need to reinforce and encourage the use of technology to find solutions
- skills to handle and adapt change – change management is critical for successful projects (they rarely turn out exactly as planned); contracts need clear simple processes to manage change and adapt project aims to meet the new reality
- mastery of collaboration and team working – not merely to build trust and avoid disputes, but to create more effective and innovative solutions; contracts need to encourage true collaborative behaviours such as early warnings, no fault insurance, joint aims and objectives, open book accounting and data sharing
What should we do?
How can we encourage and reinforce these skills without resorting to meaningless woolly phrases or tying the parties in legal knots?
We can:
- join tribes of technology users, whether that’s BIM or CoMIT or Digital Built Britain to upskill ourselves and our teams on technology changes
- be alive to the change and manage it effectively
- focus on collaboration
- create clear contracts to encourage these behaviours.
