What is Emotional Infrastructure? - Professor M.S.Rao

Emotional Infrastructure sounds strange to many readers. I got this trigger from Vijay Govindarajan, the leadership guru who is a specialist in innovation. This concept is researched by both Vijay Govindarajan and Subrato Bagchi of MindTree Consulting who are coming out with a book on this. Basically Emotional Infrastructure (EI) sounds like Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. But both are different. Emotional intelligence is mostly responsible for leadership effectiveness and it helps individuals gel well with others at ease and it is said that 80 percent of the leader’s success depends on emotional intelligence.

However, emotional infrastructure is the emotional component of employees that helps organizations achieve excellence and effectiveness. We often talk of infrastructure in physical terms. However, there are also other infrastructures such as intellectual infrastructure and emotional infrastructure where intellectual infrastructure involves people and their competencies and capabilities while emotional infrastructure involves the egos and emotions of the people working in the organization and their emotional contribution and bonding with their organizations. It is rightly said that physical infrastructure can be built easily but it is very tough to build both intellectual and emotional. To some extent you can build intellectual infrastructure, not emotional infrastructure. That is the reason although management is defined as managing people I would like to define management as managing people’s egos and emotions which is a tough task. However, the good news is that emotional infrastructure involves no costs except giving a human touch while the physical infrastructure needs lot of capital to build.

To sum up, emotional infrastructure is all about employees and their egos and emotions. It is about their emotional attachment towards their organizations. It minimizes attrition as people are attached with organizations emotionally. It helps organizations survive any eventualities as employees are emotionally attached with them. Hence, organizations must emphasize on this intangible element for achieving growth and prosperity.



Professor M.S.Rao
Founder and Chief Consultant,
MSR Leadership Consultants, India
Blog: http://profmsr.blogspot.com
Where Knowledge is Wealth
Email: profmsr7@gmail.com



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