You're managing a team with low morale. What can you do to boost their emotional intelligence?

I would adjust this first step. While assessing the EI of your team can be helpful, I'd recommend first assessing the EI of your leadership team, yourself included. You won't gain traction in conversations with a team if leaders are not modeling the desired behaviors first.

I agree that measuring the team's EI can be helpful, but this must be done in a carefully thought out way. If morale is already low, it is important to honestly assess why. For example, if a sales team has had years of low performance and rotating executive leadership or frequent changes to marketing/messaging or delayed product updates there may be fear-based actions driving decisions. Employees need to feel confident and safe that their assessment won't be used against them otherwise the responses won't truly address what needs to happen next.

I struggle a little bit with the continued reference to "EI skills". I can't see myself getting in front of a team and saying "Today we're going to work on strengthening our emotional intelligence skills." In fact, in my experience, individuals with low EI aren't at a place where they can acknowledge that. And the suggestion that emotional intelligence is low has proven to immediately put people on the defensive. If you want strong EI as part of your culture, then frame your action plan as refocusing on culture. Ideas, discussions, or activities can be labeled as "culture concepts". This shift in approach makes the work you want to do more palatable and increases the probability that you'll get buy in from team members.

Simply, Put some good music on before calling, the beginning of work day, Or in between every break-transition back to work. Creating an environment where people can let loose without needing to drink alcohol post work or Ect… helps let your team know that you know that there’s more to life than what it’s in your contract.

Transparency and fairness go along way in creating a positive culture. Leaders must put themselves in the shoes of their teams. If a directive comes from the ELT and leaders find themselves trying massage a negative into a positive that will blow up behind the scenes because the team will see right through. Additionally if favoritism is being displayed, even if inadvertently, that will erode trust and damage culture.

Again, this is an opportunity to check your leadership team. If you're promoting work-life balance and encouraging team members to practice healthy habits and prioritize their health, leaders should be modeling those behaviors as well. I've been a part of teams where I was told to prioritize my health and work life balance, but then watched leaders work while sick, send emails late into the night, and regularly commit to project work on weekends. I was being told that self care mattered, but I was being shown that in order to hold a leadership position within the organization, you had to sacrifice it. Encouraging self care and wellness is absolutely the right thing to do - but you have to do it both through words and through actions.

This is very important. You must recognize that one size does not fit all. Account for the varied interests and consider workload and burnout, which are not always one and the same.

If team's morale is low, I would first try to check the reason behind it, environment of office, reasonableness of of assigned tasks,local situation, and last reward and recognition rather then employee's EI. It's rare and concerning case when all employees feel low or exhausted. So, we also need to check with behaviour of managers and task set by them, and policy implementation. There should be clear communication employees' task, their goal and they should be recognised and rewarded fairly and at the defined frequency. After ensuring on all above points, we can focuse on EI related aspect, traning and soft nudges to change emotional behaviour. That definitely helps employee to regulate emotions at workpalce and communicating with peers.