Emotional Intelligence 101: The Basics You Need to Know
Let me throw a tough one at you. Are you that one boss who is often regarded as ‘inconsiderate’ and the one who lacks empathy? Not to blame your hunger for success, but if yes, this means that at Empowering Consulting we can together work on your creativity and add to your Emotional Quotient by understanding Emotional Intelligence.
“Emotional intelligence is like a muscle - the more you use it, the stronger it gets''. These words impel me to bring to you the gravity of Emotional Intelligence in the business and the corporate ecosystem.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
We all, at least once in our lifetime, have experienced a commotion of emotions in both professional and personal circumstances. Being in touch with your feelings and those of your team members is the secret sauce to being a badass leader. It's all about understanding and managing your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Emotional Intelligence can be obtained upon working on your self awareness, social awareness, self management and relationship management skills. Self awareness is a state of realization of your own strengths, weaknesses and emotions and how these affect you and your team in personal and professional affairs. A true self-assessment is the gateway to self awareness. Self management is the art of taking the accountability of your own emotions and reactions during demanding situations and even otherwise. Irrespective of the outcomes, you always have to maintain a positive outlook to every situation. Social awareness is your aptitude to understand and acknowledge other’s emotions and be empathetic towards your colleague’s feelings and mental state. When you tick mark your self and social awareness skills, you can combine them to tackle situations, which in turn build your relationship management skills. These skills put your communication skills on the front and your ability to resolve conflicts.
How to achieve Emotional Intelligence?
So by now you already know the exact skills to work on to polish your Emotional Intelligence on the whole and be a leader that your employees believe in, and the colleagues are proud of. But how do you actually practice them in real life? Do me a favor! Below is a routine that you have to consciously follow to polish your Emotional Quotient.
Start with being a good listener. Listen to your employees, team members and colleagues. Put in your everything to understand their perspective and take on things before you draw conclusions. Try connecting the dots, read the room and then make a decision.
At times, when being critical is needed, present “feedbacks” instead of criticism and use words that are less authoritative. Replace “You” with an “I”. For instance, the sentence, “You were terrible at the presentation”, could be reframed as “I believe, you have room for improvement in your presentations, and in particular….”.
Adopt a schedule for brainstorming. A great leader knows how to extract quality ideas from the team members. This could be an opportunity for you to keep weekly brainstorming sessions for new strategies and clients, so as to make everyone pitch in something. Who knows, which of your ‘knights’ brings in the best shot.
Adopt Recognition! Be informed of who is performing well in your team and deliberately present recognition to those efforts, personally and publicly. Use them as an example for others and make sure you avoid building an environment of competition, but motivation. Praises are like prayers, they work wonders.
Oprah Winfrey and Satya Nadella are examples of successful business leaders who value emotional intelligence. Winfrey recognizes that self-awareness is her weapon against the odds, while Nadella believes that empathy is the most important skill he looks for in his employees. In an interview with Forbes, Oprah openly stated “The most important thing I have learned is that you have to know yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses and your values. That's where your power lies”. Similarly, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, Gates stated, "Emotional intelligence is one of the things that sets successful people apart".
At Empowering Consulting, we believe, in fact we know that you are aspiring to be a business leader yourself one day, and our job is to put forward the best tools you could use to be one. Emotional Intelligence is one of the most important tools today to stand out in the race and to set an example of what a wonderful leader looks like. Emotional intelligence is like having a built-in translator for the language of feelings. It's like being a human emoji, but instead of using symbols to express yourself, you use empathy and self-awareness to navigate social situations. In other words, emotional intelligence is the ability to know when to say "I'm sorry" and when to say "Let's get pizza".
Take your first free Emotional Intelligence test here!
We know that you love to read. Do not miss out on these books on Emotional Intelligence.