How Emotional Intelligence Can Make You A Better Leader

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When talking about emotional intelligence and its importance to business success for years, there are some leaders who still dismiss it as tactile nonsense.

The problem with this train of thought? Nothing could be better than the truth. EQ can really make or break a person’s career, which means every leader needs to be smart when it comes to emotional intelligence. Still not for sale?

According to Emotional Intelligence 2.0, people with high EQ earn an average of $29,000 more per year than people with low EQ. Other studies have shown that when companies hire EQ, sales go up and revenue goes down.

The 4 parts of emotional intelligence

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is a skill. This includes our ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions. People with high EQ tend to be less stressed and communicate better than people with low EQ because they empathize with others and manage their reactions to their own and others’ emotions. Emotional intelligence is divided into the following four areas:

Self-Awareness – The ability to recognize your emotions, your strengths and weaknesses, and how emotions affect your thoughts and behavior. Confidence is an important aspect of self-awareness because you need to trust yourself to gauge your own feelings.
Maturity – The ability to manage your emotions in a healthy way, control impulsive behavior, take initiative, keep promises, and respond flexibly to change. Maturity refers to your ability to manage yourself and as a result, others see you as trustworthy, adaptable, and dedicated.
Social Skills – The ability to understand others, recognize emotional cues and body language, feel comfortable socially, and perceive group dynamics. Social skills allow you to communicate clearly, lead others, and sort issues constructively.
Rapport – The ability to develop and maintain healthy relationships, communicate clearly, influence others, work in teams, and manage conflict. In the workplace, relationship management helps you engage with colleagues, collaborate on goals, and coach effectively.

What does a high EQ employee look like?

The team leader is very frustrated with a project and wants to scream at someone (self-conscious). However, he admits that this won’t work or reflect well on the ability to manage projects or teams (maturity and social skills). So he walks around the building to clear his mind and focus on potential solutions (maturity). Upon his return, she discusses these solutions with her team, guiding them towards productivity (report).

EQ vs. IQ vs. personality

People often confuse EQ with intelligence quotient (IQ) or a personality trait. However, these are all separate pieces of themselves.

Treat IQ like your hardware. Your IQ is your ability to absorb information, solve problems, and think critically. Personality traits are more important – whether you function as an introvert or an extrovert, whether you avoid conflict or are responsive to change.

EQ is software. Your emotional intelligence skills guides how you interact, empathize, and manage those around you – and yourself – when facing problems or responding to change. Like software, EQ can be learned and adjusted to adapt to new business situations. This means that EQ can also be unattainable if these skills are not practiced continuously.

Just one example: your IT director, tends to be a quiet person (personality) who learns new software extremely quickly (smart). He’s quite passionate about IT security, which is an asset to your business, but if you push him forward on the topic, he won’t know when to stop (EQ). Ken can learn to recognize other people’s body language and adapt his behavior to the environment (EQ).

EQ mistakes in business

Managers with precise EQ inherently apprehend the want to be cognizant of others. These high-EQ managers apprehend that:

Emotions play a tangible position withinside the enterprise world. The supervisor professional in EQ can manual and inspire her personnel to have satisfaction withinside the corporation, experience pride in a process properly done, or be grateful for and feature loyalty to a supportive boss.
Body language and different nonverbal cues want to be studied and understood. We`ve all labored with a person who stands too near and makes all of us uncomfortable. This is simply one instance of a loss of self-cognizance and social skills. Being cabin in a position to “study the room” will pay off for personnel in any respect tiers due to the fact they could tools their verbal exchange for the scenario at hand, fostering more productivity.
Getting to understand your crew is important for success. On a micro level, a supervisor who doesn`t understand who’s striving for promotion and why, or who’s beaten at domestic is not able to optimize the overall performance of his crew. This can result in overlooked targets, misplaced possibilities, productivity, inefficiencies, frustration, and turnover.
Adapting to your corporation subculture is essential. At the macro level, a false impression company subculture can get a supervisor into a problem fast. Say a brand new worker pushes recognition of a seller he utilized in a former process, now no longer spotting that his seller will displace some other corporation that`s an antique favorite of the CEO. This loss of EQ might also additionally color the CEO`s opinion of the brand new supervisor for years to come.