Are you able to control your temper no matter what problems you are facing? Are you easy to talk to? Do you have the total trust of your teams? Do you constantly make careful, informed decisions?
Emotional intelligence (also known as EI) is the ability to understand your emotions and those of the people around you. People with a high degree of emotional intelligence know what they are feeling, what their emotions mean and how these emotions can affect other people. This is an essential characteristic of a successful leader in today’s working world.
KEY ASPECTS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Self Assessment
Are you able to analyse your own abilities, emotions, strengths and weaknesses? Are you able to analyze how your actions affect other people? If you have the ability to look objectively at yourself and therefore improve yourself regularly you can increase your success rate in any part of your life.
Self Regulation
Can you calm yourself down when you’re stressed and angry and can you jolly yourself up when you are feeling low? If you have a sense of panic about you so will your teams. If you are calm and strong they will feel reassured and won’t panic. Do people respect you for being organised, calm with an assured ability to get things done effectively?
Empathy & Compassion
Empathy is more than being sympathetic to another person’s situation. Empathy is the ability to experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions and experience of others. Are you able to truly put yourself in the position of others? Can you imagine what they are feeling and thinking? If you empathise with and truly feel compassion for other people then you can truly help them and they will in turn be able to help you as they will know they are supported by you.
Relationship Management
Our working life is more enjoyable when we have good working relationships with our colleagues and boss. For leaders this means building real rapport with your team members. Would your team consider you more of a ‘friendly senior colleague’ or a ‘boss’? In order to manifest an enjoyable workplace for everyone (which essentially leads to a more innovative and more productive workplace), It is essential that you can make strong, solid relationships with everyone you work with. Take the time to find something you have in common and make the effort to create rapport with EVERYONE you meet.
Effective Communication
Ineffective communication in the workplace leads to confusion, feelings of not being listened to and under-valued and is the beginning of anything that ends up in disaster. Are you a good communicator? By that we don’t mean speaking clearly and pronouncing each syllable correctly. Are you able to communicate with people so they instantly understand what you are saying to them? This could be verbally, through tone of voice, expression or physically through body language.
If you think you have a high score on the emotional intelligence richter scale, then congrats! If like many people you are good at some areas and not so strong in others all you need to do is become more aware. More aware of yourself, your actions and emotions. If you can see you’ve upset somebody, rather than feeling defensive, thinking they are idiots, ask yourself why they could be feeling that way. What could you have said / done or communicated that made them feel upset? Ask yourself what you could do differently next time to have a more successful outcome where they feel happy and you feel happy from the communication.