Emotional Intelligence

For a manager to get the most out of their employees, emotional intelligence is key.

 

Emotional intelligence is a crucial skill that can help you to become successful in all aspects of your life. We’re all born with some degree of emotional intelligence that can either be developed throughout a lifetime or degraded by poor experiences and lack of effort.

From a business point of view, leaders with high emotional intelligence can inspire their teams to greatness — after all, the aim of a leader is to lead by example. With the ability to control emotions, make solid decisions, and remain stable in the face of adversity, you’ll be a beaming light of inspiration to those around you.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence collects ten thought-provoking articles led by the most ground-breaking research available. Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of “What Makes a Leader,” is one contributor, as well as Andrew Campbell, author of Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions. Collated by the Harvard Business Review, taking this advice on board could revolutionize your business performance and personal life.

 

Emotional intelligence isn’t just about controlling heightened emotions; it’s about decision-making, showing empathy, managing arguments, problems, and conflicts, and it’s the ability to handle issues with a steady mind. In addition, emotional intelligence ensures that you can understand what you’re good at and where you fall short. All of this helps you to move towards your ultimate goals in life and business.

Did you know? The Plutchik Theory of Emotions states there are eight core emotions — joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. These are arranged on a wheel with direct opposites facing each other. The theory helps us to identify emotions and deal with intense reactions, therefore building emotional intelligence.

 

Work on the five elements of emotional intelligence to improve your performance.

What does it take to become a great leader? Throughout history, there have been success stories and massive failures. Some of the most intelligent and experienced people have been promoted to leadership roles and failed spectacularly. Why is that? Contributing author, Daniel Goleman, suggests that it’s down to a lack of emotional intelligence.

Throughout his years of research, Daniel Goleman has discovered that emotional intelligence is twice as important as any other skill or asset in terms of leading a team to success. Every situation indeed calls for a slightly different type of leadership, but the common theme is emotional intelligence every time. Without this, you’ll fall short of the mark time and time again.

 

Five elements make up emotional intelligence: 1. Self-awareness 2. Self-regulation 3. Motivation 4. Empathy 5. Social skills.

Self-awareness allows you to take stock of your strengths and weaknesses and understand how you can improve. It also means that you can recognize your emotions as they arise and avoid acting out of character. This also runs into self-regulation, which again comes down to how you control your emotions, moods, and any impulses you experience.

A person with high emotional intelligence is also likely to be more motivated simply for the sake of achieving something great. They’re able to put themselves in the shoes of others and show empathy, making them a great leader. Finally, they can show highly developed social skills, which allow them to connect and build strong relationships with those around them.

 

A manager who is regularly irritated and constantly in a bad mood is not going to be someone an employee feels comfortable approaching with a problem or idea. The entire team will likely feel the same, and before you know it, morale has fallen and has taken productivity with it. However, a manager who can keep their moods out of the workplace is more approachable to employees.

he idea that ruling with an iron rod creates disciplined and hard-working employees only works for a short while. An employee who feels tense or under pressure may use that as a motivator in the short term, but it’s not sustainable over the long term. It’s far more productive to create a positive and open environment in which employees can flourish.

 

We all indeed have bad days, so how can a leader avoid letting those moods affect their performance at work? By developing emotional leadership — being more aware of your emotions and moods and understanding how they impact those around you. By carefully managing your personal life, you’ll find it easier to avoid negative actions and moods that affect your work life.

Anyone can make a wrong decision, but managers need to safeguard against it.

 

Nobody is immune to making a wrong decision occasionally. However, a bad decision could lead to millions of dollars of lost revenue for a CEO or business owner. Some of the very best business minds in history have made huge mistakes that have cost them big. But, why?

“Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions” by Andrew Campbell explores this crucial question. To understand why bad decisions are made by some of the most intelligent people, it’s worth understanding how the brain makes those decisions in the first place.

 

The brain uses two particular processes when making a decision: pattern recognition and emotional tagging. Both engage the person’s prior experiences, judgments, and memories to come to a conclusion about what to do. This is a good process for the most part, but when the stakes are high, the decision can be affected by a person’s gains, high emotions, and memories that are distorted in that person’s mind. Put simply, decision-making can be a flawed process.

In that case, how can managers protect against these risks and increase the likelihood of a good decision? The managerial team around the decision-maker needs to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses in specific subjects. Decision-makers should also look towards those around them to ask for advice, rather than making snap decisions and just jumping straight in. This helps to reduce the chances of a wrong decision while also pulling the team together.

 

The price of workplace rudeness could be devastating for a business.

 

We’ve all experienced a rude employee in the past. Did that experience make you want to go back to that store or office and give them your money? Probably not. “The Price of Incivility” by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson explores the very fact that when someone is treated rudely or without respect, the ramifications affect everyone around them.

Within a business, morale is critical. If a manager is treating their employees poorly, that will affect how hard they choose to work. In the end, why should you work hard for a manager who is calling you names, disrespecting you, or constantly criticizing you unnecessarily? Studies have shown that employees show less creativity when they feel like they’re being treated poorly, and many simply work to a lower ability level because they don’t see why they should try harder.

 

It’s also true that when a customer or client is treated with rudeness, they’re less likely to return to that business and more likely to tell their friends and family members about the experience. All of this can be extremely bad for a company and can lead to a large amount of lost revenue.

Everyone needs to be more aware of how they treat those around them, but from a managerial point of view, the focus again falls on emotional intelligence. Part of this whole concept is treating others with empathy. So, how can managers improve on that?

Managers need to act as role models to everyone in the business regarding how they treat other people. They also need to listen to ideas and questions from employees and always do what they say they’re going to do. Simply show respect to employees and customers, and you won’t go wrong. Within the business, punishing employees who show rudeness or disrespect is an option while also finding out the truth about the company culture. This can be done via anonymous staff surveys or asking the opinions of former employees.

Developing emotional agility is key to business success

Throughout any single day, we all have countless thoughts and speak many words. Some of those thoughts and comments help make positive change, while many are unhelpful and do nothing but instill negativity.

We’re told that we should push down our negative thoughts and do our best to ignore them, but that’s not human nature. Negative thoughts can be reframed into something upbeat, and by doing so, you work towards creating a more positive mindset in general. Trying to ignore your negative thoughts will simply cause you to be caught up in the endeavor. Instead, try developing emotional agility.

 

Emotional agility is the ability to manage your thoughts and judgments as they enter your mind and not act upon them immediately or cause them to ruin your entire day. Instead, you allow them to enter your mind and flow back out, deciding whether anything can be turned into something helpful along the way.

Emotional agility is akin to mindfulness. When you’re practicing mindfulness, you allow thoughts to enter your mind, you’re mindful of them, but you observe them rather than panic and think you have to do something about them. The first step towards doing this is to recognize the thinking patterns you regularly fall into. What are your triggers for negativity? Is it a specific person or task? Then, acknowledge the issue and put forth the effort to change it.

It would help if you also label the emotions you’re feeling; otherwise, they simply flow into one another, and you’re not sure what you’re feeling versus what you’re not. Recognize when you’re experiencing anger and tell yourself that you’re feeling angry. It’s also useful to recognize when you’re feeling jealous and put a label on that emotion too.

 

Do not fear feedback; embrace it for positive change.

 

Appraisals, staff development reviews, performance reviews all mean the same thing, and they’re all feared by employees and managers alike. The reason is that they have such a bad reputation; employees assume this is the perfect opportunity for a manager to criticize them for everything they’re doing wrong. In reality, this review is the ideal time to give praise and constructive criticism. Both of these things help an employee to improve.

Authors Jay Jackman and Myra Strober call this the “fear of feedback.” Employees feel like they will be criticized, and managers worry about the reaction, so both sides stay quiet and avoid approaching any issues.

Feedback can be a healthy and valuable tool, as long as it’s delivered in the right way. Lots of positive reinforcement and reminders of the good things a person is doing works very well alongside a small piece of feedback that they can use to improve. After all, everyone has some room for improvement, even the very best manager.

A lack of emotional intelligence can cause a person to take criticism as a direct attack on their character. It can also cause a manager to struggle to give criticism because they don’t know how to deliver it in a way that helps the employee rather than makes them upset.

Rather than avoiding feedback, face it head-on. Accept the comment and look for a positive message. Be honest about your strengths and weaknesses and take on board what is being said without feeling attacked. Ultimately, feedback is a chance to improve. Remember to reward yourself when you improve and put a plan in action to continue developing your skills.

 

Conclusion

 

Emotional intelligence is entirely different from IQ. IQ is a measurement of intelligence, i.e., how smart you are. Emotional intelligence is a measurement of how able you are to control your emotions, use them in the right way, connect with others, make firm decisions, and show empathy to those around you.

A top-quality manager has high emotional intelligence. They can be the most intelligent person on the block, full of high-flying ideas and dollar-making suggestions, but if they cannot connect with others correctly, their efforts will always fall short of the mark. A manager leads by example; if they can show their ability to control rising emotions, embrace their strengths and work on their weaknesses, their employees will do the same.

Learning to improve your emotional intelligence takes time and effort but will never be wasted. The first step is to do some deep thinking and pinpoint times when you allowed your emotions to get the better of you. Start to be more aware of the feelings you’re experiencing and what causes them. Once you’ve identified your triggers, you can start to make a plan to minimize them or face them head-on and overcome them.

A business that ignores the role of emotional intelligence in a manager is sure to flounder sooner or later. Tough decisions need to be made by those in charge, and emotional intelligence can ensure those decisions are positive ones rather than huge mistakes. No amount of smarts can outweigh the positives of emotional intelligence.

Try this.

• Keep a journal and identify your emotional triggers. Note down at the end of every day the emotions you experienced and anything that was going on at the time.
• The next time you need to make a decision, be brave enough to ask someone else for their opinion first. Be open to what they have to say.
• Seek out feedback and listen to what the person has to say. Rather than being offended by it, look for a constructive message.

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