How do your work colleagues see you? Are you the life and soul of the party, the fount of all ideas, someone who beavers away quietly and doesn’t have much to say or the complainer who is always campaigning for change?
Do you have any idea how your approach impacts on the people around you?
Emotional intelligence is all about awareness – not just of yourself, but of the others in your team, other parts of the organisation and the customers and suppliers you interact with.
Daniel Goleman, considered to be one of the gurus that brought EQ into the business world, uses a model to show how EQ drives performance. This has five areas that impact on any individual’s emotional intelligence.
- Self-awareness. How well do you know your own emotions, how you react in situations and how this impacts on others? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What drives you to achieve? What values do you work to?
- Self-regulation. This is about consciously making decisions about how you react to various stimuli. Instead of a knee-jerk response to other people’s actions, do you think before acting? Being able to respond appropriately in any situation is a key part of EQ.
- Social skills. When you work with people it’s important to be able to manage relationships. The more advanced are your social skills the more able you will be to persuade others to take action to achieve specific goals. This is essential for any good manager.
- Empathy. When you make decisions it’s going to affect other people, to persuade them to get ‘on board’, you need to consider their feelings. Empathy is the ability to appreciate how someone else might feel in a given set of circumstances. It’s another key management skill.
- Motivation. Understanding what drives you, what makes you want to achieve is important. And even more important to really understand what drives the others in your team – people really don’t work for money – it’s rarely at the top of their list of ‘why I’m doing this job’ – and, in any case, it’s more about what the money can do for them.
If you want to improve your performance, whether or not you are a manager, practising emotional intelligence consciously will help it to become a habit. You’ll become someone people actively want to work with.