Everybody has heard of intellectual intelligence and its role in career-building. However, more than being intellectually intelligent is needed to properly handle and maintain professional relationships. What else does it require?
The working environment is obviously characterized as being extremely volatile. Today you aren’t meeting deadlines, the budget is in the red, or you’ve lost a pitch for the contract of your life. Tomorrow you’ve reached a new level of productivity, found new investors, and experienced an unprecedented upturn in sales. Does it ring the bell? In this swirl of events, how to remain sane and not go nuts ending up in emotional burnout? The answer is – to develop emotional intelligence in the workplace.
In this article, we’ll look at what emotional intelligence stands for, what the components of emotional intelligence are, and how exactly developing emotional intelligence skills will contribute to your career success.
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The term ’emotional intelligence’ or EI appeared due to psychologists Peter Salovey and John D Mayer back in 1990. They defined EI as the ability to understand your own and other people’s emotions and use this information to solve problems more efficiently and accurately. However, Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and science journalist, was the one who popularized the term by devoting the whole book called Emotional Intelligence to it. He also introduced a bit different explanation of EI, describing it as a set of emotional and social competencies that help improve managerial and leadership performance.
In both cases, EI is a valuable asset, the possessors of which can contribute to any workplace. We don’t claim that emotionally intelligent people are bound to be more successful than others; however, working on emotional intelligence can exponentially improve one’s experience at work and boost mental well-being. Learn more about the pros emotional intelligence in the workplace can bring about in the next chapter.
Humankind has learned to manage emotions to the extent that they are not always obvious and easy to read. At the same time, we’re only on our way to being free from various emotional weaknesses. It’s obviously impossible to get rid of negative emotions altogether. However, it’s possible to handle them in such a way that they affect neither job satisfaction nor job performance. Let’s check a few illustrative examples of why emotional intelligence at work should be encouraged and cultivated.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said, be the change you wish to see in the world. We can’t expect reasonable reactions from other people if we aren’t able to do it ourselves. By recognizing your emotional gaps and working on them, you create favorable conditions for your surrounding to change for the better as well.
Paying attention and meeting your inner needs will help you avoid inappropriate reactions or behaviors. Acknowledging what can throw you off balance and preventing it is bound to bring you to a new level on the communication skills scale and therefore achieve goals faster. Unfortunately, admitting that you have self-regulation or social skills issues may be pretty gut-wrenching and not everyone is capable of doing it. However, the result of this change will exceed all your expectations.
Unforeseen circumstances are an integral part of any working process. The aim is not to successfully avoid but to successfully deal with them. The first step is changing your attitude from a negative to a positive one. This is not another problem. This is a challenge that will boost your professionalism. Your vision of stress may change dramatically if you delve into stress management approaches. For instance, embracing the idea that you cannot control everything can significantly decrease tension. The less anxiety we feel, the better our brain works. Another stress management technique, proven by Stanford researchers, can boost creativity and activate problem-solving abilities. It’s as simple as that – have a stroll in the park!
High emotional intelligence levels are a critical part of managerial and leadership skills. Being patient, emphatic, understanding, and an active listener will help you win your subordinates’ hearts and enhance your credibility. If you have not held leadership positions, working on your emotional intelligence is the first step toward a new title or pay rise. Your boss can’t help but notice and appreciate it. It’s because the ability to handle your own emotions and move them from destructive to constructive gives you, as a leader, an opportunity to make better and more reasonable business decisions.
Luckily, people have realized that brutal power in the workplace doesn’t contribute to a company’s prosperity and well-being. Actually, it works the other way around. Improving emotional intelligence is what will turn your company into a better place.
As a part of emotional intelligence, active listening can help your company strengthen the customer-company relationship. How? People appreciate it a lot when they feel that they are heard. When hearing another person’s point, you can walk in their shoes, and it’s easier for you to understand the reasons and motives for their responses and behaviors. For instance, if a customer complains about something, let them feel you understand their frustration. Next, ask them several questions to clarify if you’ve understood them correctly. Here is when they think they are genuinely heard. And for you, as a company representative, it will be way easier to address the issue appropriately and find the best resolution for both sides without stressing anybody out.
Emotional intelligence will teach you to look at a conflict as an opportunity to hone your negotiation skills and ability to find a middle ground. With the help of shifting your focus from negativity to a positive attitude, no more room is left for aggression. The less aggression, the more positive the work environment becomes, the lower workplace stress levels are, and the more efficiently employees interact and resolve issues within the team.
Even though you’ve advanced your emotional intelligence and become self-aware, other people may not have done the job yet. They are not difficult to detect – individuals with a low emotional intelligence quotient usually give apparent indicators, such as aggressive responses, raising voices, or acting rudely. However, there might also be unconscious body-language signals such as hostile facial expressions or gestures. Knowing them will help you recognize when it’s high time to start taking the necessary action and not allow the conflict to grow.
Emotional intelligence works both ways, therefore there are both internal and external rewards when applying EI to interpersonal communication.
People tend to hide their genuine emotions and emotional states due to frequent social unacceptance and judgment cases. If you can detect nonverbal cues of mental issues or struggling behaviors, you may provide timely help and prevent adverse outcomes such as burnout, depression, and even resignation. Demonstrate your care by being sympathetic and offering this person your time and attention. It’s a great asset to use not only in the workplace but in your personal life as well.
Providing appropriate feedback is a skill that only some people can brag about. You should give another person a feeling that they are valued and cared about. To achieve this, your feedback shouldn’t look like criticizing or presenting a list of their mistakes. Instead, start by highlighting and praising the good sides of their performance with a smooth transition to what should be improved. Your feedback has to increase intrinsic motivation for improvement, not lead to rejection. Under no circumstances should your feedback focus on the person, only on their actions and behaviors. Providing specific suggestions and recommendations will also make your feedback very welcome and appreciated by the receiver.
When are people more motivated to work when existing in a toxic or constructive environment? A positive work environment is the first step to achieving high levels of engagement and productivity. By inviting emotionally intelligent individuals to your team, you automatically improve the workplace atmosphere and facilitate building strong interpersonal skills among the team members. The atmosphere of understanding, trust, and sympathy creates an incredibly safe place where employees can entirely focus on solving business problems, not the personal issues between them.
If you’re a leader and you feel like improving the level of emotional intelligence in your team, you may consider using the following recommendations.
We hope this article has left no room for doubts that emotional intelligence matters and makes a lot of difference. The benefits of high emotional intelligence levels in the workplace can hardly be overestimated. They include freedom from gossip and microaggressions, creating safer working environments that enhance productivity and teamwork, less stressful conflict resolution approaches, and many more. However, not only do emotionally intelligent people contribute to their overall performance at work but also to the quality of their personal lives. The mastered art of self-regulation can bring your communication skills to a new level, allowing you to achieve your goals and accomplishments by communicating with other people more efficiently and fruitfully. Decreased stress levels, which can be achieved through cultivating EI, are bound to improve the quality of your life, bringing more positive feelings and impressions from your day-to-day communication with others.
