Following on from last week’s blog about leadership skills, this week we are going to look at emotional intelligence. But, what exactly is it? Put simply, it’s the ability to manage your own and other people’s emotions. It is obvious to see how important this can be if you are in charge of lots of people, with different personalities and preferences. You may already have a high level of emotional intelligence. If you do, you should understand your feelings, know what they mean to you and recognise how they affect other people around you. When you think about emotional intelligence in these terms, I’m sure you can identify someone you work with whose emotions can affect the whole office. For example, a colleague who gets annoyed about a situation in the office and pronounces it loudly, whilst banging things on their desk will undoubtedly have an effect on the rest of the staff.
If you want to be a successful manger, you need to recognise emotional issues and deal with them quickly and calmly. So, how do you achieve that? Well, according to American Psychologist, Daniel Goldman, learning to manage your own emotional intelligence is essential. There are five main elements of emotional intelligence – these are:
Self-Awareness – this is pretty self-explanatory, you need to be able to recognise and understand your own emotions and how they affect the other people you deal with. It also means you need to know what your strengths and weaknesses are and, according to Goldman, you should show humility. This essentially means you should not believe that you are superior to others. If feel you need to develop yourself-awareness, you can do two things:
- keep a journal – this will allow you to identify your feelings towards different situations, such as what makes you feel frustrated, what makes you happy and so on. A couple of months doing this will raise your awareness level
- slow down – when you feel yourself becoming frustrated with a situation, slow down and think what it is that’s making you feel that way. Always keep in mind that you are in control of how you react to every situation or person you encounter
Self-Regulation – this is all about staying in control. It allows you to stop yourself from making rash, emotional decisions, stereo-typing people, verbally attacking them or compromising either your own or other people’s values. This also covers accountability – your personal accountability for your actions and the decisions you make. You can improve your ability to self-regulate by:
- knowing your own values and ethics and deciding what you will and will not compromise on. Knowing what is important to you allows you to face moral or ethical decisions with confidence
- make yourself accountable – if you make decisions and they turn out to be wrong, admit to it. Don’t, under any circumstances, try to blame others. There’s nothing wrong with making an error, trying to cover it up or apportion blame elsewhere however is wrong and you might find that you quickly lose the respect of your fellow workers if you do this
- remain calm – what do you do if something doesn’t go your way? Do you shout at somebody to relieve your stress? Do you stomp about, slamming doors and muttering under your breath? If you do, maybe you should practise calming exercises, such as deep breathing or removing yourself from the situation for a few minutes. This can help prevent an emotionally driven outburst that you’ll later regret. Another practical way of de-stressing is to write down all the negative things you might want to say to your team and then screw it up and throw it away. This is 100 per cent better than ranting at your team, plus it’ll give you a chance to see if what you wanted to say is fair or not
Okay, that’s enough for this week. Try out the theory and see what you think then pop back next week for a look at the final three points – Motivation, Empathy and Social Skills.
