The 5-Minute-Manager - How to increase your Emotional Intelligence (EI)

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of yourself and others. It is the ability to be able to identify and express feelings, perceive and evaluate others’ emotions and use emotions to facilitate thinking.

It is extremely difficult to be a good communicator, to inspire others, coach, be a role model, and know yourself if you aren’t emotionally intelligent. Daniel Goleman, the author of ‘Emotional Intelligence,’ researched people from 181 different job roles from 121 companies and discovered that 67 per cent of the competencies deemed essential for effective performance were ‘emotional’ competencies. We learn, develop, and practice our emotional intelligence skills through real experiences. 

“Emotional intelligence is how well a manager connects to their team members and is an often-overlooked management skill. Psychology Today defines emotional intelligence as the ability to spot and manage your own emotions while still understanding others’ feelings. In the past, the ability to empathize with team members wasn’t seen as a prerequisite to being a good manager. Progressive management styles have since realized that a team member’s mental well-being is as important as their physical well-being. "Managers who display emotional intelligence also display high levels of self-awareness, a trait that helps them to understand how their emotions impact those around them. They also show self-regulation. The human mind can handle several emotions at once but separating one from another is a skill not many have. This trait makes a manager able to handle challenging situations more confidently." Source: Top 15 Management Skills, Lifehack.org.

All these traits stem from empathy, and that’s a skill that you can practice. Listening and talking with your team members can help you to develop deep compassion for their individual conditions. Moreover, research has found that emotional intelligence is crucial for effective, progressive leadership. "Emotional Intelligence involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions." Source: Emotions and Interpersonal communication.

High-performance managers can easily make a difference by taking decisions according to team members’ emotions. Inspirational, motivation and individualized consideration are components of high-performance leadership correlated with the ability to monitor emotions and the ability to manage emotions. So, it is important to improve emotional intelligence to be an effective High-Performance Manager. Findings suggest that managers higher on EI are more likely to achieve business outcomes and be considered effective leaders by their team members.

High-performance managers make use of EI as follows.

·      Not being afraid of expressing feelings clearly and directly. Letting their feelings lead to positive choices that benefit the whole team.

·      Having thoughts that are not dominated by negative emotions like fear, worry, hopelessness, and victimization. Instead of asking, "why me?" they develop self-awareness by asking, "Why does this issue keep coming up over and over?"

·      By being great at communicating not just through words but by being able to listen intently and read body language.

·      Balancing emotions and decisions with reason, logic, and reality. Assessing a situation from all angles before making a final call. 

·      Not being motivated by power, wealth, status, fame, or approval. Instead of being humble and acting with moral authority.

·      Do not internalize failure. Rather speaking about the good, the bad, and the ugly openly because everything is a learning opportunity.

·      Probing team members’ emotions in any given situation to understand their feelings and why. This is key for understanding how to respond appropriately rather than just impulsively reacting.

To develop or improve your EI, this is what you need to do.

·      Become more self-aware by noticing how your emotions affect your decisions and actions. Pay attention to managing strong emotions such as excitement, anger, frustration, and distress.

·      Improve your social skills by being ‘curious’; start a conversation by asking benign questions like: “That’s an amazing tie, where did you get it?”, “Those are fabulous shoes; where did you buy them?”

·      Focus on being more empathetic by using active listening to look for ‘emotional’ cues and words.

·      Work on motivating yourself to do things you don’t like, such as starting difficult tasks as early as possible. It’s most often a lack of confidence and self-doubt that stops you from doing such things. Breaking a difficult task into smaller chunks and just doing a bit simultaneously builds confidence and teaches your resistance.

·      Have empathy, meaning that you understand and share in the emotions of others. This communication skill is important in both team and one-on-one settings. In both cases, you must understand team members’ emotions and select an appropriate response. For example, if a team member is angry, empathy can help you diffuse their emotion. At the same time, understanding when a team member is feeling positive and enthusiastic can help you get support for your ideas and projects. Put yourself in your team members’ shoes. People are drawn to empathy; it's an attractive quality to have in building successful relationships at work. Empathy is something any manager can develop. It is all about thinking of other people's circumstances, understanding their current state of mental health, and knowing that their emotions are every bit as real as yours. This helps you develop perspective and opens you up to helping others.

·      Manage your emotions better than most. Reasonable people, the ones who maintain control over their emotions, are the people who can sustain psychologically safe workplaces. In these settings, productivity is high, and top performers flock to these organizations and rarely leave them. Self-control is a skill high-performance managers must learn to be present, calm, and focused during times of stress.

·      Respond instead of reacting. So often, we react when faced with an emotionally charged situation. We get defensive or act out in fear about something that triggers us. High-EI managers understand the root cause of their negative emotions and reactions, so they can respond, not react, with confidence and self-control. By modelling an appropriate and effective response rather than letting emotions get the best of them, managers with EI set the example for others to follow as a cultural trait.

·      Being open to feedback. High-performance managers ask peers and respected team members, "How am I doing?" then they listen to the feedback to become more self-aware. The key is acting on the feedback you receive. This shows team members you are listening to what they have to say. This sets the tone that if they come to you with issues, questions, or concerns, they will be heard and taken seriously.

Summary

1.     How to increase respect. - High-performance managers know that respect isn't an entitlement linked to a job title; rather, it is earned.

2.     How to build trust. - Trust means being transparent to be open, and honest in the way you speak and act. To encourage these qualities in your team, you must demonstrate them yourself. Transparent leadership means you have nothing to hide; this builds trust with your team members.

3.     How to use your body language. - A great deal of our communication happens through nonverbal cues such as body language, facial expressions, and eye contact. So, you need to think about it as a form of communication. Your everyday body language is often what determines whether people like you or not, and when someone has made up their mind about you, it’s all but impossible to change; therefore, body language must be made to work for you.

4.     How to use persuasion. - Persuasion is an art, not a science. We all know someone who can get us to do anything, an ability we all crave. Having had a career in Change Management, I have had to, on many occasions, convince people and teams of wholesale and often dramatic changes that need to be made. High-performance leadership activity is the ability to easily persuade people to do things they either don’t want to, have an unreasonable fear of, or think they will fail at. The key to persuasion is motivation when delegating a task to consider, for example, telling the team member that if you were doing the task, this is how you would do it.

5.     How to develop charisma. - Charisma was once believed to be an innate personality trait, a gift that certain individuals possess that gives them the capacity to do extraordinary things. The thinking was that it could not be learned, you either have it, or you don’t; however, this is not true. When a high-performance leader displays gusto and alacrity, is curious and always upbeat, this makes them charismatic. Doing these four things puts forward a positive attitude which infects team members thinking and feelings and can extend to the whole workplace. Communicating high expectations to team members and exhibiting confidence in their abilities to meet the expectations, in turn, increases your charisma.

6.    How to increase your emotional intelligence (EI). - Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of yourself and others. It is the ability to be able to identify and express feelings, perceive and evaluate others’ emotions and use emotions to facilitate thinking.

Management and TeamsRussell FutcherHow to increase your Emotional Intelligence (EI)