Building Your Emotional Intelligence
FountainBlue's July 7 Front Line Managers Online program was on the topic of 'Building Emotional Intelligence'. Please join me in thanking our panelists.
This month's diverse and passionate panel represented a wide range of experiences, roles and backgrounds, but they had much in common:
They are passionate about developing a growth mindset and choose to continuously learn and grow.
They are business-minded and people oriented.
They leverage their emotional intelligence to deliver business results and to drive social and cultural changes.
Below is a compilation of their best practices.
Choose to Become a Better Version of Yourself
Emotional intelligence begins with your own personal self-awareness and your dedication to continue to learn and grow.
Understanding who you are, how you are impacting others, and what motivates you will not only help make yourself more emotionally intelligent, it can also help you better understand how you are impacting and influencing others, and even help them to become more emotionally intelligent.
Manage your passion and emotions so that it doesn't negatively impact and influence how others perceive you or respond to you.
Becoming more flexible and more open-minded will not only help you better understand what drives and motivates others, but it will also help you better connect with others, and leverage the relationship to drive results.
Having Emotional Intelligence Helps to Build Relationships and Connections
When you're emotionally intelligent, it's easier to build trust and empathy which is foundational to growing relationships and connections with people who may not be like you.
Ensure that the other parties feel heard and respected, even if you disagree.
Choose to be emotionally intelligent enough to gauge when and how you deliver feedback or make requests. It will increase the likelihood of a successful response.
Authentic and transparent communication is critical, but can't be expected each time, every time. Understanding and forgiving less-than-ideal communications will help maintain positive, constructive relationships even when we can't always be perfect.
Communicate with Empathy and Authenticity
Be an open and curious listener so that you can be an on-point communicator.
Leverage your emotional intelligence to speak to the common goals and focus on delivering measurable results, using language and communication styles which resonate for each individual recipient.
Make sure that the timing is right for the giver and the receiver to have a difficult conversations.
Manage your Emotions and Focus on the Business Impact
Try not to take things personally even when you feel that something someone said or did was a personal attack. Having a calm exterior and a curious mindset may help head off an awkward interaction.
Speak to the business value for managing and leading with emotional intelligence, and point to the metrics and results for same.
Emotional Intelligence is Dynamic and Evolving
There are no right answers on how to be emotionally intelligent in every scenario, for emotional intelligent is largely situational and dynamic.
Choosing to better understand a broader range of perspectives, scenarios and challenges will help you build your own emotional intelligence.
It's not a direct path to increasing emotional intelligence, and it's not always going to be easy. Adopting humor and a longer-term perspective may help you to continue navigating forward.
The bottom line is that emotional intelligence is an essential component for any successful team and organization. Leading and managing with emotional intelligence will drive long-term results and also make the day-to-day challenges more rewarding and enjoyable.