While intelligence is critical in business leadership, many people don’t understand the significance of emotional intelligence (EQ). It’s certainly not as easy as scheduling a move with Black Tie Moving. EQ is all about the ability to identify, own, and manage your emotions. It entails considering how your emotions impact others and how you empathize with their feelings and relative reactions. You can think of emotional intelligence as how you portray yourself to others and how to respect the feelings of those around you.
Demonstrating emotional intelligence can help your business succeed. And a lack of emotional intelligence can easily contribute to your business’s failure.
Four categories of emotional intelligence
Before we dive more specifically into how emotional intelligence impacts businesses and leadership, let’s align on the four primary categories.
- Self-awareness – Understanding your emotions and the impact you have on others
- Social awareness – Your ability to read the mood and emotions of others and respond respectfully
- Self-management – Your ability to maintain self-control in stressful situations
- Relationship management – The approach you take to leading, inspiring, and influencing others
How cultivating your emotional intelligence can create a better work environment
Companies with high morale and productive employees are generally led by leaders who demonstrate positive emotional intelligence. Their approach to managing their emotions and leading others creates a positive, productive environment where workers feel free to do their best work every day. And employees in this type of work setting are more likely to cooperate and brainstorm with others, looking for ways to help the company grow and prosper.
Consider a work environment where a leader criticizes employees or cuts them down when they share ideas. Stifling work settings hinder creativity, making it hard for a company to move forward. On the other side of the spectrum, when an emotionally intelligent leader is at the helm, they create an environment that results in the following:
- Happy, motivated, and inspired employees
- A pipeline of ideas to help move the business forward
- Positive conflict resolution
- Lower attrition
The greater the emotional intelligence a leader has, the more potential to bring together groups of diverse individuals to solve challenges thoughtfully and creatively.
10 tips for cultivating your emotional intelligence
Whether you are an entrepreneurial business leader or want to build your own EQ, these tips can help you harness your emotions and understand why you are feeling the way you are in the first place.
- Make a note of how you feel in various situations.
- Pay attention to the behaviors that you exhibit as a result of those emotions.
- Consider your opinions on a handful of serious topics, how you arrived at those opinions, and how you have expressed those opinions to others in the past.
- Take responsibility for your feelings and know that though others may influence how you feel, only you can own how you feel and ultimately react.
- Celebrate your positive emotions.
- Build a mitigation plan for your negative emotions.
- Seek counsel from a trusted family member, friend, or licensed therapist to help you identify and process negative emotions.
- Prioritize daily self-care and ensure you get an adequate amount of sleep each night.
- Prioritize exercise consisting of moderate activity three or four times a week at a minimum
- Remember that cultivating your emotional intelligence is a lifetime exercise
The more time you take to harness and cultivate your EQ, the better you can work with others. And perhaps most importantly, a strong EQ will help you to lead others better, and employees are far more likely to willingly follow the lead of an emotionally intelligent leader than one who is not.
