Emotional Intelligence.
Let’s start our 6-week series here. Being able to understand how people are feeling, how their emotions will impact on their behaviour, attitude and performance and being able to identify and manage one’s own emotional states are a cornerstone of effective leadership – and underpin many of the other skills we will touch on in this series of blogs.
Higher emotional intelligence allows us to communicate with people more effectively. It’s also critical to enabling us to understand how people differ, how they need different things from their experience of work and thus to a manager’s ability to personalise and adapt their approach according to each individual to get the best out of everyone.
Leading thinkers in the EI field, JCA Global, hold a firm belief that our emotional intelligence can be developed and improved. They have developed a range of questionnaires and tools which can help managers to strengthen their EI muscles, including a cool new app. Described as,
“a personal learning companion which helps to embed emotionally intelligent attitudes, feelings, and behaviours through daily practice”,
it’s a combination of self-assessment, personal reflection, reading and learning, sharing your learning with others, a feelings tracker and a log to help you embed good habits. So a pretty useful tool to have in your work toolbox.
There is also – obviously – a wealth of reading material out there on Emotional Intelligence. Pick up anything by the brilliant Daniel Goleman and you’ll learn more about EI. Or if you're short on time, watch and listen to someone else’s synthesis of one of them, such as this one by 2,000 Books.
Honing yours and your team's emotional intelligence is a crucial part of developing managers so they can help their organisations maximise the talent in their organisations and enable positive and meaningful conversations to take place. Techniques such as 360-degree feedback can help pin-point blind spots in the various facets of emotional intelligence and help develop greater self-awareness.
Next week we'll delve a little deeper and look at when and how to give good feedback to team members.
We hope you'll tune in then, but if this is not quite your thing then why not forward the link to a colleague who may like a read.
If you have any questions in the meantime do please get in touch.