Emotional intelligence accounts for 67% of the abilities necessary for exemplary leadership performance.
Hard skills alone no longer determine a candidate’s right fit for a leadership role – and what makes all the difference is their soft skills.
So how do you, as a leader, develop emotional intelligence?
The 5 Elements of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is your ability to identify and manage your emotions and the emotions of others. It’s made up of five components:
- Self-awareness- This is your ability to identify and name your own emotions and recognize your moods, emotions, drives, and their effect on others.
- Self-regulation – This is your ability to control or redirect your emotions, your moods, or your disruptive impulses.
- Internal motivation – This is your passion to work for reasons beyond money and status.
- Empathy – This is understanding the emotional makeup of other people. You treat people according to their emotional reactions.
- Social skills – This is your ability to manage relationships, to build networks, to find common ground, and to build rapport with people.
5 Simple Strategies to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
- Implement a 360-degree feedback form.
If you give employee reviews, have your team review you as well. This will help you measure your self-awareness. You might think you’re doing amazing, but your team’s feedback will tell you the truth. And if you want unfiltered truth, make their reviews of you anonymous.
- The power is in your pause.
If you are in a heated high-stress moment and you feel like your mind is racing, work to pause, and just breathe.
- Write an email but don’t send it.
If you are not sure about how something sounds, write an email. But don’t send it after writing it. Just read it from the point of view of the person you’re sending it to. Imagine how they might feel reading it. Would you change anything about what or how you wrote that message?
- Hire people to manage what causes you stress.
Remember, trauma is toxic stress, so don’t carry more of it unless you’re ready to handle it.
- Ask yourself, do you want to continue to play the role that you play in your business?
Do you like being the worrisome, hypervigilant, helicopter CEO? Or do you want to have a team of empowered people ready to help you that have your confidence?
If you want to learn more about improving your emotional intelligence as a leader, check out the Diary of a Doer Podcast on https://trivinia.com.
