Emotional Intelligence at Work

On the fields as well as on the screens, we admire when both athletes and celebrities demonstrate it and scoff and ridicule when they do not exemplify it. Emotional Intelligence (EI) is known as the ability to become aware of, understand, manage, and effectively express one’s own feelings as well as effectively interact with others and their emotions. According to a new leading EI training and testing program, Talent Smart, 90% of those that perform highly at work have been noted to have a high Emotional Quotient (EQ). Typically, it has also been noteworthy to highlight that leaders with high EQ within the workplace have a memorable, resonating, and genuine charm about them that differentiates them from others in the crowd since they have learned to build EQ as a skill set. In reflection to an instructive survey of business managers, over 75% of the respondents indicated that possessing EI is more important than IQ for workplace success. As indicative within the findings, EI can lead to better outcomes in: keeping with emotional regulation during and within interpersonal work conflicts, being calm when experiencing greater work pressure to perform, having more fitness to create and sustain healthier decision-making, possessing greater empathy, maintaining a likelihood to pause, listen, reflect, and respond to constructive criticism, as well as employing a greater degree of understanding the dynamics of team work, communication, and interpersonal relationships. The benefits of Emotional Intelligence can be monumental for cultivating workplace success. 

More than a quarter of a century passed since one of the first research reflections on emotional intelligence had emerged from the literature in 1990, citing research from developmental and social psychology that emotional intelligence is “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” Including this article, several thousand publications have cited this research since that time, and the research efforts on emotional intelligence and its related social applications have flourished and increased across the earth. As part of a Super Power nation, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair even relayed that “one big change in what kids should learn is the need to nurture creative thinking and emotional intelligence” as part of the Global Ed & Skills 2014 conference. Current high-ranking business schools and other institutions have added emotional intelligence screenings as part of their assessments to better determine the success trajectory of their students and better assess which ones will be their top performers. Recently, the University of Málaga in Spain acquired a new offering for a master’s degree in emotional intelligence. These are just some of the recent developments as to how emotional intelligence has started to set trends within the global platform. 

Apatheia, instead of apathy, is known to be the state of mind in which we are able to care appropriately to the surrounding dialogue around us, but not enough to the point that we are not disproportionately impacted by those external circumstances around us. Apatheia needs to now become part of the emotional intelligence discourse, especially in workplace scenarios that require high levels of investment in others. On one hand, we do not seek to become too emotionally intertwined with other colleagues that we emphasize more of what they think, feel, and do (known as enmeshment). On the other hand, we do not want tremendous distance that we portray a sense of being emotionally uncaring (known as dissociation). When in an enmeshed style of work relationship, we tend to care too much about the other colleagues’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs on matters. When we exemplify dissociation, the opposite is true and we convey that we do not care at all about our colleagues. Typically for two individuals at work embracing a dissociative style of relationship, being collaborative with each other will be less likely. Additionally, when working on a team – dissociation demotes the degree of collaboration and effort usually required for a successful outcome. When hearing a perspective or idea from another colleague that we generally dislike or distrust, we might maintain what is termed as reactive devaluation. This is when we negatively evaluate and value less the opinions and perspectives of those that we dislike and distrust. Emotional intelligence is required to navigate all of these circumstances and to flourish in the workplace. 

Framework of Emotional Intelligence

There are several main pillars in the framework of emotional intelligence that can be very relevant and applicable for workplace success. One study reflected that adults that grew in these EI competencies are better able to experience social relationships, lower cortisol levels (stress hormone), and increase improvements in physical and emotional well-being overall alongside job satisfaction and workplace productivity. One pillar is self-awareness, the knowledge of yourself that is grounded in truth of your strengths and limitations along with optimism, confidence, and a ‘growth-oriented mindset.’ Here are three simple strategies to improve your self-awareness at work: 

• Take inventory of your strengths and weaknesses. Bring recognition to your weaknesses and clarity to what can benefit from more improvement within your work sphere. Do you get impatient, angry, and/or irritable with others? How do you communicate (between body, tone, and discussion content) with others at work? What needs to change in order to deal with yourself and these emotions more effectively? 
• Likened to Illinois weather, emotions can be ever-evolving and on a constant shift. Keep in mind that your anger with a co-worker or supervisor will one day soon lessen. Making a decision based on specifically intense emotions can be disastrous for long-term outcomes. 
• Remain attentive to your emotional experience every day and ask yourself: Does what I’m feeling have any impact on the people that I interact with, and how are these emotions influencing how I am choosing to respond in the moment? 

Another pillar is self-regulation, and this is another critical EI skill that has additional benefits when embraced. Author and researcher Daniel Goleman perceives self-regulation as the ability to manage what we are feeling in an appropriately safe context. Self-regulation at work can look like: growing in understanding what has been shared from a co-worker and thinking with reflective dialogue, stress management with regular exercise and rounds to the local gym, and keeping calm while weeding through stressful circumstances. Relationships skills would be another pillar in EI skill sets that can be understood as: communicating clearly, listening well, cooperating with others, resisting inappropriate social pressure, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking and offering help when needed. Strengthening relational skills in the workplace can look like paying attention to the non-verbal cues of the body language of others, actively listening and providing reflective feedback to others (see here for further reading on listening well), avoiding office drama and minimizing relational tensions while looking for ways to enhance problem-solving in the workplace environment. Empathy is currently being defined as recognizing how others feel and responding accordingly with our thoughts and emotions. Empathy is an additional pillar within EI that seeks to understand another co-worker’s perspective as well as become aware of our own thoughts and emotions related to the behaviors, feelings, and interactions of the work flow of relationships. All of these pillars within EI will cause workplace effectiveness to mature as cultural distinctives, societal values, and contextual considerations increase the demand for successful, healthy, and functioning individuals and teams at work. 

Here is a practical acronym to continue establishing strategies to build a greater EQ within your workplace using FRAME: 

F – Your feelings will not over-take your thoughts. Instead of dwelling on any negative emotions, use them to help motivate you to have more heightened focus and make necessary changes within the day. 

R – Read the room that you find yourself. More and more workplaces require team work. Just as when a barometer that forecasts short-term weather patterns can experience changes, it is a necessity to become emotional savvy as participation, cooperation, and collaboration among team members can continue to increase when understanding the emotional barometer within the room. 

A – Learn to be consistently authentic. The key is to make any mistake a learning opportunity for growth. Each opponent to your goals will help to push you to become even better. Authenticity will attract colleagues into a unified effort to work wholeheartedly and effectively. 

M – Understand your daily mood and the mood of those around you. Making constructive choices about your personal behavior and social interactions will require that you maintain self-awareness of your inner experience and acknowledge that of others around you. 

E – Continue to engage in order to understand. We learn when we continuously stop and reflect, using lessons from failure to help us grow overall. Ask yourself regularly, “What problems did my personal mistakes reveal? What can I do differently next time?” 

Keep FRAME in mind to continue building your EQ. For many within the workplace, cultivating the soft skills of emotional intelligence can be difficult. Yet, the accumulating research trends are clear and emphatically demonstrate that emotional intelligence increases the capacity for effectiveness in the workplace, creates margin for individuals and teams to function better, maintains more pleasant emotions, engages in better interpersonal relationships, and achieves greater work productivity outcomes.

Here are 5 Ted Talks that can provoke, challenge, and encourage you to improve your EQ: 

• Why aren’t we more compassionate? 
• Why we all need to practice emotional first aid
• How to spot a liar 
• Let’s try emotional correctness
• Why we make bad decisions

Recommended Resources: 

• Working With Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Bradberry and Greaves
• Primal Leadership by Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee
• Wired to Care by Dev Patnaik
• The Language of Emotional Intelligence by Jeanne Segal