Emotional Intelligence at Work — What Is It and How to Use It?

Misunderstandings, conflicts and miscommunication are issues that can be avoided. Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ that stands for Emotional Intelligence Quotient) may be the key to solving all these problems. Though people pay more attention to IQ, successful teamwork relies on smart EQ. Without understanding what other people feel and how to treat them in different cases, it would be difficult to succeed as a team.

So, today we’ll talk about enhancing emotional intelligence to best know your people.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

This phenomenon seems recent but the term emerged back in 1990. Two researchers, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published a joint article of the same name in the ‘Imagination, Cognition, and Personality’ journal. Later, in 1996, Dan Goleman popularised the term in his book ‘Emotional Intelligence’.

Essentially, it refers to the ability to recognise and regulate own emotions as well as understand emotions of others. People with high EQ can not only scan what everyone feels but can impact those feelings, either positively or negatively.

This ability plays an important role in every social interaction, especially in crises cases when one is pressured by stress. All of us face situations of meeting tight deadlines, dealing with fast changes, fixing failures, exchanging feedback, and so on.

There are 5 main components of EI:

• Self-awareness
• Self-regulation
• Social skills
• Empathy
• Motivation

At a quick glance, you see that almost all of them are widely used at work, especially when communicating with colleagues and making serious decisions. That’s why people with a developed EI have higher job satisfaction, perform well and achieve success faster.

How to Measure EQ?

Scientifically-proven tests take time, with results requiring manual calculation. So for a quick, approximate look at your EQ, we suggest these short and informative quizzes:

Mind Tools explains every metric and gives some tips on improving them.

Institute for Health and Human Potential offers an interpretation, with some things to consider.

How to Improve Emotional Intelligence?

Even if your results are far from ideal and you commonly focus on work, not feelings, it isn’t catastrophic! With boosting some EQ skills, you’ll just improve effectiveness and achieve goals faster. Sounds nice? Let’s learn how to do this!

1) How to Build Self-Awareness

Understanding possible weaknesses will not only help to find an effective way of dealing with negative emotions, but also to cope with irritating things at work. Self-awareness results in balanced decisions, completing tasks without dramatic mistakes, good relationships with colleagues and managers, and career growth.

So, before trying to understand emotions of others, you should learn to recognise your own:

• How are you feeling in different situations?
• Do emotions interfere with your work?
• Do these emotions change your behaviour or impact decisions?
• Can you control them to keep the entire situation under control?
• What helps you to keep the mind clear?

It’s great if you already have the answers, but few of us have ever thought about this. More often than not, we just respond to external stimuli.

2) How to Master Self-Regulation

After bringing emotions to your attention, it’s crucial to find effective ways to deal with them, to adapt to new changes, solve conflicts and resolve crises. Impulsive decisions rarely lead to positive results.

Here are simple techniques for that:

• Before responding to something that causes stress, count to ten (or even more) and ask yourself what the other person would do.
• Think about the consequences before reacting to a situation. Would the rash decision lead to discomfort after a day, week or month?
• If you are feeling pressured, take a break or even do some physical exercise to let emotions subside.
• Accept that you won’t ever control everything and instead focus on a set of steps that will lead you out of the crisis.
• Visualise plan A and plan B before making a decision. In Collabio Spaces, we have free-to-use templates such as ‘Decision-making matrix’ and ‘Decision making — Pros and Cons.’
• If you need to reply to a colleague or partner while being overwhelmed by emotions, create a note or a draft email and read it twice. Delete everything you would never be happy to receive, and only then send the reply.

https://collabio.onelink.me/qA4Y/ebce026b

So, leave the rash actions behind and plan forward with healthy emotional analysis. A little thought, or pause, will help avoid negative situations and personal regret and enhance your team’s EQ!

3) Enhance Social Skills

As we said before, even love wolves can be great team players. Teamwork is inevitable in almost every field — all of us attend corporate parties from time to time. :) At work, proper communication within a team, between departments, and especially with customers, is key to success.

When it comes to social skills, there is always room for growth, and this will contribute to your EQ.

Check out these tips:

• Listen to others carefully and without interrupting. Would you like to finish the sentence for the interlocutor? It’s great that you understand the way of thought, but it’s still better to let the person speak.
• Use active listening techniques to make sure you understand the person correctly. Don’t repeat every phrase but focus on important things, placing necessary emphasis.
• Don’t rush to judge. If you disagree with a colleague’s opinion, gather the pros and cons, and then calmly explain why you disagree.
• Keep an eye on non-verbal communication. Use open gestures and copy elements of the interlocutor’s behavior to win their attention. If the person uses closed poses, find out what the reason is; try to win them over.
• Avoid gossip and other office drama. If you can get around sharp corners, why not? At work, focus on tasks, and stick to the positive side in relationships with teammates. This will help you avoid being considered a conflict person but will allow you to build an image of a polite, intelligent and reliable colleague.

4) Nurture Empathy

Empathy helps us look at things and problems from a different perspective, understand why people think and act differently, and find the best solution for all parties. It helps immensely when building healthy relationships, both at work and in personal life. With empathy, you will know how to act with mates, partners, customers, company leaders, and enjoy the natural flow between all these people.

Here’s the checklist for improving empathy:

• When doing joint projects, always look at things from others’ points of view. Disagreement often leads to conflict, but sometimes people have reasons to make certain decisions. It is difficult, but try to find out these reasons. And if you see that the person is wrong, use your social skills to listen, consider and give arguments.
• Show interest in others, watch how people react to your behavior and to the situation around you.
• Dig into your own inner world and analyse your emotional background. Record, in a journal or digital notes, what makes you delighted or indignant at work.
• Spot emotional ‘red flags’ and look for their causes. For example, too much sarcasm or harsh answers to simple questions may signal something more than a bad mood.

Empathy can create the most productive and comfortable relationships and working conditions.

5) Improve Intrinsic Motivation

The last key part of EI is motivation: the magic that helps us succeed in career growth. It’s great if your job is about more than the money. :)

If you feel that it has become harder to feel inspired at work, grab these tips for becoming more motivated:

• Do what you love. Naturally, every job has ups and downs, exciting and routine tasks. This is fine! Even if you suffer from boring trivia at the moment, remember fascinating challenges that bring you joy and put these future things on your to-do list.
• Set short-term and long-term goals. Even if the motivation leaves you for a while due to fatigue, the list of goals will return focus to what energizes you. Check out free templates for setting goals in Collabio! :)
• Track your progress. Understanding how much has already been done, and how much remains, always inspires commitment at work.
• Work in a team. Sharing positivity, as well as a sense of competition (even if it’s not direct competition), supports us in difficult times. A sense of belonging helps the common flow of motivation.
• Ask for feedback. Useful comments will give you a hint about in which direction to develop, and positive feedback will simply give credit where it is due and incentivise you to keep going!

The Bottom Line

Many people still reduce emotional intelligence to a popular term meaning much less than intellect. However, all of us need to collaborate and communicate with people every day, and our overall success depends on that. So, why not try using a couple of tips from each of the five points and see how it works? We are sure that productivity will grow, and promotion and acknowledgment will come.

If you’re still not convinced by the benefits of teamwork check out this piece and get back to today’s EI tips. ;)