Imagine leading a meeting where your team is going to discuss and decide the future path of your company by crafting a vision statement. 

How would you like the meeting to proceed? An all inclusive discussion where everyone is contributing their ideas or a meeting where you just keep sharing your own vision with hardly any inputs from the team? 

Anyone can tell you that a vision statement arrived at by the team is more likely to succeed. But to get the team involved you must foster an environment of trust and mutual respect. A culture that can be easily developed if you possess a high level of emotional intelligence.

So, what is emotional intelligence? 

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions as well as those around you. It allows you to understand how your emotions affect you, your peers, seniors and team members. It also enables you to perceive others’ emotions and act accordingly.

Which brings us to the next question.

How do you identify emotional intelligence? 

The term emotional intelligence was coined by John Meyer and Peter Salovey in 1990. But it gained popularity later owing to the work done by psychologist Daniel Goleman. He says,

IQ and technical skills are entry level requirements for executive positions. Effective leaders have a high degree of emotional intelligence.

He describes five characteristics of emotional intelligence.

Self-awareness

It is the most critical component of emotional intelligence because it entails being aware of yourself. Your own strengths and weaknesses, which enables you to function to your fullest. A self-aware person does not have impossible expectations of themselves and since they are operating within their strengths, hedging against their weaknesses, their output is always good.

If you have not yet started on the path of self-awareness or would like to hone this skill even more, here are some tips to do this:

• Journal your thoughts and emotions every day. Journalling allows you to unravel the multiple thoughts crossing your mind and understand and analyse them.
• Practice mindfulness whenever you can. Mindfulness is observing your own actions and thoughts dispassionately. Initially you may be skeptical about how you can observe yourself while you are also doing something. It sounds difficult but trust me with practice it can be achieved. Try starting with observing your actions. It is easier than observing your thoughts. Imagine how a fly on the wall would be looking at your actions and that is your mindfulness practice.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation means you are in control of your emotions and actions. How you behave with others, what you expect from others or yourself, and more are within your control. Your actions are not guided by impulse or knee-jerk reactions.

Self-regulation is possible if you know your values – what is right and what is wrong. Share on X

You need to be calm to be in control. Practising mindfulness helps in better self-regulation.

Motivation

The ability of an individual to work towards their goals continuously, despite all odds, is motivation. 

There are two things essential for being motivated:

• Knowing your why. You must always know ‘why’ you are doing certain tasks. Keep asking yourself why till you reach the bottom of your emotional reason for it. Sometimes you might need to go six or seven levels deep before you work out your real ‘why’.
• Having a positive attitude. Life happens to each one of us. Which puts a spanner in our plans. Those with a positive attitude ignore the problems and continue moving towards their goal.

Have you ever tried to start exercising, whether it’s walking, running, cycling, swimming, yoga, or whatever, but stopped after a couple of days or weeks? 

Try finding out why you want to start exercising. It could go something like this:

1. To lose weight.
2. Why? To be fit.
3. Why? To be able to run the next marathon being held in the city.
4. Why? I felt ashamed when everyone except me ran the last Marathon.

This is your real motivation. Every time you don’t feel like exercising, imagine a situation where you have run your marathon and are part of the group of people who have completed it successfully. That’s the emotion you are striving for.

Empathy

The ability to feel what the other person is experiencing is empathy. Notice that I have used the verb feel. If you just understand what the other person is going through, you are sympathetic. But to really feel what they are going through, you need to be empathetic. 

To be empathetic, put yourself in the other person's shoes and imagine how you would have felt if that experience had been yours. Share on X

Let me assure you it is not so difficult to do this; it’s more of a mental block. 

Try practicing empathy the next time you are in the same room as a person in distress. You will be able to connect with that person better and help too. Once you practice empathy a couple of times, it will be easier to fall into a habit. Empathy is an essential skill for a leader because without it you will not be able to make the team function cohesively as a unit.

Social skills

You must be a great communicator to be an emotionally intelligent person. Feeling what others are feeling is not enough. You should also be able to convey that you empathise with them and stand by them. Some of the practices that can improve your social skills include gratitude and praising others. Mind you, praising others is not the same as buttering them up. Praising means genuinely knowing a person and identifying their qualities you admire.

How Emotional Intelligence helps leaders

We need emotional intelligence to keep things under control when they threaten to go out of hand. As a leader you should be able to perceive and manage negative emotions like distrust and dissatisfaction brewing below the surface. 

Emotional intelligence is critical for developing many other skills like:

• Decision making
• Time management
• Empathy
• Team management
• Anger management
• Flexibility
• Customer service
• Embracing change
• Stress tolerance
• Assertiveness
• Communication

And you can see how essential any of these skills are to your success as a leader.

Final thoughts

An important point to be noted is that emotional intelligence is not just an innate ability; it can be learnt. 

For instance, since you know stress breeds negative feelings, you should develop a positive attitude. A positive body language is an essential ingredient of an emotionally intelligent person. How you are saying something is equally, if not more, important than what you are saying. 

But the journey towards heightened emotional intelligence must start with observing yourself to identify your negative emotions.

Are you ready to start observing yourself like a fly on the wall?