What do you know about your EQ?
The way leaders interact with one another and with their teams is under scrutiny. And the qualities that are prized within the best leaders have shifted. For aspiring leaders, one of the most important skills to develop in the workplace is Emotional Intelligence, or Emotional Quotient (EQ). This is the ability to understand your own emotions, and those of the people around you (e.g. your team members).
EQ is generally measured via 4 competencies: self awareness, social awareness, self management and relationship management. All are extremely important in leadership positions.
Self-Awareness
At the core of EQ is a high level of self-awareness. This includes the ability to understand your strengths and weaknesses but also to recognise your emotions and how they affect you and your team’s performance. Though 95% of people describe themselves as self-aware, the reality is that only around 15% actually are. Self-awareness is crucial to understanding the best of yourself, which is, in turn, how a great leader brings about the best in their team members.
Self-Management
A key skill for leaders, self-management describes the capacity to manage your emotions, particularly in stressful situations, and maintain a positive outlook, despite setbacks. Good self-management is what helps great leaders to keep their impulses in check and react well in a diverse range of situations. Though our reactions tend to be automatic, a leader with a high EQ and in particular, a good level of self-management would be able to make a smooth and calm transition from reaction to response.
Social Awareness
A high level of social awareness gives leaders the ability to recognise others’ emotions and pick up on organisational dynamics. Those who excel in social awareness have high levels of empathy. They strive to understand the feelings and perspectives of their colleagues so they can be better communicators and collaborators. Empathy is often considered the number one leadership skill, and has a positive knock-on effect on other important leadership facets, such as coaching, communicating and engaging, decision making and judgement.
Relationship Management
Relationship management skills are based around a leader’s ability to resolve conflict, as well as influence, coach, and mentor others. It requires both self and social awareness and channeling both of these skills into positive interactions upwards and downwards. The key here is that great leaders want to help raise other people up, not keep them in their place, so a leader with great relationship management skills will always be looking at the ways to get the best out of each individual they work with.
EQ in leadership
Building emotional intelligence is what helps leaders grow, and make them effective motivators in the workplace. It’s a crucial skill to ensure in all leaders, as it can have a profound effect on a business. Leaders with higher EQ scores have more satisfied and engaged teams, leading to lower staff turnover.
Excelling at your job is a good first step towards a leadership position, but without a high EQ, your ability to communicate and collaborate will be hindered, and this is likely to be a hinderance in moving forward. Taking the time to work on your self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management will help any technically strong candidate to make the leap into leadership.
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