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Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is one of the most sought-after interpersonal skills in the workplace.
In fact, 71% of employers value emotional intelligence more than technical skills when evaluating candidates.¹
This is because employees with high emotional intelligence are more likely to stay calm under pressure, resolve conflict effectively, communicate with co-workers more efficiently and influence and foster better relationships.
So, especially if you aspire to be in a leadership role, there’s an emotional element you must consider to your management style. As you set the tone for the whole organisation.
If you lack emotional intelligence, it could have more far-reaching consequences; resulting in lower employee engagement and a higher turnover rate. However, if you have a high EQ it will help you successfully coach teams, manage stress, deliver feedback, and collaborate with others.
The Four Components of EQ
First, let’s briefly explore what EQ is. There is a simple model that breaks it down into four different domains. We need to understand and develop ourselves in each one, to become a truly emotional intelligent individual.
The ‘Blue’ side is intrapersonal; which means understanding and managing your own emotions.
The ‘Red’ side is interpersonal; which means understanding how we interact with others.
1. Self-awareness
Arguably the most critical part, as it impacts all of the quadrants.
This is the ability to recognise and understand your own emotions. It is the foundational building block of emotional intelligence; and to cultivate this you need to understand your brain; your triggers, values, motivators, and threat responses.
Dr Steve Peters breaks this down in his book, Chimp Paradox. He introduces the concept that we all have two brains:
- The human brain, that is responsible for the intelligent, rationale and logical thoughts you have.
- However, the other one, known as the ‘Chimp’ brain, is not under your control. This brain thinks emotionally and is led by feelings and impressions.
For example, have you ever felt like your reaction to certain situations is less of a conscious decision and more of an instinctual one? That’s our chimp brain at play! As it reacts 5 seconds faster and 5 times as strong as the human one.
So, we need to learn what triggers the chimp brain to stop it hindering our reactions, and instead lead with our human brain (or at least wait for it to catch up) before we respond in situations, to stay emotionally aware and intelligent.
Takeaway: Everyone has a different formula that dictates their response to situations. It’s determined by a combination of factors like personality, experience, values, and goals. One model that some people find useful is the SCARF (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness) model. Exploring this can help you delver deeper into your own self-awareness; learn more about yourself to understand why you react in certain ways and therefore how to make smarter choices. I’d also recommend reading the Chimp Paradox.
2. Awareness of others
This is our ability to understand how other people are feeling and recognise, how you would feel in their shoes. It does not mean you have to sympathise, validate, or accept their behaviour, just that you can see things from their perspective and understand what they feel.
To do this, we need to take the time to learn more about people; their beliefs, culture, motivators, values and personality traits that drive their behaviours. If we spend enough time, we can try to understand their core.
The model below breaks down the 3 key viewpoints you should consider:
Using these perceptual positions and considering any situation from these three different angles can help you become more empathetic.
Empathy also involves listening carefully to the other person to really hear, not just what they are saying, but understand their feelings and emotions too. Unfortunately, listening has become less common. Hearing is something people do all the time, but listening and understanding takes effort. And it’s the empathetic listening that builds positive and impactful relationships.
Empathy is a powerful skill, and one that is essential for those in leadership roles to develop your awareness of others.
Takeaway: Make listening your superpower! Use your eyes, ears, and heart to listen. Manage the environment with no distractions, no matter how small. Plus manage your own mindset. You can explore and use the model (Receive, Appreciate, Summarise, Ask) to listen empathically. You should not be saying anything during the first 2 stages of RASA, then a top tip from me would be to count to 5 in your head once someone finishes speaking to make sure they’ve truly finished. Often, given this extra time, people will reveal something else they may have been holding back. This helps us to get all the information from them. Then you can move into the final 2 stages, helping you build a stronger connection.
3. Self-management
This is being able to appropriately express, regulate, and manage our own emotions.
Understanding communication is the first important expertise for self-management. We’ve talked about improving your self-awareness of triggers and values, which is great. But, it’s one thing being aware of how we are perceived, and it’s another changing it!
It’s important to be aware of our own body language (especially when we are triggered), as we may think we’ve masked our emotions, but it’s easy to give visual clues away about our feelings. There are three key elements to communicating, both face to face and virtually, and each component can change or distort a message; words stated, tone and inflection used and body language.
You need to make sure sure you are putting thought and effort into how you are communicating, to manage yourself and what you are conveying to others.
In today’s fast-moving world, we are always under pressure to act now, rather than spend time reasoning things through, thinking about the true facts and making decisions founded on reality. Not only can this lead us to a wrong conclusion, but it can also cause conflict with other people, who may have drawn quite different conclusions on the same matter.
We all do this. Our values, beliefs and experiences of the world allow us to make quick decisions and our brain interprets things quickly and urges you to react. But learning how to control how we react, is another aspect to expanding your self-management.
Then the final element of self-management is self-talk. Also known as (PQ).
We all experience self-talk, it is the voice inside us that can determine our actions and thoughts.
When we are having positive self-talk we are happy, productive and successful. But when we allow it to become negative, the effects can be damaging to our confidence and our actions, and ultimately our performance. For example, when your mind tells you that you should prepare for tomorrow’s important meeting, it is positively serving you. When it wakes you up at 3am anxious about the meeting and warning you of the many consequences of failing, it is sabotaging you.
These 2 sides can be known as the Survivor brain (tasked with survival and activates your saboteurs) and the Sage region (where you tap into great powers of empathy, curiosity, creativity, and fearless, clear-headed, laser-focused action). Your PQ is the relative strength of these two modes, it is the percentage of time your mind is serving you (sage) as opposed to helping you survive (saboteurs). You need to make sure the balance is highly weighted in the sage mode to be successful at self-management.
Takeaway: There are individual tasks you could complete for the 3 parts to self-management.
- Keep a reflection journal. This will help you learn from yourself and document when you displayed positive communication skills.
- Explore the “Ladder of Inference” to help you understand the thinking steps; that can lead to jumping to wrong conclusions, and will help you get back to achieving decisions based on hard reality and facts.
- Assess your PQ score and then avoid sabotaging yourself by learning what yours are, and how they affect you: Saboteur test.
4. Relationship management
This the final stage of the journey and is largely impacted by applying ALL of the tips from the first 3 sections of the EQ model; communication, influence, collaboration and co-operation with others, based on our awareness of emotions and our ability to self-manage.
Once you learn to accept and deal with your own emotions then you should be able to do this for others, and allow them to feel comfortable expressing their emotions.
Another consideration is how to widen your network. Determine what you want to achieve from your current relationships, plus, explore if they are any specific relationships that need work on, changing or even creating. Then really connect with those people on a personal level.
Takeaway: When communicating consider these 2 skills to strengthen your relationship:
- Mirroring body language: try to subtly match the posture, body language, tone of voice and pace of the other person. Although make sure you consider how neurodiverse people may engage in conversations in a different way
- Use their language: use words that appeal to the individual and consider their preferred styles
Summary
It is crucial to approach all relationships with patience, understanding and empathy.
If you take the learnings from the 4 quadrants of the EQ model you have the true foundations to build strong and meaningful relationships, partnerships and connections.
After all, Gallo couldn’t have put it better when he said:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Do you want to enhance your EQ or leadership skills? Take a look at our course and programme offering and unbox the potential in yourself and others, or drop me an email or message on LinkedIn for more information.
