Emotional Quotient
Emotional Quotient is the ‘ability to understand, use and manage your own emotions.’ We need to have an understanding of our emotions to function effectively in society.
By gaining an awareness of our own emotions we are then able to work more effectively with others.
One of the key factors of being a good manager is the ability to develop strong people skills, and consequently have a high level of emotional intelligence. A couple of years ago, many employers felt that they did not need people skills in order to run a workplace, and instead they could just be authoritative and expect their workforce to perform. However, we have now discovered that it is critical in today’s workplace. You must be emotionally intelligent in order to build rapport, make people feel motivated, and for effective team-working.
There are 5 elements of Emotional Quotient:
Self-Awareness – It is important to have an awareness of your own emotional needs in order to help others. Those with high emotional intelligence will often be able to understand their emotions and therefore do not let their emotions take over.
Self-Regulation – This refers to how an individual controls their emotions. For example, someone who is self-regulated will usually be able to stop themselves from becoming too angry or upset when they make careless decisions and instead will think before they act to make rational choices about how to manage their emotions.
Motivation – Those with a high level of emotional intelligence will often be motivated with themselves and are highly productive within teams as they look for long-term goals.
Empathy – This refers to being able to understand other individuals’ emotional needs. It is important within the workplace to understand when someone may need some extra support and identify feelings that may be subtle. This will allow individuals to build relationships and ensure that there is support amongst their community.
Social Skills – These are the skills that we use every day to interact with people around us. Those with a high degree of Emotional Intelligence will usually have a high quality of social skills using a range of verbal and non-verbal communication to interact with others.
If a manager is able to master these skills and has a high degree of emotional intelligence, they will be able to recognise what they need and what others around them may need. This will allow more effective working in the workplace and improve overall team performance.
When we work with individuals and companies one of the ways we enhance individuals EQ is through a program called ‘Everything DISC’. By utilising specific, targeted questionnaires, we can work out personal behaviour profiles. We all have a mixture of all 4 main profiles but will have a dominant profile. There are different sections where you can work on your own personal development, how you work together as a team and how as a manager you can work better with the team. One of the sections is Agile EQ, which allows us to read emotional and interpersonal situations and alter our responses to become a more agile workforce. It also gives actionable targets to improve EQ. We love using this with teams and individuals to help stretch across the profiles and help with EQ.
If you want to read more about how to improve working relationships why not check out a blog I wrote: How To Improve Workplace Relationships.
Thank you for reading, I hope it helps you to start to have some awareness on EQ.
Written by Claire Elmes – Inspire You
