Are you someone who finds it difficult to understand other people’s feelings at the workplace ?? Not able to regulate your emotions at the workplace?? Well, we got you cover, here is your go-to guide to managing your emotions and thoughts at your workplace proactively and enhancing your emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is one of the key skills most recruiters look for in the candidate post covid, due to an increase in awareness regarding mental health. “Emotional intelligence” has been the buzzword in the last 2 years among recruiting professionals, but what does really emotional intelligence mean?? Let’s understand it.
What Is Emotional Intelligence ??
Emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of your feelings and how they affect your work environment. When an individual emotional quotient is high, one can recognize their mood, be able to control their impulses, and develop a sense of internal motivation to help them excel. You understand and tend to empathize with other people’s emotions and situations and manage professional relationships better.
Why Emotional Intelligence Is a Crucial Skill In Workplace In 2022??
Emotional intelligence at the workplace is critical to managing cohesive, high-performing teams, and understanding your emotions and others’ feelings to create a holistic work culture. Eventually, it helps an organization or company to have highly efficient and productive working professionals and increases employee retention.
Researchers and behavioral scientists mention that emotional intelligence affects how leaders communicate with their teams and how their team members interact with them and each other.
Emotionally intelligent leaders and managers have the capability to know to manage their emotions and behavior at work, creating safe environments for exchanging ideas and feedback, productive teamwork, high morale, and employee engagement. They manage workplace stress and conflict carefully and be an inspiration for their teams to do the same.
How To Develop Emotional Intelligence ??
Emotional intelligence is a mental muscle that is developed with practice. As with anything, it takes practice and small steps daily to make a big difference. When we look at examples of leaders in most successful companies, it shows that all of these leaders have and demonstrate high levels of all the key components of emotional intelligence. , women tend to have higher emotional empathy.
Here are some actionable steps to improve or build your emotional intelligence skill:
1. Build Interpersonal Work Relationships:
The best way to build emotional intelligence is by practicing in daily life situations. Make a habit to go on for lunch with co-workers, attend industry-relevant networking events, and creating relationships with people you work with or with whom you would like to work with.
It can be done by connecting with like-minded people virtually also and making a fruitful connection in the digital age.
2. Lean Toward The Positive :
Develop the habit of replacing your negative thoughts with positive ones. In moments of stress, focus on amplifying the positive and optimistic outlook and lead your team. When things go wrong, instead of hammering on the negative, which reduces team morale, you can reframe your perspective and ask, “How can we do better next time?” or “What can we learn from this mistake and avoid next time?”
3. Manage Your Stress Proactively:
Stress is inevitable. Stress at work is almost guaranteed. Exercise, meditation, journaling, and regular breaks from work are a few ways to bring more mindfulness. Daily journaling and maintaining progress data in your career helps you to take less stress and function with more clarity.
4. Schedule “me” time to think :
As a leader or project manager, you must schedule a time during the workweek to think about and plan your ongoing projects. Writing in a journal, list, or within a tool is one of the simplest ways to increase self-awareness and emotional intelligence in the workplace.
5. Have A Mentor:
Leaders with coaches perform better as they get the correct direction and clarity of thoughts. It is important to talk to someone whom you trust.
Talking to a mentor, who understands your work and responsibilities helps you reflect and become aware of what needs to be done. You can even ask for advice. Having a good confidant or mentor can quickly help you build your emotional intelligence.
6. Enroll In Emotional Intelligence Training:
By joining the emotional intelligence training program you have more accountability to develop the skill with other peers and more easy learning experience with your peers. It will elevate your process of being more emotionally intelligent in a more structured fashion.
Conclusion:
Emotional intelligence is a crucial skill to develop in the world of capitalism. It will not only help you to understand your emotions of yourself but others also. These will help you to make great professional relationships with your teams also. Emotional intelligence consists of self-awareness, motivation, social skills, and clothes subdomain. To know the ways of developing emotional intelligence go through the steps mentioned above. Start with the skills where you lack and practice.
