What is Emotional Intelligence?

The term ‘emotional intelligence’ has become a buzzword in the workplace of late because the benefits it brings to the workplace are starting to be recognised as a valuable soft skill that all employees should possess, no matter their role or the industry that they work in. Everyone develops different levels of emotional intelligence naturally depending on their experiences and personality, but it’s a skill that can be worked on to help improve your workplace relationships and your abilities as a leader.

In this article, we explain the key characteristics of emotional intelligence, discuss why it’s beneficial for workplace leaders, and share our advice on how to develop and improve your emotional intelligence skills.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence, often known as EI or EQ, is an awareness and understanding of emotions, both of yourself and others.

The dictionary definition of emotional intelligence is:

(n) the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.

(Oxford Dictionary)

Emotionally intelligent people are highly empathic, intuitive and tend to find it easy to develop strong relationships at work. They are comfortable identifying and voicing their own emotions and find it easy to understand where other people’s feelings and reactions are coming from, making them great listeners and support systems.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace is seen as a really important soft skill for employees to have because it can help with a wide range of scenarios, from managing conflict to dealing with positive and negative feedback. Some people may find that developing emotional intelligence doesn’t come as naturally to them as others, but it’s a quality that everyone can benefit from trying to work on.

Why Is Emotional Intelligence Important in the Workplace?

Emotional intelligence is incredibly beneficial to the workplace. It underpins our work relationships entirely, which is vital because these relationships are key to the running of the business. How well employees work together can have an impact on projects, morale, or even the business’s success.

Overall, employees want to thrive, they want to do well, and they want to be part of a business where they are valued and their needs are recognised. Having leaders that are empathic and self-aware will be a step towards that. 

One of the key reasons why emotional intelligence is important is that if employees feel like their colleagues and managers understand them, they’ll be much less likely to want to leave their roles. So ultimately, developing emotional intelligence in the workplace can have a positive impact on your employee turnover and help to increase profits as a result.

Another reason why emotional intelligence is important at work is that it leads to better employee relationships. When workers are friends with, or simply just enjoy spending time with their colleagues, they enjoy the time they spend at work more. Enjoying your job means that you’re more likely to work harder, feel more engaged and be more productive, which again has a positive impact on business performance.

Finally, if you have a workforce where the majority of employees exhibit emotional intelligence and empathy, you’re less likely to have to deal with conflict and miscommunication at work. Avoiding the former helps to create a more positive workplace atmosphere, and avoiding miscommunication is another thing that can improve employee productivity and help teams to work together more efficiently.

The Five Characteristics of Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman, a psychologist who carried out ground-breaking research into emotional intelligence, concluded that there were five characteristics of emotional intelligence. Understanding these characteristics of emotional intelligence can be a really useful way of improving your skills and improving your relationships at work.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to recognise your own emotions, reactions and their causes, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. Self-aware people are better at understanding where their feelings and reactions come from and are therefore better at dealing with them, self-regulating and letting these feelings pass without much disruption.

Self-Regulation

Self-regulation, which links nicely to self-awareness, is the ability to control how you react. People who can’t self-regulate often lash out or make impulsive comments or decisions that they can regret later. Therefore, self-regulation helps people avoid reactions or situations like those.

Motivation

Motivation includes traits such as drive, focus, taking initiative, and commitment. People who have these characteristics often lead by example and are considered inspiring, as they have an innate drive to keep working, improving and succeeding and don’t need an external source to fuel this.

Empathy

Empathic people can gauge the emotions of others, recognise how they feel, and will try and understand things from others’ points of view. Empathy is one of the most important characteristics of emotional intelligence because it demonstrates an ability to recognise emotions in other people as well as yourself. 

Social Skills

Emotionally intelligent people often have excellent social skills, which means they are usually found to be approachable and are great at communicating, interacting, listening, and collaborating. They tend to find it easier to build relationships because they can emotionally connect with others faster, building deeper connections and more trust.

What Is Emotional Intelligence in Leadership?

The leaders and managers in a company are an essential part of the creation of the company culture. As part of their role will involve managing, whether that is one person or a team of twenty, emotional intelligence will play an important part in the success of their responsibilities. 

A good leader needs to have strong communication skills, be able to coach and mentor, create a team culture, manage remote teams, listen effectively, influence, and negotiate. Yes, a leader needs knowledge, authority, strategic thinking and technical skill – but studies, such as Daniel Goleman’s work, are now illustrating why that isn’t enough. They also need to lead themselves, others and the organisation.

People with emotional intelligence demonstrate traits and actions such as explaining how they feel, embracing change, recognising their own strengths and weaknesses and using them appropriately, letting go of mistakes, and being curious about people. They’re more in touch with other people’s moods and reactions and find it easier to desolate situations by demonstrating empathy and helping other people to feel heard and understood.

Emotionally intelligent leaders will strive to understand their team by helping others to communicate, picking up on non-verbal cues and actively listening. So not only are they in touch with their own emotions and can lead themselves based on this, but they’re also great at gauging the needs of their team and taking an intuitive approach to motivate them and keep them progressing.

Emotional intelligence skills can make the difference between a manager who shuts down a meeting because they don’t like what they’re hearing, and another who listens to feedback and acknowledges where they might be at fault – even if it might not be easy hearing! It can also be the difference between a manager who is in tune with their team’s emotions, and notices when someone is unusually quiet or subdued, and then reaches out to see if there is something wrong, and one who doesn’t notice at all.

If your leaders and managers have high levels of emotional intelligence and can really connect and understand their team, there is going to be better team engagement and better performance, which, in turn, is great for your organisation.

Why Emotional Intelligence Is Important in Leadership

Within a business or organisation, who absolutely needs to have emotional intelligence? Without a doubt, the leaders and managers.

We’ve just discussed above what some of the key emotional intelligence skills are, including things like being empathic, self-motivated and having good social skills. In the role of a manager you need to be able to inspire a team, lead them towards a goal and develop a culture where working together happens organically, which involves building good relationships with everyone involved.

Emotional intelligence in leadership is also really important because leaders often have to make big decisions for a business, and need to be aware of how other people might react to this. A leader with a lack of emotional intelligence might make choices based solely on their perspective, and if they fail to consider the impact on the rest of their team, they might end up damaging their relationships and making their colleagues feel disrespected or unsupported. So whilst leaders will sometimes need to make hard decisions, they should do this with full awareness of how other people might feel.

Another of the benefits of emotional intelligence in management is that these employees are often much better at helping other employees to realise their full potential. This happens because of the meaningful and supportive workplace relationships that are developed, making it easier for employees to set and achieve goals that they are really motivated about. This is a benefit to the business because you end up with a workforce that is more motivated and more talented, which contributes positively to business performance.

How to Develop Emotional Intelligence

Contrary to what many people believe, emotional intelligence isn’t something a person either has or doesn’t have. It can be developed and improved if you take the time to learn about the best ways to demonstrate emotional intelligence and seek out situations where you can practise and hone your skills.

Developing emotional intelligence starts with improving your own self-awareness so that you have better emotional literacy. Then work on improving your empathy, and with this work on improving your active listening skills as well so that you know how to properly engage with a conversation and make the other person or people feel understood. 

Training can also help to kickstart your journey into developing emotional intelligence and is a great way to introduce the topic and gain knowledge about different techniques. If you’d like to start working on your emotional intelligence to become a better leader, why not have a look at our practical, bite-sized ‘Emotional Intelligence’ course, which is a great introduction?

FAQs

Is emotional intelligence a skill?

Emotional intelligence is an interpersonal skill, which means that it’s something that can be developed and improved if you make a conscious effort. Many people assume that being emotionally intelligent is something that comes naturally to some people and can’t be improved in others, but just because it’s a skill that is based on emotions, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get better at it.

What does it mean to be emotionally intelligent?

Being emotionally intelligent means that you are more connected to your emotions and feel comfortable identifying, talking about them and processing them. Emotionally intelligent people are also better at perceiving these feelings in others, along with finding it easier to form strong connections with their peers and being more empathetic to other’s emotions and knowing how to respond and support them because of this.

What is high emotional intelligence?

High emotional intelligence refers to a strong proficiency in emotional intelligence skills. People who are described as having high emotional intelligence will be really empathic, very confident in a wide range of social situations and very competent at offering emotional support or helping to de-escalate emotional situations.

Summary

Emotional intelligence and empathy are both incredibly important skills for a leader or manager to possess. Every employee will find that their workplace experience improves when they display elements of emotional intelligence, but it’s particularly useful in leadership positions because of how it can help you build stronger professional relationships and make better decisions for you and your team.

We’ve already highlighted our dedicated training course on improving emotional intelligence in the workplace, but if you’re looking for more support in becoming a better manager, take a look at our range of online leadership and management courses to find out more.