Mastering Emotional Intelligence In Leadership

When navigating leadership, In the bid to improve your competence the desire would be to work calmly under pressure and handle emotions appropriately. This allows a solution driven mindset which helps achieve proper results. This is possible when one’s emotional intelligence quotient is high.

What is emotional intelligence? 

Emotional Intelligence is the ability of an individual to understand and manage their emotions and the emotions of those around them. People that possess a high emotional intelligence quotient know how they are feeling and how their feelings impact those around them. 

To thrive as a leader, having a high level of emotional intelligence is paramount. When this is absent, it affects the kind of results that can be achieved. This is why it is important that leaders master certain areas of emotional intelligence in order to improve competence. 

What are some of those areas? 

Self-awareness: 

Possessing a high level of self-awareness is crucial to managing emotions effectively. This would really go a long way to help the leader to become better at what they do. Being self-aware is the ability to acknowledge strengths and weaknesses. 

So what are the ways that this attribute can be developed: 

• Journaling: Keeping a journal and investing a few minutes daily to write down thoughts has the ability to make the leader more aware of their emotions. 
• Slow down: Don’t live your life at 100mph, learn to slow down. When situations that are emotionally activating happen such as anger, it is very important to slow down and examine the situation. Before taking any action. 

Self-regulation. 

Leaders who are able to regulate themselves do not lose their heads to emotions. Self-regulation is being in control of emotions and feelings. It’s a very important skill to have. How is it developed?

• Know your values: Having a set of strong values is important to help regulate actions. Values help to keep leaders in line and help them to think twice before taking an action. 
• Hold yourself accountable: Playing the blame game when things go wrong and not being accountable is one major reason why a lot of people are not in charge of themselves. 

Empathy. 

Empathy is  very consequential to emotional intelligence. To lead a diverse team, empathy is indispensable. The ability to feel what others feel goes a long way in building emotional intelligence. 

To improve empathy: 

• Put yourself in other people’s shoes: It’s easy to always want to be right. But that’s not possible, sometimes even leaders get it wrong. That’s why it’s paramount to step in the shoes of others and see their point of view 
• Pay attention to non-verbal cues: When communicating with others, try to pay attention to their body language and hear the things they are not saying. The ability to read  non-verbal leads to the discovery of intentions that are not put into words.

To be effective as a leader, emotional intelligence is keen. When Leading and achieving effective results, mastering emotional intelligence is important. 

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