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Advancing your career requires more than just hard work—you need to demonstrate growth, leadership skills, ambition, and emotional intelligence. Also known as your emotional quotient, or EQ, emotional intelligence refers to the ability to understand and manage feelings in healthy, positive ways. The following guide below explains the importance of emotional intelligence and how an executive coach can help.
Why Is Emotional Intelligence Important for Career Success?How you manage, use, and respond to your emotions affects every aspect of your life. Having high emotional intelligence leaves you better equipped to deal with stressful life situations, complex tasks, and conflicts with other people. These skills are critical for a successful career. Whether you need to navigate a major project or figure out how to communicate effectively with a new client, turning your emotions into a positive motivating force will help you excel. Taking the time to identify and understand your emotions gives you the control you need to express them properly and recognize how other people are feeling. This can help you form stronger relationships with coworkers and clients. How Can You Develop Emotional Intelligence? Manage Emotions Recognizing how you feel is a step in the right direction, but overcoming negative impulses is the biggest challenge. Anxiety can reduce the ability to think clearly and critically, causing people to make poor decisions in high-stress situations. Addressing emotions head-on to prevent them from overwhelming your thoughts gives you more control over your reactions. Be Mindful of Others Emotional intelligence is not just about knowing yourself; it's also about the ability to empathize. People are constantly sending out verbal and nonverbal cues. To fully understand them and their needs, social awareness is necessary. It’s common to have a mind full of deadlines, previous conversations, and tasks you want to accomplish while at work. When having a conversation, it really helps to pay attention to what the person is saying and how they’re saying it. Picking up on subtle emotional cues and remembering important details can help you improve communication skills, understand the dynamics of any group, and build positive relationships. Don’t Dwell on Mistakes Everyone faces challenges they can’t always overcome. However, those with high emotional intelligence will use these opportunities to learn and grow rather than dwelling on them. Overthinking will only lead to self-doubt. Instead, consider what can be learned from the situation and move forward. Other opportunities await you!
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Parsing out the elements of good judgment is helpful in allowing leaders to improve when they’re using it and when they’re not. In The Elements of Good Judgment – How to improve your decision-making by Sir Andrew Likierman (Jan-Feb 2020 Harvard Business Review), he states that “leaders with good judgment tend to be good listeners and readers. They are able to hear what other people actually mean, and thus able to see patterns that others do not.” The six elements of good judgment Likierman points out bear mentioning:
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Going, going... and the coach is gone.
Before last week, the Giants' much-heralded and popular football quarterback, Eli Manning, had started in a staggering 210 consecutive games. Then, on November 29th, Manning was benched by Coach Ben McAdoo, the first time Manning would not start a game since 2004. The fans did not like it one bit even though the team's 2-10 win/loss record was miserable. The next day, the Giants' ownership abruptly fired McAdoo with four games left in the season. (A Giants' coach had not been fired mid-season since 1976, over 40 years ago.) And Manning, despite the Big Blue's poor season, started in the game against Dallas on December 10th. What happened? It appears that part of the reason McAdoo was fired was his poor communication and EQ skills (aka emotional intelligence). "He was stiff, humorless and obsessively guarded at news conferences. His communications skills — with the news media and eventually with many of his players — never developed into a strength." (The New York Times 12/5/17). Without good communication skills, let alone emotional intelligence, building a successful team, a successful fan base or a successful career, is that much more difficult. Eli Manning, I suspect, has excellent communication and EQ skills; his years of success in the game, his enduring (for the most part) popularity with fans, his demeanor on and off the field and his many endorsements of high-end products, all support this conclusion. So does Manning's response to McAdoo's upsetting coaching decision to bench him for a game — no tantrums, no blame game and no bitterness. If you communicate well and have good emotional intelligence, great. If not, you probably are fighting battles you might otherwise avoid and should consider some coaching to get you there. Consider who got the pink slip on the Giants' roster. And, while you're at it, consider why Joe Girardi, who was very successful in many ways, didn't get his contract renewed. |
Margaret EnloeI'm an executive coach who works with clients on leadership and transition challenges, including retiring with enthusiasm and ease. Blog Categories
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