As an aspiring leader, we always seek to identify that one specific skill, which differentiates the best from the rest! Emotional Intelligence is the ability to become cognizant of and manage ones’own emotions and the emotions of others, understanding the signals that emotions transmit about relationships.
Understanding the basic factors that a person requires in their roles and duties are primarily negotiation, persuasion, motivation, and inspiration. While we have a strategy for projects and places we deal with, we feel with the people through our hearts. The purpose of adopting the Emotional Intelligence metric is bringing the shift from ‘Walking in with pain’ to ‘Walk out with a smile’, in simple words, impacting and transforming the lives of people by understanding their perspectives.
With increasing digitalization, this skill is on the rise! If we interact with people as we do with ourselves, we cannot truly connect with them. We shall treat people according to their personalities and not ours.
Critical components of Emotional Intelligence:-
Self-Awareness
One’s ability to recognize their own emotional capabilities, weaknesses, values, goals, and their impact on other people. A person who is patient and passive tends to become a good listener to people who get stressed easily, and awareness of this fact helps work better with each other.
Self-Regulation
Balancing and redirecting disruptive and impulsive emotions. Instead of being judgmental and reactive, rather being reflective and responsive would make a leader more impactful on his/her team, thereby reducing the chances of failures.
Motivation
To be able to internally drive oneself towards achieving individual and collective goals. Staying optimistic while facing challenging situations.
Empathy
Sensitive to other’s feelings/emotions when it comes to decision making. Living in a social world, competing globally, operating virtually and pressured by multiple forces, the least we do is to step into the other’s shoes and look at the picture from another angle. Getting a holistic understanding of a situation is more important.
Social Skill
Along with being goal-oriented, now it’s being people-oriented as well. Managing relationships to influence people to move in desired directions is essentially the skill of the hour. The D.I.S.C [Dominant-Influential-Steady-Compliant] approach, helps understand the nature of people during the course of interaction by pre-determined attributes that define them.
For instance, Dominant personalities focus on tasks and are proactive, whereas Influential personalities focus on people yet are as proactive. Steady personalities focus on people but are reflective instead, Compliant personalities seem to be reflective as well as task-oriented.
Successful people are majorly a combination of the three personality traits- Intelligent Quotient, Emotional Intelligence, or EQ and Technical expertise, overlapping each other in the modern era. The power of the lens we wear seems crystal clear to us alone, but the trick here is to try wearing on the lens that best-fits universally. The game-changer is to draw a meaningful connection with people at the point they stand at, and not from the point where we want them to stand at.