What Is Emotional Intelligence And Its Importance In The Workplace?

Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage emotions in both ourselves and in others. There are specific skills that are involved in emotional intelligence including self-awareness, self-control, motivation, empathy, and social and communication skills. Emotional Intelligence is now highly recognized as an important trait for employees by various human resources departments across the globe.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize your emotions and the emotions of others and to understand what these emotions are telling you. Once a person becomes emotionally intelligent, it allows them to manage relationships more effectively and leads to happiness and success in life. Additionally, Emotional intelligence or EQ has been well researched over the last few decades, and has been shown to be important in the workplace.

Improving one’s emotional intelligence has many benefits. A high EQ helps individuals to communicate more effectively, reduces anxiety and stress, defuses conflicts, improves relationships, helps to empathize with others, and effectively overcome life’s challenges. It also can improve overall success. 

How does emotional intelligence help in the workplace?

Research tells us that your personal and professional life are directly affected by your EQ. Every day, we make decisions, and most of these decisions are influenced by emotions. With a higher EQ, you can understand the emotions of others, manage and communicate your own, build healthy workplace relationships and solve problems efficiently, even through deadlines and pressures.An emotionally intelligent leader is one who stays in control, and calmly assesses any situation.

Low EQ in the workplace can be characterized by not taking responsibility for mistakes and having a hard time working as a team. Communication can be passive or aggressive, unclear or not assertive.  Another characteristic is the inability to accept constructive criticism.   A low EQ leader may bully, pressure, and discourage their staff members. 

Improving emotional intelligence is well worth the effort so that leaders and employees can easily empathize with each other, communicate effectively, and be both self and socially aware. Living in the corporate world means interacting with many different types of people, as well as constant change and surprises will be waiting in every corner. Building your EQ will help you better deal with everything that comes your way. 

So, what are you waiting for? Being emotionally intelligent is the key to how you respond beautifully to what life gives you.