How To Identify And Practice Emotional Intelligence In The Workplace

In years past, the emotional intelligence of employees was low on the list of qualifications, especially for leaders. However, with the way that the market has changed, how someone connects with others on an emotional level is becoming much more important. Company leaders need to understand the emotional connection audiences have with services, products and companies as a whole. The most recent Fjord Trends 2020 even talks about “liquid people” and why it is important to set up human insights teams instead of consumer insights. All this leads to the conclusion that now, more then ever before, if you want to successfully lead your company or grow your startup, you will need to understand what emotional connections are and how they can propel you forward.

How is EQ a KPI for emotional connections?

EQ is a term that describes the emotional intelligence that people in the workplace have with each other, and also with the customers or clients of that company. It propels the relationships that people build with one another and can also be applied outside of work.

In general, EQ is thought to have four distinct characteristics, including self-awareness (being aware of how we respond in situations), self-management (how we apply that self-awareness), social awareness (how we perceive others’ feelings in the context of their environments) and social management (how we apply social awareness in order to have fruitful interactions with others).

How does EQ make leaders more successful?

The way people connect allows them to understand what others are going through, which can be the perfect way to help solve someone’s pain points. Leaders with high levels of emotional intelligence often notice how people around them observe, react and respond. Knowing how to respond appropriately in all situations, both in private and in a group, allows for better experiences with the people around us. As leaders, we want to create the best employee experience possible so that those positive experiences trickle down into how our company’s representatives treat clients and customers. In turn, this can help build positive, trusting relationships with customers.

Where can EQ be utilized in today’s companies?

The greatest thing about emotional intelligence is that it has endless applications. It can be used to help inspire higher performance, develop new products and services, and improve personal development opportunities. It can also be used to prevent burnout, as people who learn how to manage their emotions are often less overwhelmed and benefit from a better work-life balance.

Higher EQ can benefit everyone in a company, from the CEO and founder all the way down to the latest part-time hire. But when it comes to helping improve the employee experience, leaders need to fully understand and utilize EQ regularly. The reason? When you understand where your employees are, both with the company and with the clients, you can better serve them. You can inspire them to strive for more fulfillment and give them challenges that allow them to feel as though they can accomplish even greater things.

Three Ways To Improve Emotional Connections

For many leaders, the question is less about why emotions matter and more about how to create better emotional connections. Here are three practices that you can easily incorporate into your schedule:

• Coffee Surprise: Pick one employee from your team, and schedule a coffee this week. Have a 20-minute conversation about how things are going. Show sincere interest. This conversation is not about facts and figures, sales objectives, or difficult clients. It’s purely about your people and what’s on their minds. You might be surprised by what your employee brings up.

• Listening Marathon: Practice your active listening skills on a large scale by engaging your entire team in a monthly listening marathon. This is a meeting — preferably outside — where two people from your team go for a 30-minute walk. For the first 15 minutes, one person is talking, and the other person only asks questions — no commenting, no telling stories — and practices active listening. Then, switch roles. At the end of the month, take time to reflect with your team on what you’ve collectively learned.

• Gratitude Board: Next to your team bulletin board — whether that’s an objectives and key results board or the spot where you post announcements in the kitchen — set up a gratitude board where every team member is required to post one note every day, stating what they are thankful for. This could be related to work, colleagues, clients, the office building, company events, etc. The point is to get in touch with your emotions and practice positive thinking.

Emotional Intelligence Can Be Taught

If you do not feel as though you have as solid of a grasp of emotional intelligence as you could, then feel better about the fact that you can learn it. You have the opportunity to learn about what makes customers respond the way they do and how to help your employees use that to their advantage. But it’s not a tool or a plugin you can buy. It takes dedication, passion and a real interest in the human beings around you to grow your emotional connections.

This post was initially published on Forbes.com early 2020.

7 Must-Haves for Leaders in a VUCA world

Today’s business world is different than it used to be, requiring business leaders to have new sets of skills to succeed. The sheer amount of responsibility that CEOs now must face can be incredibly overwhelming. The term that many apply to this concept is VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. This concept shows how the state of the world is in constant flux, which makes leading far more difficult. However, having the right tools can make that prospect a little easier. Let me share with you today some tools many successful entrepreneurs, young leaders and progressive startup founders use that can help you stay in control no matter how uncertain or complex a situation may seem.

1. 360° Talking

In an uncertain environment, communication skills are easily able to make any situation better. Thus, today’s entrepreneurs need to be able to ask the right questions to determine the problem, delegate tasks to the right people or departments and explain how their knowledge and skills can resolve the situation. These skills can reduce the uncertainty of many situations and bring a level of control to an otherwise ambiguous situation.

2. Uber-Management

To get into a CEO position or any position of leadership, people must have above-average management skills. However, in today’s world, it is more important than ever before. Projects have more facets than they used to, with more people in multiple locations and with a plethora of cultural backgrounds required to make those projects successful. Juggling these facets, the people, the budgets and all of the details require someone who can manage a lot while still staying focused on the final objectives.

3. Talent Combination

As mentioned, today’s projects are more complicated than ever before with more people involved. Getting these people to work together is one of the most effective ways of reducing the unknowns of any project while still achieving peak performance. People may be in the office, work remotely or some combination of both, making the ability to get these teams working together essential — and success critical!

4. Lateral And Critical Thinking

Some people accuse millennial entrepreneurs and young leaders of not having lateral or critical thinking skills that are on the same level as those of workers in the generations before them. The question, though, is not which generation is better at problem thinking. The key question is how to improve personal development skills to be able to see what is going on and come up with solutions. It’s critical to alter these solutions to fit a myriad of problems, and people need to be able to implement these solutions into the problems effectively. If one solution does not work to reduce the problem, the solutions will need to undergo alterations to work as imagined.

5. Collaborative Know-How

One of the most sought-after skills for current entrepreneurs and successful leaders is collaboration. This needs to be within the company, with customers or clients and with any other stakeholders. Doing it right allows for increased company performance, as well as more innovative solutions for the company to bring to the market.

6. Underutilized Inspiration

Being inspirational is something that many overlook when it comes to leadership. Today’s CEOs — more than ever before — need to be role models that employees can emulate. Doing so boosts the organization’s culture and allows for a more cohesive experience when a customer or client works with people at different levels within the company. Plus, it allows everyone in the company to reach out in an attempt to reach the same goals.

7. Vital Flexibility

Stress is an inevitable result of the constant change that comes with today’s business environment. Point taken! That is why flexibility is so vital to successful CEOs. It helps avoid some of the stress that comes with these fluctuations and allows for a more agile way of working. Additional plus: Being flexible and working with agile tools is the only way to stay current with fast-moving market trends and consumer behaviors. Evolution is going to happen during every role that we play, so if you want to become a high performer, you need to be flexible enough to evolve with it.

The more of these skills that young entrepreneurs learn to master, the less the VUCA world is going to challenge them. When your goal is to have more healthy high performance in your life as an entrepreneur or young leader, let’s focus on these seven must-haves to surpass even your own expectations and learn to be the leader your company wants and deserves! Reach out to us at braininspa today and let’s jointly work on your skills – because we care for you!

This article was originally published on Forbes.com in October 2019.