Emotional Intelligence

5 Aspects of Emotional Intelligence Required for Effective Leadership
http://www.inc.com/brent-gleeson/5-aspects-of-emotional-intelligence-required-for-effective-leadership.html?cid=sy304time

BY BRENT GLEESON

CREDIT: Getty Images

Emotional intelligence is widely known to be a key component of effective leadership. The ability to be perceptively in tune with yourself and your emotions, as well as having sound situational awareness can be a powerful tool for leading a team. The act of knowing, understanding, and responding to emotions, overcoming stress in the moment, and being aware of how your words and actions affect others, is described as emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence for leadership can consist of these five attributes: self-awareness, self-management, empathy, relationship management, and effective communication.

As a Navy SEAL veteran, entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and leader of one of the fastest growing digital marketing agencies in the country, I have experienced many emotions and become very aware of how those emotions can have a positive or negative effect on my ability to inspire and lead a team. Many individuals try to shut off their feelings, but as much as we distort, deny, and bury our emotions and memories, we can't ever eliminate them.

You can learn to be emotionally independent and gain the attributes that allow you to have emotional intelligence by connecting to core emotions, accepting them, and being aware of how they affect your decisions and actions.

Being able to relate behaviors and challenges of emotional intelligence on workplace performance is an immense advantage in building an exceptional team. One of the most common factors that leads to retention issues is communication deficiencies that create disengagement and doubt.

A leader lacking in emotional intelligence is not able to effectively gauge the needs, wants and expectations of those they lead. Leaders who react from their emotions without filtering them can create mistrust amongst their staff and can seriously jeopardize their working relationships. Reacting with erratic emotions can be detrimental to overall culture, attitudes and positive feelings toward the company and the mission. Good leaders must be self-aware and understand how their verbal and non-verbal communication can affect the team.

To help understand the emotional intelligence competencies required for effective leadership, I would recommend determining where you stand on the below elements.

Self-Assessment: This can be defined as having the ability to recognize one's own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values and drivers and understanding their impact on others.

Without reflection we cannot truly understand who we are, why we make certain decisions, what we are good at, and where we fall short. In order to reach your maximum potential, you must be confident in who you are, understanding the good with the bad. Those that have a strong understanding of who they are and what they want to work on, can improve themselves on a regular basis.

Self-regulation: Also known as discipline. This involves controlling or redirecting our disruptive emotions and adapting to change circumstances in order to keep the team moving in a positive direction.

Leaders can't afford to lose their cool. Being calm is contagious, as is panic. When you take on a leadership role you can no longer afford to panic when things get stressful. When you stay calm and positive you can think and communicate more clearly with your team.

Empathy and Compassion: Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and understand how they may feel or react to a certain situation. When one has empathy, the capacity to feel compassion is open. The emotion that we feel in response to suffering that motivates a desire to help.

The more we can relate to others, the better we will become at understanding what motivates or upsets them.

Relationship Management: You can't make deep connections with others if you're distracted. Many of us have families, other obligations, and a crazy to-do list, but building and maintaining healthy and productive relationships is essential to one's ability to gain higher emotional intelligence.

You must have the ability to communicate effectively and properly manage relationships in order to move a team of people in a desired direction.

Effective Communication: In the SEAL teams you have to do three things flawlessly to be an effective operator and team member: Move, shoot, and communicate. Communication being of the utmost importance. Studies show that effective communication is 7% the words we say and 93% tone and body language.

Misunderstandings and lack of communication are usually the basis of problems between most people. Failing to communicate effectively in a workplace leads to frustration, bitterness, and confusion among employees. Effective communication can eliminate obstacles and encourage stronger workplace relationships. When employees know their role within a company and understand how they benefit the overall direction and vision, there is a sense of value and accomplishment. Good communication results in alignment and a shared sense of purpose.

Emotional intelligence is a powerful tool critical for exceeding goals, improving critical work relationships, and creating a healthy, productive workplace and organizational culture.

Why You Need Emotional Intelligence to Succeed

Emotional intelligence is responsible for 58 percent of your performance, so what are you doing to improve yours?

http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/why-you-need-emotional-intelligence-to-succeed.html?cid=sy304time

BY TRAVIS BRADBERRY

CREDIT: Getty Images

When the concept of emotional intelligence was introduced to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success--IQ. Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

Emotional intelligence is the "something" in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence consists four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.

Personal competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

• Self-awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.
• Self-management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people's moods, behavior, and motives to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.
• Relationship management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others' emotions to manage interactions successfully.

Emotional intelligence, IQ, and personality are different.

Emotional intelligence taps into a fundamental element of human behavior that is distinct from your intellect. There is no known connection between IQ and emotional intelligence; you simply can't predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it's the same at age 15 as it is at age 50. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a flexible set of skills that can be acquired and improved with practice. Although some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high emotional intelligence even if you aren't born with it.

Personality is the final piece of the puzzle. It's the stable "style" that defines each of us. Personality is the result of hard-wired preferences, such as the inclination toward introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can't be used to predict emotional intelligence. Also, like IQ, personality is stable over a lifetime and doesn't change. IQ, emotional intelligence, and personality each cover unique ground and help to explain what makes a person tick.

Emotional intelligence predicts performance.

How much of an impact does emotional intelligence have on your professional success? The short answer is: A lot! It's a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with a tremendous result. TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58 percent of success in all types of jobs.

Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills--it impacts most everything you do and say each day.

Of all the people we've studied at work, we've found that 90 percent of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence. On the flip side, just 20 percent of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim.

Naturally, people with a high degree of emotional intelligence make more money--an average of $29,000 more per year than people with a low degree of emotional intelligence. The link between emotional intelligence and earnings is so direct that every point increase in emotional intelligence adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. We haven't yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren't tied closely to emotional intelligence.

You can increase your emotional intelligence.

The communication between your emotional and rational "brains" is the physical source of emotional intelligence. The pathway for emotional intelligence starts in the brain, at the spinal cord. Your primary senses enter here and must travel to the front of your brain before you can think rationally about your experience. However, first they travel through the limbic system, the place where emotions are generated. So, we have an emotional reaction to events before our rational mind is able to engage. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.

Plasticity is the term neurologists use to describe the brain's ability to change. As you discover and practice new emotional intelligence skills, the billions of microscopic neurons lining the road between the rational and emotional centers of your brain branch off small "arms" (much like a tree) to reach out to the other cells. A single cell can grow 15,000 connections with its neighbors. This chain reaction of growth ensures it's easier to kick a new behavior into action in the future.

As you train your brain by repeatedly practicing new emotionally intelligent behaviors, your brain builds the pathways needed to make them into habits. Before long, you begin responding to your surroundings with emotional intelligence without even having to think about it. And just as your brain reinforces the use of new behaviors, the connections supporting old, destructive behaviors will die off as you learn to limit your use of them.

Why You Should Hire for Emotional Intelligence

People with high EI are better at reading and responding to customers, for one thing. Here's how to spot them in a lineup of potential hires.

http://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/why-you-should-hire-for-emotional-intelligence.html?cid=sy304time

BY CHRISTINA DESMARAIS

CREDIT: Getty Images

The notion of Emotional intelligence (EI)--the ability to understand one's own and other people's emotions and steer behavior accordingly--has been a widely touted leadership trait in recent years. Adam Ochstein, founder and CEO of Chicago-based HR consultancy and software company Stratex, defines EI as the ability to look at a situation, analyze it and understand its objective and subjective angles. In essence, he says people with high EI are adept at reading people. "I think one of the biggest attributes of someone who has emotional intelligence is someone who can take a critical look at themselves, laugh at themselves and not take themselves too seriously," he says. "They realize that what I see on the surface might not really be the whole story."

Here's why he says you need to hire these kinds of people and how you can spot them.

Employees with high EI are better at wooing your customers.

Regardless of the stellar nature of your product, customer service reps, receptionists and account managers who are good at reading customers and responding appropriately will be better at making them happy. "Clients connect with people, not with a product, and hiring people who have those type of innate skill sets enhances your brand," he says.

Employees with high EI make great leaders.

These people are excellent listeners who have an ability to empathize with a myriad of personalities. Because they're aware of other people's feelings, they understand that their decisions--and how they communicate them--will affect everyone on a team. "People want to follow people who have a personal investment in their success, and people who have a high degree of EQ typically excel in human interaction and getting people to follow them," he says.

Prospective employees with high EI are easy to spot in an interview.

They raise questions, own their failures without dwelling on them, and are comfortable in their own skin, meaning you can throw tough questions at them. Look for potential hires who are good listeners and think about their responses before answering honestly. They also use adjectives and adverbs generously, an indication they're thinking more with the left side of their brain. "There's not only the factual element to something, it's the component of how does that make me feel and what was my reaction to it," he says. "They're very descriptive in their language, not only giving you X, Y and Z but how and why X, Y and Z impacted them, how it made them feel and how it impacted people around them."

7 Interview Questions For Measuring Emotional Intelligence

The traditional interview model helps you probe someone's past experience, not their style of thinking.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3057294/work-smart/7-interview-questions-for-measuring-emotional-intelligence

HARVEY DEUTSCHENDORF

[Photo: Flickr user Al Ibrahim]

Emotional intelligence involves self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. In other words, it's a complicated amalgam that hiring managers have a hard time testing for. As a result, many fall back on gut instincts and subjective impressions.

It isn't always a smart move to leave something so important to such faulty measures. When a candidate has these qualities, they can work well with others and lead change effectively, so it's no wonder why organizations are placing a higher priority on emotional intelligence. And fortunately, even the traditional interview format can be retooled to test for it.

Just about every smart interview candidate has figured out how to appear highly emotionally intelligent, whether or not they actually are. For hiring managers looking to tell a great performance from genuine attributes, a helpful first step is to get out of the office. Go to a quiet coffee shop, park, or some other place where you won’t be interrupted. That can help get your candidate off guard a bit without making them overly uncomfortable. Then ask these seven questions.

1. WHAT BOTHERS YOU MOST ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE?

Instead of asking that outright, you might tell a quick anecdote about a family member or colleague who annoys you. Then ask if there's anyone at the candidate's last job who really bothered them and how they dealt with that.

Of course, a savvy candidate will focus on solutions—like how they've smoothed that relationship over—but it can still give you valuable insight into how they perceive other people. You'll probably also learn something about how well they understand the effect of their behavior on others (and its limits).

2. TELL ME ABOUT A DAY WHEN EVERYTHING WENT WRONG

Here, too, you can start out by giving them an example of one of your days from hell. It isn't about feeding them a scenario you're looking for your interviewee to spit back; you're just modeling the type of situation you want to hear them reflect upon.

So don't just ask them to describe a bad day; ask how they dealt with it. Does it seem that they dwelled on the problem or blamed others (even if they put it differently), or really looked for solutions? Listen for evidence of any surefire coping mechanisms. You want to hire someone who's got the flexibility to deal with uncertain and unpredictable situations—a hallmark of emotional intelligence.

3. TELL ME ABOUT A COLLEAGUE YOU REALLY GOT ALONG WITH AND WHY YOU THINK YOU DID

The relationships people build with others can tell you a lot. For that matter, so can the way they perceive those relationships. Based on the candidate's account, how do they see themselves, and what do they value in others? You'll also get some insight into your interviewee's self-awareness. Humor, unless it's sarcastic and demeaning, is always a good sign. If the relationship they describe sounds too formal and humorless to be true, it probably is.

4. WHAT'S SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN TEACH ME?

This can set an interviewee off their footing a bit, but in a good way. Ask questions that indicate your lack of understanding and really press for details in the explanation. As you do, does your job candidate seem to fight back frustration and impatience—in their facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice? Or do they ask more questions in order to gather information about what it is you don’t get?

Are they able to explain the idea simply and rework their approach to clarifying things when it becomes clear you're still confused? A highly emotionally intelligent candidate naturally assumes responsibility for getting their ideas across. The opportunity to share their knowledge and teach others is exciting, not stress inducing, and takes communication skills that this type of person loves to hone.

5. TELL ME ABOUT SOMEONE YOU ADMIRE AND WHY YOU DO

Consciously or otherwise, we tend to model some of our behaviors after those we admire. Ask your interviewee to reflect on that. Is the object of their admiration a "people person," someone who inspires and encourages others, or more of a tactical thinker who's better left down in the weeds, working things out on their own? There are no categorically wrong answers here, and sometimes the person a candidate says they admire reflects attributes they wish they possessed, not those they do.

All this is useful to find out. Listen carefully, then dig further by asking if there's anything they've picked up from the person they admire. You can even ask whether there's anything about that person the interviewee doesn't like, in spite of the things they do.

6. WHAT'S ONE THING YOU'RE REALLY PROUD OF AND WHY?

This one's good to leave open-ended, although you can offer an example of something you've personally achieved in order to get them started. It can be related to their career but doesn't need to be. When the candidate talks about their achievements, do they include and credit others, or are they a one-person show?

Do they talk about how it made others feel—the validation and support they got from family, friends, and coworkers who helped them along the way and celebrated their success? Sometimes great accomplishments really are individual wins, but emotionally intelligent people know that nothing really meaningful ever happens in a vacuum.

7. IF YOU RAN YOUR OWN COMPANY, WHAT KINDS OF PEOPLE WOULD YOU HIRE AND WHY?

This will give you a view into what your interviewee values in others and on teams. What sorts of people do they prefer to work with? Do they focus on the people or the outcomes? What's their style of relating to and managing others in order to accomplish shared goals? Do they like to work closely with others, or do they prefer to work independently?

The more you can get away from the traditional interview model, which is mostly geared to probing a candidate's past experience, the better insight you can gain into their emotional intelligence. This means being creative—ask hypothetical questions and don't hesitate to share your own views and experiences.

That can help get a candidate to open up and offer their own candid (rather than scripted) perspective on the things that will matter most in a real work environment. These seven questions are great to start with, but they're only a jumping-off point for measuring emotional intelligence, so don't hesitate to adapt them. You might even make better hires if you do.