What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, manage and understand your emotions and the emotions of those around you. It sits between your personality and behaviour and relates directly to individual and interpersonal effectiveness.
Not only can emotional intelligence predict performance, but it’s also been proven that those with a higher emotional intelligence tend to earn more money, deliver a higher standard of work, be happier in their relationships, be healthier and even live longer as their immune systems are stronger.
And the great thing is that emotional intelligence can easily be measured and developed with the help of people science.
What signifies high emotional intelligence?
If you have high emotional intelligence, you are more aware, resilient, better motivated, deal with conflict better and have a growth mindset.
Having a low emotional intelligence may mean that you stay in one mindset, become stuck and struggle to grow. When you are dealing with the future of a business that’s more than a little problematic - we know 75% of leaders derail because they have low emotional intelligence.
The benefit of emotional intelligence for managers
The benefit for managers is two-fold.
The first benefit comes in the form of self-management. If managers are connected to their own emotions, they have greater control over their responses to things outside of their control, and can manage their approach to workplace stresses more effectively. Higher levels of self-awareness and self-belief can also help them to be more productive.
A manager with a lower level of emotional intelligence can find this more difficult. Dealing with surrounding noise, whether it be office politics, changing priorities, or high volumes of work, will act as a barrier to their maximum levels of productivity. And when that gets in the way of productivity it ultimately leads to frustration – frustration they are less likely to be able to handle in a suitable way.
The end result? A manager with high levels of emotional intelligence is likely to be more effective and productive, whilst dealing with clients and stakeholders better.
The secondary benefit of having high emotional intelligence is the ability to set your tone and management style based on the needs of your team. Managers with a higher emotional intelligence can understand how it feels to work with them as a leader and use this knowledge to get the most out of their team. And the research bears this out. Forbes suggests that 75% of employees prefer working for a leader with high EI, while managers who are emotionally intelligent create a strong uptick of engagement in staff around them, which in turn leads to higher retention.
Can you increase your emotional intelligence?
So we’re clear on the benefits, but can we coax more emotional intelligence out of our employees. Essentially, is investment in emotional intelligence worth your time, money, and effort? Let’s look at the science.
Emotional intelligence (EI), used to be called EQ, denoting a fixed ability, similar to IQ. You were considered ‘born with it’ and it would remain the same throughout your life. But over recent decades, neuroscience has shown that the brain is more flexible than we thought. There are up to 3x more emotional neural pathways than logical neural pathways, making emotion our dominant driver – but more importantly, we can create new neural pathways for both behaviours.
There are various ways to develop your emotional intelligence. But outside help is nearly always needed to provide neutral insight into behaviour. Maybe you don’t like conflict, so you get passive in those situations, or maybe you don’t pick up on the emotional nuance of what others are saying. But with time and work, you can create a new neural pathway that helps you to become more emotionally intelligent. Sometimes it is as simple as asking yourself why or how another individual might react.
The Thomas Emotional Intelligence assessment
Within our Thomas Assess platform, we have built a new emotional intelligence assessment that measures your level of emotional intelligence and creates quality, accessible content that everyone can take value from.
Our tool measures the three pillars of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-effectiveness (how you manage yourself), and relationship management.
Receiving insights through our emotional intelligence measure helps managers, employees and leaders become more effective, manage their emotions better and manage their relationships with others. And having a higher level of emotional intelligence is particularly helpful in helping managers connect with their teams better.
Find out more about the benefits of emotional intelligence and the new Emotional Intelligence assessment from Thomas.
